Some organization is required in order to feed billions of humans. Allowing individuals to be rewarded for effort has worked well in partnership with some overarching socialism.

That explains why it exists, but doesn't address the morality of it.

As you say, it is immoral.

Amen.

You might like the anarchist Frenchman Pierre Proudhon's ideas. In his 1840 book he declared that "Property is theft!" (What he meant by 'property' is land, factories... not one's personal 'stuff' clothing, books, etc.)

Your orchard analogy is apt. No doubt the the capitalist mogul has worked very hard in his quest to accumulate as much wealth as possible, but it still amounts to a theft. In Value, Price, and Profit (and in other books) Karl Marx showed how capitalism steals the wealth workers create.

Some people have argued that the the size of the earth and man's ingenuity mean that resources are unlimited. This is, of course, a pipe dream, but it is put forward to justify the stupid notion that that everybody can have as much as they want.

It would not be an issue of there were only a few humans so that there was more than enough to go around.

I think everyone deserves a home, food and shelter but this becoming harder to achieve.

Also people inherit property and other people are born into poverty so it is far from a level playing field.

I so like the concept of stewardship and I am sure that was advocated in the bible but largely neglected by Christians in favour of "Go forth and Multiply."

We can reward peoples efforts with in reason especially if those efforts involve creative and ingenuity and not just exploitation.

Everything in moderation.

You might like the anarchist Frenchman Pierre Proudhon's ideas. In his 1840 book he declared that "Property is theft!" (What he meant by 'property' is land, factories... not one's personal 'stuff' clothing, books, etc.) — Bitter Crank

Yes.

If you cite Proudhon people claim you are a communist. I don't know much about communist theory but what I am talking about is rationality. Don't kill the planet that is feeding you.

the problem with communism is that its adherents and proponents, and its intended subjects, are humans. If we could just get rid of those increasing numbers of pesky humans...……………….

If we could just get rid of those increasing numbers of pesky humans — gloaming

How will take care of you in your old age if you get rid of the pesky humans? :worry:

Here is a related issue.

"Unsurprisingly for a field that relies on calling happiness 'utility', economics students are the most likely to display evil personality traits, new research has suggested.

Budding economists, as well as business students, scored highest on the 'Dark Triad' set of personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism – in the study conducted by two psychologists at Aarhus University in Denmark."

https://thetab.com/uk/2017/07/26/if-youre-evil-you-probably-study-economics-says-science-44013

A survey conductedby Gandal, Roccas, Sagiv, and Wrzesniewski (2005) find that economics students valued personal achievement and power more than their peers while attributing less importance to social justice and equality.

Rubinstein (2006) reports that economics students were much more likely to favor profit maximization over promoting the welfare of workers when faced with a business dilemma.

Faravelli (2007) finds that economics students were significantly less likely to favor egalitarian solutions to problems than their peers outside of economics.

Haucap and Just (2010) find that a survey of economists revealed they were more likely than their peers to consider the allocation of scarce resources in accordance with who can afford to pay the price set by supply and demand to be a fair method of rationing and distributing resources.

And Bauman and Rose (2011) report that economics majors are less likely to donate to local social programs.

https://www.uv.es/sasece/docum2015/Etzioni-2015-Sociological_Forum.pdf

How will take care of you in your old age if you get rid of the pesky humans? — Sir2u

Right - we need a morality shift. Nobody should live without affording his or her own life - a simple question of justness. Suicide should be an open door without social stigma - a simple question of freedom.

Nobody should live without affording his or her own life - a simple question of justness. — Heiko

So if I break my back and cannot pay my own living expense then......

Suicide should be an open door without social stigma — Heiko

............nice.

a simple question of freedom. — Heiko

While I agree that life should be allowed to end if a person thinks their life has no worth and there is no dignity to it, I don't want to be asked to get rid of myself just because I cannot afford to pay my way.

And there are no simple questions.

So if I break my back and cannot pay my own living expense then...... — Sir2u

You are ruining the joke: My thought was more of a redesign of public pension schemes. The question who would care for someone has some propositions. Not there wouldn't be enough people on the world that presumably would enjoy such a job in a first-world country. But yes, of course...

............nice. — Sir2u

That's me. I am totally unaffected by irony. It pearls off like a drop of water on a Goretex jacket.
Are you registered as an organ donator?

While I agree that life should be allowed to end if a person thinks their life has no worth and there is no dignity to it — Sir2u

Is that a condition you are talking about? Why this "if"?

I don't want to be asked to get rid of myself just because I cannot afford to pay my way. — Sir2u

Why should anyone ask? Your affairs are your own problem, aren't they? Maybe you have an insurance for things like this. Or you took the "sh*t happens" all-or-nothing-approach.

And there are no simple questions. — Sir2u

Of course there are. The moral bankrupcy is officially declared when thinking about how to obliterate people while on the other hand talking about freedom. It does not make sense.

Ownership is an illusion.

My thought was more of a redesign of public pension schemes. — Heiko

They say that there will be more than 8,000,000 old age pensioners in England in the next couple of years. Add to that all of the people that for some medical reason cannot work and those that don't try to find work.
Who is going to pay for all of these people as the number keeps rising and the number of people working drops because no one can afford kids to replace the workers?

Are you registered as an organ donator? — Heiko

No such thing where I live. And I cannot even donate blood for medical reasons.
If I have my way, when I die it will be on top of a mountain of firewood with a dead man's switch hooked up to a big tank of gas so that I can have my Viking funeral. Fuck funeral directors and coffin makers all.

Is that a condition you are talking about? Why this "if"? — Heiko

It is a common, everyday type of if, not IFF. The decision would, obviously, be theirs to take if the thought that their lives lacked those things

Stunning revelation.

It means that if you own part of the earth you are depriving someone else of it. — Andrew4Handel

Then you should be paying rent to them, obviously. Let's call it 'tax'. In the case of real estate, it is very easy to allow the tax to accumulate as a charge on the land/house/factory if it is not paid, so that eventually the property becomes valueless on the market, and automatically reverts to the state.

Who is going to pay for all of these people as the number keeps rising and the number of people working drops because no one can afford kids to replace the workers? — Sir2u

Reality in Germany. The bitter irony about this is: They should have done themselves. From one point of view they did for sure, from the other they did not as they allowed politicians to spent all the money right away. One surely can call that aspect naive as you cannot simply put so much money aside without doing something with it. Only peasants think that way.

No such thing where I live. And I cannot even donate blood for medical reasons.
If I have my way, when I die it will be on top of a mountain of firewood with a dead man's switch hooked up to a big tank of gas so that I can have my Viking funeral. Fuck funeral directors and coffin makers all. — Sir2u

That's cool somehow. The reason why I asked is that in our society the right of a dead to itself is more valuable than any living being. I guess calling this fetishism only scratches the surface.

The reason why I asked is that in our society the right of a dead to itself is more valuable than any living being. — Heiko

I was reading something about English law being changed to make organ donations the default for every dead person unless they have signed an "OPT OUT" form. I guess that when you are dead you don't need them anymore, so what difference does it make to the dead. If mine were any good to anyone I would give them, but that is not to be. So

Valhalla I am coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think having children is making an unjustified claim on a limited resource.I think exploiting the earth for your own survival is completely understandable. That is just brute survival

But putting demands on resources by creating children that don't need to exist goes beyond survival to what I suppose you could call it colonisation.

As they say it takes a society to raise a child so then the dynamic becomes exploitative of other people. When you have to cooperate with others and share resources then the ethical questions become more prevalent.

Allowing individuals to be rewarded for effort has worked well... — frank

Indeed it has, but it's the extreme that is the problem. Looked at in isolation, most of us would agree that, if you work twice as hard as me, you 'deserve' twice the reward. This is moderated when you also consider the limited size of the pool from which these rewards are drawn, but it still seems fair, which is something that matters a lot to many animals, humans included.

But the problem is when the richest person in the world owns around a million million dollars, while the poorest of us own less than one dollar. Now the extremes and the inequality are laid bare. There is not enough wealth in the world for everyone to have a trillion dollars, so we must redistribute what there is. Perhaps not to the point where everyone has exactly the same number of dollars, but so that the gap between the richest and the poorest is seen by most to be fair.

The status quo is not fair, whatever else it is. It must change.

I think there are lots of problems with the notion of just desert. The most prominent is that we are randomly born into our initial circumstances through luck or misfortune which means some people immediately have access to more resources, better genes, a more democratic country, a favoured gender/sex.

So no one can be blamed for factors like these or praised for achievements based on luck or birth and genetic inheritance. (You could add free will debates in here)

A lot of millionaires and billionaires were already from wealthy backgrounds and or had access to resources others don't. I only found out recently that Richard Branson went to possibly the most expensive private school in the UK whereas he has often been portrayed as a self made man.

Another issue is quality of parenting and parental support, it can be very hard to overcome childhood adversity.

Governments are responsible for a lot of wealth creation because for example they invest in a lot of technology and infrastructure. So everyone's taxes are necessary to aid individual wealth creation.

I don't think you can find a logical relationship between effort/hard work and ownership. Ownership is usually created by force or by negotiation.

The problem with your position is that very few parts of earth, of the useful matter on earth, are a passive resource just waiting to be plucked off a tree (or sat on). They have to be worked on by others to become useful. And that's why we have division of labour and property rights - that way you channel peoples' efforts as efficiently as they can be (into things they are particularly good at, specialize in) and you let them have the use of things for as long as they want (provided they're using things harmlessly) so they have a chance to fulfil whatever designs they may have on their bit of matter, so that it may become useful to the rest of us.

And you are not necessarily depriving someone of anything by using a resource. You may be, but only in very particular and rare circumstances. In fact by adding value to a resource (by processing it into a more useful form, with your particular specialized knowledge, know-how, skills, etc., that they don't have) you are usually enriching others' possibilities.

Essentially, your argument has limited viability, and only in the case of land as something to live on - but that's actually the least of humanity's problems, there's plenty enough land to live on for everyone. The real mystery, the real difficulty, is how to produce enough to keep everyone alive, happy and fulfilled.

The real cause of the confusion here is a misunderstanding (with the Left generally, but also with some liberals) of what property is: it relates to actual concrete ongoing use of something, a relationship of control, steering, shaping, marshalling, between a human being and a bit of matter: that's what's being protected by property rights.

I am not being deprived of the use of something on the other side of the world that I'm not using, that I'm not in a natural relationship of control with. Therefore someone else using it is not thieving from me; they are not snatching CONTROL of something FROM me (which is what theft actually is).

Again, the limited validity in what you're saying is that by taking control of something uncontrolled by me (or by anyone else - the limiting case of first use), they may be limiting my options for controlling things. For example, it's an old principle of English law that you can't "hem someone in" by owning all the land around them and preventing them getting to market with their produce. That would amount to a kind of harm. But in the vast majority of cases, it's as I said above: other people are usually adding tremendous amounts of value to the bits of matter that they control, which actually redounds to your benefit when they exchange the product of their activities with you for the the things you produce that are useful to them (you'd rather have an iPhone than a lump of silica in the ground, right?)

The problem with your position is that very few parts of earth, of the useful matter on earth, are a passive resource just waiting to be plucked off a tree (or sat on). They have to be worked on by others to become useful. — gurugeorge

This seems implausible because we are the only creatures on earth that have technology. We must have survived on the land at one stage with no tools or technology.

I don't think you can justify ownership based on clever usage of resources. Would you allow someone to move into your house because they designed something clever for it? I don't see people giving up land just in order for someone to be innovative with it. Primarily land is for basic survival shelter or food.

Innovation doesn't justify polluting and overpopulating the environment in an unsustainable way.

There is rarely if ever just one person involved in innovation. It is not like someone found some rock and made an iphone unfortunately phones have an unethical dimension with some of material they consist of mined with slave labour in places like The Congo and assembled in oppressive regimes like China.

We must have survived on the land at one stage with no tools or technology. — Andrew4Handel

Well in a sense, yes, our more ape-like ancestors survived like that. But our recognizably human or human-like ancestors co-evolved with technology as far back as can be traced. There has never been a time when we didn't modify our environment extensively, to the limits of our capabilities.

Primarily land is for basic survival shelter or food. — Andrew4Handel

You're vastly underestimating how complex and intricate the society that's sustaining you is. The only sorts of people alive today who are in the kind of situation you're describing are undiscovered Amazonian tribes and the like.

I don't think you can justify ownership based on clever usage of resources. — Andrew4Handel

Ownership doesn't need any "justification" in that sense; the argument I outlined justifies the utility of it, but ownership as such is a very basic human habit that, again, goes as far back as humanity. You let people keep control of whatever they control until and unless they do harm. This is because doing things with stuff is the most basic human function, and to interfere with humans harmlessly doing stuff is grossly immoral.

You're vastly underestimating how complex and intricate the society that's sustaining you is — gurugeorge

The main part of being sustained is having shelter. Technology is pretty useless if you are homeless.

I don't see why you can't have innovation and fair shared sustainable use of resources.

Your position seems somewhat colonialist and justifying controlling already settled territory because you feel your values and lifestyle are superior.

I think if people don't have somewhere decent to live and equal access to resources that would be adequate reason for protest, noncompliance and resistance.

Fortunately most of West has social welfare which is a reasonable redistribution of resources but still humans are leading highly unsustainable exploitation driven or exploited lives imo.

Your position seems somewhat colonialist and justifying controlling already settled territory because you feel your values and lifestyle are superior. — Andrew4Handel

No, the classical liberal or propertarian position is against colonialism because the natives were there first, doing stuff with their environment, they are the ones with the "already settled territory."

Again, I'm not saying that what you're talking about is total nonsense, but like many on the Left, you are misconstruing what the problem actually is. The grain of truth in what you are saying is that people doing stuff with things limits the options of other people to do stuff with those things (IOW if something is already being used, you cannot take control of it without their consent, or without exchange). And under some (quite rare) circumstances, that may possibly be harmful if those are the only options available.

However, if it's harm, it's not harm because it's theft (taking control of something away from people who already control it without their consent - ex hypothesi, the people whose options are being limited have no control over the thing, if they did, control of the thing wouldn't be an option, but a realized fact).

Rather, it's potentially harm if and when two conditions are fulfilled: 1) that people's options for controlling x are being limited (by others' already-ongoing control of x), and 2) that they have no other options available (for survival, etc.).

But those conditions hardly ever hold in a developed capitalist society based on private property.

In sum, the trope "property is theft" is really, really stupid (or rather, not stupid, but merely a rhetorical trick to get the unwary riled up). More sophisticated Leftists, like Marx, understood this, and based their system on the labourer's property in their labour (i.e. it's the working class' surplus labour that's being expropriated - here the error is more sophisticated, and deeper, so I won't go into it now, but you get the general idea).

If I have my way, when I die it will be on top of a mountain of firewood with a dead man's switch hooked up to a big tank of gas so that I can have my Viking funeral. Fuck funeral directors and coffin makers all. — Sir2u

I like the image of dying on top of one's very own funeral pyre, composed of cardboard, household furniture, waste wood, sawdust, branches from diseased street trees, and the like. BUT Vikings didn't use gasoline in their funeral pyres. Even so, it was all their huge funeral pyres (them and Hindus) that started global warming.

There are green alternatives, however:

One type of green alternative is to self-compost your body; this is a pleasant, no-cost outdoor process which involves no chemicals or carbon emissions. It's NATURAL. You just find a pleasantly remote spot, make a deep bed of leaves and other plant material, lay your dying self down, pull a large amount of more green stuff over you, and die. If you live in a civilized part of the world with few large scavengers and nosey hikers running about, your bodies demise will be quite peaceful and private.

For a livelier physical demise, plan on dying in an area with lots of large scavengers (hyenas, vultures, beetles, etc.). The flora and fauna will have your body taken care of in just hours or days, at most.

For a more graceful physical disappearance, (it could be rigged up so that your deadman's switch could be used) plan on expiring in a large thick-walled plastic tank (just big enough for you). The deadman's switch will open a valve from a large tank of caustic potassium hydroxide which will dissolve your fatty/protein body leaving only bony material. It takes... less than a day. It's 72% more energy efficient than the bonfire approach.

You might like to know that the Mayo Clinic developed this method of "green cremation" to dispose of donated cadavers and other tissue from surgeries, etc. By the time the potassium hydroxide is done, what's left in the tank are bones and clear water.

Plastic tubs and potassium hydroxide are affordable and ready available.

BUT Vikings didn't use gasoline in their funeral pyres. — Bitter Crank

Awe shucks, and I had my dreams of being a true viking. Being blonde and blue eyed meant so much to me.

OK, so plan B. My dead hand will drop a stone to cause a spark that will light up the tinder that will start the fire. No that wont work, it might be raining.
Plan C. I will pay the next door neighbor to light it up when the light goes off. No, that wont work. He smokes. Murphy's law says that there is never a match available when you need one.

Bollocks to it, I'm a modern viking and I have gasoline, or maybe enough pig fat to do the job.

For a livelier physical demise, plan on dying in an area with lots of large scavengers (hyenas, vultures, beetles, etc.). The flora and fauna will have your body taken care of in just hours or days, at most. — Bitter Crank

Not a bad idea, around here it would be hours. The dog killed a possum the other night, there was not enough to bury a couple of hours later. And that was just the ants.

The deadman's switch will open a valve from a large tank of caustic potassium hydroxide which will dissolve your fatty/protein body leaving only bony material. It takes... less than a day. It's 72% more energy efficient than the bonfire approach. — Bitter Crank

No, then I have to think about the disposal of that crap. What the hell can anyone do with a bunch of used caustic potassium hydroxide?

I found this and thought it was sort of funny

http://whatculture.com/science/10-ways-to-dispose-of-a-dead-body-if-you-really-needed-to

until I read the pages that followed.

I have heard about the quick freeze method, they put you into something, I think it is liquid nitrogen, and then drop you so that you turn into a million pieces. When it is dry it is a fine powder you have become. They then can use you as fertilizer for a tree or something. Sounds nice, but expensive.

So well maybe I'll go for a burning barge and sea burial(but I want the gasoline). Now where the fuck can I find a cheap barge?

There are barge brokers who can sell you a used barge. Like this:



Fairly expensive, but if you want to go in a blaze of glory, I think this size might be right.

No, then I have to think about the disposal of that crap. What the hell can anyone do with a bunch of used caustic potassium hydroxide? — Sir2u

The beauty of this system is that the potassium hydroxide is expended in the process. What's left is water and bone.

I have heard about the quick freeze method, they put you into something, I think it is liquid nitrogen, and then drop you so that you turn into a million pieces. When it is dry it is a fine powder you have become. They then can use you as fertilizer for a tree or something. Sounds nice, but expensive. — Sir2u

I've seen demonstrations of smaller objects like carnations being dipped in liquid N, and then being shattered. Impressive. Unfortunately, liquid nitrogen is expensive. But you know, you can fertilize a tree by just digging a hole, getting into it, and pulling a tree in after you. If you're on the edge of the grave at the time this might be too strenuous.

I have heard that if you use liquid oxygen as a charcoal starter and light it with a very very very long match that the result is incandescent. So, get some liquid O, use that instead of gasoline on your funeral pyre, and the flash will be truly magnificent.

If you aren't buried in a lead lined concrete box, eventually you'll end up fertilizing a tree, pretty much however you decide to rot.

Capitalism has won the battle but not the war. The future is Socialism/Communism.:grin: