Reply To: Political Statements
(Warning: tl;dr post)
I think there may be some hunter-gatherer societies where there isn’t much of an idea of property. When hunters succeed, they benefit from the social prestige that comes from sharing the kill, whereas they wouldn’t benefit in letting excess meat rot. I can’t really describe such societies as utopian, but they’re not truly distopian either.
In between the extremes of a society in which everything is held in common and a society in which everything is held privately and there is no taxation or public property, there’s a huge gray area that includes all of reality. Societies vary in respect to how much is held in common, how much wealth is redistributed, and how that wealth is redistributed. Let’s take a look at some of the gray areas.
Confiscation and doling out is often an oversimplification. There’s a lot which is held in common, available to the public at large, and typically purchased rather than seized: public roads, public parks, public landings on public waterways, public libraries, public schools, public universities. All of these are part of a long-established tradition in the United States that predates Marx. Intellectual property is an area which is artificially private; copyrights, trademarks, and patents are created by governments, and the fact that copyrights and patents expire isn’t a seizure of property by the government. Ideas differ from real property in that I can take someone’s idea without that person losing their idea.
The argument for public roads (with a possible exception for private turnpikes) is that they’re of broad benefit to the public and that there’s no more efficient method than taxation to support their upkeep. Toll booths are slow and expensive, they’re impractical for shorter roads, and unless they’re going to make motorists wait for a gait to raise or open, they require a means of enforcement. Public parks and public landings on public waterways are means by which a greater number of people might be allowed to benefit from natural resources. Public libraries serve several purposes, one of which is as a repository of works that go out of print. Bookstores are not sufficient to provide all the needs of modern societies, and authors typically sell enough to libraries that few authors have reason to complain about libraries undercutting their business.
Public libraries, schools, and universities serve another purpose, one which is seldom explicitly mentioned: the redistribution of wealth across generations. The obvious argument against a generic redistribution of wealth, from the rich to the poor, is that it undermines everyone’s incentive to do work, since the rich don’t benefit and the poor needn’t bother, and thereby decreases productivity and aggregate wealth. There are certain clear exceptions to this rule. Young children cannot be expected to work, and it is in the interest of most of the population that today’s children become productive adults, and if this involves some of them staying in school well into their twenties so as to become doctors and the like… well, when I’m retired, I’m going to need doctors, so I can hardly argue against training the next generation of doctors. And when I retire, I’d prefer to be living in a society where younger people are productive members of society.