Well, well, I see Helmuth has returned for another discipline session. Time to bend him over and humiliate him again, as he obviously loves it...
You know, you throw this word "feudalism" around as a swear word, in much the same way as people in the mainstream generally use the word "fascism".
No, I am using it in its exact economic and historical meaning: an agrarian economy characterized by weak or absent government and allocation of possession and use of land by hereditary contracts of personal service and fealty of the land user to the landowner. It is quite common for feudal libertarians to try to claim various virtues for feudalism, as they know that is what they actually advocate. All such claims are of course false, absurd, ahistorical and dishonest.
It appears to be a device wherein, like any swear word, you give yourself permission to simply turn off your brain and express your visceral hatred of whatever you're swearing at.
<yawn>
Let's look at feudalism as a real thing, and not merely a swear word.
Without reading any further, I know that you will be lying about what feudalism is as a real thing.
Was it a bad system? It was, of course, the system under which the European Miracle arose -- the first time in history wherein men achieved sustained per-capita economic growth over a long period of time.
No, of course it wasn't. That's just another stupid lie from you. Feudalism was the system under which Europe stagnated economically (and in pretty much every other way) for nearly a thousand years, the system under which even kings were poor. Its record elsewhere -- India, China, Japan, Russia, Latin America, etc. -- was no better.
That had never happened before, at least we have no clear record of it ever having happened.
Bull$#!+. It indisputably happened in ancient Egypt, Athens and Rome (all of which recovered substantial publicly created land rents for public purposes and benefit), as well as in ancient China (where farmland was periodically redistributed to give everyone more equal opportunity to use it) and Heian-era Japan.
In all of recorded history, the bulk of humanity had struggled along at a baseline level remaining roughly the same century to century, millennium to millennium; a level not much above subsistence.
But that first changed not under feudalism, but under governments that recovered substantial publicly created land rent for public benefit and/or ensured rough equality of opportunity to use the good land -- Confucius eulogized such arrangements as characterizing the Golden Age of Chinese prosperity and equality -- but returns to feudalism consequent on growing landowner privilege returned those societies to bare subsistence economies ruled by landowner greed. Historians and archaeologists have proved this fact in many ways, such as by comparing potsherds from different eras. Roman pottery was of high quality and is very abundant in Roman archaeological sites; such quantities could only have been produced for mass use by quite affluent populations. By contrast, potsherds from post-Roman feudal-era sites are few and of low quality, showing the population was much poorer than in Roman times. The same is true of the quality and quantity of all manner of goods that have survived at such sites.
Ancient Rome produced enormous amounts of exquisite marble statuary, much of it copies of Greek originals. In feudal times, that marble statuary was BURNED to produce cement to build fortifications and cathedrals. The fact that it was considered more economical to burn marble statues than to mine limestone for cement is eloquent proof of the stagnant, poverty-stricken and totally de-industrialized feudal economy of post-Roman Western Europe. In fact, the transition from Western Roman government to feudalism in the fifth and sixth centuries caused such extreme economic disintegration and impoverishment that it was accompanied by a population decline of about 1/4.
Then, Western Christendom in the middle ages burst on the scene with its unique feudal system.
More bull$#!+. Feudalism was not unique to western Christendom, it had arisen before in lots of places whenever landowners became more powerful than government, including China, Japan and India.
It was a decentralized system -- unlike the Russian feudalism where the czar picked the lords, the lords in the West were an independent class and thus played a countervailing role against the power of whatever prince, duke, king, or other ruler was over them. This created a system of real "checks and balances" -- as opposed to the phony ones which some laughably pretend exist between the branches of the current U.S.A. central government.
That is absurd, ahistorical revisionism.
The strong institutional church provided yet another check and balance on the power of the princes -- the Pope had an incentive to make sure the prince did not raise taxes too high, since this would harm his own ability to collect offerings, so, the Pope required the princes to ask for his permission before raising taxes. This feudal system allowed liberty to flourish as never before, and because of that a prosperity arose and flourished such as had never existed before on the face of the Earth.
That is an absurd fabrication with no basis in fact. European feudalism was a period of unrelieved tyranny, poverty and stagnation leavened only by frequent warfare and slaughter. Whatever liberty existed was confined to the freemen who had land use rights on common lands, and thus could not be enslaved by the big feudal landowners.
So give feudalism some respect. It made the modern world.
That is an idiotic lie. The modern world awaited post-feudal institutions that began to emerge around the time the Crusades were ending: democratic governance of towns free of the yoke of feudalism in Italy, around the Baltic Sea (Hanseatic League) and in the Low Countries; a reformed Protestant church that was not run as a vast landed feudal estate, etc. In England, it was not the power of feudal lords that forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, but rather the fact that the feudal lords were themselves powerless to enslave free Englishmen who had the right to use land held in common, a right they did not lose until the feudal lords got together and passed enclosure laws in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was precisely the prevalence of non-feudal village commons that made Englishmen freer than the feudal serfs of continental Europe.
It's not a perfect system, but without it we'd be digging in the dirt, barely eking out enough to eat, just as the man in 500 A.D. was doing, just as the man in 1000 B.C. was doing,
Note how you have to pretend the whole period of high classical civilization in both Europe and Asia beginning in the 6th century BCE never happened.
just as the man in 5000 B.C. was doing, and just as the man in 5000 A.D. would still be doing.
No, that's just another idiotic fabrication from you.
Political hegemony is a stable system -- it can (and did) go on indefinitely, for millennia.
Nope. Never happened. You are just spewing idiotic lie after idiotic lie.
But western-style feudalism, and its explosively successful -- unprecedented! -- wealth generation, turned the world upside-down and made it what it is today.
Your claims are the diametric opposite of the truth. There was never any wealth generation at all under feudalism, let alone explosive or unprecedented wealth generation, because all surplus production had to be devoted to military purposes, whether defensive of offensive. Your claimed feudal prosperity simply never happened, and this fact is common knowledge attested by all archeological and historical data. Feudal libertarians just try to give feudalism a positive spin by lying about it.
Which, inevitably, does not support your claims.
If there is no one present to initiate force against, they cannot be initiating force.
Garbage. If you set a trap to kill passersby, it initiates force because it will kill someone who shows up later. That is more or less what the land grabber does.
If a man claims a location, and no one is yet present in that location -- and that is what homesteading means --
No, of course it doesn't. That does not describe actual historical homesteading at all, so you are just makin' $#!+ up again. ACTUAL homesteading has almost always involved either appropriating land that others (hunter-gatherers or nomadic herders) were using at low intensity and gradually dispossessing them as more and more land is stolen from them, or the pre-emptive forcible dispossession, enslavement and/or slaughter of the whole population of aboriginal inhabitants to remove them from the land so homesteaders can steal it in "peace." Is there a single reliably attested historical case of a homesteader appropriating land where no one else was yet present in that location? If there is, I have never seen it. Certainly the homesteaders of the American West were not examples of such "innocent" appropriation. The aboriginal population had already been there for millennia, and was simply forcibly dispossessed.
then he absolutely cannot be initiating force against anyone when he makes that claim. There's no one there! He cannot be molesting anyone, for there is no one around to molest.
Even if someone were to homestead land in that fashion, when no one else was or had been around (an event never recorded in the history of the world, AFAIK), he would still be initiating force in much the same sense as the person who fashions a trap to kill passersby when no one is yet around. "There's no one there!" you exclaim, all innocence. Maybe not. But when they do show up, the trap is set to kill them.
I think that you would, of necessity, to remain a rational being,
This, from
YOU??? ROTFL!!!
This, from the soi-disant "rational being" who claimed land is essentially homogenous?
This, from the soi-disant "rational being" who claimed natural resources have been bequeathed to us by "massive human labor and intelligence"?
This, from the soi-disant "rational being" who claimed a chainsaw contains "raw matter"?
ROTFL!
agree with the above. Where you say the "initiation" of force comes in is when, years later, more people come to the area and this conversation ensues:
"Hey, it's getting crowded, it's not fair you own that large location just because you got there first, we want to take it from you. Nature gave it to us, as well as you, after all."
No, you are just lying again. The newcomers do not propose to take the land, simply to use it, or be justly compensated for being deprived of their liberty to do so.
"I claimed this location as my own.
"I stole it fair and square!" What on earth do you imagine claiming to own something nature provided accomplishes? How could it extinguish others' rights to liberty?
No one objected to my claim.
"No one objected when we claimed this continent for the King of Spain."
"No one objected when I set my man-killer trap. Your tough luck if you thought you had a right to life."
I consider it legitimate.
Just as slave owners consider their ownership of their slaves legitimate -- and might even, as landowners do, get a government to agree with them.
I have made many improvements to the original state of nature at this location -- improvements which would be very difficult or impossible to relocate to a different location. Please, respect my property as I respect yours."
"Oh, we are very willing to respect your
property -- your
rightful property. You rightfully own what you have produced, no doubt about it. But you did not produce the land, so how can you claim you own it? If you want to exclude us from it so that you may enjoy the fixed improvements you have made to it, and wish to compensate us justly for the consequent loss of our liberty rather than simply initiating force against us, we are certainly willing to deal with you by mutual consent."
"Ha! Meet my gun barrel, you puke-faced slaver. We won't stand for your feudalistic lies."
It is the landholder who ALWAYS purposes to initiate force against the new arrivals, stop lying. Google "range war" and start reading.
The homesteader, by taking exception to the mob's claim on that location, is thus, Mr. L. claims, initiating, or starting, an act of force against the mob.
He is indeed. They just want to exercise their liberty to use what nature provided. He wants to stop them from doing so by force.
One wonders if the definitions of defense and aggression have gotten a little tangled.
They certainly have: in your head.
The homesteader didn't start anything.
He certainly did, the first time he presumed forcibly to exclude others from the opportunities nature provided.
It is logically impossible to pretzel any way in which he could be said to have "initiated" the force.
Lie. He indisputably initiated it: when others sought merely to exercise their rights to liberty, he pulled a gun.
The homesteader was already there.
No, sunshine: the LAND was already there. The homesteader simply purposes forcibly to deprive others of their liberty to use it. Please explain how his being there extinguishes others' rights to use the land that was there before he was.
The homesteader just wants to defend what he sees as his property.
What he "sees" as his property and what
is rightly his property are two entirely different things.
No one else has any claim on it, even under Mr. L.'s philofolly, since he has now stated he does not hold that the Universe is owned by everyone, but rather by no one.
It is self-evidently and indisputably owned by no one. And everyone has exactly the same "claim on" it: their natural liberty to use it. But there is probably a stupid, evil, lying sack of $#!+ somewhere who claims that because no one has any claim to own the ocean, no one would have any right to use it if someone DID claim to own it. That is essentially the "argument" you are offering regarding the homesteading of land: the absence of ownership becoming somehow proof of ownership.
That means that instead of everyone having a claim to the Universe,
Another bait and switch lie. The claim everyone has to the universe is precisely their natural liberty to live in, access, and use it, which precludes any claim to
own it.
as I had incorrectly assumed he believed, no one has any claim whatsoever.
Lie. Everyone has the same claim to it: their natural liberty to use it.
Thus, no one in the mob has any legal or moral standing to challenge the homesteader.
Lie, as proved above. Everyone who would otherwise have been at liberty to use the land has moral standing to challenge the homesteader's theft of it, just as they would to challenge a greed-maddened homesteader's claim to own the earth's atmosphere and charge them rent for air to breathe. You just refuse to know the fact that people have a rightful claim to atmospheric air to breathe, and that this is not a claim to own the earth's atmosphere.
Defensive killing is not murder,
But killing people to stop them from exercising their liberty to use what nature provided for all is not defensive killing. It is murder. You are rationalizing, justifying and excusing that murder. That is evil.
and building a fence (or otherwise excluding vagrants
Prospective productive users are not "vagrants." That's just more stupid and dishonest name calling on your part.
from your backyard) bears no resemblance to slavery.
Wrong, as already proved:
"During the war I served in a Kentucky
regiment in the Federal army. When the war
broke out, my father owned sixty slaves.
I had not been back to my old Kentucky
home for years until a short time ago, when
I was met by one of my father's old
negroes, who said to me: 'Master George, you
say you set us free; but before God,
I'm worse off than when I belonged to your father.'
The planters, on the other hand, are contented
with the change. They say, ' How foolish it was in
us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper
now than when we owned the slaves.' How do
they get it cheaper? Why, in the shape of rents
they take more of the labor of the negro than they
could under slavery, for then they were compelled
to return him sufficient food, clothing and medical
attendance to keep him well, and were
compelled by conscience and public opinion, as
well as by law, to keep him when he
could no longer work. Now their interest and
responsibility cease when they have
got all the work out of him they can."
From a letter by George M. Jackson, St. Louis.
Dated August 15, 1885.
You're doing intellectual somersaults all in the service of the entitlement complex.
In that everyone is entitled to equal rights, yes, I am arguing for an entitlement. You, OTOH, are denying that people are entitled to equal rights.
It is the landowner who is legally entitled to pocket other people's taxes, not the landless, and you are doing intellectual somersaults in the service of that entitlement complex.
If I swear at Helmuth enough, it will make his wrongness clear to everyone!
No, I simply identify your dishonesty, and the fact that you are serving the greatest evil in the history of the world, an evil that makes slavery look like cheating on exams.
To the contrary: we believe only in just titles, based on homesteading.
Lie. I have already proved that you believe in stealing -- and slavery and murder -- and that the "just" titles you claim are based on homesteading are in fact based on forcible appropriation: i.e., stealing. Furthermore, it is impossible for you to believe only in just titles, as there is no way to convert an unjust current title to a just title. It is too late for homesteading. The land is already occupied.
If a title can be shown to be illegitimate, based on initial aggression,
I have proved that all land titles are illegitimate and based on initial aggression, and you have not come up with a single counterexample. In fact, you have not even tried, because you know very well that no such rightful title exists, or ever could exist. No one EVER bothers to homestead land that no one else has ever occupied or used, because such land is useless. Homesteaders only want useful land, and others -- if only hunter-gatherers or nomadic herders -- have always been there and used the land first. ALWAYS.
then it should be declared invalid and the victims or their heirs regain their rightful property which was stolen from them.
No one could ever have had "rightful property" in a privilege of violating others' rights without making just compensation; and even if they could, there is no way to identify who the victims were or who their rightful heirs might be. You know this. You simply purpose to accept current land titles as valid, and your idiotic and proved-false homesteading justification for them be damned.
Aboriginal peoples robbed of their land through broken treaties, for instance, would have standing to bring claim against the holders of the robbed land.
All such treaties, broken or otherwise, were made under duress, and were thus invalid from the outset. Do you really purpose to return all land to the descendants of its aboriginal inhabitants? Of course not. It's impossible, and you know that very well. You are just lying to rationalize landowner privilege.
Descendants of slaves would have partial claim to the plantations of the slaveholders, for another instance.
Idiocy. You KNOW there is no practical way to untangle such claims (going back how many thousands of years, hmmm? We are all the descendants of slaves, one way or another), so you are just offering a pro forma "reparation" with no practical effect to rationalize greed and injustice.
Yes, of course you are.
It seems not too late at all.
You know very well it is too late. All the good land has already been stolen, most of it multiple times.
The vast majority of the Universe remains unclaimed and open for homesteading.
And totally useless for any such purpose.
Even the majority of the locations of Earth (including oceans, Antarctica, northern Canada, many other currently-desolate places, aerial and underground locations, etc., etc.) are still available for homesteading, once a libertarian framework makes such homesteading possible.
It's not lack of a "libertarian framework" that makes such homesteading impossible -- there is a fine libertarian framework governing the oceans outside territorial waters -- but the utter uselessness of the locations.
Yes, England had primogeniture laws prohibiting the sale or division of the estates of the landed aristocracy. There, the land-owners really were like barons ruling over the serfs who were legally prevented from owning their own land.
And that system arose from the kind of feudal libertarian system you advocate.
That system broke in the American colonies, smashed against the reality of vast, open territory stretching endlessly to the west.
"Open" territory already occupied and inhabited by no one we need trouble ourselves to consider at this late date....
America does not have any landed aristocracy.
Yes, it most certainly does, and it is getting worse.
Families get land, families lose land, everything is ever and always in flux and everyone has a free and equal opportunity to buy their own land.
Disgraceful. Having a "free and equal opportunity to buy" your right to liberty from its owner is not the same as actually having a right to liberty.
Ted Turner famously owns vast tracts of land in America. John C. Malone, who no one's even heard of, owns even more. Who here thinks that 50 years from now the grandsons of Turner or Malone will still be the largest landowners in America? I sure don't.
It is land
value that matters, not acreage. You apparently aren't even aware of what the American landed aristocracy
is. It is corporate-owned land -- by far the majority of land by value -- and those corporations being owned mainly by old monied families. Whether the grandsons of Turner or Malone still own their vast acreages 50 years from now is totally irrelevant: the great majority of land by value will still be owned by the same rich landowning families who own it today. They understand their privilege, even if you refuse to.
Fortunes come and fortunes go -- that's the great thing about America.
Nope. The DuPont heirs, as just one example, now number nearly 2000, with average net worth of over $100M.
Freedom is a meritocracy.
Which might be relevant, if we had freedom.
Shirttails to shirttails in 3 generations.
That is becoming rarer and rarer. It takes a really stupid rich kid to squander a fortune these days. You practically have to give the stuff away.
There is no reason to fear this boogeyman of a big, scary, monolithic "landed aristocracy" in America. There is no such thing, and there is reason to believe there never will be any such thing. There is no primogeniture in America.
It's happening right in front of your eyes, and you can't -- rather, you
won't -- see it. What do you think has happened in the housing bubble and crash? Ordinary people have been turned into permanent debt slaves, and their tiny little scraps of land repossessed by the landed aristocracy that also owns the banks. "Homeownership" is alleged still to be widely distributed, but that has less and less to do with owning land: a growing fraction of those owner-occupied homes are condos with little claim on the land under them or trailers in trailer parks sitting on pads owned by the landed aristocracy.
Right, O.K., no one then. No one has any claim upon any of the resources of the Universe whatsoever. Got it.
Another bait and switch from you. No one can rightly claim to
OWN them. Everyone has a rightful claim to
use them: their right to liberty.
Well, other than homesteading. That's a pretty good way of getting part of it to belong to you.
But only the things you produce, which can never include the location, as that must already have been there for you to produce anything on it.
But OK, according to your misosophy, no one owns, ever owns, nor can ever own, any part of the Universe.
You again choose deliberately to lie about what I have plainly written. You have done nothing but heap disgrace upon yourself by your dishonesty.
Natural liberty to use it? In other words: a right to use it?
Natural liberty is a physical fact. A right to exercise it is a societal construct.
A just claim upon the resources of the Universe?
No, upon one's fellow human beings not to initiate force to deprive one of the liberty to use those resources.
No, I'm sorry, no one has that. Any such claim is merely nonsense. The Universe belongs to no one, not everyone, remember?
I remember: like the oceans or the earth's atmosphere, which indisputably belong to no one, yet which everyone indisputably has a right to use. I also remember that you always have to lie about what I have plainly written.
No one has any right to use any portion of the Universe. It doesn't "belong" to them, you inform us.
But in fact, only evil, lying, propertarian sacks of $#!+
ever claim that people have no right to use anything unless it belongs to them. People self-evidently and indisputably have rights to use things in nature -- the oceans, the atmosphere, the sun, the land -- that don't belong to them. That has been the case for millions of years, since long before anyone thought anything belonged to them but their own bodies and perhaps a few bits of wood, stone and hide. You know this. Of course you do. You have merely realized that it proves your whole belief system is false and evil, and so you chose deliberately to lie about it. And so you lied about it, just as if you were an evil, lying, propertarian sack of $#!+. In fact, I am having some difficulty telling the difference between you and an evil, lying, propertarian sack of $#!+.
They have no "claim" on it, you educate us.
You again lie about what I have plainly written. They have no claim to
own it unless they have produced it or traded for another's product. They certainly have a claim to access and use anything nature provided: their rights to liberty.
They cannot justly "own" it, you enlighten us. Now you want to tell us they have a "natural liberty" to it? Sorry, that's a contradiction.
No, of course it isn't, stop lying. It self-evidently and indisputably is not a contradiction, because no one can own the earth's atmosphere, but everyone self-evidently and indisputably has the natural liberty to use it. You know this. Of course you do. You simply chose deliberately to lie about it, just as you have chosen deliberately to lie about everything else.
Either mob-member X can claim the bounty of the Universe or he can't. You have told us that he can't. So he has no grievance with any person or factor preventing him from making that bogus claim.
Huh?? ROTFL!! It is precisely the mob-member
landowner who makes that bogus claim! And all whose rights to liberty that bogus claim would extinguish most certainly have a grievance with the greedy, thieving parasite who seeks to enforce it by initiating violence against others who only want to exercise their rights to liberty.
You see how the Universe belonging to no one prevents your defense of the entitlement mentality.
No, I don't, and neither do you, so you can stop lying. That you presume to call equal human rights to life and liberty an "entitlement mentality" speaks volumes -- and all of them are about your dishonesty and servitude to evil.
If the Universe doesn't belong to the vagrant, he really has no entitlement to use it.
Already proved a lie, not to mention a self-evidently vicious and evil repudiation of the right to life.
Right to what? Liberty to what? To use portions of the Universe? But they have no such right nor liberty. You said.
Lie.
Too bad you always have to lie about what I have plainly written.
Well now wait, if all peoples of the world have a right to use the Universe, what does that "use" involve? Does it involve making decisions about it? Yes. Does it involve exercising exclusivity over it (only one person can drink that cup of water)? Yes. This is sounding suspiciously like ownership. In fact, it is ownership.
No; in fact, you are just lying. Again. Inevitably. Making decisions about how one --
not others -- will use the universe, and exercising exclusivity that does
not forcibly deprive
others of their liberty to use it is self-evidently and indisputably NOT ownership. You know this. Of course you do. You merely decided you had better deliberately lie about it.
If you use a gallon of water to put in your stomach, you have claimed ownership over that gallon of water. No one else can use it now. They may have had every right to use it, but they didn't. You didn't let them.
Lie. I didn't
stop them from using it.
You took it. Now what? Who is in the right? Mr. L.'s misosophy has no coherent answer.
Lie. Inevitably. Everyone is in the right as long as they don't initiate force to deprive others of what they would otherwise have without making just compensation, as landowners do. If that gallon of water was from a natural source that others are also at liberty to use, and there is plenty to go around, then I have deprived them of nothing, because they have suffered no deprivation. OTOH, if the water was scarce, as good land is, and others wanted to use it but now can't because I took it, then I owe them just compensation for depriving them of it, just as the landowner owes just compensation to all whose rights he violates by initiating force against them to deprive them of the liberty they would otherwise have to use the land.
Other than, to be consistent with his answer to the problem of a man who claims a location, he would say that the mob ought to punch him in the gut until he vomits up the water for them to all get their "fair share".
Another stupid lie, as always.
Not a strawman, I figured you thought the Universe was owned by everyone, since this is what it means for everyone to have a just claim on the use of the Universe.
No, it self-evidently isn't, stop lying. Everyone has a just claim to use of the atmosphere, the sun, etc., but do not own them. You know this. Of course you do. You simply decided deliberately to lie about it. Again. Inevitably.
Instead, you think no one has such a claim. Yet you also think everyone has such a claim.
Lie. A claim to atmospheric air to breathe, which everyone has, is not a claim to own the atmosphere, which no one has. You know this. Of course you do. You are just deliberately lying about it.
Yet you most emphatically hold that no one has such a claim, and are outraged I would think otherwise. Yet you most definitely propound the self-evident truth that everyone has such a claim, and roil in fury that I might disagree
<yawn> You just lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie. Everyone has a right to breathe atmospheric air. The atmosphere nevertheless does not belong to anyone, nor to everyone. It belongs to no one. You know this. That proves you are lying again. You are
LYING.
In short: you have no answers, you know I have proved your beliefs are false and evil, so you choose deliberately to lie about what I have plainly written.
How come it keeps getting disputed?
Because evil, lying sacks of $#!+ have to deny self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality in order to rationalize privilege, justify injustice and excuse evil. Hence your claims that land is essentially homogenous, that natural resources are produced by labor, that chainsaws contain raw matter, that "vagrants" have no right to exist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I am at a disadvantage, of course, because I am concerned about quality
No, your only concern is to tell whatever lies will allow you to convince yourself that you are not serving evil.
and so I do things such as actually read the entire post before responding, which it is as clear as day that you do not do, and then actually think about it, and then attempt substantive communication.
You have never attempted substantive communication, because you know I will demolish you. All you ever do is lie about the self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality and about what I have plainly written.
As you typed your "replies" to all my lines above, you had no idea how this post would end.
Yes, of course I did. I knew it would end just as it began and proceeded: with lies.
All that's relevant is that every single sentence I type is a lie, and your job is merely to tag and identify them as such.
Pretty much. I rarely respond to anything that is not provably fallacious, absurd and/or dishonest, but I do refute those claims quite relentlessly. The fact that this seems to include almost every sentence you write is a clue.
This style of pure rhetorical debate lets you produce massively voluminous quantities of text extremely rapidly, since you don't have to craft any kind of overall structure or argumentative logic into your posts.
What would be the point? You have proved you won't address anything I say, but simply lie about it.
Anyway, on this matter of production bestowing just ownership: what is production? Production is mere transformation, taking matter, space, and perhaps other abstractions,
Matter and space are not abstractions, duh.
and forming them into something different and presumably more to your liking. When one produces a chainsaw, he transforms ores, oils, and fibers, into this finely-tuned tree-massacre machine. So how is it different to take and transform an empty prairie into a parking lot?
One does not "take" the prairie out of nature as one does the ores, fibers, etc. One simply occupies it. The natural opportunity is still sitting there, under the cars. You are just initiating force against others to stop them from using it. The ores, etc., on the other hand, are gone. You do not have to initiate force against anyone to stop them from using the natural ore you used, because it no longer exists. The prairie, the space the parking lot occupies, still does.
You will say and believe
anything whatever in order to avoid knowing that fact.
One takes a location, transforms the matter there to be flatter, more smoothly perpendicular to the direction of gravitation, perhaps adds in matter from other locations to create phenomenon like pavement, paint, and lighting. Both the chainsaw and the parking lot are produced from the raw resources of the Universe. Those raw resources have been transformed into something greater, or at least different, than their original form. The chainsaw, you say, has been produced, while the land on which the parking lot sits has not. But Mr. L.: it has!
No, it self-evidently and indisputably has not. The parking lot has simply been put on top of the land. This is self-evident and indisputable. You have merely decided deliberately to lie about it. You even explicitly stated it yourself: "the land on which the parking lot sits."
That land has been transformed, just as assuredly as the raw resources in the chainsaw.
No, it self-evidently and indisputably has not. It is still sitting untouched under the parking lot, and if left alone long enough, the parking lot will again become natural land. The resources used to make the chainsaw, by contrast, have been removed from nature and NO LONGER EXIST. They will NEVER return to their natural state.
If one can appropriate for one's self some pieces of the raw Universe by building a chainsaw with them, one can just as justly appropriate some pieces of it by building a parking lot with them.
Notice how you had to say, "with" them, and not "on" them? You have just tacitly admitted that the resources used to make the pavement, paint lines, lighting, etc. of the parking lot are what one can justly appropriate, not the land you put them on.
The raw ores were there all along. The surface of the Earth was there all along. Fine. But you changed it.
The earth's surface is
still there, while the ore is not. You know this.
If you accept that the chainsaw owner can have absolute ownership over the matter composing the chainsaw, and the three-dimensional space which it monopolizes,
He doesn't own the three-dimensional space it monopolizes, because he will lose all claim to it when the chainsaw is moved and monopolizes a different three-dimensional space. You want to own the land under the parking lot even after the parking lot is gone.
you should at least be able to understand why I think it possible for the parking lot owner to have absolute ownership over the matter composing the parking lot and the location which it occupies.
Of course I understand why: you want unearned wealth. Simple.
