[ekianjo]

I disagree with your point that "private property is an invention of the State". There is no need for any state to claim property on something. As you said, as long as you can defend what you have, it "belongs" to you. I'm pretty sure prehistoric men had a concept of property. Even animals have a sense of property. A dog will defend the bone it likes to chew on. A bird will fight to defend its nest. Property is rather natural.

I however agree when you say that intellectual property is an invention of the State, because that is precisely where it originates: the granting of monopoly to an individual by the hand of the King. There is no natural root in intellectual property.

> workers who lived in "company towns", in a life one step away from indentured servitude

Again, please put this rhetoric in perspective, not in the eyes of a 21st century person from a developped society, but in the eyes of a person of that time, who had the choice between staying in an enpoverished countryside, potentially victim of starvation and malnourishment, and the perspective of having a stable, paid job in a factory. People were NOT stupid. They made the choice of "more gains", not less. They ended up richer and in better position than where they started. They progressed on the social ladder. The very same story is happening with all these workers in China, queuing outside of Foxconn to get a good and sustainable job, compared to the Nothing they had in the countryside.

> The common thread between democracy and capitalism is to lessen the corrupting influence of power by distributing it: one person = one vote

Totally agree with the decentralization of power, but democracy is a poor tool to reach that goal. You elect high ranking officials who are above the laws. Who are all RICH, without exception. Who have immense powers over other individuals. And who can use violence to force their laws on you, or make you go to war and lose your life if they decide to do so. Government is, by itself, a huge body of asymmetrical power against individuals. You do not "choose" it, when you are born you are already, automatically, subject to it.

When you buy some goods, however, every dollar you spend is a vote for a product, a company. Should that company screw up, you will not buy it again. Its reputation will worsen. It will lose customers. It may go bankrupt. It is, actually, at the mercy of the decentralized power of customers who AGREE to buy it everyday or on a regular basis.

Governments (almost) never go bankrupt. Instead, they will tax you to death, they will take your property and declare it theirs (like when they forbid possession of Gold). And they will use violence to punish you and put you away in prison if you do not comply. And you will have no way out, but to leave the country (if you can).

Governments CAN be useful, but I think in most developed countries they have gone way further than what their initial role was supposed to be. That's a vast subject, anyway.

[lukifer]

> As you said, as long as you can defend what you have, it "belongs" to you.

...in which case, there is no ownership of property. Someone else can just come along and take it.

Honestly, embracing this kind of "natural law" does make sense to me, as it's least internally consistent, but I don't see it as synonymous with calling the cops because someone takes something that a legal document says is "yours".

> Government is, by itself, a huge body of asymmetrical power against individuals. You do not "choose" it, when you are born you are already, automatically, subject to it.

> When you buy some goods, however, every dollar you spend is a vote for a product, a company. Should that company screw up, you will not buy it again.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. So when it comes to politics, people are always stupid, picking tall wealthy men with good hair and no conscience; but when it comes to spending decisions, people are always smart, based on their rational self-interest.

Now, I'll concede that capitalism has a faster, tighter feedback loop: you generally don't have to wait 2-6 years to change your mind. (Why there has been no public advocacy for rethinking the concept of only voting periodically, I have no idea.)

That aside, I see the same phenomena in both arenas of human decision-making. People are mostly smart, left to their own devices, but they are sometimes irrational with both voting decisions and purchasing decisions. Moreover, there is a strong incentive in both arenas to manipulate those decisions, and the industries we have developed around this goal have become extremely efficient: electioneers, marketers, public relations, and all other sorts of "compliance professionals".

In my mind, the question is not whether democracy is good, but whether it is possible. I have yet to conceive of a social structure in which the smart and/or rich cannot play the game at the expense of the foolish and/or poor, whether it plays out at a political rally, or a corporate boardroom.

[batista]

Again, please put this rhetoric in perspective, not in the eyes of a 21st century person from a developped society, but in the eyes of a person of that time, who had the choice between staying in an enpoverished countryside, potentially victim of starvation and malnourishment, and the perspective of having a stable, paid job in a factory.

Let's not play the "they chose it" or "at least they were fed" argument for those situations. Having to choose between starvation and working as a wage-slave in horrible conditions, as they had, is not really a choice at all.

It's just employees of the time TAKING ADVANTAGE of people that had no other option than giving in to them, and the laws et al permitting them to do so. It is only slightly better than the "choice" slaves had, i.e that of working for their masters or getting killed.

People were NOT stupid. They made the choice of "more gains", not less. They ended up richer and in better position than where they started. They progressed on the social ladder.

Yes, working to your bone and getting paid peanuts is "more gains" over dying of starvation. Nothing to write home about, though.

I wouldn't call it exactly "progressing on the social ladder" either. Those people were dirt poor, they died dirt poor, and their children were dirt poor also, usually working on the same dead end conditions. With the occasional success story.

And those people knew the were getting a raw deal. That's how the labour movement was established, that's why people fought for the 8-hour day. And those people were also many times killed, by private guards and even the national guard, ever lending a hand to the rich men of their day, when they asked for fairer treatment.

One of my most vivid memories was visiting the Ludlow site in Ludlow, Colorado, and hearing of the story of the Ludlow Massacre, one of many. Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

[ekianjo]

> I wouldn't call it exactly "progressing on the social ladder" either. Those people were dirt poor, they died dirt poor, and their children were dirt poor also, usually working on the same dead end conditions. With the occasional success story.

I disagree. They did not die as poor as they started off. They were able to save a little, raise children and some of them did get education. This is the result of wealth creation. Life expectancy increased. They WERE better off.

By the way, facts and studies on the subject do not corroborate your theories:

"According to estimates by economist N. F. R. Crafts, British income per person (in 1970 U.S. dollars) rose from about $400 in 1760 to $430 in 1800, to $500 in 1830, and then jumped to $800 in 1860. (For many centuries before the industrial revolution, in contrast, periods of falling income offset periods of rising income.) Crafts’s estimates indicate slow growth lasting from 1760 to 1830 followed by higher growth beginning sometime between 1830 and 1860. For this doubling of real income per person between 1760 and 1860 not to have made the lowest-income people better off, the share of income going to the lowest 65 percent of the population would have had to fall by half for them to be worse off after all that growth. It did not. In 1760, the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860, their share was down only four percentage points to 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off, with an increase in average real income of more than 70 percent."

And this one too:

"Other evidence supports the conclusion of slow improvement in living standards during the years of the industrial revolution. Crafts and C. K. Harley have emphasized the limited spread of modernization in England throughout most of the century of the industrial revolution. Feinstein estimated consumption per person for each decade between the 1760s and 1850s, and found only a small rise in consumption between 1760 and 1820 and a rapid rise after 1820. On the other hand, according to historians E. A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, between 1781 and 1851, life expectancy at birth rose from thirty-five years to forty years, a 15 percent increase. Although this increase was modest compared with what was to come, it was nevertheless substantial."

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/IndustrialRevolutionandth...