[DanielBMarkham]

Your analysis prompts a bunch of knee-jerk reactions from me which I'm going to attempt to squelch. :)

First, property as a result of superstition? Really? This is the first I've ever heard of this. In fact, most primitive societies have no concept of property -- this is why they are primitive. "Culture Cult" does a great job expanding on this argument.

Second, a dichotomy between energy and property? Really? So you can't be somebody who has a lot of energy and wants to smash doors down and also somebody who likes to own stuff? Sounds like a conclusion you'd draw from various discussions on MPAA and BitTorrent, but not one that would work for much besides that.

Let's say it's fifty thousand years ago and I live in the forest with my clan. I take a flint and make a wood carving. At this point I own nothing -- so if it's nice, the alpha male or one of his females takes it from me. So I stop making carvings.

Somewhere down the line, at least in Western Civilization, I make the same carving and get to keep it. This is the beginning of civilization, the basis for all progress: both the naming of property as the product of somebody's energy and the common belief that they get to keep it. Property is stored energy (in your terms). Once it's stored we can trade it or pass it around without having to expend energy again. So progress begins to accumulate. Energy can either create property or not.

Of course I can't keep everything I make; the clan needs extra arrowheads or whatever in order to fight off another clan. So I share -- or I'm taxed. However you put it, I give up some of my property, some of my "stored energy" in order to benefit the greater good.

There is a tension here, and it's a good tension. Where you come down on most political issues boils down to whether you're a "sharer" or a "creator/trader" You can be both, of course, but your answer to this tension defines your sensibilities. Not some kind of energy/property thing.

I love ad-hoc analysis. Your comment strikes me as an informed comment of somebody who has kind of floated along in the various property discussions we tech heads have without taking much time at all to dive deeper (apologies if that sounds condescending.) Might want to up your game a bit. Using your terms, energy without persistent property is a fool's game. Yes, you can trade MP3 tunes all day on the net and it doesn't hurt the economy much. You can participate in the FOSS movement, providing somebody else a bigger piece of property down the road for less effort -- a great cause indeed. But the reason you can act in such an idealized manner is that you're resting on other more fundamental principles of property. They don't come and take your house or computer any more, and the things you create you get to either choose to share or not. Because we rest so solidly on the foundations of property, we begin to forget they are there.

Seriously, this property rights equals don't-change-things and religious superstition is way whacked.

[roguecoder]

I don't think "creator" goes with "trader". Every creator I know enjoys having people enjoy their work, but would also like to eat. However, as soon as their basic needs are covered many prefer to give their work away because it isn't being created to make them rich, it is being created to be useful to people.

This is why open source works.

The tension, I believe, is scarcity versus sufficiency. In a scarcity society you have to horde everything. Life is a zero sum game, and you benefit most when you are better off than people around you. If you ask an MBA how they would feel if a friend bought the same car they had just bought they will tell you it cheapens their car a bit. In a sufficiency society, we stop trying to beat the people around us and start collaborating with them, forming communities of discovery and creation. If you ask working class people how they'd feel if a friend bought the same car as them, they say it makes them feel better: now they both have great cars. People are happier, more satisfied and more contented when they feel like there is enough to go around. They are also more productive, creative and innovative. There isn't the wasted effort of geniuses stuck trying to figure out where their next meal comes from.

The rich in a scarcity society are better off (though still less happy): both because they are richer and because they are richer than people around them. Humans use comparative status, not absolute status as their measuring rod, and it's a rush to know you are more powerful than the people around you. However, in a world of nothing but scarcity life is incredibly miserable, lonely and riddled with anxiety.

[mcguire]

"...most primitive societies have no concept of property -- this is why they are primitive."

Could you elaborate on that a bit? I'm having a bit of a problem with it, I think mostly because

"...I make the same carving and get to keep it. This is the beginning of civilization..."

doesn't seem to match what I know of the history of civilization.

[michaelochurch]

"Property" is quirky word, and I now wish I could think of a better word to represent what I'm talking about, because the points you've raised are valid. Property rights are a great thing in moderation. There's a social need for people to have the right to own the products of their own labor. Where property becomes a systemic disease when property relations persist for longer (and allowing larger concentrations than are reasonable) than serve any purpose. If a person who works hard gets rich, great. If his moronic, undeserving, spoiled great-grandchildren are rich and powerful and still call the shots in society, not great.

There needs to be a way of storing Energy, as you said, but it needs to be limited and kept reasonable. Infinite transferability of property rights is a demonstrated disaster.

For example, private land ownership (at scale, in non-agrarian settings) is pretty much illegitimate. I'm not saying that it's illegitimate for a person to own a small house in the woods on an acre of land. That's fine. I'm talking about what happens at scale. Private land ownership was necessary at one time because it gave people an incentive to use the land properly, but the senseless wealth transfer we see in, e.g., Manhattan is just perverse. People like me (hard-working, ambitious, energetic, talented) are the fucking reason people want to live (or work, or employ people) here... we fucking make cities... and yet, instead of thanks for making this place great, we get the obligation to pay immense sums of money in rent.

I would actually support a government solution to the urban land problem. Since the total price is going to be high anyway (because of the high demand for housing) I'd rather see it go into taxes that make the place better-- better schools, more and nicer parks-- than into the already bloated coffers of multimillionaire real estate owners.

The religion aspect: private land ownership pretty much emerged out of ancestor veneration. Land "ownership" started at the ability to defend land, which was usually the job of the chieftain or king or alpha male. However, being people, they died. If their descendants weren't strong or persuasive or wily enough to defend the land claim through ordinary means, they started using supernatural claims, based on the idea that the ancestor still existed and could enforce those claims supernaturally. (Over generations, these ancestors became gods.) This was almost certainly not the only religious impulse, and it's far from true that all religion was borne of this desire, but it's a strong and consistent strain of the impulse to corrupt religion toward political aims.

[eli_gottlieb]

You seem to be getting at the distinction between possessions and property. Proudhon would be proud.

Possessions are things you own (in the sense of being the exclusive user) because you made them and you're the one who uses them. You make a flint and then a wood carving, these are your possessions.

Property, however, is what we get when you start having exclusive usage rights to things you don't actually use. So a feudal landlord has the property rights to a manor. However, he only actually uses the bit of land occupied by his own castle. So what's the problem? He still "owns" the rest of the land, particularly the productive farmland, and he "rents" it to the peasants who actually work it.

He is engaging in the fundamental economic crime: rentiering, demanding that other people pay him forever to use something without their ever acquiring actual ownership over it. This can only be done because he has a property right over something he never productively uses (in fact, cannot physically make full use of: no one person can farm an entire manor or village worth of land). The creation/acquisition of property titles that can be rentiered upon is the usual historical mode of what Marx termed "primitive accumulation" or "the original accumulation", the first initial step that creates a capitalist class capable of living without working.

Note that we can use this definition to arrive at formulations of other great economic "crimes". Usury, we can now say, is the rentiering of money: the debtor never actually acquires ownership over the investment he borrowed, he just rents it for a while in the hope of generating enough return to make a profit for himself even after paying the "money-rent" of interest.

This, it is worth noting, is why modern capitalism really took off when we started forming joint-stock corporations. (Start-up guys, start reading here!) Equity investment routes around rentiering by actually trading the start-up capital for a share of ownership in the business. Ownership of one thing is exchanged for ownership of the other thing. This is why it's harder for venture capitalists to earn money than for, say, Goldman Sachs to earn money: venture capitalists are trading, Goldman can rentier (in fact, investment bankers in general are rent-seekers on their exclusive professional access to the broader capital markets) and commit usury.

[_delirium]

Interestingly, the distinction was actually common among the founding generation of Americans, before even Proudhon, though Proudhon turned it into more of a fully worked out theory of property.

Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote this:

"All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such a disposition."

(Elsewhere he clarifies that what he means by "necessary to a man" is essentially personal possessions, work tools, and shelter.)

Thomas Jefferson made a similar distinction in some of his letters. There's some speculation that Jefferson+Franklin's view that property isn't a natural right, but a social convention, is why the Declaration of Independence discusses "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", rather than the formulation, "life, liberty, and property" that was otherwise more common at the time.

[einhverfr]

One useful thing would be an excise tax for land rentals. This would drive up the cost of renting (but probably not the price, since rentals are competing with purchases) in comparison to owning in terms of both one's own home and productive property (farmland, office space, etc). This means less incentive to be a landlord. Ideally the home should be productive property but all too often it isn't.

[eli_gottlieb]

This is exactly the conclusion Henry George came to when he investigated these phenomena: a land-value tax. I, personally, would couple it with a rebate/"prebate" for a certain value, as society's way of saying, "If you use less than $X in land/commons value per year, that's fine." The X would be set so that the fat middle of the bell curve of single-family residences would fall within X.

[malandrew]

The terms you're probably looking for are "land rent" and "money rent". Both of which are well discussed in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. The text may be old, but it is remarkably thorough.