RE: Property Rights

Peter Passaro (ocsrazor@cablecomm-pa.com)
Sat, 22 May 1999 14:22:50 -0400

David,

Why you being vilified is because you are taking up a discussion which has already been debated on the list many times before. The arguments you are using are extremely thin and don't make much sense in terms of the real world.

The concept of property rights extends all the way to your very person. Without property rights you create a very slippery slope which leads the way to communism (i.e. all your possesions including yourself belong to the collective) All of our concepts of physical being are tied to the right to possess things. The concept of physical reality may indeed be an illusion ("There is no spoon") but it is the only set of rules which we currently have to operate by. Using another set of rules to operate by is often referred to as insanity or mysticism.

In the modern world we operate on material goods (matter) and information. We act as individuals or organizations on that matter and information. If you take away the right of individuals or organizations to act on that matter indepently and for their own benefit, you seriously impede technolgical progress (making all matter available to everybody at the same time would be chaos). As we progress through the nanotech revolution there will be less emphasis on matter and more on information, but you can't do away with property rights completely until you have technolgies such as nucleonic scale engineering and matter-energy-matter conversion, and the value of a specific piece of matter becomes negligible.

The concept of natural law is well established in modern philosophy and referrences can be found quite easily through the web.

Peter Passaro
ocsrazor@cablecomm-pa.com