At 06:38 PM 11/12/00 -0800, samantha wrote:
>Property is theft from whom? You can['t] steal if no one has any ownership
>rights. :-)
This standard retort to a snappy slogan (or counter-slogan) entirely avoids
the case being implied.
I make no assertion on the legitimacy of the following case, but it strikes
me as far from incoherent let alone meaningless:
In the first instance, the world's natural abundance has no owners. People
emerge in communities, with shared language and skills, who learn to turn
this abundance to their advantage. This wealth can be broadly shared (by
some algorithm of distribution), or sequestered to the possession of a few,
often by force of arms. If theft is the wrongful confiscation of hard-won
or even widely available wealth (naturally occurring, cultivated or wholly
contrived by intelligent human effort), it is easy to see how the fiat
assertion of `property' might be regarded with indignation as theft from
the commonwealth or commonweal.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:35 MDT