Des

What is the communist assertion wrt the validity of the institution of "making a treaty" (as distinct from, but related to the institution of "private ownership of property"). The questions are: Was it valid, per communist theory, for the collective of people of East Germany, to make treaty with the collective of people of West Germany, in which each agreed to limit use of the other's territory? e.g. the collective of West Germany will not tax the people of East Germany, or drive their tanks over East Germany? Is it valid per communist theory, for the collective of Johan and Gertha Friedrichs, to make treaty with the collective of Berthus and Magda Jakobs next door, in which each agrees to limit their use of the other's farm? e.g. the Jakobs collective will not harvest from the farm of the Friedrichs collective?

Okay, so if a collective can make a treaty to define borders and then that collective is the owner of that property, what if the collective is a man and his wife, and they make a treaty with their neighbours, same as the East German collective was doing with their neighbours - what then?

The people of East Berlin did not own the land on their side of the wall? My point is about the contradiction. Communism as implemented, asserted the right to make (national) borders (and say "this is ours"). However, if a smaller group like a family, made a border and said : "this is ours", then by communist theory of property, they were incorrect and it is not theirs. Please understand that I have not done detailed study of either Soviet history or communist theory, am looking for someone knowledgeable in one or the other (or both), to clarify whether or not this contradiction exists. Unless I am corrected, then there is a contradiction between the communist theory of property, and all possible implementations thereof within the universe, and therefore the communist theory of property is inferior to any theory of property which can be applied in a non-contradictory implementation.

To highlight a conclusion within the above linked document: Fractional reserve banking (morally a fraud), will in any case be limited in a free society, by people who get suspicious and propose a run on any bank which seems vulnerable. If there is some fractional reserve banking, caution at the consequences of failure (without a state apparatus to combat failure), will limit the fraction of fake money pumped into the economy.

Wait, let's be sure which meaning of the word institution we are referring to. Meaning 1 is an organisation, that is not the meaning I intended. Meaning 2 is an established social practice or rule (put in place [instituted] by people). There is an institution(2), by which property scheme conflict may be resolved. This is the institution of the treaty. Because it has already become an established practice, you are in the wrong if you fail to apply it in seeking to establish a definition of property to ensure that you and I do not come in conflict over property. I have started a new topic:

Is this contradiction going to emerge from every possible implementation of communism? My description of the contradiction is set out below, as applicable to the Soviet Union, but is there any escape from this contradiction? The soviet man has, and can therefore delegate to his elected representatives, the authority to make treaty with neighbours, thereby defining the borders of the Soviet Union. The soviet man does not have, and therefore may not delegate to an attorney, the authority to make treaty with neighbours, thereby defining the border of his front lawn.

Ownership and property are institutions. I would have said human institutions, but I can't (can you) imagine space aliens coming here and telling us their space vehicle is not subject to any institution of property. "Every thing is both owned and unowned" is an example of a theory of property less valid than other theories of property (because it is contradictory). The functional value of the institution of property is the resolution of conflict between those capable of resolving conflicts by argumentation (rather than physical intimidation), with the result that I don't die in some avoidable physical conflict. Let's say you camp on my lawn as suggested above (and there is no government). I call my security provider to remove you. You publicise to the world, your complaint that their action at my instruction, is an aggression against you. I publish my response that you have no treaty with me, and there is therefore no institution we can use to resolve this conflict by argumentation (physical conflict is unavoidable), so my use of force is reasonable. What will your response be?

Thanks, have digested that, will see if some new insight emerges in my mind, later, from that.

I say property is a matter for treaty. Practicality comes into it. If two neighbours have a treaty about where their common boundary lies, that is the treaty between them. If you want a space near that boundary, try make a treaty with one or both of them. Ethics is also a matter for treaty, but failure to prohibit murder, theft, assault and fraud in the treaty would make the treaty worthless, which is why some (those 4) categories of action are objectively immoral. If you do not have a treaty with a person, and you move to where he does not want you to be, why should he not kill you?

I want to try output here the links in my mind, and I admit possibly altered by your input above: Yes, the intent is what determines whether or not the action is moral. Okay, I admit intent can provide a line which is a line of certainty (intent to save life, on one side, intent to enrich self whilst disregarding harm to another, on the other side [those are mere examples from the set of all possible good or evil intents]). There can be a certain line there, even if no-one can see it clearly (not even the actor, because his self-knowledge may have distortion). To fulfil his intent, the actor must make a prediction. Theft, assault, fraud and murder are simple names for the actions motivated by that which has the simple name: evil intent. All of these derive from the victim's preference to be alive. Clearly, a rational actor with the usual preference for being alive, would prefer to exchange with you, a treaty in which you each agree to restrict yourselves from murdering the other, compared to risking death at your hand. This extends to theft, assault and fraud because of the reasonable prediction that such acts, if not restricted by the same treaty, could cause his death without meeting the definition of murder. We determine that these four categories of action are immoral, by predicting the consequence to the victim. The consequence is death. The immoral actor has intent to disregard the (however slightly) increased possibility of death his victim suffers from say: being defrauded of some resource that could possibly be the one resource to keep him alive at some point. I'm saying that with no prediction of consequence, there can be no determination that there is a set of actions, with intent included in the definitions of the actions, that are immoral actions. Without objectively predictable consequences, we would be back to aesthetics. To define an objective morality, we require the process of rational prediction of consequence.

Would you accept that, or ask for a reasoned proof of that statement?

The difference between spanking and not spanking is: By what you describe above, you create a hierarchy in which you as parent are the ruler, and the children are your subjects. You are in a class of ubermenschen and the children in a class of untermenschen. Ubermenschen may hit, untermenschen may not. This prepares them nicely to be ruled for fun and profit, by people more skilled than you are, at ruling people. Is that what you want?

I have an answer which I estimate is better (by being additional to taking co-ercion out of the picture): Whoever wants grandchildren should save up, create a trust fund, and offer it as support for whichever sons or daughters wish to make grandchildren. This would be a better custom than past marriage customs (dowry with the bride, bride-price for the bride), because it would adjust the financial situation so that the pressure is for providing for grandchildren, (if you fail, at least the children don't suffer while children, only when adults and better prepared for setbacks like : oops, we have no trust fund to offer to support you to have children). This is better than : oops, we thought we could afford 4 children, but now our income collapsed and we can't, and the children suffer whilst children.

I can get value from other people restricting themselves to moral actions (avoiding aggression), and I am willing to trade with trustworthy people, my non-aggression for theirs. That is the use I have for the computation of what is moral. If something in my posession is highly radioactive and you decide not to steal it (with each of us not having any knowledge of it's danger), then you have decided to do the moral action and I am dead. The computation that the action of not stealing is moral, uses the reasonable assumption that things I possess are not about to cause my death, that stealing them could lead to my (earlier) death. Prediction is entangled with morality and can't be untangled from it (if I am wrong about that, please explain). Initiating an interaction by whacking me over the head with a baton, is immoral because it is far more likely to lead to my death, than to lead away from my death (by say dislodging a thrombus that is about to kill me). Knowledge allowing better prediction, changes the character of the act. In each above case, if you knew it would very likely save me, then you were my lifesaver, not my attacker (even it the act fails and I die). I maintain that certainty is unrealistic, even for morality.

certainly is an unrealistic standard. I don't certainly know what happens if I skip work vs attend work, I make my decision without needing that standard of foreknowledge to be met, as do all of us, with all our decisions.

This is true because democracy within statism has is not limited to non-aggressive actions only. A voting system within a sharehold company is limited by the national law, which generally forbids direct aggression, so the voting system in a company does not allow the wolves to dine on the sheep. A voting system in anarchy would be within voluntary associations, and, at the point that "everyone" understands anarchy well enough to have an anarchic society, "everyone" knows that you can't eat anyone by majority vote.

If I ostracise you (or threaten ostracism), I don't thereby become your ruler. If you do something for which only a few people wish to ostracise you, then that is not really ostracism, just sloughing off a few potential friends. If you do something for which most people want to ostracise you, for example, you defraud people, then you are showing that you don't place much value on being accepted by those people (or that you have difficulty predicting consequences, or empathising with your future self). No, suppose you want to do fraud, I'm not your ruler forbidding it, I'm just another man saying okay, but then I'm not your friend and I haven't got your back when your victim wants revenge. No ruler, therefore anarchy.

Ownership is not pre-existing outside of our ability to co-ordinate action by use of reasoned argument. Given that we are able to co-ordinate action by use of reasoned argument, and given that one of the threats to my life is death due to conflict, how can I argue for a trade which minimises the threat to me, of death in conflict?** Well, I can argue that people have a (pretty much universal) preference for owning their own buttholes, vaginas and toothbrushes. From that it follows that accepting the principle of ownership of "stuff", is on the path to best practice in conflict resolution. The preference is not generally for some limited ownership of the butthole or the toothbrush, so the proposition of some principle of limited ownership is going to fall over against the general tide of preference. Now, how to distinguish some other thing from the toothbrush? Sure, I want to say that the oil that is partly under the land registered to someone in Kuwait, and partly under the land registered to someone in Iraq, is somehow different from the toothbrush. How is it different? When the oil has been brought to the surface and put in a barrel, it is very much like the toothbrush. When it is glopping around underneath the rock above, it is still the same stuff. The difference is in the blurry lines in the dispute over ownership, not in the principle that it is ownable stuff. What is the dispute-resolution method for stuff that "sits still" like the land surface, or sloshes around like oil or seawater? The long-practiced method is the treaty. If we don't want to die in a conflict between the man in Kuwait with a drilling rig, and the man in Iraq with a drilling rig, what we would do to resolve that conflict, is advise them to write up a treaty and sign it and stick to it. Whichever one of them breaks it, we ostracise him, and take the side of the one not in breach of the treaty. If they won't make a treaty, we ostracise them both, sell them no arms, and go destroy any arms they acquire, so that the conflict is limited to rock, fist and knife fighting in a local area. Why? Because the whole point of ownership is that you and I do not die in conflict (to be specific, that we hugely decrease the odds that we die in some conflict). When ownership is a little more complex that toothbrush-ownership, a treaty resolves it, and people being unreasonable about treaty terms, get the social disapproval appropriate to that unreasonableness. **for a trade which minimises the threat to me, of death in conflict That I trade not aggressing against you, in exchange for you not aggressing against me, within a society of people all committed to that trade each one with all the others in that society. In some cases ownership is defined by treaty. This could cover "intellectual property", to the extent that some practical treaty can be drafted. I have not explored how one would draft such a treaty, but I can say that whoever has not signed, is not subject to it's provisions, but could be sanctioned by ostracism, if the signatories choose to use that pressure, if they can make the argument that: not signing up to the intellectual property treaty is unreasonable.

moral pinch, hmmm. Why is Mr X the atheist limiting himself to moral actions? Because he wants other people to do likewise, and finds it hard to convince them to do that when he is not. What could create this moral pinch of which you speak? People whose actions will not respond to a decision Mr X makes to limit himself to moral actions. For example, whether Mr X immorally operates a drone to murder an ISIS operative, or he does not, ISIS will continue to commit murders, unresponsive to the moral character of Mr X's decision. Would that be the moral pinch you mention?

There is a co-ordinator, it is called insurance. Insurance is a more recent innovation than government, and insurance is the innovation which makes government obsolete. Alternately put, government was a primitive insurance system (with huge pitfalls). You don't want an invading force taking your piece of real estate? Insure against that.

I will just repeat that I am against having a government, and against (naturally) having a government BIG program, as much as having any other government program. I want to clarify that the BIG idea is to do away with measurement of income, do nearly zero administration, and give to billionaire and pauper the same stipend. The pauper survives off it, and the billionaire leaves it lying as loose change somewhere in one of his cars. I have typed in earlier posts in this thread, how and why a stateless society could adopt the BIG idea. No, foodstamps do not represent the innovative idea inside the BIG. The G should be for grant, not guarantee. To fulfill a guarantee, you do the work of determining whether or not the product failed. For a grant, you don't do that, there is no means testing.

What? no comment on the irony in advising words in between times of using force? Okay, occasional un-coordinated gun owners can't match a military force who - because of words - believe they are doing good by suppressing those un-coordinated gun owners, who, if they started to co-ordinate, would be reported to the military force, by people who - because of words - believe they should do so. I think I have just typed to you something you already grasp, just wanted to put it down clearly for those who may not have thought it through.

Succinctly worded, nice one, thanks. I upvoted for that.

Your mom didn't say "use your words, not your fists" (in between the times she spanked you) ?