One of the few things that libertarians get right is that the foundation of Western civilization is private property. They claim this is a universal reality, which is clearly incorrect, but it is true with regards to Western civilization. The assumption that a man owns the produce of his labor is the main difference between Europeans and the other people of the world. It forms the foundation of law and the logic of political organization, in addition to being the bedrock of Western economic systems.
What libertarians get wrong is that you can create a society where government only protects private property and does nothing else. As with so many things, they get the causal relationship backwards. Like everything else about human society, the concept of private property is downstream from biology and culture. Therefore, the primary reason to have a state is to defend the people and their way of life. Private property is one attribute of Western people’s way of life.
Putting that aside, the ape historians in the glorious future will no doubt trace the decline of Western man to the decline in private property. It will not begin with socialism or other economic concepts. Those are far downstream from what really matters to a people and their way of life. The Nordic people made socialism work while at the same time maintaining the concept of private property. They simply struck a different balance between property and culture than other occidentals
The erosion of this key facet of the West starts further up the chain of causality at the cultural level. This is where the abstract concept of property exists, the platonic form of private property. This is where the wreckers and subversive have gnawed away at the concept in little ways, thus making it less clear downstream. As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.
Take, for example, the internet. It exists because thousands of people working in government institutions invented a way to link computers into a network. This is why the internet is a public good. It is the creation of public institutions, in the same way the highway system is a public good. The internet was further built out by private companies seeking to profit from the exchange of information, much in the same way merchants use the highway system to profit from commerce.
This is true with regards to e-commerce. Jeff Bezos is able to hurl himself to the edge of the atmosphere in a giant phallus, because he got rich selling stuff on-line. Like all large corporations, he also bought indulgences from the government, in order to gain an advantage over rivals. First it was not paying sales tax and then he moved onto direct subsidies from state and local government for his supply chain. Like other big retailers. Amazon would not exist without government subsidy.
Amazon, however, is the exception. The rest of the tech oligarchs made their money stealing the property of others. Facebook, for example, sells the property of its users to companies looking for data on the population. They call this marketing revenue, but in reality, it is just theft. They steal the labor of their users and then sell it to interested parties without the knowledge of their users. It is a form of slavery in which the user base volunteers to give away their labor to the platform owner.
Many will push back against this characterization. After all, they will say, the service is free, and the real product Facebook is selling is their own creation. They use their technology to capture human activity. Then they make it accessible in a friendly format for their actual customers, the people paying them. The users, because they are choosing to use the platform, are choosing to abide by an agreement they never read and therefore agree to allow Facebook to steal their property.
That right there is how the concept of private property is eroded at the abstract layer of Western civilization. Most people, even classical liberal types, think what the tech companies are doing is legitimate commerce. They have accepted this degraded version of property that carves out an exception to the laws covering property to allow for what amounts to theft. If Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was sent through the time portal to this age, he would call the internet “legal plunder.”
That is what we are seeing, legal plunder. Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor. The business owner, the man who organizes men and material to produce goods and services, sees the return on his intellectual labor in the form of profit. It is his ideas and organizational talent that makes the enterprise possible and maintains its operations. The Marxists always attacked this idea but could never get around the reality of intellectual property being the fruit of labor.
Instead, the way around this problem is to attack the concept that you own you and therefore you own your labor. If Facebook can watch you on-line, track your activity through your mobile device, then sell this activity to their customers, it means one of two things. Either you no longer own you or we no longer have private property. After all, your activity is the product of your labor, so if you own you, then you own your activity and Facebook is stealing. Otherwise, you no longer own you.
If we return to the original Western concept of property, then you not only own your activity but also your reputation and your defining attributes. If a company wishes to use these things in a product, then they would need to strike a deal with you in the same way they would if they wanted your physical labor. If Facebook wanted to sell your data, they would need to get your permission every time they sold your data. The mobile devise makers would have to pay you to use their phones.
Of course, this is not present reality. The assumption is that you do not, in fact, own you, so all of this is perfectly normal. The reason enterprising lawyers have not proposed a novel legal theory to the court based on the ancient concepts of private property is that no one questions the right of the tech companies to harvest your property. The state is acting on this new normal as well. New laws, for example, have been passed to require alcohol tracking devices in new cars.
A world in which you do not own you is called a penitentiary. The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves. Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.
The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist. The secondary and tertiary reasons, like crime control and tending to the poor are all dependent on the people and their way of life. The defense of property is one of those attributes of culture the state must defend. The failure of the elites to defend the people and their way of life starts with this Western notion that you own you and all that you produce. That failure is the death of the West.
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“The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, because the population has been habituated to the idea that they do not own themselves.”
Excellent observation !!
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“Shelter in place” was already taken
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England used to have a solution to the Google/Facebook problem
The 1977 Unfair Contract Terms Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_Contract_Terms_Act_1977
Dunno what happened to it.
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We used to have similar customs in the US. A one way contract or contract of adhesion was assumed to be one sided with the issuer being more powerful than the other party. Courts have traditionally used the doctrine of reasonable expectations to test whether an adhesion contract is enforceable. Specific parts of an adhesion contract or the whole contract may be deemed unenforceable if the contract terms go beyond what the weaker party would have reasonably expected.
That principle has been abandoned with regards to end user license agreements.
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Ahhh contract law… What seems so easy has always been convoluted, but the digital age ramped things up tenfold. We already have doctrines of duress and unconscionability but we need to create a new doctrine of digital shysterism.
I agree with your larger point, but personal autonomy only dates to the Enlightenment. One of the enduring appeals of all forms of collectivism (a term that would baffle anyone born before about 1750) is that it promises a return to the garden, where everyone is secure in his place in the collective. It’s “escape from freedom,” as Fromm put it, and he might’ve been a goofy commie, but he wasn’t wrong.
You *don’t* own you. The tribe owns you, or the gods own you, or the spirits of the ancestors, or the genius loci. The Enlightenment idea that the State is somehow different from the People was an ad hoc response to the Wars of Religion, which is where the notion of radical personal autonomy got started. Luther and especially Calvin made you and you alone responsible for the state of your soul, from which all else developed.
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“…the Wars of Religion, which is where the notion of radical personal autonomy got started”
So was the New Testament Christianity the latent kernel of this trend? In ancient times, the thought of personal “belief” in the gods and the broader cultural mythos didn’t make much sense. The gods were everywhere, rituals and temples were embedded within every day life–down the road, near that stream etc.
It wasn’t until Christianity emphasized a personal relationship with one god that belief made any sense in society. This standard of personal belief had to have started us down the track of “radical personal autonomy” as you put it.
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But the collectivist are inventing history here. Even in feudal times, property and autonomy were closely linked. Their imagined pre-history man is not rooted in reality. It is just a device to make the rest of the ideology happen. The noble savage is the McGuffin of moral philosophy.
Again, a defining part of Western culture is property. This is not a defining characteristic of all people.
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I don’t disagree, but the “autonomy” of the feudal noble, or the Athenian freeman, was very narrow. The Athenian who stepped too much to his own drummer would be literally ostracized; the feudal noble who failed to respect his station both ways would be sent on Crusade. The Saxon freeman actually “owned” himself far more than the medieval English freeman, in that he knew exactly what his life was worth, down to the penny.
It seems to me that late medieval social structures, eg guilds, came into being largely to address the growing sense of “property = autonomy.” Even the best craftsman was bound by guild regulations from expanding his craft too much, just as sumptuary laws kept him from dressing above his station, though he was much richer than any noble in his shire.
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The idea of self-ownership, at least to the degree consonant with the Fatherhood of God, is most certainly pre-enlightenment. Thomas Aquinas recognized it, saying that children of non-believers should not be forcibly converted as children, but wait until “it begins to belong to itself—incipit esse suus–and is able to look after itself, in matters concerning the Divine or the natural law, and then it should be induced, not by compulsion but by persuasion (non coactione, sed persuasione), to embrace the faith.”
So self-ownership was certainly a medieval concept. I certainly wouldn’t argue that it wasn’t different in many respects than the Enlightenment concept, but it was most certainly there.
By the way, if Aquinas thought that even the saving of souls should be accomplished by persuasion, I think we can guess what he would have thought of vaccine mandates…
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Though I understand the Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., business model, it never really bothered me that they would use it to try to sell me $400 sneakers, etc., and these days, since most of the websites I frequent are excluded from the online advertising racket, I don’t see all that many ads.
That said, the move by these tech monopolies to integrate their thievery into the government surveillance apparatus is more that a little alarming. I expect the conversion of the West into an anti-white, multi-cultural and sexually deviant version of Chinese surveillance state authoritarianism to precede its death.
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I was looking for a plaid necktie to go with my kilt. I did an online search for “plaid neckties.” I then saw ads on Facebook for businesses selling plaid ties.
Google had sold my online search to Facebook who sold it to these businesses. I contacted the businesses, saying that since I hadn’t given Google or Facebook permission to sell them my search, I should be paid for their access to my data in the form of a discount if I were to purchase one of their toes.
No takers. I purchased my tie at a Salvation Army store. It isn’t the Black Watch plaid that I was looking for but it’s close.
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Were all the models wearing Scottish attire non-white?
We have had problems with Google Maps reviews for our business. About half the ones on our location are fake, some positive, some negative. A few others are retaliatory, including one from a disgruntled former employee that is defamatory. We have made multiple attempts to have the reviews removed and Google just sends a form reply saying they won’t remove them. We are told we need to pay for “reputation management” to keep bad reviews from being published to our Google listing. This is extortion fully backed by the government.
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Is it possible to manufacture a large number of ‘genuine’ ones, to counter the negatives? May as well play Clown World at it’s own game.
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We have done some of that. We know a competitor who requires employees to go on Google and leave 5 star reviews of their company. A government not controlled by Big Tech would tell Google to get this process under control quickly or remove it.
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“The phrase “lock down” was quickly normalized, despite being a prison term, Of course, the state can lock you in your home. After all, they can determine your associations and they allow private enterprise to spy on you in your home. You don’t own you. Like a pet, you are the property of powerful interests, and you must do as you are trained.”
yep, that’s how entitled these oligarch fuckers are, they treat us like we’re some freaking teenage characters from the Salo movie.
I don’t think they realize that not everyone has similar mental patterns. Yes, there’s lots of npcs out there who are born & waiting to be tamed by someone of higher rank, but not everyone is a bitch, there’s just as many dudes who simply cannot adapt to this great reset lifestyle, will half of the male population be sent to reeducation camps? Is such a thing even feasible?
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“there’s just as many dudes who simply cannot adapt to this great reset lifestyle, will half of the male population be sent to reeducation camps? Is such a thing even feasible?”
This point to me reveals that our rulers are simply not very competent. I oscillate at times between some evil forces (WEF, etc.) driving a reset to plunder our wealth, or a bunch of incompetent betas and women haphazardly driving to some gay utopia in their mind.
Consider the current ongoing purge of the military, both those considered “extremists” and those who won’t submit to the “vaccines”. A competent Machiavellian trying to consolidate power would realize the risk of having hundreds of thousands of bitter, angry, yet very well-trained warriors purged and therefore naturally allied against you. A bunch of incompetent, immature, beta fruitcakes and women think they are winning a victory simply by doing this, by removing undesirables as they define them from the military.
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We all have a choice of using Facebook or declining. Exchanging our labor willingly for something we value (sustenance) does not make us slaves. If we value the Facebook service enough to exchange our privacy willingly, it does not reduce our property rights. (Eviction moratorium’s do, however)
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But that is not what is happening. You act like Facebook is the local blacksmith and you are bargaining with him over shoeing your horse.
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Huh? I don’t even own a horse.
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Europe has found ways to protect personal privacy (and property) online; Google and Facebook routinely get record fines leveled against them when they get caught violating those laws.
It can be done. But it begins with people understanding that they own themselves, not big tech.
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Hmmmmmm.
I am not sure of the foundation of your argument. It’s easily shaken, and easily attacked.
A. The profit that Bookface makes is from property or a commodity that they create. That info would not be “property” unless somebody curated it, archived it in a way to be retrieved when needed. Torba over at Gab could do the same thing if he chose. So could the guys at bitchute, and other free speech service providers.
B. Privacy and personal information may be important to you, but both parties can waive that ownership in any contract they enter in to. It’s done all the time in business partnerships where access to proprietary info and intellectual property are required to facilitate effective partnerships and contracts. Don’t like it? Throw your cell away. Their contracts are legally bulletproof: they say what they mean, and mean what they say. Our property, contract and torte law is based on you READING your contracts and understanding them before you agree to them.
What should bother the dissidents and is of far more legal concern is the monopolies being set up by these guys. They are flat out illegal under American law, and most other western countries as well. For their part The oligarchs are doing exactly what they should: competing against their rivals and trying to shut them out of any further competition. We used to understand that sometimes this made for unhealthy monopolies and market manipulation and we acquiesced to informed and objective market regulators to deal with them as equitably as possible.
This is an issue of monopolies, not property infringement
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A. How is this different from a factory? The widget is the result of the organizational talent of the factory owner, but he must still pay for the labor used in the plant. The Facebook factory is relying on free labor and does so through relying on a degraded interpretation of property and deception.
B. If that was what was happening with these tech companies, then sure, but that is not the case here. These are not contracts freely entered into by both parties. They are one-way contracts, so they have historically been treated differently than mutual agreements.
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The one way nature is the effect. The disparity in bargaining position is the cause.
Sure, but equality exist only in the world of fantasy. The landlord with two rental units has power over the tenet in the contract. You don’t have to be a global corporation to issue a one way contract. If we subjected these agreements to the same scrutiny we apply to car rental agreements, Facebook probably collapses as a business. The same with Twitter. I’m focusing on the property aspect here, but it is not a single cause phenomenon.
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In any rental agreement, however, the tenant is granted extraordinary rights and powers over someone else’s property.
Perhaps I am missing your point? Bookface pays it’s workers. Be patient with me, Z, I am a Yesterday Man trying to catch up.
Legally, this is how I would counter your argument if I worked for the bad guys: This is not a case of intellectual or property infringement at all. As a marketing guy, I was paid to notice (for example) – that, say, customer Karl McHungus is buying Alaska Chaga – but not the the ever-so-trendy Z Man boutique jewelry. My job, which is as legal as church on Sunday – was to find out why he wasn’t buying and see if there wasn’t a more effective strategy to market that line to him. I would also find out why he bought the chaga and see if we could use his motivation for buying those products to get him to buy others. Since you are a customer of bookface – they are simply doing the same thing to you, under the terms and conditions of your contract in using them. My methods for gathering that information is as legal as church on Sunday too. What’s the difference if I gather the marketing data or an algorithm does it?
For you to have a case against me – you will have to prove that I ‘stole’ something of value from you, and that I did it by illegal means. You must put a dollar figure on it, and spell out exactly how my activities hurt you. If you can spell that out… maybe you have a case. For most of us, in the real world, it doesn’t matter.
The sheep are not being robbed of their rights, Z. They are selling them or trading them. We see this when they line up for the Covid shot because they are also getting a coupon for free junk food at Rotten Ronnie’s.
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Note that Mr. Filthie said the arguments are “easily shaken”, not wrong.
Mr. Z-Man mentions in the comments section “contracts of adhesion” for the very good reason that in a free society, a monopoly would not be able to enforce or would suffer liability for changing terms of service.
In a free society.
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A contract that includes a clause that allows one party to unilaterally change the terms of the contract at any time, for any reason, and denies the other party that power, is no contract at all.
Peoples’ laziness in clicking on those pieces of trash should in no way qualify as legal consent.
As many have noted in this space, including our host, if you don’t have freedom of association, you don’t have freedom – full stop. All of what we see around us today, up to and including the coming Magic Shot Mandates, can be traced back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When future Chinese, or Islamic, or Mexican historians, look back at the demise of the USA, they are going to take one look at the Civil Rights Act and say “There! That was the turning point right there. The CRA is like a wall across American history; before 1964, the US almost never failed, after 1964 it almost never succeeded. It’s seeming triumphs after this, like the Moon landings and victory in the Cold War, were all a result of energies and processes started pre-1964. The CRA poisoned America at the root” And they will be right.
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You don’t even have the right to have an opinion in digital space that is contrary to your employers publicly stated “values”.
Even if you completely divorce your online persona from your working one, that will not be a defense if doxxed for many corporations.
How is this legal? How do we put up with this? Corporations now get to own what you say, think, and write online?
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Many European countries have laws in place where you can not be fired for political views. While I hate the CRA, expanding the law in a way that would benefit us would solve a lot of issues.
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Agreed, but we all know that the CRA doesn’t really apply to white people, unless the PTB, for some reason want it to. It’s always been this way de facto, and now the Left is starting to argue this explicitly. And of course, if they want to, they can always find a reason to can you. Every used your work email for personal use? Is that a paperclip I see in your pocket? Company property, you know…
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I mean, technically university professors have tenure and can believe anything they want politically, but any professor who started publically supporting right wing causes would immediately be hit with a raft of sexual harassment, racial insensitivity, and administrative malfeasance complaints, and be railroaded out in about twenty minutes. It would be even easier in the private sector. This is not Ike’s America, or even Reagan’s – we’re not going to legal our way out of this.
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That only applies to Leftist political views. They just want to make sure you can’t be fired for being too far Left, or for endorsing Leftist violence.
But you can’t be a dissident and keep a job.
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The Panopticon. The Zman and Foucault converging.
Synopticon
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22900
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20641
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22831
The idea that you own you is very important to the West and the state has never respected it. In peaceful times it collects taxes, punishes people and various other infringements on the concept. In war time, you can be conscripted and various other measures of extreme coercion. You can probably define ‘a state’ as something that has the power to violate this and is seen as legitimate when doing so. This is not too different from Weber’s traditional definition of an entity that monopolizes the use of violence. But it has one advantage which is that it contradicts the illusion that big business and especially Big Tech, are not really wielding state-like power. Which they of course do.
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Agreed. I read Z’s line here:
“As a result, the idea of private property has slowly receded from the public discourse with regards to politics and economics, even within socialist debates.”
And thought “The capitalists learned from the state.”
Own your house free and clear with no mortgage? Stop paying your property taxes and see what happens to your house.
Own your car free and clear with no loan and the title in your name with no other liens? Don’t license it or commit an act of “malparkage” and watch your car get impounded and ransomed for return.
Work for a living and don’t pay income tax, and you’re not a Vibrant! visitor working for cash under the table? Expect a meeting with the IRS at some point, with criminal charges brought up later.
The state respects personal property. As long as they get their cut.
Long ago I had a college professor that explained the job of Government was “To do the tasks the private sector cannot or will not do”. At that quaint time it was things like building roads, bridges, raising armed forces, etc.
Now I believe the job of Government is “keep the grift going”.
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The World Economic Forum, with the Schwab guy running it who looks like a superman villain, is all-in on eliminating private property and making humanity a bunch of renters. From a purely economics standpoint, it makes sense, as any hindrance to the transfer of capital is seen as an evil.
Normal people get stuck in such irrational wants as farming the same farm that has been in the family for generations, building structures for beauty rather than for utilitarian purposes, buying from people they know and trust instead of the cheaper megacorp, and working for a business where you actually know the owner. You know, stuff that makes us human.
Expect rental companies to start aggressively banning guns on property, big capital finishing off the last of small businesses, and traditional institutions being bribed and destroyed to be replaced with a weird skinsuit of an organization.
But don’t worry, they assure us we’ll be happy.
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It seems to me a lot of evil comes from making being happy the goal.
Rather happiness is just a byproduct of an industrious and moral life. A lot of evil can be justified in pursuit of happiness.
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This is an excellent essay and something to build a foundation around.
We must take back our property and our very being from the oligarchs.
One thing the pandemic has exposed is that the “my body my choice” line from leftists, particularly women, is all fake.
It went from yelling about needing bodily autonomy, so that old white men can’t prevent her from murdering her 9 month old pregnancy, to demanding unvaxxinated people be rounded up and sent off to camps – because granny needs to be protected from mean, heartless people.
Conservatives keep going on about hypocrisy, as usual. As if the neutral arbiter sky God will come scold leftists for their supposed hypocrisy.
They clearly don’t think you own your body. As usual, their positions are about destroying traditional Christian morality, and uprooting white society. Many women are just pawns, repeating what they are told by the Alpha, the leftist elite. But the agenda has always been destruction of the West, and being both pro-abortion and pro-mandatory vaccination achieves that goal. There is no hypocrisy there.
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Years back at a neighborhood wine aunt get together the topic of the latest attempt by the City of Portland to fluoridate their water came up. Knowing I was in the company of mostly libtards I was astounded when I was the only one who opposed it. One of the younger attendees (obviously raised by stupid hippies judging by her name) even went so far as to call personal sovereignty a “red herring”. Amusingly, the main reason they gave for supporting this abomination is that “the poor” (i.e., blecks) don’t have the agency to take care of their kids’ teeth. It wasn’t expressed that way, but it’s exactly what they meant.
I’m not sure there’s anything more dangerous in modern times than an army of clueless petty tyrants that mindlessly enable the really dangerous ones.
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The Covid nonsense has a strong potential to create a Black Swan cataclysm with the vaccine, all because of a purity spiral that no one has the power to reign back anymore. Not even the Biden admin or the CDC can reign it in anymore, as there’s too much money flowing into the pandemic hysteria now and too many promises that are impossible to keep.
If it only becomes a minor event, in the sense that millions are now only living their lives with weakened immune systems from the spike proteins rather than flat-out dying, we’ll be allowed to talk about it in ten years.
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I remember debating fluoride in the water with my old buddy from high school in PDX. It was one of my first views into the contradictory mind of the radical leftist. This guy was against state and corporate power in all its forms but also was vehement the state contaminate the water supply with industrial waste. Why? Because science. His position seemed more of a reaction against his perceived ideological enemies than a positive one. His ideology demanded fluoride in the water because that was the party line so that was that.
I’ve known him for 25 years but I haven’t even tried talking to him since the holocough.
“My body, my choice,” only applies to abortion and the trans stuff because both of those movements align with the Bolshevik needs to destroy the family and natural human identity to achieve their goal of atomizing human beings into fungible meat bags with two legs that are tagged, tracked, and controlled by the state.
Declining the clot shot flies in the face of those totalitarian needs, so of course they are, and will always be opposed to those who do so.
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Women are chaotic and evil without moral men to lead them. Not unlike how the sun makes the earth fertile, and the farmer makes it good.
Immoral men are weak and detestable.
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I don’t think there is any regular reader here that doesn’t understand the Nature of Woman, even the women themselves. (3g4me, rangefrontfault, etc.)
They are empty vessels, by design, and their anatomy literally reflects this. As you pointed out they will allows themselves to be filled by whatever the Alpha of the Moment is proclaiming as good for the herd / society. Herding animals to the core, this can even be things detrimental to society and themselves because critical thinking or going against the grain are not part of their genetic makeup. To expect them to act differently is to have a dim understanding would of a good survival strategy as a very weak very dependent creature.
This is why in less than a century we went from millions of German women throwing roman salutes at rallies to those same women now holding signs welcoming inferior genetic aliens into their midst to rape and debase them supporting their own ruination. A gender built for social compliance will be socially compliant at all times. (((They))) figured this out mid century and executed a master stroke of using feminism as a cipher and attack vector to distribute all manner of societal poisons.
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Property is the product of human labor, both physical labor and mental labor.
That might be true if the product is a baseball bat or an edition of Pilgrim’s Progress. But is it true about what’s now the state of Nebraska, for instance? At one time all property in some areas was supposedly owned and administered by an hereditary despot. Anyone questioning that state of affairs would be considered insane or treasonous. Now it’s normal, at least in the US and other parts of the world that have come under western colonialism, for the state to distribute property amongst those able and willing to pay for it and remit regular tax payments to the state. In exchange for these payments the state allows the owners exclusive rights to the property except for that needed for state requirements.
One of the biggest problems in adapting to the demise of socialism in eastern Europe was the redistribution of state-owned real property to the private sector. All of that property had once been in private hands but the chain of ownership had become unclear and the boundaries of property were uncertain. It’s still an issue in places like Romania. It’s fashionable to call Russian industrialists “oligarchs”, as if the assets of the defunct Soviet system were to be disbursed to the general population through lotteries or contests.
The US went through one of its own redistribution programs in the process of permitting the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Alaskan native groups threatened to have the project tied up in legal challenges for decades to come unless they were allowed some property rights in the state. They did receive property, which had in fact been theirs for millennia, but under a paradigm that suited TPTB, the creation of 13 regional corporations and subsidiary local ones rather than any private ownership of real property. Millions of acres of land, once the property of individuals, after being held by the Tsar and the US government, ie. all the citizens of the US, is now owned by abstract governmental creations rather than ordinary citizens. Private property, other than your own personal jack knife, toaster or cargo shorts, is a myth.
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The fact that the state infringes in private property rights does not mean that private property is a myth. It just means that, like every other right, an eternal struggle exists between the state and the invidividual for exercise of that right.
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The loss of private property is something I have noticed with dismay over the years. In my youth, great pride was had in owning cassettes and cd’s – the music was ‘yours.’ Now, people just have access through streaming services; they conflate access with ownership. Most adults nowadays are up to their eyeballs in debt; again, they conflate access (lease/ mortgage/ payments) with ownership.
The problem this creates is not solely the loss of private property. The largest effect, in the psychological sense, is a loss of dignity. Look at the breadlines of the 30’s – those men were in their Sunday best. Even if they only had a shack, it was orderly and neat. In the heyday of the suburbs, people took pride in their lawns and maintenance of their vehicles.
Of course, these are slightly idealized views, not always able to survive historical scrutiny. However, at the very least, they were ideals that people had as ideals to strive for. Maintaining your station in life maintained your dignity, and allowed a healthy sense of pride from fulfilling your obligations.
Now, as everything is loaned and full of contingencies, so is self-worth.
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Streaming is renting music. Another aspect of the rentier economy.
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Eloi: Brilliant comment. Equally important to the concept of private property is the concept of mutual societal obligations. If you own yourself and your mental and physical labor, then you are also responsible for yourself. I am sick to death of hearing about muh rights. When and if people tend to their duties as decent free adults, then they warrant rights. And those duties and rights have nothing to do with the government or laws or paying taxes.
Perspective matters.
Privacy is extinct and the tech oligarchs own DC so there will never be a law passed that reigns in this novel form of organized crime. So what to do?
First, get off social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Second, leave your smartphone at home when you want to be left alone. Get a burner for emergencies if you need to have a phone on your person when out & about. This also has the added benefit of suppressing your phone addiction habit. Third, fight back tangibly. These businesses do not exist solely in the ether and rely upon tangible assets to function. And those assets are distributed all over the place. Death by a thousand cuts can be a two-way street too. Think outside the box. And if the pain gets great enough, even the corruptocrats in DC may have to rethink their mode of treachery. We are not helpless, and sometimes you just have to get up off the couch.
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I need my iPhone for work but since Apple’s new spy policy I’m probably going to delete everything personal off it and use it for that one purpose. I’ll activate the flip phone I have on hand and tell friends to text me rather than use Telegram.
What it seems to boil down to is free is not free. You may not be paying Facebook a monetary fee to use their service but rather a data mining fee.
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To be fair, in any civilization nobody can ever be free. I doubt anything is really free in the absolute sense, as we all know. But things really do seem to have become worse in recent times; governments at some points probably looked out for Joe Average far more than they do now.
A million and one levies charged in a million and one different ways on, say, a property. I’ve no beef with kicking up my share, but new tax (or tax increases) seems to be quite common. And, as Z mentions, the populace that doesn’t care to own itself often just acquiesces. Add to this how underhanded certain elements have become – naturally the addition of Chinese, Jew and Indian to society change it in such a way.
That said, the default mode for most civilizations seems to be dumping on Joe Average, so there’s nothing new here.
Laws that served a great purpose are interpreted far differently between those who have the final say now, than when originally drafted. And then a million and one new caveats are added to cover all manner of edge cases. It’s a goddamn minefield and it is now surprise to me when I hear a person say they’re looking for more simplicity in life.
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If you don’t act free, you aren’t free. Natural rights are merely the legal justification for acting free. If they aren’t practiced, they aren’t respected. Words on paper don’t command respect.
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From the late, great Dr. Walter E. Williams about the ultimate private property, the ownership of your own body:
“Self-ownership can offer solutions to many seemingly moral/ethical dilemmas. One is the sale of human organs. There is a severe shortage of organs for transplantation. Most people in need of an organ die or become very ill while they await an organ donation. Many more organs would become available if there were a market for them. Through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, Congress has made organ sales illegal. Congress clearly has the power to prevent organ sales, but does it have a right? The answer to that question comes by asking: Who owns your organs? One test of ownership is whether you have the right to sell something. In the case of organs, if it is Congress that owns our organs, then we have no right to sell them. That would be stealing from Congress.”
I remember hearing him speak about this issue in depth while guest hosting the Rush Limbaugh Show. His premise was that everyone in the organ donation “chain” profits, except the donor or his estate. The recipient of the organ gets say a new heart and a new lease on life. The hospitals, healthcare professionals, those that preserve and transport the organ(s) and every one of their suppliers and support staff get to make a profit. The donor or estate is S.O.L.
It is for this reason, I REFUSE to be listed as a donor, and even though my wife has the little notification on her license, I as her surviving spouse would not authorize an organ harvesting. She will be cremated 100% intact.
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Heh. The second most quoted magic negro after Thomas Sowell.
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Let’s not forget St. Martin. And BO. And Candace Owens. And Bill Clinton. And Snoop Dog. And Lebron James.
No, I always respected Sowell and Williams. They are definitely high IQ negroes and their writings were filled with common sense. They may just be a paid part of the dialectic, but they were better than most White conservative commentators. But, then, I’ve become so paranoid I sometimes think ZMan could be a paid part of the dialectic.
This is one of those things that makes libertarians utterly retarded and repugnant. Plus, they will defend organ sales, but not freedom of association.
After death sales is another thing and I would probably support it, though even there it does make me a bit uneasy, especially when it comes to minors. Little Tyrone gets hit by a car and the next thing you know they’re selling his eyes, his heart…..
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Glypto Dropem: I, too, refuse to be listed as a donor, but my primary reason is that I would have no control over to whom any organ went (i.e. no non-Whites, no long-term drug users, etc.). You make an excellent argument for the sale of organs, but the same argument could be for the sale of sex – and that brings us to the moral angle. I don’t want the Senate legislating morality; that’s properly the role of a decent White society, but I don’t know that it’s not now a necessity with today’s degeneracy. Another thing to ponder.
I believe the current view of property by our betters is, “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” Of course, that doesn’t apply to them, but when has hypocrisy mattered to the elite. Its just a quaint concept for losers.
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The people themselves have to be upset that their data is being scraped. It may be their property, but it’s clearly not all that important to them. This will likely change when the tech companies just hand the scraped data over to the government to make their cases for them. Apple was smart in using the kiddieporn issue as the camel’s nose under the tent. Almost everyone recoils at that. But then it’ll be images of black suns and swastikas, then frogs, etc. And then the dam will break on everything.
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Maybe the Indians were onto something with the idea that taking a persons picture was stealing their soul.
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“The point of the state is to preserve the people and their way of life. This is its primary reason to exist.”
The point of the State [in Occidental context] has always been to preserve, and when needed to adroitly modify, a lifestyle that doesn’t threaten its bureaucratic hold, which with the passage of time has almost become ontological.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution (which is fundamentally an anti-White document) was a signal that the Potomac functionaries would determine the context of a people’s ethnocultural expression, not the other way round.
You are free, even encouraged, to live like a de Sade but the State would consider you a menace if you decide to mobilize in the name of religion or race.
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The idea that the US Constitution is fundamentally anti-White is ridiculous. It’s certainly not a perfect document, but it was written by White people, for White people.
The First Amendment did fatally weaken the role of religion in society, but I don’t credit the authors with having a grand plan, as some states maintained state churches for decades after the Constitution was ratified. There are reasonable alternate justifications for why they didn’t want a state church established at the federal level (and that’s all the first amendment prohibits). For one thing, various states had different established state churches, so any established federal church would be suspected of favoritism toward states that had the same church. It’s hard to understand for people raised in the modern US where states are effectively little more than administrative districts, but the US was much more a confederation of sovereign states than a single united nation. People considered themselves, for example, Virginians first, Americans second — thus the real reason for the Civil War. It’s easy to see the progression in hindsight, but things aren’t so clear when you are in the middle of them.
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One big example of the loss of private property rights is how landlords were given eviction moratoriums last year on by the CDC. Who was President last year? Oh that’s right, orange f uk face. Now Biden is attempting to re-up it, and it’ll once again be knocked down by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court had it wrong. They claimed that only Congress can create a law to do this. If we followed “muh Constitution” it would be unconstitutional to even attempt to do any eviction moratorium, even on the state and local level, unless all landlords were justly compensated for this. While programs are in place, there’s no guarantee that you as a landlord will be justly compensated for having COVID freeloaders on your property. But this is the same government that takes away our private personal property through asset forfeiture laws. How dare you have too much cash on you.
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What happened with Vox?
I clicked on a link to his site where he was explaining the fraudulent nature of advertising, and got a “this blog violates our TOS” block.
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This is fairly radical, not that I disagree. But can’t this same logic apply to wage labor?
By your standard I own the product of my labor so when I go to work the output I produce should be mine however the boss actually owns it. We can say that I have an agreement with him that I exchange some of the value I create for use of his capital and organization but really it’s much more akin to the Faceberg EULA that nobody reads. The user agreement is baked into society and everything is set up for me to accept it by default with few or no alternatives. In reality my employer actually owns everything I create during *his* time and gives me some portion of that; instead of me the employee renting his equipment and organization he’s renting my being.
We’re used to this deal in the West and maybe it’s not the worst thing but I think we should consider if it really suits Western man.
The question of property is a concern second to none. How we define it and enforce it is the wellspring of social organization. “You own you” is a good axiom and we could test further outcropping of our system of property against it. The Faceberg EULA and wage system don’t hold up.
Kind of a divergence but I’m very interested in another fundamental of property, and that is enforcement. What is property? It’s what you can kick someone off of. Capitalism offers privatized ownership with socialized enforcement, i.e. ever worker and renter is taxed to pay for the security of the bosses and landlords. There is no natural limit to the amount of property an entity can have because no matter what the state will secure it.
What if there was no socialized property enforcement and the owners had to pay for their own security? It would radically alter the balance of things. An apartment building owner would have to pay guys to do evictions and the insurance for such risky business. A factory owner, in addition to the productive laborers, would need to hire security to make sure the workforce didn’t walk off with the machinery or just collectivize and seize the shop as their own. In such a world there would be steep natural limits to the profitability of ownership. I believe Western could handle this and businesses would be small private firms and larger collectively owned shops; every man would own and maintain his own home. It would be a truly middle class society.
Not to sound like some kind of socialist or ancap but I say we should question the current arrangement of property. We went from feudalism wherein only a small caste had property rights to capitalism where anybody can theoretically buy those rights. Why can’t we go further? I say end subsidized property enforcement.
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Astralturf: Interesting proposition. I have to think about this a bit and what the long-term consequences would be. As you note, however, this might work in a White country. Either way, brilliant, brilliant post by Zman.
There is no limiting principal to self-enforcement of the law or anarchocapitalism. It devolves to war of all against all. If the Boss has a private army to protect his plant, then he’s also got what it takes to take what you’ve got. Feudalism is a great leap backwards.
Also, your wage idea is wrong. Ownership includes the right to dispose of the thing, including renting it out. If you cannot hire out your property (with fringe exceptions that prove the rule), you do not own it as defined by the Western Christian White tradition. Your idea re ownership of the produce of labor ignores and violates the boss’s ownership of the physical plant and his ownership of the intellectual property of the business. It therefore logically fails, as your conception of ownership violates its own plain terms.
I tend to accept your point, but at a certain abstract level your example might not expand. There are long standing decisions in our Courts wrt whether a person is able to understand and sign away certain rights. Even when both parties seem to have agreed, one party can dispute at a later date and the contract can be voided due to the lopsided nature of the agreement. In short, there are limitations.
Something along that line is what I’ve thought for years in these “shrink wrapped” agreements. Example, “… by opening this package (of software) you agree to the terms an conditions within…”. Indeed, my last University told us to ignore them as the Attorney’s Office considered them invalid.
I consider the use of software (apps, e.g. FaceBook) in a similar vain. Personal identifiable information gleaned from use should be treated no differently—it belongs to us, and can not be signed away. Facebook (and most others) needs to find a different business model. However, I’m not naive, it won’t happen because the Federal Government has as much to lose as Facebook in loss of this information. We live in a truly Orwellian world.
And mentioning it gif the comment sent to moderation.
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We’re all living in a Skinner Box.
Here is an article related to the decline of the West and how others in the geopolitical sphere are taking advantage.
The West isn’t dying-its ideas live on in China
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2021/07/west-isn-t-dying-its-ideas-live-china