Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!ucdavis!csusac!sactoh0!pacbell!osc!tma
From: tma@osc.COM (Tim Atkins)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: how many people are enough?
Message-ID: <1869@osc.COM>
Date: 17 Jan 90 07:45:44 GMT
References: <499@smcnet.UUCP> <386@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> <504@smcnet.UUCP> <21453@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Reply-To: tma@osc.UUCP (Tim Atkins)
Organization: Object Sciences Corp., Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 60

In article <21453@unix.cis.pitt.edu. rhg2@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Rich  Graham) writes:
.** Disclaimer on **
.
.This is NOT a flame nor a set of views that I hold particularly strongly, 
.mostly because they've never been tested, which is something I hope you'll 
.help me do.  (In other words, don't flame my ass, just tell me how you
.disagree).
.
.** Disclaimer off **
.
..** Flame ON **
..
..I am NOT a tenant of the US government.  The land I live on is MINE, the 
..money I make in trading is MINE, and the choice of what I do with my
..life is MINE.  The government may have forgotten it, but feudalism
..(let's call what you advocate what it really is!) not among the founding ideas
..of the US.  
..
..** Flame OFF **
.
.No, but you are a member of the organization known as the US government,
.and are bound by its decisions which you're expected to participate 
.in making.  If you're no longer interested in your membership, you
.could renounce your citizenship.
.
No, I am a free individual supposedly in a country that knows that
the responsibility of government is the protection (not creation) of
individual rights.

.Also, I'm not sure I understand your conpect of ownership.  Isn't
.onwership a human concept and institution?  You speak as if there is
.some kind of "real" ownership that is deeper and more basic than the
.govt. based notion of ownership.

Ownership is a concept logical growing out of individual rights.  If 
individual rights are "inalienable" then property rights follow 
immediately.  The gov't based notion is nothing but the legal paper
(some of it fit for the w.c.) that the government encodes its purportedly
protective policies upon.  Its validity can only be judged by reference
to the concept of property rights.  Yes, they are independent of gov't
daffy-nition.

.As far as I can see, "ownership" is a way that people behave toward
.objects.  To say I "own" something means I act toward it in certain ways
.as compared with the way others do.  My "ownership" exists by virtue 
.of the general concensus that I "own" it, that I and others acknowledge
.and recognize my "ownership".  Govt. based ownership is a formalization 
.of the common (and therefore variable and unreliable) concept of 
.ownership.

About as utterly pragmatic and anti-conceptual statement as I've seen in
many a post.  Catches the other signs of ownership but says nothing about
the concept itself.  Of course, the entire post seems to wish to deny that
such a concept has any real meaning.
.-- 
.Richard H. Graham
.University of Pittsburgh - CIS
.rhg2@unix.cis.pitt.edu

- Tim