Price fixing - the Feds throw the e-book at Apple

[Seth]

It's not a natural law that ideas and thoughts are owned. That is completely a construct of our society.

Indeed. But the EXPRESSION of those thoughts and ideas are, and that is completely natural. If I create it, or acquire it, I have a natural right to defend my sole and exclusive possession of that thing. I may choose, for various reasons, to let others use it or benefit from it, but it's mine to do with as I please and I have full moral authority to defend that right against intrusion.

There is nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say, "If I hear you sing a song, I am not allowed to snap up the tune and start singing the same song myself, even publicly and making money for it."

There's nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say "If you sing my song without my permission I will beat the shit right out of you" either. Laws and social codes are put in place to replace survival of the fittest lethal combat with a less violent method of conflict resolution.

Socialists have always had, by virtue of the nature of their indoctrination, great difficulty with the concept of private property. They have been deluded into thinking that what one man has labored to acquire or create is not his, but is the property of the collective. This defies nature in the extreme. Nature itself says that in order to survive all living organisms must compete for resources and that all is "fair" in the battle to acquire and take sole and exclusive possession of that which is necessary for survival, and that the most basic right of any organism is to do exactly that; reduce resources to the organisms sole and exclusive use and possession.

If I chip an obsidian spear-point and affix it to a shaft in order to hunt mammoth, this is the reduction of resources (flint and wood and sinew and labor) to my sole and exclusive possession. If you come along and covet my spear and try to take it from me so that you can reduce a mammoth to your possession without having to acquire the knowledge and skill or invest the labor in finding and modifying the resources to that purpose, which is your natural right of course, I have an equal if not superior right to defend that resource and keep it from you. The natural arbiter of which right prevails is force. Whichever of us can physically prevail in combat to obtain the resource is entitled to the resource as a function of nature. It's an expression of the most fundamental natural right, the right to acquire and reduce to exclusive possession the resources necessary for survival.

Every part of nature that deals with the adjudication of rights between individuals in conflict over resources is an offshoot of this fundamental principle. The fact that the male lions eat first and kill rival cubs is a natural adjudicatory mechanism. The District Court and the Legislature of a state is nothing more or less than a much more complex method of resolving conflicts for resources and survival.

If we take this one step further, the whole concept of ownership is a human construction, especially views on ownership of land have varied strongly through history, and there are still things that cannot be privately owned, like air we breathe.

Wrong, as I demonstrate above. Moreover when I reduce the air that enters my lungs to my exclusive possession and use I may defend that private property from being taken from me. Air pollution control laws are merely complex iterations of the fundamental right of the individual to acquire and reduce to his or her physical possession and use those resources necessary for survival.

You want the private ownership part of the societal construction that creates a market to be upheld and forcefully protected by government, and you want that ownership to be absolute.

That's the way it is. It has nothing to do with "want." What I create or reduce to my possession is mine, absolutely, by natural law. But only if I can defend it against intrusion by others. If I cannot, then it is the property of the competing organism. Might makes right.

That means you want the government to meddle with the market, you just want them to be very one sided about it. You are not advocating liberty you are advocating ownership.

Ownership is a manifestation of liberty. If I go into the woods for a week and labor to find, stalk and kill an elk so that I can cache it and survive the oncoming winter that elk is my property. I own it absolutely. It is an expression of my freedom and liberty as a living organism to go seek that necessary resource, reduce it to my sole possession and use and defend it against being taken by other organisms to my detriment.

What is unnatural is the assumption by Socialists that I have some natural obligation to turn that elk over to other members of the tribe simply because they exist and therefore supposedly have a "right" to be supported by others. Nothing is further from the truth. If I submit to a social order that encourages me to share my property I do so because the benefits I gain from being in communion with that society outweigh the consequences of forking over my property. I may choose to benefit the tribe because the tribe supports me in various ways and I support them with my area of expertise; hunting.

But I am under no moral or ethical obligation to turn over my privately owned resources to anyone else. I can take my elk and go live in a cave by myself if I deem the price of social communion to be too high. I need only cooperate with the tribe if it benefits me more than not doing so. This is natural law. In natural law there is always a quid pro quo of some sort involved that makes the input of energy required to reduce a resource to possession and use smaller than the benefit to be gained by doing so.

Everything beyond that simple equation of energy expended must be less than energy acquired is just a more complex iteration of that fundamental truth of nature.

Therefore, I have a natural right to private property that I acquire or create which I may defend against taking or intrusion by others.

All the law does is codify this natural right as a part of the structure and organization of a society. But the right exists completely independent of such social constructs and flows directly from the natural functions of evolution.

[Coito ergo sum]

It's not a natural law that ideas and thoughts are owned. That is completely a construct of our society.

Indeed. But the EXPRESSION of those thoughts and ideas are, and that is completely natural. If I create it, or acquire it, I have a natural right to defend my sole and exclusive possession of that thing. I may choose, for various reasons, to let others use it or benefit from it, but it's mine to do with as I please and I have full moral authority to defend that right against intrusion.

There is nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say, "If I hear you sing a song, I am not allowed to snap up the tune and start singing the same song myself, even publicly and making money for it."

There's nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say "If you sing my song without my permission I will beat the shit right out of you" either. Laws and social codes are put in place to replace survival of the fittest lethal combat with a less violent method of conflict resolution.

Well, sure, but the idea of the writer of a song having some right to exclude other people from singing it is a relatively new sort of property right. The first copyright law was in the 18th century and protected only the copying of books. It didn't even protect translations -- so if you wrote a book and published it in English, someone could copy it word for word into Russian and go sell it and there was no property right invasion there.

From the early 18th century on, greater and greater protection was afforded to creators of written and musical works, but those rights aren't "absolute" in any way even today. If you write a book, for example, and publish it. There are plenty of uses I can make of it and plenty of instances where I can copy it and distribute it without having to pay you, and do so legally. Like, for example, someone sells me an eBook now, I can make copies of that eBook to make sure I don't lose it. If I buy a paper book, I can give it to a friend of mine even if the writer says that he's only licensing it to the first buyer and nobody else can read it.

[Seth]

A free market must also account for anti-competitive forces, of which price-fixing, trusts, cartels, and monopolies are examples.

And free markets that are actually free do indeed account for such things through market forces alone. Regulation is not necessary except to regulate the authority of government to meddle with the free market.

This isn't exactly true, as private enterprises can organize to monopolize suppress competition and thus distort the market.

That's not a monopoly. That's market domination. Anyone with the skill and ability to defeat that attempt at suppression can compete in the free marketplace. The degree of force used to suppress competition is irrelevant unless the government itself uses its inherent force to prohibit all competition. If the Mob tries to use force to prevent competition in the liquor industry that is market domination by intimidation, coercion and force. But it is not unlawful to compete with the Mob, merely difficult and dangerous. This is distinguished from the government enacting laws that make it a crime to compete with a government-selected monopoly liquor provider.

The practical effect may be exactly the same; the suppression of competition, but the nature of the suppressive efforts and the inherent right of the competing individual to resist, evade or overcome those suppressive efforts are markedly different between a criminal enterprise, or merely a cabal of liquor producers and the inherent power of law and government.

Only the actions of government in PROHIBITING competition can create a monopoly. Market forces (which include fraud, theft, intimidation and naked force) that control dominant market share are not monopolistic so long as competitors have the legal right to compete. Don't take this as approval of force or fraud in the marketplace, I merely state that such things are in fact part of market forces that determine marketplace winners and losers.

There are many examples of laws and regulations that must exist for capitalism to function in a meaningful way -

Like, for example -- limited liability laws -- corporations have limited liability because of laws, not because a group of people can band together and call themselves a fictitious name and pretend to absolve themselves of liability. Shareholders of corporations have limited liability because we have corporation codes as part of our laws. Without that, raising capital would not be practical because investors would be exposing themselves to personal liability for the debts of the companies they invest in.

Well, yes and no. Limited liability is a method of reducing capital risk, but it's also a method of encouraging corporate malfeasance. It's a double-edged knife that is not always supportive of a free and fair marketplace.

Where there isn't a corporations code providing limited liability to shareholders, than any shareholder of the company (someone who invests money to have an equity interest) is essentially a "partner" in the group, and as such is liable personally for all the debts and obligations of the enterprise, because the people are the enterprise.

Correct. What's your point?

There have to be commercial transaction laws to regulate how liens, security interests, mortgages and commercial paper function. Securities laws regarding stocks, bonds and such.

Yes and no. The Common Law is generally good enough, but a voluntary Commercial Credit Code is acceptable to Libertarians. That way consumers can choose to do business with organizations that subscribe to those rules or not, as they wish.

I'm not talking about Libertarians. I'm talking about Capitalism.

Okay. I'm talking about both. Nothing in Capitalism requires statutes to create a free market. Statutes and government oversight in the markets is a product of the initiation of force and fraud by individuals that is not dealt with directly by those who have been harmed. They sub-contract to the government to provide enforcement and adjudicatory mechanism. But in an absolutely free market, defense against force or fraud is entirely the purview of those who are being harmed and defrauded. Viz: the Mafia. Defraud them and they don't take you to court, they just kill you and put you in a hole somewhere.

THAT is a completely free and unregulated market. Everything else is just a mechanism to prevent too many holes from being filled with bodies.

The list goes on and on.

Not really. The fundamental Libertarian precepts of free markets, regulation of the initiation of force or fraud, and the sovereign right of the individual to enter into a voluntary contractual relationship and be bound by those provisions are all that's really needed.

Libertarian Capitalism and anarcho-capitalism are not the only or even the original forms of capitalism.

True. What's your point?

The idea that capitalism means that we don't have any government is some strange idea that seems to be born of a modern day ignorance of what capitalism is and how it works.

Absolutely correct. Worse, it's usually a willful and deliberate ignorance that flows from deep psychological disturbance in the personalities of liberals that leaves them bereft of logic or reason.[/quote]

I would not agree with that. It may well flow from a reasonable difference of opinion, or an opposition to capitalism overall.

I agree. But USUALLY it's willful and deliberate ignorance...or appears to be based on the rhetoric of those who object to capitalism.

Perhaps they need to make better arguments and defenses of Socialism if they are not to be characterized as willfully and deliberately ignorant.

[Seth]

It's not a natural law that ideas and thoughts are owned. That is completely a construct of our society.

Indeed. But the EXPRESSION of those thoughts and ideas are, and that is completely natural. If I create it, or acquire it, I have a natural right to defend my sole and exclusive possession of that thing. I may choose, for various reasons, to let others use it or benefit from it, but it's mine to do with as I please and I have full moral authority to defend that right against intrusion.

There is nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say, "If I hear you sing a song, I am not allowed to snap up the tune and start singing the same song myself, even publicly and making money for it."

There's nothing inherently natural or obvious in laws and concepts that say "If you sing my song without my permission I will beat the shit right out of you" either. Laws and social codes are put in place to replace survival of the fittest lethal combat with a less violent method of conflict resolution.

Well, sure, but the idea of the writer of a song having some right to exclude other people from singing it is a relatively new sort of property right. The first copyright law was in the 18th century and protected only the copying of books. It didn't even protect translations -- so if you wrote a book and published it in English, someone could copy it word for word into Russian and go sell it and there was no property right invasion there.

Wrong. There was no societal proscription against such misappropriation. The right of exclusivity is a function of the intellectual effort input in the creation of the work, which has some beneficial purpose to the author, else he would not expend the time and energy to produce it. His natural right to defend that energy input and enjoy sole possession and benefit from that act is the natural companion to the creative act itself. Therefore the individual has ALWAYS had the moral and ethical authority to control who makes use of that property. Copyright laws are nothing more than a complex method of adjudicating disputes over the acquisition, possession and use of resources. They do not "grant" the property right, they PROTECT it. The property right exists prior to and independently of any codification of social codes.

If I, as an author, object to someone selling my book in Russia in translation without my permission, I have a natural moral and ethical right to use force to prevent that from happening. The fact that it may be inconvenient, expensive or energy-intensive for me to pursue enforcement of that right does not disparage the right itself. Copyright law is merely a method of reducing the need for and incidence of individual defense of property ownership in the context of a civilized society. But again, copyright law does not grant a right, it enforces a pre-existing right.

From the early 18th century on, greater and greater protection was afforded to creators of written and musical works, but those rights aren't "absolute" in any way even today. If you write a book, for example, and publish it. There are plenty of uses I can make of it and plenty of instances where I can copy it and distribute it without having to pay you, and do so legally. Like, for example, someone sells me an eBook now, I can make copies of that eBook to make sure I don't lose it. If I buy a paper book, I can give it to a friend of mine even if the writer says that he's only licensing it to the first buyer and nobody else can read it.

Wrong. The RIGHT to the exclusive use and possession of the work is absolute. The willingness of the society, through it's laws and powers of enforcement to PROTECT and ENFORCE that right on behalf of the creator is what is limited. Government says "we will help you to protect your rights to this work, but only under these circumstances and for this period of time..."

Then, unfortunately, government becomes the predator that uses superior force to seize and acquire the resource. Philosophically however there is no difference between the right to defends private property against interference by another person and the right to defend private property against interference by the collective, in the form of the government. It's all the same natural right at the core. One's actual ABILITY to successfully defend one's private property is entirely irrelevant to the nature of the rights involved. The government has no more inherent or natural right to take private property from the individual than another individual does. It simply has greater power to force submission.

[Coito ergo sum]

A free market must also account for anti-competitive forces, of which price-fixing, trusts, cartels, and monopolies are examples.

And free markets that are actually free do indeed account for such things through market forces alone. Regulation is not necessary except to regulate the authority of government to meddle with the free market.

This isn't exactly true, as private enterprises can organize to monopolize suppress competition and thus distort the market.

That's not a monopoly. That's market domination. Anyone with the skill and ability to defeat that attempt at suppression can compete in the free marketplace.

That's a simplistic way of looking at it. A monopoly can form when a single company effectively becomes the industry, and prices are no longer set by competitive forces, and there are high barriers to entry which effectively preclude competition. This is especially true when a monopolizer uses anticompetitive actions to achieve its goals -- collusion, lobbying governmental authorities, and force, etc. When product differentiation is low that is another indicator of a monopoly. The presence of excess profits for a long period of time indicates a monopoly. Excess profits tend to attract competitors until excess profits drop to zero, but where they persist for a long time, that indicates anticompetitive behavior.

[MiM]

Ever heard about Hume's Guillotine "There is no ought from is" or moral statements cannot be derived from purely factual statemenets. Well everything you wrote is in violation of that largely accepted philosophical concept.

But let's toy with it a little more (just for more luls)

If I chip an obsidian spear-point and affix it to a shaft in order to hunt mammoth, this is the reduction of resources (flint and wood and sinew and labor) to my sole and exclusive possession. If you come along and covet my spear and try to take it from me so that you can reduce a mammoth to your possession without having to acquire the knowledge and skill or invest the labor in finding and modifying the resources to that purpose, which is your natural right of course, I have an equal if not superior right to defend that resource and keep it from you. The natural arbiter of which right prevails is force. Whichever of us can physically prevail in combat to obtain the resource is entitled to the resource as a function of nature. It's an expression of the most fundamental natural right, the right to acquire and reduce to exclusive possession the resources necessary for survival.

Every part of nature that deals with the adjudication of rights between individuals in conflict over resources is an offshoot of this fundamental principle.

And obviously, if there is a group of ten people, and one of them decides to keep his kill for himself and let the others go hungry, the rest will gang up against him and take the meat through force by numbers. They have the force, so they have the right "The natural arbiter of which right prevails is force". The ultimate force in today's modern societies lies with the states, so by your own reasoning it is the natural law that the state can take and divide anything in any way it wishes.

Of course that is as much crap as what you scribbled, partly because of the before mentioned Hume's Guillotine but even more because beings living in groups do not follow such simplistic rules as you want to start from. Most group dynamics are much more complex, and cannot be derived from "the right of the strongest" only. Neither does survival of the fittest equal survival of the strongest (and meanest). Humans for example would never have prevailed against individually stronger predators without very efficient and complex cooperation systems.

[Coito ergo sum]

Wrong. There was no societal proscription against such misappropriation. The right of exclusivity is a function of the intellectual effort input in the creation of the work, which has some beneficial purpose to the author, else he would not expend the time and energy to produce it. His natural right to defend that energy input and enjoy sole possession and benefit from that act is the natural companion to the creative act itself.

It wasn't, traditionally. The idea of intellectual property as something one could "possess" didn't make sense until fairly recently in time. One wrote a song and did not "possess" it, and there was nothing stopping anyone else from singing it, even for money.

The holdover of the old ways in this regard are newspapers. A newspaper is a publisher of a daily "book" essentially. Yet a newspaper has much more limited copyright in the articles published in its news sections. That's why you can have the guys on C-SPAN holding up the newspaper to the camera, and people on the radio actually reading the news right out of the paper. You can't read someone's book on the radio without their permission, though.

Therefore the individual has ALWAYS had the moral and ethical authority to control who makes use of that property.

That may be your view of it morally and ethically, but it has nothing to do with the law. The First Sale doctrine takes care of that. If you sell me a book and tell me I can't resell that hardcopy of the book, I'll happily do so without a second's thought. I will be within my legal rights, and I really don't agree that it's immoral for me to do so.

Copyright laws are nothing more than a complex method of adjudicating disputes over the acquisition, possession and use of resources. They do not "grant" the property right, they PROTECT it. The property right exists prior to and independently of any codification of social codes.

That may be your view of it, but it has nothing at all to do with reality. Copyright is not now and never has been a natural right.

If I, as an author, object to someone selling my book in Russia in translation without my permission, I have a natural moral and ethical right to use force to prevent that from happening.

You have a legal right, but you wouldn't have had that right up until the late 18th, maybe early 19th centuries. It's not some sort of natural right. Cite your source other than your own opinion. Has this natural right been recognized as part of the common law by any authority or tribunal? Blackstone? Hugo Grotius? Anyone?

The fact that it may be inconvenient, expensive or energy-intensive for me to pursue enforcement of that right does not disparage the right itself. Copyright law is merely a method of reducing the need for and incidence of individual defense of property ownership in the context of a civilized society. But again, copyright law does not grant a right, it enforces a pre-existing right.

Hogwash. Copyright has major limitations and isnothing like the rights you have in a desk or a car. A copyright is a limited right to prevent distribution and use of a copyrightable work. It is not forever, and it is not nearly as extensive as the property rights in products like cars and desks. There is, for example, no "fair use" exemption that allows people fair use of my car or desk or house. But, there is a "fair use" exemption for copyrighted and trademarked material that allows people to use those materials without permission and without payment. That isn't some "natural" law. That's a creature of statute. The statute limited the right of people to use intellectual property of another, but only in a limited way.

From the early 18th century on, greater and greater protection was afforded to creators of written and musical works, but those rights aren't "absolute" in any way even today. If you write a book, for example, and publish it. There are plenty of uses I can make of it and plenty of instances where I can copy it and distribute it without having to pay you, and do so legally. Like, for example, someone sells me an eBook now, I can make copies of that eBook to make sure I don't lose it. If I buy a paper book, I can give it to a friend of mine even if the writer says that he's only licensing it to the first buyer and nobody else can read it.

Wrong. The RIGHT to the exclusive use and possession of the work is absolute.

Nonsense. Never has been that. There is no "absolute" copyright. Copyright is by definition limited -- it is a subset of property rights.

You do not now and never had an "absolute exclusive use and possession of the work" if you, say, write a book. If you write a book and publish it, there are many ways I can copy it without your permission and even distribute it. If i run a lending library, you can't keep me from distributing it. If I'm working on a school project, you can't keep me from quoting large portions of your book in my paper and distributing it, and I can even publish that school project in another publication and make money off it and not pay you a dime or get your permission. And, that's today, when we have greater copyright protection for writers than we have ever had in the history of western civilization.

The willingness of the society, through it's laws and powers of enforcement to PROTECT and ENFORCE that right on behalf of the creator is what is limited. Government says "we will help you to protect your rights to this work, but only under these circumstances and for this period of time..."

Back that assertion up -- find me one authority anywhere in the history of anglo-American jurisprudence that states that a writer has a natural right to an absolute and exclusive use and possession for all and every purpose, and the power to control the downstream distribution of his writing after the First Sale. Has anyone other than you theorized this?

it's o.k. if it's just you, but that just means it's your own theory that nobody of note shares.

[Coito ergo sum]

Where there isn't a corporations code providing limited liability to shareholders, than any shareholder of the company (someone who invests money to have an equity interest) is essentially a "partner" in the group, and as such is liable personally for all the debts and obligations of the enterprise, because the people are the enterprise.

Correct. What's your point?

That laws and regulations such as that are necessary to the function of competitive free market capitalism.

[Seth]

A free market must also account for anti-competitive forces, of which price-fixing, trusts, cartels, and monopolies are examples.

And free markets that are actually free do indeed account for such things through market forces alone. Regulation is not necessary except to regulate the authority of government to meddle with the free market.

This isn't exactly true, as private enterprises can organize to monopolize suppress competition and thus distort the market.

That's not a monopoly. That's market domination. Anyone with the skill and ability to defeat that attempt at suppression can compete in the free marketplace.

That's a simplistic way of looking at it.

No it's not, it's the rational and logical way of looking at it.

A monopoly can form when a single company effectively becomes the industry, and prices are no longer set by competitive forces, and there are high barriers to entry which effectively preclude competition.

Wrong. Because the market price is determined not by the company but by the consumers. Any company that tries to create a dominant (and even exclusive) market share for a product that prices that product too high will end up bankrupt when consumers refuse to pay what the company demands. Standard Oil is a perfect example. When the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was put in place, oil-based fuel and products were never cheaper. Standard Oil used it's market dominance and huge investment in research, exploration and development to drive fuel prices so far down that other oil producers were unable to compete because they couldn't do it as cheaply as Standard Oil.

And that is what the Progressives and Marxists objected to that caused the Congress to enact the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

It was NOT monopolistic HIGH prices that was the "problem" government tried to "solve," it was LOW prices that suppressed competition, which the Marxists and Progressives in government objected to. They enacted the law in order to RAISE fuel prices so that it was "fair" to the smaller, less efficient oil companies. Any oil producer however could have cut costs and found economies and lowered the price of their fuel to compete with Standard Oil if they had the moxie, capital and business sense to do so. But they didn't want to, they wanted government protection against fair competition, and they got it, and they got it again with the Apple verdict. It's all about Marxist Progressive notions of "fairness" rather than allow the market forces to operate as they naturally do to deal with overpricing caused by market domination.

Monopolies can ONLY exist with government sanction of the exclusivity of distribution. Period.

This is especially true when a monopolizer uses anticompetitive actions to achieve its goals -- collusion, lobbying governmental authorities, and force, etc. When product differentiation is low that is another indicator of a monopoly. The presence of excess profits for a long period of time indicates a monopoly.

Wrong. You have just proven my point; a monopoly cannot exist WITHOUT GOVERNMENT SANCTION. Lack of "product differentiation" doesn't mean anything other than other potential competitors cannot produce a product that the public finds to be a better value than the original. Apple proves that unequivocally. There are thousands of computer builders out there but only two dominant operating systems, Apple and Microsoft. But there IS COMPETITION, and the price of each is (or should be) determined exclusively by the natural forces of demand from consumers, and nothing else.

Excess profits tend to attract competitors until excess profits drop to zero, but where they persist for a long time, that indicates anticompetitive behavior.

All market operations are axiomatically, necessarily and rightfully "anti-competitive."

The whole point of market economies is that one manufacturer does everything possible to stamp out all competition and all competitors try to do exactly the same thing to gain market share. It is that battle that IS the marketplace.

You putatively mean "unfair" anti-competitive behavior. But what's fair has nothing to do with market forces. So long as the company with dominant (or exclusive) market share does not initiate force or fraud to gain the competitive edge, it's a perfectly normal and valid exercise of market strategy and tactics.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other statutes barring "anti-competitive" business practices are a manifestation of pure Socialist dogma, which holds that it's "unfair" for one company to be so good at what it does that nobody wants to buy anything else, and that therefore government is justified in infringing on the rights of the dominant company by enacting laws that interfere with their business strategies and tactics and burden them in order to "give the little guy a chance" or bring "fairness" or "consumer power" to the marketplace.

That's all a clear manifestation of Marxist ideology and nothing more. It has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the operations of the free market.

[Seth]

Ever heard about Hume's Guillotine "There is no ought from is" or moral statements cannot be derived from purely factual statemenets. Well everything you wrote is in violation of that largely accepted philosophical concept.

But let's toy with it a little more (just for more luls)

If I chip an obsidian spear-point and affix it to a shaft in order to hunt mammoth, this is the reduction of resources (flint and wood and sinew and labor) to my sole and exclusive possession. If you come along and covet my spear and try to take it from me so that you can reduce a mammoth to your possession without having to acquire the knowledge and skill or invest the labor in finding and modifying the resources to that purpose, which is your natural right of course, I have an equal if not superior right to defend that resource and keep it from you. The natural arbiter of which right prevails is force. Whichever of us can physically prevail in combat to obtain the resource is entitled to the resource as a function of nature. It's an expression of the most fundamental natural right, the right to acquire and reduce to exclusive possession the resources necessary for survival.

Every part of nature that deals with the adjudication of rights between individuals in conflict over resources is an offshoot of this fundamental principle.

And obviously, if there is a group of ten people, and one of them decides to keep his kill for himself and let the others go hungry, the rest will gang up against him and take the meat through force by numbers.

Yes, they may do so.

They have the force, so they have the right "The natural arbiter of which right prevails is force".

This is true, if they have the force.

The ultimate force in today's modern societies lies with the states, so by your own reasoning it is the natural law that the state can take and divide anything in any way it wishes.

Only if it can, and only if it is allowed to do so by the members of society. Political disputes are merely a civilized way of arbitrating social policy. But as we see in Egypt and Syria today, naked force is the ultimate arbiter of such disputes when all else fails. You claim that the state has superior force, but as you can see from numerous instances of popular revolutions to expel the State and replace it, that is not in fact true, and the fundamental truth remains.

In the United States we choose a sophisticated and complex system of acknowledging, respecting and adjudicating disputes over the fundamental rights of our citizens, but that is only a civilized veneer on the surface of fundamental natural truths, and as we see in Syria, that veneer can disappear in an instant when the system fails to serve the needs of the citizenry.

Of course that is as much crap as what you scribbled, partly because of the before mentioned Hume's Guillotine but even more because beings living in groups do not follow such simplistic rules as you want to start from. Most group dynamics are much more complex, and cannot be derived from "the right of the strongest" only. Neither does survival of the fittest equal survival of the strongest (and meanest). Humans for example would never have prevailed against individually stronger predators without very efficient and complex cooperation systems.

Hume has nothing to do with it. I'm not deriving an "ought" from an "is," I'm stating an "is," that is all. Whether that "ought" to be how its done is entirely subjective to the individual and the society and is determined by the society's acknowledgement and respect for natural law, or lack thereof.

Of course humans don't NOW live in simplistic individualism, but that's beside the point. I'm going back to fundamental principles of nature to demonstrate that the right to private property is not granted by society, it is INFRINGED UPON in various ways by society. The right exists independently and naturally as a function of evolutionary biology.

Whether that natural law "ought" to prevail is an entirely different and much more complex subject.

I'm merely making the point that it is logical and rational fallacy to state that there is no right to private property other than that which the collective agrees to.

That's the foundation of an "ought" philosophy of societal relationships and operations, nothing more. "The collective OUGHT to be in control of all resources necessary for survival and dole them out as it sees fit." But unless it is acknowledged up front that the right to acquire, reduce to personal possession and enjoy the resources necessary for survival does NOT originate with the collective, there is no rational basis for discussion of the "oughts" of political and social organization.

If you believe otherwise then please do as I have done and make your rational argument supporting the notion that the "right" to seek out, acquire, reduce to personal possession and use and enjoy the resources necessary for survival find their fundamental origin in the decision making power of the collective and not of the individual.

[MiM]

If you believe otherwise then please do as I have done and make your rational argument supporting the notion that the "right" to seek out, acquire, reduce to personal possession and use and enjoy the resources necessary for survival find their fundamental origin in the decision making power of the collective and not of the individual.

Well I just did so, starting from your own premises. You only seem unable to understand anything that goes against your own reasoning.

However, I don't really believe in either. I don't believe in "natural law" at all. All laws are social constructs and agreements, and they can be changed if the people so will.

Anyway, as always, arguing with you has become more cumbersome than giving, as you are completely unable to listen, and only repeat your own crap over and over again, with more and more words. I've had my fun. So long and thank's for all the fish.

[Seth]

If you believe otherwise then please do as I have done and make your rational argument supporting the notion that the "right" to seek out, acquire, reduce to personal possession and use and enjoy the resources necessary for survival find their fundamental origin in the decision making power of the collective and not of the individual.

Well I just did so, starting from your own premises. You only seem unable to understand anything that goes against your own reasoning.

No, I understand completely, I just disagree with you and I present a well-formed, strong logical and rational argument in defense of my position. What do you present?

However, I don't really believe in either. I don't believe in "natural law" at all. All laws are social constructs and agreements, and they can be changed if the people so will.

It's not about "belief" MiM, it's about observable facts, reason and logic. If you believe my logic and reason to be faulty, then by all means present your rebuttal.

Anyway, as always, arguing with you has become more cumbersome than giving, as you are completely unable to listen, and only repeat your own crap over and over again, with more and more words. I've had my fun. So long and thank's for all the fish.

Admitting defeat so easily? How disappointing, I thought maybe you might actually be up for the challenge. Sad.

[MiM]

Being the "last man standing" would be a win in your book wouldn't it . Comes from the same place as your "natural law", does it?

As I said, teasing you was fun for a while, now I'll just get back to be

[klr]

Being the "last man standing" would be a win in your book wouldn't it . Comes from the same place as your "natural law", does it?

As I said, teasing you was fun for a while, now I'll just get back to be

[Seth]

Being the "last man standing" would be a win in your book wouldn't it . Comes from the same place as your "natural law", does it?

As I said, teasing you was fun for a while, now I'll just get back to be

What exactly is wrong with a businessman seeking to drive out his competition so he can have the market to himself? That's the very basis of a free market economy. Rational self-interest.

And talk about your trolls....