Q&A: —“Curt, what are commons in the framework of propertarianism? How are the

Q&A: —“Curt, what are commons in the framework of propertarianism? How are they constructed, and what advantages do they confer?”—

Property: that which I bear costs to obtain without imposing cost upon that which others have born costs to obtain.

Shareholder Property: That which I have born cost to obtain an interest in without imposing costs upon that which others have born costs to obtain an interest, but which I may not privatize, wherein the property ownership is articulated, and non-transferrable without group permission.

Common property: That which I have born cost to obtain an interest in without imposing costs upon that which others have born costs to obtain an interest, but which I may not privatize, wherein the property ownership is weakly articulated and is transferrable through reproduction to one’s offspring and mates.

Property en toto: referring to that which people demonstrate acting to obtain without imposing costs upon that which others have acted to obtain, and for which they demonstrate retaliation for imposition of costs upon. This includes but is not limited to: life, kin, mates, physical, normative, traditional, and institutional assets.

Positive/Negative Costs: While some physical assets are purchased through direct payment (positive costs), some assets are purchased through indirect payment that we call ‘restraint’ or ‘deprivation’ or ‘forgone opportunity for consumption’ (negative costs).

Homesteading of Opportunities produced by the commons is permissible (competition), but transfer of assets already homesteaded requires productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of costs upon the property en toto of others by externality.

THE LOGICAL INVERSION

As people congregate and develop normative institutions they are able to develop increasingly dense common property which in turn produces lower cost opportunities.

“we are not wealthier than cave men, we have made all goods and services infinitely cheaper through cooperation in a division of perception, cognition, knowledge, labor and advocacy.”

Hence collections of people create discounts on opportunities (time) which are then open to identification (experimentation) and homesteading (transformation), into private property, which may then be consumed, inventoried, or invested in the commons.

Getting one’s head around the fact that we improve rates of everything in time, and that we cannot know truth only falsehoods, and that we pay for commons both directly via payment or indirectly by forgone opportunities is a sort of inversion of the way we look at history. So it may seem counter intuitive at first until we grasp that time is our only existential asset and that the division of labor eliminates switching costs in exchange for increased productivity. And that the principle value of population density is the cheapness with which opportunities are constructed. And that the principle value of property rights is to reduce transaction costs in the process of production that we call cooperation in a division of labor.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine.