Dear Cosmopolitan Libertines:

You’re Infected. Infected with a virus of the mind.

When you hear the word commons, you’ve been misled by the artificial limits to the category of property established by the principle of ‘intersubjectively verifiable property’: material things. Yes, material things may be scarce. But cooperation is more scarce. And cooperation is always a shareholder good. And as such, a commons for those shareholders.

So, first, you confuse those property rights necessary for the construction of production under inter-temporal division of perception, cognition, knowledge, planning and labor, with the production of institutional commons: informal and formal institutions. (property rights, truth telling, courts, the jury, rule of law, the common law, liberty, and the militia.)

And secondly you presuppose that a commons of necessity can be consumed rather than an investment merely maintained and used (a park).

And thirdly you presuppose that the construction of commons must be performed monopolistically rather than civically (a courthouse, a temple, rule of law).

And fourth you presuppose that entry into the market is a sufficient payment for constructing the voluntary organization of production that we call consumer capitalism. When this is illogical: if one cannot make use of the market, then it is not logical for him to pay for it by forgoing opportunities for predation, parasitism and consumption. So you wish your market – the voluntary organization of innovation, production, distribution and trade – to be purchased at a discount, if not for free. That in itself an act of parasitism: forgoing an opportunity for trade.

Physical resources must be acquired, but institutional resources must be constructed. Both bear costs. But property rights themselves are a commons. The west is better at the production of commons than any other group. The reason being we evolved from a civic society and voluntary organization of production instead of forced production in the lands of irrigation, or primitivism of tribal conflict of the steppe and desert.

You have been infected by the cosmopolitan libertines with a cognitive error. This is what they do. They create mental viruses. They create these viruses out of the repetition of half-truths therefore resulting in a process of suggestion that overwhelms reason.

And you’ve been infected.

It’s OK. We have a cure.

Propertarianism.

Source: Curt Doolittle