Source: Facebook

Q&A; ON THE COMMONS. PLUS, BONUS: RESTATING MARXISM VS PROPERTARIANISM

(I am turning out to be an enemy of the twentieth century’s advocacy of highly loaded easily understood, short sentences.)

—“The mainstream econ definition of a common good is one which is rivalrous but non-excludable. So in this sense, I understand why one might consider law itself a common good, but court systems? Is demonstration sufficient to consider something a common good? I mean, wouldn’t Marxists consider everything to be common goods?”—

–“rivalrous but non-excludable”—

But is that demonstrably true? Is any good non-excludable?

Instead, humans demonstrably reciprocally insure all property against some subset of:

1) Constituo – Homesteading: Convert into property through bearing a cost of transformation.

2) Transitus – Transit: passage through 3d space.

3) Usus – Use: setting up a stall.

4) Fructus – Fruits: (blackberries, wood, profits)

5) Mancipio – Emancipation: (sale, transfer)

6) Abusus – Abuse: (Consumption or Destruction) Opposite of Constituo.

A park is an interesting example: we grant people Transitus, but deny all other rights.

A common grazing ground is another interesting example: we grant transitus, fructus, but that is all.

A monument (or a church, which is our most common monument), we grant only transitus.

We prohibit people from denying Transitus where it imposes unnecessary burdens: property lines.

Water is another interesting example, we deny pollution that externalizes costs. We have done the same recently with air. We probably need to do the same with the seas.

But does any people tolerate abusus? (making land uninhabitable or unusable?) Only where land is not valuable.

A commons is that which some group has expended effort (born costs) to inventory, and to prohibit one or more rights, the most common of which is Abusus, Mancipio and Constituo. (See Nobel Prize Winner Elanor Ostrom’s work)

—“wouldn’t Marxists consider everything to be common goods?”—

It is better to see marxists as preserving discretion and accrual of debt to produce a dysgenic order, and property rights advocates as eliminating discretion and replacing it with accrual of debt, to produce a eugenic order. In other words, marxists are promoting the parasitic female strategy to reverse civilization, and propertarians are promoting the productive male strategy to continue civilization.

(This is a profound restatement of these issues)

Curt