Re: What fun! Loving the anarchist fight!

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

davisd@auburn.ee.washington.edu says:
> The argument is over property, which is just a particular ritualized
> relationship between people, their behaviour (especially use of direct
> physical violence), objects (often people as well) in which each
> object has one individual designated the owner and can dispose of the
> object as they see fit. Some mechanism exists which resorts to
> physical violence against those who attempt disallowed control over
> the owner's property. 

I agree that property is a human construct. However, it is a
peculiarly valuable one. The notion of property has very nice game
theoretic properties. Without property, the division of labor is much
harder, because people have no way to be sure that they are being
rewarded proportionately to their work. This gives people every
incentive in the world to defect rather than cooperate. Moralistic
posturing by altruists  about the value of altruism aside, we must
accept the fact that evolutionary pressure favors those that work in
their own long term self interest, and not altruists. (Self interest
in an evolutionary sense extends to one's children and close family).
We would expect people to behave self interestedly, and indeed that is
what we observe in practice. Given the institution of property,
however, it is easy to produce a stable system that favors the
division of labor. Thus, we should not be suprised to find the
institution of property to be widespread -- it confers a huge
advantage over societies that have it, and thus they tend to expand
and become dominant through time.

Myself, I've picked and chosen those institutions that seem to me to
provide a personal benefit to me if the society I am in has those
institutions. Property is an institution I see as being beneficial.
Government is not. I thus favor the one, and disfavor the other.

Perry