The Gaming Den

Do we really need to get into an existential debate on the nature of ownership?

Doom's entire argument is that Hoarders are committing a moral good. A hoarder is gathering up a bunch of stuff and sitting on it. It's irrelevant whether they "own" the thing they're sitting on or have the "right" to sit on it. The entire discussion is whether putting ass to pile of cash is a moral good.

It seems that Doom is arguing the following:

1) Hoarding stuff raises the value of the stuff.
2) People who own the stuff but aren't hoarding it benefit from this rise in value.
3) Everyone has cash.
4) Hoarding cash benefits everyone.
5) Benefiting everyone is a moral good.
6) Hoarding cash is a moral good.

Arguing that everyone is benefiting from cash hoarding is like like arguing that everyone benefited from the 9/11 attacks because they led to the elimination of Bin Laden. You have to take such a myopic view of the situation to justify the statement that it's practically a non-sequitur.

Grek wrote: So I ask you: What exactly do you mean when you say "own"?

What definition works for you?

Doom wrote:

Grek wrote: So I ask you: What exactly do you mean when you say "own"?

What definition works for you?

We are not the ones claiming that "own" is meaningful. If it's so meaningful, you should be able to tell us what about it is meaningful.

Kaelik wrote: We are not the ones claiming that "own" is meaningful. If it's so meaningful, you should be able to tell us what about it is meaningful.

Oh no, wouldn't dream of it, y'all are way too smart for this bumpkin. Nothing I've said here is original, or not well known.

I've quoted historical fact, and paraphrased the information straight from the book. It's so curious nobody on the planet before now has determined that "own" was such an amazingly difficult to grasp concept that it's impossible to discuss anything until a perfect infinitely unchangeable definition is found, or that the arguments are all so trivially, fundamentally wrong, right down to disputing the existence of Romans.

I have no idea what Doom is talking about anymore.

Doom wrote:

Kaelik wrote: We are not the ones claiming that "own" is meaningful. If it's so meaningful, you should be able to tell us what about it is meaningful.

Oh no, wouldn't dream of it, y'all are way too smart for this bumpkin. Nothing I've said here is original, or not well known.

I've quoted historical fact, and paraphrased the information straight from the book. It's so curious nobody on the planet before now has determined that "own" was such an amazingly difficult to grasp concept that it's impossible to discuss anything until a perfect infinitely unchangeable definition is found, or that the arguments are all so trivially, fundamentally wrong, right down to disputing the existence of Romans.

Actually, people throughout history have had all kinds of trouble when distinct concepts of ownership collide. Good modern issues can be found wherever externalities are present, such as the issue of secondhand smoke (not the scientific side of things, that's pretty much settled). People argue against regulation of smoking in public because they feel that such rules violate their ability to make free use of their property. Proponents of regulation argue that a person's body is their property, and damaging other people's health via secondhand smoke is thus a violation of another's property. I think that the latter group is obviously inn the right, but most libertarians disagree with me. While I would love to put that down to the basic incoherence of their ideology and the lack of critical faculties that acceptance of said ideology typically entails, this may be slightly uncharitable. In actuality, we probably just have mutually incompatible ideas of what ownership means.

I don't understand why this is a problem. If you actually know what you are talking about a definition should be super easy (Also, look up "operational definition").

Zinegata wrote:I have no idea what Doom is talking about anymore.

He's trying to avoid defining what he means by "own", despite the fact that everything he's talking about is utterly dependent on the definition of ownership that he is using. The fact he doesn't get this is why people think he's a fucking idiot.

It's actually way dumber than that, because Doom's actual argument doesn't rely on ownership at all. The premises and the conclusion don't actually contain or depend upon ownership in any meaningful way. The thing is that each of the premises is clearly nonsense unless you have a basically absurd notion of what ownership means. So Doom keeps tail chasing and hemming and hawing about how we need to accept "ownership" (and by extension, his particular ludicrous version of ownership) as axiomatic so that he can keep from justifying the rest of his premises. He wants to keep it axiomatic, because if he gets stuck actually delineating what ownership has to entail to keep the rest of his premises floating, he will be laughed at.

So here's his actual formal argument:

Premise One	Reducing the value of your property is "just like" destroying some portion of your property.
Premise Two	Destroying someone's property is "just like" stealing.
Premise Three	Inflation reduces the value of your property.
Conclusion	Inflation is just like stealing.

Now Doom keeps trying to get people to focus their ire on Premise Three, because while it is actually quite contentious as to whether and to what degree inflating money is "yours", a majority of people would probably agree to it. The big problems are Premise One and Premise Two, because fucking no one agrees with that shit. And I mean no one.

If you own a pizza place and the value of your pizza place goes down because it has less customers because someone else opened a new pizza place down the street next to the bus stop, there are very few people who would equate that with vandalism. Like, the entire set of people who would agree to that assessment is you (the owner) and your immediate family. Everyone else in the entire world would, if asked whether some other schmuck had the right to open their own restaurant on their own property without that being considered an attack on your property rights would say yes. The moral rectitude of reducing the value of other people's property with simple competition is the very foundation of capitalist theory, without which the invisible hand cannot exist. And that's the basic problem with Premise 1. It is incompatible with capitalism and most other economic systems and it is incompatible with all theories of property and value that I am aware of.

Premise 2 is also incredibly shaky. And by shaky I mean that I am unaware of a single theory of justice anywhere that equivocates vandalism and theft. And most moral frameworks make a distinguishment between intentional and unintentional destruction of property. Not only can I not think of a single moral philosopher in history who would equivocate running your car into someone else's car with stealing, I can't imagine that there are many people on Earth who would sit through such an argument without calling the initiator a moron.

And that's why Doom keeps directing attention away from his premises to his prancing failure to define ownership. Because his entire fucking argument doesn't hold any water at all unless you posit a definition of "ownership" so total that other people having something similar to what you have and thereby reducing the demand for the things you own and thereby reducing your stuff's value constitutes an attack on your person.

-Username17

@Doom: What I mean by the word "own" isn't terribly important, as it's your manifesto we're discussing here. If you and I have differing definitions of the word own, then, for the purposes of this discussion, we should either come to a joint agreement, or just use your definition. If it were my post, the onus would be on me to explain what I meant when I talked about a right to own currency.

And ownership is a tricky thing to define. One of the common definitions of ownership is to have the right to destroy something, but that doesn't mean that you should expect to have the right to take a billion dollars and set it on fire as part of your funeral in order to fuck over the feds on estate taxes.

@Frank: I'm not so sure about that. Doom appears to be arguing in this thread that deliberately decreasing the amount of revenue that a business receives in an attempt to force them to lower prices to attract sales to replace the lost revenue is a moral good. If we apply the principle of charity and assume he's not just wildly contradicting himself, it follows that Doom thinks that the guy opening a pizza shop down the street and devaluing your own pizza shop is actually doing the right thing. And it also follows that Doom is supporting a policy of intentionally trying to deflate our currency, which has the problems pointed out previously of making it so that only ventures that produce money faster than the rate of deflation are worth doing over nothing at all.

Zinegata wrote:I have no idea what Doom is talking about anymore.

I sort of lost it around page one. It's like the attack of the killer straw men. Pitty, this could have been a very interesting thread. (Had it been, like on any other board but this one.)

tzor wrote:

Zinegata wrote:I have no idea what Doom is talking about anymore.

I sort of lost it around page one. It's like the attack of the killer straw men. Pitty, this could have been a very interesting thread. (Had it been, like on any other board but this one.)

Indeed, it's simply stunning how many people think "getting a shot in the arm is bad, because it hurts you" really does negate the fact that the shot is antibiotics. There really are two parts to the story, and everyone's too busy crying about the pain of the shot to even consider anything past that. Throw in that in this case, the pain has only been told about, and never felt, and it gets even more surreal.

What's really curious, like I said before, is this isn't even MY argument. These facts are thirty years old (the Roman empire stuff is, of course, MUCH older), and literally nobody anywhere (except here, of course), would consider any of the stuff said here in counter to it as valid...you'd think if the arguments were that bad, someone in the Amazon reviews would have mentioned it by now, eh? Exactly 1 negative review, even HE doesn't say any of the stupid stuff that we see here, and you really should read it to see how bad it is (he's shredded by everyone there).

Ultimately, of course, ownership, like pornography, like being a miser, is a matter of opinion. It's infantile to actually claim such things do not exist and thus cannot be discussed intelligently simply because nobody can agree on what exactly the definition is.

Grek wrote:that the guy opening a pizza shop down the street and devaluing your own pizza shop is actually doing the right thing

Actually, competition IS usually considered a good thing for consumers. It might not help you in particular if you happen to be the other pizza shop guy, but, honest, the other 99.99999% of the human population benefits from there not being a monopoly on pizza.

Grek wrote:One of the common definitions of ownership is to have the right to destroy something, but that doesn't mean that you should expect to have the right to take a billion dollars and set it on fire as part of your funeral in order to fuck over the feds on estate taxes.

Actually, it's a crime to deface money (as an end) in the US, so yeah, you don't have this right--although the government will be extraordinarily hard pressed to put you in jail. You might be able to pull it off as artistic or political expression, however. On the other hand, you could spend a billion dollars on a painting and burn it for your funeral, if you so wished.

Doom wrote: Ultimately, of course, ownership, like pornography, like being a miser, is a matter of opinion. It's infantile to actually claim such things do not exist and thus cannot be discussed intelligently simply because nobody can agree on what exactly the definition is.

Nobody is claiming this. People want you to make a definition so that we can evaluate your argument. We might also argue via reductios that your definition is silly or incomplete, but that can't be done properly until you make one.

I mean seriously, why is this hard for you? If you have any sort of understanding of your own argument you could just shoot of a definition of ownership in your next post. Instead of doing so, or addressing any criticisms at all, you have made a series of posts in which you tell us how obviously wrong we are.

Well, nobody is claiming this except the half dozen people in this thread. I again remind, it's not even my argument, although I don't expect anyone to follow that since I haven't defined 'my'.

So infantile. Fine, I'll step into the can of worms, here's a definition as good as any:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ownership

Now watch what happens.

For what it's worth,

frank wrote:Premise One Reducing the value of your property is "just like" destroying some portion of your property.

Premise Two Destroying someone's property is "just like" stealing.

Premise Three Inflation reduces the value of your property.

Conclusion Inflation is just like stealing.

At no point, anywhere in the OP, is this argument being made. Hell, the straw men have little straw men inside them. You can't ignore me and continute to post against the arguments, Frank...I openly defy you, again, to identify, where in the OP, is anything like this argument made. A quote from everyone's hero regarding this, however:

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

~ John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp. 235-248.

Not one man in a million indeed, to judge by posts here.

Doom wrote:Well, nobody is claiming this except the half dozen people in this thread. I again remind, it's not even my argument, although I don't expect anyone to follow that since I haven't defined 'my'.

Well, you're still posting it as an argument you're making. You're whole comment about not defining "my" seems like you're just trying to obfuscate the issue and dodge any actual analysis of what you said.

RobbyPants wrote:Well, you're still posting it as an argument you're making.

Nooo....I explicitly say I'm paraphrasing from a book, and I even tell you the book. I imagine you've not read the OP, like so many others.

You're whole comment about not defining "my" seems like you're just trying to obfuscate the issue and dodge any actual analysis of what you said.

No, I'm just imitating the other posters. It's more fair to say that abusive deconstructionism is being used to dodge analysis, but I'm not the one dodging...I'm not sure how anything I can say actually prevents people from thinking.

Past this point, anyone who honestly thinks they have an actual argument against the views of the book, should demonstrate so by posting it to Amazon reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Undefen ... ewpoints=1

Naturally, I recommend actually reading the book, first.

Doom wrote:

RobbyPants wrote:Well, you're still posting it as an argument you're making.

Nooo....I explicitly say I'm paraphrasing from a book, and I even tell you the book. I imagine you've not read the OP, like so many others.

So, you're paraphrasing an argument in the OP, but saying it's not your argument. Is the argument in the OP one you support? If not, why post it? If so, you're just being pedantic.

Doom wrote:

You're whole comment about not defining "my" seems like you're just trying to obfuscate the issue and dodge any actual analysis of what you said.

No, I'm just imitating the other posters. It's more fair to say that abusive deconstructionism is being used to dodge analysis, but I'm not the one dodging...I'm not sure how anything I can say actually prevents people from thinking.

Sooo, obfuscation by trolling your own thread?

This thread is as dumb as I thought. Thanks for the clarification.

I concede you're right, I'm acting just like the trolls in this thread when I imitate them, and that's wrong of me. With all due respect, you're also trolling here, posting without any intention of contributing, as well.

I do concede, while the Den is a place for occasional intelligent conversation, this just isn't the place for much past that. Mea culpa.

Here, it's simple:

Ownership: Other people cannot come and take my physical stuff away from me, except for imminent domain, or as a result of a lawful court order.

Ownership of Money: Noone can come and take my money away from me physically. IE: You can't just up and take it out of my wallet, or deduct it from my bank account (save where I have entered into contracts specifically allowing such)

Is that so hard?
Land ownership: I own the right to the land, up to about 100 feet up. By default, unless they have previously been sold, I should own the mineral rights. But Land Rights and Mineral Rights are /seperate/

Now this is pretty basic, there are many fucking edge cases.

Are you that incapable of saying what "right to own" means.

I own a $100 dollars, if the government prints 1 million dollar bills, making my $100 dollars barely able to buy a loaf of bread, that's not stealing. I still own the same $100 Dollars.

I do not have a RIGHT to Purchasing Power Equivalence over time.

Oh and Doom.

Fuck you, you self important asshole. Stating that anyone who disagrees with you is Trolling is about as immature and dickish and argument as you can make. I think Frank had the right idea. On Ignore you go.

Okeedoke then, that definition is fine, too.

Again, where, in the OP, is there ANY CLAIM AT ALL, to such a right of purchasing power?

Anyone who's actually read the OP realizes that such a right, if claimed, would negate the entire argument. The miser, by causing deflation, would be changing people's purchasing power, and thus violating their rights.

Fuck you, you self important asshole. Stating that anyone who disagrees with you is Trolling is about as immature and dickish and argument as you can make.

I note that time and again you've made posts demonstrating that you've not actually read the post you're supposedly responding to. Can you at least pretend you've read the OP?

Stating that anyone who disagrees with you is Trolling is about as immature and dickish and argument as you can make

Additionally, I've made no such assertion. I flat out openly call you a liar.

Doom wrote:What's really curious, like I said before, is this isn't even MY argument.

The problem is I still don't know what the argument is. We are discussing this at such an abstract level that's it's impossible to follow. There is the discussion of how saving something is akin to hording, but the something is vaguely defined. Is this saving something when there is excess of something? (Because it really seems like grain silos are evil in this thread.) Or is this saving something in spite of the fact that it is actually needed now? (Even then it is not an evil thing, rationing allows one to spread out a resource over time.) That doesn't even address the multitude of questions about the release (if ever) of horded materials. I could "on the one hand ... on the other hand" about a hundred different unknowns in this discussion so far and each hand is going to lead to a radically different moral outcome.

Doom wrote:

Grek wrote:that the guy opening a pizza shop down the street and devaluing your own pizza shop is actually doing the right thing

Actually, competition IS usually considered a good thing for consumers. It might not help you in particular if you happen to be the other pizza shop guy, but, honest, the other 99.99999% of the human population benefits from there not being a monopoly on pizza.

There are times when it is good, and there are times when it is less good. There is a minor problem with retail. If someone has a store of type X in a location, it means that there is a demographic desire for that product. But then you have to equally compete with the existing store, while it may be the case there is an untapped market 1 mile down the road that could expand the total market for the product. Having a Burger King at the same corner of a McDonalds is of little value when it's no where near your own corner in the first place.

Doom wrote:Okeedoke then, that definition is fine, too.


Additionally, I've made no such assertion. I flat out openly call you a liar.

I concede you're right, I'm acting just like the trolls in this thread when I imitate them, and that's wrong of me. With all due respect, you're also trolling here, posting without any intention of contributing, as well.

I do concede, while the Den is a place for occasional intelligent conversation, this just isn't the place for much past that. Mea culpa.

Does that ring any bells, or did you not say that.
Or is basically saying we're all idiots because we don't agree with you not the samething.

And I did read the OP, you go off on this Misers are good diatribe that's based entirely on the idea that if I hoard all the money so there is less money, people will be forced to reduce prices, and this is better than inflation, which is stealing of my money.

Grek wrote: Doom appears to be arguing in this thread that deliberately decreasing the amount of revenue that a business receives in an attempt to force them to lower prices to attract sales to replace the lost revenue is a moral good. If we apply the principle of charity and assume he's not just wildly contradicting himself, it follows that Doom thinks that the guy opening a pizza shop down the street and devaluing your own pizza shop is actually doing the right thing. And it also follows that Doom is supporting a policy of intentionally trying to deflate our currency, which has the problems pointed out previously of making it so that only ventures that produce money faster than the rate of deflation are worth doing over nothing at all.

But if Doom was the owner of the first pizza shop, wouldn't he be pissed off that the second guy was stealing his money or whatever, because now he has to charge $9 for a pizza that he used to charge $10 for? Or if Doom's supplier came to him and said he now needed to charge $103 for the supplies he was charging $100 for last week? Or is this a only a good situation as long as Doom isn't one of the two pizza shop owners?

(double post, sorry)

Doom wrote:

tzor wrote: The problem is I still don't know what the argument is.

The tl:dr version: Misers (basically, people that save) are not all bad.

Note again: yes, it *might* do harm...it might now. It goes both ways. Everyone only knows about the first way ("misers are bad"), I'm just mentioning there's more to the story.

Please note: You have not actually pointed out any legitimate way being a miser can benefit anyone, including the miser. A policy of keeping certain monies or materials in reserve and out of circulation is good - in moderation, and only as insurance against catastrophe or foreseeable need. If practiced to excess or if it is very widespread, miserly behavior is always bad. When people don't put their money in banks, banks cease to function as an institution, and the entire economy suffers.

tzor wrote: The problem is I still don't know what the argument is.

There are two parts to the OP:

The tl;dr version for part 1: Romans hated 'hoarders', but it's interesting what 'hoarders' were considered back then.

The tl:dr version for part 2: Misers (basically, people that save money as money) are not all bad.

That's it, although it's easy to lose track of that amongst the swarms of straw men, vitriol, personal attacks, and loopy hypotheticals.

Note again: yes, saving *might* do harm...it might not. It goes both ways. Everyone only knows about the first way ("misers are bad"), I'm just mentioning there's more to the story.

Because it really seems like grain silos are evil in this thread.

Some people in the thread believe this; I believe otherwise (again, I acknowledge that it's theoretically possible to hurt people by saving too much food, but benefits to saving food also exist, is the OP claim).

"on the one hand ... on the other hand"

Exactly, a mature viewpoint realizes this. But many people, as children, are only told of the evils of misers, and never think past that point...there's more to the story.

There are times when it is good, and there are times when it is less good.

Agreed. It's the extremist, crackpot pot view of it always being bad, that is disputed.

sabs wrote: better than inflation, which is stealing of my money.

Again, I openly challenge you: where in the OP does it say "inflation is stealing your money"? All that is said is that the miser can cause reduced prices and deflation...and that this isn't usually hurting most people.

Or is basically saying we're all idiots because we don't agree with you not the samething.

Asserting there are trolls in a thread is NOT the same thing as asserting all posters are trolls. Frank had some valid points, as have others (go back and see if you can find me using the word 'agreed') and no matter how many legions of straw men he conjures, having some valid points does not constitute trolling, and other posters have had things to say as well that are not trolling, either.

violence wrote:But if Doom was the owner of the first pizza shop, wouldn't he be pissed off that the second guy was stealing his money or whatever, because now he has to charge $9 for a pizza that he used to charge $10 for?

Again, these bizzaro hypotheticals really miss the point. So maybe I am pissed at a guy competing with me. What of it? Does that mean, TO YOU? Would you really be pissed at paying $1 less for pizza? I mean, if it really bothered you, you could always just pay the extra dollar as a tip. How is having a choice like this a bad thing, FOR YOU?

When you go shopping, do you actively try to spend as much as possible on a product, or do you shop around? Most people try to get lower prices, this hypothetical is a total non-issue.

Ancient wrote:Please note: You have not actually pointed out any legitimate way being a miser can benefit anyone,

Actually, it's in the OP. Or do you claim that getting things at lower prices doesn't benefit you, at all? This is a moot point, of course. Lower prices benefits ME, so, indeed, a miser's behavior does benefit someone.