X-Message-Number: 15989
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 20:52:55 +0100
From: Philip Rhoades <>
Subject: Private property was: Trust In All-Powerful Lords

Lee,

>Message #15972
>Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 18:38:09 -0800
>From: Lee Corbin <>
>Subject: Re: Trust In All-Powerful Lords
>
>Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote
>
> > PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR PROPERTY.  They can NEVER be your
> > property.  Everyone owns himself, herself, or verself
> > and can never be owned by anyone else.

. . .

>When people gather to form governments, many of these
>issues surface, such as "Should one man be able to own
>another?", and "Should private property be sacrosanct?"
>Those schemes in the past that did not agree to respect
>private property floundered and failed, because it turns
>out that the way people are constituted, wealth creation,
>prosperity, and progress have never been possible without
>strong safeguards for private property.

This is not accurate - for most of human existence, "society" has probably 
been setup on a hunter-gatherer system with no real conception of "private 
property".  Even in historical times most of the periods have been 
dominated by some form of feudalism and all-powerful war-lord or king or 
something.  "Democracy" with ordinary individuals having relatively more 
upward mobility is a fairly recent event.  Just because all you have 
experienced is western "democracy", don't think that is all that has ever 
been or that is all that will ever be . . it is quite likely to be just 
another interesting, brief, historical phenomenon in the future . .

R&LL,

Phil.

-
Philip Rhoades

Pricom Pty Limited  (ACN  003 252 275)
GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW	2001
Australia
Mobile:  +61:0411-185-652
Fax:  +61:2:8923-5363
E-mail:  

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15989