Alexiev wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 1:18 am
Property entails nothing other than the legal right of one person to control other people.
That's' something that Nietzsche would have thought, or Marx definitely believed. But it's not true.
Locke had it right: property is an unalienable human right, because a man with no property ("property" considered very broadly here, not merely as land or money) has no freedom or choice either. A person must have something at his/her disposal, in order to make responsible choices in life. If nobody owns anything, then they have no choices, no freedom, and no possibility of responsibility.
Marx was no economist, though he styled himself as one. He was really an economic dolt. For example, he thought "value" was zero-sum game, a situation in which gain by one had to be loss to the others. So anybody who got money, Marx reasoned, had to be a thief, since his gain had to automatically be everybody else's loss. (A highly ironic thing for a chronic mooch and layabout like Marx to imagine, but nobody ever said he wasn't a miserable hypocrite, in addition to his other charms, such as boils, rage, hating the world, and raping his housekeeper then abandoning her son.)
But the truth, as modern economics has so routinely demonstrated, is that value can be created, and often is. A man who invents something new adds value to the world. A person who mines resources and turns them into sellable things others want to own has added value. A person who takes a product or stock and through improving it makes it more useful to others and more desirable for them to purchase is adding value to the world. A musician who composes new music or an artist who paints, or a writer who creates a novel, are all adding value. A business owner who creates a new business, invests his own capital to start it, hires people to work for him, and provides services to the community is adding value.
There is not just one amount of value in the world, such that it has to be divided equally among people; and one person's value-add helps, not hurts society. That's what Marx didn't get.
Owning land involves no "creation".
Have you ever met a farmer? It certainly does. But so does putting up an apartment complex, or opening a recreational space, or any one of a million other things. People don't just buy land and let it sit, you know. If they're smart and self-motivated, they add value by employing that land in some way.