Thursday 29 March 2012

On Property and Ownership of Assets - Numpty vs Joe Soap

Property only has any value if ownership rights can be enforced.

Ownership rights are enforced by 'society', 'the state', 'the people' or however you want to characterise it. So it is we, the people, who create all property value - so logically and morally everything belongs to all of us (who are willing to fight for it).

Permitting private property (enforcing property rights) only make sense while we the people get fair value from doing so.

This works well where the 'owner' can make better use of the property than we could ourselves - and in return they are expected to share a proportion of the 'extra' we have enabled them to create, extra value that we ourselves could not have created.

Permitting/Allowing an entrepreneur to own assets worth (say) £10,000,000 is fine, because with it they will create more jobs, goods etc than joe soap could with the same assets - in return part of that 'exrta' is shared among the true value creators (property right enforcers).

Conflict arises where Numpty get control of such assets. When Joe Soap knows that he could make as good use (or better) of those assets than Numpty can, Joe wonders why he is honouring/enforcing property rights that are destroying value.

This is most offensive to Joe when Numpty adds no value at all - where the assets Numpty controls, simply by virtue of existing, create more value - value that Numpty gets all the benefit of.

The current problem is that many people think property is 'real and absolute' and that property rights are 'real and absolute' so they are not accountable to anyone for them.

But property exists because we choose to allow it (even created the very concept of) - and we will continue to do so while we beleive it is in our interests to do so. But undeserving rich.. beware...

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