Comment Re:Apple effect (Score 1) 137
You own the food you swallowed unless they force you to regurgitate it, and then you don't own that either. Usually, in a society you have your own underwear, unless your girlfriend steals it from you, in which case you don't really own that either, but you have your coat, your knife, that are personal property, then also your house or your tent, even under a nomadic way of life. Nomads don't have land as property because they have vast amounts of it, and usually none of it is very fertile, or agriculture is just not worth it - for instance, because of military reasons, as in someone steals your harvest, so you're not gonna spend a whole year tending to land just to watch the crops stolen, even in a very fertile land situation. In a stable, honest society, where people respect each other, agriculture and private land property is possible, but even that gets abused into the naturally tending weak get weaker strong get stronger feudalist landlord/tenant or serf situation, to where, when you compare, you are not that much better off than you used to be as a nomad without land property. Similar situations go for intellectual property, it has two sides to it, the good and respecting side, and the bad, abusing, and exploitative side, and it's all often simply a matter of a number, as in price. The feudal lord had a yearly 10% of your property confiscation tax - he'd enter your private home, and take 10% of everything you got - which, btw. might have been less than present democratic tax rates. But the very fact that someone can enter your home and just take personal stuff, just because the two of you were born into a situation where one is assumed as an "owner" of all surrounding land - by birthright and what not, whatever went down a couple generations ago, - and everyone else owes him for that, is not a very tasty one. The founding fathers of the US envisioned a self reliant, landlord- tenant free (as in huge property owner vs. serf or indentured servant or slave - free) yeoman farmer democracy, instead we have urban slave to somebody throwing you a bone of a job, or welfare shame bankrupting the system situation, and the price of food has been kept very low, while property taxes on farms very high comparatively, with some exceptions, plus modern farming requires machinery that decays and it's overly expensive compared to income, and farmers are in perpetual debt. Growing your own food and surviving in absence of someone throwing your a job should be like a right, but it's complicated, because there is such a thing as economies of scale, and a large farm can afford efficient equipments like combines, and cooperatives of small farms, they are communists contraptions that don't work, everyone abuses the tragedy of the commons, such as a collectivized combine, everyone runs the crap out of it but does not pay for the maintenance, let the other guy take care of it, or pay for it instead. So we have the bulk of the population living in cities and begging for someone to give them a job, and food is a petty item on their list of expenses compared to housing, or landlord tenant cost, which even applies for homeowners paying mortgage, they are like indentured servants for 30 years, and the banks get the tallest sky scrapers downtown from this setup, while creating a tulip mania out of the housing market.