Property, Ethics and Capitalism (Score 1)

Your statement is emotionally quite loaded, so that I couldn't refuse and had to create an account in order to answer you.

Maybe I start with the answer first:
- Yes, property exists for real life things.
- No, not every real life thing can become property.
- No, there is no such a thing like Intellectual Property (IP).

When I have a look through the responses I see answers that exactly play around my statements, but normally it is very hard for regular people to answer this hard question properly. I had to read a lot and do lot's of thought, before I really understood.

In legal terms, property is not really well defined. Legislature makes use of stomach-felt intuition about it and makes single rules and exception in how to deal with it. You guess it: it is always very dangerous to use undefined words. Property is also used in an attribute-of-something sense, which adds to confusion, but has no relationship to what we mean by property here. The result of this intuition-based approach is that every country has different rules for it and especially with immaterial property the discussion really heats up. But I think completely unnecessarily.

Property is the right to control the use of objects (entities). From an ethical point of view that kind of property concept arises, when the question comes up about who decides, what happens with the fruits of your work. Therefore, correctly, many people associate property with (hard) work. Unfortunately, in capitalism, work and property are set to be equal, to be kind of the same thing, instead of being just related concepts (work produces property). The laws in all capitalistic countries protect this unjustified "equal sign". The work of property is the "interest". This is the extra amount of work you have to do in order to make the other guy work less. You know it from the bank, but you also know it as the dividents to your company's owners or any kind of rent. The result of this is that you can acquire more property by owning property. I abbreviate this statement here and come right to the point: The result of the wrong equal sign is, that Adam Smith's "Magic Hand" doesn't work! The Magic Hand, expressed in terms of Systems Theory, is a negative feedback loop that makes a system converge to a stable (and by the way distributive) state. By allowing property to behave as if it was work on the market you convert the negative feedback loop into a positive feedback loop. Therefore, in capitalism everything has to go faster, bigger and bolder. This seems like a nice thing, but a positively feedbacked system also amplifies all negative economical and social developments in a unsolvable way like the problem of the rich and the poor and resource exhaustion. Capitalists are people, who favor the system of getting some extra property, without having done some useful work for it. Economy looks then not like a serious matter of using resources to provide people with things they need but like a nice game of chances where you can earn some extra score. In capitalistic systems there never arises a trade off between limited resources and gain. The very rich people do no do useful work, but their property "earns" the riches for them. And it does it, basically, with no limit, since doing less than nothing is not much of trading-off argument. From the statements posted here, I guess, that none of you guys is a capitalist, because everybody favors the principle of property as a result of work.

But doing work is, ethically again, not the only criterion to be fulfilled, when it comes down to the decision, if something can be property or not. Without getting into very long details, property must fulfill ALL these criteria:
- result of (human) work
- identifiable entity (i.e. not a class of things)
- quantifiable (can be counted or limited resource)
- has no will (no slaves, no animal property)
- was not obtained at the expense of others
- does not harm others

That means, that for most of the things like dishwashers, baseballs and cars property is a clear ethical necessity, if you want to guarantee, that humans get the fruit of their work.

But there are real life objects, that clearly do not fall into this category like i.e. land, waters or any nature made resources. They are missing the very first, the very most important ethical criterion, which is required for establishing a claim of property. Such resources must underly public control and this control must guarantee, that no monopoles exist on it. Of course digging things out of the earth costs you work. The transformed resource becomes you property but public control and free market make you get not more property out of it as if you did by doing any other job on average. If people owning scarce resources are extremely rich, then it means, that public control has failed, partly because land has been falsely declared as property. In such cases we get monopoles and oligarchies controlling few nature resources, which cannot be counter-generated in order to bring the market back to balance.

Other things exist, that are commonly understood as property, but are missing some of the points I listed:
- Money
(is actually a public institution for managing job-sharing - missing last point, in capitalism even the first one)
- Companies
(is actually a social institution for economical activity; the declaration of companies as property of some small set of people is kind of a joke. I think there are better systems of legal classification but I cannot get into that here )
- Information
(is not limited or quantifiable in ethical sense and is not identifiable as individual token of your claim)

And there we are. Information of no kind can be considered as property. Some people claim that information can be clearly identified but my daily experience shows in all richness, that it can't be done like with real life objects. This whole IP property confusion comes from people confusing copies of information (Instantiation) with information (Class of copies) itself. But the today's law clearly protects not only information, but also its processing, which leads to some very harmful results.

All attempts to gain exclusive control over information like patents, copyrights and taste-laws are ethically not upholdable. These laws were created in short-sightedness NOT in order to create some morally pending justice, but in order to CREATE industries that normally would have no other right to exist. These laws create monopoles and people like I who are involved with all the IP stuff on daily basis see that these monopoles ARE the problem. Many people think that there is a problem of finding a trade-off between some personal rights and immaterial property right, but indeed, there is no questions for the latter in the first place. And as far as I know, the U.S. law guarantees monopoles not even for "information sets" (copyright), "inventions" (principles) but today even for "discoveries" (I looked at it first, so it's mine!). The U.S. and the countries following their example try to solve the problems of (unjustified) property with even more (unjustified) property. Clearly a vicious cycle, a no-goer. No wonder that U.S. citizens start to shake their heads and wonder what's gone wrong. They feel treated unjust, feel tricked and feel that large companies end up owning all of their country. Now, this IP hype came that far, that people even find IP issues in their food, food they actually seriously paid for it. And when the DNA of the genetically modified food ends up in your genome through absorption, then your body ends up being property of Monstanto, or what? IP just creates problems and solves none.

I am sure, that by having eliminated any kind of IP concepts from law we would end up evolving somewhat slower in some aspects, but with information having a higher social and economical impact (faster in other aspects).

Some additional philosophical wax: Information is part of our mind. Information processing means copying parts of it or of wholes. Copyright means, to be really honest, extension of the right to control copying based on the right of property even right into your head and to actually control how it may or may not process information. You think, this is a joke, try to use your cultural knowledge, process it, modify it, put real effort and work into it, try to communicate it and you'll get sued. Movies and stories never may fully become part of your culture, because you're never allowed to use it (without paying capital interest to the capital owner). If you had to pay all the interest that is indeed loaded on your head, you better look for the next bridge to sleep. All the millions and billions spent on creation of "content" are essentially garbage. We cannot move into something like the informational society and bring all the balast of the material world into it. If we want a switch like that, we must start thinking anew.