>
>The human mind is a productive asset. Lots of folks on this list make their
>living using PC's, digital camera's and the
>like that they can use in their home or at a McDonald's or a public library
>which affords them the ability to earn a
>moderate, or in some cases very comfortable, standards of living. How are
>you going to deal with the self ownership
>issues and the distinction between a consumer item and a productive asset?
Democratically and politically.
Are you saying, would my socialism commnad workers with intellectual capital to think in certain ways, Go to med school, we need more doctors? Or, as in my casem go to law school, we need fewer philosophers? The answert is yes: I'd let the market make those commands. Social decisions like this are inescapable.
Will we own our spleens and stem cells in a
>Schweickartian world?
Yes.
Or does the human body become a ward of the State in the manner that parts
of it are now in the
>US?
>
No.
ANother way to put how I think of these things is that self-ownership gives you a natural, ahistorical, nonconventional right to your own labor, but not to realize it in a particualr way, if others don't agree that that's useful and constructive (a decisoion to be made in large part by the labor market), and not to its fruits, since the fruits of labor do not depend solely on its exercise, but also requires material to work on that you did not produce, and also a division of labor.
jks
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