----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Saturday, April 06, 2002 10:02 AM Subject: Re: Food, money, Justin
>
> >
> >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.
============
This is way too Olympian. What are the implications, say, for a rock band, if the State ultimately owns their insturments? Untangling - if it's even possible- productive assets and expressive freedom could look really horrible for small-medium skill intensive collaborations so it seems there's lots of work to be done.
>
> 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.
===============
Markets don't command, *some* people do and that's the problem. If a Schweickartian economy can't seriously attenuate the number and types of commands that are given by people in the society, what good is it?
>
> Will we own our spleens and stem cells in a
> >Schweickartian world?
>
> Yes.
==============
Ok if we own them and want to freely alienate them for pecuniary gain why should that be democratically decided, unless you're saying that the democratically decided zone of negative liberty will be such as to allow the free alienability of body parts as commodities? And if those, why not lots of other commodities?
>
> Or does the human body become a ward of the State in the manner that parts
> of it are now in the
> >US?
> >
>
> No.
===================
So why should the products of the human mind become the property of the State? Being a State is no more productive than any other form of ownership intimately tied up with how individuals in society view their bodies as productive assets.
>
>
> 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
================
This sounds like a recipe for demosclerosis and perverse incentives. "We don't like the type of music those bands are playing, nor the lyrics, lets re-appropriate our property to stop the noise."
Ian