Justin writes:
"I think there are rights that don't depend on legal enactment or social convention. The right to freedom, not to be a slave, is one of them."
Without enactment or social convention, what does a right mean? You said "Property is a creature of the law, an entitlement purely enforceable by the state." but it's no less true of this "natural" right against slavery. Individual-to-individual, people may steal from each other or enslave each other. The human "state" qua self-organizing group is the force that keeps these things from happening (when it does), not some "natural" right. The force of the "natural right" against slavery does not deter a pimp from beating a young girl into servitude, the force of the state - the group as a whole - does.
When I wrote: "You try to prove that property rights are ahistorical because monarchs didn't extend property rights to the slave classes, except as custom."
And you responded: "I hate to say this again, but I don't understand what you are saying. I don't recognize anything I think in this statement attributed to me. I don't think that property rights are ahistorical, and I don't see how the supposed argument for that proposition would support it."
Okay, explain what you meant in this exchange:
J.S.: "Except to democracies, law has generally been decreed from above by a King or other ruler, not agreed on by any popular body.
dlaw: "The right to property is explicity guaranteed in the Constitution and is continuous throughout history, except among slave classes."
J.S.: "That is, most of humanity for most of recorded history."
I think you're clearly fence-sitting on this question of property rights because you can't resolve your belief that the bourgeoisie should be dispropriated with your understanding of law and the right of a person not to be dispropriated. So, you make the the distinction between "productive" and regular property and sneak in, by implication, this idea that the notion of property is somehow ahistorical.
I say that the increase of personal property rights since feudalism is a good thing and I point out to you that the most important productive assets in the modern economy are not personal property as such, but corporate property.
Finally, when I say that "it seems clear to me that under any socialist legal ideology the one thing a worker could be guaranteed rights to would be the product of his own work."
You reply: "But this won't do. What is the product of one's own work? Labor is social. How do we disaggregate the contribution of my own labor versus others'? Moreover, my labor depends on a division of labor, which is not the sort of thing anyone has a right to. And I must work on material that I did not create, what right do I have in that?"
If I buy flour, yeast and water and make bread, that is both the product of my work and my personal property. If you want that bread, you don't have any right to it unless I agree to relinquish my rights, which I'll do for $2 a loaf. I don't need to grow the wheat, mill the grain, incubate the yeast or lay the pipes that carry the water for it to be mine because I bought those things for consumption. If it was "allocated' to me for consumption, it would be the same thing. Are you proposing that a milliner should effectively lease his flour? He's not going to want it back when I'm done with it, is he?
If products are to be consumed then each producer must relinquish his rights to the next person in the chain and those are logical points of disaggregation. They're necessary. You say people don't have a right to the division of labor. That's crazy. Are you telling me that the person who fixes an irrigation pump should be able to tell me what to cook with the tomatoes he helped water? Suppose he doesn't like my chili recipe but the people I'm cooking for do?
Producers serve consumers with disparate interests and, logically, must leave it to the consumers to how to use what they produce. Otherwise, you have fertilizer refiners in Qatar making national dictates on French bouillabaise and iron ore miners in Australia responsible for Japanese automobile styles. By your "no division" logic, Saudi oil workers would have a say in virtually every economic decision in the world. The oil workers, iron ore miners and fertilizer refiners get to decide what other people produce as consumers, not as producers. As consumers, we ask that our needs be met. As producers, we meet the needs of consumers. From each producer according to his ability, to each consumer according to his need.