Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[ipecac]

(Wealth tax: I don't know of a great way to do this, but a decent way might be to make everyone declare the value of their stuff, and pay 5% of that. Your honest declaration is enforced by treating it as an offer to sell your stuff for that much money that anyone can accept.)

So you're suggesting that people be forced to sell anything beloved or cherished in their house, if anyone wants to buy it? Are you living in the real world?

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

(Wealth tax: I don't know of a great way to do this, but a decent way might be to make everyone declare the value of their stuff, and pay 5% of that. Your honest declaration is enforced by treating it as an offer to sell your stuff for that much money that anyone can accept.)

So you're suggesting that people be forced to sell anything beloved or cherished in their house, if anyone wants to buy it? Are you living in the real world?

Something similar in Periclean Athens was used. Wealthy people had to sponsor naval ships, public games, temples, that kind of thing. When there was a dispute over who was wealthier, the guy claiming to be poorer could offer to trade everything he owned for everything the other guy owned. If he refused, he had conceded that he was wealthier. It's also the way claiming races are done in horse racing.

Not saying it's a good idea, just sharing what I think is an amusing historical anecdote. Back to your regularly scheduled bickering.

[SevenSpirits]

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

The concept of private property (combined with a free market, etc), while it has many benefits, has one major injustice, which is the baked-in assumption that those of us who are alive right now get to divvy up all the stuff in the world between us. That leaves nothing for people who arrive in the world in the future, i.e. babies.

This works out to a rough approximation solely because when new people are born, there are usually people who feel personally responsible for them. Those people often effectively bequeath a large amount of their private property to the babies. In addition, many countries have state policies of giving some minimal amount of property to babies that don't have much. (I don't literally mean that they are giving babies the deeds to material wealth; rather they are allocating wealth for them and spending it on things they think the babies need, seeing as the babies are pretty bad at handling that themselves.).

I mostly agree; however I think this is also mostly already solved.  If you cause a particular new person to arrive in the world, you personally are liable for them.

Sounds like we may agree on this. One possible point of disagreement is in how I see expectations changing as societal wealth allows. Do you envision a future where parents are considered liable, but largely given free reign on how to raise their kids? I foresee society getting more restrictive about that, not less. I'd consider cash transfers (e.g. to an account the child will control when they become an adult, and from which some funds can potentially be used earlier for vetted purposes to improve the child's early life) to be one of the more liberty-friendly ways of upholding a minimum standard of opportunity for children.

The advantage of our system of private property is that it provides excellent incentives for behavior that leaves everyone better off. It is clearly better than even a functional system that redistributes wealth equitably, even discounting the fact that such a system would be ruined in practice by individuals cheating the system. But the fact that new people are at the mercy of charity is still an injustice inherent in our rules regarding private property.

It's not really a fact, though.  It might perhaps be a fact if we went all the way to anarcho-capitalism, or all the way back to Roman mores (where even the child itself was the property of its father, absolutely).

Hm, let me clarify my "fact": Children are at the mercy of their parents and their community. I'm not trying to say anything controversial here, just that people are born without any inherent power and have to rely on others' caring to survive.

At the same time, we know the following:
1) Capital (/property) tends to concentrate over time in the hands of fewer and fewer entities. (In fact, war has been a mitigating factor here, and if we want to build a world without war we'd better have a substitute for its one beneficial effect.)

I don't think we know this at all.  It's pretty clearly false on a generational scale, except in the rare case of a strictly-enforced primogeniture system where the major landowners are also the government.  No matter how much you build your own fortune, splitting it among your wastrel heirs will dissipate it even faster.

I'm not convinced, but I'll concede the point because it's not important and would take time I don't have to dig deeper.

2) To varying extents, distribution of property in the present is influenced by unjust actions in the part for which appropriate reparations are all but impossible to assess.

No argument here.  However, distribution of property is also influenced by work and sacrifice, and doing things for others.  If you look at the Forbes 500 list, you'll find many many who got their wealth by building it, and only a handful who inherited or stole their wealth.  So the problem is already 90% solved.

Sure, but that's baked into the nature of that list - it's a lot harder to hide wealth that you earned legitimately. The list obviously doesn't capture wealth we don't know about or can't easily quantify, for example that was inherited and is obscured through legal international means, or that was gained through criminal activity, or that is inherent in being the dictator of some country.

Additionally, that list tells a story about the very rich, but most people don't experience that particular story. Most people have parents with not very much money, and also end up with not very much money themselves. In the US, the canonical past injustice is slavery, and while you may choose to argue that other factors are at stake, I think it's pretty obvious that the legacy of that past injustice has had a huge effect on the descendants of those involved. Here are recent stats on average wealth by ethnicity in the US: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/n...170927.htm

I don't know how you got to "90% solved". Needless to say, although I consider it a huge mess that's impossible to disentangle, I don't buy that number.

3) People change over time, and do not 100% deserve the consequences of their past selves' actions. (Our society acknowledges this in the concept of a statute of limitations, bankruptcy, letting criminals out of prison after a period of time, etc.)

Desert is one interpretation; practicality is another.  You can't have a meaningful criminal system that doesn't have graduated punishments without getting the Dazexiang uprising problem.  You can't practically get more money out of a debtor than they have.  A crime committed too long ago will have very little useful evidence, and therefore reflect politics rather than facts; in addition there's only so many resources worth spending on each crime.  You can easily justify these rules by saying practicality can sometimes overrule desert, rather than by claiming desert fades over time.

I'm sure there's some practicality in there too. Though it's not true that you can't get more out of a debtor than they have. Indentured servitude is an option if you find that kind of thing moral.

I can't tell if you disagree with the claim ("People change over time, and do not 100% deserve the consequences of their past selves' actions.") or only the interpretation of our laws as being partially rooted in that belief.

To me, all these factors point towards private property (and the 100% continuity thereof) being not quite correct. I think there is some rate at which we should (morally and practically) be redistributing wealth, so that new people who enter the world have some immediate concrete claim on it, and so that there is a natural defense against wealth concentrating indefinitely. That rate should still be a lot closer to 0% (libertarian utopia) than to 100% (communist utopia) - I'd say maybe a 5% annual tax on wealth that's redistributed equally to everyone.

I somewhat agree, except that I think there's no way to set a rate that is both meaningful and that doesn't have horrible consequences.  The wealth of the world doesn't just grow - it's the result of conscious steady investment in tools, at the expense of deferring consumption.  If you set up a system where it is worse for me to save money than to spend it, then we will stop having economic growth, as no one will build or maintain anything tangible.  Why build a factory or a granary?  You'll do better to just have a big party, storing up favors and friendships, which aren't taxed.  Tools and such that we already have won't cease to exist, but they will be worth something close to zero, so no one will have a reason to build any new ones.  Then in 20 years when everything has broken, we can all starve together.

If you set up a system that preserves the incentive to plan and produce for the future, then it will not have a meaningful effect on equality, nor will it produce enough revenue to matter.

This doesn't sound like a serious argument, but maybe it is. First, although I'm suggesting a wealth tax, I think it's well-understood that in general, taxes dampen economic activity but don't usually completely destroy it. If it turns out a wealth tax is the exception, then for god's sake let's not do a wealth tax. But I really doubt it. Here are two largely equivalent situations in a toy world where the expected rate of return on investment is 5%:

A) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a wealth tax in place of 5%. Therefore I value the factory at $100, pay $5 in taxes on it, and get a net profit of $5, which is the return I expect for that much investment.

B) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a 10% sales tax, 20% corporate income tax, and income tax where my marginal rate is 31%. The food sells for $9.09, my company's profits are $7.27, and ultimately my own profit is $5. Thus here too I value my factory at $100.

You can nitpick the particular taxes and amounts (and situation B should clearly have property taxes too!) but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that this wealth tax is too far off from the status quo.

(Wealth tax: I don't know of a great way to do this, but a decent way might be to make everyone declare the value of their stuff, and pay 5% of that. Your honest declaration is enforced by treating it as an offer to sell your stuff for that much money that anyone can accept.)

I used to like this for its cleverness, but not after reading a recent thread at another forum, where people pointed out all the flaws.  This becomes a tax on stability and on consumer surplus, just as much as it is a tax on wealth.  Part of the value of my home to me is the way I've customized it, and avoiding the complete disruption to my life that would be entailed by moving.  The data on my computer is worth much, much more than the hardware itself - to me - but it's practically worthless to someone who buys my computer from me.  My music collection is valuable because it fits my taste, not because you can actually sell CD's for anything notable anymore.  What about my wedding ring?  Can you buy that from me, in order to melt it down for gold?  My grandmother's ashes - to me, they're priceless, to the market they are a biohazard.  Therefore I would need to declare my stuff to be worth substantially more than its actual market value, in order to preserve stability and consumer surplus and sentimental value.  

It can be trivially avoided, too, with poison pill type contracts.  I don't own my home, Mardoc, Inc. owns it.  The firm paid for the house at market price, and then signed a contract with me where I have a perpetually-renewable (at renter's discretion but not owner's) rental contract for $1/month, and the firm is responsible for all maintenance requested by tenant.  That contract, of course, dropped the value of the house substantially, so it's listed for taxes at $500.  When I want to move, I first cancel that contract, wind up Mardoc, Inc, then place the home on the market.  If you buy the house from me against my will, the contract remains in effect.  If you would rather have a rule where purchases from corporations negate contracts, then you've destroyed basically all of capitalism, and most renter's rights.  

Further, much wealth has value only in combination with other things.  Does Coca-Cola need to declare the value of the total enterprise?  Or each factory, the brand, the secret recipe, etc?  Can I buy just 10 feet of your newly constructed railroad, and set up a tollbooth?  If I'm annoyed with you, can I buy just your toothbrush?  Market value...arguably negative, once you used it.

Also, this only works for wealth whose existence can't be hidden, so therefore it must be registered.  It works fine for houses and cars, but not for the gold buried in the backyard.  But we don't want wealth to be hidden, we want it to be invested in tools making us all better off.

And, it's not great for items whose value changes.  Do I need to update my wealth registry every minute, to account for the performance of my stocks on the stock market?  You might be creating a new breed of high-frequency traders, whose raison d'etre is to steal all the upside from any investment, but not the downside, by buying stuff the moment it increases in value then selling it for cash to repeat the process.

If you want to set up enforcement where these approaches are outlawed and I can set only reasonable values for things...well, you've just reinvented the tax assessor, why are you bothering with the 'must sell on demand' rule again?

This method might work for items which are only valued for their ability to produce a predictable income - bonds and investment properties, because they can't both be hidden and be valuable - but there isn't a lot of difficulty in putting a price on them.  Further, these are the items which we care most about not disrupting.  I could live with a wealth tax on my house, I sort of already pay one, only it's called 'property tax' and goes to the local school district instead of to all children everywhere.  Also my house is already falling apart every moment, and requires constant influx of money for maintenance.  A wealth tax on my retirement fund, though...that defeats the entire purpose of its existence.  I might as well enjoy my income while I have it, instead of investing it in productivity-growing companies which increase the world's wealth, and allow me to support myself when I am old.

Good arguments. Like I said I'm not satisfied with that method.

Some of your issues are solved by saying that if you want to buy stuff from me you have to pay a premium over my declared value. Maybe that premium is 10% of the declared value plus $1000. That stops most of the bullshit. Maybe everyone gets a tax-free "pile of personal stuff" bucket that they can put however much they want into and that costs $20k to buy out.

I'm sure that your poison pill point is correct and important but I don't understand what the problem is in the situation you describe. It seems to me that in the example, you're the owner of an incredibly valuable rental contract that I would like to buy. But yeah, I don't have the background to come up with anything meaningfully useful in this area.

Back to the children: I claim they deserve some fraction of the stuff in the world to be allocated to them, and the amount of value in the world is growing faster than the population. It makes perfect sense for the amount we consider children deserve to go up over time. The fact that this higher allocation is described in the form of concrete things rather than just a higher quantity of money is an artifact of humans thinking in human, not abstract terms.

We do enforce this, just not through generalized taxes.  If you have a child that you don't support, it will be taken from you and placed in someone else's care, and in addition your income will be garnished by an amount chosen by a family law judge, in a hearing.

In addition, there are all the investments in schools and similar, usually supported by property tax.

In addition to the amount a child deserves by right from those who caused it to exist, many many people are willing to donate to help the less-fortunate, anything from Christmas toy drives to scholarships to free medical treatment.  It's just that we consider this to be supererogatory.

I think your primary mistake is implied by your use of the passive voice here.  You claim that 'value is growing'.  I claim that people are investing in tools and knowledge to increase productivity, which enables us to consume more.  I might maybe be willing to accept your perspective on real estate only, where I can gain value by the mere fact of owning something near productive people.  But, well, anywhere with democracy, property taxes already exist; anywhere without democracy, there are bigger more urgent problems.

Edit:  Also, honestly, land is about the only thing my ancestors could have stolen from your ancestors that doesn't fade to nothing on its own, given time.  Anything made by peasants/slaves/etc was long since eaten or decayed into dust, with maybe the exception of things that were gold.  If it hasn't decayed, that's because of the constant influx of additional maintenance work, which at some point because the majority of the value anyway.

Well, we're not in disagreement there. I agree those things exist too. I was just trying to say that something like them is morally justified, and that as society becomes richer, larger amounts of that become morally justified. Gavagai and T-Hawk were arguing against Huinesoron about this.

[Mardoc]

This doesn't sound like a serious argument, but maybe it is. First, although I'm suggesting a wealth tax, I think it's well-understood that in general, taxes dampen economic activity but don't usually completely destroy it. If it turns out a wealth tax is the exception, then for god's sake let's not do a wealth tax. But I really doubt it. Here are two largely equivalent situations in a toy world where the expected rate of return on investment is 5%:

A) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a wealth tax in place of 5%. Therefore I value the factory at $100, pay $5 in taxes on it, and get a net profit of $5, which is the return I expect for that much investment.

B) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a 10% sales tax, 20% corporate income tax, and income tax where my marginal rate is 31%. The food sells for $9.09, my company's profits are $7.27, and ultimately my own profit is $5. Thus here too I value my factory at $100.

You can nitpick the particular taxes and amounts (and situation B should clearly have property taxes too!) but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that this wealth tax is too far off from the status quo.

Ah, here is the heart of our disagreement.  The difference is in how you define '5 % is the expected rate of return on investment', I think.  You're using the bond/debt/rent perspective, where 'rate of return' is a market-wide constant, set by equilibrium, and the value of everything is defined to fluctuate in response.
I define it as:
A factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food, costs $200 in foregone consumption to build.  

Under my perspective, taxes cause a difference between before-tax rate of return and after-tax rate of return, but the value of the factory is what you could exchange it for, which is clearly $200 worth of immediate consumption.

In tax scenario A, the heart of the issue is in 'I value the factory at $100', even though it cost $200 to build.  I'm not completely sure what that means in practice.  One possible interpretation is that I value the factory at $100, and immediately someone buys it to dismantle it for $200 worth of parts, which they use for immediate consumption, and the factory never produces anything.  Another interpretation is that it's only worth having as a whole factory, and so I keep it...but if I ever sell it, the most I can get is $100.  After 20 years, I've finally gotten $200 worth of consumption from forgoing $200 worth of immediate consumption. Since I saw that would happen, I don't build the factory in the first place.

In either interpretation of scenario A, odds are that the factory never gets built.  That is my fundamental objection: without investment, the economy dies.  And investment only really exists in the form of building new factories.  Transferring ownership of existing factories or debt and bonds or etc, while interesting for Wall Street, isn't fundamentally investment until it causes someone to build a new factory.

Maybe you can describe what I'm missing here, an interpretation that makes it worth building this factory.

In tax scenario B, I earn $5/year net in exchange for forgoing $200 worth of immediate consumption, if I build a factory (buy shares in a factory-building project). The true physical rate of return is 5%; I only get 2.5% but at least it is still a positive number.  I am a bit less likely than if my personal return on investment were 5%, but I will clearly have more stuff tomorrow than today, so I go ahead.  I can sell my factory to someone else later for $200 (since, after all, their alternative is to build a factory for $200), and in the meantime I've gotten return.  After 20 years, I've gotten $300 worth of consumption in exchange for forgoing $200 of immediate consumption. I build the factory.

Fewer people choose to create wealth in scenario B than if there were no taxes, but the incentive still exists.

I think a wealth tax could work as you say for items of wealth that can neither be created nor destroyed, just revalued, like land...which is a category of wealth that is continually declining in importance, specifically because society is getting richer. Creation of new items of wealth is practically the definition of society getting richer.

Good arguments. Like I said I'm not satisfied with that method.

It's honestly a side point, since that method doesn't determine the underlying question of wealth taxation anyway.  I think the current method of tax assessment + tax courts approximately works; all I really wanted to convince you was that the Periclean solution is a lot less simple in practice than in theory.  To the extent that wealth is hard to measure, it will always be hard to measure, there's no shortcut.

Well, we're not in disagreement there. I agree those things exist too. I was just trying to say that something like them is morally justified, and that as society becomes richer, larger amounts of that become morally justified. Gavagai and T-Hawk were arguing against Huinesoron about this.

I think you've missed what they're disagreeing about.  You and Huinesoron are arguing that this is a societal-wide duty, to take care of all children.  Gavagai is arguing that specific children impose a personal duty on those who made the decision to have these specific children.  T-Hawk, I'm not sure, might be arguing that duty is a meaningless concept because there is no 'duty' particle - I'm not sure I've understood him correctly though.  I'm confident that Gavagai and T-Hawk aren't coming from the same perspective even if they would vote together on this specific issue.

I personally feel that children impose a personal duty, and in addition it would be nice if society were to improve the lot of the poorest children, but that society isn't morally required to level the field, just prevent outright abuse.  

But...I'm also pretty sure that the distinction between personal duty and societal duty is mostly a question of axioms, not arguments. It's a question of whether my duties arise from my actions, or from the state of the world.  The only argument that might apply is that in general it's good to attach duties and consequences from a decision as close to the decision-maker as you can, in order to get good decisions, but that's a practical rather than moral argument.

[Gavagai]

2 Mardoc. The heart of the disagreement is whether the society owns anything. Because it cannot have any duty if it does not have the resources needed to fulfill it.
As Seven ignored my question he, I believe, did not find it interesting but it was aimed towards uncovering this problem. He needs to assume common ownership of natural resources as a normative starting point. From that position, any individual ownership can be viewed as a result of a willful decision on behalf of the society to distribute the resources and be criticized as such. Like, it is unfair to withhold from the unborn their share of the resources because they are the part of an initial group of owners. But I reject this assumption of common ownership, this is why Seven's arguments, specifically designed to target "libertarians", are not convincing for me.

[Gavagai]

It's a question of whether my duties arise from my actions, or from the state of the world.

I do not see how one can seriously advocate the idea that one's duties depend on the state of the world. It would mean that the content of your duties constantly shift without any connection with your actions and even without your knowledge. This kind of moral system is just unusable.

[SevenSpirits]

This doesn't sound like a serious argument, but maybe it is. First, although I'm suggesting a wealth tax, I think it's well-understood that in general, taxes dampen economic activity but don't usually completely destroy it. If it turns out a wealth tax is the exception, then for god's sake let's not do a wealth tax. But I really doubt it. Here are two largely equivalent situations in a toy world where the expected rate of return on investment is 5%:

A) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a wealth tax in place of 5%. Therefore I value the factory at $100, pay $5 in taxes on it, and get a net profit of $5, which is the return I expect for that much investment.

B) I own a factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food. There is a 10% sales tax, 20% corporate income tax, and income tax where my marginal rate is 31%. The food sells for $9.09, my company's profits are $7.27, and ultimately my own profit is $5. Thus here too I value my factory at $100.

You can nitpick the particular taxes and amounts (and situation B should clearly have property taxes too!) but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that this wealth tax is too far off from the status quo.

Ah, here is the heart of our disagreement.  The difference is in how you define '5 % is the expected rate of return on investment', I think.  You're using the bond/debt/rent perspective, where 'rate of return' is a market-wide constant, set by equilibrium, and the value of everything is defined to fluctuate in response.
I define it as:
A factory that makes an annual $10 worth of food, costs $200 in foregone consumption to build.  

Under my perspective, taxes cause a difference between before-tax rate of return and after-tax rate of return, but the value of the factory is what you could exchange it for, which is clearly $200 worth of immediate consumption.

In tax scenario A, the heart of the issue is in 'I value the factory at $100', even though it cost $200 to build.  I'm not completely sure what that means in practice.  One possible interpretation is that I value the factory at $100, and immediately someone buys it to dismantle it for $200 worth of parts, which they use for immediate consumption, and the factory never produces anything.  Another interpretation is that it's only worth having as a whole factory, and so I keep it...but if I ever sell it, the most I can get is $100.  After 20 years, I've finally gotten $200 worth of consumption from forgoing $200 worth of immediate consumption.  Since I saw that would happen, I don't build the factory in the first place.

In either interpretation of scenario A, odds are that the factory never gets built.  That is my fundamental objection: without investment, the economy dies.  And investment only really exists in the form of building new factories.  Transferring ownership of existing factories or debt and bonds or etc, while interesting for Wall Street, isn't fundamentally investment until it causes someone to build a new factory.

Maybe you can describe what I'm missing here, an interpretation that makes it worth building this factory.

In tax scenario B, I earn $5/year net in exchange for forgoing $200 worth of immediate consumption, if I build a factory (buy shares in a factory-building project).  The true physical rate of return is 5%; I only get 2.5% but at least it is still a positive number.  I am a bit less likely than if my personal return on investment were 5%, but I will clearly have more stuff tomorrow than today, so I go ahead.  I can sell my factory to someone else later for $200 (since, after all, their alternative is to build a factory for $200), and in the meantime I've gotten return.  After 20 years, I've gotten $300 worth of consumption in exchange for forgoing $200 of immediate consumption.  I build the factory.

Fewer people choose to create wealth in scenario B than if there were no taxes, but the incentive still exists.

I think a wealth tax could work as you say for items of wealth that can neither be created nor destroyed, just revalued, like land...which is a category of wealth that is continually declining in importance, specifically because society is getting richer.  Creation of new items of wealth is practically the definition of society getting richer.

I believe that in the real world this example factory actually costs less than $100 to build (and that if it cost more, it would not get build in either situation A or B). However, I see that I could be wrong, and your point is telling me that if you misjudge what wealth tax rate the market can bear you might screw it up pretty bad. Whereas an income tax is a lot harder to screw up. I accept that argument might be right (though, I think the situation gets really complicated given how prices of assets would change under those different tax schemes, e.g. it seems the land you build the factory on would be cheaper, raw materials to build it might be cheaper, and labor (being untaxed) would be cheaper) and I'm personally fine with income taxes. On the other hand, I've yet to hear a convincing moral case for income taxes. I tried to articulate a moral case for wealth taxes specifically because I think there is such a case that is related to the question of what children deserve.

I think you've missed what they're disagreeing about.  You and Huinesoron are arguing that this is a societal-wide duty, to take care of all children.  Gavagai is arguing that specific children impose a personal duty on those who made the decision to have these specific children.  T-Hawk, I'm not sure, might be arguing that duty is a meaningless concept because there is no 'duty' particle - I'm not sure I've understood him correctly though.  I'm confident that Gavagai and T-Hawk aren't coming from the same perspective even if they would vote together on this specific issue.

I personally feel that children impose a personal duty, and in addition it would be nice if society were to improve the lot of the poorest children, but that society isn't morally required to level the field, just prevent outright abuse.  

But...I'm also pretty sure that the distinction between personal duty and societal duty is mostly a question of axioms, not arguments. It's a question of whether my duties arise from my actions, or from the state of the world.  The only argument that might apply is that in general it's good to attach duties and consequences from a decision as close to the decision-maker as you can, in order to get good decisions, but that's a practical rather than moral argument.

Very well said.

I believe what's happening is that as our society becomes wealthier, more things become practical, so that the morals we choose to live by become less bound by practicality and therefore come closer to abstract universal morals.

[SevenSpirits]

There's a large amount of preexisting stuff in the world that's not a product of anyone's labor (which is the typical moral justification for private property). Claiming this stuff as private property by existing people to the exclusion of the unborn is useful economically but not justified morally. See also Georgism.

But it does not answer my question. I am asking why the unborn have a justified claim on "stuff" and you are answering why existing people do not have such claim. It's a non-sequitor.

simply ensuring that claims over property decay naturally and over time revert to the public makes a good compromise.

"Revert" implies that they were once held by the public and this is an assumption you need to prove. Also, if claims over property "decay", it means that an object, after a while, should become unowned by anyone, including "the public". Moving this object from the unowned state into the public domain is an additional logical step and you are skipping it.

Sorry, didn't see your questions here.

I don't think anyone has a claim on stuff except insofar as what we, people, decide. The a priori condition of the universe is that nothing belongs to anyone. Because we find stuff useful to own, we have decided on a system of private property whereby we assign rights to particular stuff to particular people. But if your system of private property divides all the stuff up only among the people who are currently there, and anyone else who shows up has no right to any of it, does that not strike you as unfair? I'm not saying it would make it automatically a bad system of private property for economic reasons, only that it wouldn't be a fair one. "Fair" means roughly that I'd be equally happy to be any of the people involved, knowing only the system of distribution.

I should not have said "to the public". I mean revert to a state of not being assigned to a particular person.

[Gavagai]

I don't think anyone has a claim on stuff except insofar as what we, people, decide. The a priori condition of the universe is that nothing belongs to anyone.

This is a very contradictory set of statements. If "we, the people" decide who has a claim on what, it assumes that "the people" already own all this stuff, otherwise, on what basis they make decisions about it. If a priori condition is that nothing belongs to anyone, it means that in the initial state no one can make any decisions about anything. There should be a logical step where "the people" appear and assume the ownership over natural objects and with that ownership assume an authority to distribute them to individuals. This is the step which I ask you to justify. And this is very important if you want to craft an argument aimed at libertarians because libertarians reject this logical step. This is, probably, the most basic difference between libertarian and non-libertarian worldviews.

[SevenSpirits]

Can you explain what you believe instead? I'm afraid I'm completely lost.