====== Propertyandinternationalcollapse ======

Creation-Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 18:07:56 -0500
Modification-Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 18:38:46 -0500

====== Propertyandinternationalcollapse ======
Created Friday 27 May 2011

I like Israel. I've kept up on it enough to know, the day Obama made his speech, that Obama was essentially being an idiot, at least from a political perspective. Even should have want what he said he wanted in that speech (1967 border, lines, whatever) he should have known 1967 isn't very feasible in terms of defense, and he also should have known Bibi is a formidable speaker, with a lot of friends in Washington.

All that aside, I support the state of Israel a lot less since Gaza. The sight of a Jewish state taking property away from Jewish people helped remind me that Israel (the state) is far more socialist than it is Jewish. Of course, the Palestinians don't have a good track record of protecting individual property right either; so I came to realize that ethnicity, despite the passion, wasn't the real problem here. The two state solution isn't a solution because neither state protects the property rights of their citizens. Indeed, a no state solution would be preferable to the current situation, for there isn't a single state that I am aware of on this planet that actually protects individual property rights.

I noticed the international political situation was reaching a nadir. Various EU and IMF type have called on the Greeks to sell island; now they say to sell beaches. Obviously, Greece is somewhat socialist and has engaged in the myth of public property with some gusto, but the idea of a country selling property (even to it's own people, though I suppose in the real world it might work once if it were to go from 'public' to private) to pay off the loans it's 'democratic' institutions incurred shows how things will devolve. Let me give an easier to understand example.

Suppose you own a farm. If you know your farm can be seized at any time, you are unlikely to invest in it- make any improvements. Indeed, the more invasive the government- the more it seizes and sells your property, the less anyone will be willing to invest in it. Why plant seed if the field can be seized and sold to someone else before harvest? This is the kind of situation we are in now. The world, the IMF, the EU, the international corporate banks, the U.N., etc... - all of these institutions need people be productive so that there would be some surplus with which to run these superfluous organizations, but since all these organizations have paper that says they have rights to our property (largely through outright fraud plus government backed coercion) they are very likely to take. At least for them, they are very likely to kill the goose that laid all these extra eggs which gave us enough of a surplus to be able to put up with such a number of stupid bureaucrats in the first place.

It has really gone this far, in no small part, because they've encouraged several generations now to eat the surplus we had, instead of being productive. The siren song of college, to which even I succumbed, is a big fat lie. It becomes obvious once you realize somebody has to build up some kind of capital so that we can do anything at all. Otherwise we would all be stuck subsistence farming, or trying some version of hunting and gathering. The thing is, we've been eating into capital for several generations now, and before that the two world wars destroyed a lot of stuff too. A century (at least) of destruction of capital, where we turned it over to consumption and used fiat paper money so that we could hide the truth from ourselves.

So, if they don't protect property, and instead (as the KELO decision suggests) use it as a pawn in their games, we will stop being able to produce because the conditions just won't be amenable to producing.