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July 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:44
329 Property Rights On A Desert Island
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Good afternoon, everybody.
How are you doing? It's Steph.
Oh, we are emerging into the light.
We are leaving behind the dark and ugly abscesses of the human soul.
I've been listening to Crime and Punishment.
I've read it once, and I've also listened to this audiobook before, but nothing like a good chunk of Dostoevsky to get you down into the depths.
But we are going to emerge into the light like a geyser of thought up to the sky and a chat about...
Something a little less dismal than the last couple of topics.
I'm glad that you hung in there.
I think there was some value in it, but I find that my mind compresses like a choleosanth relative to the sunny skies that I am wont to inhabit.
Nothing wrong with dipping into the depths, but now we must rise again so that I don't feel like carrying around a sort of baby elephant on my back all day.
And sorry for those who were trying to post on the boards.
I'm in a convoluted situation with GoDaddy, who's been a good provider, has nothing wrong with them as a hosting service, but I think that the size of the board, I mean, we had 40,000 people come to visit Free Domain Radio, Last month,
just come to visit, we had, you know, I don't know how many thousands and thousands of posts, but we are breaking the back of their community server, which is supposed to be, I don't know, like for 20 people to exchange messages, not for 161 people to exchange the core content of human thought.
So it's a little more...
And I'm having trouble getting through to somebody at GoDaddy who can actually help me because what I'm finding is that I talk to people who say, oh no, it's just a free software package that we give you.
And someone said that we're limited to 10 megs, which of course, even though you can't embed photos or anything, we've got to be getting close to the size of the board.
And so, no disrespect to GoDaddy, but we're a little bit further.
And I wouldn't mind. I mean, people have donated and I'm using that money for...
The good purpose, and so I wouldn't mind getting another host for the boards, because they are an essential part of what it is that we're doing, but I don't know any way that I can get the data from GoDaddy, and I haven't talked to any technical person who has a clue what I'm talking about in that arena.
So, I really didn't imagine that it was going to grow this quickly, and also, I was not aware of any limitations.
I thought that the limitations on the server were my bandwidth, like for a community server, for the forum.
I thought that the limitations, and not irrationally, I thought the limitations were my bandwidth and my hard disk space.
Now, I'm nowhere close to the hot disk space, even with all the free domain radio shows, and we're still not over the bandwidth because I've upgraded a couple of times, or twice, or once.
I've bought the package and upgraded to a larger package, but the limitations with community servers are that we're sharing a server with other Community servers, like a physical server, I think, and so the physical limitations are not related to my account.
This is all a bump which I'm sure is putting many of you to sleep, but just for those who want to post on the board, myself included, I finally got some time to spend a little time on the board, and after three posts, I am rejected.
So for those of you who think it's been turned off because people were disagreeing with me, well, that's been going on since the beginning, and we'll go on to the very end of our days.
An interesting debate that was going on around property rights gave me another way of looking at it that I think is useful.
And I'll share it with you, and you can let me know if my feeling about it being useful is a valid feeling or not.
So, if you'd just like to feel my feelings, I'll just lie back and have a smoke.
Anyway... So, the idea was, it was a desert island scenario, which I decided to pick up because I thought it was useful.
I'm not a big fan of desert island scenarios, and someone mentioned that in an earlier podcast I talked about Pavarotti in the jungle with an orange, but this one is not so bad.
So let's have a look at a scenario wherein we have somebody who is on a desert island, and he is the pretty much ruler of all his surveys, right?
I mean, we assume that there aren't predators that can bring him down or anything.
So if he wants a coconut, he goes and gets a coconut and so on.
Now... Somebody else, a woman, a lithe young dancer, let's just make it enjoyable to work with, as a metaphor, a lithe young dancer alights on the island from parts unknown, eventually Lily will call her, but anyway, and she says, well, I now want to get coconuts and you want to get coconuts and aren't we a lovely bunch of coconuts?
We have problems because now there's going to be conflict over who owns what.
Now, The sort of thought that I had that I think is worth sharing, and I think it made it through the posting beast at the moment, the problem with the posting beast at the moment, but the problem that I had, sorry, the solution that I had, was something like this.
The question is, why does the investment of labor into something make it yours?
And I think that the way I'd like to approach it is that fundamentally, property rights arise not out of the possession of property, but out of the creation of We're good to go.
But where people sort of get into problems is in this question of something that already exists as property and you just, you know, paint it or something and it becomes yours.
But that's not really how property works, I don't think.
So I'm going to take an example that I think is useful from this desert island metaphor.
So, the man is hungry for a fish.
I guess he's hungry for something, but maybe he's, you know, sick of coconuts.
He wants a fish. And...
Swimming lazily in the bottom of the lagoon, next to Brookshield's discarded thong.
See, I'm telling you, we're going to work on the metaphor that we like.
Boy, there's a Blue Lagoon reference that dates me somewhat, eh?
Well, you know, it's not like it's just down to the Blue Lagoon reference to date me.
You're all aware of my musical taste, so I'm sure there are no shocks there.
Down swimming lazily is a fish that would make a very tasty dinner.
And now... This gentleman then dives down to get the fish.
And, you know, lungs are bursting, eyes are goggling, with incredibly rapid reflexes honed by years of training.
He grabs this fish and takes it to the surface and, you know, clubs it on something rock and then builds a fire and cooks it and eats it.
Well, the reason that I think that he has a right to this property is because nobody cares about the fish.
Nobody cares about the fire.
People care about the food.
I mean, you don't sort of build a fish, you don't grab a fish, build a fire, cook it, and then throw it into the ocean, right?
Probably not, unless you're some very, very strange environmentalist.
Or somebody putting a sacrifice to the ocean gods or something, but then it probably wouldn't be something the ocean gods would have access to, like a fish.
But let's not delve into that sort of stuff, because I can feel the tangent monkeys hard-pedaling, but we shall restrain them.
Restrain their beastly little hides and continue.
So, what people care about, the reason the property exists, is for consumption.
And the fish is not property because it cannot be used.
It has no value while it's sitting at the bottom of the lagoon.
You can't eat it.
And unless you're Gollum, you can't eat it just raw either, right?
You're going to cook it and maybe throw in a little saffron sauce and a lychee anti-sauce or something like that, butternut squash or something.
And the fine china is de rigueur, of course.
We can't live without that.
But the fish at the bottom of the lagoon is not property.
It exists in a state of nature because it's useless.
It might as well be a rock on the moon, right?
There's no property rights for rocks on the moon, because it doesn't matter.
You can't use them. They're not in a state which is conceivably consumable.
Like, I could say, I own Mars, and you could say, you own Mars, but so what?
It's not consumable. And so, to take this to the metaphor of, or not the metaphor, but the property rights of land, well, people don't care about land, What they care about is, and we'll just talk about farming for a second, right? The property rights in land don't matter.
The property rights in wheat do matter.
Because you can't eat land.
We'll just stay with the farming example for the moment, right?
Not live on it or whatever, right? But let's just say there's a big patch of earth and it's just sitting there growing grass or random rainforest stuff or whatever.
It doesn't do anyone any good.
Nobody can consume anything.
You can't eat the rainforest leaves, you can't eat the grass, and there's, you know, there's a lot of bugs in there.
So it's in a state of, like, can't be consumed.
No point, no use. Now, if you then grow in and clear out that land, right, you get rid of all of the trees and the bugs and the grass or whatever, and then somebody says, okay, this patch of wet earth is now yours, well, you still can't do anything with it.
It's just wet earth. Unless you want to do a woodstock-style mudslide, it's just not going to be of much value to you.
But if you then plant wheat and grow wheat, the wheat is consumable.
The earth is not.
You can't eat the earth and get along well with your intestines.
So when you grow the wheat, the wheat is consumable.
The earth has now produced something which is consumable.
In the same way, not a lot of people have property rights in seawater because you can't really do much with it, right?
It's just kind of gross.
And there's a lot of minerals and salt and you can't drink it or whatever.
You can't water your lawn with it.
But if you then filter out all of the minerals and you can drink it and use it, then it becomes something that can be consumed.
So, it's not the property rights in land that are important.
It's the property rights in wheat or what the land produces, right?
It's not the apple tree or the ground that the apple tree is in that's really important.
It's the apples. You can't eat the tree.
And you can't eat the land, but you can eat the apples.
So whatever is consumable is that which property is relevant to.
And so that's sort of something that I think is an important consideration.
So to go back to the island, because that's where the Hardis, Light, Dance of Brook Shields people are, then we can say that the coconut that is at the top of the tree is not consumable.
Unless you're a giraffe or something.
The coconut at the top of the tree is not consumable.
Now, to move it into a state where it is consumable, somebody's got to climb the tree and grab it and bring it back down.
So if you're 95 years old and in a wheelchair on this desert island, the coconut at the top of the tree is useless to you.
You will starve. Similar to if you are this 95-year-old person and you've got really bad arthritis and you can't do this and you can't do that, you can't even open a, I don't know, like a jam jar lid, then having a coconut which is not opened for you is also pretty useless.
The coconut remains in a non-consumable state if you're old, this old, I guess, if it's on top of the tree or not open for you or something.
And once it's brought down and it's opened and given to you, then it's in a consumable state.
And so I think that's fairly important.
The fact that the fish exists, of course, is true in terms of empirical reality.
You can take photos. You can measure the sonogram of when it goes by and the water vibrations or whatever.
The fish exists for sure, but it's not important that it exists unless you just want to, I don't know, take photos of it.
But in terms of just eating, we'll just sort of stay at that sort of basic level for now, all the complexities of, well, I want the land for tourists to take photos of.
I want to leave it in a natural state or whatever.
That's fine. We can deal with that another time.
But the first and primary issue that we need to deal with is that you have to get property into a state of utility.
And in that sense, you are creating a consumable or you are transitioning something from who cares to it can be used.
So if I said to you, would you like to buy my iPod?
And you say yes, and then you give me the money, and I say, great, the iPod is yours.
It's in a satellite iPod orbit with a bunch of other ones.
Just go and grab it. Then you're going to say, well, actually, I think that I would like to have my money back.
And I would say, why?
I've told you where the iPod is.
You can go and get it. And you'd say, well, but it's...
I kind of want it here so I can consume it, not in some place where I can't get at it, or if I can get at it, it's after spending tens of millions of dollars to build a rocket to go and pick it up.
So the iPod exists and you have ownership of it, but it's not in a usable state if it's sort of floating in orbit.
And so it is effectively non-existent, I mean, as far as property rights go.
Property rights don't matter to things which cannot be consumed.
So saying to the old man in the wheelchair at the bottom of the coconut tree, you have a perfect property right to that coconut, well, you can't use it.
So it doesn't really make any sense to assign property rights to that which cannot be consumed.
So when you do something to property, To make it consumable, sorry, when you do something to an object to make it consumable, you climb up the tree to get the coconut and you bring it back down and you cut it open into nice little bite-sized morsels and you chew it and spit it out so the old man doesn't have to chew or whatever.
You invest labor in to make something that exists in material reality consumable, right?
Like you dive down and you grapple the fish up to the shore and then you build a fire and you cook it and now it's consumable.
Now you can actually do something with it.
And so... Property rights, in this sense, can be thought of not simply as grabbing something, not simply putting a fence around land, because nobody puts a fence around land except with the express object of producing something that is consumable.
And so they don't build a fence around the land, in a sense, in a very real sense.
They build a fence around the wheat.
And they only build a fence around the wheat so that they can remove the wheat and move it somewhere else.
If you imagine that I'm trying to sell you a seed, and I say to you as a farmer, I've got this wheat, and what it does is it puts down iron roots about 400 feet down, which no human implement can remove.
So this is fantastic wheat, it tastes fantastic, but you can't get it out of the ground, then the farmer would say, I appreciate that it might be a beautiful golden color and might taste great, but I'm not going to buy it, because I can't get it out of the ground and transport it anywhere.
And it turns into iron, so you can't even thresh it and get the ear or the whatever it is.
I'm no farmer, but you can't get this stuff off your land in whatever manner.
Well, the farmer's not going to buy it.
He's not going to be interested in that because he's not fencing off the land.
He's fencing off the wheat so that he can move the wheat.
So wherever he moves the wheat to, right?
So he puts the wheat in the back of his truck and he drives it to town and sells it to a baker.
He is creating something which can be moved and the baker would not have access to the wheat if this guy didn't do it.
So he's creating something that can be consumed.
He is modifying what is ground with a bunch of rainforests on it, and he's clearing it, and he's planting, and he's putting the right nutrients in the soil, you know, whatever, the fertilizer, and then he's harvesting and packaging and so on.
So he is creating.
He is not homesteading property.
He is creating property out of nothing.
Out of something that simply exists.
Like the fish exists at the bottom of the lagoon.
You are creating a consumable piece of property by diving down, getting the fish, cooking it, and serving it in a nice white wine sauce.
Or slap between a filet or fish bun.
Who knows? But you are creating property Because you are moving something from a who-cares state to a consumable state.
And that is very, very, very important.
I think that's the fundamental thing.
The property in every context, and I'm thinking of a bunch of contexts, and I'm sure that this theory may have problems, but I can't sort of think of them up front, that everything that you do creates something.
It's not simply just homesteading something, right?
I go build a fence around a piece of land and do nothing else.
What have I done? Well, I've just wasted my time putting a fence in.
Because it doesn't produce anything that's consumable.
And so therefore, nothing comes out of it that is new.
Just everything grows like it did before.
It's just got a fence around it.
But if I clear it and I plant wheat, which I can then transport elsewhere, I've created the wheat.
I have created the wheat.
And that's what I want to have property rights for, not for the land.
And the way to test that is if I say to you, That I will sell you the land, but I get to keep all the produce of the land.
Are you going to want to buy it?
Are you going to want to invest labor in it?
Well, no, of course not. What you want is not the land, but the products of the land.
What you want is not money, but what money can buy, and so on.
So I think that this approach to property rights is actually quite important.
If we take away the difference between physical property and intellectual property, that in every case where property rights are valid, you are creating a consumable.
And you own that consumable because that consumable would not exist without you, would not exist without your labor.
So, in creating something, it has to be yours, right?
Who else could it be? You're the one who created it.
You're the one who invested the labor.
You're the one who thought ahead. You're the one who did X, Y, and Z. Now, when you go to work as a programmer, or, you know, maybe there's a few people out there, perhaps the ladies who aren't programmers, if you go out there and you type up some code, or copy it from the internet, or something, whatever it is that you do to come up with your code, Then you are creating something that did not exist beforehand, namely a computer algorithm.
And so you basically are in a continual process of selling that to your employer, assuming you're an employee and so on.
But you're creating something that didn't exist before when you write computer code.
When you write a memo, you're creating something that did not exist before.
And so in general, in property, you are creating something Or moving something to a consumable state that did not exist before.
Teachers are creating knowledge.
If you teach someone something and they get it and can use it, then you're creating something that is usable for them.
Like if I teach you French and you now know French, then you are able to have something.
I've turned French into a usable commodity for you by teaching it to you.
If you say, I know French but can't speak French, it's not a usable, or read it, it's not a usable commodity.
This is why you don't hire someone who knows French who's in a coma, because they have the knowledge, but it's not in a usable form.
It can't be property, it can't be transferred, it doesn't have value.
So I think that's an important approach to take, in my humble opinion, towards this issue of property.
That transforming material things into consumable objects is...
Property is creating property.
Property does not exist in a state of nature because it can't be consumed.
Anything which can't be consumed is not property.
Now, the question then becomes sort of around complicated things.
Like, if I buy a shirt, have I created that shirt?
Well, forgive me for a possibly over-esoteric answer.
It feels like it has value, but, you know, feelings ain't proof, so I'm fully aware of that.
But let's just, you know, let's just see where we go, baby.
Well, this is sort of Say's law.
This is sort of consumption. Production produces consumption.
And we'll just touch on this relatively briefly, depending on how the traffic flow goes.
We're currently cruising along at half our regular cruising speed, but we'll see.
This certainly is something which can be dipped into at great length, unlike everything else which I don't dip into at great length.
But, even for me, this could be a lengthy topic, so we'll keep it brief.
But, the question is, if I buy a shirt, and now I say that I own that shirt, Have I created that shirt?
I mean, and so on. Well, yes and no.
I mean, to some degree I have.
And this isn't sort of really esoteric.
This is sort of a very important thing in economics.
I have created that shirt by buying that shirt.
Because if no one bought shirts, there would be no shirts.
If everybody wanted to, and I think what a wonderful world this would be, if everyone wanted to wander around topless, With the exception of German tourists over the age of 55 with extreme sunburns and banana hammocks.
But if everybody wanted to go around topless and there was no longer any demand for shirts, then obviously there would be no manufacturing of shirts.
And so the demand for shirts creates, I mean we all know this, right?
The demand for shirts creates the supply of shirts.
And so by buying a shirt, I am creating that shirt.
Because if I didn't buy that shirt, it would not exist.
And I know that, yes, somebody else can buy the shirt.
But trust me, in aggregate, the shirt exists because I buy it.
Because people who make shirts, every shirt they don't sell, they lose a fortune on.
And there'll be a couple that they don't sell for the style changes or whatever.
And most of my friends and myself don't notice.
Which is quite likely that we won't notice.
But they're very careful not to make more than they can sell.
It's not down to if I don't buy this shirt.
No one will buy the shirt.
But if the shirt is not bought, then it will not be created.
So if I produce a million and one shirts, but every year I only sell a million shirts, then I'm not going to produce a million and one shirts next year.
And then if somebody does buy a million and one, one new guy needs a shirt, then I will produce a million and one next year.
Or maybe more dynamically than that.
I'll probably keep track of it very closely.
And I'm not going to build until I get demand.
You don't just build a million shirts and go and try and sell them.
You build five shirts and try and sell those, and ten shirts.
You don't build more than you can sell.
This is very finely calibrated in almost every business in the world.
And so... Yes, you are creating that shirt by buying it, because your act of buying it is what causes it to be made.
So, yeah, I think that that still holds, just in terms of trade, that when you produce something, then you are...
something that is of value, right?
Like, I produce some gas after Indian meals, but it's not particularly of value, unless you would like to blue angel the size of the Northern Lights.
But... You really are in a situation of trade.
When you create something, you are automatically creating.
Production is consumption.
The two things are the same.
So if you do a fantastic job at work and you get a big raise, then immediately you have the capacity to buy more.
And even if you just stick that raise in the bank, then the bank's going to lend it to someone.
The only way you can block that is to get it printed in cash and put it under your mattress, which virtually nobody does.
A couple of old crazy people with way too many cats, but not many people.
And so, the moment that you produce more, you are instantly consuming more, right?
I mean, the production is consumption, from that standpoint.
It's not that production creates consumption.
They are the one and the same thing.
As soon as you produce more, you are consuming more, in one form or another.
Or you're causing consumption to increase.
Production and consumption are the same thing.
Because, of course, you can't...
You can't eat what you don't grow, right?
That doesn't really make any sense.
You can't have a bread if you don't have any wheat.
And so when you produce, you consume.
It's the same thing. And if you really like debt, then you can consume and then draw production even over what you produce.
But at some point, somebody has to produce more to fill that in, right?
Because if a lot of loans go bad, then the interest rate for loans goes up, which means other people have to produce to fill in those holes.
So I think even in the realm of this, you have a fairly strong case.
I think a fairly strong case can be made that when you are buying a shirt, you are creating the shirt.
So I would say that that's well worth looking at from a property rights standpoint, that to move something from an unowned or a who cares situation, like the fish at the bottom of the lagoon, to go down and get it, to cook it so that people want to eat it so it's not going to make them sick and unwell or whatever, then you are actually creating something.
Property. Property is consumable goods.
The stars are not property because you can't consume them.
You can look at them, I guess. Maybe you can charge people five bucks to have a look at the stars.
But you can't consume the power of starlight.
You can't do anything like that.
The Van Allen Belt can't be owned.
The radiation belt around the Earth, the people say, is why the moon landings are a hoax.
Who knows? But the Van Allen Belt cannot be owned because it cannot be consumed.
So it's in that who cares category.
The coconut at the top of the tree can't be eaten until it's brought down, and so it's in the who cares category.
You could hang around below and try and wait for it to fall down and hope that it cracked open and so on, so yes.
But that's not really what we think of in terms of property.
So property is material objects that are now consumable and labor to create, to transform them into something that is consumable, Is what gives you the right to control it.
Because it doesn't exist in a fundamental way.
In a fundamental way.
Not in a metaphysical way or an epistemological way.
But in a utilitarian standpoint, it does not exist.
Until you make it something that can be utilized.
So yes, the fish exists at the bottom of the lagoon.
But it doesn't exist in terms of having any value.
Until it can be consumed.
Again, let's forget about all the complications if you want to take photos of it and so on.
We'll sort of deal with that perhaps another time.
So you are creating property.
You create a meal by going to get the fish from the water and cooking it and serving up a sauce and all that.
You are creating a meal.
You are creating bread.
You are creating wheat that would never have existed otherwise if you clear the land and plant the weeds and nourish it and grow it and harvest it and bake it into bread or whatever.
You are creating a meal that would not have existed otherwise.
If you're on the line of an assembly plant and you're the guy who turns the ratchet that puts on the windshield, then you are creating an attachment to a windshield that would not exist otherwise, right?
And this explains other things, too, like, of course, the reproducibility of labor.
Most people can crank a windshield.
Very few people can model underwear.
Trust me, after several series of rejections, not for men's underwear, I can certainly testify to that, but...
So the more rare your skill, obviously, the higher and the more demand there is, the higher that it is to the higher your price you can command for it.
But it is in this essence, I think, of this aspect of creating, of creation, that is sort of unique.
I mean, I'll take a silly example just to see how far this theory could stretch.
And maybe, I'm sure this theory's out there already.
I doubt that I'm first to the party in this area, but I've never read it.
It's something that came to me, which probably means that it's come to about a bajillion people before me, but I thought I'd throw it out there with my ideas behind it.
But let's take a look at another example of how you create something.
So let's just say that you're a good-looking guy with a good genetic basis for lean body and musculature or whatever.
You have the good genetic basis for bulking up and you don't have any genetic basis towards subcutaneous fat or anything like that.
So let's just say that you're that guy and...
With a certain amount of labor, you can turn into the kind of, you know, biffly stud muffin that people like to see, you know, washboard abs and pecs, and you've got the V-shaped back and the narrow hips and all that, and long legs and muscular and so on.
And so with a certain amount of labor, you can turn yourself into that kind of really great-looking guy that people imagine they can look like if they put the same Joe Boxers on, right?
Sadly. Anyway, we'll talk about that another time.
But, um... So you're that guy.
Now, you obviously are going to look around and see if there's any demand for that kind of service, so to speak, outside of sort of the gay porn or gay escort industry.
Or just non-gay escort industry, who knows?
Because you're going to have a look around and see that because you want to know if it's worth doing this for yourself.
And so you invest that in yourself, right?
Suddenly you're turning your body into one of these real nice male physiques so that you can elicit desire for purchasing a product in...
I mean, you don't want to see the tidy-whities wrapped around a beard gut with some lint hanging out of the belly button, right?
That's way too much like being married.
But anyway... So, you want to see sort of the rock-hard abs and, you know, tight buns and all that kind of stuff.
And so, what is desired is desire, right?
So, what the person who's going to hire you or might hire you for the shoot, for the underwear, what that person wants is to elicit desire on the part of the people who are cruising up and down the aisles of Kmart looking for some Joe Boxers or some underwear.
And... If you have the right physique and you've done the work and this and that, then your body, photographed with the right angle and you haven't drunk a drop for four days or whatever, you're dying of dehydration, but you've sort of frozen moment in time and you've got that Michelangelo sculpture thing going, then you create, you are going to create a desire which would not exist otherwise.
So if the only people in the world were the fat guys with belly lint hanging out of their guts, then there would be a desire.
For men, it might be to never buy that underwear.
For women, it might be to never have sex again.
Who knows? But you have that...
You have that desire can be created.
If only one guy had the washboard abs, right, obviously be in high demand, because he'd be the only guy who could create that desire that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Now, that desire translates into purchases, so that desire is a good that the person who's hiring the underwear model is going to look for.
They want that good in order to be able to sell more underwear and get more money and this and that and the other.
So, the underwear model is creating a desire which otherwise would not exist.
Assuming, I mean, forget about, well, some other underwear model or whatever.
We're just talking sort of a one-on-one situation.
And so, even from that standpoint...
Something is being created that otherwise would not exist.
And obviously, that is, to some degree, mixed in with the photographer and the printer and the store and the guys, whatever, right?
But to some degree, that is, that desire is the property of the underwear model, because it's his body, right?
So, a stripper who has, you know, got the gut and the belly lens and so on, and It's had one boob job, like just on one boob or something like that.
A stripper is obviously, owns the desire that she creates in her patrons.
I mean, that's her property.
So she gets paid for that.
Plus the club and, you know, greasy guys serving the drinks.
Or the little umbrella manufacturers who put stuff in the drinks and so on, right?
Not that I've ever been, but I'm sure that's what it's sort of like.
But the desire then...
So she goes to the gym or whatever, she sculpts her body, and so she starts with a natural sort of possibility for that, and she goes further and sculpts it and does yoga, Pilates, or whatever.
So then she owns her body, so she owns the effects of her body.
The effects of her body is desire, so she sells that to...
So the guys like to have the desire, and then, you know, if she wants to go further, she can satisfy the desire in the champagne room.
Who knows? But...
The basic fact is that she owns...
She's creating desire that simply would not be there if, say, Roseanne Barr were shaking her moneymaker.
If you could even see it.
Anyway, let's not go there because we don't want to become psychosomatically blind while we're driving.
That would put a crimp in the podcast style, let's say.
Even in things as esoteric as desire...
Or envy or whatever it is, right?
That you actually can create these things based on who you are or what you've done with your time and energy.
And some people may envy wisdom or knowledge or, you know, I don't know, like Jessica Albers' butt or something like that.
But... So, that's sort of something that's a basic idea around property rights that I think might be worth exploring.
This idea that you're not just grabbing property and artificially saying that it's yours, but you are creating property.
That is now consumable that would not exist otherwise.
So you go to the gym, you get a great butt, you become an underwear model.
Well, you're creating something that otherwise wouldn't exist if you didn't go to the gym and whatever, right?
So this idea of creation, I think we can all understand, or at least a lot of us can understand, that there's some sort of ownership that's more legitimate if you write a poem that never would have existed beforehand, assuming that you didn't steal the pen and the paper and the computer.
But the stuff that you create out of nothing is...
It's easier to understand ownership from that standpoint than it would be to say, well, I put a fence around a piece of land and now it's mine, mine, I tell you.
That's a little bit harder to understand.
But if we do sort of understand that the ownership of the property relates to the...
The stuff that you create, like the wheat that you create by creating a farm and planting and transporting and so on, that that's the stuff that's important.
It's the stuff that you create.
The meal that you create by going to get the fish, right?
The coconut meal that you create by scaling up the little rope type between your legs and scaling up the coconut tree and grabbing the coconut, that's...
The property, right?
So it's not the moon rock.
Moon rock somewhere in the middle of nowhere that someone's desperate to have, right, on the moon, is not property.
Who cares? It doesn't matter.
But if you fly up and go and get it and bring it back, then you've turned it into a consumable item.
You have created access to moon rocks or the possibility of owning and using a moon rock that didn't exist before.
So in a very real sense, you're creating property.
You're not just grabbing property.
It's not just possession. It's an act of creation.
Anyway, I hope that that's helpful.
I now own this podcast and your ear, your ear canal, and at least two inches of your brain.
So, you know, this is part of the homesteading that I'm working on.
Just slowly, slowly, bit by bit, we will get this done.
Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations.
Sorry again about the board. We will figure out this stuff as we move forward.
I think we're having great discussions.
Thank you so much to everyone who's participating.
And I guess we move from triumph to triumph.
You know, it's a really, really exciting thing.
A really exciting phase in what's happening with our conversation.
So thank you so much for listening.
Donations, feed burner, listener survey.
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