Then you've never really been out in the countryside and wandered, or hell, even in a suburban area where most property lacks fences. Vast parts of personal property especially in wooded areas is not demarcated by ANYTHING when you're out in the land. In some of the places it would be entirely trivial to end up on another person's property without knowing it or who's it was, and given how some property lines are drawn, you cannot even assume it's the nearest house to you.
So you would compare all cases of accidentally violating people's intellectual property as my accidentally crossing into a neighbor's property without knowing it or who's it was?
Umm... sure there is? I find out someone has republished my work, I take a gun, and I go shoot them. Sure, it may be harder to find out that someone is doing that than it is for me to patrol the edge of physical property. The purpose of the State to protect property rights is specifically to prevent this sort of violent property protection that is necessary in an anarchic state.
You'd only be able to do so if you "find out" about it. Doesn't that strike you as odd?
If we accept your premise that there's no such thing as intellectual property, I guess there isn't. However, I fundamentally disagree with that premise as such, of course I don't see it as rent seeking, merely normal commercial exchange enabled by the government. Because I see ideas as "intellectual property" I see no difference between the state enforcing copyright than the state enforcing laws against stealing something from a store.
I understand our views differ on this. But my use of the word "rent-seeking" is literally describing reality as I see. Your use of the word "slavery" to describe an artist working for a patron is hyperbolic, akin to the socialist description of capitalist employment as "wage slavery." Do you dispute this, yes or no?
I'm not sure what I can say to this. Are you a collective consciousness or something? It's nonsensical. Individuals do creative work all the time and create unique stories and songs. Influence or inspiration from prior cultural works is not the same thing as it being created by multiple people. Do you do any creative work yourself, or do you only wax philosophical about it, as I feel like there is a fundamental disconnect from what I know of my own creative process and how you seem to think the creative process works...
I don't believe in individual authorship, and I don't believe in real originality. Those are concepts that presuppose ideas of authorship that I just don't buy into. If you want to defeat my arguments, then you have to address the root: that I don't believe you can actually believe in it.
Well, that's hilariously unchristian, considering that Christ clearly considered the profits of privately held land to naturally be the property of the land owner and not the laborer (see, Matthew 25:14–30) and there was clearly individual land ownership laws outlined by God for the Jews. Regardless though, this is probably an entirely seperate discussion.
I don't think it's an entirely separate discussion. I think it's useful to understand the differences in our conception of property too.
According to Catholicism, property rights are not absolute, but relative to the needs of others. As
St. Thomas points out, "it is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need." You find
in the writings of the Popes that there are other principles besides private property, such as "the
universal destination of the earth's goods," that need to be respected.
The Georgist view of land is foreshadowed by the Scriptures. In chapter 25 of the book of Leviticus, God laid out a safeguard against the alienation of each family's land. He justified this by saying "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine " (Leviticus 25:23). In the book of Isaiah, it says "woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room" (Isaiah 5:8).
The early Christians also foreshadowed this idea. St. Ambrose, in the fourth century AD, says to the rich man: “For what has been given as common for the use of all, you appropriate to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich; but fewer are they who do not use what belongs to all than those who do" (
De Nabuthe, PL 14:747). In the same century, St. Basil the Great speaks similarly when he addresses the rich man: “You are like one occupying a place in a theater who should prohibit others from entering, treating that as one’s own which was designed for the common use of all. Such are the rich. Because they were first to occupy common goods, they take these goods as their own" (
Homilia in illud Lucae, PG 31, 276).
Finally, in the modern day, the Catholic Church holds that “God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone.”
You are correct that there wasn't land socialism in the Old Testament, sure. But Georgism isn't land socialism, but a form of liberal capitalism derived from
the Lockean Proviso. I am not a Lockean, though the Catholic view of property is similar in some ways to Locke's.
The Georgist critique of land ownership is also implicit in the Church's views on usury. Usury is "when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk” (
Fifth Lateran Council). The appropriation of site rent by landowners is akin to usury in that it consists of taking what one has not earned and belongs elsewhere.
Claiming that my views on land ownership are somehow alien to the Catholic faith are somehow unchristian is an astounding feat of ignorance, in other words.
. . . Are you serious? This... this is so ahistorical and false to what we know of pre-modern peasant life that I'm not even sure where to begin. Wandering entertainers were in fact, a thing, and one doesn't need much money to sing or tell stories yourself. Yes, they had much less money than the later middle class did, but they did have plenty of time on the numerous holidays and festivals that happened.
The wandering entertainers and festivals are quite a bit different from the ravenous nerd fandoms that exist nowadays. The latter didn't appear until after the rise of industrial capitalism.
Umm... look, citing the Frankfurt School for just about ANYTHING raises about a million red flags considering their ties to Marxism. Given how inaccurate to reality pretty much all of Marxist theory actually is, I'm inclined to believe that reality is entirely the opposite of anything the Frankfurt school posits. Again, I think this entire idea is nothing more than a time filter onto the past where the best works of the past were preserved while filtering out the dross. My evidence for this would be to point back at music from the 1950s - 1970s to see the process happening in real time in our own culture. The songs and stories preserved from those decades are generally considered the best they had to offer, but due to the extensive archiving we've done, you can actually go and dig up huge amounts of random stuff that almost nobody even remembers today. I mean,
here's the list of the Top 40 songs for the entire year of 1960, a nice even sixty years ago. These were the
top songs of that entire year, and you'll likely only recognize a HANDFUL of them that have been preserved because of how good they were.
Considering I can provide pretty empirical evidence of the "Time Filter" premise, while your counterpoint is founded on literal Marxist philosophy... I, uhh, know which one I'm going to believe in.
So you are just going to dismiss my ideas just because they have come from a Marxist while extrapolating a twentieth century phenomenon so that it stretches back all throughout history? There are so many things wrong with this, I don't know where to begin.
First, your crude dismissal of my counterpoint ("It was proposed by the Frankfurt School, therefore it's wrong.") is an example of the
genetic fallacy and marks you as an ideologue. As an eclectic thinker, I have no problem incorporating viewpoints that radically differ from my into my overall view of the world. A true idea is a true idea, no matter who comes up with it.
Just earlier, you were (falsely) accusing me of assuming "that all Enlightenment thought is axiomatically wrong" and acting "as if just by establish something is related to the Enlightenment that it than proves that it's wrong."
Second, my counterpart, while borrowed from the Frankfurt School, is not based on any of the premises that Marx got wrong, such as dialectical materialism, economic reductionism, or class conflict. Rather, it's based on Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, something that Sir Roger Scruton admitted had some weight in his book
The Meaning of Conservatism. Commodity fetishism is something that we do see in modern culture. As Edward Feser (who is no Marxist) pointed out
in his blog:
Think of the way people talk of their “brand,” of “selling themselves,” of the re-description of prostitution and pornography as “sex work,” of the home as something to “flip” for a profit rather than to possess and pass on, of “starter marriages” no less than “starter homes,” and on and on in a culture of increasingly ephemeral attachments rather than rootedness.
So there is some empirical basis to the idea that I propose too.
Third, your reassertion of your previous argument does not even attack the Culture Industry idea. I mean, you can disagree with the idea that popular culture is destroying high art, homogenizing our cultural experience, and turning us into passive consumers, but you can't dismiss the idea by saying "we've forgotten the bad stuff from the past!" Because the Culture Industry critique is about the decreasing quality. There's not just more garbage, there's less quality stuff. The video below provides an example of this.