That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)
Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
I don't necessarily agree with the GP, but I don't think you can reject the argument out of hand because you don't like the answer.
The GP has provided an argument as to why they are entitled to your copyrighted work. You haven't provided an argument in response.
Other way around. Western law has looked dimly for about the last 800 years on having property rights abridged.
If you steal my car, I don't have use of it. If I copy your book, we both have copies.
Further western law for the past 800 years looked dimly on the rights of women. Should we deny women the vote, just because that's how it's alway been done? Is an argument not required to explain why women shouldn't have the vote?
Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft (Assuming standard copyright. I have released several books under permissive terms myself.) This goes way back to Dickens and Beethoven, Who were damaged by piracy, along with many of their contemporaries.
Was that done all the times copyright was retroactively increased?
>Anyone with common sense knows that copying my book is theft.
Just because we use the same language for ideas as we do for physical things. Doesn't mean they are equivalent. Calling it intellectual property doesn't magically make it property. And it is common sense that copying is theft.
Further book copying isn't theft, at least in the UK. Theft requires an intent to permanently deprive. If I copy your book I'm not permanently depriving you of it.
Nothing stops you from seceding or overthrowing government if you don't like it. But because what you want won't fly with the rest of society, peaceful options are not feasible.
> Being born in the same country as you does not entitle you to my property and work.
Of course you use collectivist idea that every individual can continue to own things while unable to defend them and themselves from potential new owners. Such idea is enforced by majority through government (it's not perfect especially in USA), it's collectivist idea. In natural state, people will fight for resources and take them from eachother. But such constant warfare also waste a lot of resources. So people compromised.
In that case you wouldn't be entitled to any of society's collective work either. Electricity? Sorry you didn't invent it. Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
> It enslaves the individual and post-hoc justifies the theft of their property with terms that they never agreed to and which were imposed on them as a child.
Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I buy electricity. I don't tell the people creating that I am entitled to it because we're both members of the same society.
> Fire? Not your intellectual property either, no heat for you. Have you reimbursed anyone for your use of a language you didn't create lately? After all, it's immoral to benefit from someone else's work.
I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. Infact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
> Libertarians have this strange lack of awareness of the fact that the world we live in is built on millennia of other people's work, without which they'd be foraging naked in the mud with sticks.
Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
> Leave then. You're no longer a child, it's in your power to simply start walking. What's stopping you? Perhaps the "collectivist" society is actually quite comfortable? Perhaps life outside of one isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The US is one of the few western countries that hasn't entirely descended down the collectivist path. I quite like it and contribute quite a lot to it. Rather than leave, I intend to stay and continue to disagree with the collectivists hoping to change it. Not wanting to live in a collectivist society doesn't mean not wanting to live in a society at all.
Society, through taxation, has put in place the systems that make large scale electricity generation feasible. Without it you'd be unable to buy electricity at all. In fact you'd more likely be bartering the shiny pebbles you'd found while washing in a nearby river.
> I'm not clear what point you're trying to make here. It's not immoral to benefit from someone else's work. In fact, mutual benefit is sort of the entire point of society. What's immoral is to take someone's work against their will simply because you feel entitled to it.
Mutual benefit is exactly what's occurring. Without society you wouldn't be able to carry out that work at all. You willingly engage in the work that society makes possible with the understanding that society will receive a percentage for it's part in enabling it.
What's immoral is feeling entitled to benefit from collective knowledge and effort for nothing. Why shouldn't society expect something in return for providing collective knowledge and infrastructure? I look forward to the independent rediscovery of computation.
> Authoritarians have a complete lack of awareness of history, especially the history of societies that begin treating their productive members as kulaks to be robbed.
It's precisely an awareness of history that reveals the danger of your position. Societies that fail to balance disparity collapse violently. The failures of "collectivist" societies lay clearly in the power imbalance between a small group of individuals and the collective whole.
The irony of your "productive members" largely being slavers or aristocrats of lands won through violence should not be missed. On the other hand, child prostitution and capitalism entered the USSR hand in hand.
To return to a more modern example, disregarding any other potential benefit, taxation keeps me safe from desperate people. I happen to enjoy going about my business safely. In fact I greatly prefer it to fighting off the hungry.
As far as being authoritarian, perhaps we're using varying definitions. I'm happy for people to live their lives as they please to the degree that they don't impose on the freedoms of others. To me, a major factor in that is the management of wealth disparity and the provision of a basic standard of living. Personally, our current system feels coercive in the sense that it puts the majority of people in a situation where they are effectively forced to accept poor treatment and pay. The reticence of most people towards cleaning work illustrates this. The reality of the job is decoupled from how much it pays. This is a result of a huge number of people lacking the freedom to demand better conditions or pay.
I’ve heard this said before. Can you link to some science about this please?
But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.
And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.
At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.
I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.
I think it’s already covered by a system called “taxation”, in which the government requires we pay for our income, the right to own the house we bought, the amount we made on retail sales, the right to live in our state, the right to live in our county, etc.
I was educated at a public school, went to college on tuition funded by scholarships, where I learned things written in public libraries by people studying with public funds, now I commute physically on public roads and digital cables...
Anything I accomplish is tied up in our shared history. To say that the unique things I built are attributable to me and me alone is to ignore that someone else with the same knowledge and the same problems would likely come up with the same ingenious solutions.