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A comment on Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain. Parent comment

Re:Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS D... by rayiner on Thursday April 25, 2013 @02:48PM (#5609112)
> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.

Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.

What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.

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Re:Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS D... by vy8vWJlco on Thursday April 25, 2013 @03:29PM (#5609331)
Since a government's power is drawn from its populous, I would argue with your conclusion as to who is granting whom control. (A state divided cannot stand.)
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Re:Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS D... by rayiner on Thursday April 25, 2013 @03:40PM (#5609393)
The people, acting through government, grants specific people, monopolies over particular property. That's all that property rights are--my community, acting through government, agreeing to come to my aid if I'm dispossessed of my property outside the framework of rules we have collectively established. That agreement is what distinguishes property rights from mere posession.
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Re:Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS D... by vy8vWJlco on Thursday April 25, 2013 @03:52PM (#5609451)
Gotcha - I grant myself my property, which I already had, by way of possession. :)

I see the subtlety of the point you are making - that property is defined collectively (otherwise it is mere possession) - but I am making an equally subtle point about the underlying meaning of that definition: that collective responsibility is just a statistic on a population of individuals, not a statistic about an entity.

There, I've tilted at my windmill for the day.

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