>From: Anton Sherwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Kevin Carson wrote: > > Like speculations on seizing land left fallow or whose > > owner goes away on a 2-week vacation, this requires putting > > the most inconvenient spin possible on mutualist rules. > >I have encountered people who claimed to believe that your hammer >ceases to be your property from the moment when you put it down, >so such speculations are not necessarily in bad faith.
I hope you haven't encountered many of them! They sound like the most extreme kind of anarcho-commies--even the vast majority of that genus, followers of Kropotkin and Malatesta, believe in a right to secure personal possessions. But take my word for it, that's not a mutualist failing; we're all "petty bourgeois deviationist" types. >Well, suggest another spin. What's a dividing line between >good hotel operators and evil absentee landlords? It's a problem I've never encountered in discussions of mutualist land tenure. Perplexing at first glance, to be honest. I suspect the solution lies in treating a mutualist hostel or motel as a form of "occupancy and use" in the same sense that the premises of a barber or shoe repair shop are occupied and used by the owner, and viewing it as a business service. Of course, an apartment or rent house landlord could say the same thing; there would still have to be an (arguably arbitrary) distinction between short-term lodgings and genuine dwelling places. But such a distinction would be compatible with the spirit of the mutualist principle of land tenure; and most mutualist thinkers argue that any system of rules is arbitrary to an extent, would require a social consensus, and would be ironed out through some kind of libertarian system of courts on the understanding that the law was made for man, and not vice versa. >see also >http://samizdata.blogspot.com/2002_02_10_samizdata_archive.html#9753522 >(``In praise of renting and to hell with owning'') > >-- >Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/ _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
