You Treat Me Like Property
Vedran Vuk, as an economics major, thinks that it's not such a bad thing to treat one's beloved like property, so long as it is private property. It means that he would take care of her, gaurd her value, protect her, and treat her well above all things not in his possession. His girlfried didn't quite get the point. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (27)
While I liked this article, I would note that "building roads that last forever" is not necessarily a good thing. Building roads that last as long as the free market demands they should last is a good thing.
The pyramids were built to last forever. They were an enormous and fraudulent waste of money which was stolen from working Egyptians, who were impoverished because of such.
Published: February 14, 2006 9:21 AM
I'll send it to my girlfriend!
Published: February 14, 2006 9:35 AM
Vedran's recent participation in Mises.org is a refreshing turn of events. I think his topic selection and laid back style create some of the most interesting reading among the daily article selections.
Published: February 14, 2006 10:01 AM
Public libraries and roads are frequently cited as examples of large-scale public works that would be better done by the private sector. But I'm curious about the libertarian perspective on really large-scale projects that government has undertaken and apparently done well. Two examples would be the Marshall Plan and the GI Bill. Could private interests have accomplished either as effectively as the government did at that time and in as timely a manner? Could private relief and charities have ameliorated the situation in Europe as quickly and effectively as the large and apparently well-organized effort by the Truman administration or would their efforts, as I suspect, been too little too late to prevent starvation, disease and chaos in Europe? Similarly, could any combination of private interests have provided the range of benefits (not just education) to the wave of returning vetarans that a large-scale and apparently well-run GI Bill did? Furthermore, the benefits to this country from both programs appear to have been enormous in both the short- and long-run, with few if any undesirable consequences. Given the scale and cost of these programs, huge government debt did not result. If smaller government programs invariably have all the unfortunate economic and social consequences pointed out by libertarians, why is it that these two programs appear to be so atypical? Note that I have repeatedly used the word 'appears' above; no doubt I am missing either some huge inefficiency in those programs or their success was in fact more apparent than real. But could it be that on rare occasions a well-run government program does actually accomplish something that would be beyond the scale of what private interests could manage and do it an efficient manner?
Published: February 14, 2006 10:45 AM
Alan,
If by "success", you mean oppression, thievery, murder, etc, these are not things that the free market -- absent a State -- can succeed in on a massive scale (fortunately). I would recommend reading articles on Mises.org about the Marshall Plan, particularly The Marshall Plan Myth. Tucker, Jeffrey; and reading articles on Mises.org about the GI Bill, particularly The GI Bill. DiLorenzo, Thomas..
Published: February 14, 2006 11:33 AM
But could it be that on rare occasions a well-run government program does actually accomplish something that would be beyond the scale of what private interests could manage and do it an efficient manner?
The Marshall Plan and the GI Bill did not achieve the goals often advertised. In fact, Germany and France got on their two feet by individuals' hard work and resourcefullness, not the Mashall Plan. Giving that money away actually hindered recovery more than it helped, since it gave a negative incentive - why work if you can receive a check from a guilt-ridden victor?
The GI Bill created a massive distorsion in the decision-making process in many people, giving them incentives to study subjects that most likely were not very productive. It also drove the price of college tuition above market levels, starting the spiraling increase in tuition costs that continues to this day.
Published: February 14, 2006 12:53 PM
Dear Vedran,
Your Misesian reasoning is impeccable,but unfortunately, logic and rigor are not the strong points of the fair sex. It might have done you (and your beloved) some good if she had more appreciation of what private property was, how it developed, and why it is valued, as opposed to government or "public property".
Maybe the problem was, on the other hand, that you were trying to TALK English to her, and she HEARD your remarks in some feminist dialect, unfortunately taking your comment about "property" as some slur on her "personhood". Mores the pity, but unfortunately, feminism is as common among modern women as fleas on a hound dog in August.
Even if you had a common libertarian frame of reference, she still might have gotten mad at you, but there would have been some chance of later working out the honest misunderstanding.
May you have better luck with a new, perhaps a libertarian or conservative girlfriend.
Published: February 14, 2006 3:13 PM
"do you mean public or private property?"
lol now thats pretty damn funny
If you're ex didn't even have a remote sense of humor to laugh at that comment, then trust me, you are wayyyy better off now and you're lucky to find out now than later. I think i'll use that the next time a girl says that to me (As a sense of humor profit or loss test)
Valentines day is an interesting day, i was reading a newsletter talking about the origins of valentines day. Apparently, it occured as a resistance against outlawing marriage. To make a long story short, some emperor back in 270 AD outlawed marriage and this bishop/presit watever, died resisting it and helping people marry illegally. You can all look online for the details of this story.
So i suppose today is very much a libertarian day (for all us lovers and potential lovers). I mean, what more can you ask for
-resistance against a draft
-freedom of marriage
-fight for religious freedom and love
So lets all celebrate, even if we don't have a woman (i.e. property hahahaha)
Oh yeh I hope mises.org sells "I treat you like my private property" V-day cards
Published: February 14, 2006 4:16 PM
The Marshall Plan was a wonderful success. WW2 was the first major modern war not followed by a depression
Published: February 14, 2006 5:44 PM
My girlfriend *is* my property, literally. She asked for that herself, explicitly. So now I have to care for her just as well as I care for my cats:) Better, actually, for she is absolutely unique.
Published: February 14, 2006 8:32 PM
I'm a hobbyist student of urbanism and I will tell you the roads have been the most wastefully managed government property perhaps ever. The whole debate over sprawl is caused by government mismanagement of roads.
A private provider of roads would not necessarily encourage people to drive on them. In fact it would encourage people to drive on important commercial roads, and discourage them to drive on secluded residential roads, by adjusting the capacity of roads to their particular use. The users would pay for access to the roads from their property. Small townhouses would pay significantly less than big box retailers since they consume much less road. The current "one-size-fits-all" megaroads that are built in America have been justified by the bureaucrats as necessary to let oversized firetrucks through. A free market in roads could cut right through this absurdity.
Published: February 14, 2006 8:56 PM
Interesting and humorous take on the importance of property. But for some reason the term “public property� has always troubled me. In my mind it is a nonsensical phrase. If a thing is public, it is supposedly owned by “all of us�, which means that it is actually owned by no one. Likewise, “private property,� always seemed a redundant term to me. I do understand, however, that we accept these terms because we live in a world in which most people believe that something can be owned collectively. A method is needed to indicate situations that are otherwise.
Of course, the difference between my property and my wife is that if she malfunctions, I don’t throw her out and buy a new one. She owns herself; I just get to spend time with her.
Published: February 14, 2006 10:07 PM
I don't think 'public' property really means it's collectively owned in any sense, rather that it is state owned. I cannot take my portion of the 'collective' good and on-sell it so I don't really own it in any sensible way.
Likewise, local and national authority rules on 'private' property use along with the effects of eminent domain (at least here in NZ) effectively mean that the state also owns private property and the status of supposed private owners is reduced to little more than that of lessees who must ask for (and pay for) permission do anything more than slap some paint around the inside of their house.
Published: February 14, 2006 11:00 PM
Let us please emphasize the difference between public property and mafia, or state, property.
Roderick Long and Randall Holcombe have written much about the difference between public property and state property. Public property is a legitimate concept in that it is the result of multiple homesteaders that have steadily contributed to its utility. No one individual can claim ownership. A footpath is one example, over time becoming a kind of common property.
State property is an entirely different thing however, with the agents of the state being the true owners, not "the public", which would imply a free for all (with the only stipulation being use restricted to its historic purpose - footpaths for feet).
Published: February 15, 2006 12:53 AM
Dain - what you described is a property of a group of shareholders, not a "public" property. Public anything by definition is open for use by any member of general public (or is presumed to be used for their benefit even if they are not allowed on the property itself).
There's no such thing as "public" property in Long and Holcombe's sense. Property always comes with some individual or specific organization which defines conditions and decides on property use.
"Contributing" to something doesn't make one an owner or confer any rights to control - it is the act of making a contractual agreement with previous owners or act of homesteading (and someone *always* homesteads first, thus making the homestead property his) which confer property rights.
The agreement can be informal or verbal or even presumed - but it is still there, along with understanding of the mechanism of decision making and rights of co-owners in regard to the property.
Having a common ("pubic" or otherwise) property without clear understanding of ownership structure is a recipe for disaster, as anyone who ever did business learns very quickly. I only wish more economical theorists tried running a business, there would be a lot less half-baked theories and maybe a lot more wealthy economists :)
Published: February 15, 2006 4:43 AM
A very amusing, timely article. I sent my wife the hyperlink from work.
Published: February 15, 2006 6:49 AM
Somebody does care about public library computers - the people who use them. However, they are not the ones responsible for the maintainance of them. And to be fair, decent library officials care about their "clientele". (But an internet cafe owner ALWAYS is concerned about the computers.)
Published: February 15, 2006 1:00 PM
Ah! The blindness of those who seeing, misunderstand the insights thus revealed. Because today is the birthday of Susan B. Anthony I will use this occasion to inform some ignorance and blindness.
Vedran Vuk may be a savvy economist of the Austrian persuasion but he has failed to understand what his girlfriend knew all too well. The clash between law and custom treats women as commodities instead of securing to them the rights with which nature endowed them. The latter is the basis of America's mission Statement. The former is how things really are.
Rhetoric vs. Reality; Privileges vs. Rights: The Bush administration, and indeed all of our interactions with politics, have fully informed us of the very real differences between the two.
Bush asserts his inherent 'right' to executive privileges that include wire tapping and suddenly the protests and noise level rises. But, Baby, you asked for it.
Rights precede government. The point of the mission statement enunciated in the Declaration of Independence was that each of us possessed those rights and government, if it is to act in accordance to that truth, may not change, withhold or modify those rights. Each of us is sovereign in fact.
That was the understanding throughout the period when women were sweating blood to produce the capital that kept the Revolution going. Men were free to leave because, as in the earlier case of John Peter Zenger, wives, mothers,sisters, and daughters kept the gears of commerce moving and food on the table and in the pot out in the encampment.
Abigail Adams expected women to be secured in their rights; so did most women then living. It was not to be. Commodifying women, no matter how charming the rhetoric was too profitable for those in power.
So government moved in, placing the foundations for the conversion of rights that has come back to bite men in the ass today. Through that means has government converted to themselves the power to decide who has rights and who does not. So instead of lives secured from the predatory power of government men now are beginning to experience some tiny sense of what women have faced for 230 years in an America that sold the idea of independence (a costly venture in large part capitalized through the work of women) and delivered the foundation for the conversion of rights, preceding government, to privileges, meted out by government.
In 1953 married women in California were finally given the right to control their own paychecks. Women have sweated and paid for every tiny increase in their right to act autonomously, something men take for granted. How would a man feel is his wife could walk in and pick up his paycheck? How do married women feel when the State asserts that they husbands can, by right, rape them?
But Vedran thought his sweetie should glow with happiness to be treated as property?
While it might be swell trappings for some period of time to be treated as a cherished race horse the fact, lying in the future securely disguised by the paeans of praise ringing in equine ears and the lavishing of goodies, is that as soon as the horse stops fulfilling the fantasies of the owner the horse, property, and having no rights, is dog food.
The fact is women that today, after 230 years of struggle and work, still are not secured to their rights under the Constitution and will not be until the Equal Rights Amendment is ratified.
If by “love� men mean that they assert that women should regard being “loved� for however short a period, as being as good or better than the recognition of their rights then I suggest that the other tenet in the Declaration of Independence, the one about Revolution, is in order.
Austrian economics is a theoretical model that assumes each individual has the right to free exchange. It cannot work if the market, which includes all human action and not just monetary exchanges, prevents some groups of people from registering in that market the full constellation of the actions they choose by their right to negotiate compensation by the same means.
Let the market decide is meaningless if the laws imposed by men prevent women from full participation.
Get your laws off my body – and Happy 186th Birthday to Susan, a woman who understood the issues of freedom from her bones out past her skin. We will not see her like again.
Published: February 15, 2006 3:53 PM
*sigh*
There's plenty of solid evidence that women have achieved equality with men in just about every way imaginable. And besides the empirical evidence, there is the a priori truth that men who value their well-being above all else will not engage in sexist business policies.
"Let the market decide" is meaningless if the laws imposed by men prevent women from full participation.
A free market is not composed of laws as you describe them, but indeed of their very absence.
Published: February 15, 2006 4:12 PM
By the way, you misspelled your URL.
Published: February 15, 2006 4:16 PM
This is a very good point. I am a minister, and conduct weddings. In the English wedding vows, we recite,
"..To have and to hold from this day forward..."
To have and to hold does not mean "embrace"; it is in fact the exact legal term for ownership. Read the documents witnessing your transfer of Real Estate title, and you will see the term "To have and to hold". Modern marriages are conducted with both consenting, using this terminology. If properly understood, they would "value" each other. This is precisely why communism seeks to do away with marriage.
Published: February 15, 2006 7:37 PM
Well, property can also be sold, traded, and dumped in favor of something else once you get bored. Telling someone that this is how you plan to proceed with respect to her/him is hardly flattering. I just thought I might enlighten Your Ueberjerkness on that point.
But I think I'm wasting my time with language you don't understand, talking about friendship and love and so on, so I'll try something that can be understood by those of your kind.
Just in case you haven't noticed, your property only exists because "we", that is, the rest of the world, don't just come over and take it from you. So, if you cannot be relieved from your horrendous and ugly egoism, you might at least choose different words for your tirades. Out of, shall we say, some sense of respect. Or even self preservation, in case you didn't understand that 'respect' stuff.
I propose the following interpretation: Tax money is the bribe you pay to the rest of the world, so that they don't come over and, just for fun, beat seven types of shit out of you. Public property comes from the fact that "we" are actually not that bad (although "we" might reconsider) and are ready to share a little with you. in the form of slow and stinking trains, or roads with potholes (that would not have been built without a little expropriation here and there. How about that?).
You see, "we" are in the security business, and can make sure that nothing too bad happens to you. We can even provide you with roads, for "free", like they say in the internet. You see, it's just business, after all. And you like business, don't you, you little prick?
Published: February 18, 2006 5:38 PM
Zombie,
The only one here who's a uber-jerk is yourself. Property doesn't exist because other people refrain from stealing it from you. It is a concept of rightful ownership -- a law of morality, a natural law -- and cannot be altered no-matter the actions of mankind. Your interpretation of taxes is nonsense, since taxes are in fact the stealing of property, and they are imposed on people, and then their property is later stolen again (e.g., emminent domain, more
taxes, etc).
A strong respect for private property is essential to being a gentleman; for a person's body is their property (that is, their's to do with as they please, and no-one else may aggress against it). Someone who does not respect private property also has no rationale to respect self-ownership of others.
Regarding him treating his g/f like property, lighten up, he's obviously making a joke.
Published: February 18, 2006 10:41 PM
"The pyramids were built to last forever. They were an enormous and fraudulent waste of money which was stolen from working Egyptians, who were impoverished because of such." - what the hell?!! This seems the comment of a young child who does not have a single clue about history or culture - you're talking has if Ancient Egypt shared the exact same paradigmas!
As for the "personal property": what I cherish most is what is not mine but I'm lucky to share - what us my personal computer compared to the Notre Dame or Hamlet?!
Published: March 18, 2006 1:26 PM
The first paragraph shouted to me,SLAVERY,which didn't appeare in the entire text as that is what one person is as property to another. By and large the black slaves of that shining city on the hill were treated worse than the animals. Many a corpse show broken bones,lacerations and general neglect by their owners. Slaves had to even augment the meager food by hunting for themselves.
I think that Verdan Vuk needs to research women's history and slavery then consider what was left out of his rosey skewed view of the world.
Published: April 23, 2006 2:28 PM
The first paragraph shouted to me,SLAVERY,which didn't appeare in the entire text as that is what one person is as property to another. By and large the black slaves of that shining city on the hill were treated worse than the animals. Many a corpse show broken bones,lacerations and general neglect by their owners. Slaves had to even augment the meager food by hunting for themselves.
I think that Verdan Vuk needs to research women's history and slavery then consider what was left out of his rosey skewed view of the world.
Published: April 23, 2006 2:29 PM
The problem with girls(girslfrinds) is that you treat one like your personal property ans she runs away to become the same for someone eles.On the contrary you don't treat her like that and she thinks that you are not too much into her.
So all in all it is a Catch-22.
Rt ?
Published: October 27, 2006 2:18 AM