From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   QUORA: Why didn't Karl Marx approve of private property?   
   ---answered by Susanna Viljanen, 2 years ago   
   Because he was a philosopher, not an economist.   
   With perfect 20/20 hindsight, Marx did not understand anything about economics   
   nor sociology. He did not understand anything about the nature of humanity nor   
   how economics work. Most of all, he did not understand the Tragedy of the   
   commons.   
      
   Private ownership goes in hand in hand with responsibility. When a resource is   
   owned privately - be it private property, by shares in a joint-stock   
   corporation, or by a cooperative - it is maintained, upkept and taken care of   
   much better and much more    
   effectively than when it is common property. Common property is something   
   nobody owns. When there is no clear ownership, there is also no responsibility   
   - and the result is overuse, neglect and outright sabotage and vandalism - to   
   prevent others from    
   benefiting the resource and to show spite. The result is collapse of the said   
   resources.   
      
   This tragedy of the commons was prevalent in all Socialist countries. The only   
   method to upkeep the resources and prevent their collapse was coercion and   
   state terror. In the USSR, everything was broken, run-down or vandalized.   
   Nobody took any care nor    
   any responsibility of anything. Because nobody could say “This is mine!”.   
      
   Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse   
   (such as in over-fishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where   
   members of a community with access to a common resource co-operate or regulate   
   to exploit those    
   resources prudently without collapse. The most trivial method is, of course,   
   privatization of the said resource. It creates responsibility and it also   
   makes the owner to maintain the said resource and upkeep it instead of   
   plundering - unless he is some    
   kind of a kleptocrat or a warlord.   
      
   But other methods exist as well. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel   
   Prize in Economics for demonstrating exactly this concept in her book   
   Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were   
   able to do this without top-down    
   regulations or privatization. The second most trivial is cooperative - the   
   joint community of the resource users, which comes together with obligation of   
   maintaining the said resource. But cooperatives are a hallmark of Anarchism,   
   which Marx strictly    
   disapproved!   
      
   Taking care of the resources without privatization requires exclusion and   
   altruistic punishment. Exclusion means strict limits on who may use the   
   resource and who may not, and punishing any use of the resource by outsiders   
   strictly. Altruistic punishment    
   means punishing those who steal from the till. While the punishers do not   
   benefit from it and it may only cause damage to the punishers, it is a must.   
   Because without punishing, moral hazard will ensue because of the free-rider   
   problem.   
      
   This is the reason why draft dodgers are punished extremely severely in   
   Finland. National defence is the common resource in question, and all Finnish   
   able-bodied males are required to take care of the upkeep of that said   
   resource in form of conscription.    
   Draft dodgers correspond to freeriders, and punishing them is a must. The   
   punishment is a prison sentence. Draft dodging has been made also almost   
   impossible by legislature - Finnish males between 18 and 30 cannot renew their   
   passport unless they can    
   demonstrate their service document.   
      
   Finland does not want to privatize the national defence. So coercion,   
   exclusion and altruistic punishment ensues. The needs of the nation outweigh   
   the rights of the individuals.   
      
   Marx did not understand anything of this. He saw only the flip sides of   
   Capitalism and the squalour in which the proletariat lived, and he thought   
   Capitalism is evil. He saw no possibility on ameliorating the things nor   
   making the situation more    
   palatable by means of intervention of the state - and he promoted violent,   
   genocidal revolution to attain a paradise of workers. In the real life, the   
   only thing which was attained was a living hell.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)