From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2006 - 15:36:23 EDT
Hi Jerry, Thanks for the comment. Of course this type of article is a bit metaphorical, but it caught my eye because I hadn't thought of the possibility of asserting property rights to waves in the sea, it seems just as ludicrous as people staking claims to outer space! Of course, one would not think of it as a property issue in the first instance, more a question of territoriality, the fight over territory. One of the questions that preoccupies me at times is the limits to privatisation, i.e. at what point does the privatisation go so far that only social disintegration occurs. But the deeper question is the conditions in which public property can be equitably shared, an "ethic" of use and how you promote such an ethic. It links also to the theme of scarcity - there is real scarcity, and then there is perceived scarcity (the ideology of scarcity such as in economics or certain environmentalisms). Even if there is abundance, this still does not remove fights over territoriality. In New Zealand (where I lived a long time) there was a political controversy about the coastline recently. New Zealand's parliament passed a law 18 Nov 2004 making its coastline public property - a move protested by indigenous Maori who claimed the 160-year-old Waitangi treaty puts much of the coast under their control. The government said the legislation protects public access to beaches, while granting Maori "customary use" of their ancestral areas on the coast, such as fishing and gathering shellfish. The law nationalizing New Zealand's coastline passed in a 66 to 53 vote. In May 2004, more than 20,000 protesters marched to parliament to denounce the legislation. Some tribes claimed the new law blocks their plans to set up lucrative fish-farming ventures along parts of the coast. In his discussion of the proper role of the state (Free to Choose), Milton Friedman wavers on the issue - he cites Adam Smith to the effect that the cost of toll collection on roads could be prohibitive (of course that could now be automated to an extent). He ignores the question of freedom of movement and the ability of the user to pay. The interesting part is of course where privatisation/marketisation undermines basic freedoms by shutting out anybody unable to pay. The big slogan in New Zealand in the 1980s was "the user pays principle" - but the illiberal implication is that if you cannot pay, then you cannot use. This is another aspect of the use-value/exchange-value dialectic... The real thrust of the user pays principle was, to eradicate the subsidiary (redistributive) principle which, it is argued, creates too much complexity and bureaucracy. This contrasts sharply with e.g. the Netherlands where I live now, where you still have a lot of subsidization, and the largest nonprofit sector in Western Europe. Traditionally, the subsidiary principle is the material basis of social reformism, i.e. the ability to levy taxes and redistribute wealth. Basically, the social indicators for countries which do subsidise considerably are better than for societies that don't, but of course the wealthier a society is, the easier it is to subsidize. I'm not much of a surfie really, though because of my interest in long-wave research one time I got labelled a surfie. Most of the surfing I do is on the net. Real surfing is an art that isn't so easy to master... Jurriaan
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