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  • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    “raid” implies non-consent, so no, that’s not fair.

    It’s also not fair for a farmer to find some prime farmland, build a fence around it and say no one else can touch it, and then keep everything it produces to himself, and then call everyone who wasn’t able to claim good land but still wants to eat a thief.

    Why does he get rights to the land just because he said it’s his? That leads to feudalism.

    “Civilization” is about finding balance to what’s fair.
    It’s unfair for people to want something for nothing.
    That extends to people wanting food, and also to the farmer claiming land.
    Some arrangement where the farmer gets to keep his crops, but can’t exclude people from also working the land, with some sort of communal oversight to make sure the land is being worked well seems fair.

    • FastAndBulbous@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree the word raid was the wrong word to use there

      They don’t just find land and build a fence around it though in the modern era, that’s extremely reductionist. They pay for the privilege to work the land. Society as a whole agree the land is his because of this.

      How do you parse how much belongs to the farmer and how much belongs to the community? I would argue we already have an arrangement like that. Who oversees this and what do they get out of if?

      Most importantly where is the incentive to maximise yield if people are just growing personal crops? What if you want to eat but don’t want to work the land?

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You’re moving your goalposts at this point. The original point was literally about people claiming land in a primitive extraction system.
        In the modern era people also don’t just walk up and demand bushels of barely from farmers, so ignoring the entirety of a comment to reply with how changing the context makes it irrelevant is just a bad faith discussion tactic.

        Yes, a modern economic system is hard to develop inside of a single comment. I hope we can at least agree that feudalism is bad, despite it respecting the Lord’s property rights, and also that no one is okay with letting the Saxon horde take all our grain.

        And, to jump straight to your questions about the modern day: I would propose a system where the vast majority of the engines of production would be worker owned, allowing them to select their own management as primary shareholders.
        By merit of existing in society people would be entitled to food, shelter, medicine, a means to better themselves, and the basic dignites of modern life (clothing, the ability to have children, the ability to do more than sit in the floor and stare at the wall).
        Beyond what’s needed to provide these basics, the excess value produced would be given to those that produced it in the form of “currency”, which can be exchanged for “goods” and “services”.