#school lit

[kaleacreates]

As the French philosopher Michel Foucault has argued, it may be easier to discover what something means by looking at it from the opposite side of the bridge. "To find out what our society means by sanity,” Foucault has written, "perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality."8 Moreover, property, like energy, is a concept; it cannot be experienced directly. Pure energy has never been seen or touched. And no one can see property. One can only experience energy and property by their effects.

The Mystery of Capital Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else Hernado de Soto

[kaleacreates]

Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms in which it travels. It is always easier to remember a difficult concept in one of its tangible manifestations than in its essence. The mind wraps itself around "money" more easily than "capital." But it is a mistake to assume that money is what finally fixes capital. As Adam Smith pointed out, money is the "great wheel of circulation," but it is not capital because value "cannot consist in those metal pieces."6 In other words, money facilitates transactions, allowing us to buy and sell things, but it is not itself the progenitor of additional production. As Smith insisted, "the gold and silver money; which circulates in any country, may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either."

The Mystery of Capital Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else - Hernado de Soto

[kaleacreates]

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value-- and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Opening excerpt from:

The Mystery of Capital Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

Hernado de Soto 

[kaleacreates]

Were it possible to prove title without demonstrating exclusive occupation, the result would be absurd, because it would be possible for more than one aboriginal nation to have aboriginal title over the same piece of land, and then for all of them to attempt to assert the right to exclusive use and occupation over it.

Delgamuukw v British Columbia (1997) SCC 

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What's wrong with the concept of group ownership? I can't help but thinking it a little absurd we're all supposed to work so hard for the youth of our lives so we can have property to finally lay down in. 

[kaleacreates]

When the rules of law and the expectations of those who are governed by them become seriously incongruent, odd things begin to happen.

CONTRACTS - Cases, Notes & Materials (8th ed) Swan, Bala, Reiter;Consideration

[kaleacreates]

But perhaps the deepest aspect of the common law text of possession lies in the attitude that this text strikes with respect to the relationship between human beings and nature. At least some Indians professed bewilderment at the concept of owning the land. Indeed they prided themselves on not marking the land but rather on moving lightly through it, living with the land and with its creatures as members of the same family rather than as strangers who visited only to conquer the objects of nature. The doctrine of possession, quite to the contrary, reflects the attitude that human beings are outsiders to nature. It gives the earth and its creatures over to those who mark them so clearly as to transform them, so that no one else will mistake them for unsubdued nature.

The University of Chicago Law Review - Carol M. Rose:Possession as the Origin of Property

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The concept of possession and property is something specifically connected to commercial or agrarian people, and is justified with economics so trade and commerce are not hindered. Ownership is a man-made thing.

Furthermore, our desire for ownership may be analogous to the world's need for firearms. If all nations relinquished their desire for arms, other nations would not feel threatened to also need arms. No one needed property rights until one decided he had ownership in a thing, and excluded common (wo)man from something that once used to be shared.

[kaleacreates]

In fact, it is the metasystem, not the system, that is operating. It is not necessary to invoke the rules of the adversary system, or adversary behaviour in the broad sense, to explain how these decisions, the majority, are reached.

Steve Coughlan, "The 'Adversary System': Rhetoric or Reality"

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Well, they take no time in helping us 1LS-ers get nice and jaded about society.

[kaleacreates]

He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; and he that dares not reason is a slave.

William Drummond