[P2P-F] Fwd: Three...or Four Property Rights

Sat Mar 15 15:52:58 CET 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chris Cook <cjenscook at googlemail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 5:52 AM
Subject: Three...or Four Property Rights
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>, Michel Bauwens <
michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

Hi Michel

I posted this response to that Naked Capitalism post to which you linked
before I realised it was a month and a half old....

Best Regards

Chris

The subject of property rights, the protocols which define them, and the
instruments which are necessary for their exchange, has been central to my
work for maybe 15 years.

The first thing to say is that - as that notable jurist and pedant Jeremy
Bentham pointed out - "Property" is not an object.

*It is to be observed, that in common speech, in the phrase "the object of
a man's property", the words "the object of "are commonly left out; and by
an ellipsis, which, violent as it is, is now become more familiar than the
phrase at length, they have made that part of it which consists of the
words "a man's property" perform the office of the whole.*

ie Property is a relationship: it is the bundle of rights and obligations
which links a subject person to an object.

Secondly, we have become used, at least West of Suez (I shall come back to
East of Suez), to the use of the absolute property rights of 'dominium'
which dates back to the Romans, with roots with the Greeks, and - where I
agree with Pirsig that everything went wrong - with Aristotlean
'subject/object' metaphysics.

So we are used to two either/or absolute property rights of ownership:
(a) absolute permanent ownership of infinite duration, such as freehold
land, and 'equity' shares in a joint stock company which confer what has
been called the Divine Right of Capital;
(b) absolute temporary use for a defined term ('date certain') such as
leasehold land, and dated interest-bearing debt or loan-stock such as
preference shares..

But of course, it's not a matter of 'either/or' is it? There is at least
one further property right which must be accommodated, which is that of use
for an indeterminate period, such as an 'evergreen' tenancy at will
agreement to occupy land or the undated prepay credit instrument which is
what actually constitutes currency.

In Scotland (uniquely as far as I know), this indeterminacy occurs in
criminal law in the fact that there are three verdicts: 'guilty', 'not
guilty' and 'not proven'.

But as Martin Hay has pointed out, in his fascinating work on what he
calls Chiralkine
Logic <http://chiralkine.com/system/chiralkine-logic/> there are in fact
FOUR states, because the zero indeterminate property right may be resolved
into two 'chiral' states of *both/and* and *neither/nor*.

The four states defining economic interaction are:
(0,0) = Not Mine/Not Yours;
(1,0) = Mine/Not Yours
(0,1) = Yours/Not Mine
(1,1) = Both Mine and Yours

But lets park that concept, important though it is, due to the way it will
enable complete dis-intermediation in data flows. Unfortunately, Martin is
applying his Chiralkine
Logic<http://chiralkine.com/system/chiralkine-logic/> to
the existing paradigm of absolute property rights, illustrated by the fact
that he has applied for a patent to protect the transaction engine he is
building, but which is hopelessly mired in complexity as a result of trying
to accommodate existing conflicted property rights, when the system can be
defined without them.

But I digress.

My work for fifteen years or more has been in respect of the protocols
which define property rights, and the development of protocols which work
better in an era of direct instantaneous connection than the conflicting
twin peaks of finance capital which essentially put us in the shit we are
in.

I have come to the conclusion that these protocols are to be found not in
the Western absolutes and Rule of Law but rather in the use of the
consensual interactive associative protocols to be found East of Suez.

As has been said, there are as many Sumo wrestlers in the US as there are
attorneys in Japan, and that is because when trust is assumed, and 'face'
matters, it is an order of magnitude easier to write simpler consensual
agreements to a common purpose, than to write prescriptive adversarially
negotiated contracts based upon the necessity to protect the interests of
the holders of conflicting absolute property rights.

As Lessig puts it, Law is Code.

Consensual machine programmable interactive protocols are already emerging,
and I use the word
Nondominium<https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/resilience/2011/10/04/nondominium-establishing-consensus-and-collaboration-for-the-caspian-nations/>
to
describe how these may be used to define rights to use and usufruct in a
way that replaces dominant positive rights over others, with negative veto
rights.

When linked to generic use of the prepay ('stock') credit instrument - with
indeterminate duration - which pre-dates the banking system, I believe that
a new economic paradigm will rapidly come to replace the existing paradigm
and dispel the Myth of
Debt<https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/resilience/2013/03/11/the-myth-of-debt/>

-- 
*Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
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