Hey /liberty/, I'm having trouble figuring out a concept in Hoppe's book.
>Now assume that aggressively founded ownership is introduced.
Whereas before every person was the exclusive owner of his body
and could decide on his own whether to become a drunk or a philosopher, now a system is established in which a person’s right to
determine how to use his body is curtailed or completely eliminated, and instead, this right is partly or fully delegated to another
person who is not naturally linked to the respective body as its producer. What would be the consequence of this? The abolition of
private ownership of one’s body can be far-reaching: the nonproducers can have the right to determine all of the uses of “my” body
all of the time, or their right to do so can be restricted with respect
to time and/or domains, and these restrictions again can be flexible
(with the nonproducers having the right to change the restrictive
definitions according to their own taste) or fixed once and for all,
and so the effects can, of course, be more or less drastic! But whatever the degree, socialization of ownership always, and necessarily
so, produces two types of effects. The first effect, “economic” in the
narrower sense of the term, is a reduction in the amount of investment in human capital as defined above. The natural owner of a
body cannot help but make decisions regarding that body as long
as he does not commit suicide and decides to stay alive, however
restricted his ownership rights might be. But since he can no longer decide on his own, undisturbed by others, to what uses to put
his body, the value attached to it by him is now lower; the wanted
satisfaction, the psychic income, that is to say, which he can derive
from his body by putting it to certain uses is reduced because the
range of options available to him has been limited. But then, with
every action necessarily implying costs (as explained above), and
with a given inclination to overcome costs in exchange for expected
rewards or profits, the natural owner is faced with a situation in
which the costs of action must be reduced in order to bring them
back in line with the reduced expected income. In the Garden of
On a critical assessment of the term “human capital,” in particular of the absurd
treatment that this concept has had at the hands of some Chicago-economists (notably G. Becker, Human Capital, New York, 1975), cf. A. Rubner, The Three Sacred
Cows of Economics, New York, 1970.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe 27
Eden, there is only one way left to do this: by shortening the waiting time, reducing the disutility of waiting, and choosing a course
of action that promises earlier returns. Thus, the introduction of
aggressively founded ownership leads to a tendency to reduce
investment decisions and favors consumption decisions. Put drastically, it leads to a tendency to turn philosophers into drunks.
Now I can see how the net satisfaction that one can derive from one's body would be reduced if he does not have exclusive ownership of it, but I don't see how it would make him favour consumption decisions over investment decisions. Because let's say that someone else can choose what ends he can put his body towards for 30% of the time, surely the remaining 60% of his time he is free to put his body to the ends that he wants and derive full satisfaction from them? Thoughts?