Re: Property rights

From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2008 - 15:08:16 MDT


> But that isn't true everywhere. Many countries in Europe have
> consistently done very well with decades of (moderate) socialism,
> while other countries in Latin America have done very poorly despite
> capitalism being allowed greater freedom than in the United States.

Yes, your are comparing highly developed countries with less developed
ones. There are many more things apart from degrees of capitalism that
separates these situations.

But that's beside the point - because strong property rights do not
exist anywhere in the developed world. Most developed countries have
more than 30% GDP from government, environmental laws, variants of
eminent domain, inheritance taxes, quarantine laws, etc... The western
world doesn't have "property laws" but has "weak property laws".

Philosophically, I'm very attracted to weak property laws - they have
most of the positive attributes of strong property laws (both the
individual and the collective ones), while allowing error correction
if the consequences get bad.

Ooops! This is completely off subject! Quickly, must make this
relevant to this list... But how?

By repeating my claim that the error correcting of AI's moral system
is much more important than the initial setup.

Stuart



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