Rule against perpetuity; what if there were no property rights?; checked out Harry Potter; short fingers can’t throw a football or play a guitar very well

4:12 PM 1/27/2012

I went on one of my long random drives today, and I also drank several cups of coffee. I’m not sure why I wanted coffee so badly that I decided I should have it. I know that I’ve quit coffee many times in the past and I’ll be able to quit it again whenever I decide to, and I also know that it’s easier to quit it when the drug residues aren’t on my clothes. So, because of the coffee, I’m extremely verbal. Someone recently used the word ‘hyperphasia’ to describe what happened to him whenever he drank coffee. That’s a good word.

While I was driving, I was having a big ‘discussion’ about why we buy land. Why do we have property rights? What do they actually accomplish? What do they fail to accomplish? What would happen if we abolished them, and who is ‘we’ in that scenario, and what does it mean to ‘abolish,’ and who enforces that abolishment? And it all came around full circle to the realization – as always – that the dreaded scenario has already occurred, that we already are living in exactly the situation that we claimed we were trying to prevent, and that the very thing we wanted to stop from happening, is exactly what the current system causes to happen.

Before I get into that, I was also going to mention that I finally checked out a library book. This should help stop me from going to see so many movies. I forgot that there was a taboo on books, and I forgot the reason why there was a taboo. I had a taboo on checking out library books because the last time I did that, it was in the middle of the very worst contamination at my apartment, and I set the book down onto the carpet and it got covered with ephedra residue, the worst of all the residues. I had to then go back to the library and explain to them that I had ‘damaged’ the book, and I wanted to buy them a new one. I offered to go out and buy one, but the library lady told me that the library could just buy it themselves and that I shouldn’t worry about it. But I wasn’t happy about that at all, and I really wanted to buy them a copy, but for some reason, the lady discouraged me from doing that, and I forget the details. So I felt guilty for ruining the book. I refused to give it back to them with ephedra on it.

After that, I forbade myself to check out any library books, and I also severely limited the books that I bought over the next few years, although I bought several Schaum’s Outlines of Bookkeeping and Accounting, several of which were ruined and thrown away, while I was finishing up all those assignments. Other than that, I bought very few books, and I refused to check any out of the library.

So I just got ‘Harry Potter.’ I didn’t get anything that required me to learn or to study, because I don’t want to start up a learning project only to abandon it in a week or two because it’s unsustainable. I got something which was purely entertainment, and it wouldn’t matter if I abandoned it. I’ve read it several times before, but it’s always enjoyable. I like to read the same books over and over again. This is something that differs between people. There are some people who love to watch the same movies, and read the same books, over and over and over, while there are other people who like to move on to the next book or the next movie as soon as the first one is done. If I find something that I enjoy a lot, then it’s re-watchable, re-listenable, or re-readable, and so I will do it over again a hundred more times and not get tired of it.

I read the book for a couple hours last night, instead of watching a movie, and when I woke up this morning, I had this feeling that I had recently been watching one of the Harry Potter movies, and I was confused, because I don’t have the DVD or a DVD player right now – the DVDs are all in my closet in West Virginia. I realized it was because I had been reading the book the night before.

I’m not that worried about contamination now. The book might possibly fall onto the floor of the car, but I’m trying not to let that happen – although the car is such a mess right now that the book might actually slide off one of the piles of junk. So I have the book inside of a plastic bag, in case it does slide down onto the floor.

Yesterday, I did work on setting up the tent in the rain. I didn’t work on it today. Yesterday, I sort of got tired and had to leave anyway because it was starting to get dark and I think we’re probably not allowed to park our cars there after dark – most of the other parks have made me leave if my car is parked there after the sun sets.

So I partially set up the tent, but it’s all wet and sagging and shabby looking. As I walked away from it, I looked back at it. It looked sad and pathetic, like a piece of garbage, like a big plastic bag that someone had thrown away. I wasn’t happy about that. It might encourage someone to go get rid of it because it looked like garbage.

Whenever I was buying the vinyl fabric that I was going to use, I chose the clear, see-through stuff. The reason that I chose that particular fabric was because ‘they’ suggested it. I was already familiar with that particular type of vinyl and I didn’t have any chemical sensitivity reactions to it. It was the same stuff that I had been using on my car seat for a long time, and I didn’t have any problems with it. So that was why they suggested it.

But I looked at a couple other types of vinyl that were next to it. Some of them had printed ‘doilies’ on them. Doilies are those lacy flowery things that people will put on their tables and other pieces of furniture. Some of the vinyl had that, and some of it had checkered patterns, and that kind of thing. I looked at that, and imagined using it for my tent, and I found the idea so amusing that I was very, very tempted to buy one of them instead of the clear stuff. I came quite close to doing it.

Looking back at the sad-looking piece of trash hanging between the trees, I felt that maybe I ought to have bought the patterned fabric instead. It would have sent a different psychological message. I need to protect the tent against potential vandals. If somebody walked by and saw a miserable-looking piece of trash, they might get angry at the person who was littering, and remove the trash. But if they saw a pleasant-looking tent with colorful fabric or doilies or patterns, something homey-looking or feminine-looking, they might actually laugh at the idea of someone building a little tiny tent in the woods with colorful vinyl, and they might leave it alone. Then again, they could have the opposite reaction, the ‘asshole’ reaction, and say ‘Someone took time and effort to build this, so I’ll destroy it just because I can!’ They might actually be *more* tempted to destroy it.

These decisions reflect my judgment of human nature, my judgment of the type of people who live in this location, my judgment of the type of people who will be climbing on that mountain. I have to decide what they will do if and when they encounter my tent. First, I’m not putting anything there that I’m not willing to lose. I will probably carry my laptop around with me in a backpack everywhere I go, for instance, instead of leaving it in the tent. If anything happens, the potential vandals won’t destroy anything that really matters. The ‘vandals’ might also be government employees who decide that I’m not allowed to put a tent there. Either way, someone might possibly take it away or destroy it.

I might actually go back and get some of the feminine looking decorative fabric and put it on my tent just for a laugh. I might.

So this is why I was thinking about property rights. And I don’t want to go into the whole thing that I was thinking about and talking about while I went for my random drive today. But the conclusion that I came to was this: At the moment when property rights really matter the most, that’s the exact moment when they take them away from us.

We want to have property rights to protect us against somebody who wants to take over our land and use it for something else, right? I want to claim this piece of land so that my neighbors can’t walk all over it, build things on it, chop down my trees, dig holes in my backyard, and so on.

But what happens when the government decides that they are going to build a highway over your land? Or what happens when a big corporation makes some kind of special deal with the government so that they can get an ‘exception’ to the rule of your property rights? Suddenly, you are forced to give up your land to somebody who wants to do that very things: chop down all the trees, build something over it, dig holes in it, and so on. When property rights really matter the most, that’s the exact moment when we lose them.

You imagine yourself holding on to your little house, while the highway comes to an abrupt end and can’t be built any farther, right above your head, because you said ‘no’ to letting them build the highway there, and your property rights are protecting you against that highway. That’s the exact opposite of what happens in reality. Whenever somebody demands that they get your land so they can do something with it, the government is able to make ‘special exceptions’ to the law of property rights so that they can take your land away from you.

So what is the point of buying land at all? Why do we buy a plot of land? Who exactly are we protecting it against? Small-scale vandals? Do they really exist? Are those small-scale vandals really out there, waiting to trespass on our land and spray-paint our houses and dig up our flower gardens? Would they really do that if we didn’t own our plots of land and if we didn’t have the right to call the police on the vandals?

It depends on where you live! In some places, our neighbors are a lot nicer than that. Why would we even need to buy, and protect, a plot of land, if we lived in a place where we were surrounded by nice, cooperative neighbors who had no desire to vandalize our land? If we lived near a group of people who all knew each other, who all were able to negotiate with each other, why would we need to protect ourselves against them? There are only a small minority of assholes who want to go around and do things to other people’s land. Most of the people are agreeable, and they have no desire to do anything to someone else’s land, or someone else’s flower garden, or whatever. Most of the people don’t go around stealing your vegetables.

And if someone did, you would still have to find them and call the police on them, which wouldn’t necessarily protect you against them. You’d have to catch them first, and you’re still the one responsible for catching them. You still have to pay for your own videocameras to catch the vandals stealing your vegetables in the middle of the night. You still have to pay for the bear traps that you set around your property (yes, bear traps, those things that will snap shut and break your leg and trap you there) whenever you need to protect yourself against more dangerous attacks, or whatever method you use to protect against anyone who is trying to hurt you or steal from you. The police still don’t really protect you. If you need active protection, you usually have to pay extra for it.

Other libertarians have written about this before. I was just going over the same conclusions and understanding them more deeply.

So now, I just need to judge the character of the people who will be hiking around in the particular piece of woods that I’ve chosen. Are they the type of people who will report me to the police because I’ve put a tent there? Are they the type of people who will laugh at the sight of my doily-covered tent, and then keep on walking, with a smile (assuming that I actually do go back and get a patterned fabric instead of the clear stuff)? Are they the type of people that will slash the tent with their machete, and open up my bags of clothing and scatter the clothes around in the woods nearby? What will my neighbors do? What kind of people are they? These are the judgments I have to make, when my house isn’t officially protected by the law, when I don’t have a door with a lock on it, when I don’t have streetlights.

When I talked about ‘What if we abolished property rights?,’ the only answer that I could think of was that in that scenario, ‘we’ would have to be ‘the citizens,’ and ‘we’ would have to have a revolution against the government, in which we took over physical control of the government and prevented the former government employees from physically doing their job, because I could not see any other way that this scenario could possibly happen. It would require a revolution, which would be physically dangerous for everyone involved. I don’t see any other way to abolish property rights and land ownership.

I followed the scenario as far as I could imagine it, and I asked questions like ‘What if someone wants to take over your area of land and cut down all the trees, or dig a hole, or build something on it that you don’t want?’ That made me realize that that situation already exists. There’s a name for this exception to the rule – something about ‘for the good of the public’ or ‘public use’ or something – there’s a special term for what it is when the government takes control of your land to build a highway over it. That is the very situation that we are supposedly trying to prevent whenever we are buying a piece of land and expecting that it will be protected against other people trying to do things to it… so the dreaded scenario already exists, and our property rights have failed to protect us against it.

In the movie ‘The Descendants,’ which I said was kind of boring to me, they mentioned this ‘Anti-Perpetuity Rule,’ something that existed in Hawaii, which required a group of people to give up the land that was entrusted to them. This was one of the subplots in the movie. I became curious about the anti-perpetuity rule. This idea is connected to the idea of land ownership and taxes, why we aren’t allowed to just buy land and then sit there and do nothing with it, but instead we must ‘do something profitable’ so that we can afford to pay the taxes to the government. We’re not allowed to be unprofitable on our land. We’re not allowed to be inactive or to just sit there. As a result, some people fail to pay their taxes and their principal and interest, and they get their land taken away from them, foreclosure.

I found this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities. It’s very hard for me to even read that article, and it doesn’t tell me much about the reasons behind it, or the theory, or the overall concept, or the consequences of it (okay, yes it does, I just wasn’t done reading yet). It’s hard for me to connect it to what happened in the movie. It doesn’t seem to resemble something that I was thinking of, which is the concept of land ownership being forced to ‘change hands frequently.’ It doesn’t seem to be the same idea. I had this idea that sooner or later, there was going to be a law requiring people to give up the land they had purchased, and requiring them to step out of the market to buy land, so that other people would have a chance to buy the land, so that there would be less competition for land ownership. I’m not saying I agree with that idea, I’m just saying that I have a feeling that sooner or later, somebody is going to make that law. It seems stupid enough that it just *has* to be real. I’m sure that sooner or later, someone is going to make this stupid law. So a person will be forced to sell their land, and forcibly prevented from attempted to buy any land anywhere after the sale, so that everyone else will ‘have an equal chance’ to buy some land, to keep the land prices lower. I can just imagine this happening. I was thinking about that scenario while I was driving, and it seemed believable.

That Wikipedia page actually seems kind of interesting, but also hard to understand, because it’s hard for me to concentrate in the place where I’m sitting right now. So I might read more about it later. But I really want someone to connect that concept to property rights in general, the phenomenon of land ownership. I wanted to go into more detail about the idea that maybe someday, there would be a law requiring people to sell their land and let other people use it, after a few years had gone by, and nobody would be allowed to hold onto a piece of land for very long at all, so that everyone would get an ‘equal chance’ to temporarily own a piece of land. Actually, how is that different from renting an apartment? But it would apply to all land, including things like farmland, and factories, and rock quarries, and places where people had significantly changed the land, grown something, chopped down trees, or built something there – they would be forced to abandon it, and as a result, nobody would want to invest in building factories or whatever anymore. I can almost imagine this happening for real.

Another idea that I was trying to understand was this: What would happen if some rich person just bought a bunch of land, then kept it untouched forever, and handed it to their children, and their children, and their children, but refused to let anyone trespass on it, refused to let them build tents there, refused to let them grow food there, and so on, while the rest of the world was starving, and no one had any place to live, and nothing to eat, and they really ‘needed,’ quote unquote, that land. Sooner or later, someone would decide that ‘public need’ was more important than their property rights, and they would declare the property rights to be null and void in that situation. And I imagined, what if they were either 1. paying no property taxes to the government at all,’ or 2. paying taxes out of their own pockets, just because they were rich, or just because they were able to earn an income elsewhere, but not from the land itself. They could afford to just keep the land and use it ‘unprofitably’ and pay the tax out of their own pocket, or they would be in a scenario with no taxes at all. Sooner or later, someone would declare that they could no longer keep the land, and somebody must use it to farm crops or to build houses on. Or whatever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that ‘public need’ was greater than their property rights. And that already happens, but usually with things like highways.

When I think about these things, I’m taking a ‘devil’s advocate’ position. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with any particular scenario. I’m just wondering what if this would happen. I’m skeptical about the benefits of ‘owning’ property, and I believe that the spirit of property rights is already violated by the government. As always, when I talk about anarchism in the abstract, I always come around full circle to the realization ‘We already have anarchy. A hostile tribe has already taken control of the entire planet, and the only way we can remove that hostile tribe is by risking our lives in a physical fight against the hostile tribe, which few people are willing to do. We have anarchy. The end.’ So that is why I made the decision to go live in a tent in the woods on a piece of land that I don’t own.

Hyperphasia….

But anyway, the tent is partially built, but not usable yet. And it’s all wet and soggy and there will be a bunch of rainwater in it the next time I go there. I got sort of discouraged the last time when I was building it.

There’s something that I was imagining. Whenever females try to do particular types of tasks, there is the likelihood of an experienced, knowledgeable male standing there looking over your shoulder and criticizing how you’re doing it and saying ‘No, don’t do it that way, do it this way,’ and then they will jump in and actually start doing it *for* you instead of letting you struggle to do it, and then you never learn. That happened to me, over and over, throughout my life, and it must have happened to a lot of other females too. It tends to happen a lot with outdoorsy type activities such as setting up a tent. I have never learned to do anything physical, and I don’t have confidence at doing those types of things. I can just imagine if a man was there advising me and telling me how badly I was doing it and how I shouldn’t be doing it the way that I am doing it.

I didn’t like the Girl Scouts. I wanted to join the Boy Scouts instead. I thought that the Girl Scouts were doing useless things and not learning anything real. And I recently read about the Girl Scouts to try to dispel that belief. But it turned out to be true. The Girl Scouts really don’t learn the hardcore hiking stuff that the Boy Scouts learn. They don’t teach them to build a fire, find their way out of the woods without a compass, and all that other stuff that the Boy Scouts (or Eagle Scouts) learn. They might learn a tiny fraction of it, but they don’t learn anywhere near all of it. The Boy Scouts are clearly very different from the Girl Scouts, and they are not just a male/female version of each other. The Girl Scouts don’t teach me anything that I ever wanted to know. When I read about them, they really did seem to be as bad as I had always thought they were, and I confirmed my original feeling.

There needs to be a *real* Girl Scouts, something that teaches girls to do the stuff that is really difficult.

I had a conversation at work recently. Somebody said that a particular employee was able to roll the burritos really quickly, and I said, maybe it was because he had long fingers, because there were a lot of things that a person could do more easily if they had long fingers. I don’t know for a fact that this particular person does, or does not, have long fingers. I was just guessing.

I was thinking of the time that I tried to learn to play the guitar, many years ago. That was the first time that I noticed that I have unfortunately very short, stubby little fingers, that I can barely reach my fingers all the way around the stem of the guitar, and that I cannot stretch them very far, or put lots of pressure onto the strings, to go from one chord to another, with particular chord changes, because of how short my fingers are. This was very frustrating to me, because I knew that I had the skill and coordination to actually play the guitar, if only it were the right size for my fingers. It was not stupidity, it was not lack of skill, it was not lack of focus, it was just the short fingers that prevented me from playing the guitar very well.

After I made that comment at work, the conversation of course went to the ‘Ha ha, yes, there are a lot of things you can do with long fingers, blah blah,’ and I knew it would go that way, but I had wanted to have a sexually neutral conversation about how awful it was to be stuck with short fingers and to be handicapped at doing so many things because of it. I can’t throw a football! I never could. I was in gym class, decades ago, struggling to throw a football, and everyone else could do it, but not me. I couldn’t put a spin on it. The football flew end over end. This was because my tiny fingers could not even reach around the football far enough to spin it while throwing it at the same time. The football would have to be smaller. There were other balls that I could not throw very well because they were the wrong size. I couldn’t throw a basketball very well, and if you think about it, you have to grasp it a certain way with long fingers, and spin it. I couldn’t throw a softball very well, and softballs are very large.

I’ve also read that women’s shoulders are shaped differently than men’s, our bone and joint structure, which is another reason why women can’t throw. It’s really true that women can’t throw as well as men, in general, but there are some women who are an exception, and it varies.

So it seems unfair to me that I was stuck in gym class with teachers who didn’t understand that I couldn’t throw a football, and I would *never* be able to throw it, and they made me feel stupid and incompetent because I couldn’t, when it was only because I have short, tiny fingers that can’t reach around the ball to put a spin on it. Women, or small people, should get taught how to do different sports and activities that small-fingered people are able to do, so that they won’t feel like a failure for the rest of their lives.

So there is actually a legitimate reason to separate men and women, with physical tasks, and teach them to do different things. But there isn’t any reason why I can’t put up a tent by myself. I just feel insecure doing it, because I’ve never done anything like that before. My parents would always put up the ‘real’ tent without letting us children do very much, when we were young, although I vaguely remember that I would hold the stake in the ground, or something, while somebody else pulled on various strings and stuff. People always would jump in and do things for me if I was struggling. I remember Mom didn’t like to watch people struggling with a task, and she tended to jump in and do it for them. (No, this isn’t all meant as a big gripe against Mom. She was only one of many people.) It’s much harder to do a task now while I’m simultaneously being electronically zapped, too, which makes it hard to visualize anything, and I’m sure that was interfering with the work I was trying to do, too. Without that, it would have been easier. But it also would have been easier if I had had lots of previous experience with doing challenging physical tasks outdoors, such as building large objects or fixing things. I would have felt more confident and more knowledgeable in general. When I tried to put up the tent, I felt easily frustrated, insecure, and unsure of what I was doing.

Anyway, I didn’t do anything today except drive the car a long way, talking to myself, and drinking lots and lots of coffee after having withdrawn from coffee for several days. That’s not really progress. However, I also have book to read now, which I can do instead of watching movies, because I became aware that there had been a taboo on books for the past several years, and I had gotten out of the habit of checking books out of the library because of the drug residues. I’m not as worried about the book when I’m just keeping it in my car.

I think I’ll go ahead and post this. I’ll probably remember a few more things after it’s posted and I reread it, but oh well.