re: The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

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If I die and leave a list of a new form of government, why shouldn't that list be honored?

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Because of your post history.

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I wish people would stop trying to fit this thread into whatever weird motivations they are prescribing to me.

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Envy, jealousy, lack of personal responsibility. Looking to government to even the playing fields for you, knowing that will never help you succeed?

FWIW, i didn't gather that from this thread alone.

The elimination of personal property will never achieve the goal you want. There are losers in society, and there are winners. And none of it has to do with monetary earnings, holdings, or property. It is a mindset. Learn to accept you are in the position you are in based on your decisions, and you will flip that switch from loser to winner. The quickest way to success, is accepting responsibility for your own actions and lot in life.

If you haven’t read it already, I think you would benefit from Harold Demsetz’s article, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights”.

It’s really good. JSTOR link below.

Demsetz

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Earlier in the thread I said that inheritance seems like just a convenient way to dispose of someone else's stuff. If it were really about "honoring" the wishes of the dead, wouldn't we all leave elaborate lists of how we want the world to look after we're gone that would be binding? I appreciate the thoughtful engagement and I hope my response doesn't seem adversarial or anything. I'm just trying to work this out.

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I think the issue may becomes clearer if we step back and ask what property is for at the most basic level.

I contend that property is not merely a social convenience for allocating objects but that it arises from the temporal nature of human survival. Human beings don't survive moment to moment, we survive by planning, producing, storing, improving, exchanging, and preserving resources across time. In that sense, property rights derive from self-ownership and the right of survival. If I own myself, I must also have some claim to the products of my labor, because labor is the exercise of myself in the world. And if survival requires acting today for the sake of tomorrow, then property cannot be reduced to mere present possession, it must include the ability to control resources over time. This is not arbitrary. It reflects the practical reality of temporal survival in a world of scarce resources.

Death creates a genuine problem. The person disappears, but the resources, obligations, dependencies, and competing claims do not. The stuff still there. The debts, contracts, tenants, employees, family dependencies, and accumulated labor all remain even though the original owner no longer exists.

So the question is not simply 'why should we honor the wishes of the dead?' The dead can no longer use, enjoy, or benefit from property. But that doesn't mean the claim becomes meaningless the instant the person dies. If property is the institution by which human beings project their labor and survival needs across time, then any coherent property system must have some rule for what happens when the current holder exits that system.

Inheritance is one such rule, and it is not best understood as sentimental obedience to will of a dead person. It is a mechanism for preserving continuity of title across the discontinuity of persons. If title simply evaporates at death, property collapses back toward mere possession. The system loses its temporal continuity. That is not a morally better arrangement. It merely replaces ordered succession with contestability.

To your specific point, that we don't leave binding instructions about everything we care about after death, my answer is that we don't need to. The inheritance question isn't about the full range of a person's wishes and preferences. It's about a narrower and more concrete question: what happens to valid property claims when the holder dies? The answer requires a rule. The relevant question is which rule best preserves the moral and functional basis of property: the right of human beings to sustain themselves through time by controlling the fruits of their labor. Voluntary transfer to chosen successors is the answer most consistent with that foundation.

I hope this is not too long winded and doesn't seem adversarial either!

One of my favorite people in my graduate program is a sociology professor who graduated from the Chicago School. Thanks for the rec

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Every man for himself as long as everyone else agrees to it.

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everyone else

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Women!

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Women!

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24 pages because I read one sentence that made me grimace

I bet you can't wait until I turn the page of that book.

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I bet you can't wait until I turn the page of that book.

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Is the next page the one where you find honesty?

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It's oddly dependent on cooperation.

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Uh...that's the point of society? We cannot congregate together in large numbers, engage in commerce, establish laws, religion, etc. without that.

If you really want to see "Every man for himself", look at the alternatives

I imagine it's a conflation between voluntary private cooperation and mandatory/forced public behaviors improperly identified as "cooperation"