I’d say that capitalists use property ownership to exploit the cost of producing redundancy. They would capture a good or capital and prevent their use unless a ransom is paid. If consumers don’t wish to pay it, then they can re-produce the captured good in order to fulfill the same amount of demand. Re-producing the same good while the captured good remains unused is producing redundancy.
For example, a landlord purchases a home to transform into a rental property and asks for a compensation for its access. Consumers can decide not to pay, but if the house was built to fulfill a demand and its capture prevents its access, an additional house has to be built to fulfill the same amount of demand. Building 2 houses to only be able to use one is twice the cost of a house, which is a way higher cost than the price of the ransom the landlord asks for. This exploitation of the cost of producing redundancy is what gives the landlord his bargaining power. No one would otherwise need to pay the landlord to not produce anything.
So, the problem with exploiting the cost of producing redundancy is that it lacks a reasonable justification. A redundant good or capital is something that semantically doesn’t have a function. You can’t reasonably justify paying a cost, like the cost of labor or expending resources, to produce something that doesn’t have the function of fulfilling a demand.
And here’s the important part. To receive or ask for a payment, a reasonable justification is required by law. Here’s a criminal code article from Canada:
346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done.
After reading the definition, you might think that, yeah, there might not be a reasonable justification to exploiting the cost of producing redundancy, but it’s not done under threats, menace, accusations or violence. But you’d be wrong. The production of redundancy, which is synonym with the waste of resources, is itself a menace. Wasting resources leads to a reduction of wealth, not something anyone would want. The production of redundancy or the payment of the ransom are also forced through violence. If consumers don’t want to either pay the ransom or produce redundancy, the only option is to use the captured good or capital without paying the unjustified portion of the asked price. If consumers do that, they subject themselves to threats by law enforcement since it will be understood as theft. So there’s is two different sources of threats, menace, accusations or violence that forces the payment of the ransom, the menace of having to produce redundancy and the threats of being arrested for theft.
So in conclusion, it becomes apparent that generating profits from sole ownerships of goods or capital is literal extortion, a criminal act.
If that’s the case, fixing capitalism could be rather easy. Compensations for prejudices could be sought after, or citizen’s arrests could be made against law enforcement or the judiciary. We could then eliminate compensations for the sole ownership of stuff.
Liberalism and capitalism aren’t internally coherent. The only reason why they’ve stuck around so long is the sheer power the capitalist class wields via their institutions of state and private property. While you could argue that capitalism is illegal, even in capitalist nations, the capitalist class holds the institutions of justice and law in its hands and will never make a ruling that compromises its own ability to take ever more capital.
It’s true that at the core of it, the immediate effect of private property is extortion. That’s the basis of all class relations under capitalism. Private property itself has its basis in theft. The capitalist has property, the worker doesn’t, so the worker must do something for the capitalist in order to gain conditional access to said property. Taken further it’s also why social democratic compromises can only go so far, for if everyone has a reasonable quality of life they will not agree to the extortionate demands of the capitalists.
To your last thought, there is no fixing capitalism. It inevitably ends in monopolies, rentierism, imperialism, and the cooption/destruction of everything around it to feed the machine.
Capitalism isn’t explicitly mentioned or guarenteed in the constiution. Since that is the game these Federalist Society
“judges” are playing, well CTRL+F capitalism on the US Constiution 
this is about as strong an argument as “cops are actually illegal because they shoot people, which is illegal.”
No. A cop would only shot a person in order to prevent a crime of equal or higher degree, making the shooting justified.
A person using property ownership to exploit the cost of producing redundancy doesn’t have any reasonable justification.
shooting people is still illegal, even if you have a justification. also cops regularly shoot people to prevent crimes considerably less severe. that’s not the standard used at all.
my point is that it’s a contradiction in terms to say that the things that the edifice of law exists to protect and uphold are themselves illegal. it’s a fallacy shared by the sovereign citizen and related movements, who believe that law is a real thing that exists in the ideal world, which can nevertheless be wielded to effect the physical world.
Shooting people isn’t black and white illegal, you make a mistake here. You can have a legal justification.
You don’t have a legal justification to exploit the cost of producing redundancy. There are no laws that protects your capability to generate profits from the sole ownership of anything. But the law prevents you from legally generating profits without a reasonable justification. To have a reasonable justification to seek a compensation, you necessarily have to produce wealth in equivalent amount, for the simple reason that wealth is exclusively produced if we exclude rare cases of natural occurrences.
The law is a real consensus that has to be followed or altered. Being followed is its function.
Upvote for clear reasoning alone right off the bat.
I’d say that capitalists use property ownership to exploit the cost of producing redundancy. They would capture a functional good or capital and prevent their use unless a ransom is paid. If consumers don’t wish to pay it, then they can re-produce the captured good in order to fulfill the same amount of demand. Re-producing the same good while the captured good remains unused is producing redundancy.
The bolded bit is the important conditional. If it’s unused then reproducing it is redundant. If it is used, then reproducing it is not redundant, and your argument is moot.
Ahh, now I understand what you mean by capitalists using property ownership to exploit the cost of redundant production: If that captured good, like a house, cannot be easily reproduced, then the capitalist can demand higher compensation for transferring ownership than if it were more easily reproduced. That’s why a capitalist will charge high rents for homes, but generally won’t charge for using office paper. It costs a lot of reproduce a house, but you can find paper anywhere.
So, you’re saying that doing that, exploiting the cost of producing redundancy, lacks reasonable justification. And by this you mean, that it’s unreasonable to reproduce a functional good that satisfies a demand that already exists.
I follow your argument up until here:
The production of redundancy or the payment of the ransom are also forced through violence. If consumers don’t want to either pay the ransom or produce redundancy, the only option is to use the captured good or capital without paying the unjustified portion of the asked price. If consumers do that, they subject themselves to threats by law enforcement since it will be understood as theft. So there’s is two different sources of threats, menace, accusations or violence that forces the payment of the ransom, the menace of having to produce redundancy and the threats of being arrested for theft.
That bolded bit is a violation of property rights.
Your entire argument is within the paradigm of the legitimacy of property rights. So, it doesn’t follow that consumers should get to use the captured good without paying the unjustified portion of the asked price in the first place. They don’t have that right. In fact, they have a duty not to use the captured good because it’s owned by someone else. So, it’d be more accurate to say that property rights are enforced with violence, whether it’s the exploitation of redundant production or otherwise.
Thus, I disagree with your conclusion that profit generation from sole ownership is a criminal act.
But we need to go back to the first bolded conditional: you also need to show that capitalism generally produces redundancy routinely. As of now, I don’t think your argument is as broad as you’d like it to be. Even if I did agree with your conclusion, I wouldn’t agree that it applies to all of capitalism.
But I think the argument has potential.
If consumers don’t pay the unjustified portion of the price, but still use the captured good or capital, that will be understood as theft since the owner has the right to property. The problem is that the property is owned solely to commit the crime of extortion rather than, say, fulfill the owner 's demand. The unjustified portion of the asked price doesn’t have to be paid because a reasonable justification has to exist for payment to be legal. So the protection of the extortionists ’ rights to property is a mistake by law enforcement and the judiciary. This protection is also itself part of the extortion act because the acts committed by them is violence, menaces, threats and accusations, such as arresting, imprisoning, etc.
The problem is that the property is owned solely to commit the crime of extortion rather than, say, fulfill the owner 's demand.
From the perspective of the owner, the property is owned to fulfill the owner’s demand for a second stream of income by terms that are agreeable to both owner and the renter. So, it’s not owned solely to commit the crime of extortion, because the property would be rented when a renter that agrees to the arrangement shows up.
The unjustified portion of the asked price doesn’t have to be paid because a reasonable justification has to exist for payment to be legal.
What is the justified ask price, anyway? It’s like you’re referring to another concept without naming it. What’s the criteria for determining it?
Obviously, you can’t say I can do this action that will give me wealth because I want to be given wealth. The action can’t be used as an argument to justify itself. It’s a simple circular reasoning fallacy.
Other than a few rare cases of natural occurrences, wealth exists exclusively because it’s produced. To have a reasonable justification to be compensated with wealth, you need to produce it. Either you produce your own personal wealth, or in a system of division of labor, you produce wealth you don’t necessarily need and trade for an equivalent amount. The value of price of wealth is simply determined by consensus. There are no other ways.
A sole ownership isn’t a production of wealth. An ownership of wealth will never reasonably justify a compensation in wealth, no matter how the bargaining power is obtained.
To
