Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 5d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
We can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot, and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people.
We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and cooperatives, about land reform.
Very, very few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means and never an end.
In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms from which all laws, rules, and arrangements flow.
Left and right represent two radically different paradigms.
The rights paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to property rights are the only human right.
If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates.
If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk.
If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk.
As economists would say, they have a revealed preference for being killed at work.
Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws or regulations or polls or voting.
Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all.
But voting and laws aren't goods unto themselves.
The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric.
Good regulation and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem.
Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization, to safeguard the human rights of its people.
Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.
If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering.
If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections.
If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off.
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