I told my grandmother how you hlpeed. She said, “bake them a cake!”

Never fear. Posts about Jefferson are timeless.

I fear it will take tragic circumstances to shake us up enough to actually manage to change our culture from within. The current mental image I carry of the US public is of a 3-year-old pouting in the corner. And I feel just about that helpless too.

The context of "property" in this conversation started off with specific reference to "land ownership" and land alone. It wasn't extended beyond that (by me, at least), until your interjection. You're clearly somewhat familiar with Paine and George. Paine's essay has "Agrarian" in the title and George was obsessed with land, so all references still point to land as the focus of the conversation. I didn't intend any of my comments to reflect on personal (i.e., non-land) property.

In terms of non-land property, I'm sympathetic to George's analysis which distances improvements on land and goods fashioned from natural resources from the actual land and resources them selves. In terms of HGs conception of personal property, it's not as clear-cut as you make it out to be. Social leveling mechanisms to strongly influence sharing (and shun stinginess) occur in both HG and tribal/horticultural populations. In the instance of HGs, the mechanisms are similar to those used to enforce egalitarian political relationships. So while they're not mutually exclusive, they're also not easy to disentangle. In addition to Boehm's previously referenced work, Peter Gray touches on this to some extent (from a different angle).

Whatever your relationship to Scott, his work still demonstrates my previous point about the influence of external cultures impinging upon HGs (or those that would have remained HGs absent said impingement).

Be annoyed about my characterization all you want, but your defense of Spencer remains of secondary importance to my defense of Darwin with respect to "social Darwinism" – which is the context in which it was raised. On the future date that "social Darwinism" is replaced in common usage by "social Spencerism", you might have a more legitimate beef. Until then, Darwin's name is far more besmirched – as his writing was much more distanced from the concepts of "social Darwinism" – than Spencer's writing.

I don't know what you think you're arguing against. Pre-agricultural HGs, as far as we can empirically tell, did usually have property ownership. It simply was not extended *to land* for economically obvious reasons. They were extended to land when this was reversed via technological and economic development. The extension of property rights to land was largely endogenous and spontaneous, and long preceded the emergence of the State (contra Engels and Marxist anthropologists who theorized property rights were imposed top-down by the proto-capitalist State). This is empirically uncontroversial and common knowledge among researchers. See e.g. http://international.ucla.edu/cms/files/bowles_ch…. HGs did not have some anti-propertarian "philosophy" akin to Paine's protoGeorgist nonsense, and land ownership was not some foreign concept imposed on HGs top-down by states or agriculturalists.

The various and varyingly vague definitions of "egalitarianism" are not mutually exclusive with property rights, nor are sharing norms or team-hunting norms… so I have no idea why you think projections of egalitarianism onto monkeys is relevant.

And I'm actually quite familiar with Scott's work given I co-wrote that second article (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1715223, RAE forthcoming) going over his primary sources and referencing them on the subject of property rights in the pre-agricultural, stateless customary law of Southeast Asia. I don't know what "myopic political ideology" you're talking about. As far as I can tell, your political conclusions are identical to mine and there would be few people in the world who agree with me in as many ways on as many topics as you (the same cannot be said of Scott, who clearly does let a certain political ideological presupposition cloud his otherwise exemplary work, as Berkeley "Social Democrat" economist Brad DeLong points out here: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/james-scott…. I was particularly annoyed when I wrote the previous comments by your misrepresentation of Herbert Spencer and promotion of anti-propertarian HG myths.

If you’re going to be histrionic and arrogant, at least be a little less wrong. What I’ve presented here isn’t a minority opinion. There’s no shortage of anthropology and primatology to support what I’ve said.

None of the technological or economic “advances” you allude to have been motivated by some sort of HG lust for technology or economy, but have been driven by agriculture and the property ownership it necessitates, or other external factors driving change. Your reduction of all of this to rational optimization of an economic curve is cute, commonsensical, and yet has little bearing on how humans actually behave.

Using Scott to support your notion is adorably odd. Scott provides a perfect example demonstrating the point I made above about transitions HGs undergo when isolated by geography or impinged upon by other cultures. Your attempt to insert horticulturalists into a dialog about HGs is just further support of my point(s); there is no property ownership among HGs so you have to go outside of HG ethnographies to find an example supporting your point.

I like Thomas Paine’s essay on the matter. It’s insightful, interesting, and on-topic, but has nothing to do with academic anthropological support. And, I’ll recommend that people read whatever the fuck I want when I think it’s insightful, interesting, and on-topic. People interested in ideas – rather than simply bolstering their myopic political ideologies through confirmation bias disguised as ad hominem – tend to appreciate it.