this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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If you made public fruit trees, someone would try to pick them clean and sell it at a fruit stand 20 miles away.
In the Republic, Plato proposed that any citizen could eat fruit from any tree so long as they were sitting underneath the tree that bore the fruit.
This is true and has led to my new system for evaluating economic systems, what does it do with antisocial people.
Capitalism is interesting in that it actually has a plan for them. Let them be greedy little fucks and the system works for a while. Then they fuck everything up and the system collapses, either in a minor correction every couple of years or into fascism.
I would love for something like socialism or communism to work, but thereβs this 1% that would pick the trees clean to better their own lot.
I donβt have any answer, but I have come to the conclusion that every economic and social system should only be considered viable if thereβs a reasonable and compelling solution for what to do with the guy that wants to pick the fruit tree clean.
the anarchist solution is to abolish property, meaning picking the fruit tree clean wouldn't actually give you anything besides a bunch of rotting fruit and others will probably get angry and stop giving you the stuff they make
Then no one has fruit. There is a non-zero percent of the population who would pick the trees clean for that reason alone.
Anarchy, like capitalism, works best when all the actors are rational. People are not rational.
this isn't a "people will manage the commons" argument; "that reason" is property itself which anarchism wants to abolish
I get the idea: if no one exclusively owns anything, then no one needs to hoard anything, and everyone gets what they need.
Unfortunately, we do not yet live in a post-scarcity society. There needs to be a way to both ensure that limited resources are distributed appropriately (by whatever metric) AND to ensure that someone doesn't take more even when they are not acting in their own best interest.
To continue the apples analogy, it's all fine and well to say that no one owns the apples so anyone can eat one whenever they want. In theory, no one would eat more than they can, so there would be enough to go around. But how do you handle someone who decides they want to control people by controlling the apples? If they take all the apples, then people will have to go to him if they want an apple, and they will have to pay some price for it (and I don't mean cash). What is the mechanism to ensure that doesn't happen? Or, what is the mechanism to prevent someone from burning down all the apple trees because they don't like apples or because they want someone else to not have apples?
The idea that no one owns anything does not stop someone with an irrational mindset or with a mindset to force their will on others.
the idea is that everyone knows the idea that nobody owns anything, so they'll boycott that person with zir rotting fruit and stop delivering their own stuff to zim so this person with the irrational mindset will have to confront that ze's ostracized. (of course, ze could still steal stuff from them if ze wishes, but ze no longer have the social feelings of receiving a gift.) if there are no apples anywhere else they're supposed to revolt and take the apples by force because of how used they are to the status quo, and if that person wants ze can start a hermit life somewhere else and ask for people to join zir quest about rotting fruit
Yeah I think the only way around that would be to plant so many trees that the fruit is basically worthless. Probably wouldn't work in places with high population density
Rotting fruit is also a massive problem :) One of my relative had this HUGE fucking pear tree. When it hit pear season, they were begging people to come and take all they could. They would beg food pantries to organize, come and pick.
Canning, freezing, salting, curing, drying, baking ... Aaaaaaaaa there are still more!
Have pear tree, can confirm. I used to fill my dumpster twice with rotten fallen pears. I figured out a new tactic though: let them fall, then leave the back gate open so the urban deer can come eat them.
This happens in low trust societies with scarce resources and even scarcer empathy as the result. Also known as "that's why we cant' have nice things". However, not only it's absolutely not universal, I don't believe it's even the majority
Then let's get rid of money.
By having a society with a culture that encourages empathy