"May I suggest a review of the concepts of the map and the territory?"
None is needed; I'm pretty sure that I understand the use of the terms map and territory here. Maps are representations of reality, territories the correspondent reality. I don't argue against this term pairing, in fact I quite like it, and I'm pretty sure I haven't violated them in principle. I was just heading in the direction of arguing that all anyone can ever have is a map, so to speak--I'm fundamentally an epistemological idealist. But this is a discussion we could go on about to the end of time.
"I think I missed it completely. I just don't understand what rights does a "claim of ownership" give you. Let me ask the question again: what can you do with it? Let's take two people, A and B. A has the "claim of ownership", B does not. They both wake up, walk out onto the street. What can A do that B cannot? Which rights does A have that B does not?"
I think you might be under a misconception about the idea of market socialism (or my particular version of it, anyway): the only things which don't have claims of ownership are non-people, in the broad sense. To make the scenario fit, you'd have to ask, "what can A do with A's claim to ownership that B cannot do with A's claim to ownership?" B cannot take A's claim to ownership (be it his labor or the value associated with a single person's share) and use it to work towards or in any way advance B's vision of the Public Good if A does not agree with B's vision of the Public Good. This is the only right/obligation that people in this theoretical can worry about: freedom to exercise agency and vision, and an obligation on the part of each person to respect the exercise of agency and vision of others.
"What happens to people who do not like these tenets?"
They're free to participate or not participate in my, or any other entity's, vision of the Public Good, including their own. If a particular vision is in low enough demand, then it likely won't be achievable due to lack of resources gathered to accomplish it, and any organization around that Public Good will naturally dissolved as people become dissatisfied with it. This gives people an incentive to formulate a vision of the Public Good which is as universally-appealing and inclusive as possible.
In a sense, it's much like the universalizability issue of the Kantian imperative. I can make any particular vision of the Public Good as specific as I like it, but as I add more and more detail to it, the more opportunities I create to turn people off from it. If my vision of the Public Good revolves around my every specific desire, it's not likely to attract other people because I will have a different set of specific desires from other people. By contrast, if I can formulate a vision of the Public Good which is composed solely of specific desires that appeal to a lot of people, more people will join me in the pursuit of my vision of the Public Good.
This should all sound quite similar to what we have today, because it is. The difference is that, with the abolition of private property and a democratic ownership of the MoP, there's a lot more room for many different visions of the Public Good to be realized as no one has anymore ability to impose their Public Good vision on people than anyone else does. I always thought this was a pretty meritocratic system.
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.