This concept, incidentally, took some arguments to persuade into tiny Keltham, when he was first hearing about all this.  Tiny Keltham had a very strong instinctive sense that objects just were owned by people, and that what made a system fair and right was entirely that only the people who owned objects could do anything with them or transfer them to other people.

It was hard for tiny Keltham, at first, to see past his instinctive suspicion that people asking 'What's my reward for cooperating with this system?' were about to use that as an excuse to storm onto his hypothetical farm and eat his food that he'd worked to produce, and call that their share, without doing any work themselves.

But tiny Keltham was eventually persuaded - by a Watcher, then, not by an older child, after older children's attempted arguments about 'put yourself into that other person's shoes' repeatedly failed on Keltham - by the argument that it is an internally-consistent imaginary tagging system to say that some single person Elzbeth owns all the land in the world.  Everybody else has to work those lands and give Elzbeth a share of anything that grows there, since by default it would just end up tagged as hers, unless they agree to pay half their gains to her.

The question then becomes, why should anybody else except Elzbeth play along with this imaginary system, once it gets to that point?  Why shouldn't everyone who isn't Elzbeth, all just wake up out of this bad dream, and do something else which is not that?

Keltham asked if maybe the system had started out with everybody owning an equal amount of land, but Elzbeth had been a really clever asset-trader and ended up owning everything in the world after a series of voluntary transactions; in which case it seemed to him that fair was fair.

The Watcher told Keltham that, even if the last generation had gotten the world into that state through a series of voluntary transactions, the children born into it might look around and see that no land was tagged to them, that everything was tagged to Elzbeth.  They would ask what they were receiving in exchange for playing along with that particular delusion, and why they should not imagine some other tagging system instead, in which their coordinated action in playing along would actually receive any reciprocal benefit or reward.

And tiny Keltham growled and stomped around for a while, but finally conceded that, fine, the pointers were imaginary and yes it took more than just a consistent tagging system running on strictly voluntary transactions to make the whole thing be fair or right.  The elegant core structure was necessary-but-not-sufficient.

This concept, incidentally, took some arguments to persuade into tiny Keltham, when he was first hearing about all this.  Tiny Keltham had a very strong instinctive sense that objects just were owned by people, and that what made a system fair and right was entirely that only the people who owned objects could do anything with them or transfer them to other people.

It was hard for tiny Keltham, at first, to see past his instinctive suspicion that people asking 'What's my reward for cooperating with this system?' were about to use that as an excuse to storm onto his hypothetical farm and eat his food that he'd worked to produce, and call that their share, without doing any work themselves.

Older children's attempted arguments about 'put yourself into that other person's shoes' repeatedly failed on Keltham, who kept replying that he wouldn't take anybody else's stuff period.

But tiny Keltham was eventually persuaded - by a Watcher, then, not by an older child - by the argument that it is an internally-consistent imaginary tagging system to say that some single person Elzbeth owns all the land in the world.  Everybody else has to work those lands and give Elzbeth a share of anything that grows there, since by default it would just end up tagged as hers, unless they agree to pay half their gains to her.

The question then becomes, why should anybody else except Elzbeth play along with this imaginary system, once it gets to that point?  Why shouldn't everyone who isn't Elzbeth, all just wake up out of this bad dream, and do something else which is not that?

Keltham asked if maybe the system had started out with everybody owning an equal amount of land, but Elzbeth had been a really clever asset-trader and ended up owning everything in the world after a series of voluntary transactions; in which case it seemed to him that fair was fair.

The Watcher told Keltham that, even if the last generation had gotten the world into that state through a series of voluntary transactions, the children born into it might look around and see that no land was tagged to them, that everything was tagged to Elzbeth.  They would ask what they were receiving in exchange for playing along with that particular delusion, and why they should not imagine some other tagging system instead, in which their coordinated action in playing along would actually receive any reciprocal benefit or reward.

And tiny Keltham growled and stomped around for a while, but finally conceded that, fine, the pointers were imaginary and yes it took more than just a consistent tagging system running on strictly voluntary transactions to make the whole thing be fair or right.  The elegant core structure was necessary-but-not-sufficient.

This concept, incidentally, took some arguments to persuade into tiny Keltham, when he was first hearing about all this.  Tiny Keltham had a very strong instinctive sense that objects just were owned by people, and that what made a system fair and right was entirely that only the people who owned objects could do anything with them or transfer them to other people.

It was hard for tiny Keltham, at first, to see past his instinctive suspicion that people asking 'What's my reward for cooperating with this system?' were about to use that as an excuse to storm onto his hypothetical farm and eat his food that he'd worked to produce, and call that their share, without doing any work themselves.

Older children's attempted arguments about 'put yourself into that other person's shoes' repeatedly failed on Keltham, who kept replying that he wouldn't take anybody else's stuff period.

But tiny Keltham was eventually persuaded - by a Watcher, then, not by an older child - by the argument that it is an internally-consistent imaginary tagging system to say that some single person Elzbeth owns all the land in the world.  Everybody else has to work those lands and give Elzbeth a share of anything that grows there, since by default it would just end up tagged as hers, unless they agree to pay half their gains to her.

The question then becomes, why should anybody else except Elzbeth play along with this imaginary system, once it gets to that point?  Why shouldn't everyone who isn't Elzbeth, all just wake up out of this bad dream, and do something else which is not that?

Keltham asked if maybe the system had started out with everybody owning an equal amount of land, but Elzbeth had been a really clever asset-trader and ended up owning everything in the world after a series of voluntary transactions; in which case it seemed to him that fair was fair.

The Watcher told Keltham that, even if the last generation had gotten the world into that state through a series of voluntary transactions, the children born into it might look around and see that no land was tagged to them, that everything was tagged to Elzbeth.  They would ask what they were receiving in exchange for playing along with that particular delusion, and why they should not imagine some other tagging system instead, in which their coordinated action in playing along would actually receive any reciprocal benefit or reward.

And tiny Keltham growled and stomped around for a while, but finally conceded that, fine, the pointers were imaginary and yes it took more than just a consistent tagging system running on strictly voluntary transactions to make the whole thing be fair or right.  The elegant core structure was necessary-but-not-sufficient.