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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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In Aristotle's Politics, he observes that families hold property "in common" while cities hold property privately (but for public benefit). He thinks this is natural, because if cities treated property as communal, no one would have stewardship and freeloaders would be a problem--but with our true intimates, it's actually normal and natural to live communally.

What you are saying sounds to me like kind of a modern take on the same phenomena, or maybe even just a more granular take. The reason we have the law of contract is to facilitate agreement between non-intimates. But the line between family and stranger can be more of a spectrum, and in many circumstances we find ourselves treating strangers as near kin, at least temporarily.

I don't think I have anything substantive to add, really, I just think it's always interesting to observe that these questions have been the subject of philosophical inquiry for all of recorded history.

You might be interested in https://www.amazon.com/Order-without-Law-Neighbors-Disputes/dp/0674641698

It is a similar point in that law is useful when the game is functionally not iterative (either because of the size of the market or the size of the transaction) but when iterative law is basically irrelevant.