No, I don't think you're off. You don't go far enough, as far as my perspective. If you read some of my stories, you might see that I don't have a high opinion of civilization itself. I only weighed in on the property rights issue because I've been reading about it lately, but the basic problem is colonialism/extractionism/civilization (city-oriented society) itself.
I think that our entire concept of economics is backward: that instead of value and creativity flowing up pyramids toward yacht-owners, it should be flowing toward the soil and the people who tend to it.
My running theme is "UBI and healthcare based on sales tax" because the problem with our decision process is that the real costs of civilization's overhead is not visible at the point people make decisions. While liberals fight for "insurance for everyone", they don't stop and think that nobody needs insurance: they need good health.
Schemes that try to redirect wealth with progressive income taxes or 'incentives' or playing on heart strings (environmentalism) all fail to stop bullies because while a few can convince many to 'vote' for liberal-minded candidates once every 4 years, those masses of 'consumers' are voting for corporations billions of times every day without knowing where the votes go, how much value we have to the environment, or what is missing from local economic communities (including the fauna).
The contemporary predicament is climate change, but all of the talk about it turns into things like electric cars or carbon taxes that add more complexity to a system that is really driven by consumer demand, not by oil. The oil facilitates consumption, but that's only because it replaced coal, which replaced slaves. The fundamental problem is that humans see themselves as competitively useless accessories to their places rather than cooperative contributors of creativity and useful work.
The system pays them to be that way.
The money to pay them comes from extraction.
That's the fundamental problem.
The value of a human being to the economy vs a gallon of gasoline is about 1 to 30,000. Every dollar is a petrodollar at this point. That kind of power differential isn't going to be overcome by teaching people to hug trees.
It will be overcome when it fails, but only if people realize there was something wrong with it (extraction). Otherwise, they just try to keep rebuilding the same competitive systems for the same kinds of aggressive bullies.
