Even when speaking in hypotheticals, it is better to refrain from name calling outside The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
“Positive rights” is a muddy distinction. The US constitution protects you from having the government summarily confiscate your property without just cause and/or due compensation. Yet, whence come property rights in the first place? Lacking a public institution to establish title and to protect and enforce your right to own property, you are left to your own devices, so realistically, the most fundamental right to own property is itself a positive one.
There may also be some bluriness in your right to keep your earnings, primarily when you pass the comfort threshold. At the bottom, money represents survival. Further up, subsistence, acquisition and comfort. When income reaches the comfort level, one’s needs and the needs of one’s family are assured, to the point that it is realistic to expect that any desired thing is accessible.
So what lies beyond comfort? All that is left is influence. Seeking even greater profit becomes seeking more influence, which means affecting the lives of others for one’s own gain. In this realm (somewhere in the vicinity of tens of millions of dollars), the objectivist/glibertarian ethos starts to break down. If I want my freedom to be respected, is it not then a double standard if I feel the right to disrespect others’ freedom by mere dint of my overbearing wealth?
We can thus envision a struggle between the power of wealth and the power of government. If you lay constraints upon one, it seems sensible to balance those with constraints upon the other lest the result be plutocracy or tyranny. At present, to the common man, the power structure looks like some unholy symbiosis of the two. “Freedom”, in this context, appears to be little more than a pretty word that practically amounts to a choice between Chevrolet or Toyota.
I’m thinking that “incoherency” is more aptly applied to this sort of trash where you’re just making stuff up.
Freedom of movement doesn’t mean I have to pay for your relocation.
Freedom of healthcare??? Do you mean freedom from paying for healthcare?
Stand up like an adult and say what you mean. You want something but, you want someone else to pay for it…
There ya go. Stated very clearly. See, that isn’t so hard. And you don’t have to invent stuff. I want freedom from BMW and I want you to buy it for me. Then I will buy gasoline and help the economy. It is in societies interest to make a law that you have to buy me a new BMW. See how that is just crazy talk…probably not…sigh
It appears to me, the only way to be “free” is to live all alone on an island by yourself. With no one else around you can pretty much do whatever you want. (I’m sure there are some exceptions to this someone will feel compelled to point out)
As soon as you come into contact with other people, responsibility begins taking the place of freedom. You must compromise your freedom to respect you fellow mans freedom. The more people you surround yourself with, the more responsibility you have with the spiraling loss of freedom.
There’s a really good book called, “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” if you like reading about stuff like that.
I think a little tutorial on the concept of ‘rights’ is in order.
A ‘natural’ right is a right that is accepted as belonging to individual human beings as a fundamental property of being human, rather than dependent on a particular government structure. Religious people say that it is a right ‘bestowed on humans by their creator’, while the non-religious just accept such rights as being part of our nature. The right to life, the right to be free from torture and coercion, the right to own the fruits of one’s labor, the right to associate with whoever you please and say what you feel like saying, etc.
However, recognizing that people live in social groups, and recognizing that without some sort of sovereign power to ensure that the exercise of my rights does not trample on yours, we invented the concept of political rights. These are rights that are bestowed by the state and subject to political give-and-take. In short, we agree to give up some of our natural rights with the expectation that others will do the same, so that our overall freedom is maximized. For example, I may have a ‘natural’ right to swing my fist whenever I please, but I recognize that you also possess that right, and if we have to coexist while interacting with each other, it would be best if my right to swing my fist was curtailed if it intersects your face, so long as your right to do the same to me is also curtailed. We do this to maximize our autonomy, not to limit it.
Inalienable rights are those natural rights which we recognize as so fundamental to the welfare, happiness, and success of the human race that we will not allow them to be horse-traded as political rights. You can never, ever, take away my right to speak my mind, or my right to own property, or my right to ‘pursue happiness’ (i.e. my right to live for my own ends and to follow my own path in life to the best of my ability, rather than being a tool of the government or a serf).
And here’s where ‘positive’ rights’ come in. All the rights above are negative rights - they describe the sphere of my personal autonomy and the lines that others may not cross. A ‘positive’ right is the promise of something from others: a right to a home, a right to a job, a right to health care, etc. These rights are in direct conflict with other rights as described above. Taken literally as something that must be provided to you regardless of your ability to pay for it, they necessarily involve trampling on the rights of others. They are also incoherent, as a ‘right’ is supposed to be universal, but in a world of economic scarcity it’s clear that not everyone can have these ‘rights’ met.
So let’s call them what they really are - they aren’t ‘rights’, they are promises of political entitlements by a ruling class. Vote for me, and I’ll give you what you want. Never mind where it comes from. Since the ruling class doesn’t actually own the assets required to fulfill these promises, it takes them by force from the losers of the political struggle, trampling on their own ‘rights’ in the process.
The reason these entitlements and demands have been framed as ‘rights’ is purely political. By framing them that way, proponents of those policies seek to co-opt the language of their opponents and muddy the debate. If free health care is a ‘right’, then taking away the right to own property or for a doctor to treat who he or she chooses is just moving a ‘right’ from one box to another. Overall freedom is maintained. Or at least, that’s what we are told to believe with such language. In fact, the real outcome of such policies is to subjugate real human rights to large government and a ruling class, who will then apportion our ‘rights’ as they see fit. The entire concept of inalienable rights goes out the window. As I said, it’s Orwellian double-speak.
Your right to keep your earnings is supposed to end where your own consumption of public goods and services begins. The proper role of taxation is to take from individuals the money needed to provide for their share of the defense, infrastructure, legal system, and other commons that a country needs to survive and thrive. Otherwise, if I live in such a country and don’t pay taxes, I’m violating someone else’s rights by forcing them to pay for things that I benefit from. So there is no conflict between taxation and the right to own property and benefit from the fruits of my own labor, so long as my taxes are used for such purposes.
This has nothing to do with how wealthy I am, or how comfortable I am. You do not get to decide how much money I should be ‘allowed’ to have, or in Obama’s terms, whether at some point I’ve made ‘enough’ money. So long as I am paying my share of the bill, it’s none of your damned business whether I have ten more dollars in my wallet or a billion dollars in my bank account.
We’ve now entered bizarro-land. How on earth do you possibly come to the conclusion that the only way to seek profit is to seek ‘influence’? By far, the vast majority of the profit earned in a free country is earned through the simple mechanism of providing goods and services that other people value.
If I own a small shop that sells hemp T-shirts and bongs and non-GMO foods, and I barely make a living, that means that I’m creating a small amount of positive value for others, because they wouldn’t pay me for my goods if they didn’t value the good more than their money. Therefore, we both benefit, and I’ve made that person’s life better while also improving my own. That is the virtue of free trade.
If I now create "HempCorp’, and set up a factory to make tens of thousands of hemp T-shirts, I need to hire people. So I offer a wage. if that wage is more valuable to you than your time (i.e. the wages you could earn elsewhere in similar working conditions), then you’ll come work for me. Again, we both benefit. You trade your time for money, and I get labor that I can magnify through the capital investment of my factory.
Now, I set the price of my goods to be slightly more than the labor and capital costs of the business, and if my price is still low enough to attract customers, I’ll collect a lot more money. If I’m really good at controlling costs and really good at figuring out what my hemp-buying customers want, I might be able to charge a little more or retain a little more profit than my competitors. At that point, my market will expand, and I might become rich.
At NO POINT did my wealth turn my behavior into something predatory, and there was no ‘comfort level’ beyond which I stopped being virtuous and started trading only in ‘influence’. The only thing that changed was the scale of my operation. When I was just ‘comfortable’, I made the lives of a few people better. When I became ‘rich’, it was because I made the lives of a LOT of people better. I provided factory workers with a job. The taxes on my factory provided more money to the city. I provided customers with a product they valued, and raised their standard of living.
Please explain how my wealth in ANY WAY interferes with anyone else’s freedom. This isn’t a zero-sum game; I didn’t take my wealth from others by force. I created it by adding value to the world.
Now, there certainly are capitalists who deal in influence and cronyism, and who seek to monopolize markets to extract more profit that people would otherwise offer. You know where you find these kinds of capitalists? In proximity to government. It’s precisely the aggregation of political and economic power by large governments, and their monopoly on the use of force, that attracts bad actors and perverts capitalism from the creation of value to the capture of influence. Give the U.N. the power of capital allocation, and you’ll attract capitalists to the UN eager to take the ‘easy way’ and instead of profiting through competition, profiting by limiting it through regulatory capture and rent-seeking. You can’t stop this behavior - power corrupts. If you insist on creating a state with massive powers, you will inevitably create an economy controlled by those closest to the state.
You lost me there, unless you’re saying the same thing I am: The real answer to corruption is to take away the ability to corrupt by taking the power away from central authorities. Limit the role of government to merely ensuring that the rules are followed by all, that markets are functioning properly, and to the maintenance of a civil society. The fewer regulations you have, the fewer opportunities to twist them to the benefit of the powerful and connected. That means erring on the side of caution when it comes to the implementation of new government programs and regulations, and it damned sure means jettisoning the concept of ‘positive rights’, which necessarily require large governments and allocation of resources through influence peddling.
Well said Sam.
Sam Stone is a damn genius!