User:Woozle/Google+/freeMarketThread

Posts

• 2014-08-17 part one: I believe we have no choice but to make government work, because if you take away democratic government you get feudalism.
• 2014-08-17 part two: Defunding governments not only doesn't create a violence-free stateless or minarchist society in the long run (quite the opposite, in fact), it also has disastrous consequences in the short run.
• 2014-08-18 part three: Detroit was not killed by "liberal policies".
• 2014-08-20 part four: Shouldn't we want to have an organization that represents the interests of society at large? And shouldn't we want that organization to be more powerful than the largest of the private interests, so it can prevent them from taking over??
• 2014-08-21 part five: Laws and theories do not science make. (continuation of the discussion from Science-Inculcated Culture)
• 2014-08-22 part six: You can't have a civil society* without coercion.
• 2014-08-22 part six and a half: I was looking for a defense of anti-trust legislation and had marked this thread as being not for free-market discussion (#MarketFreeThread), but the free-marketeers had to crap all over it anyway.
• 2014-08-24 part seven: Is it even true that capitalism is by far the best system for distributing wealth? (continuation of discussion from the #marketFreeThread)
• 2014-08-24 part eight: Is it true that the government was "small enough to drown in a bathtub" prior to FDR? A simple graph should help resolve that question... Tentatively, here is that graph.
• 2014-08-28 part nine: rebuttal of Pauline Dixon's TEDx talk about private schools saving education
• 2014-08-30 part ten: market accountability
• 2014-09-07 part eleven: why can't poor people in India sue over pollution?

Drafts

Rights

?It seems to me that "rights" are meaningless unless they are enforced by some third party.

• If they don't require third-party enforcement, then why does it matter what they are? Why does it matter, even, whether they exist at all?*

It further seems to me that free-marketeer insistence upon the idea of rights as something that does not need external enforcement is simply a way of *rendering the idea of rights utterly meaningless -- so that nobody will have any "rights" in the sense that is commonly meant by the term.*

Discuss.

1

1. freeMarketThread Free-marketeers often argue that government should be restricted to _enforcing rights only_ because otherwise power-players can manipulate it into doing whatever they want, ultimately resulting in tyranny.

(We're agreed that power-players manipulating the government is a problem, and the source of much of what's wrong with government today.)

The problem with this is twofold: 1. There is no definitive list of "rights" anywhere; people disagree about which things should be rights and which should not. 2. Pretty much any law can be couched as a "right", or can be seen as necessary in order to enforce a "right" or something that could be couched as one.

Therefore even a "rights-only" government would not really have any more obstacles to tyranny than any government currently in existence.

This argument therefore doesn't really contribute anything to the problem of fixing government or preventing tyranny.

2

_"You can't base a right on infringing a right.?"_

Enforcement of basic rights for one person _requires_ restricting extreme expressions of others' rights. This kind of conflict arises in society all the time -- and when the government decides the wrong way, it's called a "human rights abuse" or sometimes "tyranny".

A host-mother's right of ownership of her body is infringed upon if the fetus's "right to life" is enforced.

Taking action against a thief, for example, infringes upon the thief's right to liberty. It may infringe upon the property rights of others if the thief tries to escape the police by hiding on someone else's property.

If we absolutely enforce your right to be safe in your home, then mortgages would be impossible -- because foreclosing on a home (taking it away from you) would be a violation of that right.