It's better to look at currency as a broader system than one of pure, simple, unmitigated ownership. At least, I wouldn't want to be part of a system where currency had such base semantics.
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." Frederic Bastiat
My understanding is that under the new law, you do have the right to get healthcare. You can still opt out though, so I really don't see where your personal freedom is being restricted.
Obama's new legislation gives you the the right to choose whether you want to purchase approved health insurance from a large corporation or whether you want to pay extra taxes.
Previously you had the right to choose neither of those options.
Extending your logic, it's clear that if my continued existence will cause you to die (as happens in shortage situations) then either you or I have no right to life.
Rights are a human constructions. Ultimately we are animals and subject to the same "red in tooth and claw" natural reality that every other animal is, but (most of the time) we can choose to base our behavior on other principals.
Universal rights were an invention that moves us away from the law of the jungle. Non-universal rights are a step backwards.
No it's not. No one is allowed to prevent you from obtaining and carrying said arm but no one is obligated to provide you with one either. That's the difference.
All positive rights infringe on individual liberty.
Real rights are universal, meaning there is on logical contradiction if all people exercise the right.
Speech is like that. My having the right to say what I want does not prevent someone else from saying what they want.
A "right" to be guaranteed food, for example, is not. Under this model if don't have food then my right is being violated and the only way to correct this is to have food taken away from someone else. This is not a universal right because clearly not everybody in the world can have the right to have someone else's food.
Positive rights define two classes of people: people who are entitled to receive something from someone else, and another class of people who are required to produce a surplus in order to satisfy the first group. There's a name for this kind of arrangement but I'll let you figure that out on your own.
Airships make more sense for transporting cargo than people. They let you bypass the bottleneck of a port and let you take the cargo directly to its destination.
It is a scam when not everybody plays by the same rules. It's not rate of orders that's the problem, it's the fact that they can place fake orders that they never intend to fulfill in order to provoke the market to move in a certain way.
Possibly they could avoid the exponentially increasing fees proposal but forcing all trades to be valid for one second would solve most of the problem by itself.
I believe that it's a reasonable assumption that if you're in that industry removing the force of law from those codes might have an impact on your business.
Well, "we" meaning everyone except libertarians, who of course would prefer we all haggle with a couple of different fire departments on the site of our burning house fire on who was going to put it out and for how much instead of, say, pulling our kids out.
This, on the other hand, is a great example of a strawman.
If people value quality in a product (any product) then they will seek it out. It's obvious to me that if people wanted quality homes but weren't qualified to determine the quality themselves they'd hire out experts to make the determination for them, but it's not surprising that someone with a vested interest in it won't accept any possibility that the the status quo is neither necessary nor desirable.
you have an awful lot of faith in this free market of yours.
You have an aweful lot of faith in this government of yours not to be staffed by lazy, incompetent and corrupt officials and not to use it's authority for political purposes or unfairly favor one group over another.
You know how much of the country's building stock uses code minimum insulation (in name, but usually poorly installed)? nearly all of it. why? because usually the people building do not have a vested interest in the outcome and their clients are largely not educated enough to even know what the difference is... any single thing that increases the cost of the house is largely attacked by large scale builders because it reduces their potential bottom line. their calculation is simply:
The reason that home buyers don't care about quality anymore is because he Federal Reserve flooded the market with credit for the last two decades and the government was complicit with selling the lie that "house prices always go up" and "a house is an investment".
Slashdot Mirror
WHO grows more food?
Sure they can. Congress can, in fact, do anything it can get away with no matter what is written on a 200 year old piece of paper.
There is absolutely nothing that 500-odd people can do to a population of 300 million people unless that population chooses to allow it.
The population doesn't care about the constitution any more because they've been bought off, so the constitution no longer matters.
Of course, should that group of people run out of money with which to continue to buy off the other 300 million...
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." Frederic Bastiat
If progressives were really interested in freedom they'd push to abolish marriage licenses entirely.
Why did we ever enact laws requiring people seek permission from the government to get married in the first place?
It was done to create a means of enforcing miscegenation laws.
Obama's new legislation gives you the the right to choose whether you want to purchase approved health insurance from a large corporation or whether you want to pay extra taxes.
Previously you had the right to choose neither of those options.
I'm not interested in helping those people who find it pragmatic to rob me in order to accomplish their goals.
An arrangement into which the mother entered voluntarily.
Nice try.
Rights are a human constructions. Ultimately we are animals and subject to the same "red in tooth and claw" natural reality that every other animal is, but (most of the time) we can choose to base our behavior on other principals.
Universal rights were an invention that moves us away from the law of the jungle. Non-universal rights are a step backwards.
No it's not. No one is allowed to prevent you from obtaining and carrying said arm but no one is obligated to provide you with one either. That's the difference.
All positive rights infringe on individual liberty.
Real rights are universal, meaning there is on logical contradiction if all people exercise the right.
Speech is like that. My having the right to say what I want does not prevent someone else from saying what they want.
A "right" to be guaranteed food, for example, is not. Under this model if don't have food then my right is being violated and the only way to correct this is to have food taken away from someone else. This is not a universal right because clearly not everybody in the world can have the right to have someone else's food.
Positive rights define two classes of people: people who are entitled to receive something from someone else, and another class of people who are required to produce a surplus in order to satisfy the first group. There's a name for this kind of arrangement but I'll let you figure that out on your own.
Neither. Just a bunch of misguided progressives.
Modern schooling was designed to inhibit education, not further it.
Once you realize that then everything starts to make sense.
Ok, fine - skip the airships and let's start building Cloud Nines.
Airships make more sense for transporting cargo than people. They let you bypass the bottleneck of a port and let you take the cargo directly to its destination.
Hydrogen is safe as long as you don't coat the outside of your airship with rocket fuel.
I was referring to the problem expressed by the GP ("the market is a fucking scam").
It is a scam when not everybody plays by the same rules. It's not rate of orders that's the problem, it's the fact that they can place fake orders that they never intend to fulfill in order to provoke the market to move in a certain way.
Possibly they could avoid the exponentially increasing fees proposal but forcing all trades to be valid for one second would solve most of the problem by itself.
Exactly.
Karl Denninger has been reporting this problem for a few years now.
I believe that it's a reasonable assumption that if you're in that industry removing the force of law from those codes might have an impact on your business.
This, on the other hand, is a great example of a strawman.
If people value quality in a product (any product) then they will seek it out. It's obvious to me that if people wanted quality homes but weren't qualified to determine the quality themselves they'd hire out experts to make the determination for them, but it's not surprising that someone with a vested interest in it won't accept any possibility that the the status quo is neither necessary nor desirable.
You have an aweful lot of faith in this government of yours not to be staffed by lazy, incompetent and corrupt officials and not to use it's authority for political purposes or unfairly favor one group over another.
The reason that home buyers don't care about quality anymore is because he Federal Reserve flooded the market with credit for the last two decades and the government was complicit with selling the lie that "house prices always go up" and "a house is an investment".
Again, accidents are not supposed to be lottery tickets.
The biggest infringement is the property tax.