Why not just help the ones that need helping and leave the rest alone to pay market rates? We don't give out food, clothing, shelter or medicine for free, except to those who can't afford it, why would this be different? If you can help the poor without restricting the rest of us, and you want to live in a free country, that's what you should do.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Californians pay the same federal taxes that the rest of the county does, and state and local taxes don't pay for things outside the state. I just don't see how that's relevant to a discussion of state vs federal responsibility.
California is responsible for a lot more than its share of America's industry, technology, agriculture, and GDP.
Great! Then y'all can afford to solve this problem on your own.:)
The birthplace of civilization, how could you not be interested?
You've got your own oil
Nope. Not here.
Besides, in addition to giving those people some sunlight, this stuff might attract tourists, something which international politics have yet to accomplish.;)
I can barely keep my eyes open during some of my city council meetings, I'm not spending my vacation watching the UN.;)
This is going to be harsh, but there's so much economic whishful thinking here, it's hard (for me, at least) not to get frustrated:
Allowing those that earned the money to keep it would be good for the economy too
Have you considered that some of the people in that town earned part of said money, too, and that the outcome of this is more money both for the town and the EU?
If they want to spend their money on their project, fine. Others can spend their money on what they want. But apparently money spent by individuals vanishes into a black hole, but money spent by the government magically grows and returns to the people.
That is the reason why countries subdisize their products -- the producer wins, the country also wins.
Subsidies exist because of political payoffs (like US & EU agricultural susidies - keep farmers happy or you lose votes - never mind the 3rd world people it kills), keeping an industry safe in case of war (like US steel protections - also "buys" union votes and support) and economic ignorance. The money to keep an dying industry alive has to come from somewhere, and that always means some other industry loses out.
So this town gets this huge project because they're jealous that they have to walk 10 minutes to get what some others get at their door, and people that don't get it at all have to chip to pay for it.
Them that's got shall get, and if they ain't got, they don't deserve gettin'.
Why that town and not all of the others? Don't they pay taxes too?
Hey, all you people living in places that require any kind of enviornmental adaptation: MOVE!
If it's a choice between that and using politics to steal from others, that's what should happen. In this case there's a third option: the ones who get the benefits can be the ones that pay. Is that such an awful idea? We're not talking about poor people that can't afford to contribute.
Yes, of course, but it's a wrong one. Amazon is a free market of ideas, science is not.
With all due respect, you seem to be letting your dislike of economic markets prevent you from seeing the metaphore. You like science, you don't like free markets, so they can't be similar.
Metaphores with Linux work the same way. Linux is often said to be similar to communism, and in many cases this is a good analogy. In other cases a market (or bazaar) makes more sense. Michael Tiemann even quotes Adam Smith as part of the philosophy that makes Lunux possible.
I guess I just want you to know that it's a good analogy, and that by dismissing it, you're losing out on a chance to see something from a different perspective. If I had blown off the first post I responded to as angry anti-capitalistic trash, I never would have gotten to understand your perspective.
China is doing well because 1) they have influx of foreign investment and 2) the communist party kept political control.
So pre-communism does well if it can 2) maintain power and 1) return a profit for investors. That sounds just like your description of the "capitalist elite"!
I should have been more specific, I wasn't talking about international business, I was talking about poor, rural farmers. By the mid-70s, some areas weren't producing enough food on their collective farms to feed the farmers themselves. The government started allowing people to grow food on personal plots and let the farmers trade or sell the excess above their quotas, as part of "New Communism". All of the sudden, they have excess food production. Similar things apparently happened in Russia, where small, personal gardens produced more food than large, collective farms.
In between voluntary communist cooperation makes more sense than free markets.... improving lifes of people today is also important.
As long as people are free to disagree, that's fine with me. May the best ideas on the "market" win!:)
Perhaps I misunderstood your description of Lenin's philosophy. It sounded like once a decision was reached, it could not be changed, even if new information conflicted with the theory.
Science is free inquiry, and all of its results are tenative, thats why falsifiability is part of any scientific theory.
Science is not a free market, because the criteria are not supply and demand, but agreement with experiments... Opinions are not falsifiabile!
The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy - ideas (supply) compete for a limited number of minds (demand) - just don't make it more than a metaphore. And while opinions are not falsifiabile, scientific theories are - if they aren't, then experimentation is pointless, and it isn't science.
Can you imagine Microsoft saying...
Yes, that's called "going out of business".:)
communism is actually a way to liberate man from [uninteresting] labor
But which way? You've given technology and culture as possible routes, these seem quite distinct:
The technological path would happen naturally, and no change in ideology would be necessary. People could still be quite selfish, and could still privately own their nanoreplicators and AI servants (means of production). Since collective ownership is not required in this type of labor-free society (people would almost never be required to interact) I can't even call it communism. I'd love to live here, though.
The path of altering human nature is quite different, and even if it is possible, I just don't see the point. If tech will get us there no matter what, why the community ownership? This seems to be an independent goal that's unrelated to getting rid of work.
As for Soviet success/failure, I won't comment. China, though, is doing much better now that they've allowed some private ownership. And I really do believe that free markets will get us to the posthuman stage faster than any artificial system.
How many Hollywood films can you name that glorify industrial workers (the so called "hard-working Americans")? How many films where worker is a main character?
Tons of them. Spiderman 1 (bad guy is even rich, too), War of the Worlds, John Q (again, the rich are the bad guys), Get Rich or Die Tryin', North Country. The "hard working American" vs "the rich and powerful" is the biggest cliche in Hollywood.
Relativism is fashionable in Western democracies ("everyone is entitled to his opinion"), but I share Lenin's outlook on political epistemology - disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it. I am actually against "the free market of ideas"... Science is not a free market, quakery and religious cults are. Truth is generally not relative and opinions are only good as temporary hypothesis, not as something to cling to forever.
Wow, do you ever have that backward. Science is free inquiry, and all of its results are tenative, thats why falsifiability is part of any scientific theory. Ancient Greeks, medieval monks and classical physicists after Newton all thought they knew how the world worked, thank goodness others weren't convinced! On the other hand, religions say things like "the point of an open mind is to close it around something solid". Cults don't want you to question, that's how they protect weak foundations. Truth may not be relative, but our understanding is, and without questioning conventional wisdom, progress is never made.
Even if they start out stubborn, push a scientist, and they'll eventually admit that even the most revered theories could be subject to revision. You won't find a religion that says "Go ahead, it's OK to question all of our beliefs, let reason be your guide".
If you're saying communism is the "One True Way", then it's a religious position, not a scientific one, and I won't disagree too strongly. "Disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it" is clearly stating "I know the truth, don't question me".
A monkey (kid) is selfish, but education and upbringing can shape that monkey into a human being.
So you're at war with human nature, good luck with that.
This will be the case with mature nanotechnology and AI.
According to you, if a capitalistic society reduces all prices to zero (or close to it), it is no longer capitalist. I'd say that if a communistic scociety reduces the amount of work to zero (or to only fun work), is to no longer communist. If technology alone can get us to communism, then you aren't dealing with an economic or political theory, but more of a transhumanist one.
Phosphorus bombs are bombs filled with the element phosphorus... an "elemental weapon" and not a chemical one
I hope you're being sarcastic, because chemical elements are chemicals, by definition! Even better, chlorine is an element, and by your thinking, not a chemical weapon. You might as well say nukes aren't WMDs because when one goes off, large parts of the planet are untouched.
Even meriam webster defines chemical weapons as a mixture.
If you take a Linux C++ programmer, who likes coding and make the assumptions that... Ditto for every other job
It's the "likes coding" assumption I can't get past. Some people like their job enought that they'd do it all anyway, like your programmer (work is play for them). Others like their job, but they'd still rather not do it all the time. A lot of people would rather play most of the time, and not work at all.
People don't usually compete inside an organisation if they all share the same goals
What about the goals they don't share? Other than cults, members of groups are allowed to do other things. Two people may work together as part of one project (Linux), but work against each other on another (one is part of a pro-life group, the other pro-choice).
Consider, for example, a kindergarden
You don't have kids, or you'd know "Mine!" is up there with "No!" on the list of annoying words kids say. They don't know how to trade, but the moment they figure that out, they'll start that up. Didn't you swap baseball cards as a kid?
Each time, when you allow selfishness and grant independence, [free markets] will appear.
Exactly! This was what I was talking about earlier. You have to disallow something in order to banish free markets. In order to disallow something, you have to have state intervention (or some surrogate). Whenever the state lets up, those two things are allowed again, and it's back to capitalism we go, so society gets stuck in the pre-communistic stage, and never gets to communism.
Now we get to the one exception - if culture can act as the surrogate, and banish one of your prerequisites without using state power, then that might work. But you'd have to raise kids to never desire anything other than what others want them to desire - I just can't see that as realistic.
Wow, a well reasoned argument on slashdot, who'd have thought?
private control of resources... necessitates state force
And this is where a natural rights supporter would disagree - you are believe that legal and moral claims to property are the same, while they believe that the moral claim comes first, then the legal one comes along afterward, as a way of protecting that moral right. Their belief is similar for the right to live - you always have a moral right to live (even with no government to protect it), while laws against murder are just a legal recognition of that pre-existing moral right.
Natural rights supporters would say that even when legal rights are lost the moral and ethical rights still exist. Your "Native American's kicked off their land" example makes that point quite well. They had no legal right to the land (at least under US law), but we still believe that action to be unethical, because they had a moral right to it.
It contrasts with socialism, an economic system based on the exchange of labor.
That's the strangest definition of socialism I've ever seen, could you elaborate? On the other hand, if you're talking about the labor theory of value, that was the prevailing theory (even among capitalists) during Marx's time, but it's been well-refuted for quite a while.
As for your ideas, in the words of every long-lived thrill-seeker, "you go first". Form a commune or town, run it on those ideas, and we'll see what happens. No matter how it turns out, we'll then have empirical evidence rather than conjecture, which would make this more of a scientific, as opposed to philosophic, discussion.
When the price is zero, there ceases to be a market.
Good point. On the other hand there's still opportunity costs, personal utility and competition, so at least some market theory still applies. I just don't know an English word that means "market without prices" (psudo-market?). And on the other hand, communism has that "from each according to his ability" part, which isn't happening at all - it's still "from each according to his own desires".
Of course, from my point of view, the "market" part is just an inevitable side effect of the "free" part:
As for voluntary production you are confusing central planning in a pre-communism society with communism.
Marx has some good points, but I never understood this. As far as I know, whenever a pre-communistic state has allowed voluntary production and trade (China, Russia), or can't stop it (black market), capitalism pops back up. Whenever people can, they own and trade things. Would more time or better teaching really change that result?
Maybe I'm too picky, or just tired of the libertarian/socalist flamewar. Your original post seemed to be saying "What morons, they're too stupid to notice that their own name is a contradiction!", which really rubbed me the wrong way. As for rhetorical writing, should I have replied "I scoff at thee!"? I would have missed out on this enlightening conversation!
capitalism is problematic for anyone who claims to value liberty
All of your other conclutions I can understand, but this confuses me. To me, capitalism means "a system where people have the liberty to trade". Also, I have major problems with how it's currently implemented, and would love to see changes within capitalism, but I don't know of a reasonable alternative with NO capitalism. Even if I did, people always want to trade, and if 90% of your economy is on the black market, you're still 90% capitalist. (Under Soviet capitalism, the black market trades you?)
I believe he was talking about the "free market of ideas", rather than an economic free market.
If I had to put a label on it, I'd say it's very much like communism. But free market? No.
When the cost of something is zero, as the internet is in your description, the free market and communism produce identical results. And, as far as I know, "voluntary production" goes with "free market" better than "communism".
the flaw (or rather, one flaw) is that libertarian capitalism makes untrue assertations and assumptions about the relationship between the state and property.
That's your opinion. Other people believe the opposite:
Typically, non-socialist libertarians believe that a capitalist economy is natural, rather than artificial, so it would naturally develop in the absence of regulating factors. Thus they argue that a truly socialist libertarianism would be an oxymoron.
Even that states that "they argue" not "they prove", because it's their opinion. You seem to believe in your philosophical or political opinion so strongly that you've forgotten it's an opinion, and started thinking it's indisputable. I really don't know how a well-read person (as you obviously are) can forget that. Maybe it's just me.
libertarian capitalists outright stole the terms
Libertarian loosely translates to "freedom supporter", I think it works well for both capitaist and socialist advocates of limited government. It'd love a cite on the origin of the word, though.
More money for farmers? That's what usually happens when food prices go up. Imports will rise, but that's not a bad thing in the long run.
How, exactly does this help in any way prevent the economic collapse of our largely agrarian-based economy?
The CIA lists the agricultural sector as producing 0.9% of our GDP and farming as less than 0.7% of employed people. We aren't "largely agrarian-based" by any means, only the third world is.
Guess what: the invisible hand only cares about itself, but I suppose that's all we Americans are expected to give a shit about so it doesn't matter anyway.
I would say the opposite, you only care about American farmers, but the invisible hand cares about everyone. We have good estimates about how many Africans die due to American and European subsidies, because they can't compete with people that get free money on top of their income. And the overall price Americans pay (taxes plus food prices) is much higher than it needs to be.
I am awaiting your obviously more highly-enlightened economic explanation.
I'm not trying to be mean, but I really don't know where your info is coming from. You seem to think that the world will end if as subsidies are reduced, and I can't imagine why.
any claim of real estate as property rests on state action
All rights are defended by state action, thus there are no natural rights! I don't believe in natural rights, so I would agree with that part.
Someone who does believe in natural rights would say that deeds make the protection of rights easier, just like the police make the protection of life easier, but they don't manufacture those rights. They exist independently of your ability to protect them, that's what makes them natural rights - you always have them.
Who kicked the Native Americans off the land and gave it to the guy who sold it to the guy who sold it to you?
Speak for yourself Mr. Western Hemisphere (OK, me too:) ). But plenty of regions have property ownership that can be traced back to (nearly) the start of recorded history. And what about Robinson Crusoe? There's no government on the island, but believers in natural rights would still say that he owned his house and the other things he made, just like he had a right to life.
The justification for property is that its existence supports these primary rights
Not to me, and quite a few others! Obviously I wasn't clear about what I was objecting to. You have a belief about where rights come from and what rights are primary and secondary, others have different beliefs about the same subject. You can't take one of your beliefs and one from someone else and thus produce a "contradiction in terms". That egotisically elevates your opinion into a fact. You might as well assert that rights come from the Christian God, and thus Jews don't have rights, since they don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. Even if you were right, a Jew who disagrees isn't contradicting himself, he would (in that unlikely case) merely be wrong.
Sorry for all of the bold tags, but it frustrates me that you can't seem to understand that other people really honestly have different beliefs. Some people say animals have rights, others think they don't - both are opinions or beliefs, not facts. Mock them all you want, but calling "animal rights" an oxymoron is still factually incorrect. The same for "libertarian capitalist" or "smart American".
From the GP: basic economics predicts that if we got rid of the subsidies, prices of the products produced in the country would immediately rise to compensate for the difference
I think you missed that part.
continued existence of the union... 60% of rural US turning into a poverty-stricken no-man's land.
Nice imagery, but I don't think that's how it would work. If you have a good economic argument to back up the apocalyptic vision, please let me know.
Well, first of all...there really aren't many places in the US that don't have some kind of regular disasters.
Some have many more than others. If someone's North Dakota income taxes pay for $50 of Florida reconstruction for every dollar of ND reconstruction, that doesn't seem fair. Make Floridians give more so they pay the actual cost of living there.
no one decided in recent years to build New Orleans below sea level.
We just did! Most of the city will be rebuilt, almost from scratch, but are we going to do it upstream a few miles, or fill in the non-historical areas so they're above sea level? No, of course not - that would make too much sense.
Where I grew up, CC&R's for property sales regularly included provisions forbidding sales to Mexicans or African-Americans in perpetuity.... Part of the reason the place I live has such high property velues and such wonderful quality of life is precisely because of restrictions on what people can do with their property.
Ah, so when restrictions are immoral, restrictions are bad and when restrictions are moral, restrictions are good. I'm confused, are you for or against restrictions?
Also, this seems to be a moral and cultural issue, not a regulatory one. If we were as racist now as people were then, we'd have city-wide bans on Black/Asian/Irish people living in cities (the way some cities ban sex offenders) rather than anti-bias laws.
When you open the doors to the public, you are obligated to cut people some slack.
This is what I've been saying for years - that some people think that when you let someone else have access to your property, you no longer really own it. Thanks for making it so obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just help the ones that need helping and leave the rest alone to pay market rates? We don't give out food, clothing, shelter or medicine for free, except to those who can't afford it, why would this be different? If you can help the poor without restricting the rest of us, and you want to live in a free country, that's what you should do.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Californians pay the same federal taxes that the rest of the county does, and state and local taxes don't pay for things outside the state. I just don't see how that's relevant to a discussion of state vs federal responsibility.
California is responsible for a lot more than its share of America's industry, technology, agriculture, and GDP.
Great! Then y'all can afford to solve this problem on your own. :)
Fine, I'll make my own oil well, with hookers and blackjack... Forget the well and the blackjack! /futurama
The birthplace of civilization, how could you not be interested?
You've got your own oil
Nope. Not here.
Besides, in addition to giving those people some sunlight, this stuff might attract tourists, something which international politics have yet to accomplish. ;)
I can barely keep my eyes open during some of my city council meetings, I'm not spending my vacation watching the UN. ;)
Allowing those that earned the money to keep it would be good for the economy too
Have you considered that some of the people in that town earned part of said money, too, and that the outcome of this is more money both for the town and the EU?
If they want to spend their money on their project, fine. Others can spend their money on what they want. But apparently money spent by individuals vanishes into a black hole, but money spent by the government magically grows and returns to the people.
That is the reason why countries subdisize their products -- the producer wins, the country also wins.
Subsidies exist because of political payoffs (like US & EU agricultural susidies - keep farmers happy or you lose votes - never mind the 3rd world people it kills), keeping an industry safe in case of war (like US steel protections - also "buys" union votes and support) and economic ignorance. The money to keep an dying industry alive has to come from somewhere, and that always means some other industry loses out.
Them that's got shall get, and if they ain't got, they don't deserve gettin'.
Hey, all you people living in places that require any kind of enviornmental adaptation: MOVE!
If it's a choice between that and using politics to steal from others, that's what should happen. In this case there's a third option: the ones who get the benefits can be the ones that pay. Is that such an awful idea? We're not talking about poor people that can't afford to contribute.
Forget the mirrors, fetch me a keg and some hookers. That'll raise morale around here!
If they can't move, can they at least be somewhere where they don't have to move or risk death?
If I have to pay to have their home rebuilt, can I at least avoid having to pay for it again?
With all due respect, you seem to be letting your dislike of economic markets prevent you from seeing the metaphore. You like science, you don't like free markets, so they can't be similar.
Metaphores with Linux work the same way. Linux is often said to be similar to communism, and in many cases this is a good analogy. In other cases a market (or bazaar) makes more sense. Michael Tiemann even quotes Adam Smith as part of the philosophy that makes Lunux possible.
I guess I just want you to know that it's a good analogy, and that by dismissing it, you're losing out on a chance to see something from a different perspective. If I had blown off the first post I responded to as angry anti-capitalistic trash, I never would have gotten to understand your perspective.
China is doing well because 1) they have influx of foreign investment and 2) the communist party kept political control.
So pre-communism does well if it can 2) maintain power and 1) return a profit for investors. That sounds just like your description of the "capitalist elite"!
I should have been more specific, I wasn't talking about international business, I was talking about poor, rural farmers. By the mid-70s, some areas weren't producing enough food on their collective farms to feed the farmers themselves. The government started allowing people to grow food on personal plots and let the farmers trade or sell the excess above their quotas, as part of "New Communism". All of the sudden, they have excess food production. Similar things apparently happened in Russia, where small, personal gardens produced more food than large, collective farms.
In between voluntary communist cooperation makes more sense than free markets. ... improving lifes of people today is also important.
As long as people are free to disagree, that's fine with me. May the best ideas on the "market" win! :)
Science is not a free market, because the criteria are not supply and demand, but agreement with experiments ... Opinions are not falsifiabile!
The "free market of ideas" is only an analolgy - ideas (supply) compete for a limited number of minds (demand) - just don't make it more than a metaphore. And while opinions are not falsifiabile, scientific theories are - if they aren't, then experimentation is pointless, and it isn't science.
Can you imagine Microsoft saying...
Yes, that's called "going out of business". :)
communism is actually a way to liberate man from [uninteresting] labor
But which way? You've given technology and culture as possible routes, these seem quite distinct:
The technological path would happen naturally, and no change in ideology would be necessary. People could still be quite selfish, and could still privately own their nanoreplicators and AI servants (means of production). Since collective ownership is not required in this type of labor-free society (people would almost never be required to interact) I can't even call it communism. I'd love to live here, though.
The path of altering human nature is quite different, and even if it is possible, I just don't see the point. If tech will get us there no matter what, why the community ownership? This seems to be an independent goal that's unrelated to getting rid of work.
As for Soviet success/failure, I won't comment. China, though, is doing much better now that they've allowed some private ownership. And I really do believe that free markets will get us to the posthuman stage faster than any artificial system.
Tons of them. Spiderman 1 (bad guy is even rich, too), War of the Worlds, John Q (again, the rich are the bad guys), Get Rich or Die Tryin', North Country. The "hard working American" vs "the rich and powerful" is the biggest cliche in Hollywood.
Relativism is fashionable in Western democracies ("everyone is entitled to his opinion"), but I share Lenin's outlook on political epistemology - disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it. I am actually against "the free market of ideas"... Science is not a free market, quakery and religious cults are. Truth is generally not relative and opinions are only good as temporary hypothesis, not as something to cling to forever.
Wow, do you ever have that backward. Science is free inquiry, and all of its results are tenative, thats why falsifiability is part of any scientific theory. Ancient Greeks, medieval monks and classical physicists after Newton all thought they knew how the world worked, thank goodness others weren't convinced! On the other hand, religions say things like "the point of an open mind is to close it around something solid". Cults don't want you to question, that's how they protect weak foundations. Truth may not be relative, but our understanding is, and without questioning conventional wisdom, progress is never made.
Even if they start out stubborn, push a scientist, and they'll eventually admit that even the most revered theories could be subject to revision. You won't find a religion that says "Go ahead, it's OK to question all of our beliefs, let reason be your guide".
If you're saying communism is the "One True Way", then it's a religious position, not a scientific one, and I won't disagree too strongly. "Disagreement is only valuable until you find the right answer, after that people should accept it" is clearly stating "I know the truth, don't question me".
A monkey (kid) is selfish, but education and upbringing can shape that monkey into a human being.
So you're at war with human nature, good luck with that.
This will be the case with mature nanotechnology and AI.
According to you, if a capitalistic society reduces all prices to zero (or close to it), it is no longer capitalist. I'd say that if a communistic scociety reduces the amount of work to zero (or to only fun work), is to no longer communist. If technology alone can get us to communism, then you aren't dealing with an economic or political theory, but more of a transhumanist one.
I hope you're being sarcastic, because chemical elements are chemicals, by definition! Even better, chlorine is an element, and by your thinking, not a chemical weapon. You might as well say nukes aren't WMDs because when one goes off, large parts of the planet are untouched.
Even meriam webster defines chemical weapons as a mixture.
Nope! Please try again.
It's the "likes coding" assumption I can't get past. Some people like their job enought that they'd do it all anyway, like your programmer (work is play for them). Others like their job, but they'd still rather not do it all the time. A lot of people would rather play most of the time, and not work at all.
People don't usually compete inside an organisation if they all share the same goals
What about the goals they don't share? Other than cults, members of groups are allowed to do other things. Two people may work together as part of one project (Linux), but work against each other on another (one is part of a pro-life group, the other pro-choice).
Consider, for example, a kindergarden
You don't have kids, or you'd know "Mine!" is up there with "No!" on the list of annoying words kids say. They don't know how to trade, but the moment they figure that out, they'll start that up. Didn't you swap baseball cards as a kid?
Each time, when you allow selfishness and grant independence, [free markets] will appear.
Exactly! This was what I was talking about earlier. You have to disallow something in order to banish free markets. In order to disallow something, you have to have state intervention (or some surrogate). Whenever the state lets up, those two things are allowed again, and it's back to capitalism we go, so society gets stuck in the pre-communistic stage, and never gets to communism.
Now we get to the one exception - if culture can act as the surrogate, and banish one of your prerequisites without using state power, then that might work. But you'd have to raise kids to never desire anything other than what others want them to desire - I just can't see that as realistic.
private control of resources ... necessitates state force
And this is where a natural rights supporter would disagree - you are believe that legal and moral claims to property are the same, while they believe that the moral claim comes first, then the legal one comes along afterward, as a way of protecting that moral right. Their belief is similar for the right to live - you always have a moral right to live (even with no government to protect it), while laws against murder are just a legal recognition of that pre-existing moral right.
Natural rights supporters would say that even when legal rights are lost the moral and ethical rights still exist. Your "Native American's kicked off their land" example makes that point quite well. They had no legal right to the land (at least under US law), but we still believe that action to be unethical, because they had a moral right to it.
It contrasts with socialism, an economic system based on the exchange of labor.
That's the strangest definition of socialism I've ever seen, could you elaborate? On the other hand, if you're talking about the labor theory of value, that was the prevailing theory (even among capitalists) during Marx's time, but it's been well-refuted for quite a while.
As for your ideas, in the words of every long-lived thrill-seeker, "you go first". Form a commune or town, run it on those ideas, and we'll see what happens. No matter how it turns out, we'll then have empirical evidence rather than conjecture, which would make this more of a scientific, as opposed to philosophic, discussion.
Good point. On the other hand there's still opportunity costs, personal utility and competition, so at least some market theory still applies. I just don't know an English word that means "market without prices" (psudo-market?). And on the other hand, communism has that "from each according to his ability" part, which isn't happening at all - it's still "from each according to his own desires".
Of course, from my point of view, the "market" part is just an inevitable side effect of the "free" part:
As for voluntary production you are confusing central planning in a pre-communism society with communism.
Marx has some good points, but I never understood this. As far as I know, whenever a pre-communistic state has allowed voluntary production and trade (China, Russia), or can't stop it (black market), capitalism pops back up. Whenever people can, they own and trade things. Would more time or better teaching really change that result?
capitalism is problematic for anyone who claims to value liberty
All of your other conclutions I can understand, but this confuses me. To me, capitalism means "a system where people have the liberty to trade". Also, I have major problems with how it's currently implemented, and would love to see changes within capitalism, but I don't know of a reasonable alternative with NO capitalism. Even if I did, people always want to trade, and if 90% of your economy is on the black market, you're still 90% capitalist. (Under Soviet capitalism, the black market trades you?)
If I had to put a label on it, I'd say it's very much like communism. But free market? No.
When the cost of something is zero, as the internet is in your description, the free market and communism produce identical results. And, as far as I know, "voluntary production" goes with "free market" better than "communism".
That's your opinion. Other people believe the opposite:
Even that states that "they argue" not "they prove", because it's their opinion. You seem to believe in your philosophical or political opinion so strongly that you've forgotten it's an opinion, and started thinking it's indisputable. I really don't know how a well-read person (as you obviously are) can forget that. Maybe it's just me.
libertarian capitalists outright stole the terms
Libertarian loosely translates to "freedom supporter", I think it works well for both capitaist and socialist advocates of limited government. It'd love a cite on the origin of the word, though.
More money for farmers? That's what usually happens when food prices go up. Imports will rise, but that's not a bad thing in the long run.
How, exactly does this help in any way prevent the economic collapse of our largely agrarian-based economy?
The CIA lists the agricultural sector as producing 0.9% of our GDP and farming as less than 0.7% of employed people. We aren't "largely agrarian-based" by any means, only the third world is.
Guess what: the invisible hand only cares about itself, but I suppose that's all we Americans are expected to give a shit about so it doesn't matter anyway.
I would say the opposite, you only care about American farmers, but the invisible hand cares about everyone. We have good estimates about how many Africans die due to American and European subsidies, because they can't compete with people that get free money on top of their income. And the overall price Americans pay (taxes plus food prices) is much higher than it needs to be.
I am awaiting your obviously more highly-enlightened economic explanation.
I'm not trying to be mean, but I really don't know where your info is coming from. You seem to think that the world will end if as subsidies are reduced, and I can't imagine why.
no one decided in recent years to build New Orleans below sea level.
is now incorrect. You just gave me a post full of reasons for doing so, but we still decided to do it.
All rights are defended by state action, thus there are no natural rights! I don't believe in natural rights, so I would agree with that part.
Someone who does believe in natural rights would say that deeds make the protection of rights easier, just like the police make the protection of life easier, but they don't manufacture those rights. They exist independently of your ability to protect them, that's what makes them natural rights - you always have them.
Who kicked the Native Americans off the land and gave it to the guy who sold it to the guy who sold it to you?
Speak for yourself Mr. Western Hemisphere (OK, me too :) ). But plenty of regions have property ownership that can be traced back to (nearly) the start of recorded history. And what about Robinson Crusoe? There's no government on the island, but believers in natural rights would still say that he owned his house and the other things he made, just like he had a right to life.
The justification for property is that its existence supports these primary rights
Not to me, and quite a few others! Obviously I wasn't clear about what I was objecting to. You have a belief about where rights come from and what rights are primary and secondary, others have different beliefs about the same subject. You can't take one of your beliefs and one from someone else and thus produce a "contradiction in terms". That egotisically elevates your opinion into a fact. You might as well assert that rights come from the Christian God, and thus Jews don't have rights, since they don't believe in the divinity of Jesus. Even if you were right, a Jew who disagrees isn't contradicting himself, he would (in that unlikely case) merely be wrong.
Sorry for all of the bold tags, but it frustrates me that you can't seem to understand that other people really honestly have different beliefs. Some people say animals have rights, others think they don't - both are opinions or beliefs, not facts. Mock them all you want, but calling "animal rights" an oxymoron is still factually incorrect. The same for "libertarian capitalist" or "smart American" .
I hope I made myslef clear without offending.
I think you missed that part.
continued existence of the union ... 60% of rural US turning into a poverty-stricken no-man's land.
Nice imagery, but I don't think that's how it would work. If you have a good economic argument to back up the apocalyptic vision, please let me know.
Some have many more than others. If someone's North Dakota income taxes pay for $50 of Florida reconstruction for every dollar of ND reconstruction, that doesn't seem fair. Make Floridians give more so they pay the actual cost of living there.
no one decided in recent years to build New Orleans below sea level.
We just did! Most of the city will be rebuilt, almost from scratch, but are we going to do it upstream a few miles, or fill in the non-historical areas so they're above sea level? No, of course not - that would make too much sense.
Ah, so when restrictions are immoral, restrictions are bad and when restrictions are moral, restrictions are good. I'm confused, are you for or against restrictions?
Also, this seems to be a moral and cultural issue, not a regulatory one. If we were as racist now as people were then, we'd have city-wide bans on Black/Asian/Irish people living in cities (the way some cities ban sex offenders) rather than anti-bias laws.
When you open the doors to the public, you are obligated to cut people some slack.
This is what I've been saying for years - that some people think that when you let someone else have access to your property, you no longer really own it. Thanks for making it so obvious.