Who Gets to Choose?Follow

Why? Your family needs food on the table even if your death was a suicide, right?

Maybe you should go down the street and automagically get a better job, then.

Then my family should have talked me out of offing myself. Insurance is supposed to protect against unpredictable situations, not reward people for direct action.

Lets not. Cause that's basically where your ideology is just flat out wrong. The thing itself is not the same as the right to the thing.




Yes. But at the risk of repeating myself, the right to those things is not granted by giving those things to people. The right to something means that there exists no artificially maintained rule or power that prevents you from obtaining them if you could otherwise in the absence of that rule or power. Handing the thing to someone doesn't tell us anything about whether that person has a right to it.



And this is (once again) where you show that you don't understand what rights are. No one *gives* you rights. You have rights automatically because rights are the absence of something preventing you from doing what you want. The government does not give us rights. It promises not to infringe them. You have epically failed to grasp the most fundamental concept of liberalism.

I'll also point out that the very idea that you have that people must "earn" their rights is completely backwards and illustrates the very control over the people (as opposed to the people having control) that I'm talking about. If you have to earn your rights from the government, and the government grants them to you in the form of giving you physical objects (food, housing, medical care, etc), then we're not really talking about rights, liberty, or freedom at all. We're talking about the government becoming the aribiter of what you have "earned". Which puts the control squarely in the hands of said government.



Always ironic when you say this right after clearly failing to grasp the subject matter.

Edited, Nov 7th 2014 4:23pm by gbaji

Does your family consist entirely of psychiatrists?



A life insurance is supposed to protect those left behind, not the person who died.

To add to that the idea of rights as you define it becomes less and less useful the more people that live in a specific area. It's great when anyone can have a homestead with a cow a pig and a few fields, it's much less useful in a city, or anywhere where there is a huge amount of commercial farming, which is pretty much anywhere you can have a farm.

Should have gone with hookers and blow instead.

In a situation where there's just one of me (like say if I'm the government), then I do because you have no choice but to accept what I'm giving you at the terms I've chosen. But, if there are many of me (like say if I'm a business operating on a profit motive among a sea of other businesses), then you do because you can go to someone else and offer your money to them instead of me. My profit motive will force me to collude and fix prices as has been demonstrated in every market in the history of the world

Well, that's surprisingly rational of you. Good point.

Sure. We can speak of Natural Rights versus Enumerated Rights. But it's interesting that one of the great concerns over the issue of the Bill of Rights was that people might mistakenly think that this was the complete list of "rights" that the people had, and that it was the government giving them to the people. It's why, if you read said Bill of Rights, you'll note that it repeatedly says things like "the right to X shall not be infringed", or prohibiting the government from passing laws that inhibit or abridge various free activities. There are no "rights' which claim to be given to the people by the government. They're always written in the form of restricting the government from infringing various rights, not the other way around. And, just in case anyone might be confused, they wrote the 9th amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

You know. Just in case. This is not a case of two equally valid opinions on something. In our system of government, my interpretation is correct, and Smash's is wrong. Period. Rights are not granted to us by the government. Ever. This is just not something that is a matter of debate. It's axiomatic. Like "red cars are red".





I would use the term "protected" rather than "maximized". I also agree completely with the need to make sure that the government is protecting our rights to the greatest degree possible. However, I would hope you'd agree that it's impossible to do that if we don't first have a common understanding of what rights are, and at the very least the understanding that the government doesn't "grant" them, but only protects them. Failing to grasp that leads to other misunderstandings like thinking that by giving people "things", we're giving them "rights", which somehow equates to use being more free. Which would seem to be an appropriate issue to raise given this is precisely what was proposed earlier in this thread.


Giving someone things does not give them rights. Ever. Period. It may or may not be a good thing to do for other reasons, but lets assess that on the value of the things themselves and on those other reason, and not out of the false belief that we're protecting people's rights by doing so.

Surely you can see how the government is like the company town in that example.



Similar point. The fact that businesses have to try to collude (and that this is illegal) kinda speaks volumes here. When the government is in charge, it doesn't have to bother colluding, and there's no legal authority that can hold it to task if it does.

So we're all in agreement that government running industries is equivalent to the worse case free market case? Seems like my job is done here then!

If you're talking about that specifically sure. The problem is you fall back to this defense for issues that aren't specific to natural rights, or the items outlined in the constitution and things the government should not infringe on.

If the discussion isn't about these, in that context, then we can as a people and through our government decide something is a right that the government can provide to people. This isn't a natural right, and it obviously isn't in the constitution, but your ranting about how they're not rights or shouldn't be called rights is not useful. All it does is avoid discussing the issue by pretending people are talking about something that they're not. so it's great that you only want to use the term in one way, and prefer other language be used, but it's also meaningless.