posted by xpanda:
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Under all circumstances, I prefer to live in a society that says, yes, you do have the right to life's fundamentals.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
It does not matter if 100% of society says you have a right to these things, you do not. The Lockean principles of life, liberty and estate (not the "pursuit of happiness," which is anti-market bunk which infected the Founding Fathers ... apparently no politicians are immune to psychopoliticosis) are not just arbitrarily-drawn lofty notions as most people misunderstand them; they are carefully-reasoned and exhuastively researched means to an end -- the freedom of the individual -- which Locke spent a lifetime studying and codifying, and which are as empirically testable and valid as any axiom of Euclid or Pythagoras.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Having access to health care, food, etc., is not quite the same thing as being guaranteed the right to not get hit by a car. One is presumably an accident, the other is an organised form of communal living which extends consideration and access to life's necessities.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
The key word there is "communal." These needs would be far better met in a communistic system than a socialist one.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
I am glad to hear you are charitable, although I am not surprised by this (I seem to recall you once saying that charities do better to help the poor than do gov't programmes.) It is good to see that a capitalist understands the shortcomings of the marketplace when it comes to filling in certain gaps.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
It is not a "shortcoming of the marketplace" that some people are poor. The free market has advanced the standard of living worldwide on a breathtaking scale in the last century, and has done so
despite the best efforts of socialists and fascists around the world. However, unlike all the other -isms capitalism does not make idiotic and unfilfillable promises to put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, because it is not possible to provide something
gratis when there is a means of production required for that something to "get there." This, again, has nothing to do with philosophy or opinon -- it is a matter of economic law, no different from gravity as a law of physics. There is literally no such thing as something for nothing -- even in a society without money there are raw materials, labour, distribution, etc. which must be acheived somehow.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
I wonder, and this will confuse me forever, why you would agree that the gov't should play a role in establishing a military and law enforcement and not deem those organisations socialist, yet other forms of protection, such as health care, make your head spin?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I don't think that. I think that all politicians, most judges, many political lobbyists, a small percentage of law enforcement officers, and a sprinkling of media and religious/social iconoclasts are legitimate targets for assassination. In the meantime, in the real world, this isn't likely to happen without the entire planet turning into a free-for-all bloodbath -- a situation which I would undoubtedly survive and from which I would very likely profit enormously, and yet which I view with utmost dread (a capitalist dreading a profitable scenario, oh my!) So, the only other option is to just wait it out, and given my current age, general health, net worth and distribution of same, and contact network I will almost certainly outlive the current political scenario in the world today. That'll do. Maybe if pirate cloning technology evolves in time I'll be able to enjoy it without being so wrinkly and dried up that the hookers mistake me for an elephant-skin rug.
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Why do I have the right to be protected from foreign enemies or rapists, but not be treated for illness? Are both not a covert attempt to preserve lives?
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
The principles are vastly different. Your rights are rights against
human action. You have those rights regardless of whether or not any government or individual or corporation or Boy Scout troop chooses to acknowledge them. If I rape and kill you, you had a right to life and freedom of choice (liberty) viz. your sexual partners right up to the end -- and I
willfully and deliberately violated them. It is therefore incumbent that justice be served in some manner, not as an issue of revenge and certainly not because it will bring you back, but because my willful and deliberate violation of another's rights must be analysed, evaluated and subjected to whatever steps are necessary to ensure that it will not happen again (alternatively, if I do not kill you, there will of course be the matter of somehow leveling back out the scales for my violation of your rights. Obviously I can't un-rape you, but some system of recompense without resorting to mere retribution would be in order.)
As you can see (and as you of course already knew) justice is a very complex issue linked to human interaction. We could fill up fifty threads on the topic and never cover every point, but the bottom line is that justice exists, ostensibly, to protect your rights and generally (theoretically) encourage others to respect those rights.
This is an infinitely removed paradigm from you having a baby born with, say, multiple sclerosis. While undeniably a tragedy, there is simply no system of government which can adequately ameliorate or even address this problem without involving the
involuntary coercion of others to offset your loss.
In other words, all any socialist system does -- whether medical, educational, general welfare, whatever -- is attempt to ease one person's pain and suffering by spreading it around to as many other people as possible; it is a form of egalitarian ideal acheived by making everyone equally miserable.
As I said above and have mentioned elsewhere, many of the ills which socialism attempts to fix and fails could be quite easily solved in a communistic environment. But because communism by its nature has a strong element of anarchism, it can never support a political class -- which is why Marx and Engels and Proudhon and most other socialist "thinkers" always stated communism as the ideal, and socialism as the means to the end, knowing fully well that this was an outrageous lie that any thinking person could get around.
I digress. The point is, there is a difference between the several threats to your well-being that are out there, which can generally be divided up into bad guys, falling helicopters, and birth defects. The differences are enormous, even if the outcome is often the same. To attempt to apply the same solution to these scenarios based on the outcome is like trying to treat the symptom rather than the sickness -- which is why it will never work, and will require (and demonstrably has required) constant tweaking, increasing costs, decreasing satisfaction, and eventually (as in the exemplary case of the pseudo-communist socialist empire that was the U.S.S.R.) collapse and chaos.
Phaedrus
