From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Jul 18 2001 - 11:22:14 MDT
Miriam English wrote:
>
> At 11:39 AM 17/07/2001 -0400, Mitchell, Jerry (3337) wrote:
> >I don't care what your situation is. I don't care if your suffering from a
> >mutant strain of cancer X and your about to melt into a pile of goo unless
> >someone buys you a 10 cent aspirin. You DO NOT have the right to take other
> >peoples property (or have the government take it for you). You must rely on
> >voluntary contributions and charity if you want to be moral.
>
> OK... I would have said this a little differently, but let's take your
> example. It reduces to: A person's right to life is dwarfed by another
> person's right to wealth. Huh?!?
>
> You can see how silly this line gets. This will happen anytime you try to
> talk about morality in terms of absolutes. This is exactly what religions do.
Miriam, it is quite simple: what IS wealth? What IS money? It is a
symbol of value added by labor. Every dollar in the world represents
time from someone's life spent sweating their butt when they could have
been smelling the roses. Some people's ideas, decisions, and leadership
skills are immensely valuable, so some people make more money than
others.
So the question is: in a society that abhors slavery, what is the
rationale for confiscating the labor of free individuals? I have yet to
hear anyone come up with an explaination why enslaving 100% of the
population 10% of the time is any less morally abhorrent than enslaving
10% of the people 100% of the time. If you can come up with a morally
and logically consistent answer to this, I am all ears. Nobody else has
to date.
In a socialist society of any degree (social democracy or communist
totalitarian), the most productive individuals pay the largest
percentage of their labor to be given in services to the least
productive members, who contribute little or nothing to the services of
the whole. This may work fine in a family, which is an entirely
voluntary proposition for the productive members to engage in, but this
family economy cannot be extrapolated to society as a whole without
immense coersion by the force of the state, and therefore, is engaging
in slavery.
I hear this 'it's for the children' excuse all the time, and I see
parents whining all the time irrationally "I didn't ask to be a parent"
(totally ignoring, of course, of the causal factors involved), and
expecting that I pay through income, property, sales, and other taxes,
for the cost of their stupidity. Guess what? I CAN say 'I didn't ask to
be a parent', because I'm not in the biological sense, but in the
economic sense, I sure am expected to be. Any attempt I make at avoiding
paying 'my fair share' is looked on with scorn, jealousy, and hate,
despite the fact that it should be I who has those feelings, and justly.
Just HOW do you justify my enslavement?
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