Subject:
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Re: Rights to free goods? (was Re: What happened?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 30 Jun 1999 19:00:41 GMT
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Reply-To:
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lpieniazek@noveraIHATESPAM.com
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Viewed:
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1103 times
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Your little moral problems are a sucker's trap, because you haven't
stated enough assumptions and preconditions, so whatever I say will be
twisted around. But hey, look up sucker in the dictionary... see that
picture? that's me.
Ed Jones wrote:
> I propose the following moral decisions:
>
> Person "A" is jobless after spending 35 years at a plant that closed down
> overnight. "A" no longer has medical benefits and "A"'s skills are no longer
> marketable.
Why? No one has a right to a lifetime of employment. We don't know the
circumstances here, so it's hard to say, but in many cases similar to
"A", "A" perhaps should have thought (while kicking back on the assembly
line leaving wrenches in the car doors because he was mad at GM that
day, swilling beer out on the lake in his power boat, or riding the bus
to the casino) that perhaps it might be a good idea to do a little
investing in other ways to make a living, and a little investing in the
future. Social Security and Medicare can't be relied on. A few pennies
in a mutual fund might have been a good idea instead of putting them
into a slot machine.
I am so tired of hearing about people that worked all their lives with
nothing to show for it and now want to be bailed out because they made
bad decisions. What sort of message is being sent by that? No one bailed
my parents out, or theirs before them... they lost everything they had
due to governments (1). More than once. Ya I'm bitter about it.
> "A"'s savings are gone and is on the verge of losing "A"'s house.
> "A" gets hit by a bus. Should "A" be left by the side of the road to die?
Feel free to set up a charity to address this, but yes, in your
contrived example with no other facts to go on, "A" should be left to
die, assuming that the bus company isn't a big fat lawsuit target and
some sharp lawyer doesn't front the medical money because he knows he'll
get it back and then some after he wins.
If you do not face the consequences of your actions you get unintended
consequences. Sounds harsh, but if you help "A", then you also have to
help "A2" who got fired because he boozed it up and "A3" who never
showed up to work in the first place because he was too busy playing the
ponies. As soon as you replace virtue with need as your metric the
neediest (who usually happen to be the least deserving) have as good a
claim on your limited assets as any, and sometimes more.
Medical care is a good. As such, it's scarce. Scarce goods get
allocated, somehow, by someone or something, you can't avoid it. A
utilitarian argument against free medical care is that by making it free
you're no longer allocating it in any effective way, but instead issuing
a blank check for all the free medical care anyone wants, which you can
never make good on, or else setting up an apparatchik board to decide
whether Suzy's need for braces is needier than Steve's need for a nose
job or Stan's need for a new heart, or Sally's need for a TB shot.
Clearly you have no idea what the tragedy of the commons is or why it
matters. Goods just rain out of the sky in your world view, don't they?
You have to have a system to allocate them and I reject any system
(Stembel's strident prattling about compassion notwithstanding) that
tramples rights in the name of compassion or obligation. Without
property rights there won't be any property to give away to charity.
Without property rights there won't be any society, just bands of thugs.
(2)
Analysing the other two is left as an exercise for the reader. In fact I
should quit this whole thread, it's the same old ground as always.
Those of us with proper morals will keep on doing what we do, and so
will the looters and thugs.
1 - hyperinflation, fascism, invasion, forced labor, communism, you name
it, they saw it and were victimized by it.
2 - what gets me the most steamed is when clueless latecomers start
bandying about the charge that libertarians want some sort of lawless
society in which force rules instead of law. They clearly haven't
thought about rights much. They clearly haven't read the material out
there either because they repeat the same tired old lies.
--
Larry Pieniazek larryp@novera.com http://my.voyager.net/lar
- - - Web Application Integration! http://www.novera.com
fund Lugnet(tm): http://www.ebates.com/ Member ref: lar, 1/2 $$ to
lugnet.
NOTE: I have left CTP, effective 18 June 99, and my CTP email
will not work after then. Please switch to my Novera ID.
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