I get the desire for property to belong to you and be firmly enshrined in law. I don't want anyone else using my toothbrush and fucking up my closet. But extending that to Jeoffry S. Hapsburg III's right to own the largest source of employment in a small town from a continent away is nonsense.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
This isn't a chicken and egg thing. Socialists have to point out that all of human history has been a garbage fire because every time we suggest notOligarchy and maybe dragging Larry Kudlow from his home in the dead of night we are supposed to answer for Mao.
We'd be perfectly happy to discuss socialism without having to constantly talk about how America is soaked in indigenous blood or how unappealing Siberia is.
Okay, let's discuss Socialism itself then. I am scared of the general concept of Socialism because:
-It gives the state authority to expropriate private property in general, whereas private property is a human right
-It relies on the state to allocate resources, which mainstream economists consider generally inefficient
I would like to know from the Socialists ITT what the main points of a proposed Democratic Socialist constitution would be, and what mechanisms would guard against state overreach - particularly assuming, as you have established, there are hostile reactionary powers trying to undermine the Socialist State.
I will try to refrain from pointing to historical cases, but I am also curious: leaving aside the political aspect, do you consider the USSR or any other notionally socialist country to be a valid example of a Socialist economy, in terms of centrally planned resource allocation?
Are we making distinctions between private property and personal property here? Its an important point.
You are welcome to draw a distinction, but I will argue the right to own land is inalienable
Ha
I will, most likely, never own land. How can something be an intrinsic human right if only the rich are allowed it
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right. That doesn't mean you have to be given any one form of property. You have the right to acquire it and not have it expropriated. (yes, Kelo v. New London was fucking socialist garbage and should be overturned)
Why?
Why is your "ownership" sacred?
What if your ownership is causing harm to others?
Ownership is ingrained in us. It is so foundational a concept that most people cannot imagine a society without it, and find those isolated societies that don't maintain such a concept completely alien. With that stated, I think it falls to those wishing to change this to demonstrate exactly what should change, why it should change and what the proposed benefit is.
I think if you're going to make the claim that you have the intrinsic right to land your ancestors and forefathers straight up stole from someone else you should probably be able to explain why your ownership is totally sacred and why it was totally fine for it to have been stolen before you got to it and bought it from the folks that stole it.
That seems unhelpful. You want to change a fundamental part of how society works but when asked why/how/what will the change/benefit be, you don't actually want to explain?
We can deflect forever until we're back to asking if the French really have the right to France given the Franks were a Germanic tribe that migrated to the area and became more or less dominant. At a certain point you have to engage with the idea that you're proposing foundational changes to society, and that these changes need to be adequately defined, justified and explained. Deflecting will get you nowhere.
You insisted your ownership is a sacred thing no one should ever question.
I'm questioning it. Why do you get to own it unquestioningly?
It was taken from someone else. Why is it okay for you to keep it even though we know for a fact it was taken from someone else.
I did not say it was sacred. I said it was a deeply engrained concept that is foundational to how we think and how society functions. You don't like it? Ok. What is your altnernative? What are the benefits? Why should anyone entertain this formless questioning?
No one is arguing you shouldn't have the right to own things.
I'm anxiously awaiting an explanation of exactly what people are aruging for. Because if you're not arguing against the concept of ownership why am I seeing these enthusiastic posts decrying the concept of ownership?
More broadly and less aggressively: where does socialism come down on ownership rights? I get vaguely wary when I look at certain European socialist democracies because the amount of government interference in something like... say... property rights is worrysome. And apparently this is only a half measure.
We're not arguing against ownership. We're arguing against the concept of private property as opposed to personal property. Some others are also pointing out that "rights" only mean anything in so far as society decides they do.
So if I understand correctly, in a theoretical socialist state personal property remains broadly untouched? And that includes things like a computer, a car, a house?
Yup!
Ok that's good! I'm a little hazy as to why this wouldn't extend to things you create, but that's a solid baseline.
You'd own the physical things you made. The statue or the book, but you wouldn't own the idea behind them because an idea isn't a thing.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
I am entirely puzzled, because it's not like in capitalist, liberal democracies, your rights aren't granted by the State anyways.
See: the death penalty. The State, at least in some jurisdictions, reserves the right to rescind your right to life.
I don't know why you're puzzled, the concept of natural rights is thousands of years old and is a foundational principle of republicanism. Certain rights are not granted by the state, the state merely binds itself not to infringe upon them. This is a crucial principle in constraining tyranny.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about establishing whether X or Y is one such right, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
Edit: More to the point, I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with a discussion about socialism.
If an idea cannot be owned, then workers who produce ideas with their labor aren't producing anything. A writer isn't a professional writer, he's a professional publisher--and if someone else does publishing better, they're getting paid/vouchers/social credit/whatever for that story instead.
If an idea cannot be owned, then workers who produce ideas with their labor aren't producing anything. A writer isn't a professional writer, he's a professional publisher--and if someone else does publishing better, they're getting paid/vouchers/social credit/whatever for that story instead.
Like I mentioned earlier, its worth considering a system in with the law recognizes creation and demands credit while not guaranteeing production rights.
This would reasonably satisfy the desire for recognition and creative control of artistic works and establish a reliable portfolio against which a writer can secure advances from a worker owned printing company.
I get the desire for property to belong to you and be firmly enshrined in law. I don't want anyone else using my toothbrush and fucking up my closet. But extending that to Jeoffry S. Hapsburg III's right to own the largest source of employment in a small town from a continent away is nonsense.
(weird, when I tried to quote this it keeps quoting a whole tree of prior posts as well)
Suppose the small-town source of employment is a factory vertically integrated into Hapscorp's production chain, which feeds into the main Hapscorp factory that Jeff physically lives near. Is it ridiculous for factories which support each other to be under the same management? Will the small town be able to run the factory profitably, independently, after the government forcibly de-integrates them from Hapscorp? What will happen to the community with the main factory when the small-town factory supplies them less efficiently?
Absentee landlordism is a valid problem for government policy to seek to correct (through tax, for example) but using distance as a metric for ownership creates serious problems of its own
Why is the boss entitled to sole ownership of a communal venture, wherein the employees are members of the internal business community.
See also: why does the lord own the land filled and lived upon by serfs?
The Lord doesn't pay the serfs for the product of their labor, and they can't leave to start their own ventures.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
I am entirely puzzled, because it's not like in capitalist, liberal democracies, your rights aren't granted by the State anyways.
See: the death penalty. The State, at least in some jurisdictions, reserves the right to rescind your right to life.
I don't know why you're puzzled, the concept of natural rights is thousands of years old and is a foundational principle of republicanism. Certain rights are not granted by the state, the state merely binds itself not to infringe upon them. This is a crucial principle in constraining tyranny.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about what said rights are, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
Edit: More to the point, I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with a discussion about socialism.
The discussion of rights is unavoidable when you are discussing the fundamentals of government.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
I am entirely puzzled, because it's not like in capitalist, liberal democracies, your rights aren't granted by the State anyways.
See: the death penalty. The State, at least in some jurisdictions, reserves the right to rescind your right to life.
I don't know why you're puzzled, the concept of natural rights is thousands of years old and is a foundational principle of republicanism. Certain rights are not granted by the state, the state merely binds itself not to infringe upon them. This is a crucial principle in constraining tyranny.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about what said rights are, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
Edit: More to the point, I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with a discussion about socialism.
The discussion of rights is unavoidable when you are discussing the fundamentals of government.
... uhhh, so far the right to life, specifically, has only come up because you randomly blurted it out, so if you mean to say that it's relevant because you'll jump into any discussion about the fundamentals of government to blurt it out, that's a bit circular. :rotate:
That is to say, I would naturally expect any contemporary socialist proposal to treat natural rights as natural rights, or to otherwise explicitly lay out an alternative. But ... again, the US, for example, has the death penalty. That is to say, in certain circumstances, the government is allowed, very much, to alienate your right to life. People who join the military, some might say, surrender their right to life in certain circumstances. These are examples of those cases of when various rights may come into conflict or when some rights need to be sacrificed to protect other rights, but these issues are universal, across all forms of government. Soooooo yeah. I don't "get" why this is coming up.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
My right to life is granted by most people not wanting to die, so we agree not to kill each other.
There is nothing in nature that says others are not allowed to kill me, and if i went to live in the wilderness in an area with carnivores large enough to kill me, i would very soon be lunch.
So you have no right to live if the other people agree to kill you? No right to liberty if they enslave you?
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
I am entirely puzzled, because it's not like in capitalist, liberal democracies, your rights aren't granted by the State anyways.
See: the death penalty. The State, at least in some jurisdictions, reserves the right to rescind your right to life.
I don't know why you're puzzled, the concept of natural rights is thousands of years old and is a foundational principle of republicanism. Certain rights are not granted by the state, the state merely binds itself not to infringe upon them. This is a crucial principle in constraining tyranny.
Well, you might not want to lean too heavily on "liberty if enslaved" given that is a somewhat recent concept
It took hold less than 100 years after the founding of the first constitutional republic committed to defending the principle of liberty.
France abolished it in 1794, was re-established by Napoleon in 1804 in some carribean territories, re-abolished in 1848
The British Empire formally abolished it in 1833. The slave trade was illegal from 1807. Upper Canada provided provisions to prohibit importation and to free slave children at 25 in 1793. Lower Canada effectively abolished it in the 1790s through the courts
Portugal began the process in 1761
The Spanish Empire abolished all slavery in 1542 with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico (note the Spanish Empire was rather large at the time). This also abolished the forms of slavery the native populations used on each other
The Dutch were one of the last countries in to decide to do it in 1848, though the implementation was delayed until past the US civil war
The US managed to partially abolish it in 1808 and the rest in 1865, and was the only one to have a civil war over it
But you were talking about natural rights being a thousands of years old concept. What rights? Clearly not liberty. Life? Well maybe if you were a noble or a roman citizen, but not if you were any lower status. In most places throughout history a person can kill their servants or slaves and suffer at most monetary penalties
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
This isn't a chicken and egg thing. Socialists have to point out that all of human history has been a garbage fire because every time we suggest notOligarchy and maybe dragging Larry Kudlow from his home in the dead of night we are supposed to answer for Mao.
We'd be perfectly happy to discuss socialism without having to constantly talk about how America is soaked in indigenous blood or how unappealing Siberia is.
Okay, let's discuss Socialism itself then. I am scared of the general concept of Socialism because:
-It gives the state authority to expropriate private property in general, whereas private property is a human right
-It relies on the state to allocate resources, which mainstream economists consider generally inefficient
I would like to know from the Socialists ITT what the main points of a proposed Democratic Socialist constitution would be, and what mechanisms would guard against state overreach - particularly assuming, as you have established, there are hostile reactionary powers trying to undermine the Socialist State.
I will try to refrain from pointing to historical cases, but I am also curious: leaving aside the political aspect, do you consider the USSR or any other notionally socialist country to be a valid example of a Socialist economy, in terms of centrally planned resource allocation?
Are we making distinctions between private property and personal property here? Its an important point.
You are welcome to draw a distinction, but I will argue the right to own land is inalienable
Ha
I will, most likely, never own land. How can something be an intrinsic human right if only the rich are allowed it
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right. That doesn't mean you have to be given any one form of property. You have the right to acquire it and not have it expropriated. (yes, Kelo v. New London was fucking socialist garbage and should be overturned)
Why?
Why is your "ownership" sacred?
What if your ownership is causing harm to others?
This is a nonsensical argument because it can be applied to literally any instance of ownership in which another doesn't have something you have. You have a car/house/etc. and I don't, therefore your ownership of your car/house/etc. is harming me so you should be forced to contribute your car/house/etc. to social use to prevent harm.
It's a similar line of thinking which leads to incidents like "revolutionary taxation" because resources not in the possession of the revolutionary vanguard are harming the revolution.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Because a person on the internet does not consider rights to be intrinsic?
Are you also scared of atheists for not believing in hell?
In Budhists for believing death is not the end?
And, again, how are rights intrinsic?
What methods do you actually use to decide what rights exist and don't?
I'm not scared of socialism because of a man on the internet, anymore than I'm scared of Nazism because of 400lb NEETs tweeting about jews. I'm scared of socialism actually being, just as I am scared of Nazism being enacted.
Is your right to life intrinsic, or granted by the state?
I am entirely puzzled, because it's not like in capitalist, liberal democracies, your rights aren't granted by the State anyways.
See: the death penalty. The State, at least in some jurisdictions, reserves the right to rescind your right to life.
I don't know why you're puzzled, the concept of natural rights is thousands of years old and is a foundational principle of republicanism. Certain rights are not granted by the state, the state merely binds itself not to infringe upon them. This is a crucial principle in constraining tyranny.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about what said rights are, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
Edit: More to the point, I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with a discussion about socialism.
The discussion of rights is unavoidable when you are discussing the fundamentals of government.
... uhhh, so far the right to life, specifically, has only come up because you randomly blurted it out, so if you mean to say that it's relevant because you'll jump into any discussion about the fundamentals of government to blurt it out, that's a bit circular. :rotate:
That is to say, I would naturally expect any contemporary socialist proposal to treat natural rights as natural rights, or to otherwise explicitly lay out an alternative. But ... again, the US, for example, has the death penalty. That is to say, in certain circumstances, the government is allowed, very much, to alienate your right to life. People who join the military, some might say, surrender their right to life in certain circumstances. These are examples of those cases of when various rights may come into conflict or when some rights need to be sacrificed to protect other rights, but these issues are universal, across all forms of government. Soooooo yeah. I don't "get" why this is coming up.
The right to life came up because someone asked me to explain the concept of intrinsic rights.
You can forfeit your right to life under some circumstances, such as murder, although some argue this should not be the case.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
I mean, I don't want to delve into the general rights angle of this but I guess suffice to say we've hit upon another reason why socialism is a scary word. Also, the general mockery of this issue is max offputting.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
This is a distinction based on present legal code that has little to do with a greater discussion between the differences of private and personal property.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to innovation - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
It isn't his because this is a theoretical society in which claims to privately own productive economic sources aren't recognized. For the same reason all the years and effort I've put into my current employer grant me no recognized claim to its ownership.
Your question is more appropriately, "why would a society not want productive means privately owned"? The answer being "because it invariably leads to oligarchy in one for or another". You also equate the private ownership of enterprise with with profit motives, which isn't true in either direction.
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
I mean, I don't want to delve into the general rights angle of this but I guess suffice to say we've hit upon another reason why socialism is a scary word. Also, the general mockery of this issue is max offputting.
What issue? You mean the issue of people going:
"Let's talk about socialism!"
"Private property is an intrinsic right."
I mean, what's to stop someone from violating your natural rights right now?
The state? Well socialist states have laws and courts too, it's no different
Ultimately, it all disintegrates into the application of force, yes.
Given that we need a society and a government to prevent things from getting to that point, I'd prefer to have one that assumes I have a bunch of rights by default just by virtue of the fact that I am a person, and binds itself to that concept as a founding principle... rather than one in which nothing is assumed and my existence is gifted to me by the government.
I am owed that shit, because I am alive - not because you say I am.
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
No such thing truly exists now either, but I don't see why we couldn't have the equivalent to what currently exists in terms of legal priority.
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
The current bill of rights is subject to repeal by democratic vote though, just not a 50%+1 vote
All forms of private property are an intrinsic right.
Intrinsic? How?
I don't even believe in intrinsic rights, all rights are granted by governments or agreed upon by people.
And that's why I'm scared of socialism
Pretty much this is the problem yes
It's a silly argument. To borrow a turn of phrase from Jeremy Bentham, it's nonsense upon stilts.
Our government has decided that my natural rights to my property and my person extend to a right to grow and consume wheat on my property, but not a right to grow and consume cannabis. My natural right to free speech allows me to freely sing a song written before 1909 but not a song written after 1962. My natural right to bear arms... well, let's not even go there.
Seeing these rights as anything but extensions of a social contract, fulfilling common social goals, is patently absurd; as is the belief that men in a state of nature have a 'right' to anything.
But, I'll accept for the sake of argument that you disagree. So what? Your belief in some abstract concept of 'natural rights' offers you no more protection from jackbooted socialist thugs than a Christian's belief in divine morality offers him protection from morally capricious atheists. It isn't a neighbor's belief that your rights extend from a natural or intrinsic source that keeps him from murdering you, its his belief that you have a right to life regardless of that right's source.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I'm like... trying to engage all my TA/professor brain muscles right now to not just yell at y'all, "GET ON MY LEVEL," but seriously guys, get on the right level, at least.
If you have some secret premise that socialism is incompatible with natural rights, then just state it outright, so I can reply, no no it isn't, so we don't have to do this weird talking-around-the-question thing we're doing here.
I mean, Christ, the language we're using isn't even correct here. The question of natural rights came to a head during the Enlightenment when the status quo ideology was divine right, that the only rights man had were those rights extended to them by God. The argument for natural rights was that rights grew out of our humanity, rather than descended from God, and in a time of divine mandates, this, effectively, was to establish rights as existing separate from a monarch's willingness to grant them to certain individuals as they wished. What those rights were remained a matter of debate, even amongst liberal philosophers, and still remains a matter of debate now, at least with respect to newer conceptions of rights. (E.g. do women have the natural right to have abortions?)
If you're going to throw a tiff about rights vis a vis socialism, you should be talking about individual rights vs. collective rights. Marx believed that rights should be ascribed to communities and relationships, not individuals, but this made them no less natural nor intrinsic. (Not that Marx is the end-all, be-all on rights in socialist societies, by the way.)
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
The current bill of rights is subject to repeal by democratic vote though, just not a 50%+1 vote
Not according to West Virgina Board v. Barnette, which established explicitly (albeit as dicta) that fundamental rights exist and are not subject to vote.
I'm like... trying to engage all my TA/professor brain muscles right now to not just yell at y'all, "GET ON MY LEVEL," but seriously guys, get on the right level, at least.
If you have some secret premise that socialism is incompatible with natural rights, then just state it outright, so I can reply, no no it isn't, so we don't have to do this weird talking-around-the-question thing we're doing here.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
What else is there to say? Socialists here said it usually does not permit the private ownership of productive means but is perfectly comfortable with personal property.
"Inalienable" doesn't mean anything because even in the context of the current system no right is completely impervious to being curtailed. Its liberal rhetorical puffery.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
The current bill of rights is subject to repeal by democratic vote though, just not a 50%+1 vote
Not according to West Virgina Board v. Barnette, which established explicitly (albeit as dicta) that fundamental rights exist and are not subject to vote.
I'm like... trying to engage all my TA/professor brain muscles right now to not just yell at y'all, "GET ON MY LEVEL," but seriously guys, get on the right level, at least.
If you have some secret premise that socialism is incompatible with natural rights, then just state it outright, so I can reply, no no it isn't, so we don't have to do this weird talking-around-the-question thing we're doing here.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about establishing whether X or Y is one such right, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
You are not engaging in this discussion, in a thread about socialism, in good faith.
Replied.
(Edit: Mods, I know, but I am not attempting to accuse the poster of posting in bad faith. I am trying to highlight that one cannot have a good faith discussion of socialism if one adamantly holds onto the premise that private property rights are indisputable, and am trying to encourage the poster to loosen their hold on this premise, either by releasing their hold entirely or by recognizing that rights in practice are far different than rights in principle. To establish, axiomatically, that any society that violates private property rights is unacceptable is to beg the question on any discussion on socialism.)
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
You are not engaging in this discussion, in a thread about socialism, in good faith.
Replied.
The context of my point was, in compliance with a request from Styro, to stop discussing historical "socialist" countries and talk to him about Socialism as a concept. I agreed to do so, and listed the reasons I was scared of socialist principles - without reference to historical cases - in order to foster such discussion. One of those was the above. It was an earnest effort to let the socialist side engage on the level they said they wanted to engage.
How the fuck was that arguing in bad faith? What the hell are you going to mark as good faith?
In a Socialist regime, would there be an entrenched bill of rights not subject to repeal by democratic vote? What rights would be beyond the power of the state to alter?
The current bill of rights is subject to repeal by democratic vote though, just not a 50%+1 vote
Not according to West Virgina Board v. Barnette, which established explicitly (albeit as dicta) that fundamental rights exist and are not subject to vote.
I'm like... trying to engage all my TA/professor brain muscles right now to not just yell at y'all, "GET ON MY LEVEL," but seriously guys, get on the right level, at least.
If you have some secret premise that socialism is incompatible with natural rights, then just state it outright, so I can reply, no no it isn't, so we don't have to do this weird talking-around-the-question thing we're doing here.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
I can see no mechanism by which the bill of rights amendments are immune to being amended. They themselves are amendments after all. All of them can theoretically be repealed
Furthermore, a society cannot constrain its future self against its will indefinitely. If a society were to just agree that an unchangeable rule was dumb they could just ignore and not enforce it and that would be it
What makes property ownership an inalienable right? There are clearly some things individuals cannot own and some things which they can, therefore the boundary is malleable
If we want to talk about inherent rights it would seem to me the socialist understand of ownership, largely defined by who uses or contributes to a thing, is a far more coherent and natural thing than what we have now.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
How is it an issue if the owner-employee relationship is voluntary? In this case the owner-proprietor started the business and in return for compensation the new handful of employees are providing their labor. That they aren't also owners doesn't make the relationship automatically exploitative. If the argument is that all employment relationships are exploitative because people need to work to provide for themselves then collective ownership doesn't necessarily address that because collective ownership doesn't guarantee that individuals will be able to gain access to "their part" of ownership in a collectively owned business by entering the collective enterprise.
So now you have to either mandate involuntary relationships or place enterprises under the management of the state to guarantee employment.
It's really important to not confuse "the people who often advocate socialism" and "socialism" the structure. You don't start speaking Russian or stop believing in intrinsic rights or the Buddha just because you believe in a different pattern of ownership and income.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
How is it an issue if the owner-employee relationship is voluntary? In this case the owner-proprietor started the business and in return for compensation the new handful of employees are providing their labor. That they aren't also owners doesn't make the relationship automatically exploitative. If the argument is that all employment relationships are exploitative because people need to work to provide for themselves then collective ownership doesn't necessarily address that because collective ownership doesn't guarantee that individuals will be able to gain access to "their part" of ownership in a collectively owned business by entering the collective enterprise.
So now you have to either mandate involuntary relationships or place enterprises under the management of the state to guarantee employment.
The proprietor also extracts a financial compensastion for his efforts. I don't know why labor being paid would mean their effort doesn't count for ownership while his does.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
How is it an issue if the owner-employee relationship is voluntary? In this case the owner-proprietor started the business and in return for compensation the new handful of employees are providing their labor. That they aren't also owners doesn't make the relationship automatically exploitative. If the argument is that all employment relationships are exploitative because people need to work to provide for themselves then collective ownership doesn't necessarily address that because collective ownership doesn't guarantee that individuals will be able to gain access to "their part" of ownership in a collectively owned business by entering the collective enterprise.
So now you have to either mandate involuntary relationships or place enterprises under the management of the state to guarantee employment.
If you have no say in how the business is run, and your means of self-support are limited, then the nature of the relationship is inherently exploitative. It’s only a matter of degree and compromise.
Our own current economic state is a perfect example of this, where people’s means of self-support are restricted by the emergent nature of a market that funnels resources from the many to the few and pits the many against each other for opportunities to acquire the resources necessary to live in our society.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
How is it an issue if the owner-employee relationship is voluntary? In this case the owner-proprietor started the business and in return for compensation the new handful of employees are providing their labor. That they aren't also owners doesn't make the relationship automatically exploitative. If the argument is that all employment relationships are exploitative because people need to work to provide for themselves then collective ownership doesn't necessarily address that because collective ownership doesn't guarantee that individuals will be able to gain access to "their part" of ownership in a collectively owned business by entering the collective enterprise.
So now you have to either mandate involuntary relationships or place enterprises under the management of the state to guarantee employment.
The proprietor also extracts a financial compensastion for his efforts. I don't know why labor being paid would mean their effort doesn't count for ownership while his does.
Because he took the risk of starting and growing the enterprise. A risk that the employees who came later did not take. And they are entering the relationship with the terms of compensation up front.
The only argument I see against this a structural argument, that the need to work in order to purchase necessities means that the relationship is never truly "voluntary", and the state stepping in to turn private enterprises into collective enterprises does not solve this.
Posts
You'd own the physical things you made. The statue or the book, but you wouldn't own the idea behind them because an idea isn't a thing.
I feel like contemporary political philosophy has long since moved past the debate of natural rights. Not that people don't have natural rights, but the question of whether people have natural rights or not isn't really of debate any more, and the question is how your rights are actually achieved.
That is to say, we've all largely, in the Western world, accepted that God is dead, and that morality is defined by the human self, so bandying about questions of whether this right or that right is inalienable isn't really of interest any more, but rather the question is, who is actually provisioning you said right. Nobody is really arguing any more that our rights are granted by God. The very language of declaring a right intrinsic or not no longer fits the contemporary debates about human rights, which are mostly about establishing whether X or Y is one such right, who provides for/enforces those rights, and what happens when those rights come into conflict.
Edit: More to the point, I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with a discussion about socialism.
Like I mentioned earlier, its worth considering a system in with the law recognizes creation and demands credit while not guaranteeing production rights.
This would reasonably satisfy the desire for recognition and creative control of artistic works and establish a reliable portfolio against which a writer can secure advances from a worker owned printing company.
The Lord doesn't pay the serfs for the product of their labor, and they can't leave to start their own ventures.
The discussion of rights is unavoidable when you are discussing the fundamentals of government.
... uhhh, so far the right to life, specifically, has only come up because you randomly blurted it out, so if you mean to say that it's relevant because you'll jump into any discussion about the fundamentals of government to blurt it out, that's a bit circular. :rotate:
That is to say, I would naturally expect any contemporary socialist proposal to treat natural rights as natural rights, or to otherwise explicitly lay out an alternative. But ... again, the US, for example, has the death penalty. That is to say, in certain circumstances, the government is allowed, very much, to alienate your right to life. People who join the military, some might say, surrender their right to life in certain circumstances. These are examples of those cases of when various rights may come into conflict or when some rights need to be sacrificed to protect other rights, but these issues are universal, across all forms of government. Soooooo yeah. I don't "get" why this is coming up.
France abolished it in 1794, was re-established by Napoleon in 1804 in some carribean territories, re-abolished in 1848
The British Empire formally abolished it in 1833. The slave trade was illegal from 1807. Upper Canada provided provisions to prohibit importation and to free slave children at 25 in 1793. Lower Canada effectively abolished it in the 1790s through the courts
Portugal began the process in 1761
The Spanish Empire abolished all slavery in 1542 with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico (note the Spanish Empire was rather large at the time). This also abolished the forms of slavery the native populations used on each other
The Dutch were one of the last countries in to decide to do it in 1848, though the implementation was delayed until past the US civil war
The US managed to partially abolish it in 1808 and the rest in 1865, and was the only one to have a civil war over it
But you were talking about natural rights being a thousands of years old concept. What rights? Clearly not liberty. Life? Well maybe if you were a noble or a roman citizen, but not if you were any lower status. In most places throughout history a person can kill their servants or slaves and suffer at most monetary penalties
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
This is a nonsensical argument because it can be applied to literally any instance of ownership in which another doesn't have something you have. You have a car/house/etc. and I don't, therefore your ownership of your car/house/etc. is harming me so you should be forced to contribute your car/house/etc. to social use to prevent harm.
It's a similar line of thinking which leads to incidents like "revolutionary taxation" because resources not in the possession of the revolutionary vanguard are harming the revolution.
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
The right to life came up because someone asked me to explain the concept of intrinsic rights.
You can forfeit your right to life under some circumstances, such as murder, although some argue this should not be the case.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Pretty much this is the problem yes
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
The state? Well socialist states have laws and courts too, it's no different
I mean, I don't want to delve into the general rights angle of this but I guess suffice to say we've hit upon another reason why socialism is a scary word. Also, the general mockery of this issue is max offputting.
It isn't his because this is a theoretical society in which claims to privately own productive economic sources aren't recognized. For the same reason all the years and effort I've put into my current employer grant me no recognized claim to its ownership.
Your question is more appropriately, "why would a society not want productive means privately owned"? The answer being "because it invariably leads to oligarchy in one for or another". You also equate the private ownership of enterprise with with profit motives, which isn't true in either direction.
What issue? You mean the issue of people going:
"Let's talk about socialism!"
"Private property is an intrinsic right."
Yeah, that's a pretty big issue.
/massages forehead in pain
Ultimately, it all disintegrates into the application of force, yes.
Given that we need a society and a government to prevent things from getting to that point, I'd prefer to have one that assumes I have a bunch of rights by default just by virtue of the fact that I am a person, and binds itself to that concept as a founding principle... rather than one in which nothing is assumed and my existence is gifted to me by the government.
I am owed that shit, because I am alive - not because you say I am.
No such thing truly exists now either, but I don't see why we couldn't have the equivalent to what currently exists in terms of legal priority.
The current bill of rights is subject to repeal by democratic vote though, just not a 50%+1 vote
It's a silly argument. To borrow a turn of phrase from Jeremy Bentham, it's nonsense upon stilts.
Our government has decided that my natural rights to my property and my person extend to a right to grow and consume wheat on my property, but not a right to grow and consume cannabis. My natural right to free speech allows me to freely sing a song written before 1909 but not a song written after 1962. My natural right to bear arms... well, let's not even go there.
Seeing these rights as anything but extensions of a social contract, fulfilling common social goals, is patently absurd; as is the belief that men in a state of nature have a 'right' to anything.
But, I'll accept for the sake of argument that you disagree. So what? Your belief in some abstract concept of 'natural rights' offers you no more protection from jackbooted socialist thugs than a Christian's belief in divine morality offers him protection from morally capricious atheists. It isn't a neighbor's belief that your rights extend from a natural or intrinsic source that keeps him from murdering you, its his belief that you have a right to life regardless of that right's source.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
If you have some secret premise that socialism is incompatible with natural rights, then just state it outright, so I can reply, no no it isn't, so we don't have to do this weird talking-around-the-question thing we're doing here.
I mean, Christ, the language we're using isn't even correct here. The question of natural rights came to a head during the Enlightenment when the status quo ideology was divine right, that the only rights man had were those rights extended to them by God. The argument for natural rights was that rights grew out of our humanity, rather than descended from God, and in a time of divine mandates, this, effectively, was to establish rights as existing separate from a monarch's willingness to grant them to certain individuals as they wished. What those rights were remained a matter of debate, even amongst liberal philosophers, and still remains a matter of debate now, at least with respect to newer conceptions of rights. (E.g. do women have the natural right to have abortions?)
If you're going to throw a tiff about rights vis a vis socialism, you should be talking about individual rights vs. collective rights. Marx believed that rights should be ascribed to communities and relationships, not individuals, but this made them no less natural nor intrinsic. (Not that Marx is the end-all, be-all on rights in socialist societies, by the way.)
Not according to West Virgina Board v. Barnette, which established explicitly (albeit as dicta) that fundamental rights exist and are not subject to vote.
Literally the first thing I said that started this discussion was Socialism does not permit private property rights, which are an inalienable right. Reply to it.
What else is there to say? Socialists here said it usually does not permit the private ownership of productive means but is perfectly comfortable with personal property.
"Inalienable" doesn't mean anything because even in the context of the current system no right is completely impervious to being curtailed. Its liberal rhetorical puffery.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
He did. You glossed over it:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You are not engaging in this discussion, in a thread about socialism, in good faith.
Replied.
(Edit: Mods, I know, but I am not attempting to accuse the poster of posting in bad faith. I am trying to highlight that one cannot have a good faith discussion of socialism if one adamantly holds onto the premise that private property rights are indisputable, and am trying to encourage the poster to loosen their hold on this premise, either by releasing their hold entirely or by recognizing that rights in practice are far different than rights in principle. To establish, axiomatically, that any society that violates private property rights is unacceptable is to beg the question on any discussion on socialism.)
The context of my point was, in compliance with a request from Styro, to stop discussing historical "socialist" countries and talk to him about Socialism as a concept. I agreed to do so, and listed the reasons I was scared of socialist principles - without reference to historical cases - in order to foster such discussion. One of those was the above. It was an earnest effort to let the socialist side engage on the level they said they wanted to engage.
How the fuck was that arguing in bad faith? What the hell are you going to mark as good faith?
I can see no mechanism by which the bill of rights amendments are immune to being amended. They themselves are amendments after all. All of them can theoretically be repealed
Furthermore, a society cannot constrain its future self against its will indefinitely. If a society were to just agree that an unchangeable rule was dumb they could just ignore and not enforce it and that would be it
What makes property ownership an inalienable right? There are clearly some things individuals cannot own and some things which they can, therefore the boundary is malleable
How is it an issue if the owner-employee relationship is voluntary? In this case the owner-proprietor started the business and in return for compensation the new handful of employees are providing their labor. That they aren't also owners doesn't make the relationship automatically exploitative. If the argument is that all employment relationships are exploitative because people need to work to provide for themselves then collective ownership doesn't necessarily address that because collective ownership doesn't guarantee that individuals will be able to gain access to "their part" of ownership in a collectively owned business by entering the collective enterprise.
So now you have to either mandate involuntary relationships or place enterprises under the management of the state to guarantee employment.
The proprietor also extracts a financial compensastion for his efforts. I don't know why labor being paid would mean their effort doesn't count for ownership while his does.
If you have no say in how the business is run, and your means of self-support are limited, then the nature of the relationship is inherently exploitative. It’s only a matter of degree and compromise.
Our own current economic state is a perfect example of this, where people’s means of self-support are restricted by the emergent nature of a market that funnels resources from the many to the few and pits the many against each other for opportunities to acquire the resources necessary to live in our society.
Because he took the risk of starting and growing the enterprise. A risk that the employees who came later did not take. And they are entering the relationship with the terms of compensation up front.
The only argument I see against this a structural argument, that the need to work in order to purchase necessities means that the relationship is never truly "voluntary", and the state stepping in to turn private enterprises into collective enterprises does not solve this.