4 ms·

"<thing> is a human right" == "please spend time, money, and effort so as I can have it without paying, sucker" Now replace it with housing, healthcare, and an

• esarbe 7y ago
  As a society, the moment that you allow for private property, you take over responsibility for the livelihood of everyone. Property is theft on the common good. If you steal from the common good, you have to deal with the consequences. If you deprive people from making their own living, you have to accept that these people will find ways and means. You didn't build that.
  • jaldhar 7y ago
    As a society, the moment you allow for freedom of Religion, you take over responsibility for everyone’s practice of religion. As a society, the moment you allow the right to bear arms, you are responsible for providing everyone who wants one with a gun. The “commons” are waste land until they are improved by human effort. (I’m assuming you are not a nomadic hunter/gatherer.). That is the ultimate basis for property rights. It’s true I didn’t build that but neither did those homeless moms. What they are doing is theft.
    • esarbe 7y ago
      Your counter-examples (thanks for providing them, by the way) don't quite work. Sure, they work grammatically, but not contextually. Both the right to bear arms and the right to religlious freedom are immaterial rights. There's not necessity to bear arms for my survival, there's no necessity for religlious freedom for my survival. There's however the necessity of food and shelter for my survival. As soon as you take these away by assuming property rights, you take on the burden of supporting everyone that might have used said assumed property for their own survival. Since we all started out as nomadic hunter/gatherers, this assumption of the "commons" being a wasteland does not quite hold, don't you think?
      • jaldhar 7y ago
        Yes, we all started out as hunter/gatherers millennia ago. We are not now. We have been mostly improving the wastelands ever since. (I say mostly because occasionally we re-waste them again but thankfully less and less often these days.)
        • esarbe 7y ago
          I'm not sure that I would consider i.e. cutting down the amazon rain forest and turning them into pastures for cattle or fields for mono cultures as an improvement of wasteland. Pretty much the same happened to the European rain forest and is currently happening to east-Asian rain forests. What we've been doing is changing the environment to suit our needs as agriculturalists, but that's not an objective improvement from wasteland to garden-of-Eden. Indeed; exactly with this transformation from "wasteland" (as you would maybe call it) to predatively exploited ecosystem (as I would call it) we (as agriculturalists) have infringed on the rights of all hunter/gatherers that have been there before. We've set up enclosures to limited their ability to travel from hunting ground to hunting ground, we've slaughtered their prey animals (i.e. bisons), all the while claiming that their are uncivilized and barbaric and that this is all for their best.
        • jaldhar 7y ago
          The Amazon has 50,000 species of beetles which is good for beetles I guess but what makes it wasteland or not is what it does for humans. There as well we can discuss whether cattle or biodiversity is a better improvement but that is a different topic.
          • esarbe 7y ago
            The Amazon (and similar environments) has been supporting human life for millennia. Even if you discount beetles (as I wouldn't, since beetles are awesome), calling it a wasteland does not seem very appropriate to me.
            • jaldhar 7y ago
  • eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    Spot on!
  • whb07 7y ago
    You sound like someone who isn’t aware of the wonderful events where tens of millions of people suffered and died of starvation and political prosecution where such schemes were plentiful. Perhaps living in the USSR was indeed the golden years for you?
    • esarbe 7y ago
      You sound like someone ... [insert boring and repetitive, possible derogatorive epithet that doesn't provide anything useful to the conversation and end with a snarky, rhetorical question].
  • foxyv 7y ago
    > "Property is theft on the common good." Who are you? George Orwell?
    • esarbe 7y ago
      Indeed, I am. How did you figure it out? Seriously; where does any property come from?