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> A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world
by joshuamorton 5y ago
> A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
I don't mean as an economic system. Chattel slavery is one particular example of macro-scale slavery, but macro-scale slavery isn't what I was referring to.
Put another way, our markets are not perfectly efficient, and there exists enough slack to allow niches where inefficient cruelty can exist. Even though slavery was inefficient and had died out in the north, the South did all it could to keep it around. It still took a laws and war to get rid of it. If the government stopped enforcing all laws today, how long would it take for some people to be kidnapped and enslaved? A week?
> The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Something being not a free market doesn't make it a right, nor does the government providing it as a service to some people. You might be able to get away with the argument that emergency medical care is considered a right in the US, but emergency medical care is only a small part of healthcare.
- WalterBright 5y agoTake a look at what goes on in the healthcare system. It's all the result of unintended side effects of well-intentioned regulation. For another example, the AMA deliberately restricts the number of seats in medical universities. They are empowered to by law. This keeps the number of doctors down, and increases their pay.
- joshuamorton 5y agoThis has nothing to do with whether or not something is a "right". I'll remind you, the initial statement you made was "Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.", but you're now saying somewhat ahistorical things about slave labor and market economies. Even if what you were saying was accurate, is has nothing to do with how we define rights.
- WalterBright 5y agoYou can (and people do) invent and define rights all the time. People have also tried to legislate that pi=3. Almost daily, legislatures try to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand. That doesn't make them rights, and it never works.
- joshuamorton 5y ago"The law of supply and demand" isn't a right. > You can (and people do) invent and define rights all the time.[...] That doesn't make them rights Huh?
- WalterBright 5y ago"The law of supply and demand" isn't a right. I didn't say it was. Neither did I say that pi=3 is a right. Please read what I wrote again.
- joshuamorton 5y agoYes, I and others have asked you to list out what the natural rights are, and you've waxed about free markets. I have no idea what you're trying to say, since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Hence my request for clarification. You're doing such a bad job of communicating here that the only reason I don't think I'm being trolled is that I know you wouldn't do that. My best guess is that you're trying to make the point that market economies are natural and that the rights we have under them are therefore natural, but this is basically an argument from status quo and it goes directly against what you said elsewhere about healthcare being a right due to government regulations. And from that you seem to be saying that healthcare is a right due to government regulation, but here you're saying that government decree doesn't make something a right. So like I said, I'm lost.
- cortesoft 5y agoWhat makes something a right, then? You keep talking around it, and saying things which you believe are rights, but have never said explicitly what makes your set of rights somehow objectively rights where others aren't.