> why? If we take it as granted that life has a "cost" (and therefore a value), it is also a given that someone must pay that cost for people to live. Given th

> why? If we take it as granted that life has a "cost" (and therefore a value), it is also a given that someone must pay that cost for people to live. Given that some people are born more capable than others of paying the cost (their value) we find ourselves forced to take the monsterous position that some lives have intrinsicly more value than others, and worse that some lives have negative value as they cost more than than the value they provide. However, it is obviously not true that life itself has a fixed "cost", except within one of the specific systems of government that acknowledge property rights and the concept of cost in general. A lone man born into nature incurs no "cost" by existing, he is a part of the ecosystem that supports him and "costs" it no more than the beasts of the forest "cost" it. "Cost" as a concept is a fiction that we develop to trade with other humans, not some natural and unavoidable aspect of life granted to us from the gods. > This is compatible with the statement "existence isn't free." It is not. Existence is free, and the only cost it incurs is within our imaginations. The obligation to care for those who can't or won't function within the new systems of trade are the debt we owe for taking that freedom away by enforcing property rights through violence. The obligation is real, the cost is a social fiction dreamt up for accounting purposes.