(11-05-2018, 12:45 AM)Galen Wrote:(11-04-2018, 10:28 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-04-2018, 06:08 AM)Galen Wrote: The Jim Crow agenda was an unfortunate consequence, one of many, from the compromise of allowing slavery to continue after the American Revolution. I am not a big fan as you might imagine since involuntary servitude is not something libertarians are in favor of. This forms the basis of the libertarian view of taxation as theft.
The Founding Fathers on the whole, Alexander Hamilton is an exception, could be considered in modern terms to be Minarchist Libertarians. Murray Rothbard's Conceived In Libery covers this evolution toward individual liberty from Colonial Times to the early Federalist period. Their agenda was to create a government that was limited in power which was an unheard of idea in the eighteenth century.
Modern liberals and progressives are not and never have been in favor of individual liberty. The battle always has and always be between liberty and tyranny.
But as I see it, liberty should not get in the way of human rights. Robber Barrons thus should not get in the way of food, shelter, health care, retirement and other basic rights supposedly guaranteed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Thus, so long as the absurd division of wealth exists side by side with a denial of rights, this progressive for one can scream.
Progressives tend to define everything as a right and has no concept of the difference between positive and negative rights. It never occurs to you that the progressive tendency to declare everything to be a human right would create a tyranny on par with the Soviet Union.
The problem with positive rights is that you have to apply coercion to get the resources for those things that you consider to be rights. There is no limit to what progressive consider to be rights which is why progressives tend to be such a nasty bunch of totalitarians.
The distinction is not so clear as you would like us to believe. It is worth remembering that the feudal economy was far more complex in assigning rights and duties than is the modern world. It may be the simplification of the feudal world that made free-market capitalism possible, as feudal rights and obligations could be hereditary. At the extreme, slavery is a hereditary duty to a master who can sell those duties as a right to another master. Slavery evolved from medieval serfdom in becoming more overtly commercial and with tighter control of a slave.
The arguments to abolish slavery did not come from libertarians; indeed, the more effective ones came from Christianity. If as Harriet Beecher Stowe said in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is offensive that a Sultan keeps Christians as slaves in a harem, it is similarly offensive that nominally-Christian planters keep Christians (and by then, the slaves in America were Christians) as slaves. Uncle Tom's Cabin is very much a novel of Christian heroism as an ideal.
Let me discuss a right that most people have in theory that many do not get in practice: marriage. Yes, there are singles who like life without the encumbrance of a spouse because such implies fewer compromises when things go somewhat adequately. Marriage comes with reasonable duties. I can ignore for now people who have been denied the right to marry because they are incapable of loving people of the other gender but now have same-sex marriage as an option.
Nobody has a right to a spouse even if one wants one. In my case I have Asperger's, which can make me seem creepy. I would be difficult even if I am not violent or abusive, I am not an addict or alcoholic, and I don't have expensive bad habits. I need not go into all the details. Any child that I would sire has a high likelihood of ending up institutionalized. I am somewhere between (if you want to talk about movie characters). I can hurt people without physical force or intention. I see myself as Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane) without the wealth, power, and influence. It is probably best for the world that I not have wealth, power, and influence. I am not a fun person to be around.
Libertarians cannot in principle resolve many of the conflicts of rights and freedom. In all advanced societies, education is a right. How much differs depending upon the community and the time. Not long ago, a college education could be relatively cheap -- about as costly as a hobby. In two very different places that I lived as a teenager I could tell who was going to college and who wasn't based on what they did (if boys) if they were smart enough. In both places, people heavily involved with cars -- tooling around with them, racing them, or modifying them -- were not going to college. Today, college (like much else) has had so many costs loaded onto it that one typically graduates deeply in debt, at least in America. If I had a bright kid I would get him to a country where education beyond the secondary level is free or cheap, especially as the economic rewards for a liberal education are so slight for the cost in America. The American economy wants people trained -- not educated -- to fill the economic roles, and increasingly, Americans are nothing more than their economic roles.
But I hope that that is the end of my venting.
Positive rights imply the duty to pay taxes if one has an income. But even the right to work is a suspect commodity. Some people are best suited for jobs in which they pretend to work, and their employers pretend to pay them. Surely you know the political order under which that joke applied. Law and order? That implies a police force, ideally one paid well enough so that it does not have to take bribes from organized criminals just to keep up appearances. Without law and order, civil rights are meaningless. Justice? Closely connected. Education? You might notice that if you have ever examined a pattern of people executed for murder in recent times, a disproportionate share are high-school dropouts. An educated populace is a civilized populace. Public health? That implies infrastructure that precludes open sewers.
We must keep the responsibilities limited and the rights worthy. That is a tough call. That is why we need democracy, and not plutocracy as Donald Trump wants.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.