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Many would say that the right to be employed is socialist, but if you think about it, rights for everyone is socialist. Economic rights should be part of a country's constitution.
Perhaps what FDR meant or SHOULD have meant was that people in a free society should have a RIGHT TO ACCESS these things. They aren't going to be handed to them on a silver platter. The people need to take a LITTLE RESPONSIBILITY for their own well-being.
FDR was obviously clueless about economics as all his government programs did nothing but make the depression last longer. Some say it wasn't really over until 1947! So you can't expect someone like him or Obama to understand that jobs don't grown on trees.
I am absolutely right. For several years I rented a guest house. When the owners moved, they put the property on the market. Government said I could not buy the guest house independently of a nearby larger house and land. Since I could not afford the larger house and land, effectively I had no property rights.
This is standard practice in urban and suburban America. Only rural outposts allow this sort of thing.
This again? Please stop derailing these threads with this nonsense.
Show me a non-rural local zoning code which allows sale and occupancy of a dwelling on a parcel of land 2500 square feet or smaller.
There are lots of them. Cities all over the country have very little land associated with them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by freemkt
But I was not trying to buy the larger home, I was trying to buy the smaller home. The owner was willing to sell me only the smaller home but government did not allow that option.
What they wouldnt allow you to do is sub-divide that larger lot that the larger home was on, that isnt denying you a right to buy a home. YOU didnt want to buy the larger home.
Originally Posted by freemkt:"But I was not trying to buy the larger home, I was trying to buy the smaller home. The owner was willing to sell me only the smaller home but government did not allow that option."
pghquest replied:"What they wouldnt allow you to do is sub-divide that larger lot that the larger home was on, that isnt denying you a right to buy a home. YOU didnt want to buy the larger home."
Hair splitting aside, regarding the way things were worded which may not have been expressed properly, it seems like his point was that government is interfering with property rights through the existence of the subdivision rules (typically part of zoning regs)... to which you should be agreeing with him.... at least on that specific point.
Who imprisoned thousands of US citizens and confiscated their property for no good reason, and who prolonged the Great Depression. He didn't die soon enough.
His contemporaries regarded him as among the greatest presidents to have ever led the country. He didn't get 4 presidential terms for nothing.
Many would say that the right to be employed is socialist, but if you think about it, rights for everyone is socialist. Economic rights should be part of a country's constitution.
Turning things that are not rights, but privileges offered at somebody else's good will, into "rights" is improper and a gross violation of the people's right not to have government adopt power is should not have, and engage in areas of society that it should not be.
If someone has a "right" to be employed, it is inescapable that society has an obligation to provide that to them. Society, in this case, means the government, when other outlets are unable to provided employment.
However, if being forced into a work gang to go out into the forests for reforestation, is a substitute for welfare checks in exchange for nothing, I might go for it.
Originally Posted by freemkt:"But I was not trying to buy the larger home, I was trying to buy the smaller home. The owner was willing to sell me only the smaller home but government did not allow that option."
pghquest replied:"What they wouldnt allow you to do is sub-divide that larger lot that the larger home was on, that isnt denying you a right to buy a home. YOU didnt want to buy the larger home."
Hair splitting aside, regarding the way things were worded which may not have been expressed properly, it seems like his point was that government is interfering with property rights through the existence of the subdivision rules (typically part of zoning regs)... to which you should be agreeing with him.... at least on that specific point.
Its not hair splitting. Zoning laws exist in this nation for a reason, and if you dont agree with them, are you going to tell me that you have no problem with your neighbor starting a neighborhood landfill on their property? Them not wanting to allow a sub-divide isnt denying freemkt a right to enjoy property. The only way this right is denied is the government said "Hey freemkt, you CANT BUY ANY HOME".. Not only did they not say that, but they did say he can buy THIS home, provided he can afford it. freemkt is the one who decided NOT to pursue the purchase. His rights were NOT violated simply because he cant afford the subject property.
You cant subdivide a lot YOU DONT OWN. You cant exercise a right that isnt YOURS.
pghquest wrote:"...You cant subdivide a lot YOU DONT OWN." You cant exercise a right that isnt YOURS"
Not entirely sure who exactly is "you" referring to in this case? "Freemkt" did not seem to imply that he wanted to force the owner to subdivide. Was not the moral of his story that he said it was the owner who was willing to subdivide it?
And I quote: Freemkt wrote:"... But I was not trying to buy the larger home, I was trying to buy the smaller home. The owner was willing to sell me only the smaller home but government did not allow that option."
By "a right that isn't yours" I am not quite clear who you are referring to. Were you referring to freemkt wanting to subdivide, and saying he did not have the right as he is not the owner, or were you saying the current owner of that property also should not have that right?
pghquest wrote:Zoning laws exist in this nation for a reason, and if you dont agree with them, are you going to tell me that you have no problem with your neighbor starting a neighborhood landfill on their property?
Would I have a moral problem with it such that I would ever justify preemptively enjoining it? Not necessarily. Would need more information on the harms involved. There may be some harms, or there may be none. Depends how they run the operation.
Should I have an ethical problem with the landfill provided that it offers no appreciable negative externalities that constitute a harm? No, I shouldn't.
Does that mean I have to "like it," per se? No, I don't have to "like it." I don't like the way my neighbor gardens.... he sucks at landscaping, but tough nookies on me, as I don't take such a trite aesthetic objection such as not liking my neighbors choice of shrubs as a credible negative externality such that it constitutes a harm under the any moral framework I would ever ascribe to such that I would treat it as something that can be enjoined.
What is the negative externality in this case? That some nosy neighbors delicate aesthetic sensibilities might be offended somehow because the neighborhood is not "rich enough" for the whiny ******* sensibilities? That's beside the fact that I don't even see how it would be offended via any credible argument, because in this case, whether the property was subdivided or not, the same amount of houses still exist prior to this subdivision as after the subdivision, and people could have lived in both houses both prior as well as after a potential subdivision. The subdivision is entirely a paper driven abstraction with no credible objection to be had, so far as I can see.
And even a piece of property has certain negative externalities associated with it, like living next to a highway or a preexisting airport that may have been there long before anyone of the current residents, does this then mean people should forfeit their ability to consent to the externality in deciding whether they find the trade-off worth it? Maybe the person likes the property and does not care if it is 500 feet from a highway. That's their choice. They can feel free to not live near a highway, or an airport, if they so choose.
But who is the "victim" here in this specific case? Is there a toxic waste dump or landfill (the latter, your example) on this property that you have inside knowledge of? I saw no mention of a landfill.
pghquest wrote:"...Them not wanting to allow a sub-divide isnt denying freemkt a right to enjoy property.
The only way this right is denied is the government said "Hey freemkt, you CANT BUY ANY HOME..."
That underlined statement of yours (at least the way I take the implied meaning) deserves much more scrutiny that I will give it here. I take that one statement has a great deal of moral significance to it, specifically because of the inclusion of the word "only" which I take to be an explicit clarification that you are saying "that and that alone (the comment that follows the "only" declaration is to be taken as the sole criteria on the matter. As phrased, it seems as if you have reduced your position to an entirely arbitrary legal positivist dictum which reduces to "whatever the government law says your rights are (at least on this issue), that is the sole determinant on the matter." In saying that, you have thus [perhaps unintentionally through poor phrasing] entirely decoupled your position from ethics, and in doing so, seemingly abandoned the harm concept which you did actually briefly broach in your message. So you went from trying to actually make a ethically substantive point about harm when you mentioned garbage dumps, but then you wrote that, and that one sentence seems to imply nothing about the harm principle, but everything about a position revolving around "... because the government says so."
The operative question should be not whether government did [interfere] (they did so explicitly), but whether the interference was morally justified. And as per how ethics work, that revolves around the harm concept. Just as the concept of free speech revolves around the right choose the words you want to choose just so long as they are not imposing a negative externality which consists of a harm within the framework of an ethical system, so too does property rights revolve around the right to choose available properties you want to purchase by mutual consent, with the only ethical proviso being no negative harm externalities, and it is the issue of harm that must be the linchpin of the entire discussion.
If we applied your chain of logic to free speech or firearms, the rationale amounts to this..... government could deny 99.99 percent of your free speech, or 99.99 percent of your firearms liberties, or pretty much any other liberty, and we would have to take it as a credible argument that because you have a remaining 0.01 percent "choice," that your liberty is not being abridged. You are buying into your premise, or are you just kind of winging it, hoping that it'll fly.
You raised the issue of externalities with one mere offhanded sentence, but then you subsequently said virtually nothing whatsoever about it to advance your argument for why an abridgment of property rights in this specific case should be considered legitimate.
I thus have nothing to work with here when critiquing whatever point you think you are trying to make. Hence, I am left to conclude that your entire argument revolves around the idea that if government takes away 99.99999 percent of your liberty, then somehow we are expected to take seriously the idea that your liberty is not in any way abridged simply because you get to pick through the remaining 0.00001 percent liberty leftover after they revoked the rest on questionable grounds.
Your argument so far as I can tell amounts to trying to justify a dictator when he tells his oppressed subjects that they do indeed have free speech..... just so long as they don't criticize the dictator, or don't the dictators family (or cronies), and so long as they don't criticize their government, or any public servant, or don't question the official textbook version of history, or this, that, and the other thing.
And likewise, if government mandated that 99.9 percent of food in society shall be banned, but the glorious leader is still offering his citizens the free choice of pizza or Italian food, that your freedom of food selection has not been abridged, because after all, you are still getting the choice between Pizza and Italian. Yeah. Okay. But yet that seems to be the morally decoupled legal positivist conclusion, if we took your underlined statement at face value.
That's your argument thusfar, quite literally, absent any further expansion on the "harm" issue that you tried to broach, but then never really expanded upon.
You should go back to the landfill argument, at least you were approaching the ethics of the situation properly with that brief tangent before you delved into absurdity land when you went off on a tangent implying that government can theoretically revoke all your liberty, but just so long as you have a few scraps of liberty leftover, then your liberty has not really been abridged.
So getting back to that harm... expand upon it.... what's the harm in that specific case that justifies the abridgment? What is the negative externality in your view of subdividing a property in the manner described?
Subdividing a property in the manner described seems a trite little aesthetic issue with all the moral significance of trying to equate a bona fide negative externality like a toxic waste dump polluting the entire town with somebody who has delicate sensibilities getting offended by trite aesthetic issues like pink flamingos or not liking the neighbors choice of house color or style.
Last edited by FreedomThroughAnarchism; 08-20-2011 at 09:27 PM..
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