From: hgm@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Re: Wage Slavery (Was: BIG LIE about the market)
Date: 8 Apr 92 23:16:56 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

In article <121901@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>, kent@phoenix.ocf.llnl.gov (Kent J Crispin) writes:
> response to my response to someone else:

Sorry, I hope you didn't mind my butting in.

> I guess I take a different tack, and I tend not to think in terms of "rights"
> at all.  In an earlier post I blathered on about how "ownership" is actually
> a complex notion, only partly tied up with legal notions of property rights.
> The idea of property rights itself is very complex.  It just isn't true 
> that property rights in practice are based on abstract principles -- they
> are based in a web of legal codes, customs, and social obligations, with
> no single abstract inspiration.
> 
> There are many possible reasons why I personally might coerce someone else
> in some way, or why I personally might use force on another.  These reasons
> are mediated through my morality, whatever that might be, but in general
> I couldn't base it on logic alone, and in fact, I think it would be impossible
> in principle to do so.

Very little, if anything can be based on logic alone. You must have a premise
or antecedent for a logical argument. Even 'I think, therefore I am.' is in
dispute as an incontrovertible statement.  We all have to start from statements
which we select for our fundamental belief system on the basis of 'emotional
values' derived from our experience. I like the test of imagining you are
setting up a world into which you are about to be born but you don't know to
whom, in what status of society, you will be born. If you were about to be born
into our world and didn't know whether you would be born in Ethiopia or USA
and had the power to change things before you arrived would you change
anything? If any  premise in my belief system leads logically to a conclusion
which would disadvantage me just because I was born in Ethiopia I question it.

On the basis of that kind of test, I take as my starting point that no one
person has any more natural rights than any other. You may disagree with this.
It is a quite widespread belief but there have been societies built on the idea
that that kings have a 'divine right'. However logical the argument I build on 
that starting point, you will have a perfectly valid reason for saying that my 
conclusions are false. You just say you believe my premise is false and we will 
have to agree to differ. 

I do believe that we have some 'natural rights' which exist whether we are
formed into societies or not and which no individual or group of individuals
have any right to take from us without our express permission. You say 

> The only thing I could say is that, whatever the
> reason, I am responsible for my actions.

I would agree with that and believe that a corollary of that is that you have
the right to decide when to act and when not to act. You are then responsible
for, and entitled to, all the benefits and losses which are the products of your
actions. In other words you are entitled to the full value of the products of
your labour. I believe this is a 'natural right' and that no government has the
right to, coercively, tax your income or wages without your individual, express
permission. 

Given equality of rights, I believe, there can be very few natural rights. A
right must be something that can be delivered to all who are entitled to it at
any time that they choose to exercise it. In addition to these natural rights
we may have contractual rights. Many of the things we think of as rights seem to
me to be only justifiable on the basis of an assumed contract entered into when
we become part of a society. We may give up natural rights to acquire
contractual rights but I don't think it can be assumed, given the difficulties
of moving to another jurisdiction and the limited choice of societal structures
available, that we have entered into such a contract. It must have been an
explicit, fully informed decision.

We may have a right to work if we
define work loosely enough. It could in fact be identical to saying that you
have the right to decide when to act and when not to act, since any action could
be defined as work. If we define work as paid employment, however, we cannot
have a right to 'work' as, if we all wished to exercise it at the same time,
there would be no one to employ us and my right to work has to imply someone
else's responsibility to employ me. Not on, right! So, by taxing wages and
incomes to provide unemployment benefits my government is infringing my natural
rights to deliver to others compensation for failing to deliver to them an
assumed contractual right. Similarly with education and health care.

I do not even believe we can have a natural right to life as it may not be
possible for us all to live at the same time. When I thought this all through,
and looked up the 'United Nations Declaration of Human Rights' and disqualified
almost everything in it as a natural right I was getting pretty unhappy as I am
quite sure if I am born an Ethiopian I must have some rights. I felt that if I
could not have a right to life I could at least have a right to the same share
as any one else to those things which exist in nature without anyone having
done anything. With a share of those things and the right to act as I choose,
provided I do not infringe any one else's natural rights, I have a fair chance
of surviving.

Property rights as we now understand them are as you say  'based in a web of 
legal codes, customs, and social obligations' but I believe these are
contractual rights which infringe natural property rights and are therefore
unjustifiable. 

> Use of force by society, or the state, is even harder for me to rationalize.
> Instead, I view the whole thing as a gigantic complex optimization problem,
> where we collectively authorize the state (in a democracy, at least) to 
> use force in the minimal way to accomplish certain goals of stability,
> happiness, prosperity, and so on.  (Use of force is intrinsically not
> very happy, in my experience, so there may be another way to factor it in.)


You have a natural right to freedom from coercion. All or any of your natural
rights are dependent on your recognising my natural rights. If you infringe on
my natural rights you lose your natural right to freedom from coercion. You
also may if you choose, as apparently you do, trade your natural right to
freedom from coercion for whatever benefits the collective is giving you in
return. If I, however, have not infringed anyone's natural rights and have not
explicitly given up my right to freedom from coercion then I do not believe
that your collective has the right to force me to do anything.

I think we collectively feel that we may have infringed on some natural rights
somewhere along the line so we allow the state to coerce us into paying taxes
in a confused attempt to salve our consciences. Since most of us are unclear
what rights have been infringed and what the appropriate compensation is we
have given the state an open cheque which it is abusing freely.

> To sum up (this sounds terrible, I know), I really justify coercion as just
> a means to certain ends, one of which is to minimize coercion.

Yeah, terrible. I have a horror of ends justifying means. Usually the means
dictate the ends. Coercion by the state will lead to a coercive society. Only
if we are very clear about the limits to appropriate state coercion can we hope
to prevent it being used as a precedent for escalation of coercion. We need to
fill in the name and amount of the cheque. 

In my opinion the state is already way past the mark in many areas.

Helen Marsh