From: gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Social Democracy
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 19:33:44 GMT

In article <19921104233929ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>
ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Jack B. Nimble) writes:
>In article <1992Oct29.182955.9307@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>, on 29
Oct 92 18:29:55 GMT,
>gsmith@clio.uucp (Gene W. Smith) writes:


>>One can just as well ask Marxist style "How else than by theft of other
>>people's labor can capitalists arise?"  One simplistic critique does
>>not deserve another, and this kind of hogwash will wash just as many
>>hogs as Marx ever did.

>Perhaps you'd be kind enough to explain exactly how the employment by
>capitalists of workers is theft of labor?

Well, go read Marx.  Value is created by labor, so any additional
value over and above the amount of labor required to produce something
is stealing the value of what is produced from those who have produced
it.

>The workers are paid and they freely contract to supply the labor for
>wage compensation.

Ah, but the means of production have already been hogged by the
capitalists, so this relationship is fundamentally coercive.  Your
argument proves that the abuse conditions of Marx's time, with children
slaving away for very little under dangerous conditions, was actually
OK.

>Or perhaps someone in the background holds agun to their head and
>compels them to work in a specific job?

More or less--the haves having grabbed it all, the have-nots are
forced to work under whatever conditions the haves allow.  Since the
ownership of property by the haves is based on force, it is plainly
coercive.

I better stop now or I will become a Marxist.

>>>Occam's razor. All rights may be considered to be property rights.

>>This is not an application of Occam's razor, the definition of which
>>I sincerely doubt you even know.  It also has the effect of making the
>>phrase "property rights" meaningless, which has the further effect of
>>making your defense of it also meaningless.

>Your intuition has failed you once again (looks like you average one
>such failure per paragraph). Occam's razor states that entities should
>not be multiplied beyond necessity. In other words, use the simplest set
>of hypotheses in a theory which is adequate to account for the data
>being modelled. There is no need to introduce the complexity of two
>categories of rights, i.e., human rights and property rights (though
>modern day liberals insist on doing this).

Theories involving rights are not explanatory theories, so this is
gibberish.  Moreover, introducing a right does not mean reifying it,
so no further metaphysical entities are introduced when your analysis
concludes there are more categories of rights than one.

>All human rights are completely reducible (hence the application of
>Occam's razor) and understandable as property rights, given that each
>human being is a self-owner.

Fine.  Explain the right of a child to support by its parents on the
basis of self-ownership.

>I suggest that you quote enough of an article so that you don't destroy
>context. In the original article I said that just because human rights
>are subsumed under property rights does not mean that people are nothing
>but property any more so than to a physicist would human beings be
>nothing but atomic particles.

Being a physicist does not entail being a reductionist.  But saying we
own ourselves does mean we are property, though it might mean more
than this.  Since this notion leads to slavery, among other evils, I
don't think much of it.

If we own ourselves, we must be able to sell ourselves.  Otherwise, we
are an entailed property, which is another way of saying we don't
really own said propery.


-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: soc.motss