From: gsmith@clio.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Social Democracy
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 18:59:48 GMT

In article <19921112030639ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU> ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Jack B. Nimble) writes:

>Value is created by more than labor; it requires capital goods and a
>willingness to take risk by entrepreneurs. Of course, you may, if you
>choose, view capital goods as the stored-up accumulated labor of
>capitalists (or their ancestors), but then your observation about
>stealing value from those who have produced goods is vacuous, for the
>capitalist entrepreneur has produced material goods as much as the
>paid laborers whom he hires.

Well, maybe you should go argue with a real Marxist, this is getting
tiresome and silly.  Obviously, the Marxist would point out
that the stored-upo accumulated labor in question is that of
the workers who did the actual work.  If a capitalist risks capital
which he gets by stealing value from the workers, that does not
make him any more deserving of return on it.

The Marxists have a more or less religious attitude towards material
goods which you seem to share.  They have a whole mythological theory
about property, and so do you.  You are two sides of the same
morally and spiritually deadening coin, as far as I can see.
Why are you so obsessed with the idea that you are walking around
epoxied to title deads?  What an appalling self-definition!

>Hogged? Productivity is not a zero-sum game. Workers who are so inclined
>are at liberty to set aside some of their wages, accumulate capital, and
>become entrepreneurs themselves. That's exactly how the so-called robber
>barons of the 19th century got their start in business.

Don't be an ass, Jack.  This sort of Monopoly game may not be zero
sum, but not everyone wins.  And when you are just scraping by, you
don't go out and invest in 1000 shares of General Motors.

>>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.

>Of course natural rights theories are explanatory; you've just never
>bothered to follow their development.

Complete and utter crap.  Do you think that natural right theories
explain property rights in the same sort of was that general relativity
explains gravitational attraction?  Do you know what the hell
I even meant?

 One can make all sorts of
>derivations in political and ethical philosophy from a set of initial
>principles. Even today, much of the common law is rooted in natural
>rights principles.

So what?  How the hell does this relate to anything relevant, or to
Occam's razor in particular?

>Furthermore, utilitarian consequences of these theories are amenable to
>empirical verification. For example, one can examine comparatively the
>overall economic welfare of the people who live in societies which are
>relatively free versus people who live in societies which are primarily
>authoritarian.

Well, let's just see how *your* ideas would work out:

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

>Easy. A child has no right to support by its parents. Parents provide
>for their children out of love and through natural bonding.

I suggest based on this that we don't need to make the experiment to
see how your looney tune ideas would work in practice.  I also suggest
that their moral bankruptcy is now obvious.  But if you want, we can
look at the wonderful freedom children have on the streets of Sao
Paulo after their parents toss them out when they are five or six.

You thing about property is a disease.  It will kill anything human
in you if you let it run away with you.

>Your argument is based upon the fallacy that all property is alienable.
>This is false; the concepts of property and alienability are
>independent.

Sez you.  If the Queen of England owns the crown Jewels, but can't
sell them, then her "ownership" means damned little.

And a disagreement about definitions can't be a fallacy, by
definition.  A fallacy is incorrect reasoning, and a definition hasn't
got that far yet.






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