From: ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Jack B. Nimble)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Social Democracy
Date: 5 Nov 92 07:39:38 GMT

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:

>
>In article <19921029003258ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>
>ECL4JN2@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Jack B. Nimble) writes:
>
>>Yet Michael's point about the equivalence of socialism and institutional
>>ized looting is irrefutable. As socialism requires all significant means
>>of production to be owned by the state, and as the state has no a priori
>>means of generating the wealth required to pay for the acquisition of
>>this private capital, how else besides outright theft of capital from
>>the private owners can socialism arise?
>
>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? The workers are paid and they
freely contract to supply the labor for wage compensation. Or perhaps
someone in the background holds agun to their head and compels them to
work in a specific job?

>>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). 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.

>I also am wondering why soc.motss has suddenly become
>talk.politics.theory.brain.dead.
>
Soc.motss is exactly what folks post. It seems that enough people
choose to discuss political theory at the moment.

>>The most fundamental property right of all is the right of each
>>individual to property in his/her own person, i.e., everyone is a
>>self-owner.
>
>>The mistake that would-be critics of libertarianism like you make
>>is to assume that libertarians hold that individuals are nothing but
>>property.
>
>This is what you just got through saying in the previous paragraph.
>I suggest you study some logic.
>
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.

It's not that I need a course in logic; it's more that you need some
lessons in reading what other people have to write and being responsive
to the content.
> -
>     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University
>               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
>
        =Jack=

---

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