Justin Schwartz:
> Can't be under any system. All men are mortal, as the major premise goesm
> and no one knwos theday or hour. WQhat can be a right is that you won't be
> deprived of life by humans without due process. But that is alraedy a right
> under the 5th & 14A. You can add a right to the _means of life_, which of
> course is not the same thing, and is I presume what you mean.
Sure. I'm assuming the physical bodies of such persons as we may notice in reference to this question have the capability of continuing to live given the necessities, and the absence of injuries, and so forth. In other words, a right to life quibbled as necessary to provide for boundary conditions.
Gordon:
>> Liberal rights are dominated by
>> property, and if property rights are to prevail, then they
>> must prevail against, for example, the need to eat, since
>> food is produced within the property system and a claim on
>> food would violate the claims of property. But property is
>> necessary to preserve the class system, which is the purpose
>> of the State and hence of liberalism.
Justin Schwartz:
> As a liberal (small l, not a Liberal Democrat a la NewDeal/Great Society, a
> liberal who supports constitutional democracy and civil liberties), I
> represent that remark. I oppose this and every other class system. I have
> never seen a persuasive argument from anyone, not you, not Marx, that
> liberal rights means that I am committed to the idea that some people
> should monopolize the means of production and exploit others. In fact, I
> think there is a right that workers have to control the means of production
> andenjoy the fruirs thereof. Is that consistent with a class system?
It's inconsistent with liberalism. If people have the liberal rights of property as we have known them, then they will treat their property differently, and in an industrial, technologized society some will rapidly accumulate more than others, and some of the accumulators will invest their savings, thus turning them into capital. The process will tend to feed back into itself positively; that is, those who have, will get, while those who have not, will lose. Since there is no right to life in the liberal rights system, that accumulation will enable its possessers and controllers and their servants to get power over others who are less lucky, aggressive, or efficient, and the class system will be produced. We could expect this to occur even under conditions of socialism, as long as liberalism underlay the socialist arrangement.
Actually, class will be _re_produced, because the liberal system of rights was obviously set up in anticipation of exactly this result in the first place by people who had already accumulated power and property and wanted to keep it and get more.
There is no use resenting my remark; you need to deal with the inconsistencies in either your logic or mine. Mine looks consistent to me, and it accords with what we observe as well.
Gordon:
>> If you want a system in which everyone can get enough to eat
>> as a matter of the structure of society, you want tribalism
>> or communism and their freedom, not liberalism and its
>> rights.
Justin Schwartz:
> Explain again why liberals, and in fact conservatives, can't guarantee
> "enough to eat." Milton Friedman used to advocate a guaranteed annual
> income that in 1970 was pretty generous, lift everyone over the poverty
> line. If that were enacted, it would be a legal right, what am I missing?
If it were enacted, it could be repealed whenever the ruling class got tired of it, just as Welfare has been more or less repealed. I would not call that a right in the usual liberal sense, where rights are supposed to be permanent, unquestioned, and inalienable -- if not religious truths at least the basic principles on which the society is organized, which a guaranteed income surely is not.
-- Gordon