Gordon Fitch wrote:
"I believe if you're operating in the liberal rights system, that food, water, and so forth cannot be a right, because life itself is not a right."
You're completely wrong, of course. Life is most specifically a right under liberal rights, both as a natural right and as a property right (why you can sue for wrongful death).
"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."
No, the claim to food *is* a claim to property. That's my point. When a baker bakes bread, he is creating property through his work. In a free society there can be no "right" to deprive him of his property without freely-agreed recompense.
"But property is necessary to preserve the class system, which is the purpose of the State and hence of liberalism."
Wrong. While property defines the class system, property predates the class system and survives the class system into both socialism and communism.
"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."
Neither under communism nor under tribalism can one citizen simply take the property/work product of another citizen as an expression of an a priori, natural right. The idea behind both tribalism and communism is a broad social contract. People who try and stipulate a right to food are ignoring the essential aspects of the social contract.