To the notion of property rights as a priori, Justin writes:
"No such right exists outside the law. Property is a creature of the law, an entitlement purely enforceable by the state. Property is what the state lets you have because it is beneficial to allow you to have and use it. If, as I believe, it is not beneficial to society to allow individuals to privately own productive assets, it violates no non-legal right to take that property away."
You know this isn't true. No rights exist outside law, but this is a tautology. The rights we're talking about are those in the original agreements to form bodies of law. The right to property is explicity guaranteed in the Constitution and is continuous throughout history, except among slave classes. Property is not what the state lets you have because it is beneficial to the state. Property is what of yours the state agrees not to take so that you'll agree to form the state in the first place.
When I also cite the right not to be compelled to work against your will, you say: "Any society will require the lazy and the shirkers to work in order to eat."
Society does not require people to work to eat, Nature does. What I am saying is that a free society cannot compel specific work from specific people without recompense freely arrived at (that could be through the legislature rather than private agreement). The point is that a right to food would effectively make food producers a slave class against whose work product any individual could assert a "right". Likewise a right to medicine, housing, education. Positive "rights" always undermine the freedoms of other people, except where all people are affected equally, as with some right to money (since money is created by the central government fiat and not produced as the work product of specific people).
On th topic of money, Justin writes that: "money is a convention, not that it is a contract. It is not a private agreement. It is a social convention to accept bits of metal or paper or bytes in exchange for goods and services."
Okay, but a "convention" is a new legal term to me. What's more, we have to remember that
1. People need not accept money as payment. They can accept barter.
2. The government changed the terms of the money "convention" so that it no longer represents precious metals.
Therefore we know that money is not a universal convention (or need not be) and may not that which cannot be said to be universal be said to be private? We also know that the terms of the convention can be changed by at least one of the parties and of course the amount of money in the economy depends on the choices made by private bankers, so if you want ot call it a convention, okay, but money certainly represents a lot of specific agreements by parties who have other choices.
It is a contract among banks and governments and individuals
>and we know that because money used to be issued by private banks as a
>privately-issued security (contract).
No, the govt can authorize private agents to perform public functions. that doesn't male those functions private. It partly makes public those private agents.
jks
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