>
>
> 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.
Au contraire, I insist taht it is true.
> No rights exist outside law,
Now THIS isn't true, and you don't believe it. The slaves didn't havea right to freedom even though their slavery was legal?
but this is a
>tautology. The rights we're talking about are those in the original
>agreements to form bodies of law.
Except to democracies, law has generally been decreed from above by a King or other ruler, not agreed on by any popular body.
The right to property is explicity
>guaranteed in the Constitution and is continuous throughout history, except
>among slave classes.
That is, most of humanity for most of recoeded history.
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.
What makes it yours? Btw, I refer you to a piece on the labor theory of property I wrote a decade ago, "FRom Libertarianism to Egalitarianism," Social Theory & Practice 1993, raises some questions you will find fruiitful to meditate on in this connection.
>
> 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.
Au contraire. Nature requires us to eat to live, society exempts the rich from the requirement of working to live.
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).
Ah, that's a different point. A free society, there I might agree.
. 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).
All righyts restrict the freedom of others. Your right not be murdered restricts my freedom to kill you.
>
> 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.
It's not a legal term.
>
> Therefore we know that money is not a universal convention
Never said it was.
(>We also know that the terms of the convention can be changed by at least
one
>of the parties
So?
jks
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