>
>
> Justin,
>
> You ask, rhetorically, whether the "slaves didn't have a
>right to freedom even though their slavery was legal?"
>
> The simple answer is "No". Certainly, there was no "natural right"
>because
>such things don't exist.
We disagree, then. I think there are rights that don't depend on legal enactment or social convention. The right to freedom, not to be a slave, is one of them.
> You try to prove that property rights are ahistorical because monarchs
>didn't extend property rights to the slave classes, except as custom.
I hate to say this again, but I don't understand what you are saying. I don't recognize anything I think in this statement attributed to me. I don't think that property rights are ahistorical, and I don't see how the supposed argument for that proposition would support it.
You can't show me a
>society that hasn't recognized property rights and there never will be one.
Actually, that's probably not true. Charlesd, you're the one with anthropological training, this isn;t true, is it?
>>
> To get back to the questions arising from the "right to food" debate, it
>seems clear to me that under any socialist legal ideology the one thing a
>worker could be guaranteed rights to would be the product of his own work.
But this won't do. What is the product of one's own work? Labor is social. How do we disaggregate the contribution of my own labor versus others'? Moreover, my labor depends on a division of labor, which is not thesort of thing anyone has a right to. ANd I must work on material that I did not create, what right to I have in that?
Look at my paper From Libertarianism to Egalitarianism, Social Theory & Practice 1992, which explotes these puzzles.
jks
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