Good People of the Chomsky Forum,

I have been wishing for a long time that the writers of the Constitution
of the United States of America,  specifically the Bill of Rights,  had
been more terse, direct and incontrovertible in their expression and that
they had stated specifically what actions governments were prohibited
from taking against the individual.  Alas, they were as human as am I and
did not anticipate the steady, long term attack on the document nor, I
think, did they anticipate the extent of the public’s indifference.  Now
and then I would turn my thoughts to an edited version of the document
which would have created immunity to such attack and a more ready
recognition of its value among the public.  But the demands of life have
delayed me.

When I first and quickly read this Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
 I thought that some cogent thinker(s) had done the work for me, but as I
read on and on and on (close to 2,000 words), I realized they were trying
to prescribe all human activities in just such a way against which the
writers of the Constitution  were trying to protect us.  For example, as
soon as you state the individual has a right to food one must ask whose
or what food?  Obviously, food which someone else has grown or gathered
or something from the limited, nomadically found supply of food (in
today's urban context, a dumpster. Blech!).

Try to take one step higher in a theoretical social order by saying the
individual has a right to a job to earn money for food, one must ask,
whose job and what do you mean by "earn?"  That is, who must create the
organization into which he is forced to accept the (needy) individual
whether or not the individual can produce anything of value to the
organization ... and in preference to someone who can produce (more) and
is perhaps more deserving of the job?

Proceed even one more step removed from the essence of the question and
assert that the community will, by consensus, establish such producing
organizations and you are describing a bureaucratic wasteland of bodies
with no mandate to produce anything and no visible means of support
except from coerced taxation of those who produce.  Would that money grew
on trees.

There is only one more step to take in order to fully obfuscate the issue
and that is to state that we are all one big hyper extended family
(reduced to absurdity by including whales, doggies, spotted owls,
cougars, ants, daisies, bacteria, etc.) who will readily set aside
personal goals to sustain those who are too old, too infirm, too young or
just too lazy or criminal to sustain themselves. If there is nobody among
the producers in this human family willing to sustain the non-producers,
there is always the gun.  Lets get some police together and force the
greedy bastards to give up some of their wealth  (oops! pardon me, excess
wealth,  in our opinion).  The trouble is, it is you and me in the middle
class for whom they will be coming.

But, dammit, this is the real world.  Real people will be the police.
Real people will decide what is excess wealth.  Who are they to be?  What
will restrain them and guide their real time decisions?  Philosophers
like yourselves expressing policy as in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.  Hogwash!  Do you really want politicians in charge of
these decisions?

When force is always used in defense of property and never used in
confiscation of property is there a stable social order.  It matters not
whether the property is a wallet, a house, a garden, an apartment house,
a bank account, a pile of Krugerands,  intellectual property such as a
manuscript or a manufacturing process or even a huge, multi-billion
dollar per year corporation.  All of these must be equally protected by
law from any attack: by predators from without or by parasite from
within.

If this appears to be counterintuitive, ponder this:  counter-intuition
is an oxymoron.  Your intuition is never wrong if it is based on complete
and unalloyed observations and logical reasoning.  Don’t get me wrong, I
love fantasy,  but I do not try to feed my family with ephemera,   I do
not put water in my gas tank and expect a spiritual resource to change it
into fuel,  and I do not trust bureaucrats or philosophers to filter my
information nor to decide for me who is in need of my help.

The true challenge is to convince those who are experiencing enormous
benefit from the status quo that even greater benefit will accrue them in
unshackling the common man.

Let’s use our considerable intellectual resources to rewrite this
Declaration so that it is usable and readily acceptable in the real
world.  Aim for about 1,000 words in the first edit. If this effort is of
interest to only a small subset of this forum, we can take it off line.
More later.

Respectfully Submitted,

Don Brayton
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