Please excuse my excerpting here, but it is the only way I can make my
points.
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> From: Don Brayton <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: TITLE: Universal Declaration of Human Rights
> Date: Friday, May 02, 1997 1:06 AM
>
> 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!).
First, keep in mind that there WAS a plentiful supply of nomadically
findable food right here in N. America until the past 200 or 300 years,
that is, until the land came under the ownership of individuals.
> 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?
Good point; for example, who is the "earner" here, the grandson of some
investor descended from feudal nobility who happens to "own" the firm
producing widgets, or the person who is slaving away building the damned
things all day in the same factory his father and mother worked? Who should
own the largest share of agriculture in the US, the descendants of the
people who built and worked the farms, or the descendants of their
"owners"?
> 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.
If you have any experience with large corporations, you will see that they
are just as susceptible to bureaucracy as the public ones I believe you are
talking about. And what do you mean by tax? Isn't privately appropriated
profit a tax?
> Would that money grew on trees.
Wouldn't some parasitical creep have stolen the trees from the people who
used to own it in common?
>
> 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.
The state is essentially a means of enforcing the social and order. If the
economy is privately owned, the state will serve private interests to the
detriment of the common one. If the economy is socially owned, the state
will serve social interests. Care must always be taken that a separate
self-interest isn't allowed to develop, that is, that the state doesn't
begin to pursue it's own interest to the detriment of that of it's master's
- private economy is able to do so...even Krupp &al were able to keep
Hitler on a leash so far as their own (perceived) interests were concerned.
Why should this be impossible (as many post-Soviet pundits allege) for a
socially-owned one?
> 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?
Just look at the people who are allowing the privitization of genetic
information, of individual lifeforms...who are they? The same
"politicians". Consider what I wrote above.
> When force is always used in defense of property and never used in
> confiscation of property is there a stable social order.
Africa, the Americas, etc., etc. Need I say more? REALLY?
> 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.
Do you feed them with intuition? Hmmmm.
> 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.
Their benefit, at the moment, is based solely upon that shackling. I don't
think they can be easily convinced...
> 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.
I would like to rewrite it also...more on that later.
- Don DeBar
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