Originally posted by Brooklyn-Mecca+Aug 8 2006, 05:39 AM--> (Brooklyn-Mecca @ Aug 8 2006, 05:39 AM)
[email protected] 7 2006, 11:38 PM
Perhaps you ought to ask why it is all those children in Africa are starving...
i know why, it's because those kids are too fucking dumb and lazy to become entrepreneurs. and their pathetic parents had the chance, the glorious, glorious chance, to rebel against those structural adjustment programs, and refused. so, the spineless bastards (and their children) deserve what they get.
duh!
before you accuse others of wiishing harm on them.
finding the naive notions of charity rather absurd is not an accusation of heartlessness. it's simply a criticism in the context of the facts.
Stealing is not a human right and that is what you have to do in order to give someone food and shelter that does not belong to you.
unless, of course, economics is not principally about scarcity. then, it becomes a little game of justice.
not that i could logically justify being nice to people, or anything. i could only point out the pricks among us. so far, it's good enough. maybe we could work out a better system later on. in the meantime, i'll make do with what i have.
People who approve of plunder ought not be questioning the ethics of those who believe that charity is a private affair.
ahhh, but with every "ought" comes a certain bias in the premise.
i'd rather not entangle myself in these.. conceptual muddles.
You are not entitled to one second of another human beings life.
i beg to differ. i give much of my life to my girlfriend, and she offers much of her's in return. it's symbiotic, really.. and i can't even imagine it being any other way.
the fact that people are interdependent (and love to be so) says something very different about entitlement.
Parents are responsible for the children not the state.
and when parents become sexually abusive, it's not the state's responsibility to intervene.
admit that your philosophy is a philosophy of stipulations.
Human rights are rights that politicans confer to the masses.
unless, of course, we're discussing a different society, with some other arbitrary circumstances.
What the politicans give, the politicians can also take away.
which is why i don't trust them with my livelihood.
The Natural rights of man are rights that we own before we gather to form governments.
by natural, i assume you mean "human".. that is, these are rights that we own simply by being human, simply by existing as humans, regardless of our socio-political organization.
evidently, you contradict yourself when you say human rights are not a priori ("human rights are rights that politicans confer to the masses"), and then go on to say that human rights are rights we own prior to the blessings of politicians.
anyway, you're wrong.. all rights are purely circumstantial, purely arbitrary. when some of us consider certain rights to be "human rights," we are simply exercising our own social prejudices, our own idea of what life should be, and what society should be. rights and ethics have no logical backing.. they are metaphysical, and wholly transient.
The most fundemental of those rights is that what is mine is mine; property rightss.
again, what you consider a fundamental right is purely circumstantial. it shall differ from ethic to ethic, from ideology to ideology. you cannot argue for non-logical forms by positing them as a priori considerations.
Once the right to own property is enshrined then human rights can be established.
and this is a conclusion that's reached through an arbitrary, metaphysical premise. i don't deny your right to a non-factual opinion, as all conceptions of rights (including my own conceptions) are non-factual opinions, but i do deny your efforts at trying to establish the logically incoherent as self-evident and factual. your very diction, "enshrined," points to the religious flavor of your position. it's metaphysical, through and through. you have no justification for suggesting otherwise. [/b]
The people of Africa starve because they chose Marxist idoelogs to lead them. A society that chooses a bad ideology is doomed to dust.
The Romans make the best case study of that. The Romans were never militarily defeated. Their leaders squandered the wealth creation power of 1000 years of Roman labor. The Romans went bankrupt.
You can see it in their coinage. 400BC pure gold. 400AD 2% gold in the coinage.
I guess you could call Africans dumb and lazy. They chose socialism, which is stupid not dumb, and they are lazy because they failed to educate themselves on the ramifications of that choice.
The Africans certainly are not poor because Bill Gates is rich. Bill made all his money by providing an operating system for silica sand that Intel turned into microprocessors.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/barnhart/barnhart35.html
Ship of Fools Heading for Africa
by Sabine Barnhart
However, evidence shows that most poverty in Africa and other poorer countries is created by Marxist ideology and oppressive actions of reigning governments. Among the African nations that currently suffer from poverty are countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
Zimbabwe, a country with cotton and maize production and natural resources of coal has suffered greatly under President Robert Mugabe. He recently declared all farmlands to be nationalized, removing private property from its citizens for growing their crop. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their home and the land bulldozed leaving behind a wasteland of starvation. Urban areas are no longer allowed to grow their own food forcing the prevention of illegal trade of desperate people. This recent tragedy reminds us of history that took place during Stalin’s reign in 1928–29, a period known as the collectivization. Nearly five million Soviet citizens were starved intentionally in the process in which the state forcefully removed the private ownership of the farmland.
The whole piece is on how foolish Bob Geldof is to believe handing million or even billions of dollars of charity will help Africa. That "help" would only stave off the day of reckoning.
Economics is not about justice. It is about man as an economiser. There is nothing just about stealing from some to give to others. What is just is that we keep the fruits of our labor and form governments with that very intention: to protect our property.
Social justice will have to be for the people to decide without the help of their government. Government is all about oppression. Coercive force is the only tool. All the so-called good a government does is always at the point of a bayonet.
If you chose to give your time to your girlfriend then it is a choice. You are making a voluntary donation. I have no problem with any of that.
It's when the state comes by to take the fruits of my labor at gunpoint that I start objecting. Someone else has claimed the fruits of my labor and they are taking them by force. That's called taxation or legal plunder.
When parents fail in their duties to raise their children then it is time for the family and the church to get involved, not the state. The state has no buisness meddling in family or church affairs.
Protect me from force and protect me from fraud.
When parents "sexually abuse" their children that is called a crime and we put those people in jail and hand the children over to the relatives first and the church if the family fails to act. That is exactly what family and church are all about.
I'm an athiest, but that does not mean I see no role for the church, the church simply gets no authority from the state.