It's my opinion that freedom should be of primary importance in America, not feel good authoritarian inducing woo.
Help your fellow man. Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.
I didn't ask to be born into a world where all of the resources had already been claimed, and asking me to accept it is as much of a pointed gun.
People protecting their property is an ethical action. People trying to take it from them against their will is not. This can't be reasoned away.
Fortunately, we have agency in this world that does not require violence. We can work to improve our lot.
Pretending that property rights somehow are more real than human need is an unethical action.
Property rights and human needs are both real things. I never argued otherwise.
On this basis, property rights are not much more than a social construct and redistribution is not a problem if society deems that it is favorable to do so.
If you and I get marooned on an unclaimed island and I construct a spear for hunting crabs, you have no right to my spear. I am within my natural rights to defend my property should you try to take it by force.
You can make a claim to that spear, of course. It's the product of your labour, you would get to own it, and you made it with freely available resources. One would call this "personal property".
However, imagine this scenario. You and I get marooned on an unclaimed island. I claim the island before you get the opportunity. Because of my claim on this land, which now becomes my private property, I force you to give me that spear.
This is exactly what happened in all of the globe. People laid claim to land, resources and capital that they did not build, and this is precisely the base of all private property beforethen. If I were to get any object I own, I could trace my ownership of that object to someone that, at some point, violently decided that some land is theirs, and based on the idea that the land is theirs seized the product of the labour of various people who had no choice but to work it or die.
So, unless you agree that seizing land that was not yours violently is a reasonable way of generating ownership, you come to the conclusion that the ownership of essentially everything in our society is illegitimate, and can only be motivated for utilitarian reasons.
If you do, then you agree that I have a right to your spear :)
The same can't be said of the government, of course.
My question was aimed at the OP stating as fact that
>People protecting their property is an ethical action.
Which does not seem true to me.
Can you claim ownership of part (or the whole) of the island?
The whole purpose of society is that people work together for the common good. When resources are not distributed such that that happens then I don't see anything wrong with redistributing them.
I have no problem with people redistributing wealth. Just don't use aggressive force or the threat of it to do so.
As a result, accepting the current order of property can only be justified by utilitarianism, which also dictates that there is no issue with redistribution if it is helpful.
In essence, private property is theft, but there is no feasible alternative (for now), so let's still have private property in a limited sense.
Is there any other way?
I don't know of any. Is it truly moral to reject the only method for equality?
It's not like billionaires are going to have someone pointing a gun in their face. They can afford to pay taxes.
50 people literally hold as much wealth as 165 million[1].
Just because poverty isn't aggressive does not mean it is morally superior to taxation.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
Society has a problem: poor people exist. There are a UNIVERSE of possible solutions. Charitable organizations, churches, help from family - the list goes on and on and on.
Yet here you are, saying "I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people."
The crazy thing is that I believe you when you say it; I think you're saying it in good faith! I just can't fathom how you reached that conclusion. It's utterly nonsensical to me on its face.
Those "solutions" are as old as the problem.
They didn't work.
> I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people.
The gun pointing happens as a last resort, not first.
What you are telling me is that we should just wait around for the greediest people in the world to charitably give enough back.
That's just not going to happen. We all know it.
So what you are telling me is that we should just continue the status quo, because doing something about it is technically immoral.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 50 Americans collect as much wealth as the poorest 165 million.
Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty[1]. Is that not immoral?
Approximately 14.3 million households had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources[1]. Is that not immoral?
You are so obsessed with the threat to inconvenience people who have more wealth than you will ever see that you are willing to keep millions in poverty. Get off your high horse. Children are starving.
Quite ironic considering the armed Trump supporters threatening the democracy of the country right now.
An alternative is that we could stop enforcing property rights at the point of a gun. What is more important; property or people? A selfish person in a society that provides for all may feel slighted but they will live comfortably. A selfish person in a society with strict protection of property can cause another person to die without lifting a finger. Frankly, if it's ethical to allow some individuals to die from neglect (thus losing everything of value) then it's at least as ethical to allow redistribution of some personal property (losing less than everything).
Wealth has been redistributed already. $50 trillion has gone from the poorest 90% to the wealthiest 1%[1].
The one word is "gun". The wealthy don't need firearms to compel the rest of us to work for them. In fact, we beg them for jobs every day.
I want to help my fellow man, but I simply don't have the resources. They have all gone to the hands of 50 billionaires[2].
There is a way we can get them back. It doesn't require the point of a gun. It only requires better tax policy.
[1] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources ? They don't just magically appear. The vast majority of people with material resources have worked very hard to aquire them, very often by working very hard at producing material resources.
>That's to say nothing of minority rights
What rights are being denied to minorities ?
As someone who always saw myself on the left, being a proponent of universal healthcare and focused on class issues, I can no longer recognize myself on the left with them going all in on identity politics, dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.
> What rights are being denied to minorities ? Until recently, the right to get married or adopt children, among other things. I see your point though: people of all skin colors are theoretically equal in the law. If by "dividing people" by "race and gender" you mean movements for criminal justice reform or to end police brutality toward minorities, I disagree that these movements should be divisive. They become divisive when non-minorities take offense at them, which can happen due to poor messaging from particular individuals. It can happen due to a lack of clarity about the actual goals of the movement. Some more extreme leftists might simply have views that I would also disagree with. But ultimately, "the left" doesn't hate non-minorities. When a movement is focused on minorities, it is to reaffirm that they suffer discrimination which they should not under the law. These movements focus on minorities not to say that others don't struggle too, but to bring attention to societal issues that continue to affect some types of people just because of their "immutable characteristics".
Billionaires.
They took $50 trillion from the rest of us[1]. They are beyond capable of affording it.
> What rights are being denied to minorities?
Safety. Marriage. Financial stability. The list goes on.
> dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.
It isn't the left that did that. Race and gender were divided into economic classes by racists and sexists. Acting like that didn't happen only serves to perpetuate that oppression.
[1] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
Ala, I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.
Instead I wanted to try and reframe this in a way that is a lot more inline with how many people on the left talk about this issue which is in my mind fundamentally different from how I read your comments. I hope it offers a less inflammatory way to consider what often gets thrown under the umbrella of “identity politics”.
When trying to understand the root causes of problems and outcomes in society it’s often helpful to cut the data in certain ways to identify where patterns might be emerging or have existed for a long time.
This is basically the attempt to try and apply the scientific method to issues that simply can not be controlled in a lab environment.
If you were to take an issue like poverty or incarceration rates for example and then attempted to break those issues down through the context of education for example you might start to notice some interesting correlations.
However, there is nothing about this approach that does or should stop researchers from also looking at the data in the context of immutable traits either.
A big part of the conversation that is happening around these topics is that certain groups keep appearing again and again in ways that very few other groups do. The follow up question to that is obviously why?
This commonly gets reduced to comments such as the one you made like “I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.” which is not at all what is being said.
I too am in the straight white male group and I’m not unaware of how often it can feel like that label is thrown around to the point where it can feel like a dirty word but I would beg you to put aside that initial knee jerk reaction and maybe consider that we as a society (not necessarily you personally) do in fact have some pretty serious issues that are going to overlap with immutable traits like gender, sexuality and race.
DiAngelo’s thesis [White Fragility]: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-whi...
The same goes for people who would attempt being entrepreneurs if all they had to worry about losing was money.
Otherwise, how could you explain Obama (for all the ills he committed) taking Romney's healthcare plan, and then the entirety of the Republican magically turning against the plan that they themselves generated? It's not animosity, it is certainly calculated.
I think there are a multitude of smaller problems to solve and smaller steps to take that would be utterly uncontroversial to the wider public. But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
Same goes for immigration reform for that matter. There's plenty of low grade nonsense to clean up with legislation but the culture of controversy derails trying to find where consensus actually exists and acting on it.
A good positive example would be how criminal justice reform was actually attempted recently.
Now, the main thing is this:
>But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
This is not true, as per what I mentioned before. Obama took a Republican healthcare plan, and it was still gridlocked and framed as extremist.
The truth is that there are real interests in this country that actively don't want problems to be fixed, and that's the reason why there is so much low grade nonsense that gives you the idea that it's because both sides are intransigent, but past experiments show that trying to collaborate with the obstructionist party just leads to the ratchet effect [0].
In effect, there can never be consensus because the purpose of some is simply obstruction and dysfunction, which is made evident by what happened to Romney's healthcare plan. The only solution is to use an electoral breakthrough, pushed by a not-so-moderate message, to create a new fait-accompli and change the political landscape, otherwise you either fall prey to the ratchet effect or to gridlock.
The rest of the developed world has _universal_ healthcare. In many countries it is provided through single-payer, in some it is through mandatory private insurance, in others it is a mix.
Where the United States stands alone is not the lack of a universal government program, but that we have many millions of people not covered by any health insurance system at all.
No one is talking about a free lunch, they are talking about a better, more efficient way of doing it.
We are saying "it is much more efficient and fair to have single payer health care"... it is not a free lunch... it is a cheaper, healthier lunch.