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Comment by thegrimmest | Hacker News Reader

Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation.

You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.

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There are already enough resources that nobody should live in abject insecurity and poverty. Your position is fundamentally morally abhorrent to me. You're saying that your ability to take a little bit more for yourself is more important than a child not having polio, a mother feeding her child, a village having clean water.

You are, in short, a tiny little microcosm of why humanity is doomed as a species.

We don't need to have every human care about every single other human to thrive as a species. If anything, if we did, we wouldn't be able to thrive at all.

The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.

I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that my right to choose which children I help is more legitimate than your right to dictate to me. That the voluntary nature of our cooperation is more important than equality of resource distribution.

Oh my, please rant on. I'd love to hear more about people not having the right to a decent and secure life. (After all, I've often thought that having my life tracked and used my a corporation or government would be a wonderful utopia!)

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