Your Options: To Serve, Or To Serve, by Robert Gore
There are three ways for a person to obtain something of value from another person: receive it as a donation, steal it by force or fraud, or exchange for it. It’s not much of an oversimplification to say that the advance of civilization has hinged on its movement from the first two methods to the third. The right to exchange, and the right to promise as part of a future exchange—the right to contract—are now taken for granted, but those rights are delicate and a whole complex of rights, assumptions, and obligations are subsumed by them. Their intellectual foundations are being undermined as the equality of rights implicit in contract and exchange gives way to a regressive inequality of rights: servitude.
This is an excerpt. For the full article please click the above link.
This is an excerpt. For the full article please click the above link.
and bling, plus all of the hollow words ... ! -- j
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with my parents as a kid, "Hell is here and now;
you don't have to wait 'til you die!" -- j
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The Prime Law® Reprinted from the Twelve Visions Party© At http://tvpnc.org
The Prime Law®
(The Fundamental of Protection)
Preamble
_The purpose of human life is to prosper and live happily.
_The function of government is to provide the conditions that let individuals fulfill that purpose.
*The Prime Law guarantees those conditions by forbidding the use of initiatory force, fraud, or coercion by any person or group against any individual, property, or contract.
Article 1
No person, group of persons, or government shall initiate force, threat of force, or fraud against any individual’s self, property, or contract.
Article 2
Force is morally-and-legally justified only for protection from those who violate Article 1.
Article 3
No exceptions shall exist for Articles 1 and 2.
As ever, lucid and powerful.
Yes, "Voluntary Exchange" is a beautiful thing. But then, voluntary anything is better than any other form of interaction between people. Excepting coercion by criminal activity, anytime people are compelled through the power of the government to do anything, that activity should be looked upon as an intrusion upon the freedom of the individual. And one other thing that gets me riled is that Good Intentions Don't Count! No matter what the intent, if it results in the loss of freedom for the individual, it should be looked upon as evil.
And 2084 is all of 68 years away.
"What, me worry?" -- Alfred E. Neuman
As you might guess, I'm not one of those idealists. While Objectivist philosophy has common sense logical rules to make the most individual liberty possible, it isn't ideological in nature, rejecting the idea of forcing anyone into a mold. Krauthammer might call us "realists," but his definition of that word implies a kind of hopelessness that humanity is trapped into a repetitive cycle of destructive insanity.
I think, from exchanges in this forum, we believe in creating an environment where individual freedom extends to any choices that are not destructive of the health and well being of others. We don't agree that there's some collectivist duty to protect individuals from the results of their choices. If idealism exists in the Objectivist community it is in the belief that the results of such a rule structure will be so attractive as to draw in more members to the community.
Txs for your article, as always.
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