What The **** Is Wrong With You People!?

I see a future repubblican president in the making ....

I'm with spm1138.

"Rights" cannot exist where they place obligation on others ... therefore you have no "right" to food (for example) because you would have to violate the rights of farmers by forcing them to provide you with food.

There are 3 basic rights. Life, Liberty and Property ... all other so-called rights just lead to enslavement of the productive.

Now put down that well worn copy of Das Kapital and go pick up a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell and we can continue this discussion.

And since life is a right and food is not, apparently people are capable of living without food contrary to popular belief. I'm sure the starving children of Ethiopia will be ecstatic to hear that.

Life is a right, but you don't have a right to force others to feed you.

If you want to save the starving children of Ethiopia you have to remove the oppressive Socialist government (the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) that is keeping them from exercising their rights to liberty and property (which is how one feeds themselves).

Yet you claim that people have a right to property which necessarily means that workers must be forced to produce for those who own the property. Property has always been built upon coercion. Even since the beginning of capitalist scientific economic study this hsa been well known. Smith even acknowledges it in Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.

And BTW, Ethiopia's PMAC revolution was never communist. In fact the revolution in Ethiopia was built upon the implementation of a modern bourgeois tax system.

You also have the right to disagree indefinately with the people in these forums.

Yet you claim that people have a right to property which necessarily means that workers must be forced to produce for those who own the property. Property has always been built upon coercion.

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No, "right to property" only means your land and other possessions are yours and that you alone reserve the right to profit from your own property, labor and ideas.

If you need workers to produce for you then you pay them, otherwise you do the work yourself.

I can kind of agree with some of the sentiments in this "article;" that is, people tend to think that they are entitled to more than they really are. Of course, I can't agree with views as extreme as this kid is spouting (I do have the right to spam-free e-mail, as I have a right protecting me from unwarranted harrassment); he sounds like a hyper-conservative to me.

He also brings up an important point; people are bitching about rights they don't have while ignoring the rapid dissappearance of rights they DO have.

I have to agree with one point though: the government is not responsible for feeding you or giving you a job. They have social programs to do that anyhow, but that's not the GOVERNMENT'S job. It's really a complaint about people relying on the government rather than their own devices.

No, "right to property" only means your land and other possessions are yours and that you alone reserve the right to profit from your own property, labor and ideas.

If you need workers to produce for you then you pay them, otherwise you do the work yourself.

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And if they do not work for less than the value of their labor so that you may profit, then they die and lose their right to life, because you claim the arbitrary ownership of land and resources.

People are free to choose whom they work for and the market sets the price. Yes, in a free market economy some people will have nothing to offer and they will die. Its the responsibility of the individual to make sure he has marketable skills ... however your solution kills off many more people and removes all freedom of choice from the survivors.

The only way any form of collectivism will work is if an oppressive regime enslaves everyone, or if human DNA is blended with some sort of insect DNA and all of humanity becomes something other then human.

The market never completely sets labor prices. If it did there would be no profits. The market forces all sellers to sell their wares at its actual value. Profits come from the worker not being paid the value of his labor. Labor prices have to be controlled by the bourgeoisie because of that fact. That is why they talk about rights but do everything they can to stop labor unions from being formed, something that should be okay if the bourgeoisie followed their own philosophy.

Rogue, I honestly don't mean this to be rude or insulting, but you (and the rest of the collectivists) are so far removed from reality that there is no point in discussing this with you.

I guess we'll just agree to disagree ... and if you ever end up in a position of power I'll kill you myself.

Apparently the founders of capitalist economic study are also pretty removed from reality, since they are the ones that discovered these laws.

RogueLeader said:

The market never completely sets labor prices. If it did there would be no profits. The market forces all sellers to sell their wares at its actual value. Profits come from the worker not being paid the value of his labor. Labor prices have to be controlled by the bourgeoisie because of that fact. That is why they talk about rights but do everything they can to stop labor unions from being formed, something that should be okay if the bourgeoisie followed their own philosophy.

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It isn't necessarily true that sellers sell their wares at their actual value; in nearly any market where wares are sold, there is a healthy mark-up from the price paid by the seller for the item. Case in point: I work in the deli department at the local Tops; we sell a brand of cooked ham for $5.49/lb., while we bought the thing for somewhere around $1.07/lb. That's quite the mark-up. I make $7.00/hr. working at the deli, and believe me, I don't do anywhere near $7.00/hr. of work. The notion that things are sold near their value is totally false; the sheer number of channels that the typical product must pass through today virtually ensures that it will retail for many times its actual value.

Unions aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. Sure, sometimes you can get something out of them, but we also have labor laws already in place. They were brought about by unions, but they're in place. Now, unions just collect dues and give you a nominal raise. I should know, since Tops is union.

That, of course, brings up an interesting point about unionized labor; in order to combat the hiring of scabs, labor unions managed to make it so that in a union workplace, all of the workers must be in the union, no questions asked. That is, if the company decides that it will take on union labor (and no, the employees don't have to want it), all of the employees must join the union. No, there's no room for abuse there.

The point is, the system is ****ed on both sides, because someone has to run it in either case.

It isn't necessarily true that sellers sell their wares at their actual value; in nearly any market where wares are sold, there is a healthy mark-up from the price paid by the seller for the item. Case in point: I work in the deli department at the local Tops; we sell a brand of cooked ham for $5.49/lb., while we bought the thing for somewhere around $1.07/lb. That's quite the mark-up. I make $7.00/hr. working at the deli, and believe me, I don't do anywhere near $7.00/hr. of work. The notion that things are sold near their value is totally false; the sheer number of channels that the typical product must pass through today virtually ensures that it will retail for many times its actual value.

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There is no markup. The value of a product is the value of the labor exerted on it. A sellre increases the price of a good because laborers do work on it. The increase in value is equal to labor value exerted. The worker is then paid less than labor value. The value of your labor is way over $7. Labor value is always measured in hours, so no matter what you do while working you are exerting work. The differences in what you perform during labor hours only affect what a labor-hour means, since the value of labor is the average of how much labor is done in an hour.

Unions aren't all they're cracked up to be, either. Sure, sometimes you can get something out of them, but we also have labor laws already in place. They were brought about by unions, but they're in place. Now, unions just collect dues and give you a nominal raise. I should know, since Tops is union.

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Those are not unions, they are organizations set up by the corporation to keep the workers from forming a real union. Those sort of pseudo-unions usually cannot even strike freely.

Zundy, if you kiss a tree with your car and unconsciously bleed to death crooked over your steering wheel, you also don't have the right to receive first aid as it would opress others, enslaving them to serve you.

IMHO not a good way for a society.

One could argue that you have no basic rights at all as these rights opress others... simply couse they have to accept these rights and if they don't have to accept these rights... they arent rights.

Derelan said:

im glad that i live in a country where the only embarrasing feature is the fact we were named after a village.

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Agreed .
They can laugh at us for not wearing forrest camouflage in the desert, but we'll be pissin' on their graves when their health care won't save them from their own shrapnel wounds. (lol, jk. No offense to americans )

Zundfolge said:

No, "right to property" only means your land and other possessions are yours and that you alone reserve the right to profit from your own property, labor and ideas.

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right to property is a pretty recent right. i remember my good old history lessons at high school. in france (but it can be applied worldwide i guess), the right to property was added to the "Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen" in 1789. and it's the last item on it. why? because the french revolution was started by bourgeois, not for freedom or food, but to ease business (the 18th century basically started capitalism).

"Article 17 - La propriété étant un droit inviolable et sacré, nul ne peut en être privé, si ce n'est lorsque la nécessité publique, légalement constatée, l'exige évidemment, et sous la condition d'une juste et préalable indemnité."

I think the biggest thing one has to realize is that a capitalist system without controls fails just as miserabley as a communist system with nothing but. It has been proven by history. No matter what someone's RIGHT is, the fact is for the stability of a nation it must operate with at least SOME controls limiting the rights of individuals. Even the United States realized this after the 1930s. It was the sheer uncontrolled capitalism that led to the collapse. It was also that same sheer uncontrolled capitalism that created the HUGE amount of resentment and turmoil in the workplace. Look at the disgusting workplaces in England during the height of the Industrial Revolution. It took forever to bring regulations in, and until they did it was just as bad as any sweatshop that exists today.

The fact is that without control and limitations of those three fundimental rights Zund was so admant about then an industrialized nation would NEVER be able to exist for a long period of time before they were eventually compromised or the entire economic system collapsed. The same can be said for communism. Eventaully something will give. As always the answer is somewhere in the middle.

You do realise that in Afghanistan, the Canadian's CADPAT camouflage worked very well in some of the mountains and other places?

Examples:

http://media.militaryphotos.net/photos/albums/Allied_Canada/d_cdn14.jpg

http://media.militaryphotos.net/photos/albums/Allied_Canada/d_cdn15.jpg