I got mine at The Atlasphere.
He begins by quoting Carolyn Lochhead's July 1st San Francisco Chronicle article:
"Elliot Mincberg, the [People for the American Way's] legal director, said the case [Kelo v. New London] had been brought by the Institute for Justice as part of an effort by conservatives to elevate property rights to the same level of civil rights such as freedom of speech and religion, in effect taking the nation back to the pre-New Deal days when the courts ruled child labor laws unconstitutional."
To posit a distinction between civil or human rights on the one hand and property rights on the other reflects little understanding.
...
My computer is my property. Does it have any rights — like the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are there any constitutional guarantees held by my computer? Anyone, except maybe a lawyer, would agree that to think of property as possessing rights is unadulterated nonsense.
So where do property rights come in? Property rights are human rights to use economic goods and services. Private property rights contain your right to use, transfer, trade and exclude others from use of property deemed yours. The supposition that there's a conflict or difference between human rights to use property and civil rights is bogus and misguided.
Professor Williams is an educator with a passion for his topic, Economics, so he makes sure his writing is understandable to everyone. RtWT.
Which [Al fumblingly segued] leads me back to Probligo's complaint about the Adam Martin article I quoted a couple posts back; that all the guy said, in what I quoted, was that Society is composed of individuals. At first, I found that complaint perplexing: I know that's all he was saying. But it's an important thing to say. Perhaps I should have quoted these paragraphs instead, from the discussion of Austrian moral individualism:
Moral individualism is not the same thing as egoism; even if one believes in absolute altruism towards one's fellows, those fellows must be recognized in their value as individuals rather than as an amorphous social blob. The precondition for treating another person as a person is to recognize his individual worth. The deadly flaw of collectivism is to replace concern for man with concern for mankind, which is nothing but a pattern resulting from the actions of individual man. This shift of focus can only come at the expense of the welfare of individual men.
It is always in this light that the value of subsidiary institutions should be understood. Voluntary associations are important not for their own sake, but because they fulfill man's nature. True partnership and community can only come about between distinct individuals. When we fight for our families, we must not fight for family in the abstract but for the flesh and blood people that we know and love. The efforts of those in the conservative movement to pit the community against the individual as opposing values is thus theoretically baseless; in an attempt to emphasize man's social nature they forget that such a nature must inhere in a man.
Probligo's complaint does point out that this isn't how the average guy talks - Martin is obviously heavily steeped in Mises, Rothbard and, maybe, Rand. In this latter quote, I'd eschew "man" and "mankind" for "the/an individual" and "society," but this would have been better to quote, as an enticement to read the article, because it's clearer and shows the practical social ramifications the two worldviews. But I still think the other quote is more important, because it deals with the nature of individuality and the need to consider the rights of individuals before setting up or rearranging institutions.
The path to social happiness goes through there.
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