I have to say, the contents of this speech and the reactions in the comments are frightening.
“You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.”
She should have continued: “And here I am to lead those marauding bands.”
“You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.”
She should have continued: “And here I am to lead those marauding bands.”
I thought the same thing when I heard that sentance, my thought was that the maurading band would be the government.
Harvard professor uses the “social contract” anti-concept. Nothing new here, move along.
As a quick rebuttal for this sort of argument (“you need to give something back”), I start the conversation with the question, “Okay. How much then?”
That starts to glue the concept of trade back together: as in, “yes, I agree that people should pay for what they voluntarily make use of, but no, what you are talking about isn’t the same thing”.
Proceed then to explain why stealing–even if its in the form of “giving” something to an unwilling participant and then charging them some made-up price for it–is wrong. On a practical level, you need to discover the price of the things people pay for, and it’s always exciting to talk somebody in circles when they attempt to find a mechanism of price discovery that isn’t market-based (the Soviets actually used the USAs prices to do this, for instance).
Anyhow, that’s how I’d go about it.
Yeah, this is the usual kind of stuff that gets advanced out there. If you think this is horrifying, check out this old thread Government is Good
Via Instapundit:
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Hah, I love that.
I wrote a piece on Warren’s argument. You can read it here.