“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.”
“When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.”
“The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.”
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”
Oh I’m not disagreeing what you find worth or not.
Your intention here is to convert people into your way of thinking. If they bring up counter arguments you can’t defend, of course there’s no point further wasting your time.
I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything. I’m not going to have people distort and misrepresent me and then claim I have a duty to untangle the ball of string which is their own creation. I want an honest discussion with people who are capable of understanding the matter.
How honest is it to trying to evade counter-arguments by instead asking another to justify what some other self-proclaimed Objectivist might have said in another part of the internet?
In hindsight I should never have even replied to that large excretion of a post you made after I busted your natural potential argument with the orchard example. That was the real end of this discussion.
As per OP and the ‘Galt criteria’, would it be satisfied if we accept that rights(in this context I mean the concept of rights , and legallistically the right of title and deed) are man made?
And your use of “coercive” is interesting. Is it coercive to be able to force a thief from stealing your furniture? Is it coercive to be able to force a debater to pay back an overdue loan?
The real key question here is, how should rights be established, by reason. Rights sets the boundary between individuals that allow them to deal with each other objectively. The condemnation of coercion lies with the one who _initiates _a violation of right against another. Any reasonable actions of force taken by other parties afterwards to correct the wrong and restore what is right is justified. Objectivism doesn’t condemn the use of force/coercion, but the initiation of force/coercion.
Also, while you keep pronouncing that paying for improvements is completely legitimate, what you fail to understand is that ALL improvements are an amalgamation of human work and natural potentials.
Take your apple basket for example. If free wood-sticks is laying around in the forest for anyone to pick. And if those naturally occuring wood-sticks are valued at $0.1 per piece.
If I pick up free wood-sticks laying around the forest and making them into basket for rent, your logic would argue that whatever I charge for rent for the baskets should be minus $0.1, because that $0.1 would be economic rent of me asking others to pay for permission to use naturally occurring woodsticks.
This logic would then go on, and on, and on.
Vect, I just wanted to complement you for your thorough, well stated arguments throughout this thread. The above quote sums up the entire thread really. Well done!
“As per OP and the ‘Galt criteria’, would it be satisfied if we accept that rights(in this context I mean the concept of rights , and legallistically the right of title and deed) are man made?”
“Is taking the unearned from producers an initiation of force?”
I’m assuming the contributor’s answer to my question is “yes”. A silent yes. Why the silence? Can he not bring himself to agree with me on a single point? Is this a discussion or a personal battle of wits?
“Is ownership of land itself as property an instance of the initiation of force?”
Is ownership of people as property an instance of the initiation of force?
Edit:
“Caused by a profound self-doubt, self-condemnation and fear, hostility is a type of projection that directs toward other people the hatred which the hostile person feels toward himself. Blaming the evil of others for his own shortcomings, he feels a chronic need to justify himself by demonstrating their evil, by seeking it, by hunting for it—and by inventing it.”
This guy here is hilarious. He explicitly states his argument that since no one caused natural potentials, no one should be able to claim and rent them.
Yet he advocates a “compensation” that an owner of capital should pay to others for the natural potentials his capital benefits from, that while denying any one individual should be able to claim a source of natural potential, presupposes that natural potentials should considered to be owned by ALL people.
More over, he evades the fact that there is natural potential in all things man-made. This logic of his would entail not only an apartment owner pay a “compensation” for the renting of the land that supports the building, but a “compensation” from a car renter for the renting of the metal atoms that made his car, from a kitchenware renter for the renting of the sand particles that made up the glasses…etc.
There is another philosophy that argues capitals should be publicly owned.
Our Jon here of course doesn’t argue that.
He just argues part of capitals should be publicly owned.
“As per OP and the ‘Galt criteria’, would it be satisfied if we accept that rights(in this context I mean the concept of rights , and legallistically the right of title and deed) are man made?”
Could you clarify?
Correct me if I miss understand your argument, but to me it seems you are claiming that only man made objects can be considered property. That this is the Galt criteria. My line of reason was to suggest that ownership could be expressed in the operation of rights or the enjoyment of property rights in land . As others have shown throughout the thread rights are properly understood in O’ism to pertain to freedoms of action to better facilatate societal behaviour among groups of individuals. Applying the Law of Causality to the objects of property and ignoring the nature (and foundation) of rights and the enjoyment of rights in property leads, I believe, to a missinterpretation of O’ist politics.
I especially don’t understand your use of pure economic and finance terms in supporting your moral argument.
“Yet he advocates a “compensation” that an owner of capital should pay to others for the natural potentials his capital benefits from, that while denying any one individual should be able to claim a source of natural potential, presupposes that natural potentials should considered to be owned by ALL people.”
Another straw man argument. If you were capable of following the thread, you’d realise I am not classing land as capital.
“More over, he evades the fact that there is natural potential in all things man-made. This logic of his would entail not only an apartment owner pay a “compensation” for the renting of the land that supports the building, but a “compensation” from a car renter for the renting of the metal atoms that made his car, from a kitchenware renter for the renting of the sand particles that made up the glasses…etc.”
Another straw man argument. Stop making things up. You are in fact breaking the forum rules with your intellectual dishonesty.
Aluminium atoms are not man-made. If I produce aluminium for use in production, then my exertion is the basis for my claim to have a right to gain, keep, use or dispose of the aluminium I produced (the aluminium being my wage). I was the cause of earning that aluminium by means of my exertion. It is not a right to the object I have- the aluminium atoms (which cannot be owned), but a right to action with regards to the aluminium atoms. This is consistent with Rand’s and George’s definitions. Can you see now why I asked why Rand specifically stated a right is a right to action with regards to the object, and not to the object. How could you own the aluminium atoms - they are not man-made - they are Land.