blazintommyd · @blazintommyd
8th Aug 2014 from TwitLonger
The Discussion continues
The following assertion was made by @MDSebach:
"Inalienable rights are all philosophically negative, @blazintommyd, they are rights to ACTION(s), not to positive goods of any kind".
The following was/is my partial response in re "positive goods"
"Water, earth, wood and fuel naturally occur as products of earth not of humanity".
The idea that anyone does not have the right to these aforesaid products of earth implies that some other individual does, which at the very least implies the right to possess to the exclusion of others, which is the basis of private property, which is clearly the invention of people
(you were saying something about majorities and minorities?)
If you wanted to be technically correct in re inalienable rights what Jefferson &co referred to is stated as follows - viz., Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the latter is substituted for property in the 3 categories of rights protected under the common law - viz., the recognition of rights by evidence of court decisions
Keeping your comments within the gist of what we've been discussing there is nothing you've offered to distinguish between the person as an individual or the person as a corporate body - e.g., a municipality - owning these things, as I already noted, the example of water.
Obviously, the products of earth which all humans require in order to subsist are not the same as things like Ferraris, wall crawlers or google glasses and there is nothing of this earth that requires them to be considered as the same, particularly since you can't subsist on these so called "positive" products.
What you seem to be struggling with is how to go about convincing enough people to comprise a majority that some past majority got it all wrong; and if that's the case you're not doing a very good job because you can't Do a good job with an impossible task.
On the other hand all that I've been doing, thus far, is simply pointing out that the ultimate arbiter of the basic proposition of whether (1) a government shall determine who has the right to own the earthly necessities of life to the exclusion of others or (2) that a government shall own these things for the general welfare of the citizenry - can only be secured by force or popular approbation
And people get tired of war