Excellent Henrin. Good post.
As I said:
They require labor. Something we all have right to is our own labor.
They require property(aka money) We all have a right to our property
As for the records example, labor.
So, if people decide that knowing what records the government has on them is more important to them than say the $0.01 a year it would cost them to pay for the labor required to look them up and mail them out on request, what is wrong with them deciding that they want that to be a right?
Part of my point. Taxes as an idea as I said before is not a violation of your rights. As I have said before, it's the avenue that is chosen on taxes that is the problem and where the violation of rights occurs. For example, income taxes is taken out of your wages without your permission and without you doing anything with the government. By taking it out in the way they are doing they are saying they own the income and whatever they didn't take you should just be thankful they allowed you to keep.
It is an individual help program that is meant to assist a certain individual in society while you pay for it, which is actually not similar to lets say the police where if I'm paying for it I'm getting a direct return. Sure people have argued there is an indirect return for education towards me and I am forced to agree, but then, everything could have a indirect return really. Hell, the guy that robbed you could get more economic return for your income than you would have done with it and that could benefit you, but its still theft, isn't it? Wouldn't you agree that is true?
Lastly, it takes labor from individuals to exist. As it stands now we pay those individuals to provide the education to our children, however, because it is a right then we have a right to their labor and they can not refuse their labor to us. For example, if they say, "I will not teach that student" they are violating the students right to an education.
Yes, I agree that it is debatable which government programs benefit society as a whole. That's what we have democracy for. Everybody sees it a little different, so we vote. The only real alternative would be some kind of a dictatorship where one person's notions of what was good for society and what wasn't were imposed on everybody else.
A right to property says everything I own is mine and you can't have it or use it unless I give you permission, while a right to an eduction calls for the property to be given. What other dots are there?
That is the connection between the two. That is what I guessed was the connection you were drawing, but you hadn't previously explained that.
How exactly does speech conflict with property rights? Please provide an example, thank you.
Sure, for example, if you own a restaurant and I stand out front of it telling people that you serve rat meat. I would be in effect taking property from you. Your business which was worth $200k before I was out there is now only worth $100k. You may be driven out of business completely if I'm allowed to continue and you might lose the restaurant completely. But, I'm exercising free speech, so if the courts stop me, then my right to free speech will be hindered. The way the courts currently split the baby is that if I can prove that I have a reasonable belief that it is true, I can keep saying it, but if I don't, I can't. So, both sides are losing some rights in the compromise. I lose the freedom to say things that I know aren't true about your business, and you lose the ability to protect your property to speakers who mistakenly believe something that isn't true.
I need an example here as well. Thanks.
For example, I own the lot next to yours. I dig a pit 20 feet deep right up against the property line. Nothing collapses, but it weakens the ground enough that you can't build a structure right next to the property line on your side because the weight might cause it to collapse. If I'm not allowed to dig the pit, I am losing absolute rights over my own property, but if I am allowed to, I am taking your ability to make a building wherever you want on your property.
Yes, it does. Do we allow people to take without permission from other people? Why is the government different? Look, I understand the law says so, but I'm trying to get you think about it, so please, do not use the law here. What are the differences between the two? Do you think they are not merely created by the government?
The government is different because it is elected by the people. The government is the people deciding something together. Some decisions can be made individually with no loss of efficiency. For example, you can decide what color shirt you wear and no matter what color you pick, that won't have any impact on me. It won't help me and it won't hurt me. And there is no significant efficiency to be gained by having that decision made collectively. But, on the other end of the spectrum, the decision of whether or not to repel an invasion of the country needs to be made collectively. Individuals could never defend the country against an invasion by a nation, so if we don't decide collectively to pool our resources and submit to the command and control of the government, then we are deciding to accept occupation. All decisions the country is faced with fall somewhere on that spectrum. Some can only be made collectively because our eggs are essentially all in the same basket. Some have no impact on others so we can make them totally individually. But most fall in between. Many things can be more efficiently handled by working together than individually. For example, we have dabbled with privatizing fire protection from time to time in our history. It is theoretically possible. You just pay a company to give you fire protection, and if you house catches on fire, you call them up and they come put it out. But, that is a far, far, less efficient approach. Once a big fire gets going, it is much, much, harder to stop, and to avoid putting out fires for non-covered people they would need to intentionally let it get huge. Often it would get too huge to fight before they could act. On top of that, you need to essentially duplicate the infrastructure. If you want a 5 minute response time, you need to have one private firehouse from each company within 5 minutes of you, where if they were all one, you would only need one fire house. So, it costs much more to do it privately. So, that is something that we have decided as a society we would rather handle collectively. That is what it means when the government does something rather than individuals- that is a thing that we have decided we would rather handle collectively. That's what the government is- the pool of things that we as a people have decided we want to work on together, so that's why it is different than a business. A business does not have the consent of the people in general, government does.