Rights vs. Needs: Communism and Slavery
English translation: “Achievements of Russia under Communism” (“What did the dictatorship of the proletariat give to the peasantry?”) Photo by Demyan Bedny. No known copyright restrictions., CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
On Twitter, a seemingly innocuous post by one of those meme reposters showed a map which displayed that the US was the only country that did not vote at the UN to make food a right. That is actually a very complicated objection, but I won’t get into the politics of national sovereignty or international rights. I hate the UN as it is worse than useless to the US. In short, I made the rather simple point in response to the Tweet that:
“A need is not a right.
Why is that so hard to comprehend?”
Now, to us smart people in the world, the difference between a need and a right should be rather obvious. Tankies are not very bright people. But let me indulge myself to explain the difference to those who may or may not be confused.
Needs are those things humans (or any living thing on Earth, broadly speaking) need to survive. From a 10,000-foot level, there are four core needs for a species to survive: Water, sustenance or food, air, and reproduction. There are two more some people agree on and others do not: Shelter and socialization. The first three core needs are needed for each individual within the species to survive while the fourth covers survival of the species as a group.
Now, air is of varying quality and free outside of Spaceballs. Reproduction is free technically, but it’s essentially a transaction or contract between two (or more!) people. Water and food are technically not free of cost. Water from a drinking fountain may be free to the end user, but the filtration and piping needed to keep the water clean and safe for drinking while delivering it to people are not. I have a monthly water bill. I’m sure most of the people reading this do as well. Similarly, food takes resources to produce, so it is not without cost. All resources are scarce and finite. Air is also a finite resource, but it is not a need humans currently need to distribute willingly. It’s just there.
A right, as I believe it, means something everyone on Earth already has. This is the concept of natural rights or inalienable rights. Rights endowed by our Creator. One does not have to believe in a higher power like I do to understand the philosophical imperative that states all men are created equal. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and property. These rights are free and available to all people on Earth at all times. Not every government allows this, but America tries its best to protect our natural rights.
Food cannot be a natural right. We do not inherently have food. Beyond that, the concept of ending world hunger is itself an unsolvable problem. Due to finite resources and the fact that every species needs to consume energy in order to keep living in some capacity on a semi-regular basis, all hunger will never be eradicated for long. You give a man a fish, he’ll just need to eat again soon. Self-sufficiency is what we should strive for when it comes to world hunger. Giving people food doesn’t solve the long-term problem. This is why SNAP benefits in America, known as food stamps in the parlance of our times, are meant to be supplemental (that’s what the S stands for, after all.) Temporary as well. Food stamps are not intended to be the only means by which those who qualify for them are able to purchase food. If it was, those people would just be wards of the state, removed of all agency and responsibility for their own lives and actions.
Isn’t that cold? To those overflowing with empathy, perhaps. But I am a problem solver, long-term. We’ll feed them now and not worry as to why they can’t provide for themselves! No, that makes people dependent on government welfare. Welfare is not intended to never end, at least not in principle. In practice, there are many people who are on welfare without pause for years, if not decades. With no immediate need to solve the problem of lack of necessary food, they take the government largesse for granted and waste all their other money on things.
And this isn’t a problem restricted to only poor people. A significant chunk of Americans above the poverty line have less than $500 in the bank once they pay their monthly bills. As long as you have a job, you have cash flow. So, debt piles up or you barely skirt by with minimal savings. Or both! I wish I had more savings. No debt, thankfully, but a lack of savings. A lot of people spend the resources they have or expect to have and do not think long-term. This is a profound failure of human nature that is known to most people as instant gratification. Hard work sometimes means not going out to dinner this week to save for a house or a new car or whatever things that require a lot of resources all at once in order to purchase. Humans have a tendency to not think beyond the now, even with a history of such thinking not working out well for them in the past.
Free will means we cannot prevent people from making mistakes. We can seek for people to be self-sufficient, but we cannot force them to. But such decisions eventually come due. If you make poor choices, you will eventually come to regret them. It is finding a way to be better or making excuses for your poor actions that is the fork in the road of individual humanity. Feel sorry for yourself and stay where you are, or improve.
But what does communism and slavery have to do with this? I angered the communists, the keyboard Twitters warriors, with that Twitter reply above. I then went through and explained my position to all of them until they stopped replying. This was dozens of people over many hours. I got ratioed by communists, which is always a fun state of being for me. I enjoy the chaos of debate. The simple logic that I used to counter the tankie horde was empiricism. Taking an argument to its logical conclusion. It allows you as a free-thinking individual to test the strengths of your beliefs, especially the foundational beliefs of your core ideology. F. A. Hayek, David Hume, Rene Descartes, and John Locke all pioneered new ways of thinking in relation to empiricism.
If food is a right, it must be free to the end user. This means that the government is the arbiter of food prices. Cost and price are not the same thing, so let’s move on from that issue. Everything, even things you get for free, has a cost. If the government is ensuring everyone has food, this means the farmers and other food producers mostly only have the government as a buyer. The government, having a monopoly on force, will not take no for an answer when the food producers wish to quibble on price. The food producers essentially work for the government for a price that the government can change at any time on a whim without taking into account the cost of production.
In modern parlance, that is slavery. See the problem now?
BUT BUT BUT!! If we have a natural right to life, isn’t food necessary? That doesn’t make food a right. It is still a need. Animals survive without being provided food in the wild. They hunt, gather, and/or scavenge for it. Given a lack of government or a breakdown in civilization, all humans wouldn’t automatically starve. But some would. Not all problems can be permanently solved for all people on Earth at any time. You can just seek to make the problems as small as possible. Capitalism reduced world poverty, a natural state of humanity for tens of thousands of years, to almost nothing while Norman Borlaug and others saved billions of lives through food production innovation. All over the last 300 or so years. That’s amazing, the exponential growth in wealth and innovation.
Making food a right is simply a path on the road to serfdom to an ever-powerful and centralized government elite with absolute power over your life. If the government decides that food is a right, it can take it from you. Starve you out. And communist governments did this many times since the birth of Marxism.
Natural rights are those the government merely protects. Government does not provide you with rights; it protects them should someone else violate them. The government punishes murderers and thieves and other assorted evil people. Beyond that, we make our own path in life.
Just happen to be reading this, which you might find interesting.Report
Odd that it doesn’t focus on 20th century famines at all. Just the latter half of the 19th century.Report
Ah, well.Report
Because that would require examining why they happened.Report
You should have read the subtitle, which explains what it’s focusing on.
(It’s worth noting that he mentions those 20th century famines, and their causes, in the book, so he’s already ahead of your post there.)Report
Good.Report
Anyway, it’s a good book. People who are interested in history should read it. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it’s got a lot of fascinating information.Report
Not surprised the discussion originated with tankies. “Tankie” is a term for mid-20th century supporters of the USSR, and these sort of “Communism/ Capitalism” arguments always have this sort of musty air, like something from a bygone era.
The question of food being a right or not is pretty much irrelevant because changing the answer wouldn’t necessitate any change in our public policy.
In most modern economies, food and water are quasi-socialized goods. And because of this, in modern industrialized economies, food and water are produced in such staggeringly efficient quantities that they approach being free.
Most government policies are in fact geared towards subsidizing or facilitating the mass production of consumer goods. Even when not directly subsidized, the governments construct the base infrastructure allowing them to flourish such that they are not in fact scarce.
But as the 21st century wears on and climate change wreaks havoc on the global production of food this all might change.Report
The supposition of your final sentence assumes quite a lot.Report
It’s less climate change and more the war in Europe. We might also be seeing the end of globalization.
If you were depending on Russian/Ukrainian exports to keep your argo industry working, you have a problem. Maybe big enough to cause famine.Report
“I will define ‘needs’ as something distinct from and separate from ‘rights’.” So if needs (or the fulfillment or satiation of those needs) cannot be rights, what are rights? “[S]omething everyone on Earth already has”, you say. These include: “Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and property”, which “are free and available to all people on Earth at all times.”
Of course, not everyone on earth has liberty, the right to pursue happiness, or property. I suppose it could be argued that everyone on earth has life at the moment, but this is temporary, and states take people’s lives from them all the time. And I’m not quite sure how you would consider life not to be a need? (Perhaps if one presupposes an immortal soul…)
The idea of a right to property is particularly laughable, and I suspect that you would label anyone arguing that there is a right to property as a “tankie”. Surely you mean the right to own property, if someone has the means to do so. I can’t see you arguing that if one lacks property then they are owed property. In practice, one has a right to own what one already has, not a right to stuff they cannot obtain.
We can argue that people should have a right to life or a right to liberty, but these are things that are taken from people all the time, even in our own society, where we might expect the state to protect them. Rights are not universal or absolute in practice, and they are socially decided upon. Even those who argue for rights deriving from natural law disagree about the specifics about what natural law is, what rights emerge, and the appropriate limits (if any) on those rights.
Further, what good is a right if it is not actionable? Yes, the nodding heads agree, North Koreans have a right to liberty. So what is being done to protect that right? North Koreans need to stand up to their totalitarian state! Yes, Americans have a right to life, but if someone with diabetes cannot afford insulin, that life might be quite short indeed. Too bad, so sad for you. Diabetics living in poverty need to buckle down! I got mine–getting yours is on you.
The implication is that rights can only be asserted (and are only useful) if one has the power and resources to act on them. Your argument defines rights into uselessness.Report
You don’t have a right to life. It’s too hard to implement and steps on too many other ideals. If you need my blood to survive, it’s still seriously illegal to force me to give it against my will.Report
Russell Michaels, the author of our piece, is the one who asserted the right to life.
However, I will point out that rights aren’t generally seen as absolute anyway. One can have a right to free speech without the ability to compel others to listen, or to compel third party publication, for instance. One can certainly argue that people have a right to life without also arguing that such a right compels individuals to put themselves at risk (or even suffer an inconvenience) to preserve someone else’s life. We could define such a right as an issue of community responsibility (such as the state needing to find a way to make insulin affordable, rather than forcing me to drive to the pharmacy and open my wallet for my neighbor). Of course, some will argue that taxation is theft, and others will argue that private property is theft. As usual, the devil’s in the details.Report
You don’t have the right to kill someone. That’s the right to life. The government punishes you if take the right to life of someone else.Report
TL:DR – libertarians STILL can’t get there from here without the heavy hand of government intervention.Report
Please do not confuse Libertarians with libertarians. Thank you.Report
I’m not. the lowercase use was intentional.Report
I literally say many governments don’t allow their people to have those things.
What did you think I meant?Report
I think you meant what you wrote, which is that rights are “[S]omething everyone on Earth already has”. The contradiction between “all people everywhere have this thing” and “some people don’t actually have this thing” requires at least some explanation.
Are you saying that everyone has rights, but some people don’t have rights? This isn’t a coherent idea. I recognize that, with some work, you could make this coherent (though perhaps not persuasive), but you haven’t demonstrated that work in this piece.
Your argument seems to come down to: 1) rights cannot be needs; 2) rights can be discerned by the fact that they are things everyone has; followed by the unspoken 3) but not everyone actually has discernible rights, so 4) I’ll just tell you what things are rights.
You could skip all the initial stuff and jump to step 4. This would have the advantage of at least being concise.Report
It’s called abuse of government power?Report
This seems silly and overly semantic. I agree it’s kind of dumb to characterize things like this as ‘rights’ in some sort of legal sense. However we’re a wealthy society awash in food, with techniques and technology that allow us incredible yields unimaginable for almost all of history. There’s no reason we can’t equip people to obtain it, including by subsidy where necessary. God forbid the richest society in the history of the world provide for the nutrition of those who struggle to afford it. The idea that there is some sort of ‘teach a man to fish’ parable or moral hazard to this in the context of the 21st century United States is absurd.Report
Self-sufficiency is the goal.Report
Self-sufficiency is literally impossible. It has always been impossible. There have always been natural disasters or events like war that could wipe out somebody’s hard work in an instance and they would need to turn to other people to survive or everybody starved together. Before modern agriculture, crop failure and famines with lean years were big issues. Society only started getting wealthy once humans could specialize. Capitalism generally requires that most people are going to stay employees, even if they are very high level employees, their entire career rather than be their own boss.Report
I think this is right. True self sufficiency is only possible at the most primitive level of human development. We’re way passed that. And we have all kinds of cool stuff for it.Report
Even when we were stoned aged hunters and gatherers or the most primitive farmers, humans lived in groups for survival and social needs. We are great plains social apes. We are not equipped physically or mentally for self-sufficiency.Report
“stoned aged hunters and gatherers”
On the search for those groovy ‘shrooms, no doubt.Report
It is for most people in the world, man.Report
It is always amazing that so many extreme free marketers have this fantasy of self-sufficiency when nearly every free market thinker from Smith onward would argue for specialization, even extreme speclization, and against self-sufficiency.Report
All the more amazing in that these sorts of appeals to “decentralization” and “self sufficiency” occur online, i.e., via a vast interconnected web of legal and regulatory structures erected by centralized government.Report
Most people on Earth are self-sufficient in that they do not starve or die of thirst.
Their basic needs are met.
Capitalism and innovation spurned by profit that gave us that in the last 300 or so years. You’re welcome.Report
One of these things is not like the other Russel.Report
I think we have a disagreement as to what the word means.Report
Why yes we do, in as much as my definition is how multiple dictionaries define the word. You seem to have developed a definition that fits your priors . . . isn’t functional . . . and would be the opposite of human historical experience.
Fascinating how you got there though.Report
Most people on this planet do not grow their own food, build their own shelter, or make their own repairs. They depend on a big group of farmers, producers, transportation workers, and merchants to get them their food. They don’t go out and get eggs from their chicken but to a supermarket or corner grocery store. People don’t juice oranges grown on their own trees. They pour it from a carton of orange juice.Report
They are self-sufficient in that they can feed themselves with the money they earn and do not die of hunger or exposure or what have you.Report
Now I understand what brought you into contact with tankies in the first place.
You’re speaking in a vocabulary of cultish jargon where words and phrases have special meaning hidden from outsiders.
Like, you state that you “centralized government”.
What the hell does that mean for us outsiders?
You hate the sewer system? The FAA?
You toss this phrase out there like it has meaning but it is gibberish to anyone else.
And so with “self sufficiency”.
To normal people it invokes survivalists, doomsday preppers or maybe just a wandering nomad like the Mountain Men of the frontier.
Now you tell us that no, the phrase actually means just participating in the vast interdependent cooperative system of civilization and centralized government.Report
Even the term “tankies” is specialized jargon. He won’t find the guys at the bowling alley or the gun store or Walmart using it regularly.Report
History really did end in the 1990s.
By that I mean the history that all of us were born into, the century long epic struggle between market based liberal democracy and illiberal socialism came to an end with liberal democracy scoring an absolute victory.
Which is why I say this all has a musty old time feel, like if somebody were to drop in and start making the case for Jacobites or free silver or something.
Modern political divides aren’t between markets versus government any more.Report
I think this is right, and agree that it feels like a really odd thing to relitigate, whatever may be trending on twitter. The meaningful debates are over how we navigate the victory of market economics.Report
There are lots of people who really want them to be about markets vs. governments though. Like my brother noted on the other blog, lots of people are just shocked the old center-left coalitions are gone in developed democracies and act accordingly, Meanwhile some very doctrinaire libertarians see the specter of centralized planning and nationalized industries right around the corner.Report
I have written copious times about my hatred for an all powerful centralized government.
You can read any of the articles I’ve written on economics or Hayek. I linked several of them in the piece you commented on.Report
Start with “Does America have such a thing as an ‘all powerful central government ‘?
Like are you even describing the reality we all share?Report
I said I dislike one. I never claimed we had one.Report
Why is this the goal?
For whom is this the goal?
And IF it is the goal, then what does it matter whether rights are protected or not since needs outweigh rights when you are your own provider of both?Report
Entertainment for me. I don’t get paid to write here.Report
Then troll on Brother man. Just understand that a whole bunch of us will now start laughing at you quite openly instead of taking you seriously.Report
OK? Thanks for reading my article.Report
“I then went through and explained my position to all of them until they stopped replying. This was dozens of people over many hours.” So much winning! Give yourself a pat on the back.Report
I was bored at work. It was fun.
Thanks for reading.Report
Let’s set aside the clumsy and (per the OP) inaccurate parlance of food as a “right.”
Maybe it’s to the advantage of society as a whole that everyone in it has adequate nourishment. That makes it more likely that nearly everyone can engage in productive work of one sort or another, after all, which increases the aggregate level of wealth because nearly everyone is adding value to the economy all the time instead of only searching for sustenance; certainly if people needn’t spend substantial amounts of their time resolving sustenance issues, a higher percentage of them can thus add value.
If that proposition were true, while we perhaps oughtn’t characterize food as a right per se, it maybe ought to be considered an entitlement or, alternatively, part of the infrastructure, from a mutual benefit perspective. And if some people are clumsy in their language and refer to such things as rights when they aren’t technically this, inaccurate nomenclature amongst the laity probably doesn’t much matter all that much in the long run.Report
We already do this for the downtrodden.
What exactly should we do beyond that?Report
Focus on desired policy outcomes rather than ideologically-laden nomenclature.Report
This is what I was referring to.
Whether food is a “right” or not, how would the answer to this question change any of our policy questions?
For example this story about water “rights” in Arizona:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-arizona-fresh-scrutiny-of-saudi-arabia-owned-farms-water-use
In an interview with The Associated Press, Attorney General Kris Mayes said she thought most Arizonans see it as “outrageous” that the state is allowing foreign-owned companies “to stick a straw in our ground and use our water for free to grow alfalfa and send it home to Saudi Arabia. We just can’t — in the midst of an epic drought — afford to do dumb things with water in the state of Arizona anymore.”
Does assuming the “right” to food suggest an answer in one direction or another?
No, it really doesn’t. The massive volumes of water rights, treaties, agreements and regulations already in force assume that the production of food is a compelling public interest.
But as I referred to above, as we experience megadroughts and heat, the current structure of those treaties and agreements may change.Report
Desired policy outcomes come with unintended consequences, which is why I hate centralized government power.Report
Indeed, and discussing the unintended consequences of proposals is an important part of policy discussions. “Free food for all” certainly sounds good but it’s very much within the scope of the kinds of discussions we ought to have to discuss what unintended but likely negative consequences might arise from adopting such a policy. That’s not what this post does.Report
I did that. You can’t make something have zero cost.
That’s why I brought up the example I did.Report
To the extent you deal with actual real-world consequences of implementing ideas, you went from “Food is a right” to “the government will establish a food monopsony” to “we will all become slaves.” At minimum, you skipped over a lot of steps and made a lot of assumptions to skip those steps. You explicitly state that your method of reasoning is to push an argument offered by someone else to its extreme position, rather than exploring what the proponent of an idea is actually advocating. This is thinking with labels, not experience.
Do governmental monopsonies create conditions where the government dictates prices by its fiat and thus leads to enslavement of the producers of the good or service in question? U.S. arms manufacturers operate in a monopsony market but I’m pretty sure they not only feel free but are in greater control of the price of their products than their single customer — and this while they compete with one another through a complex and heavily-regulated bidding process. Ask people in Germany or Canada or the UK if they feel like slaves because the government is the single payer of Healthcare services in those nations. You’re like to get a response along the lines of “No, I feel more free in that arena than I think you are in the United States.” The U.S. government monoposonized more than a few food products (and a bunch of other products like nylon and steel) during World War II and somehow those providers did not feel enslaved nor were enough of them driven out of business to the point of industry collapse.
That’s because in the real world, things don’t automatically and instantly move to the most extreme position. In the real world there is no such thing as pure socialism (state control of goods and services) and no such thing as pure free market capitalism (the absence of state participation in economic activity). Everywhere you go where there is a government at all you will find a hybrid of those two extreme positions, varying from place to place by matters of degree. This post is thinks in labels because contrary to the accumulation of lived experience (history, if you will) it relies on the technique of argumentum ad extremis.
It’s of non-zero but still very minimal use to say that governmental participation in the production and distribution of food could result in the use of enforced monopsony and price controls to effectively enslave food producers. Okay, noted. A caution to bear in mind. Now, let’s please set aside the ideology and talk instead about practicalities.
The realistic system that might actually result from implementing a “Food is a right” policy in the U.S. would be expanding the scope of a program like SNAP to more widely subsidize fundamentally market-driven food purchases. (Please note that this does not involve a governmental monopsony.) How much that would happen depends on the degree to which the public is willing to embrace the idea that “Food is a right.” Let’s assume that the idea really catches fire, and everyone gets to participate, even people of strong economic means, and the amount of the subsidy becomes roughly equal to, say, Social Security payments to retirees.
The downsides I see to this would be 1) higher taxes, with likely higher debt incurred before we got around to raising taxes, and 2) an expanded and deeply tedious debate about what kinds of foodstuffs would be eligible for participation. There might be others that don’t occur to me, which is a big part of the value of a discussion.
Slavery, or even an enhanced degree of economic enclosure, of the food providers seems a long long way away from subsidization of their products to consumers. Indeed, real-world experience suggests that providers of food products like it when the government subsidizes those products: it increases demand and therefore increases income. Politicians are made to pay obeisance to the corn subsidy and ethanol mandates every four years when they caucus in Iowa for this exact reason.Report
If food becomes a right, the government can take it from you, leaving you with zero recourse short of armed rebellion.Report
You probably think that’s a coup de grace but to me it looks like a reversion to an ideological bromide, thinking with labels and not with information. So I’m done here because I’m satisfied you didn’t care to read or understand a thing I wrote to try and dialogue with you, and I don’t care if you think you “prevailed” in this exchange.Report
You wrote five paragraphs to my two sentences.
Brevity is the soul of wit, man.Report
Far as I can tell, we have two desired policies outcomes.
1) Have people eat. The good news is mission accomplished.
2) Don’t lose jobs for food advocates given 1).
Thus defining “food deserts” so food stores need to be within walking distance. Ergo I live in a food desert because I drive and my kid bikes to the store.
Thus changing the problem to “access to good food” rather than “are people eating” because we can use the word “good” to claim lots of food don’t count.
The goal post moving makes it hard to evaluate the problem but this may also be a solution (and the desire for it) in search of a problem.
We need more state control! Oh, everyone is in favor of everyone eating, so we need more state control because of hunger!
Everyone can eat.
We need more state control because of lack of access to truly great food! Report
You do know there are economic costs to eating poor quality overprocessed foods? Things like increased obesity, increased rates of type 2 diabetes, and early death? And that “good food” costs more at point of purchase and is not easily available everywhere? Which is what food deserts are actually all about?Report
I put the actual definition of “food desert” below. I, personally, fit the definition of living in a food desert.
A 10 minute drive means I’m in danger of starvation or am forced to buy junk food. Heck, even a 3 minute drive would mean that so I’m probably at high risk.
The rhetoric on how dangerous it is to not have access to good food doesn’t match the reality that I have access to great food.
The definition is nakedly designed to vastly overstate the problem. There are other yardsticks we could use which would avoid this problem. My strong expectation is vastly overstating the problem is a feature and not a bug.Report
Define “walking distance.”
And good stores are businesses. That means they are affected by local things, like crime and shoplifting.
Food deserts, which don’t truly exist in the way you mean, are a function of geography, rent/lease prices per square foot, crime, and supply chain management.Report
How does the USDA define food desert?
Definition: A tract with at least 500 people, or 33 percent of the population, living more than 1 mile (urban areas) or 10 miles (rural areas) from the nearest supermarket, supercenter, or large grocery store.
This is an insane definition. The nearest Publix is 3.0 miles away and Walmart is 6. We have thousands of people here.
The number of hungry people here is probably zero (median income is high), but for political purposes we all count as being in endanger of hunger.
My expectation is more accurate definitions and/or measurements result in politically uncomfortable results. Like the number of people endangered isn’t scary high and the problem is largely solved.Report
No, your definition would create a lot of unintended consequences.Report
The quote is USDA’s definition.
“Within walking distance” is my interpretation of that. Which doesn’t change that most people have access to a car.Report
No, your desire to make it less of a distance would create problems.Report
One common use of rights is the rice to not be in a certain state (e.g., hunger), which is effectively what “right to food” says. Even if we ignore his facile view of history, the post is doomed by the fact that his definition of rights, and his criticism of others’ use of “rights,” is by no means universal (and outside of the U.S., perhaps not even all that common).
I’m sure there are interesting criticisms of the “right to food,” or “right to housing,” or “right to healthcare,” etc., but you won’t find them in this post.Report
“If that proposition were true, while we perhaps oughtn’t characterize food as a right per se, it maybe ought to be considered an entitlement or, alternatively, part of the infrastructure, from a mutual benefit perspective. ”
For someone who claims that we shouldn’t let labels do our thinking for us, you’re awful concerned about what label is being used to describe the thing that Russell is writing about.Report
Russell Michaels has as much right, or as little, as anyone else to prescribe the proper use of the English language. There may be some value in analyzing Russell Rights differently from rights as commonly and more broadly used, but here it butters no parsnips. One common use is to call something a “right” when it is an enforceable claim on X’s part to a portion of society’s wealth for food, water, shelter, or education. A society is absolutely free to create such enforceable rights if it deems them expedient. Even St. Friedrich had no objection in principle to a sufficiently wealthy society doing such a thing.
Of course, any particular scheme of enforceable claims may be too costly, too burdensome, too inefficient, too counterproductive, or vulnerable to other sorts of objections. And certainly, any such scheme entails that those of us who are relatively well-off will have to contribute in some way, usually taxes, to the effort. But that is not communism, slavery, or theft. Whether a particular scheme is expedient or not is something that can be determined only by hard work, not by consulting a dictionary, whether real or private.Report
Russell Michaels has as much right, or as little, as anyone else to prescribe the proper use of the English language.
Of course. And of course, we have to use words to communicate our ideas to one another. Words are naught but labels arbitrarily attached to concepts.
Nevertheless, letting labels do our thinking for us is REALLY dangerous.Report
One must define their labels. And not assume their meaning.Report
What you’ve done is assume their meaning, and then act as though that meaning was given from on high, instead of one person’s somewhat superficial understanding of natural rights (a particular kind of right that, even within the sorts of theories that rely on them, is not meant to exhaust the term “rights” itself).Report
No, I took my own meaning. Because that’s all I can know.
I just have to explain myself. Which I did.Report
If all you’re doing is explaining yourself, why should we care?Report
Then why did you comment at all?Report
It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.Report
I see we have reached an impasse.Report
What you think you see is your business. But if you’re unhappy with the level of engagement with what you have to say, you might want to look at what you say and how you say it.Report
Right back at you!Report
PeeWee Herman is dead.Report
But Mark Holton is alive.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLlv_aZjHXcReport
“You’re letting labels do your thinking for you. I’m just believing people when they tell me who they are. We are not the same.”Report
But you assume their labels when they tell you what they are.
Their definitions will never be the same as yours.
And this is one of the core problems with argumentation. Information differences between people.
No two people have the exact same knowledge base or set.Report
I’d make distinctions between stuff like “a right to aspirin” and “a right to buy aspirin”.
I do not have a right to aspirin. But a bottle of aspirin costs, what? Five bucks?
And I can buy it.
We can do the same for food and medical care but it’s easiest to make the point with stuff like veterinary care. Maribou and I have three nutter-butter kittens that are trying to kill us. It costs us money to get them stuff like veterinary care or food, for that matter.
Here’s a story about vets from a few years back. The grim headline: Suicides among veterinarians become a growing problem.
What’s the opening to the WaPo story?
My thought is something to the effect of “today vets, tomorrow doctors” and, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a wikipedia page dedicated to suicide among doctors.
You want to make health care a right? Well, prepare yourself for a situation where there are increases in debt, compassion fatigue and social media attacks from angry patients against medical professionals. And stuff will follow from that.
It’s a consumer good and we have a price problem. If we try to fix it by goosing demand, we’re going to end up with a worse price problem *AND* mounting debt, compassion fatigue, and social media attacks.Report
Is free veterinary care for Fido a right established by law? I must have missed it.Report
Oh, I was using the term “right” the way we use “health care is a right!” when we’re talking about humans.
Like, I was using it in a “moral assertion” sense rather than a “privilege extended” sense.
(But I stand by that what happens to vets today will happen to doctors tomorrow.)Report
Mmmm I think we’d need a much greater abundance of doctors for doctors to then be so poorly paid that the stress of their job and their patiences obnoxiousness to penetrate through the jolly jingling of lucre in their ears.Report
Hey, I already linked to the wiki page dedicated to their suicide rates.
“Well, that’s not due to X. That’s due to Y and Z!”
Okay. Sure. Is whatever is planned going to make Y better? Z better? Because if it’s not going to even touch Y or Z and it might make X a little worse but not that much worse, then we’re making the set of {X AND Y AND Z} a little worse.Report
I’m thoroughly confused. You brought up vet suicide in a comment thread on a form letter article about how positive rights are communism and slavery but allowed that vet services are not currently legally a positive right. Now you’re saying that I’m not hypothesizing much about the causes of and proposing policies to address vet suicide? You’re right, I’m not. Did you get lost on the way to the open mike thread?Report
I’m more taking the attitude that calling a particular consumer good (e.g., aspirin or the time and attention of a doctor) a “right” isn’t particularly useful but *ACCESS* to purchasing that consumer good might be less not useful.
The more any given person feels… let’s use the word “entitled” to a particular consumer good, they get resentful about finding out that, nope, it’s a consumer good.
And, from there, you see stuff like “veterinarian suicides”.
Any plan that has a goal of making sure that more people have access to consumer goods should focus on making sure that those consumer goods are abundant and access to them is somewhat easy to come by.
Because if you ignore stuff like Y and Z and are doing things that kinda make X worse, you’re going to find yourself in a worse situation regarding the set of things despite your best intentions.
Even if doctors make more money than most folks.Report
Attitudes, yes, you can find an attitude for everything. That particular attitude is pretty silly.Report
I’m not worried about it being silly as much as I’m worried about it being more common today than yesterday (and it being more common tomorrow than today).Report
Looking at the state of global (actual) communism now vs the past I’d say your worries are profoundly misplaced.Report
I’m not.
I’m merely looking at vet suicides and extrapolating from there to doctors and nurses.Report
But what does that have to do with the number of dogs that get killed when they escape their yards, run into streets and get hit by cars?
About as much correlation, I suspect, as there is between animal medical care givers rates of suicides, human medical care givers rates of suicide and the propensity of people to call a consumer good a right.Report
This goes back to the whole “mounting debt, compassion fatigue and social media attacks”.
Will making more consumer goods explicitly a “right” change anything about mounting debt, compassion fatigue, or social media attacks on the part of those tasked with providing these consumer goods?
Seems to me, from here, that it’ll make things worse.Report
It’s a hypothesis, sure, but given that the problem you are highlighting already exists and is escalating in a world where medical care for animals is not a positive right and has zero prospect of becoming one I would say it is a very weak hypothesis.Report
I’m making the additional leap from “if it’s getting this bad without it being a right, just wait until it is one”.Report
Good hypothesis testing in science requires a range of tests, some intentionally designed to disprove the hypothesis.
With that in mind, what other hypotheses might you construct about this progression and why do you reject them?Report
You mean something like “lets look at the suicide rate of medical professionals over the 10 year period following the PPACA and see if it goes up or down”?Report
Or maybe the suicide rate of medical providers in countries with single payer vs America?Report
Do you have those numbers?
I’m having enough trouble finding numbers across the years for the US.
Just stuff like this:
Report
Um no. More like what other outcomes might exist and what data might be required or exist that would point to them. Both you and Russell see only one path (albeit different paths) arising from expanding the designations of “rights” and I’m asking what alternative paths you can see.Report
The outcomes include “numbers going up” or “numbers going down” and maybe even “numbers staying more or less the same”.
But if you reject my suggestion, that’s great.
Would you like to offer up a measurable thing?
I mean, the problem with “measurables” means that we’re stuck with “what happened” rather than “HOW FREAKING AWESOME WOULD IT BE IF WE GAVE EVERYBODY FREE SKIN TAG REMOVAL RUBBER BAND GUNS” but one of the problems with outcomes is that you’re stuck comparing them to themselves over time rather than to hypotheticals.Report
well we could measure health outcomes form making healthcare a right. Things like change sin rates of obesity and diabetes. Changes in rates of ER visits. Changes in frequency of treatment for preventable diseases. I suspect they would intersect with your rates of doctor suicides . . . but I don’t think in the ways you think.Report
Rates of Obesity: Well, I’ve got this. The rate of growth of severe obesity is going down.
Which is good news, I guess. I tend to think that a little bit too chubby is better for your health than a little bit too skinny.
When it comes to long-term trends in diabetes, I have this but I don’t know whether it counts as something that disproves anything that I think or if it counts as something that would disprove any of your hypotheseses.
When it comes to ER visits, I’ve got this and same same.
When it comes to preventable diseases, I tend to think that those numbers would be muddied by stuff that is treatable in the current year but was untreatable a decade ago. So I don’t know how to search for that.Report
My hypothesis is that healthcare as a right means greater access and better long term outcomes in these sort of health statistics.
Take the obesity statistics – the rate of growth of severe obesity may be going down but there’s still growth in total rates, which represents growth is all sorts of negative health outcomes.
Your call whether healthcare as a right would impact that.Report
Would we expect this number to go up or down or remain unchanged after something like the PPACA passing?Report
Worst case I’d expect it to stabilize over something like a decade post passage, assuming the ACA were fully implemented. Which it isn’t, in as much as the Medicaid expansion that would have helped the most obese vulnerable populations has yet to be implemented in 11 states – many with significant rates of obesity.Report
What do you mean “stabilize”?
You would expect it to go up for a decade and then start to slow down?
Are there any orgs out there who made such a prediction at the time?Report
What’s missing from this discussion is any sense of what actual policy change would happen.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, the entire machinery of governance and agricultural/ industrial policy in modern economies is dedicated to making basic foodstuffs as cheap and plentiful as possible.
The sort of “Come the Revolution, food will be a right!” stuff misses that is already is, kinda.
We subsidize farmers to grow food;
We subsidize the water which they use to grow it;
We subsidize the cheap labor needed to pick the crops;
We subsidize the transportation systems needed to move it to market;
We subsidize the consumer cost to make it even cheaper;
We subsidize missions and food pantries to give food away free to anyone who asks;
At every stage of its development, from raw seed to finished bread, the government bends every law and regulation and process to put bread on every table.
Really, if we woke up tomorrow and the Supreme Court had declared that food is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, what exactly would change?Report
Really, if we woke up tomorrow and the Supreme Court had declared that food is a right guaranteed by the Constitution, what exactly would change?
I imagine we’d have two categories of foods.
1. Food That Counts
2. Food That Doesn’t Count
That’s the first thing that would happen.
Then we’d start having people be upset that stuff that is in group #2 should actually be in group #1.
But that’s just off the top of my head.Report
We already have that.
Some food is subsidized, some isn’t.
Some you can get for free, some you can’t.
What else?Report
We’d have the “food is a *RIGHT*! THAT MEANS EVERY SINGLE COMESTIBLE!!!!” people doing their thing among their 2% of the population and cultivating clout points by coming up with stupider and stupider things that they argue ought to be free.
The rest of the debate would be between the “food that is low quality but abundant” people versus the “we’re doing this for health reasons, that means black beans, brown rice, persimmons, and tofu” people.Report
So, pretty much exactly things are today then.
Like the elaborate and arcane rules set by politicians for what is allowed to be purchased with food stamps and what can’t- flour yes, corn syrup yes, but snack foods made with those are forbidden.
Really, I’m not in favor of declaring food a right but it just doesn’t seem all that revolutionary one way or another.
So I’ll just say this again- the whole epic struggle is over. Market based liberal democracy won. It is the only legitimate contender for “How should our affairs be organized” question.
We already know how to get the most amount of food into the most amount of mouths and it doesn’t have anything to do with whether food is a right or not.Report
I’ll go further than you, Chip, and say that not only has market based liberal democracy won, so too has the hybridized system of regulation and government participation within the broader market won. The fights are now the degree to which the government intervenes in the market, not whether it does at all.
Here in the U.S., we’ve opted for substantial but not overwhelming market participation, and doing what we can to make it difficult for the average consumer to actually see in action (as has been noted in several other places in this discussion).Report
What I see as likely to change things is the whole obesity debate with regards to health care.
Hey, if you truly cared about your health, you’d only need one chair in the doctor’s office. *NEXT*!Report
Proposed 28th Amendment:
A well regulated dog, being necessary to the happiness of a free State, the right of the people to free veterinary services, shall not be infringedReport
A Spot in every pot!Report
“You don’t have the right to a pet. You have the privilege of owning one and if you abuse that privilege, it can be taken away.”
“Sure.”
“Now let’s talk about your weight.”Report
The mayor who tried to ban big sodas in New York (Bloomie) was a Republican ya know.Report
Believe it or not, we had a thread dedicated to the lifting of the ban!
My favorite comment was That Pirate Guy’s:
Report
Believe it? I was there!Report
I think that the argument that if we establish X as a “right”, in the way that we use the term generally in the current year, we’re also establishing a set of obligations on the part of the people with what we’re calling “rights” now.
Hey. It doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.Report
Can you name a single right which DOESN’T establish obligations on the part of the people?Report
There are rights you can exercise without anyone knowing about it, so in that sense there aren’t any obligations imposed on others. You can think what you want but as long as the thoughts are confined within your own skull, nobody knows about it, nobody can interfere, and there is no question of an obligation, say, not to interfere.
But otherwise, probably not.Report
Yup.Report
There are a whole lot of them.
“I have a right to X.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that you have a right to take your X to the grocery store and hit someone else in the HEAD WITH IT?!?? That’s absurd!”Report
All rights rely on the collective body for defense.
The right to not be robbed implies the obligation of the collective body to defend you.Report
So, technically, slaves’ rights were not violated in the 1830s because, technically, they didn’t have any?
I appreciate that particular viewpoint and definition of rights, but know that there are others out there that believe that, no, the people who were slaves did indeed have their rights violated.
Even if the collective body wasn’t into that sort of thing.
See also: Chicks.
You seem to be using the word “right” the way that I use the term “privilege extended”.Report
Telling victims of slavery that they have rights may be true, but then it just becomes a useless exercise in self gratification.
Rights only exist in a functional sense when the collective body incurs an obligation on itself, and honors it.Report
It depends on how important “true” is, I guess.Report
He was not a Republican anymore when he did that (Independent) and he eventually ran for President as a Democrat.
Do try again.Report
Bzzzt. incorrect.
Bloomberg quit being a Democratic Party member to run as a Republican in 2001 after Giuliani was term limited out. Giuliani endorsed him, he got the nomination and was elected as a Republican Mayor. His big gulp banning was done as a Republican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_New_York_City_mayoral_electionReport
Wikipedia has him as a D until 2001, an R through 2007, and I through 2018, then a D. They also describe the proposed soda ban events as taking place 2012-2014.Report
I feel like everyone in this thread is missing the opportunity for a rare cross partisan, cross ideological consensus that Mike Bloomberg is the devil.Report
He’s certainly an wealthy idiot.Report
Ha! He probably would poll as the least respected former NYC mayor today, and that’s something.Report
Rudy’s working on that.Report
DeBlasio wins that easy right now, man.
He let his wife get away with embezzling tens of millions.Report
He ran and was elected and re-elected as a Republican but he also got the Independent party endorsement when he was re-elected.Report
By the time he did the soda ban, he was an Independent.
Do try again.Report
Bloomberg was a Republican through his entire two terms as Mayor though he also got the independent party endorsement for his run for re-election.Report
So, labels matter over actions now?Report