Re: _The Windup Girl_

In article
<ac89b7af-71d1-468d-87d4-f62e4d300e06@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Quadibloc <jsavard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jun 25, 5:18 am, Mike Ash <m...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

People have a right to defend themselves from acts of aggression. People
ALSO have a right to the basic necessities of life.

I think that the Libertarians, who here are merely following classical
liberalism, even if they are not completely right, do have a point
that at least these two kinds of "right" ought to be distinguished
from one another.

In the ancient world, at least, assuming a _right_ to the basic
necessities of life would have destroyed all hope of human progress.
Because there were overwhelmingly more hungry people than those who
had achieved some modicum of surplus could ever feed.

This was still true even in the early 1960s, since the Green
Revolution took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I do not care
to claim that the U.S. defense budget was morally indefensible, and we
should have concentrated all our efforts on feeding the hungry, while
letting ourselves fall to Communist rule.

I don't really care about the ancient world, or even the 60s. How about
now? Rights and wrongs *can* change. Many of the freedoms which we now
consider basic would have been completely impractical in cave-man days,
but that doesn't make them wrong.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
.

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