Rights and Action

Some political economists and other social philosophers, advocating statism of some sort or against it, argue mainly using economic arguments, while others argue from the perspective of "natural rights."

Both sides can get heated about which is the right argument or which is more fundamental. Both kinds of arguments have advocates who believe that it is clear that their preferred system is well defended by their preferred method of defense.

And then there are some interesting blends. What if you could throw Locke, Madison, Mill, Mises, some natural rights libertarians, some anarchists and some Marxists into a pot, shake it up, pour it into a beaker and distill, and get some crystallized insight?

As a starting point, consider the following:

If someone is starving in the minimal state, yet in a ‘no-ownership’ world they would have been in a more advantageous position, then they do, in fact, have rights to compensation against all property holders (although not against the state) under the principle of justice in rectification. The Lockean proviso, or rather its historical shadow, would have been violated.

A natural right to communism as against anarchy; what of the social welfare: could you calculate, using justice in rectification, to determine which society statically has more rights-utils from a social welfare perspective? A meaningless task, but for a rainy Sunday, it could be amusing.

And then this golden one:

The only manner in which man can act upon nature is by motion. In this respect John Stuart Mill observed: “Man moves a seed into the ground; he moves an axe through a tree; he moves a spark to fuel; he moves water into a boiler over a fire; the properties of matter do the rest.” In other words, “This one operation of putting things into fit places for being acted upon each other by their own internal forces is all that man does, or can do, with matter.”

This is a statement of fundamental import, and John Stuart Mill so highly valued it that he claimed the credit of having first made it. Yet, with the usual shortsightedness of political economists, bounded in their views by their narrow, middle-class environment, he utterly fails to draw from it the only possible conclusion, viz., the social character of machinery and the stupendous wrong done to man, a social being, by the private ownership of the mechanical organs of motion.

If you didn't catch it: that was a Marxist using Mises' law of action, via Mill to prove the truth of the Law of Value (Marx). Or wait, was he using the "natural rights" explanation for the inherent right of man to own the value of his labor... indeed, that is an example of Leeson's argument that all natural rights people are essentially able to come to whatever conclusion they want, because they can avoid all science and just assert that something is a right. Hence does he own the product of his labor, or does it own him?

Here are some thoughts on Madison.

Sorry. I am just having fun; some readings to get my mind off of serious stuff. Hope you enjoy them too.