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From: chabot@amber.DEC
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: rant control
Message-ID: <281@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 20:11:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.281
Posted: Thu May 17 20:11:37 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 19-May-84 07:07:26 EDT
Organization: DEC Engineering Network
Lines: 57

Ray Simard says:

> Certainly we all have rights to many things, (life, liberty...).  We DON'T
> have an equivalent right to material wealth beyond that which we have earned.
> Why?  Because all material good (including housing, subsistence and basic
> needs) exist only as the result of someone's productive labor, and the
> 'right' to that result belongs to the person whose labor produced it.
> This is not to deny the human compassion that engenders so much sharing,
> but the idea that anyone has an unconditional right to anything someone
> else had to produce or pay for underlies so much of the socialistic 
> sentiment that has grown in the world in recent history, and the genesis
> of such oxymorons as 'welfare rights'.  Welfare, publicly supported schools,
> and the myriad other transfers of wealth we all live with, good and otherwise,
> are gifts, not 'rights'.

Gee, something tells me I guess Ray isn't a socialist.  :-)
But my real quibble is with the phrases like "don't have ... [a] right to 
material wealth beyond that which we have earned" and "...all material good
exist only as the result of someone's productive labor, and the 'right' to
that result belongs to the person whose labor produced it."  This is nonsense--
we can all think of material wealth that goes to people who don't do any
productive labor: 

	inheritance	all right, by the definition it's the right of the
			person who owned to give it away, but this once
			transferred, if we continue to follow this definition
			it is not the right of the inheritor to keep it

	returns on investments
			there is no labor here, just money

and to get sillier but still within the definition

	wages in service industries
			strictly speaking, workers in the service industries
			(cleaning services, for example) do not produce
			anything


> A landlord owns the property s/he rents just the way you (possibly) own
> your automobile, or stereo system, or pocket calculator.  You would not
> appreciate a heavy-handed bureaucracy requiring you to give some number
> of free rides to persons without cars as a condition to registering your
> vehicle.  Why then require the owner of a property to determine the worth
> of the product s/he offers on the basis of what rate is comfortable for
> you, rather than the market?

Wait a minute! Here we seem to have jumped from controlling rates to making 
things free.  In my mind there is a difference between something and nothing.
(And definitely we need some rant control in this paragraph. :-) )

Anybody got any anecdotes about non-differences between something and nothing?
Lisa Chabot

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