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From: mcgeer@ucbvax.ARPA (Rick McGeer)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Newsflash! [JoSH on Socialists]
Message-ID: <10209@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 26-Aug-85 21:13:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10209
Posted: Mon Aug 26 21:13:52 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Aug-85 00:54:05 EDT
References: <955@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1110@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mcgeer@ucbvax.UUCP (Rick McGeer)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 53
Keywords: not so fast

In article <513@qantel.UUCP> gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) writes:
>
>One quick and obvious comment on JoSH's critique of socialist thought using
>the extended metaphor of the social engineer operating on society 'from the
>outside', adjusting or discarding parts of the machinery. The metaphor is 
>apt and I won't argue with it but it sounds strange coming from a libertarian
>who is proposing radical reforms which would mean adjusting and discarding
>a great deal and walking over a great many people. [I am not talking about
>Libertaria now but the means of getting there from here.]
>
>Take the dismantling of the welfare state, for example. Your starting point is
>a society in which around one third of all households receive a part of their
>income from government sources. As a matter of political reality, such 
>payments represent a form of property right no less real than the income
>from bonds inherited from a rich uncle. This political reality will not
>disappear through rational argument about legitimacy, force and fraud -
>or by convincing the deluded owners of these phantom property rights 
>that they are bound to be better off when the experiment is finished.
>You can only make it disappear through the very same process of social
>engineering that you find so abhorrent in socialists. Such social engineering
>would have to be underpinned by systemic arguments treating society as
>a whole, just as the dreaded socialist doctrines do.
>
>So if systemic thinking and a propensity for social surgery are inadmissible
>then socialists and libertarians are equally guilty of thought-crime.
>
>-----
>Gabor Fencsik               {ihnp4,dual,hplabs,intelca}!qantel!gabor   

This is an interesting notion.  Taxation is theft, and income redistribution is
the distribution of stolen goods.  Never before have I heard that the receiver
of stolen property enjoys any property right in those goods, especially when,
as in this case, the receivers are in fact conspirators before and during the
act of theft.

As a practical matter, you are correct: people who receive welfare, and those
who receive the non-welfare transfer payments which are subsidies to the middle
class (Social Security, Student Loans and subsidized services such as public
universities) perceive a property right therein and will not countenance
their removal.  It is this obduracy and illusion which underlies many of our
current domestic problems, from the deficit through the various agonies of
public education.  Informed discussions, however, require clear reasoning and
moral accuracy.  One has no property right in goods stolen from others, it
is not social engineering to demand that the social engineers stop tinkering,
and it is hardly a radical reform to ask that those who engage in systematic
theft please stop.

Now, if we demanded that the last socialist be hung from the entrails of the
last tax collector ---

well, now that would be a radical, if beneficial, reform.

							-- Rick.