Q & A with a socialist

Also, When I asked a hypothetical question for the sake of argument/understanding presuppositions, you didn't answer but instead said it might not be a realistic scenario, of course it might not be: that's why I used the terms 'suppose' 'assume' 'hypothetical etc., to avoid that kind of massive confusion and time wasting sidequest.



OK, here's a hypothetical. A government is formed on the premise that everyone should be equal. They then proceed to take everything that everyone produces, and redistribute it as their planners see fit. Productivity plummets, and everyone starves. To punish the slackers, they begin purges, shooting everyone that doesn't meet arbitrary production quotas in the head. Ethical?

You can construct hypotheticals to support whatever argument you're making all day long. That doesn't make them good, or interesting.

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Anyway, one thing I do want to point out that this reply:

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Is wrong.

First, I said people should have a legal right to choose their own job; I never said anybody has a right to the 'fruits' of their labor. I started a thread which showed libertarians cannot completely counter the marxian charge that capitalism is exploitative,



The charge can't be countered? First of all, that's patently false. Further, it doesn't *need* to be countered, because it can't be substantiated on it's own!

Can you "counter" the charge that aliens living in a parallel dimension are coming to conquer the earth in six months? Completely? Must it therefore be true?

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given this premise, but I also stated I do not agree with it. A person's ability to make money in the market is based upon luck and privilege, and nobody has a right to either of those things. Once they have choosen their job they can legitmately be taxed.



Not having a right to something doesn't give anyone else to deprive one of possession (or use of it. My neighbor has no inalienable right to own omaha steaks, but he has a freezer full of them. Is his possession of them illegitimate? Should I just go an help myself whenever I'm hungry?

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Secondly, I've explained in a whole thread, and have been explaining for much of this thread in an additional way, why inequality is wrong. That is why what you call 'the mob' has a right to what is produced by all.



Oh. You explained it, therefore you must be correct? Maybe you should take your own advice:

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recognize, very briefly at least, that there is more than a 0% chance you are wrong sometimes and possibly even there is more than a 0% chance I might be right about at least one thing.



Because, hey, I explained why aggregate collections of people have no rights over individuals, therefore *I* must be correct. At least, by your "I explained it, therefore it's proven" argument.

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Your assumption that nobody owns things initially begs the question in the part where you say "get claim to that production after I've mixed labor with it that they didn't have before". Why assume they don't have a claim to those matierals before you grabbed them?



I don't assume that. I said "If I mix my labor with materials that nobody else has claim to" - that doesn't "assume" that everything is unowned, but it does presume that things are not owned if no one claims ownership of them (and therefore it is possible for some things to be unowned at a given time).

Of course, this is a petty point for you to attack, anyway, since you believe that everything is taxable, and therefore people don't have true ownership of anything.

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Your 'labor' example is ridiculous; labor is almost always traded for goods (in a barter system) or for money which itself is a thing which can also be traded for other things by law and/or custom.



Exactly!

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hence the person buying your labor is transfering his right over things to you in exchange for your labor: it still involves the trade of rights to things and not just self-owned powers.



Yes.

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When you go to work for someone else you are going to work in exchange for the legal right to something. Even the building or area in which you would be working in is a thing, which is either owned by somebody



No disputes.

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or owned by the government/all of us in common.



Governments cannot legitimately own property.

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Let us think next time before assuming a point is realistically debatable.



I'm not sure why pointing out a bunch of stuff I don't dispute (and adding one minor point that I disagree with, but one that is only tangentally related to the others) somehow makes this "undebatable".

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Nor have you refuted my analysis which clearly illustrated the fact that should be obvious to everyone, namely, that everything you have, and everything you will ever have, is based on the work of lots and lots of people, and not just your self owned power.



Again, I don't dispute that at all. Cooperation is great.

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If it was true that it was your "self-owned" powers which allowed you to accumulate wealth, than you would be able to become wealthy on a five foot desserted island entirely lacking in any kind of natural resources nearby with absolutely no contact with any other people. Not only would you not become wealthy in this situation, since any food or water you could attain without humans creating it would be a natural resource, and by hypothesis you do not have any natural resources, you would be dead within a matter of days. Our own talents and powers are worthless without the help of others and natural resources. It is not fundementally your own ability which gets you wealth



Never said otherwise. Again, take your own advice.

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reread the post slowly and attentively



Your argument is basically: "The sky is blue. If you can't refute this, everything else I say must be 100% correct."