The positive right game.

But what if they used their labor and resources to suck all/most of Earth's oxygen into huge tanks? Then they'd privately own all oxygen and everyone would either pay whatever price these people demanded for oxygen or else die, right?

 

Adequate daily calorie intake.

Clean safe drinking water.

Adequate shelter.

Healthcare.

Education.

These are the basic things which determines the development of a country. Anything less, you are sliding into the 3rd World.

 

How is that any different from the first scenario? Again, no one owns the air.

If you provide those things to people who don't earn them, eventually your country will become a 3rd world country.

 

I don't hold a moral relativistic world view. I believe that morality can be objectively determined logically.

Here are a few definitions to keep this debate rolling.

Our founders also believed in moral absolutism. The term 'inalienable rights' refers to an absolute moral truth that exists regardless of whether society accepts it.

 

If you supply those things to people in a developing country they will step into the developed world.

 

I've heard that argument before.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

 

So beyond moral relativism and moral absolutism, what do you call it when you believe that morality can be logically determined but that nobody is smart enough to determine it?

I think they believed in moral progression. If morality were absolute, they couldn't have owned slaves.

 

Well, I also believe that knowledge is disperse so I don't think the smartest among us would be best suited to determine morality.

But anyway, we can determine some simple moral truths. Like the fact that man has a right to life, liberty, and property.

Why not? Morality being absolute only suggests that owning slaves was immoral.

 

I thought it was life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 

Supplied by who?

blankout.

(This will go over your head)

 

life, liberty, pursuit of happiness = declaration of independence.

life, liberty, property = language used by john locke and the bill of rights.

Just to stir up some ire, I'd suggest organized religion as a good source of the collective wisdom of a culture in regards to morality.

 

But wouldn't they own the air, according to pure material property-based voluntaryst ideology, if they sucked it all up into their hypothetical tanks? Then they could charge people everything they own and then some just to breathe, and according to pure material property based voluntaryst ideology, that would be a "voluntary" exchange, whereas I'd consider it slavery

 

And I like that talk - and I like what came of it - until recently when the libby loops decided to reinvent what words mean,

 

I fully agree with material private property rights, except for extreme situations such as if a monopoly were to hypothetically suck up all of Earth's oxygen supply and give everyone on Earth the option to either pay everything they own or else suffocate to death.

The point is, physical things, due to the Laws of conservation of matter and energy, are like a pie. If one person(s) owns all of a certain (necessary) physical resource, that sort of monopoly should be broken. Otherwise, private property rights are necessary to protect.