Originally Posted by
Texas_Dawg
So then there are no rights, only power?
In nature, yes. Outside of nature, the rights that exist are the ONES WE SAY EXIST.
They were your examples. They failed to make your point.
I disagree. You state categorically that private industry or the People would be inherently superior. I showed a number of examples where it didn't work out that way, quite the contrary.
All this says is that one government's monopoly is better than that of the others. This doesn't tell me that any monopoly is better than free competition.
Do you have examples of any time where free competition proved better in those areas?
You said nations have the "right" to defend themselves. Now you say that rights are subjective and have implied they basically come down to nothing more than a group's power to do as they will. That's fine with me. (I never would have disputed it if you'd simply said that nations have the power to protect "their" territory.) I'm not as concerned with rights as I am with what's more efficient.
Nations have the right to defend themselves because human beings have said they do. Humans have the right to defend themselves because they have said they do. At the end of the day, people make up these rights and call them as such, but they don't exist anywhere outside of human imagination, so lets not pretend they are somehow inviolable and sacrosanct. Because what we view as "right" today will seem quaint 200 hundred years from now.
So how is it your idea of how to run things is better than the majority's? Seeing as rights are just arbitrary ideas cooked up by people, why is it your one idea is more valid than millions of people's?
No different than what the Mafia offers. I doubt you'd ever argue they have a right to defend their territory though (as you said that nations do).
I say that you have what you and others are willing to fight, die and bleed for and then defend. If you're not willing to do that then you are at the mercy of those who are willing to. You just hope those providers are good-natured souls, because if not you're in for a tough time. THAT is the nature of the world, we in the civilized world just forget it because we have made our corner a little more civil.