Originally Posted by
law dawg
the rights that exist are the ONES WE SAY EXIST.
Which is just another way of saying might makes right. Power.
Originally Posted by
law dawg
I showed a number of examples where it didn't work out that way, quite the contrary.
No you didn't. You just named some wars.
Originally Posted by
law dawg
Do you have examples of any time where free competition proved better in those areas?
Yes.
Medieval Iceland and the early
19th Century American West. In both of those, legal disputes were frequently solved without the coercion of innocents (a violation of liberty
inherent to the operation of the state's legal monopoly).
But as I pointed out, there are hundreds of examples of other industries where free competition has proven superior to coercive monopoly. Law and security are just services like any other. They don't somehow, unlike all the other industries, exist outside of obvious, basic economic laws.
Originally Posted by
law dawg
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.
You don't grant many individual humans the right to defend themselves against nations. "Nations" can't exist without denying some rights to individuals. So you have a contradiction here, as they often times cannot and do not
both have rights despite the fact that "they have said they do."
Originally Posted by
law dawg
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.
Fine with me. But again, this is very different than your original claim that nations have "rights." You should have just said that they have amassed power.
Originally Posted by
law dawg
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?
I believe that theft and the violent coercion of non-aggressing others is immoral and economically and socially destructive. Many of the millions you point to claim to believe these are immoral as well, yet they support both of them in many cases. So by their
own moral code, their
own code of rights, they contradict themselves and prove their own codes inferior (they of course argue that what they support isn't theft or the coercion of innocents, but that's a different debate). Now, a few may believe that economic and social destruction are right and superior to the alternatives, but unless you believe that, or unless you believe a majority of people believe that (I don't of course), then I'll save that for another discussion.