"In modern Western societies, that's not true, even the poorest aren't allowed to just die."

Allowed by whom ? By nature ? By the government ? By charity ?

"Modern Western societies" are one in which the division of labour and free trade have been going on long enough to create abundance. We have cheap food, cheap housing, cheap clothing. Those who are unable to work due to illness or disability either rely on voluntary charity, which is only possible in a system of abundance, or through government social programs which are involuntary (i.e: they're funded by first taking resources from others whether they agree to it or not) and are also only possible in a system of abundance, though they tend to drain that system.

Go back to the island scenario. If everyone consumes and no one produces it's pretty easy to see what happens. Why do you assume it's any different in a "modern western society" ? The underlying principles are the same. Production must precede consumption.

"It isn't slavery because you are not considered property and there is no legal requirement to obey a master or suffer punishment or death."

The principle behind the tax code, as it is written, is such that the government has unlimited power to tax any amount it wishes. It can raise taxes to 100% if it wants to. There is nothing in the legal code preventing them from doing so. That means the the government, in principle, owns 100% of your productive efforts, and allows you to keep a certain amount of it.

Now I submit that no human being can actually own another human being, as a law of nature. The reason is because by our nature our minds are sovereign and our actions volitional. No one can read or alter our thoughts and no one can make decisions for us. A slave, as much a victim as he/she is, still chooses life as a slave over death, fighting, attempting escape or enduring punishment etc.

This is an important point because despite the fact that a slave-master claims to own slaves, slavery does not mean that the master actually has unlimited access to all the faculties of his slave. It only means that he lays claim to 100% of the slave's productive efforts. The only thing that distinguishes a slave from a worker is that if the slave quits the master will punish him via pain or death (in that sense we are all slaves to our nature - we can either exist as human beings or not exist at all).

If we don't produce we don't eat. If we produce the government lays claim to the results. If we don't pony-up we are punished.

"Say I work for someone. He gains more by employing me than he pays me, otherwise he wouldn't find it profitable to do so. Therefore, he's taking a slice of my efforts. By the same argument, surely that is slavery?"

It is not your labour alone that generates profit. And he is certainly not taking a slice of your productive efforts.

When you go to work for someone you are offering a service in exchange for something (usually money). What your employer does with that service is entirely his. Not yours. If it were true that he were taking a slice of your productive efforts then when a business purchases raw materials and uses them to produce a good they are "taking a slice" of the productive efforts of the miners who dug up those materials. Every time a programmer gets paid for writing code he is "taking a slice" of the productive efforts of his college professors who taught him how to program and the computer manufacturers who made the computers that he codes on and so on and so on ...

Production is the combination of labour and natural resources to produce a good or service that is of value to someone. It is not your labour, by itself, that produces the good or determines it's value.

What you are paid is the value that is attached to your service and is negotiated before you produce. While you need to produce your sustenance you have unlimited choice in how you go about it. You can produce your own food, and clothing etc. Or you can specialize, getting really good at one thing in particular and offer it for sale on the open market. The only way to claim that those who profit from trading with you are "taking a slice of your productive efforts" would be to claim that you retain ownership AFTER the exchange.

To elaborate even further, every single time you enter into an exchange both parties enter into it with the intention of profiting. You earn money so that you may spend it on whatever you choose while your employer uses the results of your labour in combination with many other factors to produce something that is of value on the open market so that he may profit. It is a mutually beneficial and voluntary business transaction.

Taxes are not. Taxes comes in the form of a 3rd party making claim to both sides of that business transaction. The government takes part of the businessman's earnings and takes part of your wages. You both lose (whether or not government programs benefit every individual a whole different debate that I would rather not enter into) and you both have little to no say in the matter. If you refuse to pony up you are punished. If you refuse to produce you die.

Which probably brings us back to your first point. You can refuse to produce and then the government will step in and feed you so that you don't die. This is a "modern western society" after all. Isn't it great ? You can do nothing and others will take care of you! What I tried to say in my first post was that such an arrangement would mean that others are producing for your benefit, not their own. And they would have no say in the matter because the government is taking from them, under threat of punishment, in order to give to you.

Imagine if every single person put down their tools and stopped working and went on government assistance (because this a "modern western society" after all where no one is "allowed" to just die). What would happen? Desert island scenario. EVERYONE would die. The system would immediately collapse overnight. You would have instant famine. Because production must precede consumption and you don't see any politicians tending crops or weaving sweaters (though some have been known to build a house or two).

"Nobody is forced to work"

If you don't work you die. I mean that in the most fundamental way possible. Assume you and your family are stranded on a desert island. How do you survive ? By our nature we are given life but we must engage in certain actions in order to sustain it. That action is productive labour, or "work."

If you don't work, but you are able to sustain your life, it can only be through the productive efforts of others. Someone has to produce your food, your clothing, your shelter etc. So while another human being may not be coercing you into working, that reduces down to: no one forces you to live.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that everyone should be making their own food and clothing. That's the beauty of trade. Each person specializes and produces what they are the best at, and then exchanges those goods or services with others who produce what they need to survive. It's not only fair but it has lead to the development and distribution of countless comforts that we enjoy today, not to mention cheap food, clothing, housing, clean water etc.

Anyway, I know that when I spend the day working I don't do it so that you may have the benefit of eating. When the results of my work are taken from me then it is slavery. If I don't work, I die. So I work, and then part of those efforts are taken from me. How is that not slavery ?

Your confusion stems from the belief that one person's gain is another's loss. That people cooperate altruistically for the selfish benefit of others. Which may be true for some misguided individuals who believe that such an existence of self-sacrifice is moral, but I do not subscribe to such a belief because 1) I do not recognize such a system as being compatible with human nature and 2) As a consequence of #1 such a philosophy is evil. Altruism is a system that constantly demands the surrendering of a value for a lesser one or nothing (the very definition of "sacrifice"). Such a system is incompatible with life itself.

In a free (and moral) society people must deal with each other through voluntary exchange. Value for value. The contract does not negate what I said, it only reinforces it. Such a society is a "contract society".

As humans we employ logic and reason to perceive the objective world around us and act accordingly to promote our survival. Historically speaking, coexisting with other humans increased each individual's odds for surviving in a hostile environment. Once the concepts of "time" and "saving" were well-formed the development of agriculture became possible and soon after goods were routinely exchanged for the mutual benefit of the exchangers. Soon people began specializing in producing only what they were good at, and exchanging their surplus for the rest of their needs rather than producing everything themselves. Consequently (but secondary), such a system maximized the benefits for everyone, because more production was possible. Economically speaking, maximizing production increases abundance which lowers costs which maximizes distribution. It is not a consequence of people "giving back to society". It is a consequence of acting to promote one's own selfish interests (i.e: maximizing personal profit by producing the largest possible quantity of what is in demand at the lowest cost possible).

The fact that people operate this way does not impose any obligations of any sort on any individual. It means that if you want something from another person the only way to go about it, morally, is to exchange. Thus all "moral obligations" are cleared at the time of the exchange. So I can agree with part of what you said, if you take from others you owe them something. But your confusion rests with the belief that everything that you have is a gift. This is simply false. If you have a job you are producing value to exchange for everything that you acquire and consume. Morally speaking your balance is clear.

If anything, you may try and claim that we owe our parents something. But that's the extent that you can take it. They produced goods and services to exchange (or provide directly) for the means to sustain our survival. So "society" is well-paid. However, dead-beat parents and extremely problematic children aside, most parents that I know were more than repaid for their voluntary service by the fact that they gained loved ones to share their world with. I've often joked about providing my children with a bill once they turn 18, but I won't. Because my kids were a joy and the means employed to help them grow into adults is a debt that is more than repaid by the wonderful relationship that I will have with them until the day that I die, and the experience of parenting which is an experience that I felt worth having. They don't owe me anything.

You're confusing desires with action.

Free will is almost synonymous with "resisting temptation". Which is why addiction advocates tend to argue so much in favour of the "disease" concept, and why their arguments tend to reduce to the notion that free will is an illusion.

I actually have a mild form of OCD. I'll check to make sure that I have my driver's license before getting in my car and then 10 seconds after leaving the driveway I feel the need to double-check and then triple-check etc. I even do the cliche checking that my front door is locked 20 times every night. But those are desires and whims. I can (and often do) choose to think back on when I first checked to make sure that I had my license and then reassure myself "Garett man, you're being paranoid. You already made sure you had your license. Chill out." Yes, it's all choices. I have the desire to eat a whole cheesecake to myself right now, but I choose not to because I recognize the negative consequences of doing so. Desire vs. action.

"Society" simply refers to all of the actions and choices of individuals. There can be no "we" without the "I". Just because the benefits of social participation are obvious to anyone does not mean that the needs of "society" (which is an abstract concept) trump the needs of the individual (which is a concrete).

Society does not threaten the freedoms of the individual. Other individuals who violate the non-aggression-principle do.

Furthermore, I never claimed, or even implied that addicts were happy. I specifically claimed that psychological addictions are an evasion of personal responsibility. A choice to engage in harmful activity. And that freedom means the ability to make choices concerning your own person. Every single addict knows that he is harming himself. Yet he values his destructive behaviour over the alternatives. There are many possible reasons that he may do so, but none of them impose any sort of duty on other individuals to offer help. I also specifically pointed out that any attempts to offer help are doomed to fail unless requested, because the "addictive" behaviour is a choice. The addict claiming that it isn't (a choice) is a further evasion; a way to escape his personal responsibility.

No one can have a "right" to the productive efforts of others. That is slavery. If you feel that anyone "owes" society anything then you are admitting that every person is a slave to everyone else. I see no evidence of that, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The body is only one part of the human. No one can read or control another's thoughts. No one can make decisions for the individual. You even chose the word "influence" in the context of decision making, acknowledging this fact. Coercion may influence my decisions, but ultimately only I can make those decisions. I can choose death over submission to any oppression and for that reason it is a law of nature that I cannot be owned by another individual, let alone "society".

More importantly, stocks are a claim to partial ownership of a company. Thus buying stocks is an investment in a business venture. There is always risk in business, but successful entrepreneurs minimize their risk by researching their markets and filling an unfilled need, or filling a need better than anyone else.

While a stock-owner does not make all of the same decisions that an entrepreneur does, they do play a vital role in the economy by funding ventures that are producing goods and services that are in demand.

Most people think of the stock market as gambling because they confuse investing with speculating. Many stock-traders do speculate by purchasing stocks that they believe will go up in price (with the intention of selling them when they do), or short-selling stocks that they believe are about to go down*. However, the VAST majority of stock-holders are investors who put their money into carefully researched companies with the intention of earning dividend yields. Here the risk is minimal and while the returns are not as high, the investor stays liquid and acts more as a lender. Lending only to those companies that have a good track record and operate in "safe" markets (traditional examples of "safe" markets are commodities, raw materials, natural resources, public utilities etc.)

* Short selling means borrowing a stock from a broker, selling it at it's current price and then buying it back at a lower price. Since you only owe the broker the stock, not it's original value, you return the stock to the broker and pocket the difference between the original price you sold it at, and the lower price you bought it back at.

Humans are volitional beings. Our very definition is "rational animal". We have free will and choose every one of our actions. We own our own bodies and our minds and thus we are "free" by nature.

Therefore, if we develop an addiction to a substance or to a behaviour we have only ourselves to blame. The notion that fully grown adult human beings need a babysitter to make sure they don't hurt themselves is the most offensive concept ever known to man. And the most dangerous threat to freedom and liberty, which means the most dangerous threat to life itself. Freedom is a requirement of life. We are given our lives as a "gift of nature" but we are not given the means to sustain it. In order to sustain our lives we need to engage in certain actions. This is the concept of freedom and "rights". Rights are any behaviour that one might engage in to promote his survival and happiness. That means that no one has the ability to interfere with any action that I may choose to engage in, so long as I'm not interfering with another's ability to do the same. If that means doing something silly like excessive gambling then that's my own business.

Psychological addiction to any behaviour or chemical is an evasion of personal responsibility, and ultimately a choice. Furthermore, it is not the "responsibility" or "duty" of anyone else to support, babysit or treat the person. All attempts to do so are ultimately doomed to fail anyway. Being a result of personal choices to begin with, the only successful "treatment" for addiction is the individual making a personal choice to make alternative choices. This is why a person who is addicted is not a "victim", and why treating him/her as such is a gross breach of the concept of self-ownership, and thus freedom.

Public broadband would amount to government monopoly. It would be like health care and education in Canada. I'm Canadian so I know first-hand. There are no laws against private schools and hospitals, but they're almost completely unheard of because you can't compete with "free". Not to mention government intervention in those industries comes with so much regulation that opening a private school or private hospital is so expensive that it becomes not worth the investment.

I'm an amateur economist and I can tell you that almost all monopoly is due to government regulations. Regulations create monopoly by making it more expensive to do business. Thus the giant megacorps who are able to devote entire teams to compliance with regulations become more secure in their markets against new competitors who can't afford to comply. The pharmaceutical industry is an excellent example of that in action.

With regards to telecos, almost all infrastructure is laid under "public" property. Building codes, permits and bidding wars for government contracts (a government contract is always a contract for a monopoly) all make it extremely expensive to build new infrastructure. There's no easy solution here because privatizing all roads and sewers is not an option worth debating unless we want to debate political philosophy. Assuming that public roads and sewers are a necessary evil, government will always be there deciding who gets to lay what infrastructure, when and for how much. This is a huge reason that we don't see broadband in rural areas. Yes, it is all about money. But the question we need to ask is "WHY is it not worth the one-time investment ?" The telecos could always charge more to recoup their investments and it's reasonable to think that more people would move to those areas if broadband were available (I hate living in the city but I work from home and so I absolutely need broadband).

It's not fair to say "they have the money, they're just evil". I have some money too but it doesn't mean I want to spend it on you. For any business it's about profit margins. If there's profit to be had the investment will be made one way or another. So the question becomes "why is it unprofitable for the telecos to expand into rural areas?" and the answer must be that either the customers don't exist or laying the lines will cost the telecos more money than they can expect to make in returns. If it's the latter then I guarantee the reason will involve the government one way or another.

You wouldn't want a teacher strip searching your kid but a cop would be ok ?

The school should call the parents. A police call would be warranted if people's lives were in immediate danger (kid brings a gun to school etc.), but for a strip search the parents should be the only ones able to make that call. If the school (or the parents) want to get the police involved to press charges after illegal drugs are discovered by the parents then that's fine too, though I think good policy would be to let the parents make the call, and if the parents are dead beats who won't discipline a consistently problematic child then expel the kid and call social services.

I don't recognize the state's authority to strip search me or my kids.

I'd say if people's life are in jeopardy then a police call is warranted. Like if a kid brings a gun to school. Seems like common sense.

As for drugs or anything else, call the fucking parents! I mean, if you have good reason to suspect they're stashing drugs in their underwear then detain them in the principal's office and call the parents, then wait for them to get there before proceeding. Again, seems like common sense.

In fact, a call to the parents is pretty much a given whether the police are involved or not. Teachers are not police officers. They should have no power to discipline the kids what-so-ever outside of suspension or expulsion ... and in those cases it's not discipline it's "you won't respect the rules that we set for our property then please leave."

Yeah it's always the political or philosophical discussions. Like these:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1253027&cid=28181617
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1231593&cid=27936867

And it shouldn't be. I don't post to incite heated emotional arguments. I post to discuss and debate. If there's holes in my logic or arguments then I'd like to hear them. If someone disagrees the intelligent course of action would be to offer a refutation or at the very least provide some links to information that refutes my arguments. Modding someone overrated amounts to blind censorship IMO. Also, at the very least, another mod will give me some indication of how a post is coming across as read by others.

You completely missed my point. And I'm not sure what yours is, because you're using the word "dichotomy" as an equivocation. I cannot tell if it is intentional, but it makes your first paragraph nonsensical.

A dichotomy is a division of a whole into two non-overlapping parts. I was not dealing with dichotomies. I was not trying to say that there are two choices (although fundamentally we do have to chose between life or death, but that's irrelevant to my point). My point was that concepts are mental integrations of percepts, treated as units distinguished by their essential characteristics, omitting specific measurements. Percepts form the basis of all human knowledge. Thus concepts always have to link back to percepts. That's all I was saying. You seem to have interpreted me as claiming that "we either chose to link concepts back to percepts, or we chose not to and, most importantly, those are the only two options we have." What I was saying is that concepts are mental integrations of percepts, and that some people don't understand that, and try to evade dealing in terms of fundamentals as a consequence.

"Choice" implies alternatives. "Alternatives" does not imply any fixed quantity. Which alternative one chooses depends on one's values. Values are hierarchical and the values one adopts will depend on one's philosophy of choice. So of course choices do not always reduce to two options (outside of the choice to live or die).

If your mother's choices did not reduce the decisions to their essences then she did not comprehend the appropriate concepts. A computer's user interface is an abstraction on top of it's hardware. Many people new to computers do not grasp that the concepts within the interface reduce back to the physical hardware and correspond to it's various states. In the end I think we might be saying the same thing. "A:" is a concept that reduces to a physical disk drive within the computer. "A:" is not a glass of water.

The GP made a really good point against himself.

which lead to some serious negative consequences. those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Socialists love to bring up poor factory conditions and the deplorable conditions of early insane asylums etc. And then they accuse capitalists of not knowing or understanding history, when in fact it is they who don't have a good historical grasp.

Before emancipation we had Feudalism where the Serfs would tend the land of the Lords in exchange for the means of subsistence. After the fall of Feudalism all the Serfs were free but they had nothing. They chose to work in those factories because for the first time they were allowed to keep what they earned. The result was a huge increase in the standards of living for the lowest classes and a massive population boom.

Many insane asylums were little more than prisons, because the so-called "doctors" were making profits keeping those people there. They were deplorable but they were fueled by Britain's "Poor Law" which forced the homeless into horrible community housing and the mentally ill into those disgusting asylums. However, as a result of emancipation the medical sciences received a huge boost. While before the mentally ill were considered possessed by evil spirits and put through torturous exorcism rituals, now medical researchers were treating their illnesses as pathological and began to open hospitals and find ways to treat these patients humanely. When the public caught wind of the deplorable conditions of the asylums they began removing their loved ones and gradually the asylums went out of business.

Unlike communism, capitalism is not a "Utopia". It is not perfect because humans are imperfect. No amount of "social engineering" or "central planning" will make a perfect society for that reason alone. Capitalism provides a gradual increase in the standards of living for everyone over time. But Utopians and central planners love to context-drop. They pick out specific temporary problems, and pretend that they're representative of the larger concept.

The charge of "oversimplification" is usually a disguised means of evading essentials. It often works because the person presenting the argument will experience doubt; thinking that the accuser possesses some knowledge that he lacks. Of course, if the accuser did have more knowledge of the problem he would make a refutation instead of charging the presenter with "oversimplifying".

When I hear the term "pop philosophy" I think of Immanuel Kant or William Hegel, or even Plato. These philosophers waged a full out assault on logic and reason. By speaking to confuse instead of persuade they preyed on the fact that the human brain develops concept formation at a very young age, and that the fully developed consciousness has the process automatized. Because most people think in terms of higher concepts and rarely bother to stop and think about what axiomatic concepts and percepts the higher concepts reduce back to, the attacker can convince the victim that concepts don't refer back to reality at all. By presenting arguments like "how do you define 'number' ?" the attacker convinces the subject that reality is entirely in one's mind. There are lots of consequences to this, but one of them is the "oversimplification" attack. When someone speaks in terms of irreducible primaries the accuser does not know how to recognize them or refute them.

Percepts are not "true" or "false" they just are. And all concepts reduce back to percepts. "Higher" concepts are integrations of more basic concepts, but eventually all concepts reduce back to some existent. Which is neither right or wrong it just is. A concept is invalid if it cannot be linked back to reality.

The "oversimplification" attack is not a refutation it is an attempt to evade having to check an argument's concepts and their correspondence to reality. "It might be true for you but it's not true for everyone." What is truth ? Truth is that which conforms to reality. Either an argument rests on demonstrable, axiomatic primaries or it does not.

When speaking of subjective decision making (which you were): how we make our decisions rests on our philosophy. Philosophy has three main branches: metaphysics (that which pertains to existence), epistemology (how we know things) and ethics (our actions). The three fundamental questions pertaining to these three branches of philosophy are "what do I know?", "how do I know it?" and "what should I do?" Most people take those for granted, and deal with them almost always on a subconscious level, and don't realize that their philosophy of choice will dictate how they go about answering those questions.

Because most people don't ever bother with philosophy (I'll admit that growing up I even thought of philosophy as sitting on a rock trying to decide if a tree has a soul) they get their philosophy from the world around them. Pop culture, their parents, government etc. It's no wonder then that their decisions and opinions are full of contradictions, and when someone speaks in terms of irreducible primaries they're accused of "oversimplifying".