No, I think it's BETTER to APPROACH the ideal of CAPITALISM. I didn't say what we have now is anything like capitalism, nor does it approach capitalism.
Why? It's objectively true, isn't it? If the thing doesn't exist, then by nature, it's but a thought. And an un-achievable non-existent thing, persisted at as if it were, is a delusion.
I'll abandon any pretense of a social philosophy when everyone else abandons theirs, and we're all left with "Earn your own keep, accept full responsibility for your own choices, and mind your own fucking business."
And rightly so. The only problem is that if it's coming from Obama's supporters, it will ignore the fact that he's been bought and paid for by Wall Street.
Now you're getting it. The only acceptible social philosophy doesn't try to coercively engineer anything at the collective level. It's an individual philosophy. People can still choose to cooperate for a collective goal, but you must live with the limitation of consent. And what you end up with is will not be a global superpower, waving it's military/industrial dick around all over the world. Nor will it be a nerf-padded safety net paradise where no one is "oppressed" with the requirement that they work at something they don't like for less compensation than they feel they "deserve," and nobody does without anything they need no matter how little they do to obtain it for themselves.
Until you try to impose it on someone else. And by surrounding yourself with emotional razor wire and going Cujo on anyone who gets within your self-assigned perimeter, you're doing precisely that. The only way to have a truly individualized philosophy that doesn't impinge on anyone else is to go Ted Kaczynski without the bombs.
Actually, if you add "Respect my freedoms and property and I'll respect yours" it's a damned good social philosophy. To which of those tenets would you object? "Earn your own keep?" What's the alternative? Take from someone else? How is that more "social?" "Accept full responsibility for your own choices?" What's the alternative? Pass the consequences for your choices to others? "Mind your own fucking business?" What's the alternative? Stick your nose into other peoples' affairs? "Respect my freedoms and property and I'll respect yours?" The alternative? The abolition of society. If being part of your "society" means forgoing my freedom, my property, my independence, or my privacy, what damned good is it?
Wasn't objecting to the tenets necessarily, just to the claim that they did not comprise a social philosophy.
The only thing I would impose on anyone else is a limitation on what they may do to me. So telling people to leave me the fuck alone if I didn't ask for their company, that's an imposition? Horse shit. Maybe that's all you can imagine.
If they approach you, in spite of the chronic glower and the threatening gestures, no. If you stalk through WalMart yelling "LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!" then, yes. Of course, do that often enough and you'll find yourself alone in a nice empty room with a cot and a toilet bolted to the wall and some Happy Meds coursing through your system, and WF can hold a candlelight vigil for you.
How do you impose the non-coercion of others on someone else? Aren't we all being imposed upon if we don't ALL live by the agreement not to coerce one another? Do you envision there should be a universal rule for all, or that the rules should be situational, tailored to each class or group or even individual? If the former, you can't give choice to some but not to others; if the latter, you have tyranny (because arbitrary). Not at all. The language of a truly individualized philosophy is in our two most important historical documents: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It's the right to pursue happiness not the obligation to provide it for others.
By inventing things like "property rights". Your one-liner definition sounds all very well until one gets into what you actually mean concerning things like that.
It's very simple. What's mine is mine, and if you try to take it I will shoot you. Things become mine through voluntary exchange of goods or labor. Anything beyond that is fucking moocher parasites trying to rationalize laying claim to someone else's stuff.
The whole purpose of government is to defend our property rights and personal freedoms. The record is crystal clear: where it does so, people prosper; where it does not, people suffer and/or stagnate. If I have no property rights, then I can own nothing, I can be secure in nothing, and I can expect anything of value I do possess to be immediately taken from me. And if you have no property rights, you own nothing, can be secure in nothing, and can expect ME to take anything of value YOU possess. So, explain to all how we'd be better off without these so-called property rights...
Albert's implementation of that philosophy (or your characterization of it) need not be everyone's. Albert wants the right to be left alone, and he should have it. It does not follow that everyone who possesses that right will necessarily wind up alone and alienated from others. The right to be left alone only means the right to CHOOSE to be left alone. It confers no obligation on others but that they respect your wish to spend your time as your please. (Of course, it confers the obligation on you that you extend others the same courtesy.) The flip-side of that--no right to be left alone--means having no choice to engage with others...for anyone.
For someone claiming to be about lack of imposition, you have quite a liking for dictatorial pronouncements. Firstly, property isn't just acquired through voluntary exchange. In most cases, ownership goes back less than a couple of centuries. But you decide to ignore that, quite arbitrarily, just because it's convenient. And then there are all of the murky statist concepts like corporations, patenting and so forth that you've got very few issues with. Along with much else. You dress it up as "leave me the fuck alone", but that's not the full story by a long shot, and it is a strawman to portray the debate solely in those terms.
It has been in civil societies for centuries. Looks around...hmm, pretty much EVERYTHING I have of value was manufactured in my lifetime. And pretty much everything I have was purchased (often indirectly) from whomever made it using money I earned laboring. Since these things didn't exist before, and I did labor to acquire them, how should they be anything but MINE? Arbitrary? Convenient? The system had been in place for centuries before I was born. Besides, on what basis could you challenge existing property rights, except with other property rights? If we go back to a time before property rights, ownership is a meaningless concept. Before property rights, the strongest owned (or, better said, controlled) everything. Corporations are associations of free people, and patents (at least in theory) serve both the inventors and the public. I never said that was the whole story, but, certainly, a person should be free to decline associations or engagements that they'd rather not accept. True obligations should be very, very few in number, and set only by the Constitution.
Except for the ownership of real estate that's not being challenged here, property is the product of work. The value of that property can only be determined through exchange, which is why it's often said that a thing is only worth what someone will pay for it. All that's left is whether that exchange occurs voluntarily or not. And the whole idea of property rights is that government protects the property creator's option to set the terms of exchange.
