[quote]pookie wrote:
orion wrote:
It might be possible to want that, whether it is possible to achieve that is quite another matter.
Why not? It’s already what every democratic country does. Various parties propose solutions to various problems and people vote for what they, as a society, prefer.
We ensconce our basic unalienable rights and principles in various founding documents and ask judges to strike down laws - even popular ones - that conflict with those rights and principles.
It certainly isn’t perfect, far from it, but pragmatically, it works pretty well.
Once private property is no longer sacrosanct, where is the limit?
There exists no society, and has never existed any civilization where some form of participation to the social fabric wasn’t mandatory. Any “society” of nomadic loners who only cooperate through entirely voluntary participation - if such a thing ever existed - have long since been wiped out by more organized groups.
Why should there be any limit?
Because most people hold some basic rights to be unalienable. Your Constitution is probably the best known example. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights would by another similar document. Those documents establish clear limits on what any government should be allowed to do to individuals.
As to why they’re needed: Governments have power and power not only corrupts, it also tends to grow as much as it is allowed to do so. The idea is to contain power so that it remains in the service of the constituents and doesn’t become it’s own end.
[/quote]
One of the inalienable rights was the right to private property, in fact all classical inalienable rights were property rights or at least can be interpreted as such even though Locke might have issues with that interpretation.
The clear limit was that government could not touch these rights because the sole purpose of government was to protect them.
The relatively new attempt to re-distribute wealth is a clear violation of that rights, it attacks the very core, private property and it was only made possible by the doctrine of a positive law.
However, these attempts are still cloaked in the language of natural rights as in the case of human rights, because the welfare state cannot come up with an explanation for blatant theft.
Since these new rights, or rather entitlements can only be realized by a government by violating the rights of its citizens there suddenly must be trade offs where before there was no need for them.
Suddenly, rights that were absolute, the very reason the state existed, can be voted on. The idea of the inalienability of rights is gone, all that is left is to bow to the masses.