Theme: Responsibility

(by Eli Harman) [N]o man is born free. Rights must be won, and rights must be defended. (All rights are property rights.) No man can do that alone. So you accept limits on your freedom in order to confederate, to cooperate, and win what you may. As a practical matter, we can say that liberty will be successfully won and defended only by those who desire to exercise it within limits deemed reasonable by their fellows. “No limits” is not a reasonable, nor realistic standard. What we (right propertarians) are trying to do with the TECHNOLOGY of property rights and rule of law (as distinct from “legistation”) is to minimize the imposition of costs, and the involuntary transfer of benefits, to enforce productivity, and suppress parasitism, and to create the conditions necessary for voluntary cooperation. What you (degenerate libertine) are trying to do in asserting absolute and unlimited “rights” is to LICENSE and JUSTIFY your own antisocial parasitism. If you run a flop house, say, or a crack house, in a decent neighborhood, you are imposing costs on your neighbors, destroying their property value and threatening their safety and calm. You may insist that it’s your “right,” but your neighbors will not agree. Conflict will be the inevitable result. That is parasitic behavior, profiting privately from imposing social costs. It is in our interests to agree to refrain from such behvior and to suppress those who do not so agree.