[adanthar]

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Adanthar,

It is abundantly clear from this objection, that, as usual, you have no idea what you are arguing against.

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No offense, but I've had this argument with people far better equipped to defend their point of view than anyone on this board.

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1 + 2 = 3

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Okay, no problem there, all perfectly logically consistent. The only problem with it is that you're holding it out as the *only* logically consistent 'right' because it happens to arise from self-ownership. So what? Why is self-ownership the only logically consistent hook to hang a right off of?

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I don't consider property rights or self-ownership rights to be "positive" rights - they are simply a result of negative rights. No obligation on the part of anyone else arises from either.

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I'm willing to grant a distinction between positive and negative rights for the purposes of this discussion, but the actual real world difference is minimal. As long as it requires (vast amounts of!) outside enforcement to make it work, it's a positive right.

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Now, contrast that with the positive rights to which you are referring. Right to free health care. Right to food/water. Right to cable TV. Etc. These all result in obligations for other parties, which I reject for the same reason I reject slavery. None of these are logically derived from self-ownership (again, an axiom virtually everyone can agree on). They are not logically derived from anything. They are pure personal value judgments on your part and nothing more.

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First off, the positive/negative right dichotomy tends to break down at the margins. For starters, the right to food and water is easily demonstrable to be inseparable from the right to life (I hope I don't have to prove why.) The right to health care is mostly a positive right, but there are plenty of times where medicine comes into conflict with personal autonomy. Etc.

Second, all you've done is drawn a line between a particular subset of rights that are drawn from self-ownership and ones that (in your opinion) aren't, then arbitrarily decided that one forms a set of logically consistent beliefs and the other doesn't. Your claim is that rights stemming from widely held value judgments are not logically consistent. Why? What separates the widely held value judgment of "children need a minimal amount of skills to have a chance to succeed" from "people own their own labor", and why should I put more weight on one than the other?