A Critique of Rothbardian Natural Rights (sorta long)

[mrick]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]


Self ownership (i.e. the right of people to own their body) in no way entails the possibility of world ownership (i.e. the right of people to own parts of the external world). It is completely consistent for someone to believe in one and not the other, and so to equate them is just wrong.

[/ QUOTE ]

But to sustain your body you have to eat. In eating food you are denying it to everyone else on the planet and are taking ownership of it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Eating, breathing, clothing oneself, etc, in order to sustain oneself are not acts of "taking" or "stealing" from someone else. They are acts of survival. Saying "Just by being alive, you're taking up space", is not an argument -- not outside kindergarden yard. To state the blatantly obvious, an organism needs to survive and sustain itself before everything else, e.g. before said organism starts philosophising about political economy systems.

The argument about sustaining oneself starts becoming relevant to our debate about what's individual freedom and what are its limits, if any, when we consider limitations on what the individual needs to sustain oneself. It's OK if I eat meat but what about if I wanna eat so much meat that my neighbors will go hungry? The ancient tribes of Man faced this question hundreds of thousands of years ago and solved it rather quickly and efficiently. Consult your local cave wall.