Rand Paul...don't ever Stall Again, Stand Up For Private Property Rights

[MMMark]

Fri. 10/05/21 16:00 EDT
.post #100

[url=Rand Paul...don't ever Stall Again, Stand Up For Private Property Rights - #95 by bloomj31]

@bloomj31

[/url]…while you might not take the deal, I think that so many people would that by the time I ever got there, there would be no diamonds left.

Perhaps, but this is a far cry from saying “everyone.” The number of these “so many people” might actually turn out to be a small fraction of the total population.

@bloomj31

It is certainly an assumption that people are like me in that they care more about laws than morals but I also see that when something immoral is made legal, people don’t abstain.

True for certain “somethings” and some people, perhaps, but not necessarily true for other “somethings” and other people.

@bloomj31

I mean when you look at social programs, you can see that when the legal penalty of stealing is taken out, people will steal and line their own pockets with money they know not to be theirs. They come up with all sorts of pseudo rationalizations and call it a day but the lack of legal consequence gives grounds for such behavior in the first place.

I think this is absolutely wrong. In my opinion, what “gives grounds for such behavior” is the pervasive belief that social programs (to use your example) are a “right.” To corroborate this, we can think of all sorts of examples of people demanding a certain thing, frequently in open defiance of the law, once the idea takes hold that what they are demanding is “rightfully” theirs.

This is precisely why soldiers are able to murder innocent people during foreign invasions: because they believe that they are morally justified in doing it, that it is their “patriotic duty,” that they are “defending their country,” that they are “doing God’s work,” etc. It is moral propaganda that their heads are filled with, because it is the moral argument that is most persuasive, and to the most people. If recruitment offices merely said “Hey, join the army and you’ll get to murder people without having to suffer any legal consequences,” I strongly suspect that their success rate would suffer significantly.