Oh waaah, a sob story. Bad things happen to unassuming people; so what? Nobody is responsible for the well-being of anyone else. If you sink, you sink, but it doesn't mean you can't swim.
There's a difference between acceptable policy and human rights. Positive rights are bogus to begin with, including this idea of a right to healthcare. Imposition of will on other people, even if for a 'benevolent' cause, cannot be a human right.
Privileges are irrelevant. I don't care about what you think you have a right too and what you think you don't have a right too. I simply find it amusing that you of all people, as someone who in the past has rejected the idea that men are animals, would illustrate the same animalistic themes as most of the people who posted in this thread.
That comparison doesn't make sense. My statement isn't that men are animals. It's that men are men, and as a result are not to be bound into the will of other men. You're using animalistic as a pejorative, clearly, but don't define it. You can't claim that I'm contradicting anything if you don't even apply the same standards to the terms you use to describe what I'm saying.
Makes perfect sense. "If you sink, you sink, but it doesn't mean you can't swim." The opposite of swimming is drowning. Sounds like survival of the fittest, a concept applied to nature and animals. Here is where you separate yourself from the others in this thread. Rather than opting for the supernatural rationalization, you instead chose to use an idealistic concept. You don't see the contradictions in claiming that humans are not animals and then promoting the primitive notion of "sink or swim"?
The alternative to that is one that violates our basic rights, to life, liberty, and property. If people are materially disadvantaged as a result of a philosophically superior system, then so be it. Healthcare and economic equality are not rights, and trying to masquerade them as such annoys me to no end. But again, public policy isn't entirely contingent on human rights, and I'm okay with that.
Well I for one I wouldn't put a mortgage on my house to "try to find a cure" for terminal cancer. If you ment that he had no insurance and couldn't pay for treatment that's different, but thinking you'll somehow come up with a cure is um, how you say, retarded?
The privileges you refer to as human rights are indeed a nice consolation prize in a primitive society where survival for survival's sake is the goal of the majority and small mistakes can be fatal. But they are nothing compared to human gains and human achievement. What we are capable of, what can and cannot do, our potential when survival and other such animal concerns are a non issue.
Yes, yes, ridiculous civilizational overhauls make "every man a king," blah blah. I prefer to live in the here and now.
What you call "the here and now" is effectively dead. The only thing anyone has a right to now is choice: prosperity or austerity. Make no mistake, eventually your choice will effect you.
Seriously? Need I refer to that famous Carl Sagan quote? We on earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice; we can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us. Or we can squander our 15 billion year heritage in meaningless self destruction. As far as I am concerned, stories like this prove that we are not by any measure of the imagination enhancing peoples lives. We are squandering are legacy. It is our duty as the most intelligent species on our planet, perhaps in the universe, to protect it, if we can not even be expected to look after are own species then what chance does the planet stand?
Need I refer to this Hayek quote? 'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.
Decentralized agrarian civilization, with all its small towns and family farms/Mom'n'Pop shops, is dead. Hayek is irrelevant to the modern world.
