Recently, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas took to the floor of the House to talk about Wikileaks, transparency in government, and the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the 
Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times. He spoke about how the Iraq War was based on lies. He asked how the U. S. government should prosecute a citizen of Australia for publishing classified U. S. documents that he did not steal. Paul also said the following: “Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.”
Paul posed a number of questions at the end of his talk:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Source: Huffington Post
– Elaine Magliaro
Tony,
How much law, dare I say property law cases, have you read in your life?
Do you really believe you can divine the law as it evolved over the past eight centuries simply by claiming you applied a ‘scientific analysis’ to facts of which you have no knowledge?
Chan,
I wasn’t quibbling over number, I was talking about the connotations of your imagery. A Greek chorus has established roles. Did you mean to imply that I provided insight to Buddha; that I serve as an outlet for Buddha’s inner feelings and thoughts; that I serve as an narrator explaining the onstage action; or that my reaction is what the average observer of the Tragedy is likely to feel? If not, then the metaphor doesn’t work.
And that’s exactly as much effort as I’m willing to put into this conversation. Consider it part of a continued effort to get you to realize that conversation works better if you use the same definitions as the rest of the world. Like I said, I was bored.
@Bob: You are right, we shouldn’t argue, because you cannot tell the difference between a ‘certain fact’ and your misguided beliefs. I am a scientist that deals in facts and logic and observation, you are an ideologue, a fawning acolyte of a primitive man living in a world completely different from your own. I suspect you are right, we have no common ground.
Tony,
Arguments are reserved for things about which we are uncertain.
It is a certain fact that the inalienable right of self-ownership is the genesis of the social compact as well as the genesis of all property rights and property jurisprudence. Accordingly, I’m not going to argue with you over this.
Once you give up the inalienable right of self ownership, the individual becomes nothing more than a piece of meat within any philosophical construct you create to describe ‘society.’
We can also say that Locke wrote in a time and from a world culture in which the concept of humans as property was prevalent. Many leaders of society, including kings and lords, practices serfdom, slavery, and indentured (and heritable) servitude.
Given his culture and upbringing it is not surprising Locke might choose to make an argument for human rights based on the idea that a man owns himself as property; but in modern times where human ownership is rejected, the argument can be updated and improved and human rights can be separated from property rights, as they should be.
@Bob: I disagree with the concept that a person is property, even his own property. I believe in property rights but they do not derive from a right to life, and a person is not his own property.
I may echo some of Buddha’s comments here but I arrive at them by my own reasoning, not Kant, not Jefferson, not Locke and not Burlamaqui for that matter.
Ownership implies control and decision making and responsibility. My house cannot own another house, or decide to rent it. My car cannot own a bike, my desk cannot own a chain of restaurants.
Property has no rights. ***I*** have rights; but I can have my car crushed and my house demolished without anybody defending the rights of my car or house to continue their peacable existence.
About 99.9999% of property has a price; it was bought or can be bought for sufficient cash. There may be some paintings or sculptures that cannot be bought, but that is because the owner refuses to sell, not because the works of art have an inherent right of self-determination.
The capacity to own requires a mind that can make decisions. Although some animals have a very limited capacity to own, only humans have the full capacity to own any kind of property.
There are so many differences between humans and property that it makes no sense to conflate their definitions. It is misleading.
I believe we have some property rights, I believe we have the right to life, I don’t believe in ownership of minds, or the human bodies that host them, or human lives. There is a price we can put on land, there is no price we can put on a child, or on a grandmother, or on the change in a person’s psyche or lifelong happiness caused by a kidnapping, rape, assault, enslavement or any similar experience. Dying is one thing, suffering fifty years is worse than that.
I will not subscribe to any philosophy based on treating a person’s body as property; their own property or any form of property. Being paralyzed for life is not some form of property loss, and treating it as such diminishes humanity. Treating somebody’s loss of their only child to a murder as if a burglar emptied their savings account is demeaning; we would not let them sell their child’s life for any amount of money; there is no sense in which this can be considered a property crime.
Human life is in a class by itself, separate and distinct from property with different rules from property. People have a right to live their life unharmed, to live as they see fit without coercion or oppression, to own and buy and sell and trade property, or not. They have the right of self-determination. All until they violate somebody else’s rights to do the same.
The libertarian idea of treating a person as if they are their own property is a way of giving them the rights of ownership like control, decision making, and freedom from harm they claim for their other property. But all of those can and should be claimed independently. It is not necessary to define people as property, and it is incorrect because the majority of assumptions humans have concerning property rights do not apply to humans.
Property has no hopes or plans or aspirations, it will never be successful or happy or married, it will never have children or strive to achieve anything. Because of that we can do many things to property we cannot do to humans, like buy and sell it, take it apart, destroy it for the fun of it (like a bonfire, or cutting down a Christmas tree) or destroy it to punish somebody that wants it. (I acknowledge we cannot do all of those things to animals that are property.)
I think the main reason libertarians cling to the idea of themselves as property is to purposely, and falsely, elevate property rights to the level of human rights. It is purposely misleading. Property rights are secondary to human rights.
I believe you have the right to own a gun, and to carry it, and to defend yourself with it when harm is threatened. But the instant you use the gun to oppress another person, you have used your property rights to offend their human rights, and human rights win. The same goes for businesses which are property. When somebody uses their business for oppression they offend the human rights of the oppressed.
Humans are not property, not even their own property. We do not need any justification to claim that life and self-determination and freedom from oppression are birthrights that can only be taken away for cause.
Perhaps I need some justification for claiming that the flip side of freedom is some responsibility to society, but I think it is a prima facie case: Violation of those birthrights has been a path to privilege and riches since time immemorial; and securing these rights and protecting them requires the commitment and deployment of the resources of a like-minded society. Those resources can be time, or money, or even the lives of soldiers, police and other citizens.
What that means is that the fruits of one’s labor, secured under the preservation of these birthrights, are not entirely one’s own. Those fruits were secured only in partnership with an enabling society, and that partner deserves a fair share.
Nobody in America is self-made, everybody has whatever they have, including their lives and freedom of choice and freedom from oppression and slavery, thanks to the rules and regulations enforced by our society. I am not saying they owe everything to society; but I am saying what they do owe is not zero. It is a partnership and both partners are indispensable and both deserve a significant share of any reward, and both deserve to shoulder a share of the burden caused by any loss or failure.
The same goes for any civilized country; and I think the life conditions in countries that do not protect these human rights speak for themself.
Locke is not a god; he was a human that carried a similarity too far. He was simply wrong. I reject his axiomatic assumptions. There are human rights, there are property rights, and whatever similarities or commonalities may exist between them, they are too different to be treated as the same thing, and doing so leads to grievous and morally corrupt errors.
B. Hope your cat is ok. You’ll get more christmases together
Bob,
I’ll stipulate to your elaboration of Kant (due in no small part to your verb choice “may”). Although ultimately I think anything external to the self and those associated freedoms directly related to the self (freedom of choice, freedom of self-determination, the right to self-defense, etc.) are property in the Latin meaning of res – simply a thing. All may be one, but as a practical matter, you are not your car. A thing, control of a thing, and social acknowledgment of control of a thing are discrete from a persons being. The only real “thing” a person has is what they come into the world with; their mind and the body that carries it. We may have a philosophical difference on this matter but I think it’s likely a semantic difference.
“Buddha: “And who are you to say Jefferson and Franklin’s deliberate – by your own evidence – word choice was wrong?”
Where did I ever say that??”
Perhaps I should have been clearer. It was not your direct words, but your Wiki quote concerning the DOI. Specifically: “Benjamin Franklin was in agreement with Thomas Jefferson in downplaying protection of ‘property’ as a goal of government, replacing the idea with ‘happiness’.”
In context, your “WTF??” to my psychic comment applies to that statement. Jefferson knew the difference and choose to downplay property purposefully. Unless you know something you’re not revealing, the quote you choose makes that manifestly clear. But the choice to mention property over happiness in the Constitution also makes sense linguistically and structurally. The courts and legislature can really only address property rights, but they can’t really legislate or adjudicate a state of mind (which is one of the reasons “hate crimes” are so offensive, but I digress).
“There is no ‘failure’ of the original constitution to contain a bill of rights.”
I was under the impression that the lack of a Bill of Rights was one of the Anti-Federalists biggest complaints about the Constitution as originally drafted and a driving force behind the initial amendment processes.
As to the Black quote, I have no issue with that wording.
In re: the cat. Thanks. He means a lot to me. I had to get up at midnight and give him antibiotics and the insomnia struck. I’m sure he’ll be fine although my sleeplessness probably belies my concern. Just like procedures on humans, I’m more concerned about the sedation than the procedure proper. He hasn’t been under since he was a kitten and anesthesia gets more risky with age.
Buddha: “Because you mistook physical property – tangible things – for happiness which is both a form of freedom (some would say the ultimate form of freedom) and a state of mind. Even Kant himself said that “Something external can be originally acquired only in conformity with the idea of a civil condition.” Property is a civil construct. Freedom is the only true property of self and that includes freedom from the tyranny of others.”
Property rights are forms of individual rights that may exist pre-society. PROTECTION and thence expansion of said property rights is a ‘civil construct’ and a prime motivation for forming a social compact.
Buddha: “And who are you to say Jefferson and Franklin’s deliberate – by your own evidence – word choice was wrong?”
Where did I ever say that??
Buddha: “Did you get psychic powers for Xmas? Did either of them express remorse for having used the phrase “pursuit of happiness”? Did it occur to you that the Bill of Rights has no mention of happiness for a reason too? Just like the DOI mentions happiness and not property for a reason as well? Both Jefferson and Franklin were learned men. They knew the meaning of words.”
WTF??
Buddha: “The DOI’s wording and the failure of the original drafting of the Constitution to contain a Bill of Rights are separate issues. If the Bill of Rights was meant to be a correction to the DOI, it would have been amended to the DOI, not the Constitution.”
There is no ‘failure’ of the original constitution to contain a bill of rights.
Buddha: “And before we go off into the rabbit hole, I don’t need to remind you that Kant isn’t our basis of laws, right?”
Kant didn’t invent analytic judgments.
Buddha: “That the only things that count are the Constitution as informed by the aspirations and rationale of the DOI?”
“The Declaration was and is a legal instrument, a juristic act of ultimate solemnity, effecting the most fundamental constitutional change, a change in the very source and foundation of law. It is par excellance constitutional. It is our one legal document on which all else rests. [The second paragraph of the Declaration] enunciates the theory of law, of ultimate constitutional law, on which the signers based their claim of power and right to effect this great legal-constitutional change. The force and thrust of the passage, as a permanent commitment of the nation, must be appreciated in that
light.” Charles L, Black, One Nation Indivisible, 65 S Y. Law Rev 27, 57 (1991)
Like that??
Good luck with the cat.
Bob,
Fair Warning: Any answer required may take some time. I have a long day tomorrow that starts and ends at the vet. “I’m getting tutored!” No. Seriously, I have to take a cat in for some dental work on top of everything else so I may be out of touch tomorrow. In preparation, I’ll be taking a mini-coma shortly.
Bob,
And before we go off into the rabbit hole, I don’t need to remind you that Kant isn’t our basis of laws, right?
That the only things that count are the Constitution as informed by the aspirations and rationale of the DOI?
Chan,
“Life in my mind is the operative word for property, not happiness.”
And therein lies your character flaw.
He who dies with the most toys does not win.
He is still dead.
The only way he lives is in the memories of others.
An echo in collective memory.
Are others going to recall you with fondness for your kindness and generosity?
Or as a selfish bastard who profited from the suffering of others and treated those in need with careless disregard?
Happiness is not a thing.
It is a state of being.
Have you ever wondered why there are people with all the material resources need for not just survival, but luxurious excess, yet they remain miserable? Have you ever wondered why there are those with barely enough to survive that are joyously happy?
I suspect the thought has never crossed your mind.
You do not take time to think of others.
Only yourself.
“Since no man has a right to another’s life, he by extension has no right to his property. Pretty simple or so it seems to me.”
Simple because it is unexamined and wrong minded.
This statement contradicts with your stated desire for unlimited acquisition at any cost and without social or legal consequence. You want the ability to have another’s property without any social or legal restraint at all on how you get it. All because you desire to create your happiness – at their expense – without fear of reprisal or paying any fair cost.
If no man has right to another man’s property?
Then neither do you.
Even if that is what makes you happy – the acquisition of their property without rules or consequence.
It is not your right to take without cost.
It is not your right to be a free rider.
The universe does not revolve around you.
That is a lie your ego tells you.
The root of all suffering is desire. Your desire for acquisition of property without rules or consequence is no different. But you don’t care because the suffering caused is not your own.
Because you have no empathy for the suffering you may cause others. Only your desire for profit – property to make you happy – at any cost. A pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others. A disregard for social norms and laws. Repeatedly lying to others and to yourself about the damage your selfish nature causes others. A willingness to place others at risk for your own benefit. And perhaps worst of all, a demonstrated and profound lack of remorse.
You are crippled where a crutch won’t help.
No matter if the crutch is made of solid gold.
Have you ever wondered why I’m philosophically a Buddhist?
It is because I had an epiphany. An awakening to the simple truths of his observations.
“If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving and sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would the stain of selfishness overcome their minds. Even if it were their last bite, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared, if there were someone to receive their gift. But because beings do not know, as I know, the results of giving and sharing, they eat without having given. The stain of selfishness overcomes their minds.” – Khuddaka Nikaya, Itivuttaka I.26
“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
—-
No one saves us but ourselves, no one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path . . .” – Dhammapada
I give you this gift in the hope you see the error of your ways.
I expect nothing in return.
—-
Bob,
Because you mistook physical property – tangible things – for happiness which is both a form of freedom (some would say the ultimate form of freedom) and a state of mind. Even Kant himself said that “Something external can be originally acquired only in conformity with the idea of a civil condition.” Property is a civil construct. Freedom is the only true property of self and that includes freedom from the tyranny of others.
And who are you to say Jefferson and Franklin’s deliberate – by your own evidence – word choice was wrong? Did you get psychic powers for Xmas? Did either of them express remorse for having used the phrase “pursuit of happiness”? Did it occur to you that the Bill of Rights has no mention of happiness for a reason too? Just like the DOI mentions happiness and not property for a reason as well? Both Jefferson and Franklin were learned men. They knew the meaning of words.
The DOI’s wording and the failure of the original drafting of the Constitution to contain a Bill of Rights are separate issues. If the Bill of Rights was meant to be a correction to the DOI, it would have been amended to the DOI, not the Constitution.
Buddha: “Nor does the social compact change anything about what I said about the nature of justice and equity required by the Constitution.”
Justice and equity are functions of society and conscience; they are not inalienable rights.
Buddha: “Individual rights end with the individual; where they impose upon the life and liberty of others, they become null as a matter of basic equity.”
What does that sentence mean?
Buddha; “No one man is more equal than another – happiness not withstanding.”
I believe that was covered by the phrase ‘all men are created equal.’
Buddha: “Happiness is an aspiration in the DOI, not a Constitutional guarantee.”
Mainly because the DOI is not a constitution and the term ‘happiness’ was a rhetorical choice.
Buddha: “And the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the Constitution. The Constitution provides in the 5th Amendment that citizens shall not “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
No, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is that 5th Amendment restating what phrase Jefferson and Franklin was a poor word choice at the time of the DOI? “Life, liberty and … property?”
I spent an immense portion of my third year in law school independently researching two amendments, the Ninth and the Fifth. Care to venture a guess why?
Tony C.: “Since Jefferson worked on the Virginia Constitution, the fact that Jefferson chose a “more lofty and vague phrase” does indeed alter the basic compact. It is entirely plausible that Jefferson considered property rights a function of state government (like Virginia) and not a function of the federal government.”
There was no federal government in 1776 and Jefferson wasn’t in Philly, PA during that summer of 1787.
Accordingly, I have no idea where you’re going with this.
Let’s get something clear right now; when I say ‘Lockean shorthand’ I’m referring to the Lockean principles of the social compact. Jefferson downplayed the ‘protection of property’ as a function of government in the document. It was a rhetorical choice for obvious polemical reasons; not a re-defining of the function of government or the principles of the social compact. Just like his rhetorical choice to avoid mentioning parliament.
Buddha: “Why was that, Bob? Could it be that Jefferson, like Franklin, saw property as a distinctly different thing than the pursuit of happiness – which may or may not involve any property at all? You’ve only proven exactly what I said about Jefferson’s precision in language. Could it be, like Tony said, that he was using the term as it is meant in plain meaning, the pursuit of a state of mind? Had Jefferson meant property, he’d have said property.”
You are so set on proving some point to Chan L. that you’ve lost all sight of what the social compact is.
Self ownership is not only the genesis of all property but it’s also the dividing line between the state and the individual. Self ownership is an inalienable right; with that inalienable right comes the ability to create property from one’s labor.
Why does the individual leave the state of nature and form a government? Hmm? What on earth would possess Franklin to deem property as a “creature of society?” After all, it did exist in a state of nature; just wasn’t … what’s that word… protected.
There is no “happiness” if the inalienable right of self ownership, with all its attendant predicates (e.g. the creation of property), is ignored by the state. Because once the individual disappears under an all oppressive sea of state doctrine, he is no longer an individual existing within the confines of the social compact. He is no longer citizen of, but property of.
“Just as man as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors.” C.G. Jung
“Resistance to the organized mass can be affected only by the man who is well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.” – C.G. Jung.
Again, Jefferson drafted a restatement of the social compact; he did not re-define it.
I always thought Life, Liberty, Pursuit of happiness meant that your life is sacrosanct that the nature of man required liberty for him to exist and that happiness meant you had the freedom to follow your dreams and make of your life what you wanted.
Life in my mind is the operative word for property, not happiness. One must work to live and that which man does to further his life is his because he has taken it out of nature for his use and survival.
Since no man has a right to another’s life, he by extension has no right to his property. Pretty simple or so it seems to me.
Gyges:
I think it works ok. Even though there were 12-50 in the chorus, the philosopher Aristotle; in chapter 18 of the Poetics says this:
“The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles. As for the later poets, their choral songs pertain as little to the subject of the piece as to that of any other tragedy. They are, therefore, sung as mere interludes- a practice first begun by Agathon. Yet what difference is there between introducing such choral interludes, and transferring a speech, or even a whole act, from one play to another.”
That there is only one of you doesnt really matter.
@Bob: If we are using Wiki (attributed), here is the direct entry on Burlamaqui: “He was the first philosopher to articulate the quest for happiness as a natural human right, a principle that Thomas Jefferson later restated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Since Jefferson worked on the Virginia Constitution, the fact that Jefferson chose a “more lofty and vague phrase” does indeed alter the basic compact. It is entirely plausible that Jefferson considered property rights a function of state government (like Virginia) and not a function of the federal government.
I also find it dubious beyond the pale to think that Jefferson, with the full intent of fomenting a revolution and betting his very life on creating a new nation and changing the course of world history, was just arbitrarily choosing pretty phrases and stitching them together without a care.
I find it most probable that Jefferson did not include property because he thought about it and decided against it, and because he preferred Burlamaqui’s foundation over Locke’s.
In any case you are simply wrong in claiming that “pursuit of happiness” is Lockean code; it had a specific meaning separate and distinct from property even according to the Virginia document which you quote.
When Jefferson used it in the DOI, he was clearly using it in the sense of Burlamaqui and was not using it as code for Lockean property rights at all.
Bob,
“I have no idea where you and Chan L. have been with this argument”. Really? Then maybe you should have looked into that.
“Benjamin Franklin was in agreement with Thomas Jefferson in downplaying protection of “property” as a goal of government, replacing the idea with “happiness”.”
Why was that, Bob? Could it be that Jefferson, like Franklin, saw property as a distinctly different thing than the pursuit of happiness – which may or may not involve any property at all? You’ve only proven exactly what I said about Jefferson’s precision in language. Could it be, like Tony said, that he was using the term as it is meant in plain meaning, the pursuit of a state of mind? Had Jefferson meant property, he’d have said property.
Your speculation on “coded language” doesn’t change that it’s simply speculation. Plain language is plain language and “the pursuit of happiness” does not logically comport to being the equivalent of “the pursuit of property”. Happiness is a state of mind, not a tangible asset. A transitory chemical state.
Sound is an intangible – a wave of energy moving through a medium. But your neighbor isn’t allowed to pursue his love of loud music in violation of noise ordinances and your property rights, is he? Even though his pleasure derives from an intangible. Conversely so, he’s also not allowed to sell an easement across your property – a very tangible asset – just because it makes him happy? When his happy collides with your happy, like all disputes, resolution falls to the State. And your right to be happy is not allowed to trample the rights of others as a matter of equity and justice. The equitable judge will enjoin the neighbor from playing loud music outside the bounds of local ordinance just like they would void ab initio the sale of a tangible easement to which he had no right.
Nor does the social compact change anything about what I said about the nature of justice and equity required by the Constitution. Individual rights end with the individual; where they impose upon the life and liberty of others, they become null as a matter of basic equity. No one man is more equal than another – happiness not withstanding. Happiness is an aspiration in the DOI, not a Constitutional guarantee. And the 800 pound gorilla in the room is the Constitution. The Constitution provides in the 5th Amendment that citizens shall not “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Whether or not the citizen is happy about it is beside the point.