Liberty

[Athena]

Quote by: Osborn F Enready You are born in liberty, and "societal" and or "cultural" expectations are taught both by education and actions. If a person "expects" less than liberty, they have been misinformed,or have been prevented from understanding mans place in the natural world. (thanks mostly to religions) Nothing in life is free, and survival is not free, so your survival and your life are or have been paid for by SOMEONES labor, whether you or not. In order for someone to expect anything less than liberty, they had to have been spoiled and prevented from learning the harsh lessons of the chore of survival, whether by good graces from loved ones generosity, or by the extortion of others for their labor using force. Society was built with a history of exploitation of peasants by Kings. Society, as a concept, is a form of extortion without the recognition of individual sovereignty and free-will contracts. So, to answer your question: No, it is not interference with someones liberty to force them to accept what their existence, and continued existence DEMANDS, or let them perish due to "unwillingness" to accept that charge for their OWN life.

As long as we have an establishment that claims every inch of land and things like property and water rights, we can not have the liberty that is natural. Liberty sure as blazes is not having to work 40 hours a week to have a legal place to sleep, food and water. Liberty is open fields and mountains, where we can wonder and take our needs as those needs are felt. Civilizations impose on this liberty.

[Athena]

Quote by: ZNFYRH See Osborn's post #4. You can force someone to have liberty they don't want. One example I can think of is a person in prison who has someone try to help them break out. They choose not to. They believe they need to surrender their own liberty and someone else believes they should have more liberty and be out of prison. The example about Iraq is pertinent as well. The explanation for that follows this post.

The problem here is not limited to another prisoner forcing them to escape, but is making a prisoner leave the prisoner, because his/her time is up, and throwing this person into a complex society for which s/he is poorly prepared to manage on his/her own.

[Athena]

Quote by: Scribbler1 I disagree. You can ALLOW a person more liberty, but they have the freedom of choice to accept it or not. If you were to somehow allow more liberty in a former dictatorship, for example, and the people chose another dictator, at least it was their choice. The very essence of liberty is the absense of force of ANY kind, so you cannot "force" liberty on anyone.

Excellent. Liberty is a good thing only when one is prepared for it.

"The freedom of some is the freedom of the herd of swine that ran violently down a steep place into the sea and were drowned. The only liberty that is valuable, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exist with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle." Burke

However, when the dominion of the US stretched from coast to coast, consuming all the wilderness inbetween, our liberty was lost, because now there is no place to go if we want to be truly free. In the wilderness it is nature and not man that provides the order, and we can no more survive in the wilderness without knowing the ways of nature, than we can survive in cities without knowning the ways of our complex societies.

"Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature. True liberty consists in the privilege of enjoying our own rights, not in the destruction of the rights of others." Pincard

[Osborn F Enready]

Athena said: As long as we have an establishment that claims every inch of land and things like property and water rights, we can not have the liberty that is natural.

Natural liberty is being able to own your own land, water and labor rights.(note I said being able, not being ENTITLED, as you have no entitlement to land by birth, unless another person who owned it left it to you, contractually.)

Natural liberty is not free, and the cost is either your labor, or your life.

If you want true liberty, live in nature with nothing, and see how long you last without shelter, water and LABOR.

Athena said: Liberty sure as blazes is not having to work 40 hours a week to have a legal place to sleep, food and water.

Exactly, and you can thank your government for devaluing your fiat paper currency to .04 cents on the dollar, from an actual dollar, in the span of 75 years. That is orchestrated economic collapse, and it is a product of the ridiculous economic concept brought to U.S. law in 1913, and further pushed in 1933.

Once again, you have false cause and effect.

Athena said: Liberty is open fields and mountains, where we can wonder and take our needs as those needs are felt.

That was when there was land that was unexplored, unclaimed and undefendable by those who owned it.

Those times are gone, forever, unless more mass genocides put us in the same place again.

Athena said: Civilizations impose on this liberty.

Agreed, and the better, more moral, more JUST the civilization, the less it imposes.

[ZNFYRH]

Been thinking on this one for a while.

The concepts of better, moral, and just, are all relative.

I think, though, that we could narrow it down to simply "just", as if the justice of the civilization matches our own relative opinion we're going to think it is better and more moral.

So to pose the question (to which I already know the answer), in a civilization, what is the opposite of Liberty?

[Athena]

Quote by: ZNFYRH Been thinking on this one for a while. The concepts of better, moral, and just, are all relative. I think, though, that we could narrow it down to simply "just", as if the justice of the civilization matches our own relative opinion we're going to think it is better and more moral. So to pose the question (to which I already know the answer), in a civilization, what is the opposite of Liberty?

I would like Osborn to explain what he meant when he said

Once again, you have false cause and effect

What did I say is the cause and effect?

ZNFYRH, all social animals have to balance individual needs with the needs of others. Social animals depend on each other for survival. Each one must be able to meet its own needs. That is the mother cares for the offspring until they become independent. Adults must fend for themselves.

They must establish their place in the social heirarchy. Those born to alpha females have a better chance of enjoying social privilage . This is really complex, because social animals are complex. Position in the group is also determine receptocipe (Sp?) give and take. They have to make friends by being good to each other to be on the inside. Those on the fringes are the least socially apt and most vulnerable. So from the git go, social groups put some limits on our liberty. Make sense? From here we have to make some agreements. Democracy favors equality to a hiarchy. We are too autocratic to be living democratically, and this is a matter of conscious choice in humans.

[Osborn F Enready]

Athena said: I would like Osborn to explain what he meant when he said Once again, you have false cause and effect What did I say is the cause and effect?

You stated Athena:
Athena said:
Liberty sure as blazes is not having to work 40 hours a week to have a legal place to sleep, food and water.

So you tell me Athena, what is the CAUSE of your argument here, to result in this effect?

From your arguments, you always seem to blame changes in schooling, neglect of democracy, while entirely disregarding economic policy which DIRECTLY AFFECTS ECONOMIC LIBERTY by affecting the VALUE of your fiat dollar.

Read your post, and then my reply again and see if that makes sense to you.

SOCIETY is forcing you to work X hours a week to attain fiat money (as opposed to tangible currency) so you can buy what you need. Without society, it wouldn't be required, all that would be required would be your labor, your ingenuity, your ability.

[Osborn F Enready]

ZNYFRH said: So to pose the question (to which I already know the answer), in a civilization, what is the opposite of Liberty?

The absence of liberty, which takes many names. Slavery, Servitude, Peasant, Subject, etc., and these can be arrived at by tyranny, PURE unchecked democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, etc.

[ZNFYRH]

For the purposes of the question, whether you completely agree or not, the definition of Liberty that I am using has two parts:

1. The ability to freely make choices.
2. Consequences arrive that which is directly influenced by your choice.

Without giving the answer away, a good example is that Liberty is the ability to choose to punch someone in the face, and that the only consequences that comes from that choice comes from the person you punched and no other entity.

Just clarifying that way hints at what the true opposite is of Liberty.

Quote by: Athena Social animals depend on each other for survival. Each one must be able to meet its own needs. That is the mother cares for the offspring until they become independent. Adults must fend for themselves.

Could you please clarify the contradiction in your statement?

You say that social animals depend on each other for survival... then you say that adults must fend for themselves. Which is it?

Quote by: Osborn The absence of liberty, which takes many names. Slavery, Servitude, Peasant, Subject, etc., and these can be arrived at by tyranny, PURE unchecked democracy, fascism, authoritarianism, etc.

You almost have it. Slavery, Servitude, Tyranny, etc., all those things represent one idea or concept.

Protection / Security.

That is the true opposite of Liberty. Any time consequences are leaned against you from a source that was not directly effected by your choices, there is a lack of Liberty.

The more Security and/or Protection that you expect others to provide for you... and not necessarily physical protection... the more you have to impose on Liberty.

Even Slavery is a part of this concept. A person enslaves others, ultimately, so they don't have to do the work themselves, or so that person can provide a service. This is so the person can derive some kind of enjoyment from the process, be it sadistic or from more free time; the slaver is protecting their satisfaction and way of life at the expense of the Liberty of the enslaved.

If you don't think this is correct, give it time.

Look around you.

If you want more Security, you have to sacrifice Liberty, and vice versa.

[Athena]

I am way too tired for serious debate, but it is too early for bed, so forgive me if I do poorly.

For the fact that social animals band together for survival reasons, and also each adult must meet its own needs, imagine a flock of birds. Together they increase the survival of each individual, but if the individual can not fly, the rest of the birds aren't going to carry it through the sky. If a bird is blind and can not find food, it will not be fed. Does that make sense? Both are true. Adults must meet their own needs, and together they increase their survival chances, up to a point. Over population reduces survival changes.

Humans take care of each other, more that any other species, and some debaters write as though humans stand alone, much more than they do.

"False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes- whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is to have all restictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought." F.W. Robertson

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their own appetities; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in perferences to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be of it without. It is ordained in the eternnal constituiton of things, that men of intemperate habits cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Burke

These two quotes remind me of hedonism, the doctrine that pleasure is good. This does not mean doing as one pleases, but rather using judgment to inhance pleasure while avoiding pain. Bad choices will always get bad results, so a true hedonist is someone who makes careful choices that will get good results.

[Athena]

[

QUOTE=Osborn F Enready;450119]You stated Athena: Athena said: Liberty sure as blazes is not having to work 40 hours a week to have a legal place to sleep, food and water. So you tell me Athena, what is the CAUSE of your argument here, to result in this effect?

The cause is a concept of private ownership. Wealth is rarely achieved by hard work, but by ownership, and before a person can own, a person must have wealth. This divides society between have's and have not's; those who are exploited and those who exploit them.

From your arguments, you always seem to blame changes in schooling, neglect of democracy, while entirely disregarding economic policy which DIRECTLY AFFECTS ECONOMIC LIBERTY by affecting the VALUE of your fiat dollar. Read your post, and then my reply again and see if that makes sense to you. SOCIETY is forcing you to work X hours a week to attain fiat money (as opposed to tangible currency) so you can buy what you need. Without society, it wouldn't be required, all that would be required would be your labor, your ingenuity, your ability.

Ah, I think my statement which you quoted is, confronting economic reality. Repeatedly I have said, we have autocratic industry and would be better off if we used the democratic model instead. Now, no one can use the democratic model without knowing what it is, right? That brings us back to education, because we can't know something if we don't learn it.

I have said more then once, we protect property rights, better than we protect human rights.

About our fiat money, I have raised the alarm a few times, that our coins no longer have valuable metal in them, and are as worthless as our paper money. I have said more then once, we protect property rights, better than we protect human rights.

I have gone on and on about the oil/economic crisis. While the lastest economic report is that, we must reduce our standard of living, because we have been living beyond our means too long. This really pisses me off! Greenspan was very blunt about how this unemployment and will be very painful. My family is not among those who have enjoyed the wealth built on bad economic policy, and those of us who live from pay check to check will be hurt the worst by a recession, that could even become a worse depression than the 1930'tys. . We might be facing real survival issues, because of terrible, terrible economic policy. You really got on the wrong person about

entirely disregarding economic policy.

I take economic issues as seriously as life and death.

I think your argument that I entirely disregarding economic policy which DIRECTLY AFFECTS ECONOMIC LIBERTY by affecting the VALUE of your fiat dollar. is an error.