Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
An example of one such justification is that you're standing in the way of our society succeeding.
|
Strike Two, my friend.
That I am standing in the way of our society succeeding isn't a justification for a socialistic society or any other kind of society. And since it isn’t a justification, it also isn’t an example of a justification. (I’ve given some examples above.)
I'm not sure how I'm standing the way of society succeeding mostly because I don't know what such “success” is. I also don't understand how a society "works" or "doesn't work." I hear complaints that a capitalistic or socialistic system can’t “work,” but what does that mean?
Do we judge the success of a society by the number and intensity of its wars? Maybe we should look at crime statistics or drug use. Usually I think people are thinking of general happiness. This or that society is successful because it produces the greatest amount of happiness. But then I’m not sure how we know what happiness is. Can we determine when or how it can be achieved? For a while we thought society was better off with slavery, then we changed our minds. We thought preventing women from voting put us on the path to success, but we changed our minds on that, too. Maybe success, whatever it is, can be achieved by prohibiting the consumption of alcohol.
Of course, one way of determining that a social theory doesn’t work is to find contradictions in the theory. I think that socialism supports the laws requiring businesses to have handicapped parking spaces and demanding that no one smoke cigarettes in building owned by businesses. The problem is that these laws interfere with the ownership of those businesses. If I own a business and the land it rests on, then I may have special parking spaces for whomever I choose: that’s what ownership allows. If government has the authority to demand I set aside spaces for some people, then I guess I don’t really own the parking lot after all, even though I am listed as the owner on the deed to the land. Socialism is a wrong theory because it claims the government is justified in compelling people do things with their own property, thereby employing while at the same time negating the possibility of ownership. This “tug” between my rights to something I own and the government’s rights to tell me how that thing should be disposed produces the contradiction showing that there can be no justification for socialism.
No matter what conception of society you advance, the question remains, “by what authority do you compel other people to behave as you determine they should?”