Holte's corner

False Arguments and Individual Rights

One reason why it is so hard to fight some of the tendentious nonsense
that passes for ideology in the USA is that this fight is very old. The
use of propaganda is old. Herbert Hoover (bless his soul) protested that
Wilson was misusing propaganda to whip up war sentiment for World War
I. And there was a spin machine that helped get us into that war, and
every war since then. Likewise, there are many specious arguments out
there. Here is an example of some of these arguments:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2259

Listen to these arguments and then deconstruct them:

"Similarly, liberals champion the political power of labor unions. But
unions deny the right of individual workers to make their own
agreements with the employer on the terms of work. Time and again,
striking unions use violence to prevent workers from crossing a picket
line. The liberals say nothing as such victims are physically harassed
and even beaten. In the name of "workers' rights," liberals nullify
the actual rights of the individual worker to choose for himself what
conditions of employment to accept."

This argument deliberately reverses the reality of life as experienced
by workers in industries where unions are available. The chief threat
to their individual liberty isn't the Union, but often the very
employers who they have to go to to get a job. Few of them have the
bargaining power to negotiate a contract. Negotiation has
traditionally meant the company demanding pay cuts for workers while
giving bonuses to their bosses. Likewise the reality of strikes is not
worker initiated violence but a history of violent repression. Police,
strike-breakers, and other measures used to violently put down
strikes, break unions and black-list those workers who would join one.

Workers band together in Unions because they perceive that the only way to protect their individual rights is to organize together into self governing groups. Similarly the companies that employ them are organized into legal or illegal syndicates with one another, with local judges, law-enforcement, prosecutors, and other folks invited into their circles. The result is that the real battle is "group against group" not individual against group. Nobodies individual rights are served by either side once the battle is joined until an agreement can be reached.

Individual rights need to be preserved because the individual can never even claim personal property unless those rights are protected. Moreover, those with power are forever trying to corrupt the leaders of groups representing the poor, workers, or others. Sometimes the Union leaders are in the club.

In the name of "right to work" employers regularly nullify individual
workers rights to even have a job. Forcing low wages, and when those
aren't low enough, shipping the jobs to Mexico or China.

If corporations and other collectives didn't arrogate to
themselves so much of the common needs of workers and workers had the
actual power to negotiate, they wouldn't need to form groups to
provide common defense against the collectivist attacks of local
governments and corporations. The issue isn't "individual rights"
against collective rights, but collective groups struggling against
other collective groups.

If the issue can be reduced to individuals with approximately equal
power than the conditions set forth in the paragraph can be made to
have some truth. But that requires that workers have nearly equal
legal and social standing with their bosses.

"Nor is it merely the rights of the workers that liberals abrogate.
For instance, though they claim to defend the elderly, they oppose the
privatization of Social Security. This means they negate the right of
each individual to use his own money to plan for his own retirement.
They negate the right of the individual to take responsibility for the
course of his own life."

Again the stance against the privatization of social security is not a
stance between individual rights and collective rights, but a stance
against the greedy designs of those who would get their hands on
social security and loot it for their own factional collective profit and the other corrupting influences seeking to siphon off private profits from moneys set aside to deal with issues of common concern but that no individual would do anything about.

That is why moderate democrats see nothing wrong with adding moneys to
Social Security programs so that workers don't depend on it, but
resist taking away from the core purpose -- which is to protect
individuals against the greed and rape of large collectives (banks and
investment companies) who whenever they get in trouble invariably loot
their small investors before touching their own assets.

So all these arguments reduce themselves to straw arguments that make
a false argument that the main issue is about "individual" versus
"collective" rights when the real issue is protecting individual
rights from factions conspiring to loot, convert, or infringe them.

"Why do liberals pay lip service to supporting the poor, the elderly,
the worker--while invariably endorsing the violation of the rights of
those very individuals? The answer is that liberals repudiate the
principle of individual rights in favor of collectivism. Only groups
exist in their thinking, and only "group rights" are valid. They see
life only in terms of collectives--the rich versus the poor, the young
versus the elderly, the whites versus the blacks. Individuals have no
reality and no meaning to them."

Indeed this author reveals himself to be thinking as he describes
others thinking. "Only groups" exist for this fellow because he sees
"liberals" as a "collective" and those who think like himself as
defending individual rights -- when in fact that is not so. He also makes other mistakes. If "liberals" violate the rights of individuals they do so for the same reasons and motivations that "conservatives" would do so.

If instead of setting up straw arguments to support collectivist corporativist agendas such as doing away with Unions, Social Security, or Welfare, this fellow would concentrate on things that actually promote human rights, he'd be better off. His arguments only make "ersatz" sense. In other words, they are nonsense.

Chris

Posted by cholte at August 22, 2007 09:54 PM