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by mbrodersen 1635 days ago
> Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them.

Hold on. I thought you said that freedom was the ability to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. Now you added rule #2: You only have the freedom pick from things somebody else (the government?) have decided that you can pick from. That sounds exactly like the system we have in most countries. So if the government decides to make education and health freely available then you should be happy with that right? It follows your rules perfectly.

1 comments

> So if the government decides to make education and health freely available then you should be happy with that right? It follows your rules perfectly

The government doesn't produce any of those. It has to take from someone else. You can't make any of those things free. You can only make them socialized.

> Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them.

If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.

> You can't make any of those things free. You can only make them socialized.

If something is socialised then it is free to choose from. So it is free as in $ and free as in freedom.

> If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.

Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?

> If something is socialised then it is free to choose from. So it is free as in $ and free as in freedom.

Yes, and that's positive rights. As I said, I only believe in negative rights.

> Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?

Then we don't allow them. It's a price to pay in lost negative rights but only to protect other's negative rights.

Ok so you want guns, kitchen knives, vehicles etc. to be illegal because we don’t know ahead of time if somebody will use it to harm somebody else? Very impractical.
Not what I said. I said Nukes. There is a huge difference. Nukes can only be used to blow up stuff. But the other things, while they can be used to do harm, their capacity to harm is orders of magnitude lower than the capacity of a Nuke, and, at the same time they have very practical uses that we depend on. So I can assume you will likely use a knife to cut bread or a gun in self defense, but I can't think of a common peaceful or legit use of Nuke.
So what you are really saying is that it comes down to a cost/benefit evaluation. You are OK with vehicles, alcohol, factories etc. harming and killing people as long as the perceived benefits to the public outweighs the cost. So nukes are not OK because clearly nobody benefits except the person who enjoys owning nukes, and the potential cost is high (millions dying when a nuke owner goes postal). The gun issue is really interesting. Obviously some people think that owning guns is worth sacrificing a few hundred school kids every year for. Others disagree. But almost everybody agrees that killing thousands of people every year using vehicles is unfortunate but acceptable. Perhaps you can argue that public roads and vehicles do benefit pretty much everybody. But guns only benefit people who likes guns and/or people who are more afraid of random violence than they are afraid of crazy people legally getting access to guns and shooting up schools.