publiusvarus wrote:
Does our freedom and property rights cease to exist when someone else needs "looking after"? Is that what the USA is about?
Elinda wrote:
You're being deliberately daft. No one - me, varus, or even you mentioned anything specific. If I said 'rights' I meant rights. If I had been referring to benefits, I would have said benefits.
Varus quite specifically (it's in the quote above) said that our freedom and property rights were being infringed "when someone else needs looking after". You do not have a "right" to be "looked after". That's a benefit.
You responded to him by asking something like: "But what if your rights are infringing on someone else's?". That's a legitimate question outside the context of his statement, but it's incorrect within it. It's like if I said that "pedestrians should always have right of way over people in cars", and you responded by asking "But what if the other person is also a pedestrian?". It's a valid question, but not relevant.
Your question implied that you believed that something within the set of things Varus was talking about might be a right, and that the rights Varus was talking about might actually infringe those rights. To me, that means that you believe that not only can being "looked after" (presumably at taxpayer expense given the context of the statement) be considered a right, but that such looking after might actually be a more important right than something like property rights.
That's how I took your statement. If you didn't intend that, then what did you mean and why did you reply to him with that statement? It's a complete non-sequitur if you didn't think that being looked after was a right. And if you did, then my response to you is completely valid.
