blackshoe, on 2013-April-30, 22:13, said:
If the theif doesn't get caught, he gets to keep the money whatever society has decided to do with those who do get caught.
Full restitution rarely happens because our legal system isn't designed on that principle. It's designed on the principle that crimes are "against the state" and the state gets to recover or confiscate whatever property the criminal has when caught, and to incarcerate or kill (in some cases) him whether anything is recovered or not.
To me, there's a simple syllogism. Rights belong to individuals. Groups, being merely collections of individuals, do not accrue rights that the individual does not have. Individuals do not have the right to incarcerate other individuals, or execute them. Therefore neither do groups. Government is a group, therefore government does not have those rights either. That governments claim those rights is a consequence of the (failed, and morally wrong imo) doctrine called "the divine right of kings".
Libertarians are far closer in their thinking to communists than either would like to admit. Their 'solutions' to social issues are very much opposed, but the underlying approach is much the same in each.
Each philosophy is founded on a set of assumptions about the human animal, considered both as individual and as a social being. The assumptions may be different but what is identical is the lack of any grounding of the assumptions in reality.
We, as a species and not, obviously, as individuals, know and understand far more about how the human animal functions than did the authors of the texts that became the bible, or Marx's Das Kapital, or aynn rand's turgid novels or even the works of Adam Smith or William Shakespeare.
The notion that there are any such things as 'rights' that have some sort of mystical possession arising in humans is akin to the belief that the wine drunk by catholics at mass has become the blood of christ (I've often thought that the Red Cross would be able to avoid a lot of problems with collectiing blood donations if they could find a way to industrialize that process, but I digress).
As anyone with more than a passing interest in actually understanding the concepts would presumably grasp readily if not entrapped in a bubble-world, rights arise only within a society.
A castaway on a desert island has no rights nor any need of them. Rights pertain to the inter-relationships between members of a society. It is meaningless to speak of 'rights' of an individual in any other context: the words one would use to describe such rights would be devoid of any real life meaning.
Rights therefore arise out of society. The development of human civilization is one of the increasingly complex rules that various societies have developed over the millenia to govern their internal workings.
The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights seem to me to reflect not the intention of the destruction of the social contract but, rather, the repudiation of a simpler, more top-down social contract whereby the (white) inhabitants of North America could set up a more complex means of government. The creation of rights, viewed in that manner, is not a repudiation of government but an expansion of it, since rights have no real meaning unless society provides for the protection of those rights.
The more rights society grants to its members, the more frequently will there be a need for some form of enforcement or protection of those rights. And in a society in which social and economic power will inevitable become unequally divided, the less-empowered cannot by themselves enforce or protect their rights against the stronger. Hence the need for society, collectively, to act: and we call the organs of society empowered to act in this fashion: government.
Hence the more a society grants rights to all rather than, say, to an aristocracy, the more one needs government.
Of course, any organ of society is prone to abuse: that is the way the human animal seems to function. The question is whether we choose a complex government, with all the costs and abuses of power and inefficiencies that go with that, or a simple government, with few effective powers, and a largely unregulated society.
History suggests that on the whole, and the balance sheet is not all one way, the more complex the government, the better off are the bulk of the people. The simpler the government, the more power and wealth accrues to the few and the more miserable are the many.
I expect the right wingnuts to point to communist governments as examples of where this breaks down, but the fact is that communist governments, such as the USSR or N Korea are actually fairly simple forms of government, where the rights are given to the elite and the bulk of the population is denied many rights.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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