giselle wrote:JamesALindsay wrote:The reality is that the money and property you possess is secured by a social contract made up of everyone in the society
I agree that property rights and, by association, the regulating of those rights by government, are part and parcel of a social contract. Property rights are socially constructed, they do not exist in nature, and so is government, this is all social construction. I agree also that we need a social contract to fend off chaos and to progress as a society and that contract might include property rights.
However, is not the
idea of a social contract also a 'social construction'? Did we not invent the idea of social contract? So I have difficulty with the idea that property rights exist, or are secured, just because they are part of a social contract.
How else would you secure them? What else would they be based on? What's the alternative? "In nature" -- before any concept of social contracts or social construction or even rights, each small group of people works out among themselves what their rules will be (i.e., what their social contract is), and one doesn't usually feel any compunction about taking the property of another tribe. There is no social contract between tribes unless a couple of tribes get together and enter into an alliance. Then we might start respecting your property rights, but if you're an enemy, you don't have any.
Of course, as 21st century denizens of a developed country, we have ideas about universal property rights that are not easy to set aside to see what the world might look like through the eyes of a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe competing with other tribes and species.
Here's another thought experiment that might let us see something about Objectivism. Suppose there are only ten of us in the world. One is a millionaire, the rest of us are much less weathy. The millionaire can buy anything he wants from the rest of us as long as we agree to trade with him. The rest of us have some purchasing power, but much less than the millionaire.
Now, suppose the nine of us who are not rich get together and agree among ourselves that we will no longer do business with the millionaire. Suddenly all his money is worthless. He can't buy anything with it. According to Obj'ism, we're completely within our rights to do business or not with whomever we want. According to Obj'ism the millionaire's right to his money is absolute, but, in effect we've managed to take it all away from him without violating any Obj'ist principles. We haven't used force. We haven't taken anything physical away from him. He still has all his money, it just no longer has any value.
How would Objectivism resolve this?
In the real world, what would prevent the 99% from boycotting the 1%?