> You don't need to be the government's property for the government to optimize
Right, so like I said. I mean you even quoted this part and then proceeded to not explain why perhaps you believe this is inevitable, but simply restate it. You're assuming you're correct but not justifying it.
Or perhaps you mean the prior comment where someone said "People dying in auto accidents costs the government money in lost economic activity as well as things like medical care." which you took umbrage with. But there's again, nothing that implies property here. I don't think that the businesses on my street are my property, but I can still support policies that benefit them, because a robust local economy still benefits me. Nor do I think I hold any sort of right of ownership over an average schoolchild, and yet I benefit from a well educated citizenry and so support robust public education.
Direct property ownership is not the only method by which people can benefit from things, and regulation is not necessarily done out of a sense of "entitlement". Some regulations are actually just good and improve the world.
So just to clarify here, does my boss or employer own me? Because he both is generally entitled to the work I do, and as such can control my behavior?
But more generally, I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership, as long as it is limited to the behavior that affects me. And as that user mentioned, there are costs society bears beyond the potential lost productivity (healthcare/rehabilitation costs as an example) so you can completely ignore this line of reasoning and their point still stands.
Nope. Because you and your boss work based on a voluntary freely consented agreement, not a forcible one. Slave contracts are illegal. You can quit anytime.
Taxation is not a free consent thing. I vote against lots of taxes, but they pass anyway and I'm forced to pay them. A vote is not consent and is not a contract.
> I don't agree that exerting some amount of influence over behavior that affects me is ownership
Forcibly controlling other people's behavior is ownership.
I wore seatbelts years before the law forced me to. I resent such laws in a free society, despite my seatbelt saving my life at one point. I will continue to wear a bike helmet even though I'm pleased the helmet law was repealed. I encourage you to wear one, too, but if you don't want to, it's your choice and your cranium.
I know. But I am asserting that is wrong. The US government was not set up to own people. (Yes, I know that it allowed individuals to own other individuals, but that got fixed.)
Some do it far more than others. The US was the first to have a Bill of Rights. It's a big deal. Although the BoR is constantly under attack. I'm amazed at the people who want to throw it away.
I know people who would happily replace it with the 10 Commandments, for example.
The Bill of Rights was literally inspired by various English Bills of Rights. To view the early U.S. as some sort of magical utopian exceptional polity that grew out of the head of Zeus is using incredibly rose-colored glasses; George Washington literally put down a tax rebellion with force, John Adams did as well, and Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Just ask Daniel Shays how much the Bill of Rights helped him.
From the beginning the United States was as flawed and as human as every single other government in the history of the world, and to pretend there is some sort of magical exceptionalism to it is both hopelessly utopian and impractical for useful discourse.
Employment is at-will on both sides. In the case of the state, you could also renounce your citizenship and try to get one with a more suitable country: so far as there's a wide range of choices and it's realistic to do that, you're not owned.
One of these cases is dramatically more realistic than the other.
Cost/benefit thinking has value. But realize you're taking one form of coercion (a state forcing others to pay for my medical costs whether or not I would choose to insure myself) to justify another (forbidding you to do something a bit risky to yourself). You might conclude the ownership is worth it, but it doesn't negate WalterBright's point. There's a cost in individual freedom.
> Ownership is the power to coerce someone to do your bidding
I could maybe agree with this. But I find the gap between "helmet laws" and "you're forced to do the government's bidding" rather wide. Like as far as I can tell this reduces to "any reduction in rights is ownership", so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.
> so the government limiting your right to murder people means that the government owns you already.
You have no right to hurt other people. Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights. Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.
> Having the government prevent you from murdering people is not owning you and is not infringing on your rights.
Of course it is! You just don't believe my exercise of those rights is legitimate, but there's no intrinsically different about the act of shooting someone and the act of riding a bike without a helmet, from a Hobbesian point of view. You can argue that the government/society has a more legitimate interest in limiting exercise of one of those rights, and I'd agree. But when we're talking about what rights should be, you can't use a legal definition of rights. That's circular.
> Actually, the government should not be preventing you from murdering others - it is there to mete out justice if you do.
And see, this is I think an interesting argument. But it leads to a really perverse system. You can't engage in any form of harm reduction policy, which means the only lever you have to reduce criminal/harmful activity is to have really cruel punishments for the few directly harmful acts.
Like take speeding or drinking and driving as obvious examples. Under the "only mete justice if you harm others" approach, you can't criminalize drunk driving or speeding, only vehicular manslaughter, so you either live with more death due to dangerous driving, or you have to like make the punishment for drunk/dangerous driving so terrible that it dissuades people from even engaging in the risky behavior. But in practice, avoiding the circumstances that lead to harm is better for everyone (the victim, the potential perpetrator, society at large) than punishing people after the fact, and there are lots of situations where punishments simply don't work.
Given that the argument being made here is that some laws formed by legitimate democratic institutions impose ownership (and are therefore unjust) no, you can't draw a distinction between laws and power here.
The Athenian assembly voted to massacre all the men on Melos, and sell the women and children into slavery. If you believe democracy is the source of all legitimacy, you need to debug your beliefs.
Edit: it's unclear whether that atrocity came to a vote, though it certainly happened. To pick a clear case of unjust and unlawful democratic legislation in the same war, there was the time they voted to execute six of eight generals, rather than subject each to a trial.
Read again the post I replied to.