Well, I wouldn't call them my best friends, but no, they don't have a monopoly. In any case, I'm not required to do business with them. And I am required to 'do business' with the monopoly of government. That's the difference. And I realize it's a difference that doesn't seem to register with you, but it's not a fantasy. It's very real.
dblack, this is about the best description you will find regarding our fundamental opposition.
This is written from the vantage point of 2096 looking back over the century but it was written in 1996:
"As long as their political discourse was dominated by the notion of ''rights'' -- whether ''individual'' or ''civil'' -- it was hard for Americans to think of the results of unequal distribution of wealth and income as immoral. Such rights talk, common among late-20th-century liberals, gave conservative opponents of redistributionist policies a tremendous advantage: ''the right to a job'' (or ''to a decent wage'') had none of the resonance of ''the right to sit in the front of the bus'' or ''the right to vote'' or even ''the right to equal pay for equal work.'' Rights in the liberal tradition were, after all, powers and privileges to be wrested from the state, not from the economy.
Of course socialists had, since the mid-19th century, urged that the economy and the state be merged to guarantee economic rights. But it had become clear by the middle of the 20th century that such merging was disastrous. The history of the pre-1989 ''socialist'' countries -- bloody dictatorships that paid only lip service to the fraternity for which the socialist revolutionaries had yearned -- made it plausible for conservatives to argue that extending the notion of rights to the economic order would be a step down the road to serfdom. By the end of the 20th century, even left-leaning American intellectuals agreed that ''socialism, no wave of the future, now looks (at best) like a temporary historical stage through which various nations passed before reaching the great transition to capitalist democracy.''1
The realization by those on the left that a viable economy required free markets did not stop them from insisting that capitalism would be compatible with American ideals of human brotherhood only if the state were able to redistribute wealth. Yet this view was still being criticized as ''un-American'' and ''socialist'' at the beginning of the present century, even as, under the pressures of a globalized world economy, the gap between most Americans' incomes and those of the lucky one-third at the top widened. Looking back, we think how easy it would have been for our great-grandfathers to have forestalled the social collapse that resulted from these economic pressures. They could have insisted that all classes had to confront the new global economy together. In the name of our common citizenship, they could have asked everybody, not just the bottom two-thirds, to tighten their belts and make do with less. They might have brought the country together by bringing back its old pride in fraternal ideals."
He returns to this idea later saying,
"Here, in the late 21st century, as talk of fraternity and unselfishness has replaced talk of rights, American political discourse has come to be dominated by quotations from Scripture and literature, rather than from political theorists or social scientists. Fraternity, like friendship, was not a concept that either philosophers or lawyers knew how to handle. They could formulate principles of justice, equality and liberty, and invoke these principles when weighing hard moral or legal issues. But how to formulate a ''principle of fraternity''? Fraternity is an inclination of the heart, one that produces a sense of shame at having much when others have little. It is not the sort of thing that anybody can have a theory about or that people can be argued into having."
Fraternity Reigns - NYTimes.com
Written by Richard Rorty.
You use the description of humans having rights but that rights don't coincide with economic rights, so you speak of economic freedom instead. A phrase that allows anything to happen like present inequality instead of securing humans assurance to food.
