HRF Week One: Getting Soaked
Stealing with legal permission is still theft and violates the Principle of Human Respect. Taking another person’s property without permission decreases their happiness, always.
In the effort to make the world a better place, human ingenuity is always at work. Ideas, however, are easy, common, and still subject to natural constraints. We would, for example, reduce the wear on roads if we experienced lesser gravity. The goal of less road maintenance and easier travel is admirable, but a law dictating gravity to be 10% less is worth less than the paper it is written on.
Ignoring natural principles creates friction. The work of improving the human experience is greater than it would be if acting in concert with what is, whether we can fully define those parameters or not (we can’t.)
Passing a law to reduce gravity is as effective as passing a law that taking without consent is not theft. It creates friction with reality as humans subject to the law attempt to comply with the impossible.
I am being paid $2,500 to write six op-eds about the Principle of Human Respect. In reality, around $750 of that money (30%) will be taken from me.
I never consented to that taking; my family never consented to decrease their quality of life. There is no just power to act where there is no consent, yet here we are.
It is a question of tradeoffs. My goal with $2,500 is to improve the use of water at my home to ensure it is properly conserved and utilized. Water should get multiple lives before being returned to the earth, and I am 30% less able to do so by an act of theft.
The damage is easily definable in my household, but there are also unquantifiable negative downstream effects on those whom I’d like to pay for their goods and services.
Worse, my labor is instead co-opted to perpetrate unconscionable acts.
There is no circumstance where I would support the killing of 387,000 civilians instead of peaceably growing food and ensuring my wife and children have better access to, use of, and ability to conserve clean water.
$750 is a fraction of the $1.5 Trillion ($1,520,000,000,000) spent by the improperly named Department of Defense (DoD) in 2023 alone. That money would otherwise be spent on local businesses, improvements to my home, and contributing to a better quality of life for my family.
The tradeoff is not in my favor, to an extreme degree.
$750 is just the tip of my financial iceberg, but even a penny used to harm innocent people is too much. That the acts are done via agency delegation is not enough to balance the scales. Despite removing my consent (more on that next week) I am still forced to foot the bill or face violence.
A stance against violence and theft is not an extreme view. It is the baseline of peaceful interaction among free persons. It is consistent with the human experience in which we have diverse definitions of happiness, joy, satisfaction, prosperity, justice, and harmony, among others. Words aren’t enough to explain what it is to be human.
The Principle of Human Respect works in concert with reality, instead of causing friction and wasting time on unattainable ends. That’s a point in favor of integrating it into each of our worldviews, and a reason to use it as a tool in evaluating whether a law or policy is proper.
Good ideas hold up to scrutiny and don’t require force to achieve.
