Monday, April 18, 2011

What Do We Mean By Economic Rights?

How should we consider the ethics of economics? Ask an economic
"conservative" what they mean by "economic rights" and ask an
economic "liberal" the same question (at least in the American
context), and you'll get an affirmative answer from both. Yet
both will mean deeply different things in their seemingly identical answers.
To the "conservative", "economic rights" means individual liberty
in our individual interactions with other individual actors.
To the "liberal" this same term means something quite different.
To the modern liberal, to speak of economic rights is to speak of a baseline of equality that presupposes commonalities that sees social systems as being as much involved as individual actors.

Since I speak as both a conservative and liberal in different respects, in so much as I'm deeply conservative in my anthropology (seeing us a deeply fallen species), but also deeply liberal in so far as I see us as deeply bound together as one species recognizing that we are united, tied together, ultimately envisaged as all human, ultimately equal.

In light of this disparate reality, let's explore how we can move forward. We can differ in all of this without becoming disparaging?

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