> Without government intervention, slavery emerges
A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
Free labor caused the collapse of the USSR. Free labor destroyed Nazi Europe.
> we don't culturally consider healthcare a "right"
Sure we do. >50% of health care in the US is provided by the government, and the rest is heavily controlled by the government. Emergency rooms are required to treat people who cannot pay for free.
The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Let's try something that is free market - the software business. Software in the US is completely unregulated. What's the result? Incredible progress, world leadership, and plenty of very high quality FREE software.
It's amazing, unpredicted, and unbelievable. But it's true.
> how were slaves a major part of Nazi war effort or economy?
The Nazis employed slave labor on a massive scale. Their slaves were Jewish prisoners, political prisoners, and POWs.
The US free labor produced plenty of war material for two major wars, and enough left over to supply Britain and the Soviet Union. US troops were well fed, with plenty of gas, bullets, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, medical supplies, trucks, everything, and also managed to ship it all to the war zones.
The Nazis and the Japanese never had a chance once the US got going. They had critical shortages of everything.
For example, what did the Nazis do when the battleship Bismarck was sunk? Game over for the Kriegsmarine except for the U-boots. What did the US do when the Japanese wrecked the US aircraft carriers? Built lots more! What did the Japanese do when their carriers were sunk? Game over for naval aviation.
Also, the Wehrmacht in WW2 was still very much a horse driven army. The German propaganda newsreels, shown endlessly in WW2 documentaries, avoided showing the horses and loved showing the mechanized troops. I don't think the US used any horses at all.
Free labor also sunk the Confederacy. The Confederacy was never able to properly supply their troops with guns, cannons, powder, food, uniforms, or even shoes. They were largely barefoot.
> The US free labor produced plenty of war material for two major wars, and enough left over to supply Britain and the Soviet Union. US troops were well fed, with plenty of gas, bullets, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, medical supplies, trucks, everything, and also managed to ship it all to the war zones.
A more realistic explanation of course is that the Allied powers had around 3x the population of the Axis, and that America's production infrastructure was never negatively impacted, while German and Japanese infrastructure was routinely bombed.
The UK, for example, despite not using slave labor, wouldn't have been able to win the war without US assistance, and you failed to mention the USSR at all, which beat Germany just as much as the US did, but doesn't fit the market based and slave labor free image you're trying to project.
The better explanation is that when you are already losing a war you need to eek out more production from what you have, and you're willing to sacrifice long-term things for it. Slave labor, in the short term is more efficient for some things, especially when you need the people who would normally be working in the free market to be elsewhere manning the guns. Employing slave labor didn't cause the nazis to lose WWII, at best it was coincidental, and at worst it was a response to the fact that they were already losing.
The German and Japanese homelands were not bombed until they were already losing the war.
The Nazi prosperity before WW2 was fairly limited, as the Nazis couldn't resist endless meddling with it. The suppression of the Jews surely must have had bad consequences for the economy, though I know of nobody who has attempted an accounting of it. The living standard did not approach that of the US.
> manning the guns
Don't forget that the US pressed into military service all the fit men 18-36. Didn't resort to slave labor.
(Footnote: FDR proposed forced labor in his 1945 State of the Union Address. Don't believe me? Look it up! Fortunately, that went nowhere.)
>Don't forget that the US pressed into military service all the fit men 18-36. Didn't resort to slave labor.
The irony here being, of course, that while the US courts ultimately disagreed, forcing people to join the military is arguably itself a form of slave labor. It is certainly a form of involuntary servitude.
> The German and Japanese homelands were not bombed until they were already losing the war.
The Allies had begun bombing Berlin before the US entered the war. So if your contention here was that the Nazis were losing from day one, sure. Otherwise you're not correct.
> The Nazi prosperity before WW2 was fairly limited
The German prosperity before the Nazis took power was fairly limited. That was in fact one of the primary reasons the Nazis took power in the first place.
> forcing people to join the military is arguably itself a form of slave labor
Indeed it is. But the soldiers were taken out of production in the economy, which is the point I was responding to.
> The Allies had begun bombing Berlin before the US entered the war.
Yes, the British bombed Berlin early in the war as a propaganda stunt. The US Doolittle raid on Japan was also for propaganda. They were ineffectual from a military perspective. It doesn't alter my point at all.
> The German prosperity before the Nazis took power was fairly limited. That was in fact one of the primary reasons the Nazis took power in the first place.
We both know that. The Nazis were in power from 1933-1939. There wasn't much prosperity.
> Indeed it is. But the soldiers were taken out of production in the economy, which is the point I was responding to.
Right, but the allies had more people, so there's nothing relevant about slave labor. Like I said: slave labor is a tool of last resort, when the market fails. The US had to use that tool to get enough labor in the fighting force, but still had enough humans that market systems (and propaganda) worked in the economy.
> We both know that. The Nazis were in power from 1933-1939. There wasn't much prosperity.
Then I have no clue what your point is. My point was, and continues to be, that Nazi use of slave labor was a consequence of the already relatively weaker economy. You seem to be arguing that slave labor caused the weak economy. My point is that it started weaker and remained weaker, and to try and keep up, they had to force more people to do things.
Help me understand your train of thought, so if there Nazis had 'free labor' they would never have shortages of oil and natural rubber? Would it just magically appear? And without the shortages they would have won the war, right?
That must be the point you are making, because if they would have lost anyway then your argument makes no sense?
And what about USSR, their 'free but not free' labor caused them to win and loose simultaneously?
If the Nazis had free labor, they would have done better, but they still would have lost because the US was bigger.
The USSR likely would not have prevailed against the Nazis if the US didn't supply them. Or at least it would have been far more difficult for them.
Synthetic rubber - "Production of synthetic rubber in the United States expanded greatly during World War II since the Axis powers controlled nearly all the world's limited supplies of natural rubber by mid-1942"
Synthetic fuel - "During World War II (1939-1945), Germany used synthetic-oil manufacturing (German: Kohleverflüssigung) to produce substitute (Ersatz) oil products by using the Bergius process (from coal), the Fischer–Tropsch process (water gas), and other methods (Zeitz used the TTH and MTH processes)."
You are picking examples that fit your idea of what natural rights should be, and are ignoring the countless counter examples. If a free society is fundamentally better, why is China so successful? Countless empires have been built on 5e backs of slaves, conquered people, and oppression. Yes, most eventually collapsed, but so have all democracies except the ones that are currently around… and there is no reason to believe the ones around are the “end state” of the evolution and not just a snapshot of civilizations that will eventually collapse like all those that came before. Democracies have fallen, to be replaced by dictatorships… dictatorships still exist, and many are successful members of the international community… Saudi Arabia is a strong ally of the US, and doesn’t seem close to collapse.
I wasn't making any claim about the lives of people in Saudi Arabia... my only claim is that it is an absolute monarchy, it is still around and not close to collapse, and is an ally of the US. All of those things are objectively true. It isn't only democratic countries that have survived.
Banks, the healthcare industry, the aviation industry and NASA would like a word with you, as well as US import and export control regulators.
Not all software in the US is the vomiting of code cowboys into NPM and Github, by a long shot.
>Incredible progress, world leadership, and plenty of very high quality FREE software.
Sorry, what potentially world-crippling bug are we on this week, I've lost count. Or was it a million dollar company that got hacked and exposed PII because their database layer was written by an intern using open source code written by a high-schooler who thinks writing SQL statements with printf is elegant?
No... the unregulated wild west of software is turning out to be a nightmare. The regulated part, at least, holds bad actors accountable and doesn't depend on "all eyes making bugs shallow" and just hope quality emerges from the aether.
If I sell medical software, yes, it would have to pass the FDA. Same for software going into aviation systems (the FAA). Same for NASA.
> Not all
Not a single byte of software on any of my computers now or since the 1970s have been regulated at all.
> the unregulated wild west of software is turning out to be a nightmare
How much have you paid for the software you're using right now? How much have you paid to use HackerNews? You're free to go use software written in the 80s, 90s, 00s, etc., if you like. I bet you aren't.
Software these days is far less buggy than it used to be. It may appear more buggy to you, but that is the result of a large increase in the number and efforts of sophisticated (and well-funded) engineers attempting to subvert it.
You didn't use strong encryption that was not allowed to be shared outside the US? I remember early versions of software (PGP, I think?) in the 90s had some warnings to this effect.
> A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
I don't mean as an economic system. Chattel slavery is one particular example of macro-scale slavery, but macro-scale slavery isn't what I was referring to.
Put another way, our markets are not perfectly efficient, and there exists enough slack to allow niches where inefficient cruelty can exist. Even though slavery was inefficient and had died out in the north, the South did all it could to keep it around. It still took a laws and war to get rid of it. If the government stopped enforcing all laws today, how long would it take for some people to be kidnapped and enslaved? A week?
> The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Something being not a free market doesn't make it a right, nor does the government providing it as a service to some people. You might be able to get away with the argument that emergency medical care is considered a right in the US, but emergency medical care is only a small part of healthcare.
Take a look at what goes on in the healthcare system. It's all the result of unintended side effects of well-intentioned regulation.
For another example, the AMA deliberately restricts the number of seats in medical universities. They are empowered to by law. This keeps the number of doctors down, and increases their pay.
This has nothing to do with whether or not something is a "right".
I'll remind you, the initial statement you made was "Rights are a fundamental consequence of human nature.", but you're now saying somewhat ahistorical things about slave labor and market economies. Even if what you were saying was accurate, is has nothing to do with how we define rights.
You can (and people do) invent and define rights all the time. People have also tried to legislate that pi=3. Almost daily, legislatures try to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand.
That doesn't make them rights, and it never works.
What makes something a right, then? You keep talking around it, and saying things which you believe are rights, but have never said explicitly what makes your set of rights somehow objectively rights where others aren't.
Yes, I and others have asked you to list out what the natural rights are, and you've waxed about free markets. I have no idea what you're trying to say, since you seem to be contradicting yourself. Hence my request for clarification. You're doing such a bad job of communicating here that the only reason I don't think I'm being trolled is that I know you wouldn't do that.
My best guess is that you're trying to make the point that market economies are natural and that the rights we have under them are therefore natural, but this is basically an argument from status quo and it goes directly against what you said elsewhere about healthcare being a right due to government regulations.
And from that you seem to be saying that healthcare is a right due to government regulation, but here you're saying that government decree doesn't make something a right. So like I said, I'm lost.
A closer examination of history shows that slavery tends to fail when in competition with free labor. The emergence of free labor destroyed slavery the world over. The Civil War was the last gasp of slavery in the US attempting to protect itself from free labor. Slavery had already died out in the northern colonies due to it being uneconomic.
Free labor caused the collapse of the USSR. Free labor destroyed Nazi Europe.
> we don't culturally consider healthcare a "right"
Sure we do. >50% of health care in the US is provided by the government, and the rest is heavily controlled by the government. Emergency rooms are required to treat people who cannot pay for free.
The government has so thoroughly regulated, overseen, subsidized, distorted, etc., every aspect of health care, that in no way can it be described as free market.
Let's try something that is free market - the software business. Software in the US is completely unregulated. What's the result? Incredible progress, world leadership, and plenty of very high quality FREE software.
It's amazing, unpredicted, and unbelievable. But it's true.