The Right to Eat as Important as the Right to Vote

A rights-based society like the US has stopped short of endorsing the most fundamental human rights of health and livelihood, telescoping them under the generic "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Political rights are spelled out in detail point by point, but no clause in the Bill of Rights spells out such physical rights. Instead they are scornfully dismissed as mere "welfare." One suspects that meeting them would trample on the one economic right that seems paramount: property.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/07/in-an-age-of-austerity/

 

you mean the right to food, produced with someone ELSE'S labor and property, just because you're alive? Nobody owes you JACK, dude! perish in and of your own void. nobody is stopping your ingesting of food, chewing,, swallowing, etc. you have no claim whatsoever on other people's property, which is what food IS, until you pay them for it. you dont work for free, why should they, hmm?

 

The right to food purchased with one's own labor, which is assuredly as much property as real estate or money.

If one has a right to life, then one has an equal right to the sustenance of life. Denial of that logic is the same as endorsing killing "useless eaters," the rationale of certain European mass murderers of the 20th century.

 

you have the right to EARN food (or money to buy that food, but no right to be fed, just because you're alive. That's statist, and I'll fight it to the death.

 

Why we WASTE enough edible food from bruised produce to perfectly good food just passed its suggest expiration date (I exclude some things like dairy, eggs and meat in that) to FEED every African in nutritional need a decent diet and we can divert this bounty to feed fellow citizens who are hungry?

 

You don't quite mean that people have a right to life or a right to eat, but that others have an obligation to keep you alive and feed you. If they decide they don't want to give you free stuff anymore, you'll have thugs with guns ram down their door, take all their property and cage them like an animal.

Not sure I quite agree with those rights.

 

Apologies for not remembering the name of the original author but i remember reading something in the lines "how much you own defines how free you are".

Well you like plutocracy , right ?

 

So no sickness benefit then? Let the sick starve to death?

 

If we're going to say that people starving is okay, I don't really care to hear any arguments from a morality standpoint from anyone who says that people starving is okay. Period. You give up that privilege when you think for even one second that people dying from hunger in your own country is fine.

 

So, that means you have the right to a job then, right? One that pays enough to buy your food (and presumably, the other things you need to live)?

 

Its also economic inefficiency. Maintaining the physical efficiency of the workforce is a crucial part of maintaining the production possibility frontier.

 

I do believe stealing food can be morally permissible if there is no other option to survive. Welfare is just an institutionalised form of this.

 

Capitalism is reliant on maintaining a reserve army of unemployed, ensuring a discipline device on the workforce. Welfare is therefore an integral part of capitalism