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0 pointsWalterBright1y ago0 comments

Morals and rights are different things, though they are often conflated. The Constitution, for example, enumerates a series of rights, not morals.

Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).

A morality based system could be, for example, you do not have the right to the fruits of your labor, you automatically owe those fruits to others.

I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.

> a wide inductive gap

A book could be easily written about it.

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bryanrasmussen1y ago

>Morals and rights are different things,

I guess you didn't understand the point, I did not say that rights and morals were the same things, I said that a rights society would still have the moral opinion that its rights were morally good to have, and that respecting those rights was the moral thing to do.

You can, I'm sure, recall many discussions on HN where people who come from a society with the right to free speech discussing this as a moral good and castigating other societies that are rights based, but without that particular right, as being bad for not having it.

>Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).

I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.

>I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.

there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country. It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.

WalterBrightOP1y ago

> I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.

You seldom hear it because it is not taught in schools and is rarely discussed. Leftist ideology is taught instead.

> there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country

There are differences of opinion about everything, even math, and even about the Earth being a sphere. Some of those opinions are simply wrong. I did not invent the definition of a free market, you can google it.

> It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.

Really? The poor dears cannot understand notions of rights? Research shows that kids develop a sense of "mine" long before kindergarten - nobody has to teach it to them.

My father, a college professor of business in his later years, said students would come up to him and say "I didn't think there was a case for free markets! I've never heard of one!" But they do hear a case in K-12 for collectivism.

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