The Seizure Of Trumps Jet Essays - Libertarian Theory,

The Seizure Of Trump's Jet The Seizure of Trump's Jet The question has been presented: Would it be right for a government to impound and sell one of Donald Trump's many Learjets in order to pay for a life saving cancer treatment? A restatement of this question may be : Would it be right for the government to seize the property of any man in order to benefit the society at large? The answer to this question is not a simple one. The inquiry immediately brings to light several layered questions concerning the matter. One might look first into the natural rights of man. What rights does man have according to nature? Secondly, one must consider the rights of a man as part of a society or one who has entered into a social contract. The third aspect up for observation is the code of the particular society of which that man is a part, in this case the United States of America. Each of these views compounded might yield an accurate picture on whether or not an action of the sort, seizure of private property for the public good, would be right, m orals not taken into account. However, with morals taken into consideration, the complexity of attaining an answer may compound with every moral theory. Several people have attempted to answer the above questions among them Rousseau, the writers of French Revolutionary documents, the authors of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and Hume in the context of morality. All persons seem to agree that man is born with some semblance of natural rights though they disagree on exactly what these rights are and their relevance. They also see the need for society and social contracts, yet they argue the point on exactly what should be included in such contracts and their conditions. Hume writes as to whether such things are moral. The United States Declaration of Independence, The Social Contract and Discourse on the origin of Inequality of Rousseau, and the Rousseau influenced French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen all seem to agree that man is born with certain faculties. However, the agreement stops with that assertion. The Declaration of Independence states, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights... The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen similarly states, Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their right. The two documents assert that man is not born only as a free being, but as equal to all other men. In respect of this freedom and equality, there are rights that must naturally be given to man. Rousseau denies such claims. He agrees that man is born free, but he is not necessarily born equal to all others. Rousseau writes in the beginning o f his Discourse, I conceive of two kinds of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul(Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p37-38). The statement implies that men are in fact not created equally, so should they be allowed the same natural rights? According to Rousseauean thought, this question is almost negligent. Man in the state of nature operates on the sole purpose of trying to survive. He is unconcerned with others, not in the sense that he is cruel, but in that he has limited contact as he in not a member of a society. The concept of rights as man knows them now is not natural, but a convention of society. Rousseau's exploration of property rights further establishes such rights as products of society. Man began possessing only his labor , according to Rousseau. Through this he came to claim land as his own, It is labor alone that, in giving the cultivator a right to the product of the soil he has tilled, consequently gives him this right, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year. With this continuing possession uninterrupted, it is easily transferred