Friday 21 December 2012

Without pr there can be no property rights

Without the state there can be no property rights so (unless we do not need property rights) the state is good whether or not people consent to it. (By definition people do not consent to the property claims of other people... otherwise such claims would be redundant. Property is antagonistic.) The state is justified not because of the consent of the people but because of utilitarian (pragmatic) arguments in defence of property rights. Since the state is (a pragmatic) good then it is inconsistent for it not to be elected proportionally. Proportional elections still provide property rights so there is no reason for the state to deny full choice to the people. There is no reason for the state to deny full democracy to the people. The alternative to pr is to have a two-party fptp system whereby property rights will be determined by not the people but instead the least bad of the two available parties. In a sense we can think of property rights determined by a proportionally elected government as being in some sense objective. We can get no closer to objective property rights than with proportional representation. Property comes from the state but first past the post fails to justify property claims made by the state since it is not fully democratic. Only proportional representation enables the state to make valid (and even objective) claims to property.

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