Well this is a first. I've never found anyone who suggested that shoes, and by extension any good or service at all, could conceivably be justly declared a public good and that therefore every man, woman and child has a right to what someone else has to produce.
This is quite amazing. You should understand that this is quite completely antithetical to what America is (even now) and certainly the opposite of what America was established to be. America has always been, from the Jamestown Colony onward, about private property.
But what America is or is not isn't really the point. My argument has to do with justice; a concept America abandoned so long ago that it has forgotten what it even looks like.
It seems that you too are unfamiliar with the principles of justice. I have a very difficult time knowing just how to respond to someone who is capable of suggesting that someone else's property is theirs by right based on their need and their need alone. You go through some effort to suggest that another man's stuff is only yours by right if all other avenues aside from theft have been exhausted and the need is very great but what you need to understand is that there is no
fundamental difference between you and the common thief who cracks car windows to steal iphones or between you and the thug who steals your life for his own convenience.
All the while you, being a Catholic, are Pro-Life, yes? And likely you're apposed to the death penalty for what you believe are similar reasons. The reason being that you hold life, human life, to be sacred. You believe that it is wrong, categorically, to take a human life for any reason.
If you're thinking that I've changed the subject, its because you don't understand what justice is and that private property rights are the foundation of any right to life and therefore to any right at all. In fact, the right to own and to dispose of the property that you have earned is the right to life because in order to have earned it you'll have to lived your life. That is you'll have had to apply your time and your effort, which is what life is, in order to have produced it. Thus to steal a man's property is to rob him of the portion of his life that he expended to earn that property. Ayn Rand put it this way...
The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.
Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values. - Ayn Rand
And...
"Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”
The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be “practical” if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal." - Ayn Rand
Resting in Him,
Clete
