Comments on: Will/Should Decatur Ban or Tax Plastic Bags?

By: Tight5

Tight5 — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:39:18 +0000

If a ban on plastic is in the cards I’d rather see, and pay for, a mandate for degradable bags vs. a tax on plastic bags. I’d prefer my money to go a business that employs people to produce the bags rather than the government.

By: Skeptic

Skeptic — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:53:39 +0000

Nellie, “Rights” (contrasted by “Priviledges”) are not a “shades of grey” type of discusion. There is not a “that far” to go. Either they are individual, inalienable, and granted by our existence or they are not. Perhaps your (sometimes) political sophistry has turned on you.

By: LordHelpUs

LordHelpUs — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:38:13 +0000

Rights, as I speak of them, are inherent or unalienable. How there could be a right to life if there was no life? So life, being life, has the inherent right to be life. There would be no rights if there was no individual to be aware of them.

Likewise, gov’t would not be if not for the people and any authority it has comes from the people. Truly, the only authority it has it to protect the inherent rights of the people.

I agree, no one has the “right” t to anything they want. If I want your car, for example, I don’t have the right to take it. We — society — make laws against me stealing you car because we are protecting your (and our) inherent right to your property.

I have no right to take actions which violate your rights. If I attempt to do so and am imprisoned as a result by society, society hasn’t taken my inherent right to freedom. I forfeited my inherent right to freedom.

If one truly understands inherent rights, he or she will do what they ought to do not necessarily what they want to do.

What you refer to as rights, I would call privileges. Privileges, unlike inherent rights, are granted or transferred.

Sure, I have an inherent right to the access of plastic bags. If we need better methods of disposing of them — we should create those methods. However, poor disposal methods do not supercede the right to the access and use of them by imposing a ban or tax.

BTW, your unlimited supply statement could be a totally different discussion which I would enjoy sharing with you sometime.

By: nelliebelle1197

nelliebelle1197 — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:13:06 +0000

I don’t want to go that far; I am not sure where the break is. That’s why I am putting this out there as strongly as I – this conversation keeps cropping up and I guess we can argue in circles for days about whose “rights” matter, how we get them and what they mean. Is there any really answer?

By: DEM

DEM — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:05:52 +0000

No, it doesn’t make it true. It just means that some very influential folks who founded this country obviously had a very different view of where certain basic rights come from than you have expressed here. One can disagree, of course, but what I understand you to be saying — that even very basic freedoms do not exist unless and until blessed by a policitcal majority or owrse, yet, are granted by a dictator — is strikingly authoritarian view. By your logic, North Koreans have no inherent right to eat if the “Supreme Leader” decress they should starve.