A Stitch in Haste

More from professional crackpot Peter Singer:

Why should we assume that sellers have the right to get as much as the market will bear? Two families acquire similar looking acreages of Texas grazing lands. One is fortunate: their land has oil beneath the surface and they become fabulously wealthy. The other is unfortunate: their land has no oil, and despite working as hard as their neighbors, and applying similar intelligence, they remain poor. What gives the former "a right" to their wealth? We believe in an inherent right to property because we believe that somehow rugged individuals living in a state of nature can acquire and retain wealth. That is nonsense, of course.

So I suppose Bill Gates was "fortunate" enough to acquire a random plot of land with Windows underneath it, or Pfizer was "fortunate" enough to acquire a random plot of land with Lipitor underneath it?

The first rule of haters of capitalism is to blank out the role of the capitalist -- to deny the existence of entrepreneurship and risk taking as a factor of production and just pretend that the whole world is one giant lottery.

More:

"Would interfering with market mechanisms make people, on the whole and in the long run, better off?" That's an empirical question, and the answer will obviously depend on the precise nature of the interference, and the context in which it occurs.

And whom, I wonder, would Singer propose try to answer this (impossible to answer) "empirical question"?

I'm going to start calling it Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always -- always -- envisions himself as the central planner.