Norwegian

Well, it isn`t the state that make people work for 70 hours a week for a lousy wage and horrible working conditions to make ends meet. People are dependent on other people whichever way you put ut. There is a great difference between being dependent on the state, and being dependent on other people. That state MUST give help if the recipient satisfies certain criteria. Because of that, people on welfare may still critize that state. Heck, people on welfare is one of the most vocal groups in critizing the holy cows of the left here i Norway, like immigration and state sponsorered art. The difference is that a private person or employer can revoke the bond whenever the wish. A privat employer can in a free market fire someone because of their opinions or choose not to hire someone because the way they look or talk. That state hovewer, may not choose to deny welfare based on such criteria. With welfare, you have an unconditional right to live. With the marked, you have a right to live as long as other people think that you satisfy their needs.

Actually, the people on "Permament welfare", like those on disabillity, are in many ways less responsive to external pressure than any other group in society, simply because the state does not have the possibility to revoke that support. For dependence to be used as a tool of oppression, the state has to able to revoke the support it gives to the dependent on will, something the state in most welfare states are not able to do.

Actually, I find your arguments in this paragraph to be rather dishonest.

That dependes on your options. If you are not attractive on the labour market, your options are severly limited! And you MUST take a felgercarbty job to survive. In a moderne society, you HAVE to work to get money. If you don`t work or go on welfare, you starve.

Again, you argue as if people were independent of each other, something they are not. You only get a job if OTHER PEOPLE agrees to hire you. You can only create a successfull business if other people decide to buy your services. The fact that people are so dependent on each other in a modern society, means that you can get power over other people without useing any form of coercion whatsoever. Simply because you control what other people need to fulfill their goals, in this instance jobs. Actually, I think that a market in itself bars people taking control of their own life, because in every trade in the market, there is two parties, and as long as both parties are not coerced into agreeing on the trade, none of the parts are in complete control of the situation. As your possibilites in a society with a division of labour are governed by the trades you do with other people, you cannot possible be in control of your own destiny in a society with a division of labour, because you are dependant on the decisions on other people on every turn.

Also, capitalism actually implies the use of coercion to force people to work for other people. People are dependent on resources from the enviroment to live like food, water, timber for housing and so on. When you have property rights, people own what other people need to survive. If you own a field, you deny other people the right to farm that land by use of force. Which means that in a society with property rights of any kind over land and resources, you MUST work for others or sell products to others to get all that you need.

No, that is not free will. That is your decision not being governed be the decisions of other people, which you actually have not persuaded me is the case in a purely capitalist society.

Free will is that your decisions is determined by something else than cause and effect relationships or random quantum physical phenomena. That there exist some kind of consiousness that both can enforce it`s will to determine what decisions you shall take, and at the same time is not governed by outside forces.

I actually prefer the physical definition of free will: "Free will implies that a certain mix of particles reacts differently in the context of the human brain, than that same composition of particles would function elsewhere in nature", or something like that.

The only way that human beings can be really free, is in a primitive anarchistisc society with no property rights and no division of labour

Well, Hitler actually killed or exiled all the socialists in the party. Many decent people like Ernst Røhm and the Strasser brothers fell victim to that purge. What really is interesting is that the nazis got nearly all their votes form the right. The working classes continued to vote for the communists and the SPD, while the liberals and conservatives all but dissapeared. After the final free elections, the liberals got only a couple of representatives in the reichstag, and the conservatives were wiped out, having lost almost every voter to the nazis. Also, the conservative nationalist party, the party of the german bourgoise, was the party that acutally got Hitler enough votes to get into power. The nazis were also pro family and very anti "affirmative action", good conservative values. Unlike the socialdemocratic countries, economic differences actually increased in Germany during Hitlers reign, while the western countries including the US became more egalitarian.

Privat charities aren`t anything but a cruel joke. Charities hasn`t got anything near the capacity to handle the poverty problems in a modern country. And all it does is to give the needy a bowl of soup and a bed to sleep in in the same room as hundread other homeless people. Private charity does not increase the wages of the lowly skilled, something that state welfare programs do.

Yes, computers are still very primitive, but it`s quite possible that they may be so advanced in the future, that the can do everything that a human being can. The point was that choices does not require free will, something that computers, though they still are simple, actually can do. And human choices are also limited. We can`t chose to fly to the stars or dig our way to China with our bare hans.

Well, that is also a choice in a way. The brain still has to process the "request" and decide not to decide anything.

No, it does not imply free will, because the option can be known, even if it isn`t present. We can chose the option to fly to Mars, but the thought of flying to Mars is know to us. And as I stated earlier, new ideas are often new sensory data and old ideas arranged in a new manner.

I made a distinction on that in my previous thread. Something you can blame the individual for, but other things you can`t blame the individual for, even if it has free will. You can`t blame someone because others choose not to hire them, even if they have done what they can to make themselves attractive. You can`t blame anyone for not having the IQ to handle complex math or get a masters degree in some other subject.