Discourse: Deserving to Breathe 

So, people talk about earning food, or water, or shelter. They perform labor, they spend money. And it does make some sense, these are limited resources. But that whole idea has some limitations. For comparison, oxygen is far more important - you can survive for years without shelter under the right circumstances, you can go for weeks without food, and days without water - but how long can you go without oxygen?

Discourse: Deserving to Breathe 

Not long at all, of course. Oxygen is by far the most important of the resources I've listed here. Now, how much money did you pay for the privilege of breathing? How much labor did you perform? What services did you provide?

For most people, the answer to all these questions is 'none'. Oxygen was freely provided, right up to their very lips, through no effort of their own at all.

Discourse: Deserving to Breathe 

Now that's not to say you don't deserve it - the entire thing with oxygen is that it's a waste product for a large class of living things, something they're happy to get rid of. Compare that with food, water, and shelter, which are valuable enough resources, and much harder to move.

No, the point I'm making here is that 'deserving to live' is a bit of an artificial construct, based on the circumstances we find ourselves in - and we can change those circumstances.

Discourse: Deserving to Breathe 

Making food and water as freely abundant as oxygen would be a real challenge, certainly - but we could make them far more abundant than they are. More so, things like jobs, education, healthcare, these could all be made far more freely abundant if we wanted them to be. They don't have to be locked behind systems of extraction and exploitation. :/

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@Angle The problem is, it takes labor to make those things. You're overlooking that part of it.

Are you willing to work for free to provide value to someone else? Well maybe you are, but a whole lot of people aren't so interested in being compelled to give up their labor like that.

So long as you overlook the worker in your equation you're not going to be proposing something realistic.

Or, I'd say, moral.

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