[One of] The Inherent Contradiction(s) of the Left

Welcome back to a fresh start! My apologies for not keeping this blog up to date - there will be changes to this.

Today I'd like to show you a very interesting feature of the lefties' reasoning.

Let's start off with the all-too-familiar political discussion about rape and/or abortion.

Leftists, rightly in my opinion, say that the woman's right to her body is inalienable. If she doesn't want Person A to do Action X to her body, she is in her right to decline Person A from performing such an action. Should Person A however proceed against her will, he is considered to aggress against her, violating her right to her body, thus can be sentenced to whatever punishment is appropriate for Person A's crime. So far so good.

I did some tiny amounts of research among friends, facebook and the Swedish Socialist party to see what they'd say. I asked where this right comes from, what's the rationale behind it? Surprisingly, most answers were along libertarian lines: She owns her body, she decides what to do with it (and some allusions to the UN, saying the same thing). Also, some allusions to freedom (="if she didn't, there'd be no freedom").

But to be precise, it is not simply a right to someone's body, it also entails what happens in that body and what the body is doing, as my friends rightly pointed out. This is illustrated by the abortion example, where Leftists also are generally quite good. If a fetus growths within a woman, she has the rightful decision about what to do with such a fetus - abort pregnancy if she chooses, continue if she'd prefer to - and nobody else can rightfully decide for her, against her will.
Point: The inalienable right to your body also extends to decisions about what's going on with that body and what that body does.

Similarly, Person A in our example above, with an equally inalienable right to his body, is responsible for the actions this body might engage in. In this case, aggressing against our woman, for which he must bear the punishment.
Point: Person A, in control of his body, made a decision to violate someone else's inalienable right and has to bear the consequences.

This is all non-controversial stuff, even for Leftists.

It gets interesting when you continue this rationale. If you are responsible for the consequences of your action, if you are in control of your body and if your right to that body (and the actions coming from it) are inalienable, what happens when the action involves agreement with another person? Person A now exchanges his labour for payment by Person B, in accordance with their mutual agreement. The rationale still applies; Person A is responsible for the consequences of his actions (loss of leisure, monetary gain), and Person B is equally responsible for the consequences of his actions (monetary loss, gained access to extra labour).

This is where Leftists lose it. All of a sudden, such relationships are to be regulated by Unions, protected by State institutions and overseen by third parties, the Lefties say. Not to mention that it is generally looked upon as exploitation, in accordance with Marx's incorrect value theory of labour. This, however, was not present in our first example where the woman's right to her body was inalienable - not subject to regulation, oversight or state intervention. When that very same woman decides to engage her body in a different activity - trade, offering her labour services in exchange for monetary gains - this inalienable right the Leftists spoke of is nowhere to be seen. Despite the fact that the essense of the transactions, the features of the participants have not changed a bit: she is still in control, her body is still inalienable and she can still rightfully make whatever decision she wants to.

The Point of an inalienable right is that it is inalienable. That means it cannot be violated. It is incoherent to arbitrarily apply such an inalienable right only sometimes (=whenever it serves your own purposes), but not at other times (=when you'd rather that other values took precedence).

Furthermore, if the rationale behind pro-choice and illegalized rape is that the woman has inalienable rights to her body, it follows that compulsory union actions, state institutions, state intervention in trade or employment etc, neither can be in a position to violate those rights.

Essentially, the Lefties' position is incoherent when it argues for state intervention in trade or voluntary employment AND simultaneously to protect women's inalienable rights over their bodies. One has to go.

Solution: either Leftists stop calling for state intervention (at which point they probably cease to be Leftists), or they refrain from protecting women's inalienable rights to their bodies.