I hope I am not going too far in doing this, but I believe one of Anthony's statements deserves a second look.
I'm doing this for two reasons. First, I believe that I tend to make quite a few good points at one time. While the quality of my points may be questioned, the quantity is certainly quite high, and I do not wish this point to be lost in the crowd.
Second, comedian Lewis Black has observed that there are comments so stupid that, when you encounter it...
...your brain comes to a screeching halt, and the left-hand side of the brain looks at the right-hand side of the brain and goes, "It's dark in here, and we may die."
Anthony made one of those comments.
Anthony said:
I'm a consumer and I have my rights, what I demand I will get. The supplier has his or her rights as well; to supply me with what I want at what I consider affordable.
Look: I come across quite a few stupid statements every day, but very rarely do they reach a level of stupidity so great that I go out of my way to point it out. This comment easily reached that level and surpassed it. If there were an award for most absurd thought of the year, this would be nominated and would most likely be the shoe-in to win. I know of no single word that can describe the comment, so I will use two: monumentally idiotic.
This is, of course, not necessarily an indictment of Anthony personally. I myself have said things that were, in hindsight, quite foolish. It's altogether possible that Anthony is a reasonably bright fellow who just misspoke, or that English is simply not his native tongue.
I believe the statement is so mind-numbingly moronic that an explanation of its faults is unnecessary. Still, others may disagree and call me insensitive for mud-slinging, so let's look at this statement, sentence by sentence:
I'm a consumer and I have my rights, what I demand I will get.
I have to assume that the the phrases are connected, so what Ant means is this:
1. I'm a consumer.
2. As a consumer, I have rights - i.e., "consumer rights."
3. One of these consumer rights entails that what I demand I will get.
I see nothing wrong with the first two points. It is the third point - the assertion that one has a right to get what one demands - that I find so ludicrous. It is first a silly thing to say in that there are demands that cannot possibly be met: the demands to levitate, to travel into the past, and to live forever come to mind immediately.
But, even when considering just those demands that are possible, the so-called right vanishes. Now, either rights are universal or individual. Either everyone has a certain right, or Anthony alone has that right.
I say "everyone," but I mean everyone in a certain group. Some people believe rights extend beyond all humans to include certain animals; some shrink the scope of rights to mentally competent adults. What matters in this discussion is that people other than Anthony have the same rights.
If the right to "get what one demands" extends to other people, the right altogether vanishes. Two people could demand the same house on the same land; the fact that at least one of them will do without means that the right never really existed.
As a retort, one could say that many rights vanish when the rights of others are introduced, when the "social contract" is imposed. In cases of real freedoms, I believe the rights merely shrink to allow the rights of others; one still has the right to speak freely as long as it doesn't encroach on others' rights, such as endangering them and their right to life. In the case of "getting what one demands," the right does disappear completely: a guarantee that one person gets what he wants to any degree runs the risk of trampling over another person's right to keep what he has. In any form, the "right to get what one demands" will require a willingness to take from others.
But if the right is not universal, it is then given to Anthony individually: that he alone has the right to get whatever he wants, at any expense to anyone else.
(If I may be honest and a bit presumptuous here, this seems to be the case, given how callous he appears to be when concerning the rights of others.)
Now, this isn't illogical likd the idea of such a universal right, but it is gallingly arrogant. Certainly, other people in history have acted as if asserting such a right, but they were all brats and tyrants. An honest claim to such a right is made only by selfish infants and power-hungry madmen.
The supplier has his or her rights as well; to supply me with what I want at what I consider affordable.
This sentence is actually quite sensible, if Anthony meant it to say what it said. What it actually says is that a supplier has the right to provide some good or service at price X. I agree, but I also believe he has the right to set prices W, Y, and Z - that he actually has the right to set any price he wants, in all but the most extreme cases of government-regulated monopolies of necessary goods.
I don't think Anthony means that, particularly if he faces no moral dillema stealing from those who "overprice" their goods. What he means, I suspect, is that the supplier has the right to supply the good only at price X or lower - and he has no right at all to supply the good at a higher price.
If that's the case, it's not a right: it is rather an obligation, a requirement to price what he is supplying at price X, at most. Again, that price is what Anthony the consumer considers affordable.
Again we have the problem of whether the definition is universal or personal. If "what I consider affordable" is universal, then we have to consider what everyone can afford. There are some people who own literally next to nothing, and their idea of "affordable" must surely mean "free." That means, every supplier has the obligation of giving their product away.
He may not have meant that. But even assuming that Anthony is the sole judge of what is affordable, he can price goods well below what it cost to produce those goods, and he can still reduce the price to next to nothing - particularly if his appetites far outweigh his pocketbook.
So, we are faced with two possible conclusions: either Anthony's statement is among the most egregious misstatements I have ever seen, or he literally means this:
Anthony has the sole right to have whatever he wants, and everyone else has the obligation to meet those demands at the price he sets.
In other words, the entire world economy bends absolutely to the whim of this one man. That's utterly absurd.
The reality is this:
We all have the right to request an exchange of goods, to request a trade of what we own for whatever another person owns. As a consumer, I have the right to ask for any good, but in the end I might not obtain that good at any price. As a supplier, I have the right to set any price for the goods that I own, and to decide that some goods are simply not for sale.
The reality is, of course, a bit more complicated once we introduce a government, a body designed to protect our rights, economic and otherwise: they can designate certain goods as illegal to own; they can designate that monopolies must have certain prices and that intellectual property rights may eventually expire; and they can make illegal the act of refusing a sale on the basis of prejudice. But no complication can bring us anywhere near Anthony's statement.
Again, the statement is one of the most appallingly idiotic statements I have seen. It should be rejected immediately as such.