Citations & References:"The statement 'The Moon is made of green cheese' is referring to a fanciful belief that the Moon is composed of cheese,' Laluna set up a talk, when previously she utterred Basmalah and Salam. "Vera Nazarian put this way, 'A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing.'But, there was never an actual historical popular belief that the Moon is made of green cheese. In its original formulation as a proverb and metaphor for credulity with roots in fable, this refers to the perception of a simpleton who sees a reflection of the Moon in water and mistakes it for a round cheese wheel. The phrase 'green cheese' in the common version of this proverb [sometimes 'cream cheese' is used], may refer to a young, unripe cheese or to cheese with a greenish tint.John Maynard Keynes, wrote in 'The General Theory,''Unemployment develops, that is to say, because people want the moon;—men cannot be employed when the object of desire (i.e. money) is something which cannot be produced and the demand for which cannot be readily choked off. There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control.It is interesting to notice that, the characteristic which has been traditionally supposed to render gold, especially suitable for use as the standard,of value, namely, its inelasticity of supply, turns out to be precisely the,characteristic which is at the bottom of the trouble.'It is almost universally believed that Keynes wrote his magnum opus, The General Theory, to save capitalism from the socialist, communist, and fascist forces that were rising up during the Great Depression era. Keynes argued that governments should solve problems in the short run rather than wait for market forces to fix things over the long run, because, as he wrote in 'A Tract on Monetary Reform','... But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.'The theories of Keynes, known as Keynesian economics, center around the idea that governments should play an active role in their countries' economies, instead of just letting the free market reign. Keynes’s fundamental insight was that we do not know–cannot calculate – what the future will bring. In such a world, money offers psychological security against uncertainty. When savers become pessimistic about future prospects they can decide to hoard their savings rather than invest them in businesses. Thus there is no guarantee that all income earned will be spent. This amounts to saying that there is no natural tendency for all available resources to be employed."The moon was silent for a moment, then said, "I'm not going to take you to the green-cheese realm or to the Keynesian world, but I'm going to take you to observe a man, a new father-to-be who was expecting his first child, a man who was just starting his business, and also, a post graduate student. One night, my light was on him, he was listening to a lecture from one of his lecturers, in a long distance lecture. The lecturer said, ''Where there is a right, there is a remedy' is a classical legal maxim. Individuals enjoy rights, in a legal as opposed to a moral sense, only if the wrongs they suffer are fairly and predictably redressed by their government. This simple point goes a long way toward disclosing the inadequacy of the negative rights/positive rights distinction. What it shows is that all legally enforced rights are necessarily positive rights.Rights are costly because remedies are costly. Enforcement is expensive, especially uniform and fair enforcement; and legal rights are hollow to the extent that they remain unenforced.Formulated differently, almost every right implies a correlative duty, and duties are taken seriously only when dereliction is punished by the public power drawing on the public purse. There are no legally enforceable rights in the absence of legally enforceable duties, which is why law can be permissive only by being simultaneously obligatory. That is to say, personal liberty cannot be secured merely by limiting government interference with freedom of action and association. No right is simply a right to be left alone by public officials. All rights are claims to an affirmative governmental response. All rights, descriptively speaking, amount to entitlements defined and safeguarded by law. A cease-and-desist order handed down by a judge whose injunctions are regularly obeyed is a good example of government “intrusion” for the sake of individual liberty. But government is involved at an even more fundamental level when legislatures and courts define the rights that such judges protect. Every thou-shalt-not, to whomever it is addressed, implies both an affirmative grant of right by the state and a legitimate request for assistance addressed to an agent of the state.If rights were merely immunities from public interference, the highest virtue of government (so far as the exercise of rights was concerned) would be paralysis or disability. But a disabled state cannot protect personal liberties, even those that seem wholly “negative,” such as the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards. A state that cannot arrange prompt visits to jails and prisons by taxpayer-salaried doctors, prepared to submit credible evidence at trial, cannot effectively protect the incarcerated against tortures and beatings. All rights are costly because all rights presuppose taxpayer funding of effective supervisory machinery for monitoring and enforcement.Like law in general, rights are institutional inventions by which liberal societies attempt to create and maintain the preconditions for individual self-development and to solve common problems, including settling conflicts and facilitating intelligently coordinated responses to shared challenges, disasters, and crises. As a means of collective self-organization and a precondition for personal self-development, rights are naturally costly to enforce and protect. As government-provided services aimed at enhancing individual and collective welfare, all legal rights, including constitutional ones, presuppose political decisions (which could have been different) about how to channel scarce resources most effectively given the shifting problems and opportunities at hand.All of our legal rights—in constitutional law as well as private law—originally arose as practical responses to concrete problems. This is one reason why they vary over time and across jurisdictions. As instruments forged to serve evolving human interests and moral views, they are repeatedly recast, or respecified, by new legislation and adjudication. Rights also mutate because obstacles to human welfare—the problems that rights are designed to mitigate or overcome—change, along with technology, the economy, demography, occupational roles, styles of life, and many other factors.The cost of rights raises not only questions of democratic accountability and transparency in the process of allocating resources; it also brings us unexpectedly into the heart of moral theory, to problems of distributional equity and distributive justice. To describe rights as public investments is to encourage rights theorists to pay attention to the question of whether rights enforcement is not merely valuable and prudent, but also fairly allocated. The question here is whether, as currently designed and implemented, disbursements for the protection of rights benefit society as a whole, or at least most of its members, or only those groups with special political influence. Do our national priorities, in the area of rights enforcement, merely reflect the influence of powerful groups, or do they promote the general welfare? To study costs is not to shortchange politics and morality, but rather to compel consideration of such questions. The subject is so important precisely because it draws attention to the relation between rights on the one hand and democracy, equality, and distributive justice on the other.Public deliberation should therefore be focused on the following issues. (1) How much do we want to spend on each right? (2) What is the optimal package of rights, given that the resources that go to protect one right will no longer be available to protect another right? (3) What are the best formats for delivering maximum rights protection at the lowest cost? (4) Do rights, as currently defined and enforced, redistribute wealth in a publicly justifiable way? These questions have important empirical dimensions, and it is important to bring them to the fore. But their resolution depends on judgments of value as well. The empirical dimensions should be identified as such; the judgments of value should be made openly and be subjected to criticism, review, and public debate. I will end today's lecture by concluding with a short sentence, 'RIGHTS ARE COSTLY'.'The next few nights, after going through Lamaze—method of childbirth focuses on labor and delivery as a natural event, Leboyer—a method of childbirth designed to reduce trauma for the newborn especially by avoiding the use of forceps and bright lights in the delivery room and by giving the newborn a warm bath—and La Leche—a voluntary organization formed in 1957 that encourages breastfeeding and offers support and guidance to nursing mothers—classes with his expectant wife, the proud new father remained by his wife's bedside throughout labor and delivery. His wife's struggle was not in vain, she gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Wanting to be as sympathetic as possible, he took his wife's hand afterward and said emotionally, 'Tell me how it was, darling, how it actually felt to give birth?''Okay, honey,' his wife replied. 'Smile as hard as you can.'Beaming down beatifically at his wife and newborn child, the man commented, 'That's not so hard.'She continued, 'Now stick a finger in each corner of your mouth.' He obeyed, smiling broadly.'Now stretch your lips as far as they'll go,' she went on.'Still not too tough,' he remarked.'Right,' she snapped. 'Now pull them over your head.'Hearing this, the husband couldn't help but smile mischievously, and while holding the two babies, he sang,Cepatlah besar, matahariku[Grow up, my sun]Menangis yang keras, janganlah ragu[Cry out loud, don't be hesitated]Tinjulah congkaknya dunia, buah-hatiku[Punch the arrogant of the world, my baby]Doa kami di nadimu[Our prayers are in your veins]Cepatlah besar, matahariku[Grow up, my sun]Menangis yang keras, janganlah ragu[Cry out loud, don't be hesitated]Hantamlah sombongnya dunia, buah-hatiku[Hit the proud of the world, my baby]Doa kami di nadimu *)[Our prayers are in your veins]Before leaving, Laluna said, "Rights and Liberty are priceless, that's why the cost of its enforcement and maintenance is expensive and tends to increase. There is no 'cheap' word for Rights and Liberty. Hopefully, policy makers realize this, and not complaining about the cost of energy subsidies they had budgeted in the Government Spending. And Allah knows best."
- Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights, W. W. Norton & Companies
- John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Palgrave
- Professor Austin Robinson and Professor Donald Moggridge (Ed.), The Collected Writing of John Maynard Keynes, Cambridge University Press
*) "Galang Rambu Anarki" written by Iwan Fals
