Collective security

“ The individual economic security assured to the beneficiaries of this Act will buttress the collective economic security of the nation. The Social Security System is protection to labor and provision to capital. ”

“ Too much is at stake here, above all the lives of many civilians. We owe them all our efforts to bring this crisis to a peaceful solution.
Ghana ⁠ Mr. Agyeman (Ghana) : Let me begin by first of all thanking the Secretary-General and Under-Secretary-General DiCarlo for their significant briefings.
⁠ Ghana is grateful to the Secretary-General for his clear statements on the situation in Ukraine in defence of the Charter of the United Nations, the rules-based international order and our collective security mechanism. The developments that are taking place in Ukraine are indeed troubling. ”

“ Ignoring the primary and principal body for collective decision-making on maintaining international peace and security — and, in fact, the system itself, which was created and nurtured as a result of the Second World War — means obstructing the system, signing it off and effectively destroying it, thereby ignoring the lessons of the bloodiest-ever war, which the leaders of the Member countries, and above all the permanent members of the Security Council, a generation ago vowed to respect. ”

“ There exist in society wants so general, so universal, that its members provide for them by organizing public services. Such, for example, is the need of security. We arrange, we club together, to remunerate by services of various kinds those who render us the service of watching over the general security.
There is nothing which does not come within the domain of political economy. ”

“ That enriched the baron, and crushed the poor.
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“Society,” continued the sage, “made up of the industrial cells, requires the security of every shilling, the service of every member, and the peaceful co-operation of all the factors in every industrial enterprise, and as it has not yet been determined how much of our imagined ‘natural rights’ we may be called upon to yield for the general good, the passionless decision of the public will, for the time being at least, must be the only guide. ”

“ The use of State resources to promote the safety and protection of private interests and the strengthening of private security robs State action of its legitimacy and indicates weaknesses in the concept of public safety that must be eliminated as a matter of urgency. ”

“ The first step to organize common security was taken when men agreed to have a police force and for it sacrificed their individual right to exercise individual justice, and agreed to pay taxes for the protection. ”

“ The authority of State and nation reaches out in numberless and hitherto unknown forms affecting and regulating our daily lives, our occupations, our earning power, and our cost of living. The need for this intervention, for collective action by the people through their duly constituted government, to preserve and promote their own welfare, is a need that is growing more and more important and imperative to meet the rapidly growing power of commerce, industry and finance, centralized and organized in the hands of a few men. ”

“ True economists are generally agreed, on the one hand, that the government should restrict itself to guaranteeing the security of its citizens, and on the other hand, that the freedom of labor and of trade should otherwise be whole and absolute. ”

“ Here is the firm foundation upon which our hopes for future security rest. What but our own neglect, what but our own unfaithfulness, can put in peril either our national institutions or our local organizations of government? True to ourselves, true to those principles which we have embodied in our Government, there is to the human eye no danger that can threaten the firm base of our institutions. ”

“ If there are still disturbances of the peace and order of society occurring, calculated to produce the impression that the security and the rights of citizens can be sufficiently protected only by the interference of the General Government, in your local concerns, you can dispel that impression by devoting your energies to the enforcement of the laws, thus proving the capacity of local self-government to accomplish its legitimate end here as well as elsewhere. ”

“ In fact, does not the undertaking entered into by the whole body of the nation bind it to provide for the security of the least of its members with as much care as for that of all the rest? Is the welfare of a single citizen any less the common cause than that of the whole State? It may be said that it is good that one should perish for all. ”

“ Security is the supreme social conception of bourgeois society, the conception of the police, the idea that society as a whole only exists to guarantee to each of its members the maintenance of his person, his rights, and his property.
By the conception of security bourgeois society does not raise itself above its egoism. Security is rather the confirmation of its egoism. ”

“ Without security, agriculture and commerce must languish and die; without security, the whole country must be impoverished in resources, while the rich become poor and the poor become poorer; without security, rights of property and rights of person will lose their value; and without security, the Union, justice, domestic tranquillity, the common defence, the general welfare, and the blessings of Liberty, for which the Constitution was ordained and established, must all fail. ”

“ Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry? ”

“ We must keep it controlled by limiting our ex­penditures to truly essential purposes and well within the revenues which we are capable of producing.
LABOR, RELIEF, AND SOCIAL SECURITY
We have established a group of governmental activities which deal with the satisfaction of the basic needs of our citizenry. Our people ask for little after their need for security-the security of their person, their property, and their freedom,-has been vouchsafed to them. ”

“ In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation.
This natural organization is called society.
The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.
Among the needs of man, there is one particular type which plays an immense role in the history of humanity, namely the need for security. ”

“ But as social organization advances, the central ruling power undertakes more and more to secure to individuals their personal safety, the safety of their possessions, and, to some extent, the enforcement of their claims established by contract. Originally concerned almost exclusively with defense of the society as a whole against other societies, or with conducting its attacks on other societies. Government has come more and more to discharge the function of defending individuals against one another. ”

“ Landed proprietors, and heads of families, who are the natural guardians of society, must all be enjoined and empowered to maintain its security by conducting its affairs: they must have an active share in the management of its local as well as its general interests; in the administration, as well as the government of the country: the central government ought to uphold the banner of{66} social order, but it cannot bear the whole burthen of it unaided. ”

“ The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security. ”

“ I understand, moreover, the urgent necessity of establishing in each town a solid and robust organization, the strongest bulwark of public security and the sole means of securing that union and discipline which are indispensable for the establishment of the Republic, that is, government of the people for the people, and warding off the international conflicts which may arise. ”

“ In the absence of State laws or State action adverse to such rights and privileges, the nation may not actively interfere for their protection and security, even against corporations and individuals exercising public or quasi-public functions. ”

“ To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over the benefits attending the collective application of the force of society, under its recognised chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the way of its well-being; to secure as much of the advantages of centralised power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity, is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. ”

“ But in order to preserve them we need to act together, to meet the problems of the Nation boldly, and to prove that the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the task of protecting the security of the people.
Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our Government to give employment to idle men. The people of America are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic security. ”

“ Our organization of society resting upon equal rights, we find our security in a general system of popular education which fits all for an intelligent exercise of those rights. This is the home policy of free society. This policy in our Federal affairs must necessarily correspond. Deeming free and intelligent labor the only safe basis of society, it is our duty to expand its blessings over all the territory within our reach; seeing our own prosperity advanced by the prosperity of our neighbors, we must endeavor to plant upon our borders a system of labor which answers in that respect. ”

“ The few that produced would again produce laboriously and painfully, without skill and without division of labour, because without accumulation; and it would probably take another thousand years, if men again saw the absolute need of security, to re-create what security has accumulated for our present use.
From the moment that the industry of this country began to work with security, and capital and labour applied themselves in union—perhaps not a perfect union, but still in union—to the great business of production, they worked with less and less expenditure of unprofitable labour. ”

“ The moment it is suggested that some small share of their gains should be taken by the State for the general benefit and for safeguarding182 the security of others besides themselves, they, including even those of them who have declared their wealth to be a burden, send up a wail of execration and protest with all the force they have at their command. ”

“ The human forces rendering these instruments, agencies and implements useful to all society, and adding value to matter and forces of nature, are divorced from their creations by powerful combinations of parasitic nature, by which a few control all the co-ordinate stations of industrial life through the means that they have organized and subjected to their rulership. Against these hostile powers the workers must organize their own resources and their own collective power, in organizations embracing all useful members of society and wealth producers. ”

“ From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism in the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universal organization of all but savage humanity, and the chief substance of history until these later years has been in essence the perpetual endeavour of specific social systems of this type to attain in every region the locally suitable permanent form, in face of those two inveterate enemies of human stability, innovation, and that secular increase in population that security permits. ”

“ To maintain order and to retain control of the population, party and governmental authorities rely on a number of police and security organizations that are able to exert physical force and, also, upon a group of large social organizations that are able to apply social pressures. ”

“ And this guild of civilization exacts costly admission fees, imposes strict and rigorous disciplines, visits heavy penalties on all dissenters and nonconformists, while it confers few personal licenses or privileges except those of enhanced security against common dangers and racial perils.
Social association is a form of survival insurance which human beings have learned is profitable; therefore are most individuals willing to pay those premiums of self-sacrifice and personal-liberty curtailment which society exacts from its members in return for this enhanced group protection. ”

“ The security it would afford to all the different parts and interests of the country — the assurance that the powers confided to it, would not be abused — and the harmony and unanimity resulting from the conviction that no one section or interest could oppress another, would, in an emergency, put the whole resources of the Union, moral and physical, at the disposal of the government — and give it a strength which never could be acquired by the enlargement of its powers beyond the limits assigned to it. ”