On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If so then what motive does anyone have to get their own food, as long as their neighbor has enough to feed them? At what point does A stop looking like a victim to you and start looking like a leech?
Pretty soon, I suppose. I would have a hard time drawing the exact line. This is, I guess, the thing that most bothers people with current models of welfare, especially when somebody perceived as being an outsider is taken within such a system.
can be born in the middle of another's desert. But people can only be born to parents who are somehow surviving in that environment. The implication is that the environment is survivable after all, and your life does *NOT* in fact depend on the power to make a burdensome demand.
The Western civilization supports individuals to such a degree that the above does not apply. People can indeed be born to parents which could not survive in the ideal libertarian society. In other parts of the world, and in earlier times, I believe death precisely of the kind described above do/did occur (e.g. the famines in Africa, often caused by those responsible for the production of food acting purely in their own interest) and are perceived as barbarian by us. That is one of the reasons why we measure a society by, e.g., its infant mortality. As for what this means purely within our hypothetical world of absolute ownership and slim governments, we get proles dependent on the owning class for survival. It is never in the best interest of the owner to kill the dependent one, just to extort him/her. I perceive this as a very concrete threat to liberty.
I had a pretty serious "desert" to work my way out of, so I know what you're talking about in a way that most americans won't.
That is a powerful argument against any personal motives I may have. But it is still well documented that financial inequality is on a rise all over the world, that is, the deserts are getting bigger. Might be that in a hundred years, you would have been awarded a life of financial slavery.
I believe in enough government to provide elementary education for all who want it, to break up monopolies occasionally when there is really egregious abuse of monopoly power, and to stop people from stealing from one another or killing one another. To the extent that governments do other things, they are exceeding the authority I'd have assigned them.
I mostly agree. I do not like broad governments or legistlative bloat either. I just can't seem to shake some of the less humane consequences of liberalism.
I don't believe in protecting idiots from themselves.
Agreed. Paternalism *is* Bad. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university