On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
--- "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote: [snip]
As governments were created to smash property rights, they are always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
Uh-huh. Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not common to most writers of modern American English?
I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect property rights (although we have no historical record of such a government because it must have been before recorded history began). They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to protect property rights of the ruler(s). With the advent of various quasi-democratic forms of government, the law has been compromised insofar as it protects property rights. You no longer have a right to keep all your money (taxes), no longer have a right to grow 5' weeds in your front yard if you live in a city, and no longer have a right to own certain evil things at all, at least not without special governmental permission. There were analogous compromises in democratic Athens and quasi-democratic Rome. When democratic states inevitably fold into tyranny, some of those restrictions remain. Right now most states have a strange mix of property rights protections (e.g. the Berne convention and the DMCA) and property rights usurpations (e.g. no right to own certain weapons; equal protection). -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936