On 2005-02-15T21:40:34+0000, Justin wrote:
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).
It seems I've been brainwashed by classical political science. What I wrote above doesn't make any sense. Judging from social dynamics and civil advancement in the animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and property rights were an afterthought. -- 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