The principle that governments have no special moral rights beyond those of normal men leads logically to the conclusion that men have a natural right to engage in just retribution, provided of course that such retribution can be seen to be just.

It's extrememely difficult (impossible?) to come up with ideological principles which can't be used as a logical basis for stupid, dangerous, and even suicidal proposistions. That's why ideology always has to be tempered with pragmatism. In school I was accused of anti-intellectualism when I made this point, and I'm sure someone will say that to me again, eventually. "There are more things under Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." No matter what your political or economic theory says and how solid it seems, you are never relieved of your duty to keep your eyes open, of trying to evaluate in simple human terms the effects of policy on the people around you. This is where privacy and free speech ought to be defended. Perry is right, people shouldn't be reading each other's mail, and the government shouldn't be able to either. I'm not sure I could justify that with a rigorous logical argument built from a handful of axioms concerned with the nature and role of democratic government, natural law, or whatever else it was that John Locke was all hopped up on. (No disrespect to Locke intended.) I don't need a political theory to tell me that it's in my best interest to have privacy, and neither do most other people. Everyone wants privacy -- if you don't believe me, grab a clipboard, stand on a street corner, and ask around. The government claims it works for us. That's all there is to it. (I was a math major my first time through school, and I was particularly interested in formal logical systems. The limits of formal and especially pseudo-formal reasoning have always interested me -- but it ain't cryptography, so I'll spare you.)