CDR: Re: Re: Shunning, lesbians and liberty

[Sampo A Syreeni]

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 at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university