Quarantines may be justified

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:41 PM 04/20/2003 -0500, Jim wrote:
>The connection between 'private freedom' and 'property' is really a
>strawman. What matters is life, liberty, and the -pursuit of hapiness-
>and not collecting more 'stuff' than your neighbor. If anything it
>demonstrates an exception lack of maturity and excessive insecurity.

It's a difficult problem - claiming that land is your private property
implies a willingness to initiate force to enforce your rights,
which is different for something like land that you didn't create
than for objects that you did create.

But if you can't collect "stuff", you can't insure yourself against
starving to death in the short term or the more distant future,
and governments in during the last century made a habit of
declaring that all the land and stuff in a given area was theirs,
and either starving the local population to death (if they were totalitarians)
or forcing them to leave (if they were merely greedy) or just killing them.
If you're looking at the world as a whole, as opposed to just the US and 
Canada and
parts of Western Europe that aren't near Germany, insecurity about such things
unfortunately demonstrates a realistic maturity.

If you live in a society that guarantees liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
you still need to plan for your old age, and you do that by collecting stuff,
or by collecting friends and kids who will care for you.
Societies that don't let you collect stuff are forcing you to
depend on them for your food and housing - not much liberty there.
People who are especially good at acquiring and managing stuff can
retire at 35 (:-), and people who don't have families to support can
argue about whether they've got more liberty or happiness with less stuff
(but the classic non-materialistic hippie ethic often involved going
back to the land, i.e. you and your friends owning land and farming.)
And farmers can never retire, except by having their kids do the work,
unless they're in high-value crops like dope that let them acquire lots of 
stuff...