<[Bill Leach 940212.12:01 EST(EDT)]
LIST
I don't particularly want to get into the justifications or detailed
discussion of the meaning for these but if one accepts that a good
society requires:
Maximum liberty and freedom for the individual consistant with the
liberty and freedom of other individuals.
Government's sole duty, responsibility and authority is to insure
the above.
Government authority derives solely from the "rights" of
individuals.
The rights of ALL groups of people are a function only of the rights
of individuals.
Then it follows that government may only legitimately do to any of its
citizens:
That which the individual would also have the right to force upon
another.
In the extremes the picture is usually clear and most generally agreed to
be all:
The government has the right to forcibly take wealth from citizens
for the common defense because:
Individuals have the right to defend their persons and
property and have granted that right to government. Note that
BOTH conditions must be true. That is, the power of
government is legitimate only when the citizens have given a
right to the government that they legitimately have as
individuals in the first place.
The government has no right to forcibly take wealth from citizens
for "welfare" because:
The individual does not have the right to take the lawfully
acquired property of another.
Of course both of my examples are extreme in their oversimplificaton too.
Also, I am talking only about the philosophy of government and economics
upon which this nation was founded.
If you believe in a system where the government owns and controls
everything "for the ultimate good of society" (that is socialism or
communism) none of the above appies. If you believe in a system where
private ownership is ok but some elite group (government or whatever)
controls what can and can not be done with privately owned property
(fascism), again the above does not apply.
What absolutely astounds me is that within the life-time of most of the
people that I encounter and within the living memory of a significant
portion of our population we have repeated dramatic demonstrations of the
failure of "managed" societies and yet we have large numbers of people in
the government, in the media, in education and in the general population
that clamor for socialism and fascism!
It is though they don't think that there is any fundamental failure in
such systems to deal with the realities of human behaviour. They seem to
think that the only reasons such systems fail is because the particular
people that tried to run the systems were not clever enough rather than
recognizing that the problem is the system itself. Anyone that is so
stupid, so naive, to believe that the leaders of the Soviet WANTED their
nation to be an economic failure...
Those leaders had as much power as it is possible to have within a
society and contrary to much popularization they were not and are not
people lacking in inteligence.
Our religious institutions, our educational system and even our
politicians and media seem to attribute the unmatched achievements of the
United States in its first 100 to 150 years to everything but what
actually caused it.
The religious like to use something along the lines that "God smiled"
upon this nation". The other either deny the reality of this nation's
accomplishments in the general well being of mankind or attribute the
achievement only to "the unique availablility of natural resources."
I discount the "religious view" entirely. If it is true then there is no
causal relationship in reality and we all better start "bowing to the
east", "smoking the peace pipe" or whatever our religious belief demand
and forget about scientific pursuits of truth.
The denial method usually points out that there were people that were
poor, people starved, for much of that period there was the abomination
called slavery, and the rich "got richer." They fail to mention any
relationship between the people of this nation and any other nation of
the world. They fail to talk about how the conditions were changing for
any other group other than the wealthy. They don't mention that life was
continually getting better in general for all segments of the US
population.
The assertion of the cause being "the unique availablility of natural
resources" is just plain not true. While it is true that this country
has had and does have a wonderful supply of "natural resources" we are
anything but unique and a long way from having the best compliment.
No, the "resource" that we had and are currently embarked upon an insane
program to destroy is the we had at on time a nation and leaders that
recognized that the greatest resource that a nation can have is the free
mind of its people.
And looking at current Perceptions... the attempts at creating a fascist
state on the part of so called "environmentalist" is riddled with
ridiculous assertions and ought right lies. "We the people" are
continously bombarded with propaganda designed to convince us that we,
especially those of us in the US, are "poisoning our environment."
And the truth? Well, the assertions that we are disturbing the
environment and no doubt are doing some damage are, I admit, irrefutable.
Is such a claim relevant? Not really. Overall, history shows that the
more highly advanced a society is in technology and the faster it is
growing, the lower the polution rate per person in the long run.
I would go into the particularly fine example provided by government
regulations concerning PCBs but this message is already far too long.
-bill