trc@houti.UUCP (06/30/83)
Response to note on arguing with Libertarians by MJ Kelly: First, I want to again make it clear that I do not consider myself to be a Libertarian. However, they do support a number of political ideas that I support. First, note the basic wrongness of your approach to arguing - you refuse to argue at the level of premises. You refuse to debate whether there are individual rights, and whether they are necessary for productiveness and happiness in life. This could either mean that you accept the premises (if you really had a good argument against them, you would state it), or that you are evading the knowledge that you have no such argument. Since you disagree with the (mostly) logical deductions of the premises, the latter would seem the more likely. Most of the abuses that led to the current heavy regulation could not have come about in a truly free market - IE one in which the government is *prohibited* from interfering (rather than merely "usually" refraining). Several examples have been sited previously on the net - EG the case of the railroads, in which huge government land grants and monopolies were given. Whenever the government passed out special favors, the worst element in the business community was doing most of the receiving. Anyone who could convince himself that he had a right to a government enforced monopoly was also likely to convince himself that he had a right to use that monopoly to rip off his customers. When those customers (voters) complained, the legislators reacted by slapping regulations on everyone - not just the abusers - rather than admit their wrong-doing. This served to place the blame on businessmen, obscuring the main source (government intervention) of the problem. In the case of unionization of miners (and others), it was not simply evil businessmen vs moral workers. Both sides violated each other's rights. The relevant rights here are the freedom of workers to form a union, and the freedom of an employer not to employ a union worker. If unions had been organized as businesses, selling labor to businesses, there would have been far less problems. But the major source of the problem was that the government did not enforce the unions' rights, and "over-enforced" business's rights. Typically, when the public outcry became great enough, the government did an about-face, and wrote laws that over-restricted businesses, to the benefit of unions. Once again the fact that it had partly caused the problem in the first place, by its partiality, was obscured. I dont think that Big Government "just developed one day" - I think that there is a basic flaw in any government that intervenes in economic matters, or refrains from intervening on the side of rights in order to have an economic influence. This is not to totally condemn the US constitution, but merely to point out that there were cracks in its concrete, in which the seeds of Big Government grew. A structure should be condemned for its flaws, not its strengths. You seem to believe that the weeds in the cracks support the building. Tom Craver houti!trc