brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (01/11/86)
In article <140@ubc-cs.UUCP> andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews) writes: >>I suggest that while cooperative companies are a nice idea, it's not right >>to march people into prison if they refuse to comply. > This extremization is only slightly more bizarre than the invitation to >live in the Soviet Union which Brad extended to us earlier in the article (and >which I have tastefully edited out). I'm sure that all I had in mind was a >government agency to support the formation of cooperative companies, tax breaks >for companies who were recognized to have some standard cooperative structure, >and things like that. This is an attitude I wonder about. Force is force, and calling it by other names doesn't make it less brutal. The government only has two forms of power over a person. It can refuse to supply its "services", or it can haul you off to jail or kill you. Any lesser wielding of that power, through threats or milder alternatives like fines, is still a wielding of that power. If the government desires to tax somebody to help subsidize a competitor, I call that unfair. If the taxpayer doesn't wish to comply, the government has to eventually haul that person off to jail. If he or she refuses, the government has to bring in actual armed goons. The average person only sees these armed goons on television, but they are there for all of us. In today's sytem, the government can't fairly revoke its "services" for two reasons. The first is that it contradicts its concepts of universality, but the most important is that the taxpayer has already paid for those services, probably more than he or she wanted to. In a more free society, the only legal application of power should be the withdrawl of services. One person's power over another should only come from the need of the latter person for the former. It should not come because the former has a bigger gun. Socialists don't like to think about it, but their whole system is based not just on the guy with the big gun getting his way, but on a special elite (necessary to run the system) controlling the big gun. I wish we were more civilized than that. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473