mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (09/01/85)
JoSH, you think with your spleen instead of your brain. There are libertarian posters to this net whose writing is valuable and forces one to rethink various positions. But your postings must be an embarrassment to them. You seem to have this beautiful fantasy of people freely cooperating, to everyone's benefit, and another fantasy of murderous Socialism, and when anyone brings up comments on the way the world really is, you go crazy. Thinking, as was (presumably) obvious from context, of countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Britain ..., I said that the people there seem less inclined toward libertarianism than are people here. (As support for this view, one major reason for the European cancellation of net.politics, I am told, was the mass of libertarian garbage). In response, what do you write? Here is some of it: >I know quite a few Europeans who came here to live permanently, on their >own. The only Americans I know who went to live in Europe had married >someone who already lived there; there were few of them, and NO ONE >went to Eastern Europe. But I number several ex-Eastern Europeans >among my friends, and most of them have an opinion of (Eastern European) >governments that you apparently just don't want to believe. > (I know quite a few Americans living in Europe.) >>Is this because they are brainwashed and cannot see where their own >>interests lie (No, of course not: Libertarians deny this possibility), > >There are two lies here. How can there be two lies with only one statement; in defence of that statement, there have been several arguments in this group with libertarians arguing that the only person who knows where someone's interests lie is that person, who is always the best judge. I am glad to see that you, JoSH, dissociate yourself from that position, because if it fails, most of the libertarian rhetoric fails with it. > >>or is it because their situation is preferable to the more laissez-faire >>conditions here? Perhaps ease of cooperation, based on social and >>governmental structures, outweighs the *feeling* of freedom that would >>be available to a few people in a Libertaria. > >Perhaps the barbed-wire fences, the machine-gun-toting police, the >ubiquitous monitoring and censorship of all means of communication, >the necessity of saying the "right thing", outweigh the hopeless >yearning for a little freedom, a little human dignity. > and >>To parallel JoSH's peroration: >>I do believe in people. I believe in the humanizing State. >> ... > >This is really senseless. Forcing someone to do something at the >point of a gun, which would be compassionate if done voluntarily, >is humanizing neither to the forcer or the forcee. Loading a >monster bureaucracy with millions (literally) of regulations >onto people does not make them better, more caring human beings; >it makes them jobholders, warmbodies, interchangeable cogs in >a soulless machine. Show me a humanizing State and I'll show you >a square circle. > >>I believe that JoSH's Libertaria would lead directly to all the >>things he claims not to believe in. >>Martin Taylor > >I not only believe that socialist snake oil will destroy those >human values that Martin claimed to believe in, but I can point to >half the world where people are living in physical squalor and >poverty, and worse, bereft of spirit, initiative, and hope; where >millions have been murdered in the name of economic equality, and >the wretched survivors envy the dead. Let's consider Sweden. Does this picture remind you of a country with few natural resources other then forests, a country of high living standards and technological competence, a country under Socialist governments for several decades? Let's consider Denmark. Does this picture remind you of a country with appreciably more day-to-day personal freedom than the US or Canada, a country that allows (perhaps encourages to some degree) the anarchism of a Christiania, a country of even fewer resources than Sweden (other than fish)? How many Danes or Swedes do you know that have escaped the barbed wire fences and the machine-gun toting police? Yes, I have spent a good deal of time in Denmark. I know how proud they are of having, a century ago, introduced the idea of publicly supported housing for the indigent. I know how they help pay the mortgages for homeowners temporarily unemployed (this being cheaper than keeping them once they are put on the street by a foreclosing banker). I know how Christiania worked, how it went from its initial anarchist condition into a democratic cooperative paying taxes (yes, taxes) to Copenhagen. JoSH, please restrict your postings to net.bizarre, or to your own playground on fa.politics. -- Martin Taylor {allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt {uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsri!dciem!mmt