Posted on 01/15/2002 6:27:04 AM PST by tberry
You are fooling no one but yourself.
Truely demented 'reasoning', CJ. -- You claim a religious fanatic, a zealot like you, -- who goes to another country and takes up arms against his own, is somehow to be compared to a 'constiatrian'? -- [whatever that is]
Your obsessive compulsion deepens.
Perhaps one Walker is, but I am referring to the American Taliban John Walker from Afghanistan, whom Ashcroft just relegated to the DOJ for prosecution. No one has said he initiated force or fraud against anyone, and hence according to libertarian principles should be a free man right now.
He is charged with three counts of, in effect, doing exactly that. You are daft.
What was he doing when he was captured? Did he participate in attacks on Americans (force)? Was he a member of a group that was sworn to attack and kill Americans (threat of force)?
I can't say I've followed his story closely; there's only so many hours in the day.
Is contempt of court a crime? Ultimately, there has to be some kind of high court, right? You could (theoretically) privatize all the lower courts, but at some point there has to be some court that can say, "if you don't abide by our rules, if you try to skip bail, we will throw you in jail."
Even though you didn't do anything but refuse to show up. You are, after all, innocent, and you never agreed (unless coerced by threat of force) to show up for trial. So there is *no* victim who is injured by your refusal to appear. Only society is injured, because if people don't show up in court, the rule of law becomes non-existant.
Any civilized society has to have a set of laws, and even if you dispense with every other branch of government, you have to, finally, try and punish crimes.
This, of course, opens up a whole can of worms. All of a sudden, it seems that government can, within reason, do anything we see proper to make society function normally. Laws don't exist to defend individual rights, but to keep society functioning because we collectively realize that we'd be far worse off in anarchy. We also, collectively, realize that defending human rights is the best way to keep society stable, and besides that's the whole reason we're trying to avoid anarchy.
That's why the gov't can tax. In fact, the oft-cited alternative is user fees which turn out to be... taxation under a different name. Hey, no one asked you if you wanted the service, they just provided it and put a gun to your head demanding payment. Much like the bums who wash your windshield whether you like it or not.
Back in the days when government wasn't looked to by most everyone for cradle-to-grave "security", a reputation was a precious commodity.
Voluntary arbitration, and, shunning or banishment are ways a community can police itself from individuals who attempt to harm or cheat others. Two individuals have a dispute. If one of them refuses to submit to binding arbitration, by an agreed-upon neutral member of the community, the other is assumed to have been in the right. If the loser doesn't pay restitution or whatever was deemed appropriate by his peers, he is shunned by the community. No one will do business with him or give him shelter. Drive them away in that manner.
Violent criminals should be either killed (ideally by their would-be victims in self-defense) or exiled. Why should productive citizens have to pay exhorbitant taxes to keep them incarcerated?
Do I realistically think that the people in control of our political system would ever allow such alternatives to be popularized and enacted? Of course not.
MadameAxe posted a good response, but let me take this a little further. First, I must ask the question - why was the person who refused to show up supposed to be there in the first place? I assume you mean the defendant. First, you must understand, that under a "libertarian" government, the court system would probably be less clogged due to "victimless crimes" no longer being punishable. This would make trials "speedy", like the Constitution says. So, given that there would be fewer crimes/trials, we would most likely have most trials involving people who committed violent crimes, and thus would probably have to be incarcerated until trial. So, there would be no way they couldn't show up. If, for some reason, they got bail, then the victim of the crime would have his/her rights violated by the perp not showing up. In deed, there is a victim, and its not just society. I have a right to justice - and the government is supposed to protect this right.
Like I said before - Because only "crimes" with an actual victim would be a "crime", then justice not being exacted again violates the same person's rights that the perp violated in the first place.
I think MadameAxe did a good job addressing contract disputes, so I will not expand on that.
Roscoe to CJ - Criticism of their nonsense would constitute an "initiation of force." Goodbye freedom of speech.
I find this quite humorous!! CJ tends to think the definition of force and fraud is "too narrow", yet roscoe thinks the definition is so broad that dissenting speech is an initiation of force! So basically, this makes it quite clear(not that it wasn't before) that neither of them have a clue about what they are talking about.
This is similar to CJ's alternating between his false claims that libertarians are all "moral liberals" who are only concerned with hedonism on one hand and his simultaneous contradictory claim that libertarians are all some sort of heartless social darwinists who lack "Christian" compassion for morally liberal hedonists.
In #367 CJ says, Libertarianism is a cruel ideology based upon cruel humanism. Libertarianism sees the worth and value of people in an unChristian way. People are just inconvenient things to be expunged from the gene pool for when they act foolishly. "Go ahead and kill yourself for all I care, just don't make me have to spend one of my sacred dimes to clean up your mess!"
And this coming from someone who's idea of Christian compassion involves sending inquisitorial government officers hither to detect hedonists, remove them from their jobs and families, and send them into a prison system where (according to a study cited here) they have a %22 chance of being forcibly sodomized!
I'll bet I could write an outline to use as the basis for a scientifically designed, more expressive, more rational, more effective model for government that incorporates the lessons we learned from this bastardized "experiment in democracy" and takes advantages of advances in technology and maintains the fundamental principles of republican government and individual freedoms.
No problem. (I know you laugh because we are taught that the design of governance is a black art which only the sages are capable of... Hogwash I say)
I believe the current form of government can be improved a thousandfold by such a project. But it would never be taken seriously because of the idolatry I accuse you of - that the Constitution is a sacred thing, a divine decree.
What it is is a Model-T in the Indianapolis 500 of the modern world, its been outfitted with so many adaptions and add-ons that its basic framework is effectively eradicated. Non existant. Its a hideous joke.
"All that is not prohibited is mandatory" is a way of stating the degree of social engineering our government practices -- the freedom that matters is NOT the freedom to whine and moan or present greivences to government, NOR is it to be free of the cost of bureaucracy, NOR is it the "freedom to succeed" -- what matters is the freedom of control of your destiny, of self-determination...
...the individuals and societies right to grow ORGANICALLY and not by dictate [use a system that is sensative to the market of individual choice, not one that relies on trust in a proxy]
We need to end what I call the "human husbandry" of government practices. Are we a free people or are we a hothouse plant, a frankenstein.
The goal of governance should be to provide insulation, lubrication, accomodation that allows peaceful coexistance of factions of political philosophy possible.
The ideas of easements and implementation speed limits. An architecture of interfaces consisting of more explicitly defined and refined spheres of (group vs individual) rights that are dependent on the type of thing you are prohibiting or mandating.
Contrast that to the application of government we now witness: It is a contest for the right to dictate with a broadband intensity. One size fits all, and the shoe they make is a product of compromise of ideologies that are intrinsically and perpetually mortal enemies.
It is inherently misengineered.
My thinking on this is that much like the liberals once people get a dose of the libertarians' loopy politics they get tuned out. So, they come here to spread their wacky ideas that have virtually nothing to do with the real world or like you say Conservative thought.
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