From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jul 29 2001 - 14:59:01 MDT
Mike Lorrey writes
>> Namely, if your group already maintains a very high level of
>> liberty, and you don't want to lose it, then resistence to
>> [liberty-destroying] invaders damn near justifies any means.
>
> Not necessarily. In a properly libertarian society, any individual with
> the cash can buy or make a nuclear weapon, or any other weapon. Taxation,
> in my mind, is only NOT theft when the individual is free to choose what
> government services they wish to pay for and which not to pay for.
In most historical circumstances in which a free society was
challenged, nuclear weapons were not available. Those societies
were not made up exclusively of white middle class intellectual
libertarians, and as a practical measure, those societies could
very well have perished were it not for the ability of their
government to draft men into armies, redirect industry, and
tax individuals at the optimum rate to win the war.
I claim that from 1870 to 1940, the United States was such a
society, and had a sufficient but realistic threat from Japan,
and Germany, and possibly the Soviet Union materialized, all
would have been lost without the laudable capabilities that
the U.S. did possess to coerce industry to make armaments,
draft soldiers into enormous armies, and tax people at whatever
the necessary rate would have been. I am even considering
unlikely cases, such as some alliance of Germany, France, England
and Japan in 1905 deciding to conquer North America. Those nations
working together could only have been defeated by the U.S. in the
way I've described. Consideration of examples like this is
warranted by our wishing to establish general principles here.
Lee
P.S. I also agreed with Daniel Ust's post.
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