From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 18:06:29 MDT
Mike Lorrey writes
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>> 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.>
> Well, since in 1870 Japan had no navy worth mentioning, it was only in
> 1905 that they kicked Russia's Pacific Navy, and neither the Russians
> nor Japan had a Navy at that time that could compete with the US Navy,
> which was not funded by any confiscatory taxation at that point, I'd
> have to say you are really BSing here.
Evidently, I am just as familiar with the history of this era as you are.
> Fantasy alliances of all the world powers against the US are rather
> ludicrous, especially in respect to other english nations, and allying
> Germany and France at that point in time is similarly ludicrous.
Oh, dear. And I had written the sentence (see above),
>> Consideration of examples like this is warranted by our
>> wishing to establish general principles here.
precisely for people like you. When libertarians write that taxation
is *never* justified, they invite real as well as imaginary counter-
examples. Perhaps you are simply not interested in theoretical general-
ities. That's fine. But please try to understand that some of us are, and
we really would like to know under what **general** circumstances, if any,
we would approve of a society forcably extracting (i.e. stealing)
resources from some of its members.
Lee Corbin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:09:18 MST