From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 15:31:42 MDT
--- Rafal Smigrodzki <rms2g@virginia.edu> wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
>
> Personally, I think this demand for perfection is the worst problem
> of
> most ideologies today. The irony is that libertarianism is based on
> liberal thought, and that is one of the few systems that does not
> presuppose people to be perfect or perfectible.
On the contrary, it presupposes, at least in its classical liberalism
incarnation, that all people (not just a hand picked few) are perfect
enough, or perfectable enough with some education, to act in the
interest of themselves and their society as co-sovereigns in a
republican society. It presupposes that people are perfect ENOUGH to be
able to handle the powers that had previously thought to only be
responsibly handled by a special few as Plato and other cynics of human
nature have argued.
Modern liberalism has succumbed to this same cynicism about the average
human, which is why it is no longer a truly progressive political force
in the world.
>
> ### But it assumes your willingness to deny yourself some simple and
> easy solutions to your problems, doesn't it? You can't hope to gang
> together with
> a bunch of other guys and extort cash (directly, if you are the
> feudal
> type), in the form of entitlements (for the social democrat), or the
> monopoly rent (for the corporatist).
Indeed, it is not the individual, but groups which classical liberalism
and libertarianism distrust. Whether they be states (city, regional,
national, or global) or other forms of corporation or association which
accord or advocate special powers to some and not all, groupism is the
enemy of individual liberty.
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