From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Mon Feb 10 1997 - 13:46:01 MST
> > A person has will, and can act for
> > his own benefit. When you create "society", and assign it rights, you
> > have given rights to an entity with no means or will to exercise them,
> > and no way to benefit from them.
>
> "no means or will"? A society is an organisation. An organisation can
> easily have a free will. Or perhaps you mean that an individual is aways
> more powerfull than organisations?
I did word that badly. Yes, a complex enough organization can behave
as if it has "will"; we ourselves are such organizations, and when we
collect enough of us with diverse drives to work collectively, the
results of those interactions can appear willful. What I object to is
the assignment of "rights" to this organization, because history shows
me that doing so is always detrimental to the individuals--all of them.
Because physical resources are limited, they must be allocated. To
allocate some to "society" requires taking them from individuals. If
doing so was a positive value to some individuals, they would willingly
do so--the fine tradition of private charity bears this out. But
democratic policies take those resources by force, and therefore by
definition are unaccountable for their use.
> How have you been compassionate recently as an individual?
I, and all libertarians I know, are very compassionate people. I
take care of my friends and family, I support charities (only private
ones), I have done volunteer work, and I perform the single, most
fundamentally moral, socially responsible act there is: I earn an
honest living, by voluntary contract. I do not steal from others,
either by robbery of by vote.
> The faster technolgy progresses the less the libertarian ideas will work
> for the common man. It will turn the world into a place where a technoelite
> owns the mean of production. When technology makes it possible for the most
> talented people to do allmost everything what will then happen to the not
> so talented?
They will be fabulously wealthy by today's standards, just as the poorest
Americans today are wealthy by their ancestors' standards. They will
enjoy the benefits of all the technology produced by those elites, and
they will probably continue to complain about the injustice of the system
that created them, and continue to fight it with pretty words like
"equality" and "democracy", while continuing to enact policies that result
in the exact opposite results.
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