From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Fri Oct 30 1998 - 12:22:34 MST
J. Maxwell Legg wrote:
> Ian Goddard wrote:
> > IAN: A libertarian society is a society in which
> > a set of collective rules (political power) exist
> > that define the rights of individuals. Robinson
> > Crusoe has no political rights, and the example
> > of your computer free from the net is Crusoe.
> >
> > So there's no contradiction between the concepts of
> > political rights, the individual, and libertarianism.
> > The individual in society has political rights, more
> > or less, but Robinson Crusoe has no polical rights.
> >
>
> Crusoe is still an individual and your earlier statement that the basic
> political unit in your definition of Libertarianism is the individual. I
> contradict this. Sure the basic political unit may reside in the
> individual but isn't the individual. The individual may be a type of
> political unit but hardly *the* basic one. I would be happy to accept
> that another basic political unit maybe an abstract conflict of some
> sort. I don't say all conflicts because right now I'm installing a
> network and have irq conflicts; - unless you accept that my relationship
> with the net is political.
Politics is interhuman relations, just as TCP/IP is a protocol by which means
individual computers communicate. A computer by itself has no need of TCP/IP,
just as an individual hermit (RObinson Crusoe) has no need of politics. When one
individual meets another, and they interact on an ongoing basis, a protocol to
exchange data is needed. This is politics. The difference between socialism and
libertarianism is like the difference between the network concepts of
server/client versus distributed networking. A Mainframe is like a Socialist
State, and the people are mere terminals, while a Libertarian Network is all PC's
interconnected and sharing data on an equal basis.
Mike Lorrey
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