From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Mon Sep 06 1999 - 18:13:32 MDT
phil osborn wrote:
>
> >From: "Michael S. Lorrey" <retroman@turbont.net>
> >I wasn't the one who cut if off, it was phil. As for my words that you
> >quoted above, I was speaking contemporaneously, as an idea for the
> >proper way to fund PUBLIC education today if a society were to choose to
> >have public education, not in regards to a currently non-existent
> >society where every child goes to private school.
> >
> >As for your gripe that I advocate 'taking money at the barrel of a gun',
> >the fact is that the behaviors I specified all are types in which the
> >practitioners externalize some of their costs onto society or other
> >individuals in the form of crime, accidents, health care costs, state
> >assumption of bankruptcy debt, below cost harvesting of resources from
> >public land, etc. In my mind recovery of externalized costs is the ONLY
> >justifiable reason for government to impose taxes on its citizens, its
> >merely a matter of extension of civil law as a standard policy of class
> >action, which is totally in keeping with libertarian ideals. Taking
> >money from a person at the point of a gun is just fine if the person
> >with the money got that money by passing his costs on to someone else.
> >Its called enforcement of judgement, and such enforcement of the
> >decisions of any arbitrator will exist even in the most libertarian
> >society. The type of people who still gripe about paying taxes in such a
> >society are the type of people whos mindset is "whats mine is mine and
> >whats yours is mine" to begin with. Once they've stolen their bit its
> >'obviously' a crime to recover that money and give it to its rightful
> >owners.
> >
> >Mike Lorrey
> Ah, thank you. That puts the discussion on a better plane. This is in fact
> one of the major blank areas of the anarcho-capitalist school, right up
> there with children's rights and orginal property claims.
> (Of course, as an anarchocapitalist, I shouldn't even mention these
> embarrassing lacks in our theory. George Smith attacked me back in the
> '70's for what he and Wendy McElroy called "sniping from the gray areas."
> I.e., PC for me would be to pretend that I have all the answers and all we
> have to do is Smash the State and everything will be fine.)
> Your most recent restatement is fine in and of itself. Yes, it is important
> to deal with these problems of externalization of costs, free riders, etc.
> However, some of people you have identified are probably not really in that
> group. One of the early members of Foresight came down with cancer in the
> late '80's. I had no idea, but ran into him and his wife coming out of the
> local jail one night. She had just bailed him out, and I later learned it
> was for a heroin possession arrest. He was a highly productive person who
> on net balance certainly more than paid his way in society, and the heroin
> probably allowed him to keep functioning a while longer than would have
> otherwise been possible.
> Then there are the 85% of N. American Indians who have the "addictive gene."
> They have difficulty enjoying life in general without artificially
> boosting certain neurotransmitters via alcohol, speed, etc. Due to the
> Puritan ethic, the development of safer, more effective drugs to
> specifically answer the needs of this large population (about 35% of
> Caucasians also carry this gene) has been blocked. Should they then also be
> charged for the harm that society has caused to them? Or shouldn't we in
> fact bill all the people who voted for and support all those laws that keep
> them from cheaply and effectively dealing with their problem?
> I.e., it has to work both ways. If society harms the individual, then
> shouldn't the individual also be worthy of compensation? And aren't many of
> the examples you chose specifically cases in which society's laws have
> worsened or created the problem?
True, but I'm not living in a libertarian society, so I don't have any
examples that would crop up in such a society to bring to mind, nor
would many readers of this list, who also do not live in libertarian
societies, understand my analogies if I did. My think about the drugs
isn't so much the legality of the drugs, but the side effects of having
drugs made illegal, i.e. crime and high health care costs in particular.
As for your points about native american and caucasian genetic
predispostions to addiction, if this is so, why are caucasian poverty,
unemployment, and actual addiction rates not proportional to their
associated incidence of the addiction gene, if that is the cause of
native american 'problems'? Now, considering that peyote, marijuana,
tobacco, coca, yahe, coffee, and guarana are all natural sources of
drugs that native americans were quite familiar with, trying to blame
the white man's whiskey taking advantage of the genetic disposition is
also a load of hooey. IMHO, native american's level of addiction is
directly proportional to the percent who depend on BIA handouts for
their living.
Mike Lorrey
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