The New Judge Bleonard's Assorted Reef Life&Bottom Feeders Message Board

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Pastimes : The New Judge Bleonard's Assorted Reef Life&Bottom Feeders

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To: Father Terrence who wrote (105)	6/9/1998 1:07:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) of 174

Stop nibbling the bait around the hook! Go for the curvy shiny thing - it's so goooood :-D I was hoping to steer the topic toward the idea that unregulated fertility might be a Bad Thing. This can be discussed without invoking what kind of state we're living in right now. Okay. Let me play with one of your statements. >She is right to believe that in a socialist state. She would NEVER believe that in a free country.< Okaaaay, but let's burnish out the non sequitur. Doesn't she have every right to believe that in a free country? After all, we're talking about belief. I should be allowed to believe in the Black Nike Comet if I so chose. Maybe what you mean (I'm reaching here, you'll approve or deny) is she has a right to EXPECT that in a socialist state. In a state that chooses Freedom over Compassion, she is well-advised to expect her kids to starve unless she feeds them and teaches them to fend for themselves. >The State does not have the right to undermine individual's rights by supporting (or rewarding) the folly of one or more of the members of its society -- especially to the detriment of other's rights in that society.< Ooooh, the big Kahuna. What's so special about this statement is the embedded evaluation. "Folly". Who judges folly? I think that the State needs to have the right to undermine the absolute freedom of an individual if it serves another's WISDOM. An example? Glad you asked. Let's take a wealthy landholder in Idaho whio discovers a cadmium deposit on his land. Let's further posit that the cheapest way to exploit this resource is by a fairly inefficient but very direct strip mining process. Our landholder understandably does not want to spend extra money to remediate the spent heap of tailings. These leach cadmium into the watershed to a degree that sheep for a hundred miled downstream take to walking in circles. Under these conditions, I'd say it was wise for the State to come in and tell Landholder that if he wants to mine cadmium, he'll have to meet standards of cleanliness. This necessitates circumscribing his rights to do business as he sees fit. More to the point - the state has a legitimate claim to making the landholder bear the costs of cleaning up his mining operation! So I argue that the idea of absolute individual freedom is a chimera. It devolves to a tribal state where people loosely associate around one individual who is strong enough to recruit or compel their loyalty. The natural condition of these tribes is perpetual war, unless or until someone smart&charismatic enough comes along to confederate several tribes into a larger, stronger entity that can defend its borders. Bang! Agriculture becomes profitable - no raiders and all that. This is all history. What's my point? Society is a constant tradeoff of Freedom against Security. Optimal social strength lies somewhere in the balance between those two asymptotes. So, what do you think? Should fertility be an absolute right, like freedom of speech? Or do you see conditions onder which it is properly revocable?

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