FT,
Know then that 'free-markets' and rampant, unpunished crime are incompatible. And crime goes unpunished when there is NO effective enforcement infrastructure (forget economic infrastructure... first things first). And there can be NO effective enforcement' infrastructure without the recognition of INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS!
Law and law enforcement are based on defining the line between the rights of the individual and the rights of other individuals. Your right to swing your fist in the air ends where the tip of my nose begins. Your right to dump your waste in your backyard ends the moment my right to clean ground water is violated (haven't we been through this before?). Now we get to the important bit: people realized long ago that the guy swinging his fist, or the guy dumping the poison, is often bigger, stronger, and richer than the victims, and that the victims cannot seek redress by themselves. Which is why they pooled their resources and created law and a mechanism for enforcing law - a collective act. ALL LAW AND ALL LAW ENFORCEMENT, MORON, IS THE RESULT OF COLLECTIVE ACTION. AND WITHOUT THAT, AS YOU ADMIT, THERE WOULD BE NO INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS DEPEND ON INTELLIGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION.
Without a collective consensus that individual property rights are important, your multi-millions, whether mythical or not, would not be in your possession very long before some bigger shark came along and snapped them, and you, up. Like it or not, you are as dependent on collective action as anyone.
Steve |
