Steve:
Please do not call me a moron. I repeat, in this particular conversation you are having you are in touch with John Galt, not me. Do you understand that? I hope so, I have repeated it to you at least three times! What you are posting I am e-mailing to him and he e-mails me back a response for you. That is why there is a delay. Anyway I will e-mail him this and will most likely get a response back for you on Monday:
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
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