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To: MeDroogies who wrote (3269)	4/25/2001 4:26:02 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

My husband and I are both libertarians - I am a small "l" libertarian, he' s a big "L" Libertarian - he belongs to the party, I don't, although I used to. I don't know if I could handle being married to a statist.-g- The interview with de Soto I linked was very interesting because he was describing, I think, the natural evolution of laissez faire capitalism. I don't think it's an accident that laissez faire developed after the New World opened up. European countries tried to impose mercantilism and succeeded to some degree, but away from their reach, what developed was laissez faire. I think it's more or less the natural state of man. Unfortunately, the down side of laissez faire is the type of thing Sinclair Lewis described in The Jungle - and B. Traven described in The Death Ship. There's always going to be the drive to maximize profit by cutting corners on quality. The higher up the economic ladder you are, the more choices you have. The poor labor under dangerous conditions and eat adulterated food. That's been the natural state of man throughout recorded history, and there's no reason to think it was ever any different. "[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." --Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651] All the laws, all the regulations, all the social programs we have that protect people from the state of nature come at a cost, they also limit freedom. Some libertarians argue that freedom is better - but most of us don't want to return to the state of nature Hobbes described - and to believe that Hobbes was wrong is to be a utopian idealist, which I am not. So my struggle is for balance.