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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (45146)	2/9/2006 2:09:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 90947

When I mentioned the "Constitutional legitimacy of certain (victimless crime) laws" I was legitimately responding to YOUR comment: "People enforcing those laws are not protecting the rights and freedoms of others at least not directly." Your comment implies that such enforcement lacks constitutional legitimacy It implies no such thing. Enforcing a law against a victimless crime is not protecting the rights and freedoms of others even if the law is fully constitutionally legitimate. "Victimless crime laws do not such thing" They purport to defend the public health and safety at individual and group levels. Your denial that they "do no such thing" is merely a denial--not an argument. Gratuitous assertions can be gratuitously denied. Your assertion - "As to defending others...that is PRECISELY what enforcing the law does" is such a gratuitous assertion. It is the premise for other arguments but it is not itself supported by solid argument. I deny the premise which makes the whole of the argument unconvincing. "Although I do in fact think that(that society has enacted bad laws)(brackets mine) , that is not what I have been telling you." Really? In this very post you said: "although many of them are (bad laws) (brackets mine). I had not been saying that the laws were bad when I said that enforcing them was initiating force. In that last post I disclosed the fact that I do indeed think that society has enacted bad laws, but this fact is irrelevant to my argument, and has not been an important them of any of my posts in this conversation. Re: " So I do not at this time intend to argue which laws ought to be changed Neither do I. " Then what is your interest in (for instance) marijuana laws as it relates to the issue of the degree of force which lies behind the enforcement of human rights and freedoms and the proscriptions on that use of force? Not all laws forbid things that are attacks on others or examples of defrauding others. Enforcing laws against something other than an such an attack (or possibly fraud, or reckless endangerment) is an initiation of force by government. That is an important point to me even though it is rather an abstract one. I have not asserted that the fact that enforcing the laws is an initiation of force, automatically means either that the laws or the enforcement of them is wrong. "I agree that the fundamental purpose of government is to protect our rights and freedoms"..."That doesn't mean, even in theory, that all laws serve that purpose" I have made it clear that laws purport to serve that purpose. That laws may or may not purport to serve one purpose or another is not that important to me. I am more interested in what they really do, not what they claim to do. "Even in theory" is an important part of my statement. By saying that a law doesn't serve that purpose I am not calling it a bad law or arguing for its repeal. I might well do so for some specific law, but one statement (that a law does not serve that purpose) does not contain the other statement (that a law is bad). A large part of my point is that making one statement does not mean you are implying the other. Making that general point does not amount to asserting that any specific law is unjust, and it does not amount to an argument about which laws should be changed either directly or by implication. without knowing what you mean by "bad" I'm not sure how much effort I want to put in to nailing down the exact meaning of bad in this context but some of the characteristics of a bad law would be that it is unjust, immoral, illegitimate, unconstitutional, excessively unpopular while at the same time unnecessary, has negative consequences that exceed its benefits, and/or should be repealed. Or in other words by saying that enforcement of the law can be an initiation of force I am not automatically saying that that law has any of the above characteristics. Tim