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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (9014)	12/15/2010 3:56:48 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

>Well, that is fine and dandy, but you also need a fully functioning society. And that requires people giving up some of their freedoms. < That is precisely the logic used by the new German regime in 1933. Quis custodiet custodes? If we look at the history of the last 100 years, the societies that reduced civil freedoms in the interest of rendering the collective more efficient did not stay successful. The Sovs ran themselves down against the internal contradictions of their system. The fascists were so just plain nasty that they elicited something not unlike an international immune response. The Chinese ... are inscrutable. (smile) Jefferson said something that I cherish: A just society grants the people the ultimate right of revolution. That is to say, if the government becomes pathological, the citizens have the right to disband that government. I believe that such a right is at the very heart of a functioning society. The right to revolution has no teeth without a provision that locates the instrumentality of power with the citizen. That is why i am aghast at the appellate courts trying to soft-pedal Article 2 into some sort of collective right. I will jealously guard my right to kill ... until the reciprocal right of nasty people to harm me has been rendered null. And there are nasty people at all levels of society.

To: koan who wrote (9014)	12/15/2010 4:07:04 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

but you also need a fully functioning society. And that requires people giving up some of their freedoms. Like the freedom to kill-lol. True (at least if you define freedom as the ability to do whatever you want even if it harms someone else and violates their rights, others might say that you properly have no right to initiate violence on someone else and that your not giving up any freedom when you recognize this), but largely irrelevant. No one is going around holding up signs chanting "murder should be allowed, legalize all killing". Libertarianism isn't anarchy or support of anarchy (and if it was then support for government impost socialism would still be contradictory to individual freedom, and an imposition of government, so "libertarian socialism" wouldn't make sense anyway). Trade offs between how much the government will control, and how much is left to the individual get made in society. The libertarian viewpoint is one that says the trade-offs should lean toward maximizing individual freedom, except when the individual is seeking to harm or violate others. Socialism is close to the opposite. Traditionally socialism meant government ownership of the means of production. Well if that's enforced its anti-individual liberty.