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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (21713)	5/17/1998 11:44:00 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

Hardly. Some if us worry about those without "ability" as you put it. What do you do with folks who are not born bright enough to succeed without help? You could just push them aside, let them live in the gutters, beg, steal, make whatever life they can on the fringes of society. But by tempering capitalism a little bit, by giving up a bit of one's economic wealth, one buys social stability and a measure of peace. One can argue about the most efficient ways to "buy" a stable society, but one cannot argue that it has a price. Anyone with children knows that it is worth the price. Complete individual selfishness leads to a rather brutal society- my guess is you, and possibly Skipper, are the only ones who think you would want to live in that reality. The rest of us realize that individual selfishness sometimes is in conflict with social selfishness- and sometimes social selfishness is more important. Most people do not want to see crippled beggars on the streets, like they have in third world countries without safety nets. Most people don't want to hire personal security forces because they live in a country where people are poor, and exploited, and kidnapping for money is a common occupation. There is a tension between personal freedom and social anarchy, you seem completely oblivious to this, or you choose to ignore it.

To: Father Terrence who wrote (21713)	5/18/1998 5:50:00 AM
From: Jack Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

FT, to say Jefferson would've supported the constitutions based on Marx's Communist Manifesto is a terrible injustice to one of the Fathers of Liberty. You read me wrong. Jefferson, one of my great heros, would indeed have supported those communist constitutions (not the governments) because they say everything he believed in: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, religion, redress against governmental abuse, etc, etc. My point is that those communist constitutions weren't worth the paper they were written on because their evil governments didn't pay any attention to them. Read them. It's truly amazing to see how Jeffersonian they sound. Sadly, our own constitution is mocked in many respects. The one which springs to mind is the forfeiture laws for drug offenses. Under this doctrine the "property" is deemed guilty and confiscated -- boat, car, home, when illegal substances are found within them. Examples abound, including the widow's home which was confiscated and sold because her son, unknown to her, was selling drugs from it. Another example: Stacy Koon was acquitted by a jury of his peers after the Rodney King beating. OJ Simpson was also acquitted. But the Stacy Koon acquittal was not politically acceptable so he was tried again under a trumped up Federal charge so that he could be imprisoned. OJ was not. Their guilt or lack of guilt is beside the point. Both were acquitted and should have gone free. IRS abuses form a huge collection of unconstitutional acts which could not begin to be discussed here. With regard to my statement that some would say we have too much freedom. This is the case, but I disagree, and just mentioned this as a fact. I think we essentially agree about these issues. Jack