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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (1950)	3/5/1999 3:05:00 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 13062

And this follow up:1.) ... As long as people engage in complex cooperative activities, there will be external systems to enable coordination... 2.) ...it is necessary for us to act as if we are responsible individuals, and to encourage responsibility as a cultural value, and therefore it is good to hold criminals liable for their actions. If we ever cease doing so, the notion of personal responsibility goes out the window, and with it civilized restraint. 3.) Keeping government as local as possible is actually an attempt to make decision making more rational, as much as anything else. For example, many of our anti- pollution laws are luxuries, especially when standards are set for large metropolitan areas, but imposed indiscriminately. In poorer areas, some amount of purity might reasonably be sacrificed for greater economic growth, and in rural areas, stringent automobile emissions standards might be irrelevant. In any case, if something were better handled at the federal level, my dictum only makes the test more stringent, it doesn't shut down the federal government. 4.) Among other things, the assignment of property rights ensures that someone is responsible for the maintenance and development of property, and is able to reap the rewards of taking care of it. This is a formidable incentive to put property to productive use, and to create surplus value that may be exchanged with others. Thus, property rights are the cornerstone of economic development... 6.) We will never be perfectly harmonious, because there will always be divisions among people. Many of the higher order animals manifest the propensity to social competition and hierarchy, and the same sort of impulses are as compelling within people as the sex drive. As rational beings, we can ameliorate the worst effects of inequality, but we cannot eliminate it.