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From: chenr@tilt.FUN (Ray Chen)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Emigration vs. withdrawing from a group:Human Race
Message-ID: <240@tilt.FUN>
Date: Mon, 18-Feb-85 01:08:05 EST
Article-I.D.: tilt.240
Posted: Mon Feb 18 01:08:05 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 19-Feb-85 08:26:26 EST
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Xref: watmath net.politics:7656 net.politics.theory:169

Cliff, do you regularly set up straw men or this article just an 
attempt to make me have to quote you a lot?

>> == Me [Ray Chen aka tilt!chenr]
>  == Cliff @ unmvax

> > Bull.  The very fact that governments of a more organized form exist is
> > a refutation of the empirical success of Libertarianism.
> 
> Righto! and the fact that people are starving to death in socialist African
> nations is a refutation of the empirical success of  capitalism's ability
> to keep enough food in a country to feed its citizens.  After all, if
> capitalism really allowed such food, the countries that are all starving to
> death would switch immediately to the better form of government, hence the
> following theorem: [...]

Here's an elementary lesson in logic.  If P -> Q does not imply If Q -> P.
Thus, the statement "If a government changes as a result of an internal
action -> that the government in question was not adequately meeting the
needs of some of it's people" does not imply the converse.

> > If Libertarianism really worked as well as some
> > people think it would, if it had been tried, it would still exist
> > (barring circumstances such as conquest, genocide, etc.).
> 
> As a government, libertarianism, the marketplace of societies, hasn't been
> tried on a sufficiently large scale to yield valid results.  On the other hand
> the marketplace of species, evolution, has been tried for millions of years;
> it works.

If you think the first statement if true, then what are we arguing about?
My article was a response to somebody who said that Libertarianism HAD been
tried and HAD worked.  I specifically stated in my article that if
Libertarianism HADN'T been tried in such a way as to yield valid results,
then all bets were off.

What does the second statement have to do with ANYTHING?

> > People who groan and moan about the "good old days" of a laissez-faire
> > government don't seem to realize that the current governments evolved
> > because there was a problem and no one was willing or able to step in and
> > solve it except the government.
>
> People who imply that the "good old days" of [any previous] government were
> examples of libertarianism either don't known their history, don't know what
> libertarianism is about or are deliberately making false implications.

This wasn't aimed at libertarianism per se, but in general at people who
tend to believe that "Less government is ALWAYS better."

> > I point you to the situation involving
> > the labor-reform laws in England in the 1830's
> 
> Sure, a monarchy makes a good substitute for a libertarian country...

Do you know YOUR governments?  Great Britain is a CONSTITUTIONAL monarchy.  
There's a big difference.  Again, this wasn't a stab at Libertarianism
in particular but rather an example of a situation where government
intervention was the only practical solution to a very definite problem.
The government intervention resulted in the legalization of unions,
child-labor laws, and general labor-laws.  The same type of thing
happened later in the U.S. and resulted in labor laws and the workmen's
compensation laws.  Note that I didn't say that any of these were
the best solutions.  Only that they were practical given the political
and economic circumstances at the time.  What all my examples have in
common besides government intervention is that the result of the intervention
was a (so far) permanent government presence/control in a previously
uncontrolled area of society.

> > and the circumstances
> > surrounding the Great Depression (U.S.) for some basic historical
> > examples of governments being forced by popular pressure to intervene.
> 
> I think the depression has been mentioned quite a few times.  The bottom
> line is that it was government interference that brought it about in the
> first place.

Umm, the GD caused a variety of government agencies to be formed, among
them the SEC and the FDIC to try and prevent repetitions of the
circumstances that caused and aggravated the GD.  Would you mind
explaining how government interference brought about the Great
Depression?  That one's news on me.

	Ray Chen
	princeton!tilt!chenr