Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site topaz.RUTGERS.EDU
Path: utzoo!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!columbia!topaz!josh
From: josh@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (J Storrs Hall)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Newsflash! [Subsidized Education]
Message-ID: <3461@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 28-Aug-85 20:31:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3461
Posted: Wed Aug 28 20:31:07 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 30-Aug-85 01:34:16 EDT
References: <955@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1110@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1680@psuvax1.UUCP> <292@ubvax.UUCP> <topaz.3257> <1660@dciem.UUCP>
Reply-To: josh@topaz.UUCP (J Storrs Hall)
Distribution: na
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 70

>>>...  I'd rather believe in people than believe in libertaria anytime.
>>>Tony Wuersch
>>
>>You don't believe in people.  You believe in the dehumanizing State.
>> ...
>>--JoSH
>
(mmt:)
>...  The USA, generally
>speaking, is probably the country that most strongly advocates freedom
>of economic choice.

Try Switzerland, or Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Taiwan, or Japan.

>  It also seems to be the country that breeds people
>who fanatically distrust state activities.  ...
>People [in Europe], do NOT seem to want to move to a more libertarian 
>condition.

I know quite a few Europeans who came here to live permanently, on their
own.  The only Americans I know who went to live in Europe had married
someone who already lived there; there were few of them, and NO ONE
went to Eastern Europe.  But I number several ex-Eastern Europeans 
among my friends, and most of them have an opinion of (Eastern European)
governments that you apparently just don't want to believe.

>Is this because they are brainwashed and cannot see where their own
>interests lie (No, of course not: Libertarians deny this possibility),

There are two lies here.

>or is it because their situation is preferable to the more laissez-faire
>conditions here?  Perhaps ease of cooperation, based on social and
>governmental structures, outweighs the *feeling* of freedom that would
>be available to a few people in a Libertaria.

Perhaps the barbed-wire fences, the machine-gun-toting police, the
ubiquitous monitoring and censorship of all means of communication,
the necessity of saying the "right thing", outweigh the hopeless
yearning for a little freedom, a little human dignity.

>To parallel JoSH's peroration:
>>I do believe in people.  I believe in the humanizing State.
>> ...

This is really senseless.  Forcing someone to do something at the
point of a gun, which would be compassionate if done voluntarily,
is humanizing neither to the forcer or the forcee.  Loading a
monster bureaucracy with millions (literally) of regulations
onto people does not make them better, more caring human beings;
it makes them jobholders, warmbodies, interchangeable cogs in 
a soulless machine.  Show me a humanizing State and I'll show you 
a square circle.

>I believe that JoSH's Libertaria would lead directly to all the
>things he claims not to believe in.
>Martin Taylor

I not only believe that socialist snake oil will destroy those
human values that Martin claimed to believe in, but I can point to 
half the world where people are living in physical squalor and
poverty, and worse, bereft of spirit, initiative, and hope; where
millions have been murdered in the name of economic equality, and
the wretched survivors envy the dead.  No thanks, Martin, you can
keep your utopia and your precious illusions about how well the
people like it.  I'm a simple soul; I haven't progressed beyond 
either freedom or dignity, and I guess I'm just unable to grasp
why you think slavery is such hot stuff.

--JoSH