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From: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Newsflash! [Subsidized Education]
Message-ID: <711@cybvax0.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Aug-85 18:04:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: cybvax0.711
Posted: Thu Aug 29 18:04:11 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 05:54:01 EDT
References: <955@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1110@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz)
Distribution: na
Organization: Cybermation, Inc., Cambridge, MA
Lines: 55
Summary: 

In article <3461@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> josh@topaz.UUCP (J Storrs Hall) writes:
> 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.

[Oh boy, a rhetoric contest!  My turn to counter-flame!]

It makes them fed, healthy, housed jobholders who can provide the soul
of the machine they create.  But I suppose Josh thinks it better that they
starve, sicken, freeze, and sit impotent and idle to develop qualities that
Josh certainly hasn't, if he wishes that fate upon them.  Show me a
libertarian state, and I'll show you economic feudalism, where Josh and
his ilk think they can get into the middle and upper levels.

> 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;

A gross exaggeration of the effects of socialism.  And why would these
human values exist at all in libertaria?  Where a Scrooge-like economic
upper class would quickly ammass the vast majority of the wealth,
leaving the masses to their "merciful" whims?

> where millions have been murdered in the name of economic equality, and
> the wretched survivors envy the dead.

Tell me of the millions killed in the name of economic equality in western
European socialist countries.

> 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.

It seems you haven't progressed beyond freedom or dignity because you
still don't understand them.  You seem to think your freedom to climb
to the top of the economic heap is worth being able to trample on the
backs of others, whom you'll freely grant the freedom to starve.

(Paraphrase)  How noble libertarianism, in it's majestic equality, that
both rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the privately
owned streets (without paying), sleeping under the privately owned
bridges (without paying), and coercing bread from its rightful owners!

[End of sarcasm and rhetoric.  Phew.  Good thing I don't do this too often.]
-- 

Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh