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From: dlo@drutx.UUCP (OlsonDL)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Re: Newsflash! [JoSH on Socialists]
Message-ID: <389@drutx.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 12:35:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: drutx.389
Posted: Thu Sep  5 12:35:51 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Sep-85 03:56:02 EDT
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From: gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642)
>One quick and obvious comment on JoSH's critique of socialist thought using
>the extended metaphor of the social engineer operating on society 'from the
>outside', adjusting or discarding parts of the machinery. The metaphor is 
>apt and I won't argue with it but it sounds strange coming from a libertarian
>who is proposing radical reforms which would mean adjusting and discarding
>a great deal and walking over a great many people. [I am not talking about
>Libertaria now but the means of getting there from here.]
>
>Take the dismantling of the welfare state, for example. Your starting point is
>a society in which around one third of all households receive a part of their
>income from government sources. As a matter of political reality, such 
>payments represent a form of property right no less real than the income
>from bonds inherited from a rich uncle.

"political reality"  Isn't that an oxymoron? :-)  Besides, government is not
a source of wealth.  Unlike uncles, government cannot generate wealth; it can
give only what it takes from people who produce.

>This political reality will not
>disappear through rational argument about legitimacy, force and fraud -
>or by convincing the deluded owners of these phantom property rights 
>that they are bound to be better off when the experiment is finished.
>You can only make it disappear through the very same process of social
>engineering that you find so abhorrent in socialists. Such social engineering
>would have to be underpinned by systemic arguments treating society as
>a whole, just as the dreaded socialist doctrines do.
>
>So if systemic thinking and a propensity for social surgery are inadmissible
>then socialists and libertarians are equally guilty of thought-crime.

That is almost like saying that since they both use a knife to cut open people,
there is no difference between Jack the Ripper and a heart surgeon.

>Gabor Fencsik               {ihnp4,dual,hplabs,intelca}!qantel!gabor   


These opinions belong to anyone who wants to claim them.

David Olson
..!ihnp4!drutx!dlo

"To laugh at men of sense is the privilege of fools". -- Jean de la Bruyere