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From: walton@ametek.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.politics
Subject: Personal liberty
Message-ID: <12226376415.23.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Mon, 28-Jul-86 18:11:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: RED.12226376415.23.MCGREW
Posted: Mon Jul 28 18:11:32 1986
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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 86 09:03:14 pdt
From: Steve Walton <ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu>
To: cit-vax!mx.lcs.mit.edu!kfl
Subject: Personal liberty

On the subjects of welfare and criminals:

(1) I doubt you are qualified to say what persons are capable of doing
    while under the influence of drugs.
(2) If criminals make a rational decision to commit crimes, they do so
    because it is their perception that crimes are their best route to
    improve their lot.  To the extent that societal problems cause
    racial discrimination, poor public schools and police protection
    in ghettos, and other such conditions, society is responsible for
    some crime.
(3) "being PAYED [sic] to have children".  The amount of extra welfare
    money which is received for another child is small compared to
    what it actually costs to raise the child.  Did you watch the
    NBC special on the black family which Bill Moyers did?  The
    problem is quite a bit more complex than this.
(3) "Watch TV all day and count the welfare checks" is a wonderful
    buzz phrase, calculated to produce an emotional response, but it
    has no grounds in fact.  Most welfare money goes to people who
    are the victims of circumstance, and most of them would take a job
    if they could get one.  Unfortunately, none of the jobs are in
    neighborhoods they can afford to commute or move to.  I'm also not
    sure why this phrase appeared at the end of a paragraph devoted
    to the causes of crime.

On the subject of business:

>And what if all the companies engaged in a given line of
>business were to simultaneously refuse to do business unless they get
>more profits?  This would be prosecuted under the anti-trust laws, of
>course.  What if instead of doing so, the government were to penalize
>any individual who does business with a company that does NOT join in
>the work stoppage?  Sound bizarre?  Well, it's the symmetrical analog
>of the current pro-labor union laws.

Read your history, Mr. Lynch.  I recommend William Manchester's "The
Glory and the Dream."  The employer-employee relationship is NOT sym-
metrical in the absence of unions, because employers can deprive an
employee of his/her livelihood, but an individual employee cannot do
the same to an employer.  When individual workers expressed political
views with which their employers disagreed, they were fired.  When
workers attempted to exercise their right to freely assemble by
forming unions, the government shot them.

Your ideal libertarian free market only exists in cases where it is
easy to enter a new line of work if profits (wages) cease in an old
one.  This isn't true in the real world--ask any farmer or steel-mill
owner or worker living in an isolated company town.  The citizens of
the US decided during the New Deal that it was a proper function of
government to provide minimum protection to people trapped by cir-
cumstances beyond their control--in the words of George Will, FDR
saved capitalism by tempering its excesses.

Steve Walton
ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu
ucbvax!sun!megatest!ametek!walton
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