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From: kfl@AI.AI.MIT.EDU.UUCP
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Message-ID: <12267766162.17.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Fri, 2-Jan-87 14:32:12 EST
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Posted: Fri Jan  2 14:32:12 1987
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    From: Richard A. Cowan <COWAN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>

    ... There have to be some laws;

  Agreed.

    there have to be roads for businesses to use.

  Right.  Which business should pay the cost of their use of.  And
which can and should be privately built, maintained, and owned.

    There have to be workweek limits, if you want to avoid slave
    conditions for labor.

  Evidence, please?

    There has to be transit, ...

  Which should be privately built, maintained, and owned.

    Libertarianism may put the individual above the State, but it
    still does not put the individual above the Corporate State.

  This doesn't make any sense.  The individual is above everything,
unless he personally chooses to place something above himself (such as
a religion).  Libertarians and objectivists all believe this.

    ... I don't see any reason why power -- this means wealth, too --
    cannot be distributed among greater numbers of hands.

  Wealth and power are totally different.
  Power should be distributed evenly among the population.  Wealth
should belong to whoever creates it, unless he decides to trade it or
to give it away.

    Trends would suggest that, if anything, power is becoming more
    concentrated.  An article in last Sunday's New York Times magazine
    on the distribution of wealth is excellent.

  Wealth and power are not the same.  Mentioning them interchangably
won't make them the same.
  I don't think it matters how concentrated wealth is.  Wealth belongs
to those who create it.  If it is routinely stolen from them, they
will stop creating it.  The bottom ten percent income group today is
wealthier than the middle class was 100 years ago.
  Even if wealth did not "trickle down", which it does, there would
still be no justification to steal from the individuals who created
the wealth.  You are free to give your wealth to the poor, and to talk
others into doing the same.  You are not free to take wealth from
others against their will, even if you have talked 99% of the
population into agreeing with you that doing so would be a good idea.

    Communications technologies ... will allow those in power to exert
    greater control over ever greater numbers of people.

  Which is one of the reasons why communitions media must be privately
owned, rather than controlled by the government as in communist
countries.

    ... New forms of organizing societies, neither completely
    socialist nor capitalist, which do not create the "forms of life"
    which traditional systems do, are necessary.

  I have seen no evidence for this.
                                                             ...Keith

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