Subject:
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Re: Libertarian stuff (Was: Re: Art Debate Was: [Re: Swearing?])
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 13 Jan 2000 20:38:19 GMT
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Viewed:
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1648 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Frank Filz writes:
> You keep bringing up spot examples of where people have gone bad, but
> that doesn't prove that over all humans are bad. And besides, if humans
> are in general incapable of doing good, how do you expect any government
> of any sort to work? The government is just made up of people. It CAN
> NOT be better than the people who make it up. Libertopia is NOT perfect,
> NO system can be.
Nor am I asserting that all humans are bad--I'm merely pointing out that
people's behavior will expand, so to speak, to fill the boundaries allowed to
them. In addition, you've given spot examples to shore up your argument as
well--how can you determine that overall humans are good based on anecdotal
evidence? Further, a government can be better than the people who make it up,
as long as a system of checks-and-balances exists to prevent any one
individual from exerting an inappropriate effect over the whole.
As far as how a government could work, here's an analogy:
If your appendix needed to come out, you wouldn't have me perform the
surgery on you, since I'm not trained to do it. That's not to say you
wouldn't have *someone* do it, but that someone would have to be (I hope) well-
trained. Likewise, even though I believe that many people will, given the
chance, often try to get away with as much as possible, there are some who
through training, experience, or even just personal responsibility are
equipped to oversee aspects of society where supervision is beneficial. I'm
not saying that *I'm* that person, but I don't deny that there are people
capable of maintaing such a position honorably and without corruption.
I don't think these characteristics are in-born, nor are they available only
to a select few, but some demonstrate them and others do not.
By the way, the Penn State "riot" resulted from a bunch of people in a
fairly conservative Pennsylvania town deciding it would be fun to destroy
property, light fires in the street, and generally cause as much chaos as
possible for no other reason than because it was late at night. It wasn't
because of a corrupt police force, or because they were too many restrictions
of freedom. These weren't bad people, and they weren't all students, so
simple student rowdiness can't have been the cause. In retrospect, having
been there, it was just a bunch of people, who otherwise might have been
responsible and upstanding, acting like idiots when they had the chance.
Dave!
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