An elementary knowledge of economics excludes Adam Smith, I take it? I recommend to your study the fifth book of the Wealth of Nations, anent, as I said, his definition of the expenditures of the sovereign.
It also excludes the definition of the duties of the State in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men". According to you, the State should do nothing to insure that a citizen's life is not destroyed by disease, his liberty reduced to a mockery, his pursuit of happiness turned into a nightmare. Congratulations. Real friend of liberty you are.
You right-wing anarchists all fail to understand what the Founding Fathers said - their actual words go in one ear and out the other. And as it never occurs to you to imagine that there might be an ethical foundation to the duties of the State - a foundation expressed by Jefferson and his co-signers in language so luminously clear that only ill-will can explain its being misunderstood - you end up with the nightmare of a State that is force for its own sake; from which you escape into anarchistic dreams that will never have any reality. The dreams go away; the nightmare bully State of your own evil dreams becomes reality - because you have rejected the plain substance of Jefferson's luminous words. And that is why every bout of Republican rule ends up leaving the American state more legally omnipotent, more unbound by law or custom, and more indebted and predatory, than it has ever been before. Ayn Randism and George W.Bushism are Siamese twins, and neither can live without the other.
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Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Date: 2009-10-20 02:07 pm (UTC)It also excludes the definition of the duties of the State in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men". According to you, the State should do nothing to insure that a citizen's life is not destroyed by disease, his liberty reduced to a mockery, his pursuit of happiness turned into a nightmare. Congratulations. Real friend of liberty you are.
You right-wing anarchists all fail to understand what the Founding Fathers said - their actual words go in one ear and out the other. And as it never occurs to you to imagine that there might be an ethical foundation to the duties of the State - a foundation expressed by Jefferson and his co-signers in language so luminously clear that only ill-will can explain its being misunderstood - you end up with the nightmare of a State that is force for its own sake; from which you escape into anarchistic dreams that will never have any reality. The dreams go away; the nightmare bully State of your own evil dreams becomes reality - because you have rejected the plain substance of Jefferson's luminous words. And that is why every bout of Republican rule ends up leaving the American state more legally omnipotent, more unbound by law or custom, and more indebted and predatory, than it has ever been before. Ayn Randism and George W.Bushism are Siamese twins, and neither can live without the other.