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From: faustus@ucbcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Exactamoondo!
Message-ID: <49@ucbcad.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Jan-85 17:25:32 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbcad.49
Posted: Fri Jan  4 17:25:32 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Jan-85 00:00:30 EST
References: <2148@umcp-cs.UUCP> <29200186@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Organization: UC Berkeley CAD Group, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 47

> >  What I have trouble with is why, out of all the possible "basic goods"
> >  people could want, libertarians seem to have a fixation for freedom
> >  from force.  Whenever a philosophical position claims that one thing
> >  is an absolute good, to be followed to the exclusion of everything
> >  else, I think that this shows there is something fundamentally wrong
> >  with it. What is wrong with saying, "coercion only in a few cases where
> >  the situation justifies it"? Or, "coercion only when the majority
> >  opinion is in favor of it"? 
> >  				-- Wayne (faustus@ucbcad)
> 
> I have trouble with Wayne's belief in the magical properties of the
> majority.  If I wish to skip church when the majority thinks everyone
> should attend, why should I be forced to comply?  If I wish to speak of
> Marxism when the majority follows John Birch, why must I be thrown in jail?
> If I wish to treat my cancer with apricot pits when the majority believes
> this to be useless, why should I be constrained?

The point is not that the majority COULD force you to do what they want,
because in any society, anarchy or whatever, they could do this (no matter
how much you claim freedom from coercion). The point is that in a reasonable
society, they will have thed sense to make use of this power very seldom,
because they will realize that they might be a mamber of the next minority
to be persecuted. This is the way most people in the US seem to think now.
(Perhaps not the most visible people, like TV evangelists, but certainly
the majority.)

> I hold this to be an "absolute good" because in a system where every person
> is free, all other goods can be obtained if people agree that they want
> them.  This is not true in other systems.

You're not giving much of an argument for this, but I guess that this has
been the point of a lot of the debate that has been going on for the
last few months... At the very least, this isn't an obvious truth.

There is another side to the coersion / freedom issue that you don't
mention, and that is that many of the things that the government forces
people to do are things that people think should be done, but will only
help with themselves if they know that others are helping too. Taxes
are like that -- most people (aside from libertarians) think that taxes
are a necessary evil, and they will pay them, provided that other people
do too. The more tax evasion there is, the more people think, why am
I doing this while other people are avoiding it, and then they also
try to avoid it. In a situation like this, the people are supporting
their own coercion, just so long as everybody else is being coerced
also.

	Wayne