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From: mcgeer@ucbvax.ARPA (Rick McGeer)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Changing ideas
Message-ID: <10439@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 20-Sep-85 15:34:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10439
Posted: Fri Sep 20 15:34:52 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Sep-85 05:32:19 EDT
References: <8509171814.AA23399@ucbopal.Berkeley.Edu> <763@cybvax0.UUCP>
Reply-To: mcgeer@ucbvax.UUCP (Rick McGeer)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 41

In article <763@cybvax0.UUCP> mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) writes:
>In article <8509171814.AA23399@ucbopal.Berkeley.Edu> mwm@UCBOPAL.CC (Mike  Meyer, I'll be mellow when I'm dead) writes:
>> The answer to this question can be found in a 130 year old quote from Thomas
>> Macaulay (British historian, circa 1857):
>> 
>>         The day will come when (in the United States) a multitude of
>>         people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt
>>         what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On the one side is
>>         a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict
>>         observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting
>>         about the tyranny of capitalism and usurers asking why anybody
>>         should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage 
>>         while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries.
>>         Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman?
>>         . . . When Society has entered on this downward progress, either
>>         civilization or liberty must perish.
>
>A classic false dilemma.  It's amusing that someone still quotes this
>even in the face of today's societies where poverty is trivial by the
>standard's of Macaulay's time, made so by a combination of great prosperity
>and substantial redistribution.  Yet respect for rights is not significantly
>different (except perhaps in more egalitarian ways) than in his time.
>-- 
>
>Mike Huybensz		...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!cybvax0!mrh



We now have a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing your own corn to feed
your own hogs is interstate commerce, and hence subject to Federal regulation.
We have federal courts willing to rule that putting up your own antenna on your
own property is theft from a cable operator.  We have laws that require each
and every citizen and resident of the United States to reveal to the government
each detail of their financial affairs.  In Berkeley, we have an 80-year-old
woman who has gone to jail for attempting to enter her own house.

Somehow, I think people's privacy was a lot more respected during Macaulay's
time: and of all the rights that a human being possesses, that is the one
that I, at least, cherish most.

						Rick.