From: "bill.stewart@pobox.com" <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 1997 11:19:57 +0800
To: Colin Rafferty <fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: It's the usual Libertarians-vs-Statists flame war!  Re: Freedom Forum report on the State of the First Amendment
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19971223190836.006f87c0@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



We're pretty far off topic for both fight-censorship and cypherpunks,
aren't we?  There's a bit more excuse on fight-censorship, since
censoring racists vs. freely publishing hate speech is a core issue there;
the cypherpunks content is mostly limited to "In cypherspace, nobody can
hear you flame" and technologies for protecting freedom of speech and
association from censors, racists, and other statists.

Colin Rafferty writes:
>>> If you want to live in a hut in Montana and shelter yourself from the
>>> real world, feel free.  Otherwise, it may be a good idea to check out
>>> social theories from the last hundred years.

There've been a number of them.  Socialism.  Fascism.  Libertarianism.
Randroidism.  Existentialism.  Non-existentialism.  Nudism.  Pick several :-)

Some of those social theories say it's a good idea to hire guys in 
blue suits to beat up people who are acting in ways you consider rude,
while others think you have the duty to beat them up yourself,
or to protest non-violently, or to keep silent if it's not your business, 
or to insult them behind their backs, or to organize boycotts.  
In uncivilized countries, the blue-suiters carry guns to encourage rude 
people to allow themselves to be beaten up; more civilized liberal countries 
issue them clubs instead so the beating gets done up close and personal.

Personally, I think that freedom of association is a critical part of
a civilized society, and that people who hire thugs to beat up racists
are just as rude as the racists they're having beaten up; 
hiring quieter thugs who'll let the rude people chicken out and just
hand over their money and close their stores instead of being beaten
is also rude, but you can make a lot more profit that way and 
keep your liberal conscience satisfied that you're stopping rudeness.

(I hope it should be obvious, but I apply the same rhetoric to people
whose idea of rudeness is using rude words or smoking rude plants
or associating with the wrong color of people or engaging in
voluntary rude activities with the wrong people.  However, 
unlike liberals, it's hard to make that kind of people feel _guilty_
about being rude, only embarassed, and they tend to respond by
making more rude laws as an excuse to beat you up...)

William H Geiger (not to let his statist ranting off the hook either) 
is alleged to have written:
>> Please explain to me where in the Constitution the government is
>> given the power to determine who I *must* associate with?? 
and Colin replies
>Given that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was upheld as Constitutional, I
>would generally use that as an argument.

The much-abused Commerce Clause is probably more useful for this argument.
Original intent or not, it's been quite effective.

The Constitution was, after all, a political compromise between people 
ranging from near-anarchists to moderate statists, slaveowners,
currency-fiaters, hard-money advocates, and non-government-money advocates,
free traders and drug smugglers, trade-taxers and trade-monopolizers,
religious, anti-religious, and a while raft of other positions.
It was far from morally perfect even on the issues where the writers
were far-thinking enough to imagine how their words might get twisted.

Keeping the states from regulating interstate commerce was a good idea,
not that the Commerce Clause appears to have done that very well,
but allowing the Feds to regulate it was, in my opinion, a serious mistake
even if the Feds had limited their control to real interstate commerce.
The previous confederation that the Constitution usurped wasn't perfect,
and allowed a more distributed statism rather than the centripetal statism
that replaced it.  Sure, if the Constitution _doesn't_ allows the Feds
to do something, they definitely shouldn't, but even if it _does_,
that doesn't mean it's even vaguely ok - it just means that the
bunch of politicians in Philadelphia agreed on it and went home
and talked their fellow politicians into buying the package.
Spooner argued that not only did they not have the right to do so, 
but that even if they had it wouldn't have been binding in his day, 
much less ours.

And by the way, none of this has to do with whether governments can
require corporations not to have their employees act rudely.
Corporations are a fictional creature whose existence is a favor
from the government to the owners, and they can tie whatever strings
they want to onto the favor when they grant it.  Whether granting
favors to bunches of owners is a State or Federal job,
or whether it's Nobody's job, the owners can do what they're told
or have their favor vanish in a puff of greasy orange smoke
and still not have a cause of action for complaining about it.
Companies run by partnerships and the business activities of
individuals are a separate issue, unless they're selling to the 
government, which also makes them fair game.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639