From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 13:07:47 +0800
To: "William H. Geiger III" <petro@playboy.com>
Subject: Re: Another potential flaw in current economic theory... (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <v04011701b2404f900352@[206.189.103.244]>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981008211304.008dce10@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Throwing my two cans of petrol on the fire....

>>	Libertarians are just cowardly anarchists, they lack the courage of
>>their convictions to take the last step and eliminate government

Libertarians range from fat-minarchists to minimal-minarchists
to propertarian anarchists to even some non-propertarian anarchists.
Some of them insist on ideologic purity before working together
with anyone else, others don't.  Personally, I'm in the camp that
says that once we've eliminated the first 90% of the government,
we can get to work on eliminating the next 90%, and then it'll 
be a good time to argue about ideological purity because we'll
all be enough safer and more prosperous that even if we don't
get all the disparate things we want, we'll be in the position
of dodging ranting ideologues instead of cops.

Petro, mixing up minarchists and libertarians, says
>> Libertarians are just cowardly anarchists, 
>> they lack the courage of their convictions to take the last step and 
>> eliminate government altogether.
Eliminating governments is a lot harder than disavowing them.

Geiger, who's never tried large-scale anarchism, says
> Anarchism does not work. It is a pipe dream much like Communism that only
> leads to Totalitarianism.
while meanwhile claiming that the
> Constitutionally limited government
of the US would maximize personal freedom.

Choate, who's never tried large-scale free markets, says that
free markets don't work, and lead inevitably to monopoly,
and therefore we ought to use governments monopolies on force to prevent
markets from being free to prevent businessmen from forming monopolies,
as if governments could overcome temptations that businessmen can't.

Stewart, who's never tried large-scale pragmatism, though he's
watched other people try it, says that
the moral case for government is untenable, even if it's
going to take a long while before enough people stop believing
it and it goes away, and getting a Libertarian Party elected
may be a good thing to do in the meantime, just as the 
US Constitution and the Articles of Confederation were useful
though temporary stopgaps to keep the Brits out and 
slow down their Federalist replacements.





				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639