Re: [twuug] Space Shuttle Columbia blows up on reentry!

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 11:47:53AM -0500, James wrote:

> The police practice legalized extortion only when they enforce tax laws that 
> collect money for anything other than the protection of our collective right 
> to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our government was created to 
> protect these rights and any funds collected to do anything other than this 
> function could safely be said to have been extorted from those collected 
> from.

That's not the only purpose of our government.  Life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness are our rights.  The intended role of government
was defined at the time, for the time, and modification was allowed to
account for future changes.

Even the Founding Fathers who served as president went beyond the
limitations you suggest, this I cannot imagine they meant what you seem
to have gotten out of it.

> God forbid I should think of myself. This is the problem with socialism,
> nobody has enough value individually to be worth anything. 

Individual value is under attack from much more than socialism.  All forms
of governent have been guilty of this when the leadership fails to do
its job.  Likewise, some goverments which were quite unlike our own did
a very good job of preserving the sense of the individual.

This is the one great failing of our government: it still requires 
leaders to be good leaders.  It's no more immune to this problem than
any other.

In fact, it was designed precisely with this failure in mind, as it
was supposed to garantee we could replace bad leaders.

Unfortunatley we have allowed changes that make this difficult.

Also, you need to seperate socialism as a form of government and socialism
as it pertains to social unity.

The formation of the United States was a social act, involving compromises
of individual liberty for common cause.

> It is because of this apalling disregard for the individual that the
> citizens of socialist countries suffer so. 

Individuals suffer everywhere due to bad leadership, regardless of the
form of government.

Even some socialist nations are as free to replace their leaders as we
are, and equally bad at asserting those rights.

While I don't agree with a lot of other government forms, I think it's
foolish to think that that alone is what determines how things go.

-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza____________________s h a n n o n@wido !SPAM maker.com


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