Quoth Brian Holtz: ----- [America's constitutional republican framework] has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries -----
Do you care to provide any actual evidence for that mantra -- at least for the "almost monotonically" part? ----- we are among the most economically free nations in the world ----- The inmates of a minimum-security prison camp are among the "most free" inmates in the US justice system, especially as compared to the inmates of supermax facilities or maximum-security penitentaries, too. It does not follow from that that either described population is free. ----- I dare you to stand next to me in front of ANY Libertarian audience and say: "to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net of sustenance and shelter for fellow community members facing death due to indigence or misfortune, then the state nevertheless should NOT finance such a safety net through a uniform system of marginal taxation on resource use, negative externalities, and land value, as decided under the rule of law by a maximally-decentralized democratic federal constitutional republic." ---- Sure, I can do that. But I'll do it in English: "To the extent that you and I decline to act as good Samaritans, then the state should nevertheless not steal from us on the pretense of making good our alleged deficit of good Samaritanism. Barbarism is not a solution to callousness." ----- If your "tortured prose" criticism had any substance at all, you could pick a sentence or paragraph of mine, and show how it could say the same thing(s) without being "tortured". Can you? ----- I just did. Tom Knapp
