On 29-Jun-06, at 11:23 AM, sastry wrote:
On Thu June 29 2006 15:31, Ashish Gulhati wrote:
Nothing "democratic" about this - it's just individual property
rights being
respected.
The judiciary, and the government are two pillars of democratic
process. In
this case the pillars have worked in one way. Saying that it is not
democracy
is moot.
You miss the point. Pure "democracy" not limited by the primacy of
individual
rights would result in the private land being seized without just
compensation.
In India, given that the fundamental right to private property has been
abolished, this is a very likely outcome, though by no means a just one.
As long as the primacy of individual rights is recognized and
respected, there's
no problem with democratic decision-making about matters like co-
operative
geographic defences, mechanisms of protecting individual rights, etc.
But all
too often, as in the case of India, democracy is used as an excuse to
legalize
the violation of individual rights.
I do not doubt the soundness opf your principle - but movement has
to occur
from what we have, and not from what we should have had.
Only once we recognize where we want to head can we move towards
that objective. Using thought experiments set in idealized conditions
is simply
a tool to reason about the issues. Progress towards a true free
market requires
the dissolution or privatization of collectivist institutions, such
as state-owned
utilities and infrastructure. When that happens, roads _will_ be
privately owned.
It's analogous to removing bugs from a program. Only when all major
bugs are
fixed will the program compile and run properly. Getting from the
buggy program
to the fixed one is the task. It's no help to say that "well if those
bugs in group A
were fixed then these other ones in group B could be fixed, but as
those group A
ones are not fixed, what's the point of trying to debug the program
at all?"
#!
