From: Kharin (kharin@kharin.com)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 09:22:45 MST
"I must not be expressing all this very clearly because I certainly don't want to suggest that collective agreement on personal responsibility and accountability can be "engineered". Even less so if the government is in charge of such an endeavor. "
I apologise for pouncing on what was an offhand comment rather than a full exposition, but I must admit to a certain degree of curiousity on this point. The reason for this is that having looked at your five conditions of libertarianism (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=60;action=display;threadid=29646;start=0;boardseen=1) I noticed that I could give a (sometimes qualified) yes in all five categories. As an example, I would certainly observe that from my point of view communism failed to recognise individual achievement and therefore failed to provide any incentives for developments that could be counted as achievements. To borrow your phrasing, it distorted affairs and annulled individual responsibility.
On the other hand, much of what you are saying does seem to me to beg questions as to what counts as inherent nature prior to governmental or social interference. An anarchist or marxist might well argue that innate tendencies towards co-operation and social support are distorted by unequal power relations; something like Peter Singer's left wing Darwinism would certainly say the same today. To a large extent I'm left wondering whether this is any less well founded than a presumption of collective resources displacing individual responsibility. For example, you suggest that a sense of social obligation at the expense of personal responsibility is a product of government establishing health as a common resource. But in that case, why do assumptions of social obligation for things like welfare start as early as medieval Europe and typically fly in the face of state attempts to deny such concepts? Why did Victorian attempts to preach the virtue of self-help do nothing to prevent the development of the welfare
state?
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