Oh, and a helluva read, too, is: Simon Seabag Montefiore’s,”Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar”(Knopf,2003). Insider-Archived-Personal stuff that blew the socks off this old Stalin ‘junky’s feet. Horrifically fascinating.

sorry

“The full power of centralized government”–this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.

This is the difference between planning in theory, and planning in practice. Governments necessarily have to use force and coercion in order to implement their schemes, and moreover:

For three decades, we’ve sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.

This right here is what makes it tyrannical, all things can be tested in reality, and when we test the theory of planning vs the practice of planning, planners treat individuals very, very poorly. Because when governments have usurped that much power over the people they govern, they don’t stop ruining peoples lives. If the plan fails, the planners keep finding an excuses and devise new schemes in what becomes one big never-ending destructive path – The Road to Serfdom.

And Pg.85: “The distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized all the way up: everyone except Stalin.” And Amis again quotes Figes:”The Bolshevik programme was based on the ideals of the Enlightenment–it stemmed from Kant as much as from Marx–which makes Western liberals, even in this age of postmodernism, sympathise with it, or at least obliges us to try and understand it, even if we do not share its political goals; whereas the Nazi efforts to ‘improve mankind,’ whether through eugenics or genocide, spat in the face of the Enlightenment and can only fill us with revulsion.”

Added note by NCS: Occam, I’ve immersed myself in the Nazi horrors and their machinery of of death and the Soviet Communists–mostly under Stalin, but also Lenin–for about 4.5 decades, off & on. For me, the Soviet Terrors–whether gulag, Terror Famine, mass executions, deportation of entire populations, etc–is far more chilling, if such can be compared and measured. There are several reasons(time now doesn’t permit), but suffice that if you will read the small book discussed here by N-Neocon, it covers the reasons I hav..breathtakingly.

I certainly don’t say the state is there for the purpose of limiting freedom. I have not been speaking of the state’s motives or reasons or goals. I am saying that government de facto limits some freedoms, certainly with the goal of preserving the freedom of (as you say) “the innocent to be unmolested.” I am in agreement on that.

And by the way I haven’t been speaking of states and nations doing this so much as local governments, that is municipalities (or states in the sense of New York, Massachusetts, etc). It is municipalities which have the police actions of which I’ve been speaking, and I was referring to that here and here.

and the idea that absolute is not possible is also false… it is possible… just not in a soviet society where such arguments are not allowed full flower.

the point was that your thinking in lines and rules and so on… which was not the founders way.. thats the soviet central planners philip dru way..

the founders way was to give you complete freedom and only limit you when your actions limited someone else… or took theirs..

ie… you have absolute freedom except where your actions cost someone else theirs.

the other way you get:
show me the man and i will show you the crime…
read below as below is the idea of limiting freedom… and the absurd argument you took…

which was given to you long ago – in the US by feminists… ie. the progressives promise you freedom without responsiblitity… how so?

so the argument shifted for women and feminists to the state taking the oppressors freedom away, and granting extra freedom… (violating equality before the law, and working towards soviet equality of outcome!)

so a long time ago.. this changed… because under the old system, they had no candy to give you…. ie. how can you be granted more freedom when you had freedom to act BUT DIDNT ACT… (which is why when they decided to act, they were not stopped… as it would be if the claims were valid).

how could they give women the candy of more freedom if they didnt take away someone elses? and how could they do that if they didnt convince you that they dispense freedom?

being lenin and stalin lovers, is it all that hard to see they took the position of rationing freedom? appling it unequally (ie they get to bless or curse by their design)… and so on.

in the old system, based on the old view, all that is not possible and the public would resist.

under the new, the one your speaking, all that is possible and more.. .and the victims believe its not, that they can stop it when they have no families, no lineage.. they work and the state gets their kids and they dont even know what they are teaching…

nope…
i am talking reality, not philosophy.
where metaphysics and material meet.

study the philosophy behind these views and note where they switched them on you.

Human rights in the Soviet Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Soviet_Union

and if your secular you may not know where these ideas come from and that our being a christian judaic place MATTERS.

let me point out that it derives from the fact that there is TRUTH that is apart from us. that there are facts and principals that are not under our control. the universe is real and outside us.

ie… TRUTH is a principal of reality…

you say that the state is there to declare murder… to limit freedom.. is THAT why?
or was it to prevent free people from taking actions that when a mistake costed more their freedom?

ie. did they do it to limit freedom, or to preserve the freedom of the innocent to be unmolested and unpunished by other free people that accuse them?

if your soviet. its the first
if your a founding father type american, its the latter.
[edited for length by n-n]

Let me try one more time: since societies always have laws and rules that by definition must limit the liberty of their members, the trick is where to draw the line.

There is no way not to limit liberty in some way (if only, for example, to prevent theft and murder). So everything is a question of deciding how much limitation is too much. I think we have gone way too far in the US, although other countries have gone much further, to limit liberty. But it is still always a question of where to draw the line. It is not possible to be absolutist about it. I believe that even anarchists ordinarily acknowledge that the state (especially at the local level) needs to have a police function

so you accept the idea of total freedom that the left conditions us for?

what happened to the idea of free to swing your arms as long as you dont hit someone?

you see… we have already past that line… smoking laws… gender laws… race laws.. affirmative action… forced sterilization etc.

no.. you are missing MY point as my point comes from the large work on this we no longer know (and i thought you did)

only the communists argue to absurdism total freedom.. no one argues that but anarchists.

but your missing the point…
and i know you are since our culture has changed from that classical point to the point they no longer know the arguments that established it.

your first sentence is the soviet argument almost direct from Lenin Stalin and Trotsky..

that governments exist to ration freedom

when has anyone ever argued the straw man left argument of anarchy? why use that on me?

your arguing totalitarianism or nothing…
and don’t even know that.

Let me try one more time: since societies always have laws and rules that by definition must limit the liberty of their members, the trick is where to draw the line.

ok… WHAT freedoms are you talking about limiting? your examples were things like murder, which cost someone else their freedom…

so, what freedom, that does not cost someone else theirs, does the state limit?

i never argued the idea of total freedom to go out and murder your boss, rape his daughter, etc.

you are a totalitarian…
and have missed the whole point of the constitution.

that a government is instituted among men to limit GOVERNMENT which seeks to take all our freedoms.

so no.. i didnt miss anything.
i know the difference between what yous aid and what the constitution is and what you said is directly out of the soviet constitutions i told you to read which you never did.

There is no way not to limit liberty in some way (if only, for example, to prevent theft and murder).

the ONLY people that made that argument are the soviets… so you dont even know the history of that line of thought…

not only that… but you missed that the state does not limit your freedom, it punishes you for costing someone else theirs.

so you have reversed our whole legal basis to a soviet one and dont know it. and are telling me that this is about freedom to murder..

well, put your way, the state is only reserving the freedom to murder to itself..

under my way, the state cant murder either!!!

your point is just one of who gets to do what, and the state decided, and people have no say..
[edited for length by n-n]

But such laws are simultaneously a protection of the personal liberty of the victim-individual to live his life and be secure in his personal possessions.

Lack of all such rules would be chaotic, but each person would have the liberty to do whatever he wanted to everybody else, and each person would also have the liberty to protect himself in whatever way he saw fit.

Not a course of action I’m advocating, by the way.

Let’s take a more relevant example: second-hand smoke. Let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it is proven that second-hand smoke harms the health of non-smokers in the vicinity (I don’t think it actually is proven, although it might be the case, but let’s just say it is for the sake of the discussion). Smokers have liberty to smoke; smoking is not forbidden. But where should they be allowed to smoke? When they’re alone, of course. But what about public places?

A libertarian (which I mostly am) might say that they should be allowed to smoke anywhere, and let the market determine the rest. In other words, if a restaurant allows smoking and people want that, they’ll frequent that restaurant. If a restaurant bans smoking, the people who want it banned will patronize that restaurant.

But what about public places you can’t avoid? Schools, airports, airplanes, etc? It goes on and one, with lots of complications. Do you protect the liberty of the smoker, or the liberty of the non-smoker to go to public places without becoming ill? And that’s just one tiny example. Some people would never have the government ban smoking anywhere (even hospitals?) because it’s too much of an intrusion on liberty, but would leave it to be done on an individual institutional basis.