Quote:
Originally Posted by classicman
And why are we therefore responsible for fixing it. The sooner we stop enabling the sooner it'll stop. Is that your plan?
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No. Because I can't honestly say I've got one. So that sure as hell wouldn't be it. Unfortunately, to be sure.
No, I do not think it falls to us to be "responsible for fixing it." Not as an exertion of the US national will, I mean. From a libertarian point of view, it's a frightful ethical dilemma: property rights are regarded as something sacred and not to be arbitrarily messed with by any entity, but a concentration of all property in the hands of the favored few is clearly the road to stagnated poverty also. That's the very thing the
ilegales trek north to escape, and they labor away diligently once they've gotten here (yes, I'm speaking only in generalities -- well-attested ones) to keep free of that. This very thing is all over Oxnard, and all over the inhabited end of Ventura County generally.
It may be summed up as "Regulations be damned,
!hay que vivir!" It is hard to gainsay that. But they wouldn't have to come north if they had anything like opportunity down south, would they? Central American countries aren't a solution; they are no more libertarian, no more packed with smallholders, than Mexico is. Ain't a livin' down there either.
And we libertarians don't
like fixing problems by force: it isn't fair to the people with property now to rape it from them and parcel it out to others whose qualification for receiving it is they didn't have any previously, and hence it wasn't fair to them. WTF kind of qualification is that, eh? Quite enough to get the libertarian philosopher to disparage "fairness" as any proper policy driver. Unfortunately, it also discourages the libertarian thinker from attaining to any fix for the economic problem at all, and how friggin' useless is that? About all we end up doing is damning and blasting latifundianism as a stagnating force: that's a lot more being said than being done. The old but apt punchline about "33 1/3 revolutions per minute" doesn't seem to have done or meant enough to fix the problem of property and prosperity either.