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To: Final Authority
We are merely less repressed than many other nations, to my knowledge there is no truly free country on the Earth and probably there never has been or will be.
17 posted on 09/16/2003 6:49:25 AM PDT by RipSawyer (Mercy on a pore boy lemme have a dollar bill!)
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To: RipSawyer
Read about Iceland in the middle ages: it was quite a bit closer than anything now, including America. David Friedman talks about it in The Machinery Of Freedom. There were many nice features of the society; among other things, one interesting aspect was that being adjudicated the victim of a crime was property, in that if a poor person was wronged by a rich one, the poor one can sue the rich, but can't exactly go out and collect. However, the poor person could sell his claim to a different rich person, disclaiming any future interest in the case, and then the other rich one could collect from the first rich guy; there were no government agents to seize your house, it was all done privately. Another interesting aspect was that one officer of the government would go to a hearing every so often, about once a year or every other year, and recite from memory the entire set of laws. If he missed something, you could object and there was some sanction that I don't recall, but if he missed something and no one objected, the missed law was stricken from the books! Basically, it was a demonstration that one person could know every law they were expected to abide by.

(Eventually, the crime rate rose "so much" that they asked a king to take over. That crime rate was quite a bit less than what is in America today.)

18 posted on 09/16/2003 7:52:03 AM PDT by coloradan
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