[Sherman Logan]

You keep shifting the basis of your argument. I thought you wanted to discuss the morality of wealth, capital and the income derived from it.

Now all of a sudden we’re talking about the common law and equity. I’m well aware there exists established law on these issues. But law, as no doubt you are aware, does not necessarily coincide with morality. Law should grow out of morality, but it doesn’t always happen.

Other societies have had law quite different on these issues, without necessarily infringing on the natural laws of morality and ethics.

It is the height of cultural arrogance to assume that one’s own culture has expressed for all time the natural law, such that any differing from it must be immoral.

[JasonC]

It is culture since Roman times, and its is the bedrock principle of conservatism, as every reader of Edmund Burke knows. The principle that ideology and politics trump prescription is the characteristic doctrine of the radical looters of "the dark place", as everyone who has ever attended a meeting of the Ancient and Honorable Edmund Burke Society could tell you. In short you wouldn't know conservatism if it bit you - which, guess what, it has.