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To: Lucky Dog

Are not establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare “traditional values?” Is establishing a constitution which specifies executive, legislative and judicial branches to carry out the traditional values, so specified, supporting them?

How are these tradintional values, when we were the first in history to promulgate them?

The VALUE was freedom, period, with as limited a Govt as could be conceived, to stay OUT of the people's way in their own pursuit of happiness, and be as burdenless as possible.

Check those excellent links I posted earlier.

What we now have is nearly 180 degrees from it.


60 posted on 05/17/2006 7:05:02 AM PDT by Marxbites (Freedom is the negation of Govt to the maximum extent possible. Today, Govt is the economy's virus.)
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To: Marxbites
How are these tradintional values[establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare, etc.], when we were the first in history to promulgate them?

From post 54:

Let’s see… establishing justice… I seem to recall something about “an eye for eye” in a document thousands of years older than the US Constitution as a concept of justice. Maybe there was something about that concept of justice addressed in English Common Law or perhaps the Magna Carta or the Mayflower Compact or… Naw… that couldn’t make establishing justice a traditional value, could it?

….

Let’s see… there was democracy invented in Greece a few thousand years earlier, a republic invented in Rome a couple of thousand years earlier, a republic in England about a century earlier, English common law, the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact, the British Parliament, the Articles of Confederation, the writings of John Locke, the governments and charters of the various colonies prior to the revolution… .the US Constitution couldn’t have had a basis in any of those things.
Could it?

The VALUE was freedom, period…

To paraphrase one of the founding fathers: freedom without restraint is license not liberty. Consequently, it would appear that the VALUE cherished by our founders was not freedom, rather it was “liberty.” However, beyond this issue, liberty was not the only value sought by our founders and enshrined in our system of government: conflict resolution with justice is most certainly another one among others.

From post 14:

The classic case of conflict of individual liberties is the individual enjoyment of private property. If a neighbor’s enjoyment of his or her property involves an activity that impairs the enjoyment of my property, whose rights are to be paramount? For example, suppose my neighbor enjoys playing loud music, but I enjoy peace and quiet. Must my neighbor cease enjoying his or her right to do whatever he or she chooses on his or her own property so that I can enjoy whatever I choose on my own property? The foregoing is but one of many potential conflicts in individual liberties and rights that must be balanced.

Even pure libertarians agree that some type of government must be called upon to coercively balance individual rights based upon certain principles. The quarrel then becomes on what principles should this coercive power be founded and exactly how should that coercive force be wielded.…


Could it be that to “balance individual rights based upon certain principles” is to “establish justice?” Would that not be a function of government?

Check those excellent links I posted earlier.

Beyond the original post and http://mises.org:88/Sophocleus I found none of those excellent links to which you refer. Perhaps, I just over looked it. Could you cite the post number in which you cited those links?

What we now have is nearly 180 degrees from it.

I have not commented on “what we have now” as being the most desirable of situations. In fact, I have grave misgivings about “what we have now” in terms of government. However, libertarianism (note the lack of a capital) must be tempered with practicality if it is to be a viable political force (see post 14).
63 posted on 05/17/2006 7:41:25 AM PDT by Lucky Dog
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