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To: headsonpikes
Limiting the size and scope of government is our only protection against these 'malefactors'.

Agreed, though your use of quotation marks in the whole of the post puzzles me...what is wrong with saying that something is 'wrong?'

Back to the topic at hand: true, evil men will break laws, and clever evil men will make laws they can use and break at will with "the majesty of the state to defend them." Might that be a matter of prudence--that men can't be trusted not to abuse power reliably enough to found a polis on it, and that "moral suasion" is futile? If the basis of the laws themselves is "interest"--by which I take it you mean, "it is to my advantage to be free from living in fear of my fellows trying to steal from and kill me, and thus to my advantage to obey the law"--and not that stealing and killing is simply wrong and shouldn't be done save in the most unusual circumstances, then what reason would there be at the individual level to obey the law, or at the level of potential governor to uphold it? Why shouldn't we screw everybody else whenever we can get away with it?

And if the answer to that is, "We should!" then I propose that such a nation is in dire straits indeed, limited government or no.

78 posted on 02/07/2002 12:58:06 PM PST by Pistias
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To: Pistias
You misunderstand me, sir.

I was speaking not of the common law 'wrongs' of assault, theft, etc., but of the politically-engineered crimes executed by shaping the varius bodies of administrative and other laws to further 'private interest'.

The so-called 'War on Drugs', for instance, is only explicable by acknowledging the power of criminal syndicates and other profiteers of human misery to warp the law for private benefit.

88 posted on 02/07/2002 1:24:30 PM PST by headsonpikes
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