I'm bad with names, but I have a feeling we've had this conversation before. There's something eerily familiar about your religious certainty that nothing would work right in this world without a bureaucrat and a cop handy to pull levers and shoot bad guys.
Without the power of the state to compel performance of contracts or obedience to adjudicated decision, people would welch on contracts and NOT PAY.
Bravo Sierra. People are sinful, so they will indeed lie, cheat and steal when they think they can get away with it--but usually they can't, and the government is not the primary reason. Companies that bilk their customers quickly end up with no customers. We have a word for that; we call it "out of business".
There is freedom of association. There never was freedom to abuse any freedom.
Sorta like there's free speech, but not hate speech? I can associate freely, as long as I don't stop associating with the people you want me to? That's big of you, herr kommisar.
You don't have to admit Catholics or blacks into your house, unless you hold open the doors of your house to commerce and become a public inn. Then you DO. Which is as it should be.
You're saying if I decide to do business with Joe, it's right and proper for a bureaucrat and a cop to come along and force me to do business with Frank, Bill and Mary as well? And you base this on the belief that doing business with whom I wish is "abusing my freedom"? I don't deserve my freedom if I plan to use it a little too freely for your tastes? Yup. I think we have had this conversation before, and I realized that you were visiting from DU. But once again, you had me going for a while.
Me, visiting from DU?
Ha!
Not at all, sir.
I am a traditionalist. I believe in our system of liberty in law. You are arguing that liberty exists without law.
And I think you are dead wrong on that score.
Indeed, I expect that without the law and the willingness of people to enforce it, you would be dead period.
As would a good many of us.
Our law has never, ever allowed people to do absolutely anything they wanted, say abolutely anything they wanted, buy and sell absolutely anything they wanted, or conduct business absolutely anyway they wanted. And wisely so.
As far back as you would like to go, there have always been very sharp moral limitations on virtually every sort of abuse.
Now, it's clear that you don't like the idea of any such limitations, which is your prerogative. To argue that they DO NOT exist, or historically DID NOT exist is, well, erroneous. They do. They did.
The basis for your resistance to the concept of the rule of law doesn't lie in history. So where does it lie? On what general principle? That your liberty is completely unlimited, limited only by your own sovereign will?