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To: Trailerpark Badass
Libertarianism subordinates laws to its nebulous "principles". Property rights under a Libertarian system would lose the fixed protections of the law, and conflicting claims would be adjudicated by the ad hoc and unpredictable application of those "principles". It's difficult to imagine anything more destructive of property rights and stable ownership.

"It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society." --Thomas Jefferson

170 posted on 09/20/2002 11:18:18 AM PDT by Roscoe
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To: Roscoe
Libertarianism subordinates laws to its nebulous "principles".

I don't agree. Certainly, some laws would be subsumed by those general principles, but how is that any different than the fact that laws now can be said to reflect, for lack of a better term, "American" principles? Perhaps an example might better help me see what you're getting at.

177 posted on 09/20/2002 11:28:32 AM PDT by Trailerpark Badass
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