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I think you'll find that this kind of thing started with making slavery illegal, a.k.a the actual use of force by the government to take away people's freedom t
by lazyasciiart 9y ago
I think you'll find that this kind of thing started with making slavery illegal, a.k.a the actual use of force by the government to take away people's freedom to own other humans. The idea that all authority is immoral because authority can be used for immoral purposes is a simplistic slippery slope, and frankly anyone arguing that is just arbitrarily picking one ingredient of tyranny and saying that it should be banned. Tyranny also requires people. Let's get rid of people!
- wallace_f 9y agoPermitting private individuals to enact injustice such as slavery is advocating anarchy. You should read a little bit of Locke, Hume, JSM, Jefferson on democracy... The idea is very generally that we agree to a social contract to "give up some of our liberties to protect the remainder." Nobody has a right to remove the rights of another in this tradition, and it has always been that way going back, long before the Civil War. So the state using force to protect the liberties has always been just.
- lazyasciiart 9y agoYou're right, it didn't start with the Civil War. I just thought that slavery was a nice simple example of the legitimate use of force by the government that was decried as abridging the liberties of the Confederates. I get that you don't think 'the right to own other people' is, like, a real right like 'the right to kill animals however I want' and all the other ones you object to the government regulating away, but that's your personal and very subjective line and not some foundational precept.