I enjoy reading your posts and want you to continue to participate, but in this particular argument, your viewpoint has an unfortunate disadvantage in that it's just plain wrong.

Wal-Mart is indeed as much an enemy of freedom as the FDA and for similar reasons. It doesn't need to violate the law in order to be so. It merely has to provide an environment where people are sheilded from accountability for their actions and can thus act without moral constraints. Corporations and Governments share that trait. In Wal-Marts case, they manage to parley their role as the only large employer in many rural areas in order to corner the labor market and shaft their employees by discoraging them from being full-time and thus gaining the benefits one normally associates with gainful employment. It not an accident that to this day, there is only one Wal-Mart in Chicago.

But, I do not see using government to punish them simply because I dislike them so much

Are zoning ordinances and minimum wage laws "punishment" or are they simply ways that communities impose standards of behavior on their otherwise disembodied neighbors?

More highlites from LWM's link

Money that government touches spontaneously combusts, destroying the economy. Money retained by individuals grows the economy, even if literally burnt

The "Party of Oxymoron": "Individualists unite!"

Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc.

Inviolate private property is the only true measure of freedom. Those without property have the freedom to try to acquire it. If they can't, let them find somebody else's property to complain on.

But that monopoly on the use of force your so worried about....

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When corporations have their own armies....

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The absence of government is not the absence of societal organization. Most libertarians believe that societal organization arises automatically.

Oddly enough, the societal organization that arises automatically IS government. Environmentalists often make the same mistake. They assume that there is some "natural" state that would be acheived if it weren't for all the meddling of humans. Trouble is, we humans are no more or less a part of nature than any other element and that includes such things as the Federal Reserve Bank or the Gulag ot the Grand Canyon.

The innovation that the US (used to) represent is the idea that governments are instituted by men and require their continued consent in order to operate justly. Of course that insight highlights clearly just why imposing "democracy" from outside a society using guns and humvees is a recipe for disaster.

FYI - Gary North was one of the main proponents of the idea that the Y2K bug was a herald of the apocalypse. My next door neighbor even went so far as to build a shelter, install a hand-pump well and carved out a portion of his yard to grow food.

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an extraordinary institution cannot arise “naturally”, as the outcome of voluntary contractual agreements among individual property owners

Just because the individual property in question was muskets doesn't make it any less "natural"

Not quite related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy

And as corporations extend their control to people outside their employ, with DRM and increasingly prevalent, shameless propaganda and their own armed forces and even co-optation of the nominal forms of governmental authority, the truth of our next useful sentence becomes ever more manifestly clear, that sentence being:

“Corporations are governments.”

I hate to break it to you but this government monopoly on force is a figment of your imagination. If it weren't then Iraq would be totally placid as our soldiers would be the only ones with guns.

Government, like the value of currency itself is only held together by the consensus of the population to treat it as an authority able to settle conflicts. If that isn't a voluntary association then I don't know what is.

Our tribal natures combined with our newfound ability to occupy the entire planet has led to some fascinating but ultimately dangerous dynamics. Now if we can just get past the current age without blowing the whole thing up. Or (worse yet) ceding control to people who think that blowing the whole thing up is a GOOD thing!

I still happen to be in the process of developing and honing my political views. (I turn 50 this year, it's probably about time) For that reason, I find it ineresting to engage idealogues in discussion. I apologize to anyone who feels that this harms the thread.

Of how having the cover of doing something for a "greater good" can cause basic decency disappear in a puff of smoke.

Because I said so.

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