CompuServe Thread

Todd: I have been out of town for the last week, but I see that the lapse of time has not calmed your ire. I think that Doug correctly restate what I was about, although I don't believe I could have stated myself more clearly: there are no objectionable people, only objectionable ideas. I hope you are not so intolerant of others ideas that you would persist in mischaracterizing them or that you would seek to censor them. (Reminds me of my younger sister, who would claim that her ears are closed when she did not want to hear and respond to something.) For my part, I'm quite comfortable in what I have said here, both in style and in content. I, for one, don't engage in ad hominems; I was criticizing proposed regulations on political and epistemological grounds. I simply reject the pretense of political elites (or even sometimes political majorities) to have *knowledge* of what the common good is. I think putting ugly labels on ideas (rather than people) is entirely fair game for the reasons I have given you. My hope is that you or whoever would see a connection between the idea at issue and its logical corollary or consequence. Putting discretionary control over public resources into the hands of an independent agency that is not beholden to anyone and often has its own ideological agenda naturally suggests the analogy with totalitarian states on the right and the left. If you disagree, that's honky dory with me. If I'm wrong (which I doubt), I'll eat my words. I've done it before, and they have most digestible!! I have never said or implied that no one has the right to own land. IF I had, then it might actually have made sense to say that anyone finding a specimen on land could keep it, sell it, etc. But I didn't say it at all. I frankly think that the government ought not be in the business of land ownership and development (or conservatorship). You may think that government officials often act in the best interest of the governed. Most of the time, most of them do. When some don't, there is very little chance of redress because of doctrines of soverign immunity and discretionary agency function. The situation is very different in the private sphere of life in which personal and property harms are freely actionable, and people have a reasonable chance of vindicating their rights. Governmental solutions are, to be sure, sometimes unavoidable. What I, and I think Lanny, John, and Doug have been saying here is that we need to assure ourselves that 1. there really is a problem, 2. there is no private sphere answer for the putative problem,