At 10:39 AM 10/30/98 +1300, J. Maxwell Legg wrote:
>Michael Lorrey wrote:
>
>> No No No. You missed the most important difference. In the first
>> definition, it applied to the individual, while the second refered to
>> the 'producers' as a common group. This is the essential incompatibility
>> of libertarianism and socialism. Libertarianism declares that the prime
>> political unit is the individual, while socialism declares that the
>> primary political unity is the community or society, thus letting in the
>> buggaboo of coersion of the individual by the tyranny of the masses.
>>
>
>Can you give net refs as to how this Libertarianism doublethink came
>about where the word *political* (i.e. I think of it as describing an
>aspect of people's connections) came to focus on a node within the
>connections rather than the collective. If I were to use an analogy, the
>concepts of a jukebox, genre, playlist or database springs to mind
>words on one end of the scale where the adjective *political* would
>reside and words like individual, song or field appear at the other end.
>Thus to me a song isn't a set and an individual isn't his connections.
>My PC isn't a primary internet unit because before I used the internet
>my PC did other things. I know there are differences between adjectives
>and nouns and that confusion between the two can lead to delusional
>thinking, but even though I also know the Nazis were deluded in their
>thinking about race, etc., this plural/singular (i.e.,
>political/individual) definition mix up that you point to has me
>perplexed.
IAN: A libertarian society is a society in which a set of collective rules (political power) exist that define the rights of individuals. Robinson Crusoe has no political rights, and the example of your computer free from the net is Crusoe.
So there's no contradiction between the concepts of political rights, the individual, and libertarianism. The individual in society has political rights, more or less, but Robinson Crusoe has no polical rights.