Dave Hinz (in ) said:

| On Fri, 5 Aug 2005 14:18:32 -0700, lgb wrote:
|| In article ,
|| says...
|||| You'll have to take that up with Will Roger's ghost - I was
|||| quoting him :-).
|||
||| Ah. I see your Will Rogers, and have countered it with Douglass
||| Adams.
||
|| So we both learned something :-).
|
| Yup. Been known to happen.
|
|| Back to the original question - what can we all agree on? Other
|| than the above, how about:
|
|| Everyone wants their own freedom maximized, and others prevented
|| from harming, or even irritating, them.
|
| Yes. The difference is in how people think that can be successfully
| done.

I think preventing irritation is a lost cause. On the other hand,
perhaps we should consider sufficiently (irritating) bad manners
justification for assault/homicide...

|| If there are no rules, or no way to enforce the rules, those with
|| no morals and lots of brains will wind up owning everything and
|| everybody. For primitive societies, replace "brains" with brawn.
|
| Seems fair.
|
|| The trick is to keep the enforcers from becoming the very thing
|| they're supposed to prevent, which gets us back to the "power
|| corrupts" theme.
|
| Or, on my opinion, keeps us in the "make sure the little guy has the
| means to effectivly deal with the threat should it become
| necessary", which in my thinking means "let honest citizens defend
| themselves with guns".

That's the approach taken by the framers of the Constitution.

Another that's impressed me is the Swiss approach which, if I
understood correctly, requires that all new legislation pass a popular
referendum. That's not to say that the general populace is necessarily
wiser than the legislature; but it does give ordinary citizens the
final say. I like that - and would be interested in comments by Swiss
woodworkers...

Another idea that I like is limiting the number of laws that can be on
the books at any time (I'd go for fewer than 100) so that, once the
limit is reached, no new law can be added without repealing a less
valued existing law.

I think that I might also like to see a process by which laws could be
repealed by popular referendum once they're considered no longer
useful.

|| These aren't quotes, although I'm certain the thoughts aren't
|| original. I suspect some ancient Greek said the same thing a lot
|| better than I have.
|
| And hundreds of people each century since. It's not like we're
| having a new argument here.

Agreed. Interesting that in all the time humans have been around we
haven't managed to produce and implement a fair and just solution all
can agree on. I don't think that means it /can't/ be done - perhaps it
just calls for a level of social maturity we haven't yet reached. I'm
pretty sure we shouldn't stop trying...

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html