In Matthias
Bethke writes:
>Why do people always come up with that "everone could kill everyone else"
>stuff when they hear "free society"? A real *free* society implies
>abolition of money, which would solve most of the problems we have today.

To the best of my knowledge, Charles Manson was not motivated by money.
Nor has there been any financial reason for the Oklahoma City bombing,
nor the World Trade Center bombing, or the nerve gas attacks in Tokyo...

>I know of few crimes that don't have to do with money. And "no laws" is

Crimes are not about money; they're about power. For many people, the
terms are interchangable, but that is not a truism.

>not the same like "everthing allowed" - there's still other people you
>have to live with (and who care about what you do or don't).

If people respected the feelings and rights of other people, there wouldn't
be a need for laws, and it wouldn't have been necessary to invent them
in the first place. Most laws did not come about because someone thought
it would be cool to restrict the activities of others; they came about
because people exceeded all decent standards of behavior and refused to
take advice to stop. People kill, rape, rob, maim, cheat, steal, and lie
even WITH laws; I can't see them turning the other cheek overnight if the
laws went away.

>BTW: no money - no problem with patents and copyrights! You donate your
>ideas to society because you think they could be useful, not for anyones
>(in most cases: your employer's, who may be a stupid bugger with no own
>ideas at all) profit.

Money is just a symbol for work. As long as ideas have any value at all,
the principle behind patents and copyrights is valid. Without money,
a barter system would develop, or some other medium of exchange. If I
had an idea that I knew two people wanted, and these two people didn't
like each other, and the idea would give one of them an advantage over the
other, I'm sure both would find all sorts of enticements for me to give
them the idea -- if they couldn't take the idea without compensating me
for having thought of it in the first place.

>> [2] is debatable. I'll stipulate [3] for now. Since [1] isn't true,
>> you can't blame U.S. citizens for AIDS deaths in prisons. For that
>> matter, you can hardly blame society for the fact that some people rape.

>I can. Just put it the other way roud: do you think rapists are born as
>such?

I think that some people are born with tendencies toward amoralistic
behavior, and in some cases with tendencies toward violent behavior. As
for "society" creating rapists, that's hogwash; although one's environment
may influence one toward such behavior, society AS A WHOLE has nothing to
do with it, especially in a diverse country like the United States where
cultural norms vary widely even within close geographic locations. Perhaps
one's parents, friends, or acquaintances make one want to rape... but the
use of the term "society" implies that the ENTIRE population of the U.S.,
or at least the majority of it, in some fashion condones rape. I hold that
to be patently and provably false.

>> Would you rather the AIDS-infected rapists were let out to live in your town?

>I have to admit I'm not real comfortable with that thought, but at laest
>society would get a better chance to bring these people back to a decent
>life - prison is certainly not the way.

I agree that some prison reform is necessary, but abolishing prisons because
of prison rape is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'd welcome
hard scientific evidence that a better alternative exists to prisons, and
that such alternative doesn't increase the risk to society at large.
I believe that there are a few felons out there who are genuinely not
reformable, whether through mental illness or just sheer cussedness. I
could never endorse "Clockwork Orange" style reform, so I think the choice
is a fair one: Reform, and walk the straight and narrow... or stay locked
up until you do. To me, that is more humane than "Reform, or we'll alter
your consciousness until you're reformed regardless."

--
--Rob Levandowski
Computer Interest Floor associate / University of Rochester
macwhiz@cif.rochester.edu [Opinions expressed are mine, not UR's.]