Mike, Too bad that you didn't read the rest of my "crap" because I made the same point you just did, within the first paragraph. But if you feel that you can no longer defend your position, that is fine. That is acceptable. (Of course referring to my defense as "crap", along with all the other disperaging remarks you have made through out this thread, pretty much tells me and everone else what we need to know.) It is too bad because I really wanted to hear your response to the extent of force that government is allowed to use that I posed in my last response. Simmons This message was sent from my android phone. On Aug 20, 2010 12:24 PM, "Mike Miller" <mbmiller+l at gmail.com<mbmiller%2Bl at gmail.com>> wrote: On Fri, 20 Aug 2010, J.A. Simmons V wrote: > I was using the story to contradict your statement tha... Sorry that I can't read more of your crap. Just because some white store owner in some place decided it was in his interest to serve black customers doesn't mean that a free market "fixes" racism. Why didn't a free market end slavery? I'm sure you'll say something to the effect that the government supported slavery through laws. Of course they did, but white slave owners were allowed to have such laws -- they wanted them, so they got them. The only way to end slavery was for the government not to say, "we have no more slavery laws," but to make slavery illegal. Yes, ending slavery required government intervention, in the US and in many other nations. Please remember what my point is: It is not that government is always good, it is that government regulations are not *necessarily* bad. It depends. Sometimes they are good and we need them. I'm saying this to contradict the idea, presented by others on this list, that one ought to oppose all government regulation, even before seeing what the proposed regulation is. Government regulations and laws of all sorts can be really good or really bad and it is up to us to look at the details and make a decision about what we want to support or fight against. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Mi... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100820/05fc4656/attachment.htm