From death comes life. And perhaps, sometimes, by accident, from government actions could come good things. That isn't an endorsement of government any more than love of life is a good justification to go around killing indiscriminately. None of us, individually or collectively, is wise enough to exercise that power and claim we are doing it for the good of life.
Someone posted, on one of my rather old columns, the same old tired (and incorrect) just-so tale about how the government invented the internet that we liberty-lovers now so mean-spiritedly use to speak out against the government.
Even if this were correct, so what? Guns that were invented by Hitler's military contractors can now be used for fun and for self-defense. This doesn't mean we are "lucky" that Hitler came to power, or that we owe him anything for "giving us" these guns.
Many types of powerful poison have medicinal uses. Should you run right out and drink or inject yourself with poison as soon as you discover that fact? Not unless you are an authoritarian.
The commenter then compounds his error by claiming that the same government that blessed us with the invention of the internet guarantees our freedom of speech. Seriously? Who else besides government has been a credible threat to freedom of speech- or any other rights for that matter- in recent history?
I have never had any neighbor try to kidnap, kill, or "fine" me for exercising any of my rights. Never has an independent migrant- excuse me- an "illegal immigrant" tried to infringe on any of my rights. I have never had any person from any of the countries the US government is so busy attacking, invading, and occupying try to stop me from exercising even one of my rights. On the other hand I have never had even one agent of the government take any action other than try to prevent me from experiencing liberty in some meaningful way.
The only threat to my individual liberty, besides perhaps myself, is, and always has been, the government that the commenter claims is "guaranteeing" my freedoms. And he calls libertarians the "dumb bells"!
Comments
...and the internet was NOT invented by government.
Two guys in an experiment figured it out.
It was USED by the government as a tactic to avoid communication loss in case of nuclear war - this project was called DARPA.
When the government ended the project, it was taken over by a group of enthusiasts and that is what became the "internet" we know today.
The inter-networking protocol and transfer control protocol were developed for DARPA. The part of the Internet that resulted from that work was called mil-net. The military network continues to this day. It is not what you use every day, though.
In fact, the original mil-net had a very small number of gateways to research universities that did baby killing research for the military. Gateways to commercial networks were forbidden. Compuserve, beginning about 1973, developed a completely parallel system, using the published TCP/IP protocols. But, no, they weren't on DARPAnet, and essentially no civilians were, either. What we use today is the robust, rapidly reconfiguring private commercial Internet.
When I first encountered the term "baby shower" it sounded like that old chestnut "raining cats and dogs." Imagine what kind of an umbrella you'd need if it really were raining babies!
When government was spending $2 trillion on Vietnam, they were likely to do something good
...just by accident.
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