> This has now been true for over a century, and as early as 1855 J. S. Mill could say (see my John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor [London and Chicago, 1951], p. 216) that "almost all the projects of social reformers of these days are really liberticide."
> I like the document title, though. "Microsoft Word - Document1". Very classy.
Textbook example of an ad homenim.
When an area is sparsely populated it doesn't matter as much how people behave. They aren't harming other people because there are none around.
As the population density increases the same actions like emitting pollution of one kind or another (air, sound, light, etc...) becomes a problem and all of the other people come together to ask you to stop, thus infringing on your liberties.
All of society is just people trying to get along with your neighbors. The more people you live near with the harder it is to stay on good relations with all of them. As the population continues to grow it becomes increasingly difficult to not live near other people, effectively impossible for an ever growing percentage of the population.
Some of this may even partially explain the rural/urban divide in politics.
You've very insight-fully described the policy debate/disagreement between people in pretty much any liberal democracy. Respecting my property rights is actually an infringement on your liberty. Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty. What's often lost in the conversation on liberty is that everyone agrees that its a matter of degree. IE -- everyone having absolute liberty isn't viable. Absolute liberty would effectively just be an anarchy. Its just a matter of where the lines are. But somehow the conversation ends up getting reduced absolutes on both sides.
No, disrespecting other people's property rights is an infringement on their liberty. You being told not to disrespect other people's rights is NOT an infringement on your liberty.
> Not being able to legally kill me without some just cause is also an infringement on your liberty
WTF?
> everyone agrees that its a matter of degree
Oh how I wish that were true. Not even most people can agree on that.
Except sometimes the liberty being killed is my freedom to die at the age of 40 of black lung because I have spent 30 years working in a coal mine just so I could earn enough company scrip to buy enough food from my employer to feed my family.
Expanding it out to reveal that JS Mill wrote it in a letter just feels like an appeal to authority (if we are to be so "debate" about it).
Utter nonsense, we've had escalating financial de-regulation since 1970's, we removed Usury laws, Interest Rate Ceilings, Repealed Glass-Steagall, etc.
Maybe if we didn't, house prices would still be suborbital.
https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/dereg-timeline-2...
This sentence is an ad hominim: I don't think you know what "ad homenim" [sic] means.
Saying something about the way someone presented their argument? That's not an ad hominim.