Tordmor

Yes, those were the good ol' days. However today it's more like: GERMAN SMALL ENTERPRISE: You have two cows. You make a small enterprise out of them. The government taxes the crap out of you and gives corporate welfare to a big corporation. 1000 small enterprises with 50 employees each go out of business but the government cheers that the big corporation's 5000 jobs were saved. They get reelected.

Ok, I get that. You seem to imply that individual rights are in fact protected in the United States. However the US has compulsory taxation, drug prohibition and legal tender laws that I think are recognized by objectivism as violation of individual rights. Now If California which has re-legalized marihuana would ceceed from the union because they realize the DEA's infringement on individual rights they would increase the protection of rights. In this case would you still say that the legal prohibition of secession would weigh more than the increase in rights protection? To tie this back to the thread's topic: As I understand it Libertarians are trying to move into a direction. And while the final goal of this effort might not be compatible with objectivism I think at least the three things I mentioned above are compatible. So my question is: would you say that the result is more important than the idea, i.e. would you work together with Libertarians to decrease the state's infringement on human rights by let's say legalizing drugs and getting back to a gold standard. Or would you say that the idea is more important than the results, i.e. tolerating immoral laws for now (maybe even to the point where you publicly justify the enforcement of these laws) and focusing your effort on spreading the idea rather than short term action?

A good discussion so far except for some post which contain mainly assertions without arguments. Special thanks to MartianHoplite for the link. What I am still missing is an argument about the scope of government. I take it that any government would be instituted by a majority vote of the inhabitants of the area the government governs. But how isthat area determined? How to determine who gets to vote? E.g. in germany there is a strong support for a leftist party (SPD) in the north while there is an equally strong support for an alledgedly rightist party (CDU) in the south. Taking these results I'd say the rational thing to do would be to cut germany in half. But if you agree on the right of the southern german states to secceed from the union then where do you stop this right of secession? Can a city secceed? What about an individual with his property? In the latter case I guess we arrive at the rothbardian model. What bothers me a bit is that objectivists seem to tend to advocate large area governments. Do you consider a one-world-government a desireable thing?

The objective of soccer is to have scored at least one goal more than the opposing team at the end of the game. This happens quite often but not too often and anything the players do during the game can be easily explained as means towards this objective. In the german soccer league teams are awarded points for scored goals which are used for ranking and the objective there is to have the highest possible rank at the end of the season. But take marathon. The objective cannot be to reach the goal because that would be much easier by car. The objective can also not be to run a given distance because depending on the starting position and the radius in which they take street corners each participant runs a different distance. So what is the objective there?