"...how can anyone who pretends to understand the corruptible and inherently coercive essence of government ever defend the right of the state to kill people? ...Think about it. With our reluctance to maximize government power, the only sensible position any libertarian can take is to support allowing juries to sentence murderers to life in prison without the possibility of parole."

Mr. Renzulli and others miss an equally problematic point: on what grounds do libertarians favor having a coercive government:

(1) use lethal coercive force against innocent citizens to extract tax money to

(2) keep a known murderer -- who is a danger to everyone -- alive?

As Walter Williams has clearly explained, the tax laws are enforced by threat of death. Walk through the sequence of events if you refuse to pay taxes and refuse to be dragged into custody ... and at the end of the sequence is you getting killed ... all because the government has been given the power to enforce tax laws by lethal force.

The "life imprisonment" option for murderers is what Mr. Renzulli and others favor, and that option currently is lethal-coercive tax funded.

So there is a grave moral problem of forcing -- with threat of death -- the living persons who suffer because of the murder to pay to keep the murderer alive.

Yes -- if your parent, sibling, or child is murdered, under Mr. Renzulli's regime, you'd be coercively taxed to support the murderer for life.

How is it morally right, under libertarian principles, to empower the "inherently corruptible" government to use lethal force to coerce crime victims to pay to keep the aggressor alive and well for his entire remaining life?

Frankly, I don't think it is morally acceptable under libertarian principles.

It would be morally acceptable, under libertarian principles, for Mr. Renzulli and his colleagues to raise funds voluntarily to keep murderers alive. If Mr. Renzulli is serious about his anti-capital punishment position, then to be consistent he must encourage an all-volunteer "keep the murderers alive" funding campaign.

It will be interesting to see whether Mr. Renzulli or his colleagues jump to that opportunity to convert the tax-coercive life imprisonment system into a voluntarily-funded charity.

Bring them ALL home now!

Catherine

Bush and his ILK - the entire cabal is CRAZY for trying to start another war. Israel is too!

People should be up in arms about this man and ALL of his policies.

It is time to nip the NWO Republicans and NWO Democrats in the bud.

The only people who had a clue on stopping this madness were RON PAUL and DENNIS K.

I was for PAUL. I was for PAUL in 1988 too.

I can think of a few good Claire Wolfe's lines right now.

NO more wars. STOP ALL FUNDING and end all manpower in all of these countries worldwide. BRING the troops home - ASAP!

IKE had a clue and warned us about the MIC.

Our Founding Fathers warned us about foreign entanglements.

Bring them on home now! TELL all of the countries worldwide including ISRAEL to get their $$$, goods and support elsewhere if they want to stay in a constant state of WAR!

Catherine

The right to keep and bear the inanimate objects known as "guns" is a God-given right.

BTW, I am not sure these comments that I post in this manner on FreedomsPhoenix are read at all. If anyone reads this please e-mail me at aliceprez@aol.com and let me know. Thanks.

Also, see my blog at http://www.alicelillieandher.blogspot.com

The founding fathers never intended to have military personnel stationed out of the country. Period.

You wrote:

"All people should have the right to own land as personal property like is done everywhere else in the world. Only the person who's name is on the deed has any claim to the land, and the deed has no reference to race or religion. Then the owner can buy and sell based own his own judgment."

This should not only apply to Israel, but to Saudi Arabia, Africa, India, and all countries. Maybe it is time to get rid of any government that practices bigotry and discrimination based on religion and/or race. The problem is, that would be relatively impossible to do because there are so many Arabic nations - a daunting task. It is easier to focus on getting rid of one tiny Israeli government. Maybe that is why so many focus on Israel and leave the grievous human rights abuses in the Arab countries alone.

2. The term Jewish settler is straight out of a jewish spin machine.

TIP: Tell the Jews to get the hell off the palestinian land and you won't have any settler problems:)

That's what's wrong with today's christians, they've lost the way. There are no boundaries. G_d is just love. Everyone is going to heaven. No one I know went to hell.

Thank you Chuck for reminding us of Jeremiah's warning! I can assure everyone that we're on the verge of a closed state and a major war is just around the corner. If you're between 16 and 38, both men and women, dust off the combat boots the show's about to begin.

http://www.civil-liberties.net/pages/reflect_cia.htm

They took used oxygen cylinders, cut off the tops, making them into improvised mortor tubes. The inside diameter was the same as a standard 1-gallon paint can. These were to be the projectiles. On the annointed day, the truck containing the paint can mortors parked on the next street over from 10 Downing Street and fired. The paint cans full of TNT landed just a tad off to the right and took out the main conference room area instead of the residence where Thatcher was getting dressed for the day.

Low tech CAN be deadly.

;-)

One of the original Strikers. He is now world famous as a pirate. Ragnar was from Norway, the son of a bishop and the scion of one of Norway's most ancient, noble families. He attended Patrick Henry University and became friends with John Galt and Francisco d'Anconia, while studying under Hugh Akston and Robert Stadler. When he became a pirate, he was disowned and excommunicated. There is a price on his head in Norway, Portugal, Turkey.

Ragnar seizes relief ships that are being sent from the United States to Europe. As the novel progresses, Ragnar begins, for the first time, to become active in American waters, and is even spotted in Delaware Bay. Reportedly, his ship is better than any available in the fleets of the world's navies.

People assume that as a pirate he simply takes the seized goods to himself. However, while many other protagonists take pride in making a personal profit from the proceeds of their creativity, Danneskjöld's motivation is to restore to other creative people the money which was unjustly taken away from them - specifically, their income tax payments.

For that purpose, Danneskjöld maintains a network of informants in the US Internal Revenue Service (and possibly also those of other countries) who provide him with detailed copies of the tax receipts; among other talents, Danneskjöld is mentioned as being a skilled accountant. The proceeds from the goods he seizes (presumably minus his operating expenses) are deposited in accounts opened in Midas Mulligan's bank in the names of various industrialists, to the amounts of the income tax taken from them - which are handed to them (in gold) upon their joining the Strikers.

Kept in the background for much of the book, Danneskjöld makes a personal appearance when he risks his life to meet Hank Rearden in the night and hand him a bar of gold as an "advance payment", to encourage Rearden to persevere in his increasingly difficult situation.

As a robber with ideological principles, Danneskjöld superficially resembles the opposite or negative of Robin Hood; he considers Robin Hood as an arch-enemy which he had sworn to pursue and destroy - or rather, not Robin Hood the person, who is long dead, but the principle that it is permissible to rob the rich and give to the poor, a principle which in Danneskjöld's (and Rand's) view is highly pernicious.

In the conversation with Rearden, Danneskjöld claims to limit himself to attacks on government property and never touch private property. This contradicts previous chapters where there is mention of Danneskjöld sinking ships belonging of D'anconia Copper and destroying Orren Boyle's plant on the coast of Maine, where Boyle attempted to produce Rearden Metal. However, the first does not truly constitute robbery, since it was done with the consent of and in collusion with the owner, Danneskjöld's old friend Francisco D'anconia, and was aimed at helping Francisco's efforts to destroy his own company. And the second was in reaction to Boyle having violated, with government sanction, Rearden's intellectual property (the term did not yet exist at the time of writing).

Danneskjöld is married to the former actress Kay Ludlow - a relationship kept hidden from the outside world, which only knows of Ludlow as a former famous film star who retired and dropped out of sight. It is mentioned that some of the Strikers have strong reservations about his way of "conducting the common struggle".

Members of Danneskjöld's crew, other than himself, are never named nor appear in the book. Evidently, they are not given access of the hidden valley where their captain sometimes goes, nor - on the basis of need to know - are they given its location, which they might give away if captured.

Such a prolonged and successful piratical career would require a secret haven, probably on the Atlantic Coast of the US. In the end of the book, Danneskjöld's crew are mentioned as preparing to form a new community, while his ship would be converted into "a modest ocean liner". Danneskjöld himself refreshes his knowledge of Aristotle and prepares to become a full-time philosopher, and it is hinted that posterity might remember him mainly as Hugh Akston's disciple rather than as a pirate.

According to Ayn Rand (verbal report), his name is a tribute to Victor Hugo. In Hugo's first novel, Hans of Iceland, the hero becomes the first of the Counts of Danneskjöld. His name may be a pun on 'Dane's Gold', although "skjold" means shield, not gold. The first name "Ragnar" recalls Ragnar Lodbrok, one of the most famous of the viking leaders (to whose many piratical exploits no motive other than seeking loot was ever attributed). Ragnar Danneskjöld appears in section 161.

However, there are some inaccuracies. 'Ö' is not a Norwegian letter, but a Swedish one; its Norwegian equivalent is 'ø'. "Skjöld" and "skjøld" still exists in Scandinavian surnames and is an old fashioned spelling of the word for "shield", that is now "skjold" (Norwegian) and "sköld" (Swedish). Also, there is actually no noble class in Norway, as the Black Death of the Middle Ages forced any survivors to revert to subsistence farming, and nobility itself was officially abolished by the Storting in 1821.

A possible inspiration might be Norwegian Trygve Hoff that Ayn Rand knew. Hoff was the editor of the Farmand business magazine and outspoken free market capitalist. Trygve Hoff was of an old fine Norwegian family "Hoff" owning grand estates outside the city if Tønsberg in Norway. Tryge Hoff was married to the Norwegian actress Aase Bye. Hoff was an admierer of Aristotle and a collector of ancient busts. Hoff also had the kind of hero like looks Ayn Rand liked, similar looks to her husband Frank O'Conor.