Jax

I kid you not, one time I was discussing the State school system with someone and I mentioned that in Detroit, the State schools produced an adult population with a literacy rate hovering around 50%. The person responded, "Without the State, the literacy rate would be zero."

Moncaloono - In my last post I used reason and logic to show you where you were wrong. I told you what would be required for you to reject my conclusions or to advance your own conclusions. You didn't really respond to anything I said except to say that I was wrong, and to repeat yourself regarding your original claim. You did not define any of the terms which you are using, and you did not show how spanking fit into those terms, despite my asking you to. We can go back and forth saying "is too," "is not," all we want, but unless you are prepared to explain exactly what you mean when you say "is not," (like I have explained exactly what I mean when I say "is too"), then the discussion isn't going to get anywhere. I do not believe you have the ability to discussion this issue with reason, and I do not believe you have the logical framework necessary to discuss morality (for example, you do not seem to understand the difference between a desired effect and a side effect of an action). I wish you best of luck and I beg you not to hit your or anyone else's children, ever. As far as I can tell, you haven't reasoned yourself into the position you are currently holding and so it would be folly to attempt to reason you out of it.

Yes they know that a child will feel pain during dental work but that is irrelevant. Do you recognize that there is a meaningful moral difference between doing something that you know will cause pain, and doing something with intent to cause pain? Do you also recognize that spanking a child is an action done with intent to cause pain, that the pain is integral to the supposed purpose of spanking? To argue that spanking is not assault, you will have to define 'assault'. If we use the Merriam-Webster definition "a violent physical attack," and we use the definition of violence that I suggested earlier, namely, behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill..." then spanking is assault. If we use this, more accurate (in my opinion) definition of violence, "the imposition of one's will upon another without consent by the use of physical force," then spanking is certainly violence. Whether it is assault or not, I don't really care. It is enough to know that it is a violent act. But let's pretend I do care whether it is assault or not. Given the following definition of assault from the legal dictionary, it is obvious that spanking qualifies as such. "An assault is carried out by a threat of bodily harm coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm. Generally, the essential elements of assault consist of an act intended to cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact that causes apprehension of such contact in the victim." To reject this, you are going to have to provide definitions for the following: spanking, violence, assault and then show, using these definitions, that spanking is neither violent nor assault.

I don't suggest taking your kids to a dentist who engages in behavior that is INTENDED to hurt your children.

I wouldn't let any adult act in a way that was intended to cause pain to my child. That includes spanking and it includes myself.

I typed "define violence" into Google and it gave me the following definition: Behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. Spanking is behavior involving physical force intended to hurt. That's the whole point. To make a negative association in the child's mind through the use of pain. Therefore, spanking is violence. No amount of ridiculous justification and fallacy can change that.

Just as an aside regarding the despair the OP felt when he saw that 70% of people support an increase in minimum wage: online polls are completely useless because of massive selection biases.

Don't do it. I see no problem in talking about Santa like other fictional characters (Elmo comes to mind), but I always go out of my way to make sure I don't suggest that Santa Claus is real. Because, you know, he's not. He's imaginary.

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." -Paul Krugman, 2002. Do your own analysis.

www.google.com Just kidding. The answer is not really. But here are a few places to start: http://lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux1.html http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux2.html http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/molyneux3.html http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2006/04/stateless-prisons.html http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2004/12/stateless-society-examination-of.html Good luck. Hopefully someone else can give you a more concise set of links

Asking how to teach a 14 month old not to throw food is like asking how to teach a three year-old how to drive. It's impossible. Fourteen month-olds throw food. It's what they do. Treat her with love and respect and eventually she will stop and move on to something else. If you treat the toys with care and respect in her presence then that will teach her how. For God's sake treat her kindly. If the other members of her family are hitting her when she is only 14 months old she is going to need all the help she can get.

This discussion is fascinating. Let me just respond to this one section with an analogous situation. In the days of Southern chain slavery, people thought that slavery was a natural and necessary condition of human society. People lamented its existence, but thought that abolishing it would be disastrous and would be worse than slavery itself. Some people advocated for better conditions for the slaves, limits on beatings, etc, reasoning that abolition was impossible and that even if it was possible, that slavery would return within a few years. However, when slavery was finally abolished, it was only one generation before the vast majority of people saw it for what it was and considered it a great evil. Nobody ever thought of going back to it. There have been no serious attempts to bring slavery back since abolition. (Let's ignore the part about the civil war, simply because in all other countries, slavery was abolished peacefully at about the same time). That is how it is with human moral progress. It's how it happens every time. Regarding the idea that abolishing the government would lead to a situation where a new government was formed, this is kind of a funny objection. It's like saying "I have cancer now, but I don't want to cure it because I might get cancer again in the future." It makes no sense. You don't want to abolish what is surely a great evil because the great evil *might* return in the future if you do? So the two possibilities are that we for sure have a tyrannical violent monopoly in the future, or we *maybe* have one. I'll go with maybe, thank you. One final comment. You are concerned with market entities coming together to form a new government, but this has never happened before, and there is no evidence that it is even possible. There isn't even a proposed mechanism for it to happen. It's almost certainly impossible, because of the high cost of doing so which would have to be paid for up front by the firm(s). How are they going to sustain that kind of cost while so much of their resources are devoted toward money-losing operations? Violence is expensive, which is why only the State has institutionalized it.

That is so sweet.