First, an aside: If what I wrote implied that you are or might be a "tye-died communist" or an advocate of increased government intervention, I apologize - I didn't intend that and I don't believe it.

Second, regarding the examples of alleged harm you think are possible without certain kinds of government intervention, all of them have been thoroughly refuted (by the economists I mentioned, and others). Read Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" to see most of those refutations. Child labor, "price gouging" and "collusion" are all covered by this book, as I recall.

Now, about the founders. Though they were great _implementors_ of the best political philosophy ever devised to that point, they weren't philosophers themselves. There were flaws in that philosophy, and hence in their thinking. For that reason I don't agree with all of their ideas.

The fundamental flaw in that philosophy was that the concept of individual rights was not fully worked out or understood. Specifically, there was no clear understanding of what violates individual rights. Without that understanding, the founders unknowingly built _violations_ of rights into the government, or at least the justification for such (which have been used ever since to take away our liberty piece by larger piece).

What the founders didn't clearly grasp is that liberty consists of the absence of physical coercion, the absence of initiated physical force, threatened or actual. Without such force, no individual has the power to prevent another from pursuing his own happiness. This is because only physical force can negate or destroy the source of such a pursuit: a man's reasoning mind.

So long as a man can think, act on that thinking, and keep the results, his pursuit of happiness is limited only by his ambition and ability. The extent to which a man is physically prevented from doing one or more of these is the exact extent to which his pursuit of happiness is stopped.

It is on this principle that force is anti-mind that the case for laissez-faire rests, i.e., the case for the total abolition of the initiation of physical force from all human interaction.

There is nothing "sneaky" about basing a view of laissez faire on a broad principle such as this - on a principle that makes clear what was muddy in the original concept of individual rights. Force _is_ anti-mind, and the mind, i.e., reason, is the source of all human values - it's our basic means of survival.

Insisting on such a broad, yet very precise concept of "political harm" is _required_ to properly understand the issue, and to implement a political system that is consistent with the requirements of human life.

Laws against "price gouging", "collusion", "price fixing", "abuse of monopoly power" lack these virtues. All of them are (deliberately) unclear and imprecise, principally because key concepts in them are undefined and/or vague. This leads (and the history of their application shows it) to judges assigning their own often contradictory meanings to those terms, and thus to massive rights violations being perpetrated against innocent people.

Such laws toss individual rights out the window as irrelevant.

They are not.

Mark Peters

P.S. - Slander and libel are examples of _indirect_ initiation of physical force. By means of false statements, these acts harm a man's reputation, which can lead others to refuse to deal with him, causing loss of income, among other things.

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