Excellent:

Every so often Mark A. R. Kleiman tosses of a line that's really good and worth remembering. In a post about sexual harassment training (to prevent), he writes:

Libertarians have one good insight, which of course they borrowed from liberals: human beings are not to be trusted when they have power over other human beings. They're wrong, in my view, to imagine that the state is the sole, or even the primary, source of abusable power: the family, the school (public or private), the neighborhood, the church, and the workplace can all create power relationships that expose subordinates to exploitation, and sometimes the power of the state is the only, or at least the best, remedy for such problems, as the civil rights laws illustrate.

We'd also like to add that the free market is another place where power, not morality, dictates outcomes.


posted by Quiddity at 10/03/2005 10:38:00 AM