[ExI] Islamic culture (current) was Religions and violence

[Adrian Tymes]

--- On Mon, 8/2/10, samantha <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> Tomasz Rola wrote:
> > "In Britain, in 1843, the newspaper The Economist was
> founded, and became an influential voice for laissez-faire
> capitalism.[10] In response to the Irish famine of
> 1846-1849, in which over 1.5 million people died of
> starvation, they argued that for the government to supply
> free food for the Irish would violate natural law."
> 
> They were quite correct.  Private people were free to
> donate as much food as they wished.  As they were the
> ones who owned the food and/or money to procure it in the
> first place any other arrangement would have involved taking
> from them again their will and thus would have been
> immoral.

Save for that whole "economies of scale" thing, wherein a
larger entity (the government) could distribute aid much more
effectively than individual private entities, which efficiency
might preclude the decision to donate individually.  (A cabbage
or two is nothing against a famine, so why bother?  It might
just get fought over and produce more suffering.  1,000 tons of
food - of many varieties, even - is another story.)