Ron Paul and the rise of libertarian politics in America

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Fraggle Rocker, Nov 25, 2007.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    For foreigners (and many Americans) who don't quite understand libertarianism and the Ron Paul phenomenon. A year away from the presidential election, with the Republican Party in disgrace and disarray, maverick "classic liberal" or "roots-Republican" Paul has as good a chance as any contender of being the party's candidate for President. (He ran twice before, as the Libertarian Party candidate.) From today's Washington Post:
     
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  3. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Does this mean that libertarians eschew any state control over any individual rights?

    What is the position of libertarians on:
    1. taxation
    2. laws
    3. prison
    4. capital punishment
    5. provision of basic necessities (food, water, energy, basic access-communication and transport, education, healthcare)
    6. poverty
    7. rehabilitation of people with mental or physical disorders that make self support impossible,
    8. provision for elderly and orphans
    9. pedophiles
    10. religious freedom
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2007
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No. Perhaps some "paleo-" libertarians think that way, but they're just anarchists in disguise. There are lots of formal definitions of libertarianism, but some of the best practical definitions come from the era of emerging democracy in the modern West:
    • That government governs best which governs least. (Thomas Jefferson)
    • Those who would sacrifice freedom for security will end up with neither... and that's what they deserve.
    • Your right to extend your fist ends at the point where my nose begins.
    The general principles of the philosophy include:
    • No one has the right to initiate force or fraud against another.
    • Everyone has the right to self-defense, including lethal force if absolutely necessary.
    • Other than that, people have the right to do anything they want so long as it causes no direct harm to others.
    • Indirect harm can be handled by the civil court system.
    • People have the right to form communities and establish their own rules over and above these.
    • But if these communities become so large that dissenters are effectively prevented from relocating in order to avoid discrimination, e.g. in housing and employment, there is a conflict that must be resolved in favor of the individual.
    • Government exists to perform services that individuals collectively desire, but cannot find a way to provide for themselves using non-governmental insititutions. Traditional examples are the court system and national defense.
    • Other obsolete examples such as mail delivery and education illustrate the fact that the need for government services must be scrutinized carefully on a regular basis as civilization and technology advance.
    People should pay fair market value for services they receive and service providers should charge fair market value. Only services for which no free-market institution can be devised are the proper province of government. It can be argued that the poor cannot effectively participate in a free market so we should be taxed to subsidized their consumption. This argument fails to classify charity as a service like any other. Americans have always been a generous people and private charities have always performed very effective income redistribution services for a very reasonable price. Americans don't let poor people die from starvation, frostbite or appendicitis. However, private charities do one important thing that government does not, which is "discriminate" against those who stay in poverty deliberately in order to take advantage of their neighbors' generosity. It's very hard to cheat the Salvation Army, but welfare law cheaters are legion.
    Laws are necessary to maintaining order. However, enforcement should focus on restitution rather than punishment when possible. Victimless crimes--acts by and between consenting adults--are an oxymoron. Laws criminalizing indirect harm, such as secondhand smoke or the effect of a topless bar on the property values of neighboring residences, should be approached with caution. A more enthusiastic approach to tort law will resolve most of these problems. We hold the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land, just as it is defined to be. President Franklin Roosevelt began using the Constitution for toilet paper in 1933--providing a frightened population with security at the cost of freedom--and the trend has accelerated since then. Declaring a "war" always frightens people into giving up their freedom, thus we've had a Cold War, a War on Poverty, a War on Drugs, and a War on Terrorism. It can be uncontoversially estimated that at least 80% of the laws enacted since 1933 are unconstitutional. The "checks and balances" that are supposed to exist between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government are a farce, with the Supreme Court as the worst offender.
    If people cannot be trusted to conform to the basic rules of civilization (the most fundamental of which is that you never have the right to kill someone except in self defense), then they must be restrained from doing us harm. However, imprisonment is currently abused as a racist tactic. The rates of drug use among light-skinned and dark-skinned Americans are roughly equal, yet a dark-skinned American who uses drugs is four times as likely to be incarcerated. And of course it goes without saying that laws against drug use are unconstitiutional because the use of drugs by consenting adults causes no DIRECT harm to others.
    There is no Libertarian Party consensus on this one. As a small-l libertarian I am opposed to it because it diminishes us all. If you catch somebody murdering your wife and in a fit of grief and rage you kill him, you can be forgiven although perhaps not ever hired as a police officer. But if you go to the trouble of tying him up and dialing 911 through your tears, suffering the humiliation of cross-examination in a trial, and doing your best to be a responsible member of civilization who can tell the difference between vengeance and self-defense, and then the bloody damn government goes ahead and kills him anyway... it makes the government an agency of vengeance instead of justice. Cycles of vengeance are the reason that people in the cesspools of the Middle East are still killing each other over something that was done more than a thousand years ago. Capital punishment is not civilized.
    Yes indeed, free-market capitalism does a fine job of producing all that stuff, doesn't it? If there are people who don't seem to be receiving it, we need to find out why. The ones who are just unlucky deserve charity. The ones who lack skills and talent need to be educated. The ones who are lazy deserve their fate. Private charities are able to make those judgments. Government agencies are not. My wife was a social worker for most of her career and they joked about how so many of their "clients" had become experts at satisfying the rules--rather than at earning a living. So many of our laws have the effect of turning us into cheaters rather than producers. Income tax rules that are downright capricious. Traffic laws that are nothing but revenue generators.
    I think I've covered that. It's unrealistic to suppose that there will never be poor people because, as we so eruditely put it in America, "shit happens." But so much unemployment is due to the very laws that have been enacted since 1933. Labor unions are notorious for barring entry into their trades in order to keep wages high. The same is true for professional "unions" like the American Medical Association and the teacher's union. My wife is a fabulous chocolatiere, but she can't get a license to sell her candy because the big candymakers don't want small-time operators with far better products competing with them. The American Kennel Club is sponsoring legislation in many states that will effectively put small-time dog breeders like us out of business and leave the breeding industry in the hands of the very wealthy and the hated "puppy mills." We have one of the most beloved lines of healthy, well-adjusted Lhasa Apsos in California, precisely because we are a small operation and our dogs live in our house and sleep in our beds. We cannot qualify for the new definition of a "professional kennel" and pay the licensing fee.
    Private charity does wonders. There is no convincing reason that these functions need to be governmental. Since FDR nationalized the charity industry, Americans have understandaby cut back on their donations to charitable organizations. As one taxpayer put it, "You took about 40% of my income last year in direct and indirect taxes, and you used that money to teach illegal aliens to read and write in Spanish, to subsidize corporate tobacco plantations, and to overthrow the government of the most secular, pro-Western Muslim nation in the Middle East. Start using my money more wisely and there will be plenty to go around."
    Same comment. Government foster-care programs for orphans are so dismally bad that if Dickens were alive today he would be just as inspired to write Olvier Twist.
    Another case of laws arguably doing more harm than good. The laws are so inflexible that an 18-year old person having consexual sex with his or her 17-year-old lover can be branded a "pedophile" for the rest of his life. This actually happened to my friend's son. Governments are large, slow-moving, and incredibly stupid organisms. That is the worst possible entity to entrust with important responsibilities!
    As I said, libertarians and Libertarians regard the Constitution as sacred. Freedom of religion is a guaranteed right in America. Even I, the most outspoken critic of Abrahamism you're ever likely to meet, understand that the solution to this cancer is not to start persecuting Christians, Jews and Muslims. After all, that's what they do that makes them so evil! Nonetheless, religions should not be coddled. Taxi drivers should not be allowed to refuse to serve blind people because their Paleolithic religion says that service dogs are "unclean." If the American community insists that taxation is reasonable, despite all the libertarian arguments against it, then churches should be required to pay taxes like any other business--and they are indeed "businesses"! A national organization like the Boy Scouts, which is the key to lifelong social, educational and career contacts, should not be allowed to discriminate against atheists or homosexuals because it was founded by Neolithic Christians.

    The libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party have (unfortunately in my opinion) been identified as beacons of religious tolerance and we've got more religious wackos among us than perhaps any other single demographic. Nonetheless even strident atheists like myself feel nothing but compassion for victims of religious persecution. The annihilation of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 BY GOVERNMENT AGENTS is the reason that I don't regard the Clinton Presidency as an oasis of rationality in the long sorry sequence of authoritarianism starting with LBJ, the first election in which I was old enough to vote.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2007
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  7. RajenBP Registered Member

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    This is not surprising.

    Libertarian politics are superior to the welfare state/police the world government we have in place.

    The founding fathers easily predicted all of the predicaments we are in today, which is why the Constitution was drafted the way it was.

    All libertarians desire is the maximization of peace, liberty, and commerce. Not a big daddy government that tries to make everything better but somehow makes everything worse.

    Although with the pedophile situation I would leave it in the hands of judges to decide how to treat the situation. As i think they need to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
     
    Last edited: Nov 25, 2007
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    It's the deregulation of commerce that I worry about. There can be no freedom if a rich corporate elite can buy more influence than you. There is no freedom of education if you can't afford to pay for it. There is no freedom to persue happiness if you are bankrupt from a disease or accident that medical science has long ago learned to heal.
     
  9. moementum7 ~^~You First~^~ Registered Senior Member

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    Nice work Fraggle Rocker.
     
  10. RubiksMaster Real eyes realize real lies Registered Senior Member

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    That was quite a long read, Fraggle, but it was well-explained.

    Lately I find myself leaning more and more libertarian. I strongly hope that Ron Paul wins, because this country needs him.
     
  11. Brian Foley REFUSE - RESIST Valued Senior Member

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    Libertarianism is fantasy it advocates an unrealistic pre-20th century world of rugged individualism, with minimal government and an economy based on the gold standard. In studying Ron Paul I came across this quote of his .

    “Property rights are the foundation of all rights in a free society.”

    The “freedom” he advocates is a society with no income taxes, little or no government programs for the poor or disadvantaged, and no regulation of occupational safety and health or food and drug standards.

    If you are impressed by Ron Pauls anti war stance recall that Milton Friedman, the archconservative economist whose free-market ideology devastated millions of lives of your fellow Americans , also opposed the military draft.

    Libertarianism would be fine if we were wild animals, an animal that after birth are equipped to survive with rudimentary support from our elders showing us the basic of survival and then leaving us to roam free . Allow for us to exact from the environment as much as life can provide. Brilliant - but tigers and bears though individually powerful suffer horribly under rapid environment changes they have no social-security-net.

    Success through raw competition is no longer viable - Game Theory and Corporate Collusion have already demonstrated that in a truly free market the rich will get richer a lot faster than the poor will emancipate themselves.
     
  12. ashura the Old Right Registered Senior Member

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    Just to nitpick, that's a common misconception. Ron Paul isn't anti-war. He just thinks war should be declared, not be preemptive and be for the right reasons. If we were ever attacked or faced an imminent attack, he'd be all for retaliating with force.
     
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    This is not a common theme in the libertarian literature, but have you stopped to contemplate WHY we have corporations in the first place? The corporation is an invention of government! It was invented as a replacement for the aristocracy, but retains its essence: They cannot be effectively punished, and they distract our attention from the evil being perpetrated by the government.

    Absent the bizarre laws that make incorporation possible, how could corporations exist? A stockholder is a special class of proprietor, one who directs the course of an enterprise's business and participates in its decision making, but has NO LIABILITY for its failures, errors, misdeeds, or even its CRIMES! Unlike a true propietor, the assets of a stockholder cannot be seized to pay the debts of his business! Corporations can be run into the ground by greedy, incompetent or sociopathic leaders, and they walk away with millions of dollars while their creditors are stiffed and their employees don't even get paid!

    Starting a business and financing it by selling stock is simply a nefarious way to avoid having to pay back your loan if the business fails. Stockholders cannot seize your home, your yacht, your jet plane and your cars to get their money back.

    As I say, most libertarians don't think about this, but a true libertarian government would not enact laws protecting citizens from the consequences of their own deeds, and in fact libertarians consistently tout the importance of laws that reinforce everyone's sense of responsibility. (This is why so many of my fellow libertarians are not as uncomfortable with capital punishment as I am.) A libertarian government would not permit the creation of corporations.
    Yes yes, we've all read Ayn Rand and critiqued her work to death. The essence of civilization is humans overriding their pack-social instinct and finding ways to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. This cannot be done in an anarchy, but neither does it require the oppressive laws we have today, the majority of which are crafted to benefit special interests rather than the average citizen. The people who write the libertarian literature tend to be zealots with impractical views. The average libertarian-in-the-street like myself simply wants a goverment that respects the Constitution. Since FDR's day, the judicial branch has not been doing its job and as a result the executive and legislative branches have been running rampant.
    The libertarian movement basically arose in the 1950s, and our arch-enemy was communism. Naturally the "economically conservative" aspect of the movement was more prominent in those days than the "socially liberal" aspect. The Soviet Bloc did not collapse because of its encroachment on individual freedom. It collapsed because a command economy creates a "negative surplus" and after a few decades of scavenging the pre-exsiting surplus and the surplus of satellite nations, no one had any property. The modern libertarian movement is concerned just as much with the erosion of individual freedom as with property rights. Ron Paul is old-guard and has an economic focus. He's not the person I would choose to be our standard bearer, and in fact he and the Libertarian Party parted ways many years ago. He is, after all, running as a Republican, not a Libertarian candidate.
    Income taxes at today's confiscatory level are not required to run a government that sticks to its Constitutional powers. Historically, the United States only levied income taxes during wartime. Income tax is basically income redistribution, and it doesn't even do a noble job of that. While a bit of it trickles into the hands of the truly needy, most of it:
    • Pays the salaries of fifteen million civil "servants" who do nothing but sit around and "administer" each other all day
    • Is distributed to corporate beneficiaries such as the subsidized tobacco plantations and contractors like Halliburton who are value-subtractors--the six-hundred-dollar hammer is old news, remember the fifteen-thousand-dollar washers?
    • Finances pet projects of politicians that benefit a small group of (usually wealthy) citizens but cost an order of magnitude more than they deliver
    • Funds our unaccountable government's attempt to re-launch the Crusades and destroy civilization.
    Milton Friedman's philosophy is controversial and you certainly are not going to find a consensus that he is responsible for the devastation of American lives. The root of that was the Cold War economy, which was artificially pumped up by the "defense" industry. People were earning huge salaries for producing nothing. When Perestroika hit, the economy was so skewed into the war-game fantasy that there were no honest jobs for them to migrate into. I'm opposed to the draft too, as are all libertarians. If people don't want to voluntarily fight the government's damn war, then they are sending that idiotic government a message that that war should not be fought. The idea that Americans are happily sending their children to Iraq to settle a religious feud that is five times as old as America and which none of them could even describe coherently is repulsive. To start drafting children who don't want to join in this psychotic effort would be criminal.
    Sound bites make good bumper stickers. One could just as easily say that the Nanny State under which we now live would be fine if we were all imbeciles who couldn't be trusted to make our own decisions and work together to find our own way.
    You're not giving enough credit for this to the invention of the corporation itself. That was an act of government, performed to ensure that there would always be a level of aristocracy to distance the people who rule from those who are ruled.
    American libertarians believe that we should first do a decent job of setting up our own country, before we start telling other people how to run theirs. If some people truly want to live in a theocracy, perhaps we should allow that experiment to run its course. The problem with the Nanny State, whether it's at the national level or the international level, is that people learn best by being able to see the results of mistakes. If no one is allowed to make a mistake, Homo sapiens's natural curiosity starts to cause them to wonder whether it's really a mistake.
     
  14. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    I'd think the Libertarians better get more voters registered rather than just

    talk about what they are going to do all of the time. "The Libertarian Party

    is an American political party founded on December 11, 1971. It is one of

    the largest continuing third party in the United States, claiming more than

    200,000 registered voters".

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_States)
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I would be more comfortable with libertarianism if more libertarians displayed some understanding of ecological reality - the absolute necessity of large community level organization in the raising of children and husbandry of land, at any level of human society more technologically advanced than a nomadic tribe.

    The reliance on civil law and the tort system for settling of grievances also seems myopic, to me.

    The level and size of government necessary for providing what even most libertarians agree are appropriate services - setting up free markets where possible, say - is not all that different from the one we have, proportionately. The gain from practical libertarianism is not in the reduction of government, but its limitation and exclusion from areas of life important to the pursuit of happiness. The cost of impractical libertarianism is the disintegration of civilization into piracy and tribalism, with Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons the dominant economic pattern on the land.

    Eventually, if you discuss with them, about a third of all libertarians will come around to advocating privatisation of highways - try it yourself. Very, very few will advocate the revocation of legal "personhood" from a corporation.
     
  16. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It's been often suggested that forming a political party was the wrong way to go about pressing our agenda. It forces the libertarian community to dissipate its effort in attempts to reach a consensus on issues that are politically important but don't easily yield to a libertarian analysis, like abortion. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have had far more success pushing their environmentalist agenda than the Green Party, because they have the luxury of focusing all their effort and money on the things that are really important to them.
    We recognize the importance of the community in those endeavors, but we have also learned from experience that the optimum size of that community is something far smaller than 300,000,000 people. People in small cities (around 20,000) do a magnificent job of raising their children communally, feeling free to discipline them without worrying about being identified as perverts, and by the same token feeling free to let their children wander and experience life without being on guard for perverts, who quietly disappear without a trace in small communities. But state and federal governments do a simply horrible job of raising our children, and it's hard to imagine anyone seriously suggesting otherwise. The entire government-run educational system is a disgrace, in which kids even give up their fundamental right to safety, and are forced to carry fifty-pound backpacks because the administrative staff who almost outnumber the teaching staff are too busy shopping for politically-correct textbooks to be able to monitor locker use. And don't get me started on the government-run foster care system, I am too close to people who have suffered under its mean-spirited bureaucratic one-size-fits-all incompetence. The Nanny State is the worst thing that's happened to America's children. As for government being a champion of the environment, you simply have to be joking!
    How would we know? Americans love to sue for punitive damages. Our entire legal system suffers from a lawyer glut.
    First government creates the Frankenstein monster of the corporation, destroying the very essence of the free market because there is no longer a level playing field populated by producers and consumers of roughly equal economic power. Then it spends the next few centuries passing laws to "regulate" corporations, even though it's the corporations who provide the campaign contributions and perks for the people who write the regulations. Not only is none of this "necessary," but it is a drain on society.
    Even today's libertarians who are more focused on social issues than economic ones all agree that property rights are fundamental. The concept of "the commons" is left over from the days of feudalism. In general, resources should be owned and managed by their owners, not left in a state of murky communism for cheaters to exploit.
    I'd say it's a much larger proportion than that. At least if you poll libertarians who live in big cities where the public highway system has completely failed. Even here in the D.C. region, America's last bastion of starry-eyed European-style social democracy, states are building toll roads.
    Sound like I've got my work cut out for me then. I'd better start my own website.

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    Ayn Rand lambasted foolish corporate leaders, but she didn't pursue the issue to its logical conclusion. She didn't understand that corporations end up with leaders like that precisely because they are shielded from market forces. (Particularly the railroads she wrote about, which for all practical purposes were nationalized even in her day.)

    Fortunately I see in the paradigm shift to a post-industrial economy a natural waning of the power of corporations. The impetus for their formation was logical: the need for huge concentrations of capital for the projects of industrialization. I admit it's difficult to see how transcontinental railroads and other such infrastructural projects could have been accomplished without incorporated "artificial persons." But the resource of the new economy is information, which does not require steel mills and bulldozers to process. New companies are forming on a shoestring, from the savings of a single family, and the marketplace is being reshaped by them. There will always be functions that only corporations can perform, but there will probably be a whole lot less of them and they won't have as much political or economic power as they do now.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2007
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    What have the Libertarians done besides run candidates for president? Are they involved in local politics anywhere? Do they have any senators or house members?
     
  18. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Unfortunately, that is simply not possible for many of the resources fundamental to civilization. The air, water, education of children, and public health are examples of commons that require common management for the common good.
    We are now arguing about the size of the governmental agency appropriate for a given governmental task. That is a sophistication libertarians seem blind to, in general.

    And perverts don't just "disappear" in small towns, fraggle. Grow up in the wrong small town, and child abuse is an accepted, quietly ignored reality of your life.
    Nope. It's the only way to manage a continent-sized river system, for example. Without government, your chestnut trees and passenger pigeons are toast, your migratory birds and Appalachian streams will follow, and your drinking water will be not far behind. Private estates can only do so much, without turning into governments themselves.

    Bad government fails, and governments tend to go bad, but that doesn't mean you can get certain jobs done with no government.
    You can't heat your house with kilobytes. Nor is information an easily marketed resource- the governmental structures necessary to set up free markets in information will be no less dangerous for being, apparently, overlooked by the new libertarians.

    Public libraries would work better. But that's government.

    In a libertarian world, like the feudal world of small communities operating under their own rules without big government, the children of rich men will be free. Others, not so much. .
     
  20. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    I'm all for letting people do what they want. It's never been done before though and never will be. All Demicans and Republicrates need to do is drop a couple bomb speeches about welfare and the destruction of family values and that's it for the freedom run. The cattle are frightened to easily. It will require force, found outside democracy, and people even more enlightened than the U.S founding fathers to perpetrate it. Good luck with that...
     
  21. Mr. G reality.sys Valued Senior Member

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  22. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    There were several of them running for city council and mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana. None of them won, but that may have been because there were too many of them running.

    I voted against one of the Republican candidates for city council because he was the driving force behind the smoking ban in our city (lots of people did, he lost despite spending more than all the other candidates put together). Anyway, I voted for a libertarian in his place. A lot of people did. But since so many were running, they split their own vote!
     
  23. Neildo Gone Registered Senior Member

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    Opinion.

    - N
     

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