| | That's odd. I thought that this was the argument room...
No disagreement yet that I can think of... Wait, a glimmer... OK, let's try this:
And valid science, based on Aristotle - or the Catholic Church's reading of him, insists that the sun goes around the earth, in a perfect circle, I seem to recall. The problem was not with his reasoning as such, but rather upon the methodology involved. Science rests its case upon experimental validation that can be replicated by anyone. Trying to deduce the physical laws of the universe a priori has not had a very good record.
The key epistemological element requirement for truth is that it correspond to reality. Since we know from personal experience - most of us anyway - that we can be in error in our identifications, we try to include extra checks of that correspondence, made by independent labs, etc., before we go public, as otherwise other people - knowing that errors are possible - will not believe us, and, will, in fact, deride us as fools for making claims without proper verification procedures.
Science is not the only realm in which proper verification procedures are critical to arriving at truth, or expecting other people to believe what we are claiming.
Law, as a body of facts and knowledge, is another example. Assuming that "... valid law, is law based upon individual rights - nothing else is valid law," still, as Rand commented upon occasionally, BTW, the whole process of making the identifications of the elements of that body of knowledge, both in the abstract and in the concrete cases of disputes that form the basis for the existence of said law, still has to be itself studied and a proper structure implemented.
If "law" is some set of rules handed down by authorities - elected or otherwise, accepted on their word to be true, then, from Bastiat's "The Seen and the Unseen," we can already predict that, no matter how pure their motivation, they will be biased in how they allocate resources for identifying those rules and establishing enforcement, at minimum, and this has the natural tendancy to slip into positive feedback loops, corruption, collapse of any real "justice," and finally the rule of pure power. (I think that we are presently somewhere between stages two and three here in the U.S.) Luckily, we had the Constitution of the Iroquois Nations' as an example of how to forstall this spiral via checks and balances, but that system is far from foolproof, as we're presently seeing.
If you want your individual rights to be sustained by the legal system, then that system itself has to be structured in such a way as to directly connect valid legal decisions to both fact and principle.
We are presently seeing the latter stages of a process by which a failure of the common law (resulting from a systemactic attack upon it), largely in the 19th century, led to a rise of De Tocqueville's innumerable boards, commisions and regulatory bureaucracies, to the point that it is more often than not less profitable to fight a case than to simply give in, and meanwhile ficticious corporate persons are using state immunity to plunder the world, relying upon those very bureaucracies to shield them from double jeopardy in the remains of the civil courts, such as it is.
The common law grounded itself in history, contract, covenant and the basic law of the commons. While it could be cumbersome, it was not inherently instable, and the cumbersomeness could be avoided most of the time by signing prior agreements to arbitrate disputes or general contracts such as the UCC.
If you want your rights protected, you need a stable system, based on facts and objective reasoning, which is NOT what we have now.
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