>Here we are at a fundamental disagreement. I don't consider
>that "great on paper" because I, and the millions of other
>basically good people in our country can and would stand up
>for ourselves to protect both our own rights and the rights of
>others. The citizenry can (and does) protect itself from
>abuses. To say I would only have those rights I can
>personally assert by force ignores other people. Not all of
>them are evil.

Not to talk down to you more than is usual for me talking down to most anyone, but this seems like a painfully naive statement to me.

I mean, if you could trust people to do what's right and not abuse the opportunities they have at the cost of others, there'd be no need to even think about something like welfare reform, either. It's sort of nice to think you can round up a posse of the just to fix all the problems, and sometimes you can... and sometimes you end up blaming the easiest scapegoat and lynching them instead. You have to gloss over a lot of abuses at the cost of the innocent to glorify simpler systems of law enforcement.