That's because the modern American libertarian movement was founded and funded by billionaires like the Koch brother. They tell the think tanks what to focus on. The only issue of concern to them is lowering taxes and reducing government regulations on business. No other "libertarian" issues really matter to them, and so no other issues matter to the American libertarian movement they fund.
The man stole from the casino, so I have a point. If you cheat at a game and know you are cheating, you are stealing. He circumvented security measures to cheat. He's a thief.
He's done nothing wrong? Hmm, what is your street address? You DO realize that your security has a flaw, right? Lock bumping makes it trivially easy for me to break in to your house and take your stuff. Not to mention, I bet you have your windows made of glass. Obviously, you won't mind if I use your security errors to profit from you, right? You do? Isn't this the free market at work? If it's a problem, buy a better lock. If you don't buy a better lock, I'm justified in taking your stuff.
In your hypothetical case, you did not decrease your child's choices, you increased them. Suicide removes ALL choice. In essence, present-self is stealing all possible choices from his future-self. You can't take it back after you do it, and you can't do anything else either. You're dead. Not that I am against suicide, but because it removes all future choice, the choice to suicide should only be made by a person with the mental capacity to make a decision of that magnitude. For instance, if your child were suffering terminal cancer and had considered their options fully, talked it over with you, and decided to end it before the pain became too great, I would support them in their decision. But in general, we recognize that children do not have the experience necessary to make such monumental decisions, and so we protect them from the consequences of their ill-informed decisions.
I reject the concept of ownership of individuals. "Ownership" is just a shorthand for a poorly defined bundle of other rights related to control of a resource. It is far better to spell out the rights you believe adhere to individuals than to use the poorly defined blanket term "ownership."
Holding a gun to someone's head is obviously coercion, and wrong. But what else qualifies as coercion? Do you reject the concept of economic coercion entirely, or do you admit there may be times when one individual has so much power, and another has so little, that the first party literally holds the power of life and death over the first? You seem to be arguing that the second party always has other options than to submit to the first, but history would seem to indicate otherwise.
You can argue that in almost any case short of a gun to the head, the person does have other options than to submit to an unfair offer. But I would say that is unrealistic. It denies the possibility of anyone holding power over anyone else, and reduces the concept of a threat of force to actually holding a gun to someone's head. It devalues the life experiences of oppressed peoples world wide and throughout history, and basically holds them responsible for their own oppression. Oh, unless it is "government" doing the oppressing. Private individual doing the same thing? That's okay, then. Can't take away his rights!
Now, I will admit that your idea of property rights allows the second person options, such as simply taking a part of the first person's harvest to survive. You seem to say that the first person would not have the right to physically harm the second person. But this leads to a contradiction in your arguments. The first person does not have absolute property rights if the second person is justified in taking the fruits of their labor to survive. If there is a single case where the rights do not apply, then they can not be called absolute.
And if property rights are not absolute, then the right of self-ownership is not absolute, as there are cases where a person is not entitled to the fruits of their labor. Either that, or you must admit to different classes of property with varying rights of control. In that case, only the right of self ownership is absolute, and other property rights are conditional. If the right to self ownership trumps other property rights, as you seem to claim, then property rights are not absolute, only the right to self determination. I posit that the right to self determination is not a property right.
But now we seem to be arguing semantics and the meaning of words. Pointless, IMHO.
You contradict yourself again in your closing arguments. Is government always a small collection of individuals telling others what to do? Then how can you argue for decentralized and localized government? Isn't that still wrong?
Telling others what to do is not always wrong. The guy who said "Don't taze me, bro!" was telling others what to do, was he wrong? Telling others not to harm you is not wrong, and from that, we arrive at laws designed to prevent harm, such as workplace safety laws, child labor laws, food safe
Don't confuse good government regulations with bad. No regulations are completely voluntary, if they were, we would not need to even mention them. No, the reason we have them is precisely because not everyone does the right thing voluntarily. All effective regulations come with consequences for breaking them. There is no fundamental difference between a law and a regulation. Breaking a law amounts to the initiation of force against the parties that enacted the law. Responding to a threat with force is not immoral. The idea that all government regulations are bad is simply an argument put forth by those who do not want to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions.
Freedom and choice are abstract concepts, but they are also concrete feelings. Everyone knows the feeling of having their choices constrained, and that feeling is universally unpleasant. Although you can not know for sure how your choices effect other people before hand, if others have made those choices before, and witnessed the outcomes,we can be fairly certain about the consequences. Killing someone, for instance, removes ALL choice from them, with absolute certainty, at least in the material world. This removal of choice is what makes killing wrong, not a violation of personal property rights to one's own body.
I do not assume that any given poor person is powerless. I DO assume that there exist situations in which poor people ARE actually powerless. My argument does not rest on the idea that ALL poor are powerless. It rests on the idea that situations exist where people do not have power over their lives, and in those situations, it is absolutely wrong to take advantage of people who, through no fault of their own, lack power.
You should treat those people as if they did have power. That is, you should not make an offer they would refuse if they had the power to do so. That is economic coercion. In my world view, it is unjust to take advantage of another's misfortune.
Your counter argument, however, does rest on the assumption that people always have the ability to refuse unjust offers, and seek a different method of survival. I'm sorry, but if someone holds a gun to your head and says "Suck my dick," you don't really have a choice, according to the most commonly understood meaning of the word "choice."
Utilitarian arguments are the only useful arguments, IMHO. Arguments from "fundamentals" are invalid appeal to authority. There are no fundamentals that all people can agree on, and there are no absolutes. Certainly, there are relative absolutes, things that are absolutely true or false within a given system, but there are no absolute absolutes, true for all possible system.
In my example, the person has their finger over the button of a device you know to be capable of killing millions. Will they push it? We don't know for certain, but chances are, if they went to the trouble to obtain and emplace the device, they intend to use it.
I do not support the idea of preemptive war unless there is near absolute certainty that a.) war is inevitable and b.) waiting will significantly reduce the chance of winning the war. Preemption is often used as an excuse when these two criteria are not met, it is a concept fraught with potential for abuse, but when it is real, it is morally justifiable. I believe the French would have been justified in preemptively attacking the Nazis after the invasion of Poland, for instance.
Do you or do you not believe in absolute property rights? You claimed you didn't before, but here you seem to. Does your right to control the fruits of your labor extend to physically harming those who would take them from you?
More fundamentally, what are "the fruits of your labor?" Say you had a neighbor whose crops were wiped out by a fire. Your neighbor and his family are starving, heck, the fire hurt most everyone except you, who lucked out by not being in the path of the fire. No one else can help your neighbor. Seeing his desperate condition, you offer him an unfair deal, he works harvesting your crops, you keep the lions share, he gets just enough to feed himself, but not enough to ever rebuild, and thus he will be your virtual slave for the rest of his life. Is the harvest now the fruits of your labor, or his?
People come out of comas, you know, just like they wake up from sleep. You still have not demonstrated any important difference, and you link your argument to the ability to act and fend for one's self, an ability notably lacking in sleep.
I simply reject the notion of people as property. I don't think the concept of property applies to people. I believe that using it in that context is simply an underhanded way of advancing the idea of
Come on, if I SAY it isn't an insult, its NOT an insult, you're just thin skinned. Ahahaha, sorry.
You can ask me to leave, what if I don't leave your property when you ask? I'm not hurting anyone, but I am not respecting your property rights. If you do not believe in absolute property rights, well, I will have to adjust my opinion of you upward a bit.
If you do not advocate absolute or very strong property rights, most of my arguments against you simply disappear. I don't mean I don't have a case, I mean I don't have a reason to argue anymore.
Government IS an owner. It owns certain rights over the land it claims. It does not own all rights, but it owns some. But that all hinges on a libertarian view of property rights. I thought based on the authors you quote that I was arguing with a libertarian. If you don't believe in your own right to throw me out of your home for doing something annoying, then I got nothing here. But that's okay! You are already sitting smugly at the very point I was trying to lead you to.
Violence is not "wrong" per se. I prefer Ghandi's concept of "ahimsa" or least violence. A man has his finger on a button that will detonate an atomic bomb in New York City. You have a sniper rifle aimed at his head. You have a choice, pull the trigger and kill one man directly, or don't pull the trigger and kill millions indirectly. I say (and IMHO Ghandi would say) pull the trigger, its the least violent thing to do.
Forcefully taking the results of other's labor is wrong. I would posit that "force" in this case is any credible threat of physical harm, including starvation and exposure. Meaning, you should not be allowed to coerce a poor person into giving up their labor by saying "do what I say or starve."
We may have different basic assumption, but I think they have lead us to a similar set of ethics. You see, I have always been suspicious of the "I own myself" argument because it is used to justify absolute property rights, because it starts from the assumption that property rights are fundamental. It is not that I disagree with the conclusion that you therefore own the fruits of your labor.
I start from axioms of choice and freedom instead. To the extent that my actions reduce the choices available to another person without their consent, my actions are sub-optimal. Taking away the fruits of someone else's labor is wrong because it reduces their available choices. You don't even need to bring the concept of property into it, just freedom and choice.
I would posit that anything over 2 hours per tape is plenty and consumers would not factor that into purchasing decisions. The picture quality was not a big factor either. I'm saying, this is an example of the network effect randomly selecting one of two very similar products. This is not an example of the free market selecting the superior product and punishing the inferior product. Which products succeed and fail in the market has more to do with factors such as marketing, branding, and the network effect than it does with quality. It is much cheaper to get a critical mass of stupid people to believe your product is better and sell it for you through word of mouth than it is to actually make your product better.
But you had to know I'd find some way to diss the free market here.
You are confusing early and late model Beta and VHS. In the first release, Beta was clearly superior, with 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal, lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS. But it only had an hour playback time at that quality. Extending playback time to two hours (plenty for a movie) gave it, well, okay, an equivalent quality. So it wasn't really quality or playback time, as they were roughly equivalent by the eighties when people really started buying videotape players.
I like you, mike. But please don't quote Mises, Rothbard, and Block to me. Either you understand the arguments they make and can put them into your own words, or you don't. I don't want to reread their thoughts again, I want to read yours.
To put it simply, policing is a positive externality. If there are police forces, you will get most of the benefit even if you do not pay. When was the last time you heard of the police stopping a crime in progress? In general, they deter crime by their presence, and by capturing criminals and removing them from society after a trial. Now, I can not picture a police force that will not arrest a criminal if the victim did not pay. That isn't a police force, it is a gang. So, what will I get by paying, that I don't already get, such as deterrence and arrest of criminals?
You have an odd definition of 'coercion' that redefines the word such that only governments practice it. Coercion is a much broader concept than simply government use of force. And the thing is, governments do not need to use "coercion" at all, if your definition does not include the response to force. If someone else initiates force, it is not coercion to respond to it. And if you can define "stealing property" as "initiation of force," (I don't think it is) then you can conveniently define anything you don't like as initiation of force. In which case, governments do not initiate force, they simply respond to it.
If you don't like Wikipedia, follow the copious references listed there to other sites.
Let me provide an example. Say you have me over for dinner. And (JUST for the sake of argument, m'kay?) perhaps I enjoy masturbating into people's soup. You catch me. You say, "No beating off into the soup!" and I say "But I like it!" and you say "Stop it or get out." What happens if I won't stop or get out? Will you "initiate force" against me? Will you enforce your decrees with beatings?
Government is the owner of this house called America. We, the people, have mixed our labor with the land, and thus we own it. We have given control to a group that represents our interests. All done according to simple contract law and agreements between individuals. We, the owners, set the rules. If you break the rules, YOU are initiating force against us, and we are morally within our rights to respond with force.
Everything has the POTENTIAL for abuse. Everything. If you can't show actual abuse, don't bother bringing it up.
You completely twist history to say that democracy has created a world of war, starvation, corruption, and unpunished murder. Democracy has not done that. Democracy has done the opposite. Where democracy has been enacted, there is far less of all those things than there was before.
I can't really express how laughable and immature it is that you imply that your system, and only your system, is built on reason and rights. Your "rights" are arbitrarily what you want them to be, and your reason is based on faulty premises and a complete blindness to history in the real world.
You should read more. Not meant as an insult, just saying, you have about a quarter of the picture. You have obviously only read the works of individualist anarchists of the libertarian branch of anarchism. Read some earlier anarchist writings. Read Proudhon. Read some modern day social anarchists' writings. Educate yourself a little more about anarchism in general, its history and its aims. Please.
Libertarianism (in America. In the rest of the world, "libertarian" is simply a general synonym for "anarchism") is a recent offshoot of individualist anarchism, most specifically the Boston Anarchists, Lysander Spooner, and Max Stirner (t
Who thinks goodness is a lack of claws? Do people really think that? Even Ghandi's concept of Ahimsa meant "least violence," not "no violence." In Ghandi's world view, killing in self defense breaks even (you die or I die) and so is morally neutral, or even good if you suspect that a killer might kill more than just you.
The rich are the ones waging class warfare, deliberately screwing the economy just so they can have more relative to the rest of us. What's the fun in being rich if there aren't desperate poor people for you to control?
Most folks who have analyzed the videotape format war agree Betamax was technically superior, at least at first. Technical superiority played no part in the ultimate victory of VHS over Betamax. It was a great example of the network effect. In essence, VHS was popular because simply it was popular, like certain celebrities who are famous only for being famous.
Note that it does not tax all assets at 40% AT ALL. Please stop spreading lies. Allow me to quote the relevant section:
Sets forth additional rules for the tax treatment of high-income individuals who relinquish U.S. citizenship or residency to avoid U.S. taxation (expatriates). Treats all property of expatriates as sold for fair market value on the day before the expatriation date and includes gain (over $600,000) or loss from such sale in their gross income. Allows expatriates to elect to defer payment of any tax resulting from expatriation if adequate security for payment of such tax is given.
When you leave the country, all your assets are assessed at fair market value. If your assets gained MORE THAN $600,000 in value since you bought them, you are taxed on any capital gains OVER $600,000. Meaning the first $600,000 in CAPITAL GAINS (not assets) are not even taxed.
Aha! Rights only relate to other people! That is what I am saying. Rights do not relate to the individual, as you claim. And you admit it. But you go on to claim that there ARE such things as natural rights, we just can't know what they are. Seriously, I would love to see your 'scientific' experiment that determines once and for all, in an unambiguous manner, what are and are not natural rights. I'll wait, but I won't hold my breath.
If you define government as involuntary and coercive, you are defining it wrong. Sand does not mean cake. Why use words in ways that other people will not understand? If I offer you some cake, but give you some sand to eat, would you eat it? I SAID it was cake, it MUST be cake. It is not my fault that you define "cake" as "a sweetened quick bread" and I define it as "small granular minerals," right? No, wrong. Cake is cake and sand is sand. You define government as coercive. Okay, what would you call a group of people who define a set of rules that all members of the group must abide by, if they want to be members of that group? I call that a government. There is no other word. What they are doing is self-governance.
You can't just redefine language to "win" an argument.
Before the civil war, there were ABSOLUTELY publicly funded schools. How can you claim there were not? States have always been free, in our Republic, to fund public education, and after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fully half the states had funding for public education as part of their constitution.
Yes, if you want to go to a private school, you still have to pay for education. Even if you have no children, and receive no education, you are richer for living in a country that supports a publicly funded education open to all students. More educated people create more value, giving more back to society. If you want to live in a society like ours, you agree to help pay for education. If you hate paying for other people's education more than you like receiving the benefits of living in an educated society, feel free to move to Somalia.
You say public education is an example of a public good as natural monopoly. You misuse the term natural monopoly, which refers to the case where the first entrant in a market has an overwhelming advantage over all other players because of the high marginal cost of entry into the market.
You have not even attempted to demonstrate how competing police forces and schools will produce better schools. Why would I choose to buy police service? If they are out there, removing criminals, do I not see the benefit even if I don't pay? If a man murders me, will he get off scott free if I am not paying for police service? THINK! Consider the realistic consequences of your ideals.
Competition does not necessarily foster innovation or better products. First, a free market
*everyone with a sense of empathy and an ability to feel remorse, that is. Sociopaths will always be with us, its in our genes for leadership and survival. Get a few of those genes and you are a great leader and/or survivor type. Get to many, and you are a sociopath. They are the real reason we need government and laws in the first place.
When a tool has the potential for misuse, we limit how that tool can be used. We forbid people from harming others with that tool. That is the rational behind controlling power. We should not let individuals amass arbitrary and unlimited amounts of power, or arbitrary and unlimited amounts of money. That is like putting the leash on yourself and handing it to your oppressor.
Look at most of Europe. They have democratic socialism. What Russia had was only real communism for about two years, before the sociopaths seized control of the revolution. That just points out the dangers of revolution in general: they are chaotic, and provide an opportunity for sociopaths to rise to the top and seize control, because revolutions create power vacuums.
As we have a cooperative nature as well as a competitive nature, you need not lose hope and become cynical. There is a solution, and one that good people the world over have been working towards for thousands of years. It sounds corny, but love is the only solution. There is a reason all major religions stress this point.
You see, we have a built in moral calculus. If the majority of people around you are lying, cheating, abusive bastards, you can not safely be a loving, cooperative person. You will be taken advantage of, and so most people decide that they have to be selfish lying cheating bastards, and the cycle perpetuates itself. But is we can reach a critical mass of loving cooperative people, then everyone* will feel free to express the loving, cooperative side of themselves, and that is more efficient for everyone. People will not give 100% to an oppressive system, but most people will be highly motivated to give 100% to a cooperative system. People want to feel that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. That drive is in our genes, because it helps our species survive. If we can activate that loving, cooperative part of ourselves, we can do so much more as a species than we are right now.
What if I do not have the ability to move around and make decisions? Do I not own myself when asleep? What a silly idea.
I spoke of the distinction between rights and powers. Without society, if you are alone in the world, rights are a null concept. There is only you, the world, and your power to affect it. Rights are, as I said, agreements between people. Whether they exist outside that agreement is a moot point. Without that agreement, you can complain to your oppressors that they are violating your rights, but your complaints will not matter. Your rights, vis a vis your oppressor, do not exist in any practical form, and to claim they do is to completely miss the point.
You claim natural rights are innate. If they were, we would not need to argue WHAT they were. But you will never find two people who will completely agree on what rights are "natural" and what aren't. Take property. When you claim natural resources as your own, you are unilaterally forbidding me, who is not a party to any agreements you made, from using that resource. You may say, mixing your labor with the natural resource makes it yours, but what gave you the right to mix your labor and forbid me from mixing mine, before you mixed your labor? If mixing labor is the criteria, how can you claim the right to mix your labor with a natural resource before you have mixed your labor with the natural resource?
I was talking about the ideal of the rule of law, not any particular implementation of it. I believe that laws can be applied universally to all members of a group. That is all that rule of law is, it does not attempt to say what those laws are, but if they apply to everyone, then that is rule of law. If the laws are unfair, ALL suffer. If the laws are not applied universally to all people, then one can not say that group practices the rule of law.
You DO NOT have to pay 40% of your assets to renounce citizenship. This seems to be a common lie spread by libertarians. Where is your evidence? You have none, you can cite no source showing that we must pay 40% of our assets to leave the country. I have friends that have moved overseas and renounced their citizenship, and they did not pay any sort of exit tax.
If government can not be considered a choice, then neither can a business in the free market. Only one store can occupy a given site. Does that mean they have a monopoly on selling things at that site? No, that is simply not what monopoly means. You can't go into any store and demand products they don't sell. That does not mean they are oppressing you by not giving you the choices you want.
You agree to the contract of a nation by partaking of its services. When you go into a restaurant, you also abide by an unwritten, unspoken contract that is sealed by you eating the food. Nobody says "You eat the food, then you pay." We all know how it works. Anyone going into a restaurant, eating the food, and then claiming, "You just gave me the food, I never agreed to pay" would be a thief. The same goes for someone who would stay in a country, partake of its services, and claim they did not agree to its rules. You agreed by partaking of the services.
Reform and abolishment are arguably appropriate actions, if you can get a majority of people to agree to them. Otherwise, you are just substituting one form of oppression for another. If you attempt to overthrow a government supported and approved by its citizens, YOU are initiating force.
Bad government is like organized crime, because organized crime IS bad government. Look at how the mafia functions in its home country, it is an unofficial government that provides services, but it is still a criminal endeavor. But good government is not like organized crime. I don't know of any crime families that are democracies, do you?
Government is a tool to PROTECT the weak from oppression. The weak band together to protect their interests from the strong. What would you suggest, that each man stand alone, waiting for a more powerful man to come and oppress him?
You see nations where certain people may have plenty, but the culture is not a culture of feast, it is still a culture of famine, That is the very problem I am referring to: we have this one selfish mode locked in due to trauma passed down through generations, limiting our nature to its worst, most selfish parts.
I do not put faith in government institutions or the laws they create. I take each on a case by case basis and decide on its merits. I put my faith in the power of human cooperation.
I, too, would rather see power in the hands of many. That is why I can not trust a free market. Money is power. Power lets you accumulate money through means outside the free market, by economic coercion. There are no checks and balances in a free market:the most ruthless will accumulate money and power over other people.
Without government intervention, free markets are doomed to fail and they will oppress the powerless. The powerful can use economic coercion to disempower others, forcing them into dependency and servitude.
Rights are not derived from property rights. You do not "own" yourself, that is a ludicrous concept. Are you your own slave, then? You can't "own" a person, yourself or anyone else. You can coerce them and force them to do what you want, but the concept of owning oneself is silly. Property rights are NOT fundamental rights. They are arbitrary rights invented by society. They only exist as long as we agree they do.
The rule of law is NOT subjective, the idea is that all laws apply equally to all people, that is clear cut and not objective at all. If it is not carried out that way, it is not the rule of law, it is arbitrary power.
Government IS market based, you have what? Two to three hundred choices in the world. If you have the resources to pay for the product, you can go anywhere. This is exactly like any other market. You can't hold the market for government to different standards than other markets.
I also am 100% for the existence of subscription based governments. Some subscription based governments, as part of the contract, can require you to, for example, not trade with any person or group that does not contribute to paying for positive externalities. If you want to subscribe to "Government A" then you must agree not to trade with free riders. You could always leave "Government A" but if you joined a government that did not require you to support positive externalities then you could not trade with anyone in "Government A."
Throughout your argument, you confuse cause and effect. You blame "government" for the ills of "corruption" but corruption can operate and amass power in any system, from a lassez faire free markets to pure state socialism. Getting rid of government without getting rid of corruption will do NOTHING except make it easier for the powerful to prey on the weak.
I'm guessing you are cherry picking your examples from the animal kingdom. Look at out closest relatives. Look at the Bonobo chimpanzees, they are non hierarchical, and females lead the tribe. Look at friendships and cooperation between housecats. Look at all the cooperative relationships in nature: there is more cooperation than competition, right down to the cooperation of our cells in our bodies. If competition were all, we would never have progressed beyond single celled organisms.
Evolution has given us the drive to share power, as sharing power benefits everyone more than taking power. When times are good, why compete against other humans? Every human is a potential friend, and an ally against the vicissitudes of the natural world.
Sexuality only has the importance it does because we are all damaged around sexuality. Sex is an artificially scarce resource. Repression of sexuality is a fundamental characteristic of famine based societies. For instance,no feast based society mutilates its children's genitals, while most famine based societies do. Famine based societies also do their best to destroy male empathy, to make men into better warriors. In most famine based cultures, non-sexual expressions of physical intimacy are still limited to male-female partnerships. Men have no other source for physical intimacy besides a partnered female. Sex then is a stand-in for all forms of physical intimacy, and assumes a much greater importance in famine based cultures than in feast based cultures, which have NO sex taboos, not even against incest. The only "taboo" in feast based cultures is telling someone else what to do. While feast based cultures have no taboos, they also have less of the destructive behaviors that taboos are meant to stop.
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Agreed. There's enough blame for everyone involved to have their share.
Except I didn't open the door for them, one of my idiot employees did due to the perp's social engineering.
That's because the modern American libertarian movement was founded and funded by billionaires like the Koch brother. They tell the think tanks what to focus on. The only issue of concern to them is lowering taxes and reducing government regulations on business. No other "libertarian" issues really matter to them, and so no other issues matter to the American libertarian movement they fund.
The man stole from the casino, so I have a point. If you cheat at a game and know you are cheating, you are stealing. He circumvented security measures to cheat. He's a thief.
Everyone should do the same thing in certain circumstances. Everyone should refrain from murder, for instance.
That's the dumbest analogy I've ever read.
He's done nothing wrong? Hmm, what is your street address? You DO realize that your security has a flaw, right? Lock bumping makes it trivially easy for me to break in to your house and take your stuff. Not to mention, I bet you have your windows made of glass. Obviously, you won't mind if I use your security errors to profit from you, right? You do? Isn't this the free market at work? If it's a problem, buy a better lock. If you don't buy a better lock, I'm justified in taking your stuff.
In your hypothetical case, you did not decrease your child's choices, you increased them. Suicide removes ALL choice. In essence, present-self is stealing all possible choices from his future-self. You can't take it back after you do it, and you can't do anything else either. You're dead. Not that I am against suicide, but because it removes all future choice, the choice to suicide should only be made by a person with the mental capacity to make a decision of that magnitude. For instance, if your child were suffering terminal cancer and had considered their options fully, talked it over with you, and decided to end it before the pain became too great, I would support them in their decision. But in general, we recognize that children do not have the experience necessary to make such monumental decisions, and so we protect them from the consequences of their ill-informed decisions.
I reject the concept of ownership of individuals. "Ownership" is just a shorthand for a poorly defined bundle of other rights related to control of a resource. It is far better to spell out the rights you believe adhere to individuals than to use the poorly defined blanket term "ownership."
Holding a gun to someone's head is obviously coercion, and wrong. But what else qualifies as coercion? Do you reject the concept of economic coercion entirely, or do you admit there may be times when one individual has so much power, and another has so little, that the first party literally holds the power of life and death over the first? You seem to be arguing that the second party always has other options than to submit to the first, but history would seem to indicate otherwise.
You can argue that in almost any case short of a gun to the head, the person does have other options than to submit to an unfair offer. But I would say that is unrealistic. It denies the possibility of anyone holding power over anyone else, and reduces the concept of a threat of force to actually holding a gun to someone's head. It devalues the life experiences of oppressed peoples world wide and throughout history, and basically holds them responsible for their own oppression. Oh, unless it is "government" doing the oppressing. Private individual doing the same thing? That's okay, then. Can't take away his rights!
Now, I will admit that your idea of property rights allows the second person options, such as simply taking a part of the first person's harvest to survive. You seem to say that the first person would not have the right to physically harm the second person. But this leads to a contradiction in your arguments. The first person does not have absolute property rights if the second person is justified in taking the fruits of their labor to survive. If there is a single case where the rights do not apply, then they can not be called absolute.
And if property rights are not absolute, then the right of self-ownership is not absolute, as there are cases where a person is not entitled to the fruits of their labor. Either that, or you must admit to different classes of property with varying rights of control. In that case, only the right of self ownership is absolute, and other property rights are conditional. If the right to self ownership trumps other property rights, as you seem to claim, then property rights are not absolute, only the right to self determination. I posit that the right to self determination is not a property right.
But now we seem to be arguing semantics and the meaning of words. Pointless, IMHO.
You contradict yourself again in your closing arguments. Is government always a small collection of individuals telling others what to do? Then how can you argue for decentralized and localized government? Isn't that still wrong?
Telling others what to do is not always wrong. The guy who said "Don't taze me, bro!" was telling others what to do, was he wrong? Telling others not to harm you is not wrong, and from that, we arrive at laws designed to prevent harm, such as workplace safety laws, child labor laws, food safe
Don't confuse good government regulations with bad. No regulations are completely voluntary, if they were, we would not need to even mention them. No, the reason we have them is precisely because not everyone does the right thing voluntarily. All effective regulations come with consequences for breaking them. There is no fundamental difference between a law and a regulation. Breaking a law amounts to the initiation of force against the parties that enacted the law. Responding to a threat with force is not immoral. The idea that all government regulations are bad is simply an argument put forth by those who do not want to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions.
Freedom and choice are abstract concepts, but they are also concrete feelings. Everyone knows the feeling of having their choices constrained, and that feeling is universally unpleasant. Although you can not know for sure how your choices effect other people before hand, if others have made those choices before, and witnessed the outcomes,we can be fairly certain about the consequences. Killing someone, for instance, removes ALL choice from them, with absolute certainty, at least in the material world. This removal of choice is what makes killing wrong, not a violation of personal property rights to one's own body.
I do not assume that any given poor person is powerless. I DO assume that there exist situations in which poor people ARE actually powerless. My argument does not rest on the idea that ALL poor are powerless. It rests on the idea that situations exist where people do not have power over their lives, and in those situations, it is absolutely wrong to take advantage of people who, through no fault of their own, lack power.
You should treat those people as if they did have power. That is, you should not make an offer they would refuse if they had the power to do so. That is economic coercion. In my world view, it is unjust to take advantage of another's misfortune.
Your counter argument, however, does rest on the assumption that people always have the ability to refuse unjust offers, and seek a different method of survival. I'm sorry, but if someone holds a gun to your head and says "Suck my dick," you don't really have a choice, according to the most commonly understood meaning of the word "choice."
Utilitarian arguments are the only useful arguments, IMHO. Arguments from "fundamentals" are invalid appeal to authority. There are no fundamentals that all people can agree on, and there are no absolutes. Certainly, there are relative absolutes, things that are absolutely true or false within a given system, but there are no absolute absolutes, true for all possible system.
In my example, the person has their finger over the button of a device you know to be capable of killing millions. Will they push it? We don't know for certain, but chances are, if they went to the trouble to obtain and emplace the device, they intend to use it.
I do not support the idea of preemptive war unless there is near absolute certainty that a.) war is inevitable and b.) waiting will significantly reduce the chance of winning the war. Preemption is often used as an excuse when these two criteria are not met, it is a concept fraught with potential for abuse, but when it is real, it is morally justifiable. I believe the French would have been justified in preemptively attacking the Nazis after the invasion of Poland, for instance.
Do you or do you not believe in absolute property rights? You claimed you didn't before, but here you seem to. Does your right to control the fruits of your labor extend to physically harming those who would take them from you?
More fundamentally, what are "the fruits of your labor?" Say you had a neighbor whose crops were wiped out by a fire. Your neighbor and his family are starving, heck, the fire hurt most everyone except you, who lucked out by not being in the path of the fire. No one else can help your neighbor. Seeing his desperate condition, you offer him an unfair deal, he works harvesting your crops, you keep the lions share, he gets just enough to feed himself, but not enough to ever rebuild, and thus he will be your virtual slave for the rest of his life. Is the harvest now the fruits of your labor, or his?
People come out of comas, you know, just like they wake up from sleep. You still have not demonstrated any important difference, and you link your argument to the ability to act and fend for one's self, an ability notably lacking in sleep.
I simply reject the notion of people as property. I don't think the concept of property applies to people. I believe that using it in that context is simply an underhanded way of advancing the idea of
Come on, if I SAY it isn't an insult, its NOT an insult, you're just thin skinned. Ahahaha, sorry.
You can ask me to leave, what if I don't leave your property when you ask? I'm not hurting anyone, but I am not respecting your property rights. If you do not believe in absolute property rights, well, I will have to adjust my opinion of you upward a bit.
If you do not advocate absolute or very strong property rights, most of my arguments against you simply disappear. I don't mean I don't have a case, I mean I don't have a reason to argue anymore.
Government IS an owner. It owns certain rights over the land it claims. It does not own all rights, but it owns some. But that all hinges on a libertarian view of property rights. I thought based on the authors you quote that I was arguing with a libertarian. If you don't believe in your own right to throw me out of your home for doing something annoying, then I got nothing here. But that's okay! You are already sitting smugly at the very point I was trying to lead you to.
Violence is not "wrong" per se. I prefer Ghandi's concept of "ahimsa" or least violence. A man has his finger on a button that will detonate an atomic bomb in New York City. You have a sniper rifle aimed at his head. You have a choice, pull the trigger and kill one man directly, or don't pull the trigger and kill millions indirectly. I say (and IMHO Ghandi would say) pull the trigger, its the least violent thing to do.
Forcefully taking the results of other's labor is wrong. I would posit that "force" in this case is any credible threat of physical harm, including starvation and exposure. Meaning, you should not be allowed to coerce a poor person into giving up their labor by saying "do what I say or starve."
We may have different basic assumption, but I think they have lead us to a similar set of ethics. You see, I have always been suspicious of the "I own myself" argument because it is used to justify absolute property rights, because it starts from the assumption that property rights are fundamental. It is not that I disagree with the conclusion that you therefore own the fruits of your labor.
I start from axioms of choice and freedom instead. To the extent that my actions reduce the choices available to another person without their consent, my actions are sub-optimal. Taking away the fruits of someone else's labor is wrong because it reduces their available choices. You don't even need to bring the concept of property into it, just freedom and choice.
I would posit that anything over 2 hours per tape is plenty and consumers would not factor that into purchasing decisions. The picture quality was not a big factor either. I'm saying, this is an example of the network effect randomly selecting one of two very similar products. This is not an example of the free market selecting the superior product and punishing the inferior product. Which products succeed and fail in the market has more to do with factors such as marketing, branding, and the network effect than it does with quality. It is much cheaper to get a critical mass of stupid people to believe your product is better and sell it for you through word of mouth than it is to actually make your product better.
But you had to know I'd find some way to diss the free market here.
You are confusing early and late model Beta and VHS. In the first release, Beta was clearly superior, with 250 lines vs 240 lines horizontal, lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS. But it only had an hour playback time at that quality. Extending playback time to two hours (plenty for a movie) gave it, well, okay, an equivalent quality. So it wasn't really quality or playback time, as they were roughly equivalent by the eighties when people really started buying videotape players.
What the hell is pence-item and why would I go there? I don't trust you for a second, AC.
I like you, mike. But please don't quote Mises, Rothbard, and Block to me. Either you understand the arguments they make and can put them into your own words, or you don't. I don't want to reread their thoughts again, I want to read yours.
To put it simply, policing is a positive externality. If there are police forces, you will get most of the benefit even if you do not pay. When was the last time you heard of the police stopping a crime in progress? In general, they deter crime by their presence, and by capturing criminals and removing them from society after a trial. Now, I can not picture a police force that will not arrest a criminal if the victim did not pay. That isn't a police force, it is a gang. So, what will I get by paying, that I don't already get, such as deterrence and arrest of criminals?
You have an odd definition of 'coercion' that redefines the word such that only governments practice it. Coercion is a much broader concept than simply government use of force. And the thing is, governments do not need to use "coercion" at all, if your definition does not include the response to force. If someone else initiates force, it is not coercion to respond to it. And if you can define "stealing property" as "initiation of force," (I don't think it is) then you can conveniently define anything you don't like as initiation of force. In which case, governments do not initiate force, they simply respond to it.
Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercion
Also, the standard poly-sci definition of government includes NOTHING about coercion, no intiation of force, only response to intiation of force: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
If you don't like Wikipedia, follow the copious references listed there to other sites.
Let me provide an example. Say you have me over for dinner. And (JUST for the sake of argument, m'kay?) perhaps I enjoy masturbating into people's soup. You catch me. You say, "No beating off into the soup!" and I say "But I like it!" and you say "Stop it or get out." What happens if I won't stop or get out? Will you "initiate force" against me? Will you enforce your decrees with beatings?
Government is the owner of this house called America. We, the people, have mixed our labor with the land, and thus we own it. We have given control to a group that represents our interests. All done according to simple contract law and agreements between individuals. We, the owners, set the rules. If you break the rules, YOU are initiating force against us, and we are morally within our rights to respond with force.
Everything has the POTENTIAL for abuse. Everything. If you can't show actual abuse, don't bother bringing it up.
You completely twist history to say that democracy has created a world of war, starvation, corruption, and unpunished murder. Democracy has not done that. Democracy has done the opposite. Where democracy has been enacted, there is far less of all those things than there was before.
I can't really express how laughable and immature it is that you imply that your system, and only your system, is built on reason and rights. Your "rights" are arbitrarily what you want them to be, and your reason is based on faulty premises and a complete blindness to history in the real world.
You should read more. Not meant as an insult, just saying, you have about a quarter of the picture. You have obviously only read the works of individualist anarchists of the libertarian branch of anarchism. Read some earlier anarchist writings. Read Proudhon. Read some modern day social anarchists' writings. Educate yourself a little more about anarchism in general, its history and its aims. Please.
Libertarianism (in America. In the rest of the world, "libertarian" is simply a general synonym for "anarchism") is a recent offshoot of individualist anarchism, most specifically the Boston Anarchists, Lysander Spooner, and Max Stirner (t
Who thinks goodness is a lack of claws? Do people really think that? Even Ghandi's concept of Ahimsa meant "least violence," not "no violence." In Ghandi's world view, killing in self defense breaks even (you die or I die) and so is morally neutral, or even good if you suspect that a killer might kill more than just you.
The rich are the ones waging class warfare, deliberately screwing the economy just so they can have more relative to the rest of us. What's the fun in being rich if there aren't desperate poor people for you to control?
Most folks who have analyzed the videotape format war agree Betamax was technically superior, at least at first. Technical superiority played no part in the ultimate victory of VHS over Betamax. It was a great example of the network effect. In essence, VHS was popular because simply it was popular, like certain celebrities who are famous only for being famous.
Did you read that article you quote? It DOES NOT claim there is a 40% exit tax. Link to the ACTUAL LAW: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-6081&tab=summary
Note that it does not tax all assets at 40% AT ALL. Please stop spreading lies. Allow me to quote the relevant section:
Sets forth additional rules for the tax treatment of high-income individuals who relinquish U.S. citizenship or residency to avoid U.S. taxation (expatriates). Treats all property of expatriates as sold for fair market value on the day before the expatriation date and includes gain (over $600,000) or loss from such sale in their gross income. Allows expatriates to elect to defer payment of any tax resulting from expatriation if adequate security for payment of such tax is given.
When you leave the country, all your assets are assessed at fair market value. If your assets gained MORE THAN $600,000 in value since you bought them, you are taxed on any capital gains OVER $600,000. Meaning the first $600,000 in CAPITAL GAINS (not assets) are not even taxed.
Aha! Rights only relate to other people! That is what I am saying. Rights do not relate to the individual, as you claim. And you admit it. But you go on to claim that there ARE such things as natural rights, we just can't know what they are. Seriously, I would love to see your 'scientific' experiment that determines once and for all, in an unambiguous manner, what are and are not natural rights. I'll wait, but I won't hold my breath.
If you define government as involuntary and coercive, you are defining it wrong. Sand does not mean cake. Why use words in ways that other people will not understand? If I offer you some cake, but give you some sand to eat, would you eat it? I SAID it was cake, it MUST be cake. It is not my fault that you define "cake" as "a sweetened quick bread" and I define it as "small granular minerals," right? No, wrong. Cake is cake and sand is sand. You define government as coercive. Okay, what would you call a group of people who define a set of rules that all members of the group must abide by, if they want to be members of that group? I call that a government. There is no other word. What they are doing is self-governance.
You can't just redefine language to "win" an argument.
Before the civil war, there were ABSOLUTELY publicly funded schools. How can you claim there were not? States have always been free, in our Republic, to fund public education, and after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fully half the states had funding for public education as part of their constitution.
Yes, if you want to go to a private school, you still have to pay for education. Even if you have no children, and receive no education, you are richer for living in a country that supports a publicly funded education open to all students. More educated people create more value, giving more back to society. If you want to live in a society like ours, you agree to help pay for education. If you hate paying for other people's education more than you like receiving the benefits of living in an educated society, feel free to move to Somalia.
You say public education is an example of a public good as natural monopoly. You misuse the term natural monopoly, which refers to the case where the first entrant in a market has an overwhelming advantage over all other players because of the high marginal cost of entry into the market.
You have not even attempted to demonstrate how competing police forces and schools will produce better schools. Why would I choose to buy police service? If they are out there, removing criminals, do I not see the benefit even if I don't pay? If a man murders me, will he get off scott free if I am not paying for police service? THINK! Consider the realistic consequences of your ideals.
Competition does not necessarily foster innovation or better products. First, a free market
*everyone with a sense of empathy and an ability to feel remorse, that is. Sociopaths will always be with us, its in our genes for leadership and survival. Get a few of those genes and you are a great leader and/or survivor type. Get to many, and you are a sociopath. They are the real reason we need government and laws in the first place.
When a tool has the potential for misuse, we limit how that tool can be used. We forbid people from harming others with that tool. That is the rational behind controlling power. We should not let individuals amass arbitrary and unlimited amounts of power, or arbitrary and unlimited amounts of money. That is like putting the leash on yourself and handing it to your oppressor.
Look at most of Europe. They have democratic socialism. What Russia had was only real communism for about two years, before the sociopaths seized control of the revolution. That just points out the dangers of revolution in general: they are chaotic, and provide an opportunity for sociopaths to rise to the top and seize control, because revolutions create power vacuums.
As we have a cooperative nature as well as a competitive nature, you need not lose hope and become cynical. There is a solution, and one that good people the world over have been working towards for thousands of years. It sounds corny, but love is the only solution. There is a reason all major religions stress this point.
You see, we have a built in moral calculus. If the majority of people around you are lying, cheating, abusive bastards, you can not safely be a loving, cooperative person. You will be taken advantage of, and so most people decide that they have to be selfish lying cheating bastards, and the cycle perpetuates itself. But is we can reach a critical mass of loving cooperative people, then everyone* will feel free to express the loving, cooperative side of themselves, and that is more efficient for everyone. People will not give 100% to an oppressive system, but most people will be highly motivated to give 100% to a cooperative system. People want to feel that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. That drive is in our genes, because it helps our species survive. If we can activate that loving, cooperative part of ourselves, we can do so much more as a species than we are right now.
What if I do not have the ability to move around and make decisions? Do I not own myself when asleep? What a silly idea.
I spoke of the distinction between rights and powers. Without society, if you are alone in the world, rights are a null concept. There is only you, the world, and your power to affect it. Rights are, as I said, agreements between people. Whether they exist outside that agreement is a moot point. Without that agreement, you can complain to your oppressors that they are violating your rights, but your complaints will not matter. Your rights, vis a vis your oppressor, do not exist in any practical form, and to claim they do is to completely miss the point.
You claim natural rights are innate. If they were, we would not need to argue WHAT they were. But you will never find two people who will completely agree on what rights are "natural" and what aren't. Take property. When you claim natural resources as your own, you are unilaterally forbidding me, who is not a party to any agreements you made, from using that resource. You may say, mixing your labor with the natural resource makes it yours, but what gave you the right to mix your labor and forbid me from mixing mine, before you mixed your labor? If mixing labor is the criteria, how can you claim the right to mix your labor with a natural resource before you have mixed your labor with the natural resource?
I was talking about the ideal of the rule of law, not any particular implementation of it. I believe that laws can be applied universally to all members of a group. That is all that rule of law is, it does not attempt to say what those laws are, but if they apply to everyone, then that is rule of law. If the laws are unfair, ALL suffer. If the laws are not applied universally to all people, then one can not say that group practices the rule of law.
You DO NOT have to pay 40% of your assets to renounce citizenship. This seems to be a common lie spread by libertarians. Where is your evidence? You have none, you can cite no source showing that we must pay 40% of our assets to leave the country. I have friends that have moved overseas and renounced their citizenship, and they did not pay any sort of exit tax.
If government can not be considered a choice, then neither can a business in the free market. Only one store can occupy a given site. Does that mean they have a monopoly on selling things at that site? No, that is simply not what monopoly means. You can't go into any store and demand products they don't sell. That does not mean they are oppressing you by not giving you the choices you want.
You agree to the contract of a nation by partaking of its services. When you go into a restaurant, you also abide by an unwritten, unspoken contract that is sealed by you eating the food. Nobody says "You eat the food, then you pay." We all know how it works. Anyone going into a restaurant, eating the food, and then claiming, "You just gave me the food, I never agreed to pay" would be a thief. The same goes for someone who would stay in a country, partake of its services, and claim they did not agree to its rules. You agreed by partaking of the services.
Reform and abolishment are arguably appropriate actions, if you can get a majority of people to agree to them. Otherwise, you are just substituting one form of oppression for another. If you attempt to overthrow a government supported and approved by its citizens, YOU are initiating force.
Bad government is like organized crime, because organized crime IS bad government. Look at how the mafia functions in its home country, it is an unofficial government that provides services, but it is still a criminal endeavor. But good government is not like organized crime. I don't know of any crime families that are democracies, do you?
Government is a tool to PROTECT the weak from oppression. The weak band together to protect their interests from the strong. What would you suggest, that each man stand alone, waiting for a more powerful man to come and oppress him?
You see nations where certain people may have plenty, but the culture is not a culture of feast, it is still a culture of famine, That is the very problem I am referring to: we have this one selfish mode locked in due to trauma passed down through generations, limiting our nature to its worst, most selfish parts.
I do not put faith in government institutions or the laws they create. I take each on a case by case basis and decide on its merits. I put my faith in the power of human cooperation.
I, too, would rather see power in the hands of many. That is why I can not trust a free market. Money is power. Power lets you accumulate money through means outside the free market, by economic coercion. There are no checks and balances in a free market:the most ruthless will accumulate money and power over other people.
Without government intervention, free markets are doomed to fail and they will oppress the powerless. The powerful can use economic coercion to disempower others, forcing them into dependency and servitude.
Rights are not derived from property rights. You do not "own" yourself, that is a ludicrous concept. Are you your own slave, then? You can't "own" a person, yourself or anyone else. You can coerce them and force them to do what you want, but the concept of owning oneself is silly. Property rights are NOT fundamental rights. They are arbitrary rights invented by society. They only exist as long as we agree they do.
The rule of law is NOT subjective, the idea is that all laws apply equally to all people, that is clear cut and not objective at all. If it is not carried out that way, it is not the rule of law, it is arbitrary power.
Government IS market based, you have what? Two to three hundred choices in the world. If you have the resources to pay for the product, you can go anywhere. This is exactly like any other market. You can't hold the market for government to different standards than other markets.
I also am 100% for the existence of subscription based governments. Some subscription based governments, as part of the contract, can require you to, for example, not trade with any person or group that does not contribute to paying for positive externalities. If you want to subscribe to "Government A" then you must agree not to trade with free riders. You could always leave "Government A" but if you joined a government that did not require you to support positive externalities then you could not trade with anyone in "Government A."
Throughout your argument, you confuse cause and effect. You blame "government" for the ills of "corruption" but corruption can operate and amass power in any system, from a lassez faire free markets to pure state socialism. Getting rid of government without getting rid of corruption will do NOTHING except make it easier for the powerful to prey on the weak.
I'm guessing you are cherry picking your examples from the animal kingdom. Look at out closest relatives. Look at the Bonobo chimpanzees, they are non hierarchical, and females lead the tribe. Look at friendships and cooperation between housecats. Look at all the cooperative relationships in nature: there is more cooperation than competition, right down to the cooperation of our cells in our bodies. If competition were all, we would never have progressed beyond single celled organisms.
Evolution has given us the drive to share power, as sharing power benefits everyone more than taking power. When times are good, why compete against other humans? Every human is a potential friend, and an ally against the vicissitudes of the natural world.
Sexuality only has the importance it does because we are all damaged around sexuality. Sex is an artificially scarce resource. Repression of sexuality is a fundamental characteristic of famine based societies. For instance,no feast based society mutilates its children's genitals, while most famine based societies do. Famine based societies also do their best to destroy male empathy, to make men into better warriors. In most famine based cultures, non-sexual expressions of physical intimacy are still limited to male-female partnerships. Men have no other source for physical intimacy besides a partnered female. Sex then is a stand-in for all forms of physical intimacy, and assumes a much greater importance in famine based cultures than in feast based cultures, which have NO sex taboos, not even against incest. The only "taboo" in feast based cultures is telling someone else what to do. While feast based cultures have no taboos, they also have less of the destructive behaviors that taboos are meant to stop.