First of all, Florida Hispanics tend to register white. The list was 95% false positives, heavily leaning black and Democrat. Secondly, Choicepoint warned the Secratary of State, in writing, that there would be a large number of false positives. The Govenor's office wrote back with instructions to proceed saying they wanted it to be broad.
The requirements for matching was last name and first four letters of the first name and a date range on the birthdate of a year. They ignored suffixes, middle names, middle initials, gender, etc. They told felons who had their rights restored in other states that they had to plead for clemency from the Govenor's office, in violation of Florida state law. A 2002 law required election supervisors to use this list. This year they wouldn't let anyone see the list and when the media sued for access and won, they dropped it. This year's list had another high percentage of false positives, was largely black and had no hispanics.
The 2000 election was stolen. Greg Palast's evidence has been corraborated by two investigations. People should have gone to jail over the 2000 election, but with the GOP in control of the state executives office and the state legislature, as well as the Federal legislative and executive branches, I don't expect anything to happen.
Libertarianism removes this principle, and the result has nothing to do with Liberalism If this statement is correct, then how can Libertarianism be reconciled with the Federalists? The Federalists stated that concentration of wealth was the weakness of the proposed Constitutional system. If you remove protections against that, then wouldn't Libertarianism be just as much of an enemy ideology to the Federalist system as say Communism?
The ownership of land, in it's modern conception as an inherent right, didn't start to form till the 17th century. Mises didn't come along till the end of the 19th century when property rights had a much different practical meaning. My suspicion is that Mises extended Liberalism in a way that would have been beyond Locke's grasp in the 17th century. Locke's idea's on concentration of wealth was developed when there was still a strong influence of the church on the definition of rights. It would seem that Mises formulated his ideas when such limitations could have been thought of as artificial boundaries imposed by moral reasoning. It would seem logical that, Mises' dedication to a logical proof of Libertarianism, would allow him to dismiss Locke's notions since the science of economics could trump inconvenient moral boundaries.
It seems that this would also be a normal progression for Liberalism, if it maintained a dedication to reason from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 19th. Since no one had come up with a reason, defined by rights, that wealth should not be concentrated, it was assumed to be religious in nature and tossed like a custom or ritual. Other than that, Liberatarianism looks more like Liberalism than any other ideology.
Jon Stewart doesn't want to be taken seriously on TDS. He has explicitly stated this. He has all kinds of people on his show and asks them "soft-ball" questions. If he was such a shill for the Dems, why does he parody the Dems so hard and why isn't he tough on his conservative guests. He's had Kissinger on his show, Ralph Reed has been there at least twice. He's had all kinds of people on there. He's actually quite a moderate.
Tucker's only attack was this, it was insane. CNN trying to hold a fake news show to some sort of journalistic integrity? WTF?! Both of them avoided the questions Jon was asking and were evading the entire discussion. They got defensive and Tucker even tried to attack Jon with that integrity crap. Jon accused them of hosting political kabuki every day and not actually discussing the things that matter to him as a citizen.
My question is how can anyone get indignant about the Dixie Chicks while also taking Jon Stewart's funny show seriously? That was Jon's real point. Both taking partisan positions on meaningless crap while ignoring the real news and holding the system accountable for it. He called them hacks because they perpetuate the absurdity rather than saying it's absurd. It's Jon's job to perpetuate absurdity, not CNN's.
Did you read Gillespie's letter? He was threatening them with legal action if they didn't stop talking about the possibility of a draft. Your argument over the draft bill is confusing the issue. The vote was an obvious act of political theatre. Rangel wanted to make a point about the differences in sacrifice between the have and have-nots, while the GOP saw a chance to visibly vote down a draft bill. That's not a serious discussion of the issue, since it is mere political theatre, by definition, you cannot trust that the issue is dead.
MTV is not trying to debate with Gillespie about whether or not there will be a draft, they were arguing about the legitimacy of discussing the issue with their target audience. Should we threaten Ed Gillespie with legal action for the events where Dick Cheney says Saddam and 9/11 are connected, what about the NRA claiming that Kerry wants to take everyone's guns? If political theatre is good enough for Congress and the Administration, it's good enough for a private voter registration group. Attempting to claim partisanship for their political theatre and threatening them with legal action is a private attempt to censor. The fact that Gillespie has the President and the Attorney General in his address book pushes this action over the top.
Your last comment is just as valid directed at many of the other organizations involved in this election year. I never claimed MTV was some beacon of integrity, I claimed that Gillespie was unduly trying to exercise power where he had no right. As long as MTV has the right to do what it does, sending nasty letters to them speaks to the character of the sender.
Potential corruption of systems have nothing to do with legal rights granted within them. Furthermore, the Federalists argued about the need for "honest" men. They determined that any system that depended on the morality of it's actors was doomed to failure, and that if there were not enough "honest" men to do anything about corruption, there were bigger problems to worry about. You are the bureaucrat's boss. You control the power in the equation, if the system is not working, you have the right to organize opposition. You generalizations create a weak argument and your analysis is sloppy.
That's true, even as ``just as many rights'' asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore, I'd say it's irrelevant. While one can argue about the state of civil liberties in the US currently, you still have far more rights that are actively protected by the rest of society than any serf or even free man in Medieval Europe.
A society can only defend as many rights as it's wealth allows it to.
You seem to have assumed that ``modern state'' equates to ``good government'', or that the change in our government has been for the better during the last 100 years. Neither assumption seems defensable to me. You would prefer the Roman Republic or the combination of canon and Royal Law that ruled Europe? Our current state is far better government than anything we've seen before, it better represents an ideal of good government than it's predecessors. If you're trying to point to the last hundred years, your definition of modern is pretty narrow. The changes in the US government for the last hundred years have been good and bad. There has been progress made in some areas and not enough in others.
There is an ideal of good government, people have been searching for it for thousands of years. Your claim of government's inherent evilness is ludicrous. Government is just a form of human organization, like a corporation, a union, a church, a tribe or an army. Power comes through pooling of resources and subordination to some direction. The system of representational government whose purpose is the recognition and protection of rights is the most efficient form of government yet found. Government and law are tools.
Your comments on the size of government sound naive. Under Royal Law in Europe, people had far fewer rights and freedoms but a very small government. The government may have been small, but it was concentrated power and completely violated Aristotle's basic principle of equity. The problems between Rome and the US are entirely different.
The US has a weakness in concentration of power, the Federalists spelled this out. The system would heal itself as long as there were enough competing groups within the nation who did not have the power to dominate. They also noted that wealth is power, since rights require wealth to defend. The "powermad" come from concentrations of power, of any type.
You should spend more time challenging your own assumptions.
When the government operates in secrecy, it's not "We the People" anymore, pure and simple. I'll agree with that, but I think this has more to do with corruption of the public property (the government) rather than the universal claim I was responding to. Other people with the power to impose arbitrary fate on you (and do), are your enemies. As long as you have an equitable stake in the government, which means that everyone must be equal under the law, then it is not your enemy, but your property. If powerful interests have the power to corrupt the government, we have bigger problems than a couple of IndyMedia servers disappearing; we need to start worrying about people disappearing.
When this country started there was opportunity. If there is not enough opportunity for people to provide for themselves, then the balance of power regarding opportunity has shifted. If you read the Federalist Papers, they cover this. During the 19th century, we gave anyone and everyone free land out west. This was wealth being transferred from public ownership to private ownership in the vain of early Urban Law. Once the economy switched to an industrial one, arbitrary land ownership didn't put one on equal footing with industrial areas. Since not all areas developed the same way, those that owned the production during the Industrial Revolution managed to concentrate much of the new wealth being created. Most of the 20th century was spent trying to rectify this problem. We did a pretty good job, but now we are sliding back.
Concentration of power is the danger. We do not want to destroy power or wealth, and we prefer to equitably distribute new wealth rather than redistributing existing wealth. As long as new wealth is used to further concentrate wealth, you will see the corrupting forces that make you shake your head.
Democratic Republic actually. You still have democratic power and our governmental institutions acquire their power through democratic means. Our particular system doesn't worry about morality in leadership, only equity in power. In other words, the Founding Fathers said that moral leaders were impossible to get from any system, so as long as there were enough competing factions with relatively equal power, the factionalism would allow the system to survive. The true danger to the Federal system laid out in the Federalist Papers was the concentration of wealth.
Bureaucracy is a factor of any organizational system. It can be defeated through information technology, so the only real issues is the power of the laborers whose jobs are being automated. Governments protect themselves because people protect themselves. If you attacked me I'd defend me, if you tried to overthrow the government, you'd essentially be attacking my property, since I own an equal share of the public property as a citizen. What you are describing is corruption. Corruption always occurs. The only way it is allowed to sustain itself in our system is through concentration of power. If those who were being hurt by the corruption had the power or at least exercised the power they have to fix it, it could be done.
Don't assign the corruption's woes to some inherent fallibility in governments. The Founding Fathers came up with a system that would defend well against these things. If you simply uphold the Founding Fathers' ideas and the ideology of the Revolution, then corruption will be fixed by the system.
I've always viewed Liberalism as the political philosophy that tried to use dialectal reasoning instead of faith. Libertarianism seems to me to be just as idealistic about the usefulness that comes from greed. The idea that unfettered markets either become free or remain free seems naive and idealistic to me.
Modern Liberalism has included many of the ideas of Mises and Hayek as they have been useful. I think the current thinking in national economies in the modern world is very much along the lines of Hayek as a reaction to the stagnation of Keynes. If you look at someone like George Soros, he has embraced Popper and has used Popper's ideas to update Keynes with ideas from Hayek and Mises.
IMNSHO, I think Libertarianism is Liberalism stuck in the 19th century. There are parts of Libertarian philosphy that have holes in the logic, mainly due to a lack of definition of terms and ideas. There are assumtions there that progress Libertarianism along the lines of modern Liberalism when answered. To compensate, Libertarian thinkers have had to elevate property rights as a first among equals. The core proof behind Liberalism is that laws are non-agression pacts that define rights. You can only have as many rights as you are able to defend and defending rights requires wealth. By agreeing to mutually defend previously agreed to rights, we agree to share in the cost of defending those rights. Since wealth is power, you cannot destroy power without destroying wealth, otherwise it is simply transfered from one entity to another. Privatization simply transfers power to private interests instead of the equity in ownership of the public. This requires a transfer of wealth. I'm not saying that privatization is good or bad, just that it has consequences that have to be reckoned with.
Now, don't expect to grab your local self-proclaimed liberal and have them be able to discuss this. Most people on the left, who think of themselves as Liberal, do so for moral reasons. These are little "l" liberals and are really just a variant of leftist.
I'd say our standard of living has improved despite government, not because of it. Then I'd say you're completely ignorant of history. Want to go back to living in a society without the "modern state"? Move to Somalia. A Libertarian paradise, if there ever was one. You can start your own justice business there, just watch for competition from the warlords.
Too expensive to defend all your rights with your own private army? Too bad, guess that means that the market, fair and square, has determined you get to be a slave. Have fun toiling for your new master as you get to hope that the market gives you the opportunity for revenge. What is the life-expectancy for a Somali slave compared to a citizen of the "modern state" anyway?
You are more than welcome to ship your ass off to a non-modern state if it's so bad here. Can't say I'll miss anyone who makes that choice.
Yes, but it can be a separate jurisdiction or a jurisdiction within a jurisdiction. It would be like medieval cities under Urban Law or the Church's jurisdiction with Canon Law.
The problem with the Internet is that there is no standard of virtual representation. Property on the Internet isn't property unless it those rights are recognized offline. The main difference between the Internet and the physical world is that as Lessig put it, "Code is Law". You can't act outside of the rules laid out by the Internet. If you want the Internet to remain without a central authority, then the code must be written which allows "property" (bits) to be moved around autonomously. If this is the way that the Internet develops, then other jurisdictions will have to pass "treaties" that recognize the relationship with the Internet's jurisdiction and protects the "rights" of entities that pass into the jurisdiction via the Internet.
Currently, life on the Internet is like trying to sell a house without a deed. You can't prove you own the land. Why should anyone trust that buying it from you is legitimate and the real owners aren't going to come and evict you next year. Until the Internet has a method, either legally or via code, to title and transfer "property" universally, then it will not be able to stand as a separate jurisdiction.
In other words, think about something like Cybercash or Paypal. You have to depend on Cybercash's reputation and interoperability in order to complete transactions with Cybercash. Same with Paypal. Since neither of these entities has authority, there can never be a standard as a competitor can come along and compete with a different system. This has the same issues as private coinage did before. The right to coinage is limited in the real world, because inefficiencies there are felt throughout the market. Either the code must determine the standards for these kinds of infrastructures or there must be a central authority that dictates the standard. Only then can the Internet actually acquire and hold wealth independent of the physical world (think of server farms as under Urban Law inside a Principality). Once you can transfer wealth to the Internet, and have it exist there solely, then you can claim that the Internet is a separate entity that should have it's own jurisdiction.
You are the government, in a democracy. By your logic, in the US you are your own enemy, no exceptions. They are you and you are they. Quite trying to act like you don't have anything to do with the government, as long as there is equality under the law, you have just as many rights backed by the same authority as the rest of us. If good government was less government, we would have never developed the modern state. Good government is good government, size is irrelevant.
You've got quite a bit of figuring out to do on your own.
I'm *very* familiar with the news story. This is about a group using deception and fraud to violate people's right to vote. How many of those registrations were people who had just moved and thought it would be convenient to do a change of address they hadn't gotten to yet. I've done plenty of those on voter registration drives. I've also turned in new GOP registrations, as much as I loathed doing so.
These people are impugning my integrity as someone who attempts to register new voters and insure that my neighbors are able to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They have even attempted to confuse the names of valid groups that do voter registration drives.
There are laws surrounding how you can register voters, these people violated those laws with the intent of suppressing voters they disagreed with. If you're not bothered by people's rights being denied, then why should I be bothered the next time yours are denied? Concern over this is your duty as a citizen of this country, turning a blind eye is treasonous.
You should go read Gillespie's letter to MTV then. That should clear things up for you. The draft issue has been used by the Rock the Vote campaign to bring home the fact that their target groups are the ones who are directly impacted by our current foreign policy. If they don't pay attention and make decisions now, decisions may be made for them. A draft may be the most extreme outcome, but it is possible. Just because the DoD, Administration and Congress are saying there's not going to be a draft, doesn't mean that's going to happen. These are the same people who thought we would find WMD and be welcomed as liberators. They got that pretty freaking wrong too. Don't expect rationality to save anyone, the entire Iraq war has been irrational.
Rock the Vote isn't lying, they aren't saying that there will be a draft, they are pointing out that there could be a draft in order to get attention to the issue. They do not make any claim that any candidate would do anything, it's simply a starting point for discussion. These people are the shiny things network, they use this same tactic in all their programming. Why wouldn't they use the same format to discuss politics with their target audience?
Oh please. Stop with the logical fallacies, it's killing me.
It's not bogus. There's a very real possibility that the MTV generation could bear the majority of human costs of our current series of military operations. This could be through a draft or through a volunteer army, but it doesn't change the probability of the age group most likely to get killed. Without political power, these people will not be able to make that decision. Did you read Gillespie's letter? He's claiming that they are violating the IRS code and is threatening to take action if they do not stop.
How is government intimidation not censorship? Gillespie doesn't want them talking about this because it's the GOP perception that this hurts Bush's chances for winning. I believe you could call Gillespie's actions a "cheap and tawdry political trick".
MTV's actions are those of people who don't want be in a position where they could wind up like those bloggers in Iran. If Iran had had more people like this, there wouldn't be bloggers in jail now. The Iranians handed power to the Islamic Revolution in order to get rid of the Shah and couldn't control their monster.
This is nothing more than setting the stage for cries of "stolen election" should Bush win.
Your fellow citizens are quite likely being denied their civil right to vote. All you can think about is how this is some conspiracy fueled by partisanship? Unless you can provide some proof that the Democrats are doing something shady regarding the right to vote, your speculation is useless. All the Democrats have done is make their people aware of these problems so that they may be used to insure that the vote is properly counted. That's believing in the rule of law, not trying to intimidate and deny civil rights.
There is a pattern of Republican operatives and party members attempting to suppress the vote. At times, the suppression is racially targeted. I will not live under these conditions, and I am completely unwilling to give this country up to people who would impose them.
When it comes to the people's right to choose their leadership, justice will be served. If it's not done through fair ballots or fair courts, it will be done with some very unfair chaos. We've reduced ourselves to Civil War twice before in this nation's history, don't believe it can't happen again.
Without faith in the integrity of our system, what law can be just and what authority can be legitimate? If you don't insure that your fellow citizens are delivered the guarantee of voting that the Constitution gives them, then who will insure yours?
Continuing on this thread and another highlight over at DailyKos: Rock the Vote versus the RNC, Ed Gillespie told MTV to stop talking about the draft. MTV responded very succinctly, IMNSHO:
Dear Chairman Gillespie,
The letter I received from you yesterday was quite a surprise. It struck us as just the sort of "malicious political deception" that is likely to increase voter cynicism and decrease the youth vote. In fact, it is a textbook case of attempted censorship, very much in line with those that triggered our organization's founding some fifteen years ago.
I am stunned that you would say that the issue of the military draft is an "urban myth"that has been "thoroughly debunked by no less than the President of the United States."
I have some news for you. Just because President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld, and for that matter Senator Kerry, say that there is not going to be a draft does not make it so. Just because Congress holds a transparently phony vote against the draft does not mean there isn't going to be one. Anyone who thinks that the youth of America are going to take a politician's word on this topic is living on another planet.
By your logic, there should be no debate about anything that you disagree with. There's a place for that kind of sentiment (and your threats), but its not here in our country.
There are questions that the politicians are running away from. How long can we keep 138,000 U.S. troops or more on the ground in Iraq? What if full-scale civil war erupts there, as the CIA has warned is a realistic possibility? Would the next President be faced with a choice of pulling out of Iraq rather than institute a draft? Would women be drafted? What exactly would the draft-age be?
According to the Pentagon's own internal assessment, there are "inadequate total numbers" of troops to meet U.S. security interests. The current issue of Time magazine reports that, "General John Keane, who retired last year as the Army's No. 2 officer, says the continued success of the all-volunteer military is not guaranteed" Keane has told Congress that adding more than 50,000 troops to the Army would require thinking about a return to the draft."
But you want young people to believe that the draft is just an "urban myth." I was expecting that you were going to present some facts to back up your assertion. But, instead, you have demanded that we stop talking about it.
Now this is probably flamebait, but I think it's poignant given this thread: Conservatives: Still trying to enforce the 3/5ths compromise!
Yellow card on your causality there: very things it was supposedly going to help with rose in tandem with the growth of sex ed
It also rose with growth in population, population density, economic opportunity, new healthcare choices, later age till first marriage, etc, etc.
Empirical research on this has shown that rates go up for the negatives when we've switched from standard sex-ed to abstinence-only sex-ed. I don't have time to pick and choose which study to point you to, so just do a google search, there are plenty to choose from, including a Wikipedia article. Standard sex-ed actually allowed the use of condoms to increase while the amount of actual sex decreased in the 90's.
There was no reason to change from the standard sex-ed, since it was working and the empirical evidence said so. Absitenance-only is completely faith based and had no record to run on. Empirical research since it's introduction has shown that, at best, it does no better than standard sex-ed, at worst it doesn't work as well.
None of the references you've cited on Ireland or Iceland deny the existence of social groupings based on Folklaw. Neither do they deny the role of cannon law and Christianization of Ireland. This specifically had a socialist effect on Ireland. It had a socialist effect on every European society. My point wasn't even about the specifics of how Ireland or Iceland were organized, just that they were organized. There was a state, not a modern state, but this anarchist society you wish to exist, has never existed. At each point in these societies you've described, there were all the same negative characteristics that you attribute to any State.
As for Commanding Heights, Laissez Faire Books has a pretty good opinion of it. It may be more historical than economic, but it does a straightforward accounting of the effects of ideas and their political implications.
As for your references on Positivism, I've never seen a set of such crappy illustrations for arguments. Mises is completely missing the point. Popper noted that logic is non-scientific. Math is just a language for logic. Mises appeal to future historians is quite telling. He could not prove Popper wrong, he simply said Popper didn't matter because he had never "done" anything. Give me a break. Is this really the best you guys can do to refute Popper?
I'll show the problem with Hoppe using your own definition of the non-aggression axiom: that only those actions which are the initiation of aggression against others should be preventable by coercive force How does one define what is an aggressive action? If you deny me enough economic opportunity to provide for my children, is my aggression legitimate? Is it a violation of your rights, or a defense of my rights? Property rights are not the only rights. This a priori shit has got to stop. Something happens, therefore it happens. This doesn't prove shit. There is no way to make a correlation between any random event and the non-aggression axiom without begging the definition of aggression. The proper term for defining the aggression point is rights. You can call it a freedom from arbitrary fate, you can call it the currency of social power. You can place a cost in terms of how much wealth is required to defend it, but it is still not property. The non-aggression pact is only for a recognition of the right, the right to sell it is separate. Some rights also have the right to trade it, others don't. This again, is based on a cost of defense for the right to trade in a specific right. But, the cost of defense must now be calculated as shared by all who have agreed to recognize the right in the first place, since it would be assumed that a violation of this pact would invalidate the one it rests upon. The converse is true as well, entering into some non-aggression pacts automatically binds you to a separate non-aggression pact. These pacts are laws which define rights (the aggression points) and the agreed upon dispute resolution protocol. This defines the base cost for us to violate someone else's rights. On top of that is reputation, which can act in it's own jurisdictions. The laws against slander and libel demarcate these jurisdictions. The modern Liberal State is the most cost-effective method for defending your rights. Expecting reputation and other non-tangibles to exist in a free market is ludicrous. Since people can lie, and there is a cost to determining each fact as truth or lie, you cannot afford perfect information. Since this perfect information is needed for a market to remain completely free, and the trade in reputation is needed to compete in the trade for tangible goods or services, the markets for goods and services can never truly be free. The cost of verifying all information perfectly outweighs the value of the tangible goods or services. The state exists as a corrective force to this imperfect information. Our wealth has grown as we have been
Apparently, Friedman hasn't read Borkenau who wrote about Icelandic cultural and political systems and studied the Icelandic Saga and Eddic poetry. Muir's position is entirely supported. But given that you're using PBS internal search results to dismiss my sources, I'm sure that you've probably missed that. The series was 6 hours long, it had ample time to cover both Mises and Hayek. It gave Hayek at least, if not more, time than Keynes.
Yes, Northern Ireland is a shining example of how well the Irish have defended themselves. Henry II was the first British king to claim title to Ireland, he certainly wasn't the last. Have the British been able to totally dominate the Irish? No. But to claim that the Irish have been able to successfully resist conquerors has no basis.
Iceland and Ireland both dispensed justice using trial by ordeal under Folklaw. Christianization and the advent of written law brought Feudal law. I doubt that trial by ordeal would qualify as justice in any definition you've given.
Praxeology doesn't prove what you think it proves. If anything, a true praxeological study supports my position far better than yours. A theory cannot be a priori, it can only have a priori elements. I'm not being ignorant, you haven't presented anything that passes Popper's 4 elements of a scientific theory. I'm telling you that your system is faith based, and I don't believe. You haven't proven why it isn't, Mises had a point during a time when historicism reigned, you don't. Until you can argue a legal framework that implements your ideas I don't see how you can claim some superior system. If you can't describe your system in terms of laws then you have no system. The market is no less coercive than the State. There is coercion everywhere, should I shake my fist at Mother Nature for raining or build a shelter? You are shaking your fist, believing that your raindance will somehow stop the rain. The Modern Liberal state is a shelter, the best shelter built yet. Markets and people thrive in this shelter, more so than at any previous time in history.
To say that the State can in any way improve upon the unhampered free market illustrates an ignorance of correct economic theory and praxeology.
You keep repeating this with no proof, or even a small inkling as to why you think it's wrong, your defense suggests faith. And could a private party not prevent entrance to a market? Couldn't the mafia make sure that no one else opens a laundry shop in your neighborhood? It seems to me that if the state doesn't have power or coercion, that power is simply transferred to private entities, it doesn't simply go away. So are private law enforcement groups (mafia) preventing entrance to a market the same thing as the state doing so? DiLorenzo hasn't proven that monopolies can't happen without the state, just that it hasn't. That's just as invalid as stating that God has never revealed himself to me, therefore God is proven to not exist. Absence of evidence does not prove a negative.
Your mind is lazy, you've failed to self-critique your own thinking.
They were not stateless, they were tribal and ruled by Folklaw. The people living under the Folklaw were subjected to all of the power sharing and coercion that you claim exists in the modern state. You haven't shown how Ireland from 0-1000 CE had more freedom for it's own people. I have countered your historical papers with historical books. If you think you can simply find the truth and understanding necessary to have this debate pointing to papers online, you're nuts. The Romans and Greeks would laugh at your claims placing Ireland on par with them. When the Irish were Chrisitianized around 500 CE, they took the Roman culture and were under a combination of Folklaw and church law. Still no stateless society. By the 11th century, Ireland developed Feudal and Manorial systems just like the rest of Europe due to the influence of invading Norsemen and Normans. As far as I can tell, the Irish haven't successfully fought off an invasion, ever.
Nothing you've linked to disproves this analysis of Ancient Ireland.
As for economic theory, you haven't stated one. Your dismissal of Commanding Heights because the link was at PBS is further proof of your dogmatic thinking. The book was written and PBS did a series out of it. It covered Keynes vs. Hayeck and Mises. It covered the Austrian school of libertarianism and the Chicago school in depth with relation to Latin America and the former Soviet block. It then went on to leave a series of questions that these systems have not yet solved.
You have not said anything that solves those same questions. You have not shown how a exclusively property rights based law and unfettered markets create stability or allow progress. You haven't shown how further rights can be defined and how your system can deal with a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and religiously diverse group. In fact, since your definition of natural law requires faith, your system is incapable of lacking authoritarianism or intolerance towards minorities on some level.
The papers about national defense are flawed at their base, they do not take into account the causes of violence and warfare. Half of them talk about ethics and moral societies, which I've already said is invalid. Only rights can provide the justice or freedom these papers even begin to contemplate. They are more a reaction to Hobbes than political science. John Keegan would have a good belly-laugh reading this stuff. Since you are answering the wrong question, I'm sure your logic all checks out, but you still haven't actually solved any problems. What Mises and Hayeck provided has been integrated and used as far as they are useful, just as Keynes was. Back to the original thread, George Soros is one of the people who understands this third way, a synthesis of Keynes' stability for the masses and Hayeck's unfettered markets. One would think you would see the problems caused by completely unfettered markets where competitiveness is so grossly unequal. The market starves and dies. Instead, you've decided that the problem is the state in the first place. You ignore that markets can be suffocated by their own internal forces. Modern Liberal law can actually be said to be the protector of the markets. By protecting markets from forces like private monopolies, theft and inflation the market is able to thrive. No market with the size that is needed to support our society has existed without a state.
You've spent too much time filling your head with useless philosophy and are now trying to apply it to all things to affirm that you've found your personal truth. Until you're able to base your arguments on empirical evidence in the historical record or argue the law of your proposed system, your basis is flawed.
It's not historical fact, it's an interpretation. Your economic arguments have holes. The papers you linked to do not close those holes, nor do they prove your points, I've given you examples how and why not. I've linked to books and authors you haven't had time to read. You still haven't proven your point that I don't know economics, not to mention that the point of government is not purely economics.
Legitimate power is a simple concept, you simply ignore it because you do not believe in a legitimate state, you have not refuted it. It's also not relevant to the argument except for pointing out the fallacies in your analogies. Your natural law is still just faith based, you haven't proven it's enforcement. It can't be natural unless it's naturally enforced.
Democracy is neutered like that by default. If rights are inalienable, then you cannot have Democracy without this neutering effect you claim. You can't seem to argue without rushing to a polar opposite. This inflexibility suggests dogmatic reasoning. Of course, you are the one who believes that all states are illegitimate.
Democratic representation is valid since it provides a equal sharing of power for the purposes of law. You can't argue with that intent, it is a fact. No matter your government, if you violate someone else's inalienable rights, you can expect to be subject to their morality. Slaves will rise up given the chance, this is a fact.
That is the only natural law there is, rights are backed up by the ability to do violence to defend them. Beyond that there is only law, which is backed up by the larger group to do violence against the offenders. The purpose is to define rights so that there can be peace and thus stability for our markets. Our rights extend beyond property rights. Your effort to declare everything extended from property rights, which are the only natural rights is utter crap. There is no empirical basis for your entire argument. Your ideology is based on faith. Anyone can divide your society by creating disbelief, hence you will have to be authoritarian. Only a political ideology based on reason and provable rights can create the laws needed to ensure a peaceful, productive society.
If I'm a stupid as you claim, you shouldn't have any problem refuting my points and placing doubt in my facts.
You still don't get it. Stealing from the 11th person is a violation of their rights, therefore the act is illegitimate. Legitimate power can be used illegitimately, it's called corruption. The Nazi government was the legitimate authority in Germany, it acted illegitimately. Hitler, like many Fascists, came to power legally. The violations that the fascists governments immediately perpetrated on their citizens was a violation of inalienable rights. That aggression is justly resisted by violence. The Jews did not have the opportunity for violent rebellion. They only could be said to have "committed suicide" if they had consented to the Holocaust. The entire argument is crap because it compares two dissimilar things, it's illogical.
The women and blacks who did not consent are long dead, they no longer have rights. Do you propose we raise them from the grave and get their vote on the Constistution? If you think you have a better plan to insure that rights are not violated, you are more than welcome to call for a Constitutional Convention. Those are the rules by which this society has agreed to consider changing the basic laws of the land. If you can't implement your ideas within the confines of the Constitution, then you will have to use the process laid out for change.
You can't simply claim I don't know history, you'll actually need to refute my arguments for me to do anything but laugh. I have already countered your arguments over the examples of Iceland and Ireland. I have stated the basis for my reasoning. I have proven that what you describe has both never happened nor can ever possibly lead to anything but the destruction of civilization, a complete halt to progress, and survival of the species. You're dogmatic like a Marxist and blinded by a Theocrat's faith.
Do you dismiss the assertion that during the years before and 500 years after; Folklaw in a tribal society was the state in Ireland. They then were conquered because they did not defend themselves? Quite frankly the Church was the most powerful force and is the premise behind why Henry II claimed the lands for Christendom. Do you realize that the majority of the Roman law and early Christian writings survived the fall of Rome by being whisked away to Ireland? The gift of the missionaries to the rest of the European Barbarians was the written law of Justinian and the ability to synthesize it with the Folklaw and Cannon law. The Christianization brought Western civilization into the power it needed to be to repel the Arab invaders. The tools that allowed this were the body of law developed based on the rights of the people. Feudal systems and Manors were private contracts. The things that held the European economy back was the Church and it's prohibitions against banking. It was through this struggle of the economic powers, the secular rulers, with the church that we learned to develop more complex non-aggression pacts and finally, separate the church from the state. This is also when we first began to understand that capitalism was the natural order of things, but that arbitrary fate would lead to regression. This principle based around homogeneous cultural and religious groups allowed European economies to grow and experiment. It was when they had to start considering the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. That was what the Federalist and the founding of this country was about. It was a progression of the ancient rights, distilled from the barbaric and arbitrary Folklaw. It wasn't perfect, but binding ourselves together to insure that rights are not violated and that there is opportunity for all, was the best anyone had come up with. It has stood the test of time. Our state is legitimate and logical. It was founded upon a basis of dialectic reasoning around the rights of people. Just because we have recognized more rights, and you being all concerned for women and blacks voting on the Constitution, means that our government has needed to insure that those rights were reinforced equally under the law. That is why the government i
Who decides what is justified and what is not justified? States are the product of non-aggression when their power is derived democratically. When you are born, you depend on your parents and do not have the right to vote. The idea that your consent is needed to enter you into the compact of the society which is feeding and nurturing you to adulthood is pure fantasy. When you come of age, you have the choice to remain in that society, prove a better way for protecting rights or find a more suitable society to live in. Your indictment of the state that came before you is utter crap. You might as well claim you have a right to be born rich.
Ireland was a tribal society that was Christianized. It was first subject to Folklaw and then loose cannon law. Neither of these systems were capable of allowing the Irish to defend themselves from the plundering Vikings or the Romanized Normans. It was never a stateless society like you are suggesting nor was it capable of defending the rights of it's citizens. Our society is the product of refinements since before the Christianization of Ireland. We have moved from the undemocratic and unproductive Folklaw to the modern Liberal State. The reason we support this progression is that it will continue to defend our rights and provide the opportunity for freedom you keep claiming doesn't exist. The British made the same mistake of all occupiers. The lack of a strong central government was what allowed the British to conquer it in the first place. Our country would have reverted to the British Empire in the War of 1812 if we had listened to the Anti-Federalists and stuck with the Articles of Confederation.
How much freedom do you think you would have fighting endlessly as insurgents against a stronger invading force. Your historical fantasies ignore large swaths of the record. You've only addressed a subset of the facts that are convenient to your preconceived ideas. Your basic absolutist anarchist principles ignore the simple facts of life.
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Did you pull this completely out of your ass?
First of all, Florida Hispanics tend to register white. The list was 95% false positives, heavily leaning black and Democrat.
Secondly, Choicepoint warned the Secratary of State, in writing, that there would be a large number of false positives. The Govenor's office wrote back with instructions to proceed saying they wanted it to be broad.
The requirements for matching was last name and first four letters of the first name and a date range on the birthdate of a year. They ignored suffixes, middle names, middle initials, gender, etc. They told felons who had their rights restored in other states that they had to plead for clemency from the Govenor's office, in violation of Florida state law. A 2002 law required election supervisors to use this list. This year they wouldn't let anyone see the list and when the media sued for access and won, they dropped it. This year's list had another high percentage of false positives, was largely black and had no hispanics.
The 2000 election was stolen. Greg Palast's evidence has been corraborated by two investigations. People should have gone to jail over the 2000 election, but with the GOP in control of the state executives office and the state legislature, as well as the Federal legislative and executive branches, I don't expect anything to happen.
Libertarianism removes this principle, and the result has nothing to do with Liberalism
If this statement is correct, then how can Libertarianism be reconciled with the Federalists? The Federalists stated that concentration of wealth was the weakness of the proposed Constitutional system. If you remove protections against that, then wouldn't Libertarianism be just as much of an enemy ideology to the Federalist system as say Communism?
The ownership of land, in it's modern conception as an inherent right, didn't start to form till the 17th century. Mises didn't come along till the end of the 19th century when property rights had a much different practical meaning. My suspicion is that Mises extended Liberalism in a way that would have been beyond Locke's grasp in the 17th century. Locke's idea's on concentration of wealth was developed when there was still a strong influence of the church on the definition of rights. It would seem that Mises formulated his ideas when such limitations could have been thought of as artificial boundaries imposed by moral reasoning. It would seem logical that, Mises' dedication to a logical proof of Libertarianism, would allow him to dismiss Locke's notions since the science of economics could trump inconvenient moral boundaries.
It seems that this would also be a normal progression for Liberalism, if it maintained a dedication to reason from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 19th. Since no one had come up with a reason, defined by rights, that wealth should not be concentrated, it was assumed to be religious in nature and tossed like a custom or ritual. Other than that, Liberatarianism looks more like Liberalism than any other ideology.
Jon Stewart doesn't want to be taken seriously on TDS. He has explicitly stated this. He has all kinds of people on his show and asks them "soft-ball" questions. If he was such a shill for the Dems, why does he parody the Dems so hard and why isn't he tough on his conservative guests. He's had Kissinger on his show, Ralph Reed has been there at least twice. He's had all kinds of people on there. He's actually quite a moderate.
Tucker's only attack was this, it was insane. CNN trying to hold a fake news show to some sort of journalistic integrity? WTF?! Both of them avoided the questions Jon was asking and were evading the entire discussion. They got defensive and Tucker even tried to attack Jon with that integrity crap. Jon accused them of hosting political kabuki every day and not actually discussing the things that matter to him as a citizen.
My question is how can anyone get indignant about the Dixie Chicks while also taking Jon Stewart's funny show seriously? That was Jon's real point. Both taking partisan positions on meaningless crap while ignoring the real news and holding the system accountable for it. He called them hacks because they perpetuate the absurdity rather than saying it's absurd. It's Jon's job to perpetuate absurdity, not CNN's.
Did you read Gillespie's letter? He was threatening them with legal action if they didn't stop talking about the possibility of a draft. Your argument over the draft bill is confusing the issue. The vote was an obvious act of political theatre. Rangel wanted to make a point about the differences in sacrifice between the have and have-nots, while the GOP saw a chance to visibly vote down a draft bill. That's not a serious discussion of the issue, since it is mere political theatre, by definition, you cannot trust that the issue is dead.
MTV is not trying to debate with Gillespie about whether or not there will be a draft, they were arguing about the legitimacy of discussing the issue with their target audience. Should we threaten Ed Gillespie with legal action for the events where Dick Cheney says Saddam and 9/11 are connected, what about the NRA claiming that Kerry wants to take everyone's guns? If political theatre is good enough for Congress and the Administration, it's good enough for a private voter registration group. Attempting to claim partisanship for their political theatre and threatening them with legal action is a private attempt to censor. The fact that Gillespie has the President and the Attorney General in his address book pushes this action over the top.
Your last comment is just as valid directed at many of the other organizations involved in this election year. I never claimed MTV was some beacon of integrity, I claimed that Gillespie was unduly trying to exercise power where he had no right. As long as MTV has the right to do what it does, sending nasty letters to them speaks to the character of the sender.
Potential corruption of systems have nothing to do with legal rights granted within them. Furthermore, the Federalists argued about the need for "honest" men. They determined that any system that depended on the morality of it's actors was doomed to failure, and that if there were not enough "honest" men to do anything about corruption, there were bigger problems to worry about. You are the bureaucrat's boss. You control the power in the equation, if the system is not working, you have the right to organize opposition. You generalizations create a weak argument and your analysis is sloppy.
That's true, even as ``just as many rights'' asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore, I'd say it's irrelevant.
While one can argue about the state of civil liberties in the US currently, you still have far more rights that are actively protected by the rest of society than any serf or even free man in Medieval Europe.
A society can only defend as many rights as it's wealth allows it to.
You seem to have assumed that ``modern state'' equates to ``good government'', or that the change in our government has been for the better during the last 100 years. Neither assumption seems defensable to me.
You would prefer the Roman Republic or the combination of canon and Royal Law that ruled Europe? Our current state is far better government than anything we've seen before, it better represents an ideal of good government than it's predecessors. If you're trying to point to the last hundred years, your definition of modern is pretty narrow. The changes in the US government for the last hundred years have been good and bad. There has been progress made in some areas and not enough in others.
There is an ideal of good government, people have been searching for it for thousands of years. Your claim of government's inherent evilness is ludicrous. Government is just a form of human organization, like a corporation, a union, a church, a tribe or an army. Power comes through pooling of resources and subordination to some direction. The system of representational government whose purpose is the recognition and protection of rights is the most efficient form of government yet found. Government and law are tools.
Your comments on the size of government sound naive. Under Royal Law in Europe, people had far fewer rights and freedoms but a very small government. The government may have been small, but it was concentrated power and completely violated Aristotle's basic principle of equity. The problems between Rome and the US are entirely different.
The US has a weakness in concentration of power, the Federalists spelled this out. The system would heal itself as long as there were enough competing groups within the nation who did not have the power to dominate. They also noted that wealth is power, since rights require wealth to defend. The "powermad" come from concentrations of power, of any type.
You should spend more time challenging your own assumptions.
When the government operates in secrecy, it's not "We the People" anymore, pure and simple.
I'll agree with that, but I think this has more to do with corruption of the public property (the government) rather than the universal claim I was responding to. Other people with the power to impose arbitrary fate on you (and do), are your enemies. As long as you have an equitable stake in the government, which means that everyone must be equal under the law, then it is not your enemy, but your property. If powerful interests have the power to corrupt the government, we have bigger problems than a couple of IndyMedia servers disappearing; we need to start worrying about people disappearing.
When this country started there was opportunity. If there is not enough opportunity for people to provide for themselves, then the balance of power regarding opportunity has shifted. If you read the Federalist Papers, they cover this. During the 19th century, we gave anyone and everyone free land out west. This was wealth being transferred from public ownership to private ownership in the vain of early Urban Law. Once the economy switched to an industrial one, arbitrary land ownership didn't put one on equal footing with industrial areas. Since not all areas developed the same way, those that owned the production during the Industrial Revolution managed to concentrate much of the new wealth being created. Most of the 20th century was spent trying to rectify this problem. We did a pretty good job, but now we are sliding back.
Concentration of power is the danger. We do not want to destroy power or wealth, and we prefer to equitably distribute new wealth rather than redistributing existing wealth. As long as new wealth is used to further concentrate wealth, you will see the corrupting forces that make you shake your head.
Democratic Republic actually. You still have democratic power and our governmental institutions acquire their power through democratic means. Our particular system doesn't worry about morality in leadership, only equity in power. In other words, the Founding Fathers said that moral leaders were impossible to get from any system, so as long as there were enough competing factions with relatively equal power, the factionalism would allow the system to survive. The true danger to the Federal system laid out in the Federalist Papers was the concentration of wealth.
Bureaucracy is a factor of any organizational system. It can be defeated through information technology, so the only real issues is the power of the laborers whose jobs are being automated. Governments protect themselves because people protect themselves. If you attacked me I'd defend me, if you tried to overthrow the government, you'd essentially be attacking my property, since I own an equal share of the public property as a citizen. What you are describing is corruption. Corruption always occurs. The only way it is allowed to sustain itself in our system is through concentration of power. If those who were being hurt by the corruption had the power or at least exercised the power they have to fix it, it could be done.
Don't assign the corruption's woes to some inherent fallibility in governments. The Founding Fathers came up with a system that would defend well against these things. If you simply uphold the Founding Fathers' ideas and the ideology of the Revolution, then corruption will be fixed by the system.
I've always viewed Liberalism as the political philosophy that tried to use dialectal reasoning instead of faith. Libertarianism seems to me to be just as idealistic about the usefulness that comes from greed. The idea that unfettered markets either become free or remain free seems naive and idealistic to me.
Modern Liberalism has included many of the ideas of Mises and Hayek as they have been useful. I think the current thinking in national economies in the modern world is very much along the lines of Hayek as a reaction to the stagnation of Keynes. If you look at someone like George Soros, he has embraced Popper and has used Popper's ideas to update Keynes with ideas from Hayek and Mises.
IMNSHO, I think Libertarianism is Liberalism stuck in the 19th century. There are parts of Libertarian philosphy that have holes in the logic, mainly due to a lack of definition of terms and ideas. There are assumtions there that progress Libertarianism along the lines of modern Liberalism when answered. To compensate, Libertarian thinkers have had to elevate property rights as a first among equals. The core proof behind Liberalism is that laws are non-agression pacts that define rights. You can only have as many rights as you are able to defend and defending rights requires wealth. By agreeing to mutually defend previously agreed to rights, we agree to share in the cost of defending those rights. Since wealth is power, you cannot destroy power without destroying wealth, otherwise it is simply transfered from one entity to another. Privatization simply transfers power to private interests instead of the equity in ownership of the public. This requires a transfer of wealth. I'm not saying that privatization is good or bad, just that it has consequences that have to be reckoned with.
Now, don't expect to grab your local self-proclaimed liberal and have them be able to discuss this. Most people on the left, who think of themselves as Liberal, do so for moral reasons. These are little "l" liberals and are really just a variant of leftist.
I'd say our standard of living has improved despite government, not because of it.
Then I'd say you're completely ignorant of history. Want to go back to living in a society without the "modern state"? Move to Somalia. A Libertarian paradise, if there ever was one. You can start your own justice business there, just watch for competition from the warlords.
Too expensive to defend all your rights with your own private army? Too bad, guess that means that the market, fair and square, has determined you get to be a slave. Have fun toiling for your new master as you get to hope that the market gives you the opportunity for revenge. What is the life-expectancy for a Somali slave compared to a citizen of the "modern state" anyway?
You are more than welcome to ship your ass off to a non-modern state if it's so bad here. Can't say I'll miss anyone who makes that choice.
Yes, but it can be a separate jurisdiction or a jurisdiction within a jurisdiction. It would be like medieval cities under Urban Law or the Church's jurisdiction with Canon Law.
The problem with the Internet is that there is no standard of virtual representation. Property on the Internet isn't property unless it those rights are recognized offline. The main difference between the Internet and the physical world is that as Lessig put it, "Code is Law". You can't act outside of the rules laid out by the Internet. If you want the Internet to remain without a central authority, then the code must be written which allows "property" (bits) to be moved around autonomously. If this is the way that the Internet develops, then other jurisdictions will have to pass "treaties" that recognize the relationship with the Internet's jurisdiction and protects the "rights" of entities that pass into the jurisdiction via the Internet.
Currently, life on the Internet is like trying to sell a house without a deed. You can't prove you own the land. Why should anyone trust that buying it from you is legitimate and the real owners aren't going to come and evict you next year. Until the Internet has a method, either legally or via code, to title and transfer "property" universally, then it will not be able to stand as a separate jurisdiction.
In other words, think about something like Cybercash or Paypal. You have to depend on Cybercash's reputation and interoperability in order to complete transactions with Cybercash. Same with Paypal. Since neither of these entities has authority, there can never be a standard as a competitor can come along and compete with a different system. This has the same issues as private coinage did before. The right to coinage is limited in the real world, because inefficiencies there are felt throughout the market. Either the code must determine the standards for these kinds of infrastructures or there must be a central authority that dictates the standard. Only then can the Internet actually acquire and hold wealth independent of the physical world (think of server farms as under Urban Law inside a Principality). Once you can transfer wealth to the Internet, and have it exist there solely, then you can claim that the Internet is a separate entity that should have it's own jurisdiction.
You are the government, in a democracy. By your logic, in the US you are your own enemy, no exceptions. They are you and you are they. Quite trying to act like you don't have anything to do with the government, as long as there is equality under the law, you have just as many rights backed by the same authority as the rest of us. If good government was less government, we would have never developed the modern state. Good government is good government, size is irrelevant.
You've got quite a bit of figuring out to do on your own.
I'm *very* familiar with the news story. This is about a group using deception and fraud to violate people's right to vote. How many of those registrations were people who had just moved and thought it would be convenient to do a change of address they hadn't gotten to yet. I've done plenty of those on voter registration drives. I've also turned in new GOP registrations, as much as I loathed doing so.
These people are impugning my integrity as someone who attempts to register new voters and insure that my neighbors are able to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. They have even attempted to confuse the names of valid groups that do voter registration drives.
There are laws surrounding how you can register voters, these people violated those laws with the intent of suppressing voters they disagreed with. If you're not bothered by people's rights being denied, then why should I be bothered the next time yours are denied? Concern over this is your duty as a citizen of this country, turning a blind eye is treasonous.
You should go read Gillespie's letter to MTV then. That should clear things up for you. The draft issue has been used by the Rock the Vote campaign to bring home the fact that their target groups are the ones who are directly impacted by our current foreign policy. If they don't pay attention and make decisions now, decisions may be made for them. A draft may be the most extreme outcome, but it is possible. Just because the DoD, Administration and Congress are saying there's not going to be a draft, doesn't mean that's going to happen. These are the same people who thought we would find WMD and be welcomed as liberators. They got that pretty freaking wrong too. Don't expect rationality to save anyone, the entire Iraq war has been irrational.
Rock the Vote isn't lying, they aren't saying that there will be a draft, they are pointing out that there could be a draft in order to get attention to the issue. They do not make any claim that any candidate would do anything, it's simply a starting point for discussion. These people are the shiny things network, they use this same tactic in all their programming. Why wouldn't they use the same format to discuss politics with their target audience?
Oh please. Stop with the logical fallacies, it's killing me.
It's not bogus. There's a very real possibility that the MTV generation could bear the majority of human costs of our current series of military operations. This could be through a draft or through a volunteer army, but it doesn't change the probability of the age group most likely to get killed. Without political power, these people will not be able to make that decision. Did you read Gillespie's letter? He's claiming that they are violating the IRS code and is threatening to take action if they do not stop.
How is government intimidation not censorship? Gillespie doesn't want them talking about this because it's the GOP perception that this hurts Bush's chances for winning. I believe you could call Gillespie's actions a "cheap and tawdry political trick".
MTV's actions are those of people who don't want be in a position where they could wind up like those bloggers in Iran. If Iran had had more people like this, there wouldn't be bloggers in jail now. The Iranians handed power to the Islamic Revolution in order to get rid of the Shah and couldn't control their monster.
This is nothing more than setting the stage for cries of "stolen election" should Bush win.
Your fellow citizens are quite likely being denied their civil right to vote. All you can think about is how this is some conspiracy fueled by partisanship? Unless you can provide some proof that the Democrats are doing something shady regarding the right to vote, your speculation is useless. All the Democrats have done is make their people aware of these problems so that they may be used to insure that the vote is properly counted. That's believing in the rule of law, not trying to intimidate and deny civil rights.
There is a pattern of Republican operatives and party members attempting to suppress the vote. At times, the suppression is racially targeted. I will not live under these conditions, and I am completely unwilling to give this country up to people who would impose them.
When it comes to the people's right to choose their leadership, justice will be served. If it's not done through fair ballots or fair courts, it will be done with some very unfair chaos. We've reduced ourselves to Civil War twice before in this nation's history, don't believe it can't happen again.
Without faith in the integrity of our system, what law can be just and what authority can be legitimate? If you don't insure that your fellow citizens are delivered the guarantee of voting that the Constitution gives them, then who will insure yours?
Rock the Vote versus the RNC, Ed Gillespie told MTV to stop talking about the draft. MTV responded very succinctly, IMNSHO:Now this is probably flamebait, but I think it's poignant given this thread:
Conservatives: Still trying to enforce the 3/5ths compromise!
That's the *real* story on how we wound up in the Matrix. No one believed that, so they made up the whole war story. Yep, we all took the blue pill.
Yellow card on your causality there:
very things it was supposedly going to help with rose in tandem with the growth of sex ed
It also rose with growth in population, population density, economic opportunity, new healthcare choices, later age till first marriage, etc, etc.
Empirical research on this has shown that rates go up for the negatives when we've switched from standard sex-ed to abstinence-only sex-ed. I don't have time to pick and choose which study to point you to, so just do a google search, there are plenty to choose from, including a Wikipedia article. Standard sex-ed actually allowed the use of condoms to increase while the amount of actual sex decreased in the 90's.
There was no reason to change from the standard sex-ed, since it was working and the empirical evidence said so. Absitenance-only is completely faith based and had no record to run on. Empirical research since it's introduction has shown that, at best, it does no better than standard sex-ed, at worst it doesn't work as well.
None of the references you've cited on Ireland or Iceland deny the existence of social groupings based on Folklaw. Neither do they deny the role of cannon law and Christianization of Ireland. This specifically had a socialist effect on Ireland. It had a socialist effect on every European society. My point wasn't even about the specifics of how Ireland or Iceland were organized, just that they were organized. There was a state, not a modern state, but this anarchist society you wish to exist, has never existed. At each point in these societies you've described, there were all the same negative characteristics that you attribute to any State.
As for Commanding Heights, Laissez Faire Books has a pretty good opinion of it. It may be more historical than economic, but it does a straightforward accounting of the effects of ideas and their political implications.
As for your references on Positivism, I've never seen a set of such crappy illustrations for arguments. Mises is completely missing the point. Popper noted that logic is non-scientific. Math is just a language for logic. Mises appeal to future historians is quite telling. He could not prove Popper wrong, he simply said Popper didn't matter because he had never "done" anything. Give me a break. Is this really the best you guys can do to refute Popper?
I'll show the problem with Hoppe using your own definition of the non-aggression axiom:
that only those actions which are the initiation of aggression against others should be preventable by coercive force
How does one define what is an aggressive action? If you deny me enough economic opportunity to provide for my children, is my aggression legitimate? Is it a violation of your rights, or a defense of my rights? Property rights are not the only rights. This a priori shit has got to stop. Something happens, therefore it happens. This doesn't prove shit. There is no way to make a correlation between any random event and the non-aggression axiom without begging the definition of aggression. The proper term for defining the aggression point is rights. You can call it a freedom from arbitrary fate, you can call it the currency of social power. You can place a cost in terms of how much wealth is required to defend it, but it is still not property. The non-aggression pact is only for a recognition of the right, the right to sell it is separate. Some rights also have the right to trade it, others don't. This again, is based on a cost of defense for the right to trade in a specific right. But, the cost of defense must now be calculated as shared by all who have agreed to recognize the right in the first place, since it would be assumed that a violation of this pact would invalidate the one it rests upon. The converse is true as well, entering into some non-aggression pacts automatically binds you to a separate non-aggression pact. These pacts are laws which define rights (the aggression points) and the agreed upon dispute resolution protocol. This defines the base cost for us to violate someone else's rights. On top of that is reputation, which can act in it's own jurisdictions. The laws against slander and libel demarcate these jurisdictions. The modern Liberal State is the most cost-effective method for defending your rights. Expecting reputation and other non-tangibles to exist in a free market is ludicrous. Since people can lie, and there is a cost to determining each fact as truth or lie, you cannot afford perfect information. Since this perfect information is needed for a market to remain completely free, and the trade in reputation is needed to compete in the trade for tangible goods or services, the markets for goods and services can never truly be free. The cost of verifying all information perfectly outweighs the value of the tangible goods or services. The state exists as a corrective force to this imperfect information. Our wealth has grown as we have been
Apparently, Friedman hasn't read Borkenau who wrote about Icelandic cultural and political systems and studied the Icelandic Saga and Eddic poetry. Muir's position is entirely supported. But given that you're using PBS internal search results to dismiss my sources, I'm sure that you've probably missed that. The series was 6 hours long, it had ample time to cover both Mises and Hayek. It gave Hayek at least, if not more, time than Keynes.
Yes, Northern Ireland is a shining example of how well the Irish have defended themselves. Henry II was the first British king to claim title to Ireland, he certainly wasn't the last. Have the British been able to totally dominate the Irish? No. But to claim that the Irish have been able to successfully resist conquerors has no basis.
Iceland and Ireland both dispensed justice using trial by ordeal under Folklaw. Christianization and the advent of written law brought Feudal law. I doubt that trial by ordeal would qualify as justice in any definition you've given.
Praxeology doesn't prove what you think it proves. If anything, a true praxeological study supports my position far better than yours. A theory cannot be a priori, it can only have a priori elements. I'm not being ignorant, you haven't presented anything that passes Popper's 4 elements of a scientific theory. I'm telling you that your system is faith based, and I don't believe. You haven't proven why it isn't, Mises had a point during a time when historicism reigned, you don't. Until you can argue a legal framework that implements your ideas I don't see how you can claim some superior system. If you can't describe your system in terms of laws then you have no system. The market is no less coercive than the State. There is coercion everywhere, should I shake my fist at Mother Nature for raining or build a shelter? You are shaking your fist, believing that your raindance will somehow stop the rain. The Modern Liberal state is a shelter, the best shelter built yet. Markets and people thrive in this shelter, more so than at any previous time in history.
To say that the State can in any way improve upon the unhampered free market illustrates an ignorance of correct economic theory and praxeology.
You keep repeating this with no proof, or even a small inkling as to why you think it's wrong, your defense suggests faith. And could a private party not prevent entrance to a market? Couldn't the mafia make sure that no one else opens a laundry shop in your neighborhood? It seems to me that if the state doesn't have power or coercion, that power is simply transferred to private entities, it doesn't simply go away. So are private law enforcement groups (mafia) preventing entrance to a market the same thing as the state doing so? DiLorenzo hasn't proven that monopolies can't happen without the state, just that it hasn't. That's just as invalid as stating that God has never revealed himself to me, therefore God is proven to not exist. Absence of evidence does not prove a negative.
Your mind is lazy, you've failed to self-critique your own thinking.
They were not stateless, they were tribal and ruled by Folklaw. The people living under the Folklaw were subjected to all of the power sharing and coercion that you claim exists in the modern state. You haven't shown how Ireland from 0-1000 CE had more freedom for it's own people. I have countered your historical papers with historical books. If you think you can simply find the truth and understanding necessary to have this debate pointing to papers online, you're nuts. The Romans and Greeks would laugh at your claims placing Ireland on par with them. When the Irish were Chrisitianized around 500 CE, they took the Roman culture and were under a combination of Folklaw and church law. Still no stateless society. By the 11th century, Ireland developed Feudal and Manorial systems just like the rest of Europe due to the influence of invading Norsemen and Normans. As far as I can tell, the Irish haven't successfully fought off an invasion, ever.
Nothing you've linked to disproves this analysis of Ancient Ireland.
As for economic theory, you haven't stated one. Your dismissal of Commanding Heights because the link was at PBS is further proof of your dogmatic thinking. The book was written and PBS did a series out of it. It covered Keynes vs. Hayeck and Mises. It covered the Austrian school of libertarianism and the Chicago school in depth with relation to Latin America and the former Soviet block. It then went on to leave a series of questions that these systems have not yet solved.
You have not said anything that solves those same questions. You have not shown how a exclusively property rights based law and unfettered markets create stability or allow progress. You haven't shown how further rights can be defined and how your system can deal with a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and religiously diverse group. In fact, since your definition of natural law requires faith, your system is incapable of lacking authoritarianism or intolerance towards minorities on some level.
The papers about national defense are flawed at their base, they do not take into account the causes of violence and warfare. Half of them talk about ethics and moral societies, which I've already said is invalid. Only rights can provide the justice or freedom these papers even begin to contemplate. They are more a reaction to Hobbes than political science. John Keegan would have a good belly-laugh reading this stuff. Since you are answering the wrong question, I'm sure your logic all checks out, but you still haven't actually solved any problems. What Mises and Hayeck provided has been integrated and used as far as they are useful, just as Keynes was. Back to the original thread, George Soros is one of the people who understands this third way, a synthesis of Keynes' stability for the masses and Hayeck's unfettered markets. One would think you would see the problems caused by completely unfettered markets where competitiveness is so grossly unequal. The market starves and dies. Instead, you've decided that the problem is the state in the first place. You ignore that markets can be suffocated by their own internal forces. Modern Liberal law can actually be said to be the protector of the markets. By protecting markets from forces like private monopolies, theft and inflation the market is able to thrive. No market with the size that is needed to support our society has existed without a state.
You've spent too much time filling your head with useless philosophy and are now trying to apply it to all things to affirm that you've found your personal truth. Until you're able to base your arguments on empirical evidence in the historical record or argue the law of your proposed system, your basis is flawed.
It's not historical fact, it's an interpretation. Your economic arguments have holes. The papers you linked to do not close those holes, nor do they prove your points, I've given you examples how and why not. I've linked to books and authors you haven't had time to read. You still haven't proven your point that I don't know economics, not to mention that the point of government is not purely economics.
Legitimate power is a simple concept, you simply ignore it because you do not believe in a legitimate state, you have not refuted it. It's also not relevant to the argument except for pointing out the fallacies in your analogies. Your natural law is still just faith based, you haven't proven it's enforcement. It can't be natural unless it's naturally enforced.
Democracy is neutered like that by default. If rights are inalienable, then you cannot have Democracy without this neutering effect you claim. You can't seem to argue without rushing to a polar opposite. This inflexibility suggests dogmatic reasoning. Of course, you are the one who believes that all states are illegitimate.
Democratic representation is valid since it provides a equal sharing of power for the purposes of law. You can't argue with that intent, it is a fact. No matter your government, if you violate someone else's inalienable rights, you can expect to be subject to their morality. Slaves will rise up given the chance, this is a fact.
That is the only natural law there is, rights are backed up by the ability to do violence to defend them. Beyond that there is only law, which is backed up by the larger group to do violence against the offenders. The purpose is to define rights so that there can be peace and thus stability for our markets. Our rights extend beyond property rights. Your effort to declare everything extended from property rights, which are the only natural rights is utter crap. There is no empirical basis for your entire argument. Your ideology is based on faith. Anyone can divide your society by creating disbelief, hence you will have to be authoritarian. Only a political ideology based on reason and provable rights can create the laws needed to ensure a peaceful, productive society.
If I'm a stupid as you claim, you shouldn't have any problem refuting my points and placing doubt in my facts.
You still don't get it. Stealing from the 11th person is a violation of their rights, therefore the act is illegitimate. Legitimate power can be used illegitimately, it's called corruption. The Nazi government was the legitimate authority in Germany, it acted illegitimately. Hitler, like many Fascists, came to power legally. The violations that the fascists governments immediately perpetrated on their citizens was a violation of inalienable rights. That aggression is justly resisted by violence. The Jews did not have the opportunity for violent rebellion. They only could be said to have "committed suicide" if they had consented to the Holocaust. The entire argument is crap because it compares two dissimilar things, it's illogical.
The women and blacks who did not consent are long dead, they no longer have rights. Do you propose we raise them from the grave and get their vote on the Constistution? If you think you have a better plan to insure that rights are not violated, you are more than welcome to call for a Constitutional Convention. Those are the rules by which this society has agreed to consider changing the basic laws of the land. If you can't implement your ideas within the confines of the Constitution, then you will have to use the process laid out for change.
You can't simply claim I don't know history, you'll actually need to refute my arguments for me to do anything but laugh. I have already countered your arguments over the examples of Iceland and Ireland. I have stated the basis for my reasoning. I have proven that what you describe has both never happened nor can ever possibly lead to anything but the destruction of civilization, a complete halt to progress, and survival of the species. You're dogmatic like a Marxist and blinded by a Theocrat's faith.
Do you dismiss the assertion that during the years before and 500 years after; Folklaw in a tribal society was the state in Ireland. They then were conquered because they did not defend themselves? Quite frankly the Church was the most powerful force and is the premise behind why Henry II claimed the lands for Christendom. Do you realize that the majority of the Roman law and early Christian writings survived the fall of Rome by being whisked away to Ireland? The gift of the missionaries to the rest of the European Barbarians was the written law of Justinian and the ability to synthesize it with the Folklaw and Cannon law. The Christianization brought Western civilization into the power it needed to be to repel the Arab invaders. The tools that allowed this were the body of law developed based on the rights of the people. Feudal systems and Manors were private contracts. The things that held the European economy back was the Church and it's prohibitions against banking. It was through this struggle of the economic powers, the secular rulers, with the church that we learned to develop more complex non-aggression pacts and finally, separate the church from the state. This is also when we first began to understand that capitalism was the natural order of things, but that arbitrary fate would lead to regression. This principle based around homogeneous cultural and religious groups allowed European economies to grow and experiment. It was when they had to start considering the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. That was what the Federalist and the founding of this country was about. It was a progression of the ancient rights, distilled from the barbaric and arbitrary Folklaw. It wasn't perfect, but binding ourselves together to insure that rights are not violated and that there is opportunity for all, was the best anyone had come up with. It has stood the test of time. Our state is legitimate and logical. It was founded upon a basis of dialectic reasoning around the rights of people. Just because we have recognized more rights, and you being all concerned for women and blacks voting on the Constitution, means that our government has needed to insure that those rights were reinforced equally under the law. That is why the government i
Who decides what is justified and what is not justified? States are the product of non-aggression when their power is derived democratically. When you are born, you depend on your parents and do not have the right to vote. The idea that your consent is needed to enter you into the compact of the society which is feeding and nurturing you to adulthood is pure fantasy. When you come of age, you have the choice to remain in that society, prove a better way for protecting rights or find a more suitable society to live in. Your indictment of the state that came before you is utter crap. You might as well claim you have a right to be born rich.
Ireland was a tribal society that was Christianized. It was first subject to Folklaw and then loose cannon law. Neither of these systems were capable of allowing the Irish to defend themselves from the plundering Vikings or the Romanized Normans. It was never a stateless society like you are suggesting nor was it capable of defending the rights of it's citizens. Our society is the product of refinements since before the Christianization of Ireland. We have moved from the undemocratic and unproductive Folklaw to the modern Liberal State. The reason we support this progression is that it will continue to defend our rights and provide the opportunity for freedom you keep claiming doesn't exist. The British made the same mistake of all occupiers. The lack of a strong central government was what allowed the British to conquer it in the first place. Our country would have reverted to the British Empire in the War of 1812 if we had listened to the Anti-Federalists and stuck with the Articles of Confederation.
How much freedom do you think you would have fighting endlessly as insurgents against a stronger invading force. Your historical fantasies ignore large swaths of the record. You've only addressed a subset of the facts that are convenient to your preconceived ideas. Your basic absolutist anarchist principles ignore the simple facts of life.