Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital.
The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the seemingly insoluble problems of private operation. What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all land areas are privately owned.
Let us take, for example, police protection. How would police protection be furnished in a totally private economy? Part of the answer becomes evident if we consider a world of totally private land and street ownership.
Consider the Times Square area of New York City, a notoriously crime-ridden area where there is little police protection furnished by the city authorities. Every New Yorker knows, in fact, that he lives and walks the streets, and not only Times Square, virtually in a state of “anarchy,” dependent solely on the normal peacefulness and good will of his fellow citizens. Police protection in New York is minimal, a fact dramatically revealed during week-long police strikes when, lo and behold!, crime in no way increased from its normal state when the police are supposedly alert and on the job. At any rate, suppose that the Times Square area, including the streets, was privately owned, say by the “Times Square Merchants Association.” The merchants would know full well, of course, that if crime was rampant in their area, if muggings and holdups abounded, then their customers would fade away and would patronize competing areas and neighborhoods. Hence, it would be to the economic interest of the merchants’ association to supply efficient and plentiful police protection, so that customers would be attracted to, rather than repelled from, their neighborhood. Private business, after all, is always trying to attract and keep its customers. But what good would be served by attractive store displays and packaging, pleasant lighting and courteous service, if the customers may be robbed or assaulted if they walk through the area?
The merchants’ association, furthermore, would be induced, by their drive for profits and for avoiding losses, to supply not only sufficient police protection but also courteous and pleasant protection. Governmental police have not only no incentive to be efficient or worry about their “customers’” needs; they also live with the ever-present temptation to wield their power of force in a brutal and coercive manner. “Police brutality” is a well-known feature of the police system, and it is held in check only by remote complaints of the harassed citizenry. But if the private merchants’ police should yield to the temptation of brutalizing the merchants’ customers, those customers will quickly disappear and go elsewhere. Hence, the merchants’ association will see to it that its police are courteous as well as plentiful.
Such efficient and high-quality police protection would prevail throughout the land, throughout all the private streets and land areas. Factories would guard their street areas, merchants their streets, and road companies would provide safe and efficient police protection for their toll roads and other privately owned roads. The same would be true for residential neighborhoods.
We can envision two possible types of private street ownership in such neighborhoods. In one type, all the landowners in a certain block might become the joint owners of that block, let us say as the “85th St. Block Company.” This company would then provide police protection, the costs being paid either by the home-owners directly or out of tenants’ rent if the street includes rental apartments. Again, homeowners will of course have a direct interest in seeing that their block is safe, while landlords will try to attract tenants by supplying safe streets in addition to the more
You cannot be a libertarian and also think that its legitimate that rights can be taken away by the State. They cant. For the record, who is to decide what rights the state will hold immune from public referendum and what rights should not, and how are they going to decide? By referendum no doubt. Your thinking is faulty on this, clearly.
Due process is a total sham; ask Julian Assange or Nelson Mandela or anyone else to whom 'due process' has been done. Its just another State brainwashing term, pure and simple.
But for a state to exist, for it to protect those rights, it must tax.
This is just a lie. You do not have to tax to protect rights; look at all the private security firms that exist without having to steal money from their clients.
This 'fruitcake' has a better and fuller understanding of Libertarianism than you do, and I dont have to ad hom to drive my points home.
I'm sorry that I am not being completely clear, please forgive me.
If we are to accept the notion of a State, then the only way it can be legitimate is if it is completely voluntary and non violent. That means that such a state can do anything, as long as they do not steal or coerce anyone.
That means they cannot raise an army through conscription (slavery). They cannot tax (theft). They cannot go to war (murder).
They can run a 'National Health Service' but they cannot steal money to run it. They can do anything as long as participation in it and contributions to it are voluntary, and the rights of other people are not violated. That means no Eminent domain for the 'public good', for example. It means no 'zoning' laws or 'planning permission'.
This is why Unions are such a good thing, and why laws controlling them are so evil. All men have the absolute right to associate with whomever they want. They can join together and refuse to work, or work together on mutually agreeable terms. These associations have nothing whatsoever to do with the State, and the State has no right to stop unions from striking. If the State can stop people from striking, they make workers into slaves.
An acceptable form of a state would take the shape of voluntary unions, where people can join and quit at will. Under the western democracies, you are born into slavery, as property of the State. The liberties you have are the gift of the state, and you are not even allowed to teach yourself unless they give you permission. You do not own your own land or house, and are forced to pay rent on it to the State ('Property Tax', 'Council Tax', 'Rates' etc)
A properly running State of Free Men could not automagically claim that you owe allegiance to them, or that 50% of your income belongs to the collective, or that your children must attend their schools and fight in their military or that you should pay 40% tax the house you inherited, or that you should pay an ongoing tax just because you own it.
In short, the State can do anything that you or I can do, but nothing that an individual cannot do.
Germany does not allow it because school is one of the ways they prevent extremism from re-emerging.
Even the UN has condemned Germany for its stance on Home Schooling:
...the long-running problem in Germany drew the criticism of a United Nations special rapporteur's documents.
"Even though the special rapporteur is a strong advocate of public, free and compulsory education, it should be noted that education may not be reduced to mere school attendance and that educational processes should be strengthened to ensure that they always and primarily serve the best interest of the child," the report said.
"Distance-learning methods and homeschooling represent valid options which could be developed in certain circumstances, bearing in mind that parents have the right to choose the appropriate type of education for their children, as stipulated in article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," the U.N. report said.
Just because the Germans had a bad episode and the German government is paranoid about a recurrence, this does not mean that the rights of Germans today should be suppressed.
Ironically, they are using a law enacted by the very regime they are trying to stop re-emerging to stop the re-emergence of that regime.
Its recursive!
At school they spend quite a lot of time instilling modern German values
This is a euphemism for brainwashing, pure and simple. Its immoral, indefensible and really bad.
What you have in democracy is mob rule, where by simply voting, people's rights are suppressed only because a majority voted for something, no matter if it is fundamentally immoral or not. That is insane.
You have a property right in yourself, i.e. you own yourself, your own life and body. Property rights have nothing to do with restricting the rights of others to resources.
There are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a "human right." But more importantly human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory.
Take, for example, the "human right" of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate "right to free speech"; there is only a man's property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.
Every right is derived from property rights. Internet freedoms are all derived from property rights; your right to the boxen you build, your right to copy data on to your own property, your right to connect that box as a peer on the network where you agree to mutually beneficial rules. All of that comes from property rights, and when the State says you cannot post XYZ on your own server, they are not violating your 'right to the internet' or some other fanciful nonsense, they are violating your property rights that you have in your equipment.
Property rights, do not imply restricting the rights of others, they in fact explain and extend the same rights to everyone.
Natural law or the law of nature (Latin: lex naturalis) has been described as a law whose content is set by nature and is thus universal.[1] As classically used, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (meaning "man-made law", not "good law"; cf. posit) of a given political community, society, or nation-state, and thus can function as a standard by which to criticize that law.[2] In natural law jurisprudence, on the other hand, the content of positive law cannot be known without some reference to the natural law (or something like it). Used in this way, natural law can be invoked to criticize decisions about the statutes, but less so to criticize the law itself. Some use natural law synonymously with natural justice or natural right (Latin ius naturale).
Although natural law is often conflated with common law, the two are distinct in that natural law is a view that certain rights or values are inherent in or universally cognizable by virtue of human reason or human nature, while common law is the legal tradition whereby certain rights or values are legally cognizable by virtue of judicial recognition or articulation.[3] Natural law theories have, however, exercised a profound influence on the development of English common law,[4] and have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, and Emmerich de Vattel. Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, it has been cited as a component in United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The essence of Declarationism is that the founding of the United States is based on Natural law.
The libertarian society of Ireland, which lasted for a thousand years — and which will be described further below — was able to resist English conquest for hundreds of years because of the absence of a State which could be conquered easily and then used by the conquerors to rule over the native population.
[...]
The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland — an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And, in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes (such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes), preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a "primitive" society: it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.
For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: "There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice . . . . There was no trace of State-administered justice."
How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All "freemen" who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their "kings." An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, "the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension."10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations [p. 232] which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland.
The street you are walking down is privately owned, and the private police at either end make escape for you impossible. You are caught, I get my property back, then the street owner sends you to the private court, where you are severely punished.
Would you really like to enter another jurisdiction who could have its own absurd laws every time you enter a store?
On the private roads which I drive, there is no speed limit, just like the Autobahn in Germany. Speed limits dont make road use safer; yet another old wives take propagated by the State.
You have no right to encroach on other people's property without permission. Period. the only rights you have are to your own property, which includes your own body.
Norway e.g.: you own land, we have a stormy season with harsh weather, I make a camp on your land at the lake or the stream: legal!
Legal yes, but moral no. Would I give shelter to people who are suffering? Yes. Do others have a right to shelter on other people's land? No.
You do not understand what the difference between rights and laws is. You do not know what rights are or where they come from.
You have to understand this before you can discuss it properly.
More to the point, and what is crucial, is what a State should not be able to do.
A State should not be able to do anything that you or I am not able to do, like stop people from kissing in public, or growing and smoking Marijuana, or brewing alcohol, or selling those things, or selling yourself, or gambling, or anything whatsoever as long as you do not violate the property rights of other people.
That means no Eminent domain, no internet regulations (censorship, net neutrality), no compulsory school attendance laws, no prohibition, no outlawing of prostitution, no theft (taxation), no enslaving other people (Obamacare, conscription, draft), murder (war) and all the myriad other bad things that the State does.
So is child slavery OK as long as the parents agree?
Being forced to send your child to a school is Child Slavery, do you approve of it? Do you believe that because a majority thinks it is appropriate, that confers legitimacy upon it?
The ownership of children is revolting and completely wrong (in my opinion) - both by the State or parents.
Then you grasp the fundamental problem. SOMEONE has to be responsible for children. What you have to decide is who you think should be responsible, the State or parents, and then you have to say why.
If you say the State, then you have to explain why such a violent idea is morally correct.
Children have rights. If the parents are unable or unwilling to provide them, the State empowered by the People should provide them. Education is one of the rights, as decided by consensus.
You do not know what rights are or where they come from. If you did, you could not say, for example, that not sending your child to school is removing rights from children, or that children have a 'right to education at school'.
Children do not have rights that are separate and distinct from the rights that all men have. The UN is responsible for creating this fallacious idea of 'Children's Rights' which is nothing more than a means of getting access to children so that they can be controlled in law.
The state is not "empowered by the people" this is brainwashing and rote repetition of the programming people get in Schools. Rights are not conferred or created by consensus, the UN, legislature or anything else.
Please provide the source of the One True Morality. Until then, there is no reason to believe that morality is anything but subjective to each person and therefore such judgments of value are meaningless.
If all morality is subjective, then you cannot claim that it is wrong for people to do harm to one another, since it is only the perspective of the individual that is the basis of morality, This is pure autism, "Only I am real, only what I know is true. Other people are not real, they feel nothing; only my feelings are real" etc.
For me it seems you want to live in an anarchy whre the only agreement is "people may own things"...
That is very insightful and partially correct. The only rules there should be are that you own property, including a property right in yourself, that no one has the right to encroach upon you or your property, and that you should do all you promise to do.
You have a right to dispose of your property as you see fit, enter into contracts as you see fit, and to generally carry out your existence as you see fit.
You claim that there is no right to property, and yet, if you have your money stolen from you, your (quite natural reaction) would be to seek to get it back or get redress. I could go on, but really these things are for you to re-discover on your own.
Perhaps the writings of one of your 'countrymen' would be useful to you:
Thats true, there is no 'right to healthcare' or 'right to education' both of those things are goods, not rights.
Rights do not come from the decisions of 'society'. There are fundamental principles of morality, and these do not change because people take a vote. You concede this by saying that because government has the 'biggest stick' i.e. a monopoly on violence, they get to say what is what. Just because they can use violence, it doesn't follow that they can dictate reality. They can force people to obey them, but this does not make what they dictate true.
If they want to set up their society so that home schooling isn't allowed they have the right to do so.
Replace the phrase 'home schooling' with slavery. Does it still work for you? No one has the right to take your property against your will, or to force your children to go to school. They may have the power to do that, but that is not the same as having a right.
See the Thomas Woods YouTube I linked to in this socialist infested collectivist fest. After you watch it, you will understand exactly what rights are, where they come from and why what you just wrote is wrong.
In our previous issue, my colleague Andrea Castillo exposed the if-you-hate-the-government-so-much-then-why-don’t-you-move-to-Somalia fallacy. This argumentative move is often used in the effort to reduce the libertarian’s position to absurdity. It is a way of pointing to the poverty and violence in Somalia, and saying “that’s what happens in the absence of a functioning government.” But all our critic has really achieved is a demonstration of his ignorance of Somalia’s recent history. It is true that Somalia is no anarcho-utopia.
But, as Andrea showed, the true cause of Somalia’s troubles is the predatory government that ruled there until collapsing in 1991. But more importantly, during its two decades of statelessness, Somalia has made significant economic progress and improvements in health and well-being. These facts suggest that government is not always necessary for progress. If anything, invoking Somalia seems to support the libertarian’s position.
For many, this correlation between anarchy and progress in Somalia is a counterintuitive phenomenon. What explains it? Why hasn’t life in Somalia become increasingly “nasty, brutish, and short”? How has productive economic activity increased in the absence of government oversight and regulation? The simple answer is that, although lacking a centralized government, Somalia nonetheless has a decentralized social structure, made up of clans and their subgroups. This decentralized social structure had existed in Somalia for centuries before Western colonization introduced the top-down nation-state style of governance. Fortunately, the decentralized structure has survived, and it now provides the framework within which social, economic, and legal interactions take place.
Seeing this same line over and over again, the Somalia Fallacy just shows how little original thinking there is, and how little thought comes from principle. People just repeat the same stock phrases that come from the State and its apologists and propagandists. Easy to refute, boring and stupid.
You're laughing because that is the conditioned response to any challenge on your spoon-fed State conditioning. I note that you are from.de ; that tells us all we need to know about your 'education' if we were prone to generalizations:
People have been given political asylum after beign forced to flee from your 'free country' that is a democracy (mob rule, where even the dumbest have a say in the violence).
Like the other poster said; It's not forbidden to educate your child at home, but it is forbidden to deprive them of the education provided by the state.
That is a flat out lie. Home Education is ILLEGAL in Sweden and Iceland and Germany (for example). You may not teach 'your' children at home, even if you decide to follow the State curriculum.
In the case of Germany, the law forbidding Home Schooling is one of the few laws left on the statute books from that country's dark era that Godwin's law prevents me from typing out.:)
No one owns another person, not even one's children. That does not lead to a default ownership of children by the state.
Your construction is interesting "one's children"; that is a possessive construction, and its one that everyone uses because quite naturally, properly functioning human beings understand that children really do belong to their parents; they are a unique specie of property in that they can be owned, but also have all the rights that human being have, meaning that they are not truly owned as a man owns a dog, but exist in a separate and special category of property that is not found in any other type of property.
Even if we were to agree that 'no one owns children' you have to accept that someone must have authority over them in the form of being a ward or guardian. The question then becomes who is that guardian, and why is that entity the rightful guardian. Its the same problem stated without the emotionally charged phrases.
All human beings have the same rights, no matter what age they are. That means (to refute your straw man) that killing your children, as a parent is wrong. Its not a matter of wether other people think that killing your children is wrong, it is a matter of objective fact that it is wrong.
Intervention when the rights of people are violated is justifiable, but this is not what we are discussing; what we are really discussing is what are rights and where do they come from. Rights do not come from the State, or the collective vote of the majority, or from a constitution or mass opinion or some economic need.
The matter of schooling in all of this is crucial, because it sits at a very tricky locus of relationships, where the state can interpose itself and bamboozle people into believing that it is legitimate, when clearly it is not.
Those countries that claim to be free but which outlaw Home Education are not free at all. The State lays claim to all children, and mandates what they must learn. Those states are even willing to violently kidnap children as they assert their ownership. No one with a working and complete moral center can say that this is right.
According to you, what IS the business of the state? In your various replies in this thread you seem to be against most things the state does. Did you just forget to mention the rest or are there some things you DO want the state to do?
What I or anyone thinks the State should do is irrelevant; the State doesn't have the right to steal your money, conscript you into an army for 'national service', steal your land or do any of those things that people are forbidden to do by natural law. 'The State' can exist in any way that it wants, as long as it is bound by the same laws that bind men; no stealing, encroaching on people and their property, etc.
yet the is the negotiating of rights. Done properly, you can maximize the freedom of people.
No. Rights are not negotiated, and they do not come from legislatures, the UN or anywhere else. Rights are born with you, they are limited in number and all stem from property rights.
Take your example of the child. You, and perhaps the country to which you belong, probably have a strong sense of paternal authority. Yet other people would strongly disagree with your assertion, equating that paternal authority to a form of slavery that society must work to overcome. After all, to leave the child enslaved to the individual is fundamentally immoral.
Unbelievable. First of all, I dont belong to any country. Secondly, Paternal authority comes from property rights, and is entirely legitimate. In absentia of that, the State becomes the owner of all children, and it is this that is completely immoral. There is no such thing as 'society' in this case; what you really mean is that a body of 'Social Workers', individuals in charge of children's affairs, are the true owners of children. This is the reality. A small number of State employees with all their prejudices and perversions have absolute power and ownership of all children:
No decent human being thinks that it is correct that a small number of State employees should have absolute power and ownership of all children. It is anathema, revolting and completely wrong.
The slavery you are talking about is actually the slavery of the State forced upon free people. You have it precisely backwards.
Of course, there really are people who believe that children are the property of the father, but they are most definitely evil in my book.
You are free to read and believe that book, as long as you do not try and violently force other people to believe what you believe. I dont have a problem with you brining up your children in any way you see fit. Its your business, not mine and not that of the State.
And that's what public consultation processes
No matte how many people you consult, outlawing redheads is immoral. Consensus cannot confer legitimacy to immorality. It might make you feel good, but its still dead wrong.
So should you get to beat your children, too? This isn't an issue of state versus personal freedom, but of whether children are simply the property of their parents or not to do with as they will.
No, its a question of wether the State owns children or the parents own them.
Discipline is a matter for the parents, not the State or you. If you have your own children, its up to you to discipline them in a way that is appropriate for them, you made them they are your responsibility and no one else's. Some children can be reasoned with without ever having to lift your hand. Others need a slap. Only the parent can judge what is appropriate, not you, not I, and not some aparatchick from the State.
If that is not the case, then the State is the parent of all children, and can order them to do anything, remove them from their families:
brainwash them in government schools and essentially, do anything they want with them, because there is no one above the State to trump their authority when it comes to protecting them.
Many of the people who talk about 'beating' children and all this other emotive red herring garbage do not have children, do not understand rights and do not understand the proper role of government. When they find out the hard way, i.e. when the State goes after something that they are concerned about (like internet censorship) then they all of a sudden 'get it' and go berserk, without ever making the connection that other people's concerns about State intrusion into their lives are just as valid, and that they share common cause with those people.
Its a pure autistic response; 'only my view of the world is correct; I am the only one that is real, only my concerns are valid and only my rights matter'. No, everyone is real, everyone has the same rights, and attacks on the rights of one person or a set of people is an attack on everyone, no matter what you believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital.
The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the seemingly insoluble problems of private operation. What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all land areas are privately owned.
Let us take, for example, police protection. How would police protection be furnished in a totally private economy? Part of the answer becomes evident if we consider a world of totally private land and street ownership.
Consider the Times Square area of New York City, a notoriously crime-ridden area where there is little police protection furnished by the city authorities. Every New Yorker knows, in fact, that he lives and walks the streets, and not only Times Square, virtually in a state of “anarchy,” dependent solely on the normal peacefulness and good will of his fellow citizens. Police protection in New York is minimal, a fact dramatically revealed during week-long police strikes when, lo and behold!, crime in no way increased from its normal state when the police are supposedly alert and on the job. At any rate, suppose that the Times Square area, including the streets, was privately owned, say by the “Times Square Merchants Association.” The merchants would know full well, of course, that if crime was rampant in their area, if muggings and holdups abounded, then their customers would fade away and would patronize competing areas and neighborhoods. Hence, it would be to the economic interest of the merchants’ association to supply efficient and plentiful police protection, so that customers would be attracted to, rather than repelled from, their neighborhood. Private business, after all, is always trying to attract and keep its customers. But what good would be served by attractive store displays and packaging, pleasant lighting and courteous service, if the customers may be robbed or assaulted if they walk through the area?
The merchants’ association, furthermore, would be induced, by their drive for profits and for avoiding losses, to supply not only sufficient police protection but also courteous and pleasant protection. Governmental police have not only no incentive to be efficient or worry about their “customers’” needs; they also live with the ever-present temptation to wield their power of force in a brutal and coercive manner. “Police brutality” is a well-known feature of the police system, and it is held in check only by remote complaints of the harassed citizenry. But if the private merchants’ police should yield to the temptation of brutalizing the merchants’ customers, those customers will quickly disappear and go elsewhere. Hence, the merchants’ association will see to it that its police are courteous as well as plentiful.
Such efficient and high-quality police protection would prevail throughout the land, throughout all the private streets and land areas. Factories would guard their street areas, merchants their streets, and road companies would provide safe and efficient police protection for their toll roads and other privately owned roads. The same would be true for residential neighborhoods.
We can envision two possible types of private street ownership in such neighborhoods. In one type, all the landowners in a certain block might become the joint owners of that block, let us say as the “85th St. Block Company.” This company would then provide police protection, the costs being paid either by the home-owners directly or out of tenants’ rent if the street includes rental apartments. Again, homeowners will of course have a direct interest in seeing that their block is safe, while landlords will try to attract tenants by supplying safe streets in addition to the more
You cannot be a libertarian and also think that its legitimate that rights can be taken away by the State. They cant. For the record, who is to decide what rights the state will hold immune from public referendum and what rights should not, and how are they going to decide? By referendum no doubt. Your thinking is faulty on this, clearly.
Due process is a total sham; ask Julian Assange or Nelson Mandela or anyone else to whom 'due process' has been done. Its just another State brainwashing term, pure and simple.
But for a state to exist, for it to protect those rights, it must tax.
This is just a lie. You do not have to tax to protect rights; look at all the private security firms that exist without having to steal money from their clients.
This 'fruitcake' has a better and fuller understanding of Libertarianism than you do, and I dont have to ad hom to drive my points home.
I'm sorry that I am not being completely clear, please forgive me.
If we are to accept the notion of a State, then the only way it can be legitimate is if it is completely voluntary and non violent. That means that such a state can do anything, as long as they do not steal or coerce anyone.
That means they cannot raise an army through conscription (slavery). They cannot tax (theft). They cannot go to war (murder).
They can run a 'National Health Service' but they cannot steal money to run it. They can do anything as long as participation in it and contributions to it are voluntary, and the rights of other people are not violated. That means no Eminent domain for the 'public good', for example. It means no 'zoning' laws or 'planning permission'.
This is why Unions are such a good thing, and why laws controlling them are so evil. All men have the absolute right to associate with whomever they want. They can join together and refuse to work, or work together on mutually agreeable terms. These associations have nothing whatsoever to do with the State, and the State has no right to stop unions from striking. If the State can stop people from striking, they make workers into slaves.
An acceptable form of a state would take the shape of voluntary unions, where people can join and quit at will. Under the western democracies, you are born into slavery, as property of the State. The liberties you have are the gift of the state, and you are not even allowed to teach yourself unless they give you permission. You do not own your own land or house, and are forced to pay rent on it to the State ('Property Tax', 'Council Tax', 'Rates' etc)
A properly running State of Free Men could not automagically claim that you owe allegiance to them, or that 50% of your income belongs to the collective, or that your children must attend their schools and fight in their military or that you should pay 40% tax the house you inherited, or that you should pay an ongoing tax just because you own it.
In short, the State can do anything that you or I can do, but nothing that an individual cannot do.
Germany does not allow it because school is one of the ways they prevent extremism from re-emerging.
Even the UN has condemned Germany for its stance on Home Schooling:
"Even though the special rapporteur is a strong advocate of public, free and compulsory education, it should be noted that education may not be reduced to mere school attendance and that educational processes should be strengthened to ensure that they always and primarily serve the best interest of the child," the report said.
"Distance-learning methods and homeschooling represent valid options which could be developed in certain circumstances, bearing in mind that parents have the right to choose the appropriate type of education for their children, as stipulated in article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," the U.N. report said.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=146273
Just because the Germans had a bad episode and the German government is paranoid about a recurrence, this does not mean that the rights of Germans today should be suppressed.
Ironically, they are using a law enacted by the very regime they are trying to stop re-emerging to stop the re-emergence of that regime.
Its recursive!
At school they spend quite a lot of time instilling modern German values
This is a euphemism for brainwashing, pure and simple. Its immoral, indefensible and really bad.
And what if the person robbing you is the one that owns the street?
You mean like 'Jay Walking' in Manhattan?
Or maybe you mean like this man being knocked off of his bicycle in that city:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ
Thinking is hard!
So, where do *your* rights come from? Don't bother replying if it involves deities.
Try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6n1FL42to8
or if you have the time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Lb8YitPs8
Actually, no:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/bryan6.html
What you have in democracy is mob rule, where by simply voting, people's rights are suppressed only because a majority voted for something, no matter if it is fundamentally immoral or not. That is insane.
Health and education are not rights, they are goods:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOwImRicZrw
You have a property right in yourself, i.e. you own yourself, your own life and body. Property rights have nothing to do with restricting the rights of others to resources.
There are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a "human right." But more importantly human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory.
Take, for example, the "human right" of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate "right to free speech"; there is only a man's property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners.
Every right is derived from property rights. Internet freedoms are all derived from property rights; your right to the boxen you build, your right to copy data on to your own property, your right to connect that box as a peer on the network where you agree to mutually beneficial rules. All of that comes from property rights, and when the State says you cannot post XYZ on your own server, they are not violating your 'right to the internet' or some other fanciful nonsense, they are violating your property rights that you have in your equipment.
Property rights, do not imply restricting the rights of others, they in fact explain and extend the same rights to everyone.
Natural law or the law of nature (Latin: lex naturalis) has been described as a law whose content is set by nature and is thus universal.[1] As classically used, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (meaning "man-made law", not "good law"; cf. posit) of a given political community, society, or nation-state, and thus can function as a standard by which to criticize that law.[2] In natural law jurisprudence, on the other hand, the content of positive law cannot be known without some reference to the natural law (or something like it). Used in this way, natural law can be invoked to criticize decisions about the statutes, but less so to criticize the law itself. Some use natural law synonymously with natural justice or natural right (Latin ius naturale).
Although natural law is often conflated with common law, the two are distinct in that natural law is a view that certain rights or values are inherent in or universally cognizable by virtue of human reason or human nature, while common law is the legal tradition whereby certain rights or values are legally cognizable by virtue of judicial recognition or articulation.[3] Natural law theories have, however, exercised a profound influence on the development of English common law,[4] and have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, and Emmerich de Vattel. Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, it has been cited as a component in United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The essence of Declarationism is that the founding of the United States is based on Natural law.
[...]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
So when has the anarcho-utopia existed?
The libertarian society of Ireland, which lasted for a thousand years — and which will be described further below — was able to resist English conquest for hundreds of years because of the absence of a State which could be conquered easily and then used by the conquerors to rule over the native population.
[...]
The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland — an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in the seventeenth century. And, in contrast to many similarly functioning primitive tribes (such as the Ibos in West Africa, and many European tribes), preconquest Ireland was not in any sense a "primitive" society: it was a highly complex society that was, for centuries, the most advanced, most scholarly, and most civilized in all of Western Europe.
For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: "There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice . . . . There was no trace of State-administered justice."
How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All "freemen" who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their "kings." An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, "the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension."10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations [p. 232] which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland.
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
It lasted 1000 years.
The street you are walking down is privately owned, and the private police at either end make escape for you impossible. You are caught, I get my property back, then the street owner sends you to the private court, where you are severely punished.
Would you really like to enter another jurisdiction who could have its own absurd laws every time you enter a store?
Millions of people do it all the time:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388279/British-tourist-faces-year-Dubai-jail-calling-prophet-Muhammad-terrorist-heated-row.html
On the private roads which I drive, there is no speed limit, just like the Autobahn in Germany. Speed limits dont make road use safer; yet another old wives take propagated by the State.
Law and rights are completely arbitrary.
Thats what they taught you in school, so that you would not be able to think like a free man.
USA: I own land, you step on it, I shot you: legal! (And from an european or asian point of view: absurd!)
In Texas, you have better property rights than you do in other states; its called the Castle Doctrine:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=texas+man+shot+trespassing+drunk+taxi+jumped+out#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=castle%20doctrine%20texas&aq=1l&aqi=g-l5&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=ea006a1cc738a9bb&biw=1268&bih=740&pf=p&pdl=300
You have no right to encroach on other people's property without permission. Period. the only rights you have are to your own property, which includes your own body.
Norway e.g.: you own land, we have a stormy season with harsh weather, I make a camp on your land at the lake or the stream: legal!
Legal yes, but moral no. Would I give shelter to people who are suffering? Yes. Do others have a right to shelter on other people's land? No.
You do not understand what the difference between rights and laws is. You do not know what rights are or where they come from.
You have to understand this before you can discuss it properly.
It seems that you dont understand what Home Education Home or Schooling actually means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
Its illegal in Germany. Thats immoral. Deal with it.
what a state government is supposed to do.
More to the point, and what is crucial, is what a State should not be able to do.
A State should not be able to do anything that you or I am not able to do, like stop people from kissing in public, or growing and smoking Marijuana, or brewing alcohol, or selling those things, or selling yourself, or gambling, or anything whatsoever as long as you do not violate the property rights of other people.
That means no Eminent domain, no internet regulations (censorship, net neutrality), no compulsory school attendance laws, no prohibition, no outlawing of prostitution, no theft (taxation), no enslaving other people (Obamacare, conscription, draft), murder (war) and all the myriad other bad things that the State does.
Please prove that property rights are innate.
Prove it to yourself:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp
So is child slavery OK as long as the parents agree?
Being forced to send your child to a school is Child Slavery, do you approve of it? Do you believe that because a majority thinks it is appropriate, that confers legitimacy upon it?
The ownership of children is revolting and completely wrong (in my opinion) - both by the State or parents.
Then you grasp the fundamental problem. SOMEONE has to be responsible for children. What you have to decide is who you think should be responsible, the State or parents, and then you have to say why.
If you say the State, then you have to explain why such a violent idea is morally correct.
Children have rights. If the parents are unable or unwilling to provide them, the State empowered by the People should provide them. Education is one of the rights, as decided by consensus.
You do not know what rights are or where they come from. If you did, you could not say, for example, that not sending your child to school is removing rights from children, or that children have a 'right to education at school'.
Children do not have rights that are separate and distinct from the rights that all men have. The UN is responsible for creating this fallacious idea of 'Children's Rights' which is nothing more than a means of getting access to children so that they can be controlled in law.
The state is not "empowered by the people" this is brainwashing and rote repetition of the programming people get in Schools. Rights are not conferred or created by consensus, the UN, legislature or anything else.
Please provide the source of the One True Morality. Until then, there is no reason to believe that morality is anything but subjective to each person and therefore such judgments of value are meaningless.
If all morality is subjective, then you cannot claim that it is wrong for people to do harm to one another, since it is only the perspective of the individual that is the basis of morality, This is pure autism, "Only I am real, only what I know is true. Other people are not real, they feel nothing; only my feelings are real" etc.
natural law
Nonsense upon stilts.
Whose stilts, yours or mine or the State's?
For me it seems you want to live in an anarchy whre the only agreement is "people may own things" ...
That is very insightful and partially correct. The only rules there should be are that you own property, including a property right in yourself, that no one has the right to encroach upon you or your property, and that you should do all you promise to do.
You have a right to dispose of your property as you see fit, enter into contracts as you see fit, and to generally carry out your existence as you see fit.
You claim that there is no right to property, and yet, if you have your money stolen from you, your (quite natural reaction) would be to seek to get it back or get redress. I could go on, but really these things are for you to re-discover on your own.
Perhaps the writings of one of your 'countrymen' would be useful to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe
Happy reading!
People don't inherently have rights to anything.
Thats true, there is no 'right to healthcare' or 'right to education' both of those things are goods, not rights.
Rights do not come from the decisions of 'society'. There are fundamental principles of morality, and these do not change because people take a vote. You concede this by saying that because government has the 'biggest stick' i.e. a monopoly on violence, they get to say what is what. Just because they can use violence, it doesn't follow that they can dictate reality. They can force people to obey them, but this does not make what they dictate true.
If they want to set up their society so that home schooling isn't allowed they have the right to do so.
Replace the phrase 'home schooling' with slavery. Does it still work for you? No one has the right to take your property against your will, or to force your children to go to school. They may have the power to do that, but that is not the same as having a right.
See the Thomas Woods YouTube I linked to in this socialist infested collectivist fest. After you watch it, you will understand exactly what rights are, where they come from and why what you just wrote is wrong.
Isn't that Somalia?
Not quite:
In our previous issue, my colleague Andrea Castillo exposed the if-you-hate-the-government-so-much-then-why-don’t-you-move-to-Somalia fallacy. This argumentative move is often used in the effort to reduce the libertarian’s position to absurdity. It is a way of pointing to the poverty and violence in Somalia, and saying “that’s what happens in the absence of a functioning government.” But all our critic has really achieved is a demonstration of his ignorance of Somalia’s recent history. It is true that Somalia is no anarcho-utopia.
But, as Andrea showed, the true cause of Somalia’s troubles is the predatory government that ruled there until collapsing in 1991. But more importantly, during its two decades of statelessness, Somalia has made significant economic progress and improvements in health and well-being. These facts suggest that government is not always necessary for progress. If anything, invoking Somalia seems to support the libertarian’s position.
For many, this correlation between anarchy and progress in Somalia is a counterintuitive phenomenon. What explains it? Why hasn’t life in Somalia become increasingly “nasty, brutish, and short”? How has productive economic activity increased in the absence of government oversight and regulation? The simple answer is that, although lacking a centralized government, Somalia nonetheless has a decentralized social structure, made up of clans and their subgroups. This decentralized social structure had existed in Somalia for centuries before Western colonization introduced the top-down nation-state style of governance. Fortunately, the decentralized structure has survived, and it now provides the framework within which social, economic, and legal interactions take place.
[...]
http://freepressonline.net/content/decentralization-and-progress-somalia
Seeing this same line over and over again, the Somalia Fallacy just shows how little original thinking there is, and how little thought comes from principle. People just repeat the same stock phrases that come from the State and its apologists and propagandists. Easy to refute, boring and stupid.
You're laughing because that is the conditioned response to any challenge on your spoon-fed State conditioning. I note that you are from .de ; that tells us all we need to know about your 'education' if we were prone to generalizations:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=home+education+germany
People have been given political asylum after beign forced to flee from your 'free country' that is a democracy (mob rule, where even the dumbest have a say in the violence).
Like the other poster said; It's not forbidden to educate your child at home, but it is forbidden to deprive them of the education provided by the state.
That is a flat out lie. Home Education is ILLEGAL in Sweden and Iceland and Germany (for example). You may not teach 'your' children at home, even if you decide to follow the State curriculum.
In the case of Germany, the law forbidding Home Schooling is one of the few laws left on the statute books from that country's dark era that Godwin's law prevents me from typing out. :)
No one owns another person, not even one's children. That does not lead to a default ownership of children by the state.
Your construction is interesting "one's children"; that is a possessive construction, and its one that everyone uses because quite naturally, properly functioning human beings understand that children really do belong to their parents; they are a unique specie of property in that they can be owned, but also have all the rights that human being have, meaning that they are not truly owned as a man owns a dog, but exist in a separate and special category of property that is not found in any other type of property.
Even if we were to agree that 'no one owns children' you have to accept that someone must have authority over them in the form of being a ward or guardian. The question then becomes who is that guardian, and why is that entity the rightful guardian. Its the same problem stated without the emotionally charged phrases.
All human beings have the same rights, no matter what age they are. That means (to refute your straw man) that killing your children, as a parent is wrong. Its not a matter of wether other people think that killing your children is wrong, it is a matter of objective fact that it is wrong.
Intervention when the rights of people are violated is justifiable, but this is not what we are discussing; what we are really discussing is what are rights and where do they come from. Rights do not come from the State, or the collective vote of the majority, or from a constitution or mass opinion or some economic need.
The matter of schooling in all of this is crucial, because it sits at a very tricky locus of relationships, where the state can interpose itself and bamboozle people into believing that it is legitimate, when clearly it is not.
Those countries that claim to be free but which outlaw Home Education are not free at all. The State lays claim to all children, and mandates what they must learn. Those states are even willing to violently kidnap children as they assert their ownership. No one with a working and complete moral center can say that this is right.
According to you, what IS the business of the state?
In your various replies in this thread you seem to be against most things the state does. Did you just forget to mention the rest or are there some things you DO want the state to do?
What I or anyone thinks the State should do is irrelevant; the State doesn't have the right to steal your money, conscript you into an army for 'national service', steal your land or do any of those things that people are forbidden to do by natural law. 'The State' can exist in any way that it wants, as long as it is bound by the same laws that bind men; no stealing, encroaching on people and their property, etc.
yet the is the negotiating of rights. Done properly, you can maximize the freedom of people.
No. Rights are not negotiated, and they do not come from legislatures, the UN or anywhere else. Rights are born with you, they are limited in number and all stem from property rights.
Take your example of the child. You, and perhaps the country to which you belong, probably have a strong sense of paternal authority. Yet other people would strongly disagree with your assertion, equating that paternal authority to a form of slavery that society must work to overcome. After all, to leave the child enslaved to the individual is fundamentally immoral.
Unbelievable. First of all, I dont belong to any country. Secondly, Paternal authority comes from property rights, and is entirely legitimate. In absentia of that, the State becomes the owner of all children, and it is this that is completely immoral. There is no such thing as 'society' in this case; what you really mean is that a body of 'Social Workers', individuals in charge of children's affairs, are the true owners of children. This is the reality. A small number of State employees with all their prejudices and perversions have absolute power and ownership of all children:
http://www.intermix.org.uk/features/FEA_20_oona.asp
No decent human being thinks that it is correct that a small number of State employees should have absolute power and ownership of all children. It is anathema, revolting and completely wrong.
The slavery you are talking about is actually the slavery of the State forced upon free people. You have it precisely backwards.
Of course, there really are people who believe that children are the property of the father, but they are most definitely evil in my book.
You are free to read and believe that book, as long as you do not try and violently force other people to believe what you believe. I dont have a problem with you brining up your children in any way you see fit. Its your business, not mine and not that of the State.
And that's what public consultation processes
No matte how many people you consult, outlawing redheads is immoral. Consensus cannot confer legitimacy to immorality. It might make you feel good, but its still dead wrong.
So should you get to beat your children, too? This isn't an issue of state versus personal freedom, but of whether children are simply the property of their parents or not to do with as they will.
No, its a question of wether the State owns children or the parents own them.
Discipline is a matter for the parents, not the State or you. If you have your own children, its up to you to discipline them in a way that is appropriate for them, you made them they are your responsibility and no one else's. Some children can be reasoned with without ever having to lift your hand. Others need a slap. Only the parent can judge what is appropriate, not you, not I, and not some aparatchick from the State.
If that is not the case, then the State is the parent of all children, and can order them to do anything, remove them from their families:
https://sites.google.com/site/thedeskofbrian/state-of-the-nation/swedengovernmentseizechildfromhomeschoolfamily
brainwash them in government schools and essentially, do anything they want with them, because there is no one above the State to trump their authority when it comes to protecting them.
Many of the people who talk about 'beating' children and all this other emotive red herring garbage do not have children, do not understand rights and do not understand the proper role of government. When they find out the hard way, i.e. when the State goes after something that they are concerned about (like internet censorship) then they all of a sudden 'get it' and go berserk, without ever making the connection that other people's concerns about State intrusion into their lives are just as valid, and that they share common cause with those people.
Its a pure autistic response; 'only my view of the world is correct; I am the only one that is real, only my concerns are valid and only my rights matter'. No, everyone is real, everyone has the same rights, and attacks on the rights of one person or a set of people is an attack on everyone, no matter what you believe.