I thought it was inherent in the definition, but property is any resource over which there can be a dispute regarding how it is employed. In other words, a resource can only be employed one way at a time, and the property right is the determination of which person has the right to decide which way. Those things which are not rivalrous (which can be employed in an unlimited number of different ways simultaneously) are not subject to property rights. Everything else is.
You want to speak? I assume that means you want to address a group? Where will you do it, if no one owns any property?
Parks, street corners, the internet, arranging for some time in an auditorium, going on the radio or tv, writing a book, writing a newspaper, yelling from a rooftop, wearing a breadboard sign, etc. There are plenty of ways, means, and locations to pracice free speech even if you don't have "property" to do it on.
Every single one of your examples requires the use of property. That property is either private or "public" (State-owned), and if it's "public" then the State controls how it is used, i.e. whether you can use it to practice your "free speach", which means the State controls which speach takes place and which does not by allocating resources according to its own goals.
That's why most countries have this thing called a "constitution" (or a long tradition of laws, treaties, common law precident, etc, for the British). In it, a country guarantees it's citizens certain protections from government abuse.
Are you being intentionally dense? Those "protections" are, in the vast majority, legal codifications of property rights -- particularly when it comes to the common-law system on which both the British and U.S. legal systems are based.
Developing application in Windows can be as easy as VB. As far as I have seen there is nothing on this (OSS) side of the fence that comes close to it for ease of use, with (reasonably) good debugging.
Have you tried Gambas by any chance? I don't know about the debugging support, but the interface and language are very similar to VB.
How do you figure? How is my right to speak or move or breathe air tied to my property rights --- unless you consider me someone's property?
property right: the right to control how a piece of property is employed.
Move to where? That "somewhere" is either unowned, or someone's property. With private property rights you can own that place -- or receive permission from the owner -- and move to it freely. No one else can legitimately prevent you from doing so. On the other hand, if all the property is collectively owned, or belongs to the State, you'll need to get permission to move. Your right to move is thus artificially subject to someone else's will. (If all property is unowned and cannot be homesteaded then it cannot be employed by anyone (see the definition above), in which case you don't have the right to move anywhere. This is a fairly useless case but it ought to be mentioned. When most people speak of an absence of property rights they really mean ownership by the State, or collective ownership by all, which in a democracy is the same thing.)
You want to speak? I assume that means you want to address a group? Where will you do it, if no one owns any property? Without private ownership the use of suitable gathering places much necessarily be decided by majority vote, and/or the State. Resources are limited; not everyone who wishes to speak will be able to do so. If your position is in the minority good luck finding a place for your audience to hear you.
At a more fundamental level, if you don't own anything you cannot ensure your own survival -- food, shelter, defense -- or save for the future. If the Majority doesn't care much for you they can reallocate your rations elsewhere, leaving you to starve. If you objected then you'd be claiming a right to that food, that shelter; a property right, to be exact. But on what basis? You didn't produce that food, or construct that shelter. In a private property system you could claim that the prior owner gave it to you in exchange for something else of value, but without private property you are necessarily at the mercy of the State.
Property rights are essential for survival. Private property rights are essential for freedom.
Democracy, privacy, and human rights are antithetical to the "free market".
You're right on the first point, but you've got the last one backwards: without a free market (i.e. freedom to act as you wish so far as it involves your own property, and freedom to engage in voluntary exchange with others without coercive interference) you cannot exercise those "human rights." You have human rights to the exact extent that you have property rights; they are fundamentally inseparable.
As far as democracy is concerned, you don't live in a democracy (assuming you live in the U.S. or Europe). The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and the important aspect of such a government is the constitutional limits, not the elections.
Just so you know, I agree with you, presuming they can overcome the development issues. (You can't just clone meat; it has to actually be used to have the right taste and texture. They're working on simulating that but it's a difficult thing to get right.)
I was trying to avoid making the Douglas Adams / "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" reference too obvious for fear of spoiling the joke, although I see from the replies that I need not have bothered. The bit about the Restaurant at the End of the Universe includes an animal similar to what I described, one that desired nothing more than to be eaten and enjoyed and which could -- and did -- explain this wish to the customers. I had thought that on Slashdot of all places someone would recognize it.
Yes; it is indeed a pity that you don't have a government to protect you from such criminals. But of course if you did, it would require funds to hire a police force to stop these criminals, and would likely end up taxing you to rise those funds . . ..
Obviously hiring a security force would require funds. The payment isn't a tax, however, unless the "security force" is the one threatening me. That's the difference between a private defense organization and a government; the government threatens you directly if you don't pay, without any prior agreement, whereas the private security force is (a) offering to protect against external threats, and (b) only demands payment in accordance with a prior defense contract you voluntarily accepted which specified in advance, among other things, the amount to be paid for the service.
Government predates law. The earliest societies were ruled by the entirely arbitrary decisions of their governments, be those governments single dictators, tribal councils, or whatever. . ..
Sure, by definition government predates law. Irrelevant, however, as the principles behind property rights -- homesteading (initial ownership by first user) and voluntary exchange, and their opposites, theft and trespass -- also predate law. The early governments merely codified the existing practices and claimed them as their own. In any event the history is less important than the fact that time and again we have seen that common-law property rights are a sound basis for resolving disputes, whereas civil-law edicts in violation of property rights serve only to create more conflict. The trend throughout history is toward more-absolute property rights, not less. It's hardly an accident that those countries with the strongest respect for property rights, and particularly those based on the system of common law, are the ones with the highest standards of living and visa-versa.
Besides, if you have sufficient power to enforce your rules - be their property laws or anything else - on others, and do so, just how are you not a government? Government is simply whoever has the final say in the matters, after all.
What I am opposed to the the use of aggression (initiation of coercion/force/violence). As far as I'm concerned "government" is any organization which claims the authority to employ aggression, which obviously includes such things as collecting taxes and making laws which interfere in the non-aggressive use of one's own property. The definition overlaps with "criminal", which is any group or individual that actually employs aggression. If a "government" does not employ aggression then I have no problem with that "government", although I wouldn't call it such myself. It's the actions and not the labels that are important.
You know, you're free to leave whatever country you happen to be in (somehow I suspect you're from the States). Perhaps you actually enjoy the benefits in living in a stable *society* funded through taxes? . . . Seriously. You're *choosing* to live where you are: a more or less democratic society that provides a certain set of services.
Sure, I'm free to leave. But why should I have to? I was born here; what right does anyone have to make me leave? I have as much right to be here as anyone else. Let's review:
I was born here through no fault or choice of my own.
Others institute "services" I never asked for, along with regulations ensuring they remain the sole providers of those services.
When the bill comes in for the services they wanted (almost certainly above the market rate, if anyone else could legally compete) they demand that I pay up.
If I refuse, they pay guys with guns to kidnap me and hold me without just cause, and increase the amount demanded.
We got by quite well enough without a federal income tax for the first hundred-plus years of this country's existance. Society would not simply collapse if the income tax were eliminated.
These services are funded through taxes and are essential to keep a modern government afloat.
There, fixed that for you.
Things like upholding the property laws which some people think are absolute or god-given.
Property rights predate government in general, and were present in the common law and privately enforced long before the United States was founded. Government does presently enforce property rights (when it's convenient for them to do so), but only because they actively prevent others from fulfilling that role. Property rights do not originate with or depend on the government.
Let me know when I can download some tasty, nutritious iFood and I'll be all over it.
You can buy food online and have it shipped to you. I chose music on purpose, since it can be exchanged entirely online and still has a real-world value associated with it, but there's no reason why you couldn't substitute any physical good purchased in Lindon Dollars through a Second Life storefront.
If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way.
I think you may have just made a compelling argument for the taxation of virtual goods. wtg:p
I guess that depends on which side you're on. If you want to be consistent you'd either have to tax virtual goods every time they change hands, or eliminate the income tax for "real-world" exchanges as well. I'd argue for the latter on the grounds that the income tax is inconsistent (among other reasons, not least of which is an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery). For example, in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up, but in a transaction involving labor and currency you aren't allowed to offset the market value of your labor against the currency you received in exchange.
If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?
If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way. Even if the tax on the final exchange remains it's still a major improvement.
Throughout human history, the greatest threat to life and liberty has been... the abuse of power
then i'd agree with you.
I would agree with that, provided you clearly defined the State as an organization dependent on the abuse of power, and "abuse of power" as aggression.
The original phrase was intended only to convey the idea that the State is a bigger threat than terrorism. I realize that the State is not the only abuse of power out there; there are plenty of private criminals with greater or lesser influence. However, I don't consider wealth, absent aggression, to be a threat, or the voluntary use of wealth to achieve one's ends an "abuse of power".
with pure, free-market capitalism there's no advocate of people's actual needs, there's only the expression of the company's needs. if that's not ripe for abuse i don't know what is.
In "pure, free-market capitalism" the people advocate their own needs through their choices in the market. Companies can only survive by fulfilling those needs. By definition free-market capitalism does not include aggression as a legitimate means for self-advancement; that leaves just the economic means, voluntary exchange, which by definition enriches both parties in any transaction.
The channel tunnel easily pays for itself in terms of what they spent on it compared to its income. The problem is the high interest rates on the loan.
Assuming that the interest on the loan is not significantly above the market rate -- with a government project it has to be asked -- then a project that fails to cover the interest on its loan is still a net loss, even if its income exceeds the non-interest expenses. Interest represents and accounts for the fact that people prefer investments with a sooner return over ones with a later return (for the same amount of return). If a project fails to break even economically (i.e. turn a profit in accounting terms) after taking the interest into account, that means that the resources could/should have been expended on other, more immediately useful, projects.
If the government had paid for the project itself, then it would have been classed a huge success[.]
No doubt. Many a government project has "been classed a huge success" while remaining a net loss, for lack of proper market-based accounting. The government, in fact, has no way to measure the true cost of its tax-funded projects, since the money it spends it not its own.
If we left labeling solely up to corporations, all we would get would be informationless, quasi-inaccurate or misleading feel-good marketing BS, or no labeling at all.
If the "corporations" are using inaccurate or misleading labeling or advertising then they're committing fraud, and the courts can handle that under common law without any special regulation. If they omit the labeling entirely, on the other hand, and don't make any other claims regarding what they're selling, then the buyer has no recourse; I suppose that's the price you pay for not caring what's in your "food" enough to ask, or in the worst case have it analyzed. It's not like most of the mandatory labels we have now contain anything close to the volume of information you can find for free online from someone who's performed their own investigation.
Eventually, of course, we'll discover a way to genetically engineer an animal that wants to be eaten, and can express said desire clearly and eloquently, at which point we can finally put all the "cruelty to animals" arguments behind us for good.
. . . if Abraham Lincoln had let the local governments decide there'd be plenty of slave states left.
Unlikely. Slavery was already dissipating at the time of the Civil War, for the simple reason that slavery is economically inefficient compared to voluntary employment. It becomes practically useless once a given society advances beyond that agrarian stage. In essence, you can't cost-effectively compel any group of individuals of significant size to learn or perform skilled labor.
Today, I think everyone agrees it was the right decision. ..
I'll assume this was intended as hyperbole. If not, know that there are some (including myself) who disagree. Note that I don't believe anyone who knows me would consider me particularly racist, or supportive of slavery, and I'm not from the South. I just consider secession a fundamental right -- yes, down to the individual level, as logic demands -- and consequently I see the Civil War as an unjust war of territorial expansion following the rightful secession of the southern states as would necessarily be permitted under the principle of free association. On a more fundamental level, perhaps, I do not feel that the Confederacy did anything to the Union which could justify a war; the Union certainly wasn't fighting in self-defense. A ban on secession can only be enforced by an unjust, non-proportional response.
People have had the choice for years and they have generally chosen to pollute "someone else's" country, river, suburb, beach,... Too much "choice" can sometimes be no "choice" at all.
You're use of "the choice" is a bit vague here. I certainly wasn't advocating that people have the right to poison each other. If anyone feels that someone else is polluting their property they can take it up with the courts as a blatant tort issue. If the courts fail to treat it as such then that is a failure of the court system to do its duty, not "excessive choice". (As it is the courts are failing to do their duty, and that's a problem.)
I agree it is all about percived and real risks. Having said that, you post is persuasive but illogical, if you disagree then can you tell me exactly how is one killed by fire when they have been killed by something else?
I believe the difference is basically what you said -- natural vs. preventable death. Cancer is both natural and unpreventable, in the sense that no matter what one does, given our level of medical science, cancer will eventually occur in the absence of all other kinds of death. Unlike death-by-fire it's essentially built into our life cycle.
Anyway, that wasn't really the point. The point was that whether the risk of death by fire, the risk of cancer, or the ongoing opportunity cost of non-carcinogenic fire-suppression materials is most important is a choice to be made by each buyer individually, not collectively by some official in near-total ignorance of the details of the buyers' unique situations.
Why do US-Americans always have to talk about "first amendment rights" all the time? Outside of the fact that this is Canada we're talking about, a school is neither Congress nor a state.
For private schools that would be true. Public schools, however, are subsidiaries of the state government, and thus fall under the state's Constitutional limitations. If a state government is prohibited from doing something -- such as violating 1st Amendment protections -- then agencies of the state (including the schools) are likewise prohibited from doing so.
For that matter even the private schools are not entirely free of such considerations wherever mandantory attendance laws are present. If the state compels you to be present somewhere then the state must ensure that such compulsion will not result in a violation of your rights, disregarding for the moment the violation inherent in the compulsion itself. If the state cannot make such assurances then the compulsory attendence law (not the school's actions) would be unconstitutional.
Just make sure you--and anyone else who chooses to boycott Sony products--e-mail them and tell them that the reason you won't be purchasing any more of their products is their copyright protection schemes. Otherwise, they're libel to blame decreasing sales on piracy and up the ante even further.
If I were them I'd probably blame the "necessity" of the copy-restriction schemes on the "pirates" in the first place, and thus account any "lost sales" due to copy-restriction issues as part of the "loss" due to "piracy". It's a halfway-reasonable argument, for one -- it's at least difficult to dismiss out-of-hand unless you're willing to discount the "lost sale" argument itself -- and it makes for more impressive statistics.
yeah but w/o regulation our nation would never have made it out of the railroad monopoly era. so win some lose some.
Without regulation we wouldn't have had the railroad monopoly era. (Or did you forget that the railroad monopolies were the result of tax-funded public-works projects?)
But yeah, if one child catches fire but it saves ten thousand from cancer, that's unfortunately a better decision over all.
Not really, because you can't save anyone from cancer except by killing them with something else first. Cancer is the natural end result of decades of genetic degradation; live long enough and you're guaranteed to get it. The question isn't whether you're saving these people from cancer, it's whether or not extending the group's average lifespan by a few years is worth one or more of them dying in a fire resulting from the lack of these chemicals, and that's a much harder call to make. I submit that it's not a call anyone has the right to make besides the purchaser. Make sure people know about the risks -- in an era of ubiquitous communications that's easy to do without violating anyone's rights -- and then let them decide for themselves whether the increased risk of (earlier) cancer outweighs the increased risk of a fire. (The same applies for the price tradeoff as well; let people make an informed choice.)
There is a reason why the digital format on a CD is about 40 MB per song and an MP3 of the same exact song is about 4 MB. The quality is lower.
Not entirely true. First, you can reduce that size by about half with a lossless compression codec like FLAC, so much of that 40MB is purely redundant; removing the redundancy does not reduce the quality. Second, even after FLAC compression there remains a large quantity of auditory information beyond the human listening range -- tones too close together to discern separately, for example, and excessive precision in the wrong places. (See also: Psychoacoustics.) At this point we've begun to move into the realm of lossy compression, referring to loss of information; since much of that information is undetectable to humans there may not be a corresponding loss of quality. Lossy MP3 compression will typically remain undetectable in a blind test above about 256-320 kbps, even allowing for above-average sensory accuity; newer codecs may fare better. Uncompressed CD audio, on the other hand, requires 1500 kbps.
In other words, measured in terms of how the listener perceives the audio, a 320 kbps MP3 track is the same quality as a CD audio file, and yet can be stored in just 21.3% of the space, or transmitted with 21.3% of the bandwidth, and most probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference even at 256 kbps (17%). Granted, most Internet radio stations only use about a quarter of that (maybe half at best), but it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine 256 kbps Internet radio streams becoming popular in the near future if anyone actually cares about the difference. I suspect, however, that the typical listening environment is noisy enough, and the quality of typical headphones/speakers is low enough, that the station's choice of compression is not the primary concern.
yea, definitely. and whilst this process is taking its duration to ripen up, poor people should die from diseases caused by weak bodies due to hunger. not to forget that a lot of youngsters' development will be hampered with lack of food in their growing period.
All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether or not theft is justified. The alternative to growing your own food is stealing that food from others. Rights are by their very nature mutual; if you can justify stealing from others then they can just as easily justify stealing from you. By refusing to recognize property rights you condemn yourself to perpetual poverty, since no one will recognize the property rights of a known thief. (Note, too, that not so long ago stealing food could easily get you a death sentence; it makes sense when you consider that by doing so you may be condemning someone else to die in your stead.)
I'd respond to the rest if I could tell what point(s) you were trying to make.
And local municipalities are subordinate to states as spelled out in their constitutions. And so on.
And there your chain of logic fails. Local and state governments may indeed have placed themselves in a position of voluntary subservience to the federal government through their constitutions (essentially making them subsidiaries of the federal government), but no such relationship exists between individuals and any level of government. My statement that "when individual morals and local law conflict, the individual's duty is to itself, not to some local community" stands on its own as a parallel of your claim regarding democractic governments (in this case a government of one), and does not depend on the prior two statements. I am willing to admit that the relationship between local, state, and federal governments may be different than my post implied, but my conclusion still stands stands:
If . . . governments are required to oversee interactions between individuals, then a world government is necessary to oversee interactions between nations. . . . [T]he lack of necessity of a world government proves the lack of necessity for local/state/federal governments.
[T]hen if all food producers have merged into a few cartels, and then put prices on basic foodstuffs ranging from $100 to $500 per item, like a single [loaf of?] bread, then people should just "not buy them" and starve is that it?
No, they should buy or grow their own materials and make their own bread, and thus compete with the cartel. The corresponding action in digital media would be to make their own copies on their own physical media (i.e. "pirate"). Of course if the cartel receives tax subsidies or favorable legislation (such as copyright or patent laws) then you're not really talking about a simple cartel, but rather a pair of criminal organizations (the cartel and the government) working together for their own benefits at everyone else's expense. In that case your only real option is to attempt to eliminate them just as you would any other criminal organizations.
The problem, of course, is finding a way to eliminate what essentially amount to a protection racket without bring in an even bigger racket to replace them; so far as I know this problem has yet to be solved.
When American law and international law conflict, the US government's duty is to its citizens, not to some international community. The same goes for any democratic government.
Exactly so. And, by extension, when state law and federal law conflict, the state's duty is to its citizens, not to some federal community.
And when local law and state law conflict, the local government's duty is to its citizens, not to some state community.
And -- last but not least -- when individual morals and local law conflict, the individual's duty is to itself, not to some local community.
The same argument that upholds national sovereignty can be trivially applied to individual sovereignty as well. You can't (consistently) have one without the other. Either individuals are sovereign in their dealing with other individuals, or there can be no such thing as national sovereignty. If local, state, and federal governments are required to oversee interactions between individuals, then a world government is necessary to oversee interactions between nations. (Personally I would argue the opposite: the lack of necessity of a world government proves the lack of necessity for local/state/federal governments.)
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was inherent in the definition, but property is any resource over which there can be a dispute regarding how it is employed. In other words, a resource can only be employed one way at a time, and the property right is the determination of which person has the right to decide which way. Those things which are not rivalrous (which can be employed in an unlimited number of different ways simultaneously) are not subject to property rights. Everything else is.
Every single one of your examples requires the use of property. That property is either private or "public" (State-owned), and if it's "public" then the State controls how it is used, i.e. whether you can use it to practice your "free speach", which means the State controls which speach takes place and which does not by allocating resources according to its own goals.
Are you being intentionally dense? Those "protections" are, in the vast majority, legal codifications of property rights -- particularly when it comes to the common-law system on which both the British and U.S. legal systems are based.
Have you tried Gambas by any chance? I don't know about the debugging support, but the interface and language are very similar to VB.
property right: the right to control how a piece of property is employed.
Move to where? That "somewhere" is either unowned, or someone's property. With private property rights you can own that place -- or receive permission from the owner -- and move to it freely. No one else can legitimately prevent you from doing so. On the other hand, if all the property is collectively owned, or belongs to the State, you'll need to get permission to move. Your right to move is thus artificially subject to someone else's will. (If all property is unowned and cannot be homesteaded then it cannot be employed by anyone (see the definition above), in which case you don't have the right to move anywhere. This is a fairly useless case but it ought to be mentioned. When most people speak of an absence of property rights they really mean ownership by the State, or collective ownership by all, which in a democracy is the same thing.)
You want to speak? I assume that means you want to address a group? Where will you do it, if no one owns any property? Without private ownership the use of suitable gathering places much necessarily be decided by majority vote, and/or the State. Resources are limited; not everyone who wishes to speak will be able to do so. If your position is in the minority good luck finding a place for your audience to hear you.
At a more fundamental level, if you don't own anything you cannot ensure your own survival -- food, shelter, defense -- or save for the future. If the Majority doesn't care much for you they can reallocate your rations elsewhere, leaving you to starve. If you objected then you'd be claiming a right to that food, that shelter; a property right, to be exact. But on what basis? You didn't produce that food, or construct that shelter. In a private property system you could claim that the prior owner gave it to you in exchange for something else of value, but without private property you are necessarily at the mercy of the State.
Property rights are essential for survival. Private property rights are essential for freedom.
You're right on the first point, but you've got the last one backwards: without a free market (i.e. freedom to act as you wish so far as it involves your own property, and freedom to engage in voluntary exchange with others without coercive interference) you cannot exercise those "human rights." You have human rights to the exact extent that you have property rights; they are fundamentally inseparable.
As far as democracy is concerned, you don't live in a democracy (assuming you live in the U.S. or Europe). The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and the important aspect of such a government is the constitutional limits, not the elections.
Just so you know, I agree with you, presuming they can overcome the development issues. (You can't just clone meat; it has to actually be used to have the right taste and texture. They're working on simulating that but it's a difficult thing to get right.)
I was trying to avoid making the Douglas Adams / "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" reference too obvious for fear of spoiling the joke, although I see from the replies that I need not have bothered. The bit about the Restaurant at the End of the Universe includes an animal similar to what I described, one that desired nothing more than to be eaten and enjoyed and which could -- and did -- explain this wish to the customers. I had thought that on Slashdot of all places someone would recognize it.
Obviously hiring a security force would require funds. The payment isn't a tax, however, unless the "security force" is the one threatening me. That's the difference between a private defense organization and a government; the government threatens you directly if you don't pay, without any prior agreement, whereas the private security force is (a) offering to protect against external threats, and (b) only demands payment in accordance with a prior defense contract you voluntarily accepted which specified in advance, among other things, the amount to be paid for the service.
Sure, by definition government predates law. Irrelevant, however, as the principles behind property rights -- homesteading (initial ownership by first user) and voluntary exchange, and their opposites, theft and trespass -- also predate law. The early governments merely codified the existing practices and claimed them as their own. In any event the history is less important than the fact that time and again we have seen that common-law property rights are a sound basis for resolving disputes, whereas civil-law edicts in violation of property rights serve only to create more conflict. The trend throughout history is toward more-absolute property rights, not less. It's hardly an accident that those countries with the strongest respect for property rights, and particularly those based on the system of common law, are the ones with the highest standards of living and visa-versa.
What I am opposed to the the use of aggression (initiation of coercion/force/violence). As far as I'm concerned "government" is any organization which claims the authority to employ aggression, which obviously includes such things as collecting taxes and making laws which interfere in the non-aggressive use of one's own property. The definition overlaps with "criminal", which is any group or individual that actually employs aggression. If a "government" does not employ aggression then I have no problem with that "government", although I wouldn't call it such myself. It's the actions and not the labels that are important.
Sure, I'm free to leave. But why should I have to? I was born here; what right does anyone have to make me leave? I have as much right to be here as anyone else. Let's review:
There, fixed that for you.
Property rights predate government in general, and were present in the common law and privately enforced long before the United States was founded. Government does presently enforce property rights (when it's convenient for them to do so), but only because they actively prevent others from fulfilling that role. Property rights do not originate with or depend on the government.
You can buy food online and have it shipped to you. I chose music on purpose, since it can be exchanged entirely online and still has a real-world value associated with it, but there's no reason why you couldn't substitute any physical good purchased in Lindon Dollars through a Second Life storefront.
I guess that depends on which side you're on. If you want to be consistent you'd either have to tax virtual goods every time they change hands, or eliminate the income tax for "real-world" exchanges as well. I'd argue for the latter on the grounds that the income tax is inconsistent (among other reasons, not least of which is an ethical objection to taxation as a variant of armed robbery). For example, in barter you only pay a percentage of the difference between the market values of what you received and what you gave up, but in a transaction involving labor and currency you aren't allowed to offset the market value of your labor against the currency you received in exchange.
What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?
If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way. Even if the tax on the final exchange remains it's still a major improvement.
I would agree with that, provided you clearly defined the State as an organization dependent on the abuse of power, and "abuse of power" as aggression.
The original phrase was intended only to convey the idea that the State is a bigger threat than terrorism. I realize that the State is not the only abuse of power out there; there are plenty of private criminals with greater or lesser influence. However, I don't consider wealth, absent aggression, to be a threat, or the voluntary use of wealth to achieve one's ends an "abuse of power".
In "pure, free-market capitalism" the people advocate their own needs through their choices in the market. Companies can only survive by fulfilling those needs. By definition free-market capitalism does not include aggression as a legitimate means for self-advancement; that leaves just the economic means, voluntary exchange, which by definition enriches both parties in any transaction.
Assuming that the interest on the loan is not significantly above the market rate -- with a government project it has to be asked -- then a project that fails to cover the interest on its loan is still a net loss, even if its income exceeds the non-interest expenses. Interest represents and accounts for the fact that people prefer investments with a sooner return over ones with a later return (for the same amount of return). If a project fails to break even economically (i.e. turn a profit in accounting terms) after taking the interest into account, that means that the resources could/should have been expended on other, more immediately useful, projects.
No doubt. Many a government project has "been classed a huge success" while remaining a net loss, for lack of proper market-based accounting. The government, in fact, has no way to measure the true cost of its tax-funded projects, since the money it spends it not its own.
If the "corporations" are using inaccurate or misleading labeling or advertising then they're committing fraud, and the courts can handle that under common law without any special regulation. If they omit the labeling entirely, on the other hand, and don't make any other claims regarding what they're selling, then the buyer has no recourse; I suppose that's the price you pay for not caring what's in your "food" enough to ask, or in the worst case have it analyzed. It's not like most of the mandatory labels we have now contain anything close to the volume of information you can find for free online from someone who's performed their own investigation.
Eventually, of course, we'll discover a way to genetically engineer an animal that wants to be eaten, and can express said desire clearly and eloquently, at which point we can finally put all the "cruelty to animals" arguments behind us for good.
Unlikely. Slavery was already dissipating at the time of the Civil War, for the simple reason that slavery is economically inefficient compared to voluntary employment. It becomes practically useless once a given society advances beyond that agrarian stage. In essence, you can't cost-effectively compel any group of individuals of significant size to learn or perform skilled labor.
I'll assume this was intended as hyperbole. If not, know that there are some (including myself) who disagree. Note that I don't believe anyone who knows me would consider me particularly racist, or supportive of slavery, and I'm not from the South. I just consider secession a fundamental right -- yes, down to the individual level, as logic demands -- and consequently I see the Civil War as an unjust war of territorial expansion following the rightful secession of the southern states as would necessarily be permitted under the principle of free association. On a more fundamental level, perhaps, I do not feel that the Confederacy did anything to the Union which could justify a war; the Union certainly wasn't fighting in self-defense. A ban on secession can only be enforced by an unjust, non-proportional response.
You're use of "the choice" is a bit vague here. I certainly wasn't advocating that people have the right to poison each other. If anyone feels that someone else is polluting their property they can take it up with the courts as a blatant tort issue. If the courts fail to treat it as such then that is a failure of the court system to do its duty, not "excessive choice". (As it is the courts are failing to do their duty, and that's a problem.)
I believe the difference is basically what you said -- natural vs. preventable death. Cancer is both natural and unpreventable, in the sense that no matter what one does, given our level of medical science, cancer will eventually occur in the absence of all other kinds of death. Unlike death-by-fire it's essentially built into our life cycle.
Anyway, that wasn't really the point. The point was that whether the risk of death by fire, the risk of cancer, or the ongoing opportunity cost of non-carcinogenic fire-suppression materials is most important is a choice to be made by each buyer individually, not collectively by some official in near-total ignorance of the details of the buyers' unique situations.
For private schools that would be true. Public schools, however, are subsidiaries of the state government, and thus fall under the state's Constitutional limitations. If a state government is prohibited from doing something -- such as violating 1st Amendment protections -- then agencies of the state (including the schools) are likewise prohibited from doing so.
For that matter even the private schools are not entirely free of such considerations wherever mandantory attendance laws are present. If the state compels you to be present somewhere then the state must ensure that such compulsion will not result in a violation of your rights, disregarding for the moment the violation inherent in the compulsion itself. If the state cannot make such assurances then the compulsory attendence law (not the school's actions) would be unconstitutional.
If I were them I'd probably blame the "necessity" of the copy-restriction schemes on the "pirates" in the first place, and thus account any "lost sales" due to copy-restriction issues as part of the "loss" due to "piracy". It's a halfway-reasonable argument, for one -- it's at least difficult to dismiss out-of-hand unless you're willing to discount the "lost sale" argument itself -- and it makes for more impressive statistics.
Without regulation we wouldn't have had the railroad monopoly era. (Or did you forget that the railroad monopolies were the result of tax-funded public-works projects?)
Not really, because you can't save anyone from cancer except by killing them with something else first. Cancer is the natural end result of decades of genetic degradation; live long enough and you're guaranteed to get it. The question isn't whether you're saving these people from cancer, it's whether or not extending the group's average lifespan by a few years is worth one or more of them dying in a fire resulting from the lack of these chemicals, and that's a much harder call to make. I submit that it's not a call anyone has the right to make besides the purchaser. Make sure people know about the risks -- in an era of ubiquitous communications that's easy to do without violating anyone's rights -- and then let them decide for themselves whether the increased risk of (earlier) cancer outweighs the increased risk of a fire. (The same applies for the price tradeoff as well; let people make an informed choice.)
Not entirely true. First, you can reduce that size by about half with a lossless compression codec like FLAC, so much of that 40MB is purely redundant; removing the redundancy does not reduce the quality. Second, even after FLAC compression there remains a large quantity of auditory information beyond the human listening range -- tones too close together to discern separately, for example, and excessive precision in the wrong places. (See also: Psychoacoustics.) At this point we've begun to move into the realm of lossy compression, referring to loss of information; since much of that information is undetectable to humans there may not be a corresponding loss of quality. Lossy MP3 compression will typically remain undetectable in a blind test above about 256-320 kbps, even allowing for above-average sensory accuity; newer codecs may fare better. Uncompressed CD audio, on the other hand, requires 1500 kbps.
In other words, measured in terms of how the listener perceives the audio, a 320 kbps MP3 track is the same quality as a CD audio file, and yet can be stored in just 21.3% of the space, or transmitted with 21.3% of the bandwidth, and most probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference even at 256 kbps (17%). Granted, most Internet radio stations only use about a quarter of that (maybe half at best), but it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine 256 kbps Internet radio streams becoming popular in the near future if anyone actually cares about the difference. I suspect, however, that the typical listening environment is noisy enough, and the quality of typical headphones/speakers is low enough, that the station's choice of compression is not the primary concern.
All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether or not theft is justified. The alternative to growing your own food is stealing that food from others. Rights are by their very nature mutual; if you can justify stealing from others then they can just as easily justify stealing from you. By refusing to recognize property rights you condemn yourself to perpetual poverty, since no one will recognize the property rights of a known thief. (Note, too, that not so long ago stealing food could easily get you a death sentence; it makes sense when you consider that by doing so you may be condemning someone else to die in your stead.)
I'd respond to the rest if I could tell what point(s) you were trying to make.
And there your chain of logic fails. Local and state governments may indeed have placed themselves in a position of voluntary subservience to the federal government through their constitutions (essentially making them subsidiaries of the federal government), but no such relationship exists between individuals and any level of government. My statement that "when individual morals and local law conflict, the individual's duty is to itself, not to some local community" stands on its own as a parallel of your claim regarding democractic governments (in this case a government of one), and does not depend on the prior two statements. I am willing to admit that the relationship between local, state, and federal governments may be different than my post implied, but my conclusion still stands stands:
No, they should buy or grow their own materials and make their own bread, and thus compete with the cartel. The corresponding action in digital media would be to make their own copies on their own physical media (i.e. "pirate"). Of course if the cartel receives tax subsidies or favorable legislation (such as copyright or patent laws) then you're not really talking about a simple cartel, but rather a pair of criminal organizations (the cartel and the government) working together for their own benefits at everyone else's expense. In that case your only real option is to attempt to eliminate them just as you would any other criminal organizations.
The problem, of course, is finding a way to eliminate what essentially amount to a protection racket without bring in an even bigger racket to replace them; so far as I know this problem has yet to be solved.
Exactly so. And, by extension, when state law and federal law conflict, the state's duty is to its citizens, not to some federal community.
And when local law and state law conflict, the local government's duty is to its citizens, not to some state community.
And -- last but not least -- when individual morals and local law conflict, the individual's duty is to itself, not to some local community.
The same argument that upholds national sovereignty can be trivially applied to individual sovereignty as well. You can't (consistently) have one without the other. Either individuals are sovereign in their dealing with other individuals, or there can be no such thing as national sovereignty. If local, state, and federal governments are required to oversee interactions between individuals, then a world government is necessary to oversee interactions between nations. (Personally I would argue the opposite: the lack of necessity of a world government proves the lack of necessity for local/state/federal governments.)