Socrates16 posted:

Not to mention throwing people into cages for owning a plant.

rudatron posted:

Ha ha yeah guys, got too much going on now, I mean I've spent hours writing dumb long posts and then creating a dummy account, but I've just got too much going on. Gotta scram!

btw I'm not running away.

Socrates16 posted:

You're a very rare breed. Most statists are worried population control, not the need grow or maintain the population.

jrodefeld posted:

I want to speak more broadly about private property rights. Many of you seem to think that enforcing private property rights (i.e. using force against a trespasser) is inherently an act of aggression rather than an act of defense. Then you go on to state that therefore libertarianism is not really about voluntarism and nonaggression but is in fact a justification for violence under the guise of “private property”.

But why does the concept of private property exist? Private property exists as a response to the reality of scarcity. Conflict exists in society because desired resources are scarce. If we lived in a society where everything existed in superabundance, then there would be no need for property rights at all, and there would hardly be any conflict in society. The only acts of aggression we would have to concern ourselves with would be those against our physical bodies, since they would remain scarce. But since desired resources remain scarce we need to have a system of determining who gets to have jurisdiction over determining the use of what scarce resource. Thus we need private property rights.

jrodefeld posted:

I want to speak more broadly about private property rights. Many of you seem to think that enforcing private property rights (i.e. using force against a trespasser) is inherently an act of aggression rather than an act of defense. Then you go on to state that therefore libertarianism is not really about voluntarism and nonaggression but is in fact a justification for violence under the guise of “private property”.

But why does the concept of private property exist? Private property exists as a response to the reality of scarcity. Conflict exists in society because desired resources are scarce. If we lived in a society where everything existed in superabundance, then there would be no need for property rights at all, and there would hardly be any conflict in society. The only acts of aggression we would have to concern ourselves with would be those against our physical bodies, since they would remain scarce. But since desired resources remain scarce we need to have a system of determining who gets to have jurisdiction over determining the use of what scarce resource. Thus we need private property rights.

I am going to assume that you all agree with me that people should be free from aggression against their physical bodies. That people own themselves and that others cannot murder, rape or kidnap another. If you concede this point, and you also concede that desired resources are scarce, then you logically must defend some sort of property rights system. The reason to support private property rights is that we want to reduce conflict in society. If everyone has a clear understanding of who has the final say over the use of a scarce resource, conflict is minimized. Furthermore, being secure in the things that you homestead, i.e. having the right to defend that property that you have acquired, means that society can become more prosperous and produce more and more which benefits all members of society.

Someone earlier said that it was in fact an act of aggression to use force to remove someone who was trespassing on my private property if they weren’t aggressing against me. Now, if I acquire private property in a legitimate manner, then that means that I have the right to determine its best use. If someone comes onto my land without my permission and they refuse to leave when asked, then are committing a violation of my rights. You want to limit the definition of “aggression” to an act of assault or battery, but regardless I must have recourse if my rights are being violated.
Any enforcement of “law” is an act of force. If someone breaks “the law” then an agency of the law should be permitted to use force against them proportional to the offense committed. What you are suggesting is that the libertarian should abandon private property rights and simply apply the non-aggression principle to actual physical aggression against the physical bodies of the citizens.

The predictable result of this is that conflict will exist EVERYWHERE. Since desired scarce resources exist everywhere, people will constantly be fighting over the use of those resources. Nobody is secure in anything he acquires because someone else can simply take it without consequence. The economy will never develop and humanity will be left at a subsistence level.

Society needs private property rights to deal with the reality of scarcity and to limit conflict. I cannot see any other rational principle by which a person can acquire property legitimately than the principle of original appropriation or homesteading. Some of you object to this principle because most usable and desirable land is not in a “natural” state. We have not had a history of respect for the libertarian principle of property rights and therefore land was stolen over and over again by colonialism, by States, by thieves and so forth. So how can any land be considered justly acquired?

I believe there is no legal statute of limitations on justice. If proof can be presented that property was stolen from you or your ancestors, then that property should be returned to you. However, there is a natural statute of limitations. The farther back in history you go, the harder it is to find evidence of theft or of property titles. The purpose of a rational concept of private property acquisition is not to atone for all the theft in the past (this is impossible) but to eliminate theft going forward.

I don’t know how this concept could be made any clearer. Civilization itself depends, literally, on the enforcement of private property rights. The reality of scarcity and the conflict that scarcity naturally produces means that the first owner, or the earlier owner of some scarce resource should have a better claim to authority over its use than anyone else. And the transfer of that scarce resource to a subsequent owner can only occur through voluntary sale, gift or trade.

How can any of you seriously take issue with this?

quote:

Dispute Resolution

The fact that people still cling to the belief that the State is required to resolve disputes is amazing, since modern courts are out of the reach of all but the most wealthy and patient, and are primarily used to shield the powerful from competition or criticism. In this writer’s experience, to take a dispute with a stockbroker to the court system would have cost more than a quarter of a million dollars and taken from five to ten years – however, a private mediator settled the matter within a few months for very little money. In the realm of marital dissolution, private mediators are commonplace. Unions use grievance processes, and a plethora of other specialists in dispute resolution have sprung up to fill in the void left by a ridiculously lengthy, expensive and incompetent State court system.

Thus the belief that the State is required for dispute resolution is obviously false, since the court apparatus is unavailable to the vast majority of the population, who resolve their disputes either privately or through agreed-upon mediators.

How can the free market deal with the problem of dispute resolution? Outside the realm of organized crime, very few people are comfortable with armed confrontations, and so generally prefer to delegate that task to others. Let’s assume that people’s need for such representatives produces Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs), which promise to resolve disputes on their behalf.

Thus, if Stan is hired by Bob, they both sign a document specifying which DRO they both accept as an authority in dispute resolution. If they disagree about something, and are unable to resolve it between themselves, they submit their case to the DRO, and agree to abide by that DRO’s decision.

So far so good. However, what if Stan decides he doesn’t want to abide by the DRO’s decision? Well, several options arise.

First of all, when Stan signed the DRO agreement, it is likely that he would have agreed to property confiscation if he did not abide by the DRO’s decision. Thus the DRO would be entirely within its right to go and remove property from Stan – by force if necessary – to pay for his side of the dispute.

It is at this point that people generally throw up their arms and dismiss the idea of DROs by claiming that society would descend into civil war within a few days.

Everyone, of course, realizes that civil war is a rather bad situation, and so it seems likely that the DROs would consider alternatives to armed combat.

What other options could be pursued? To take a current example, small debts which are not worth pursuing legally are still regularly paid off – and why? Because a group of companies produce credit ratings on individuals, and the inconvenience of a lowered credit rating is usually greater than the inconvenience of paying off a small debt. Thus, in the absence of any recourse to force, small debts are usually settled. This is one example of how desired behaviour can be elicited without pulling out a gun or kicking in a door.

Picture for a moment the infinite complexity of modern economic life. Most individuals bind themselves to dozens of contracts, from car loans and mortgages to cell phone contracts, gym membership, condo agreements and so on. To flourish in a free market, a man must honour his contracts. A reputation for honest dealing is the foundation of a successful economic life. Now, few DROs will want to represent a man who regularly breaks contracts, or associates with difficult and litigious people. (For instance, this writer once refrained from entering into a business partnership because the potential partner revealed that he had sued two previous partners.)

Thus if Stan refuses to abide by his DRO’s ruling, the DRO has to barely lift a finger to punish him. All the DRO has to do is report Stan’s non-compliance to the local contract-rating company, who will enter his name into a database of contract violators. Stan’s DRO will also probably drop him, or raise his rates considerably.

And so, from an economic standpoint, Stan has just shot himself in the foot. He is now universally known as a man who rejects legitimate DRO rulings that he agreed to accept in advance. What happens when he goes for his next job? What if he decides to eschew employment and start his own company, what happens when he applies for his first lease? Or tries to hire his first employee? Or rent a car, or buy an airline ticket? Or enter into a contract with his first customer? No, in almost every situation, Stan would be far better off to abide by the decision of the DRO. Whatever he has to pay, it is far cheaper than facing the barriers of existing without access to a DRO, or with a record of rejecting a legitimate ruling.

But let’s push the theory to the max, to see if it holds. To examine a worst-case scenario, imagine that Stan’s employer is an evil man who bribes the DRO to rule in his favour, and the DRO imposes an unconscionable fine – say, one million dollars – on Stan.

First of all, this is such an obvious problem that DROs, to get any business at all, would have to deal with this danger up front. An appeal process to a different DRO would have to be part of the contract. DROs would also rigorously vet their own employees for any unexplained income. And, of course, any DRO mediator who corrupted the process would receive perhaps the lowest contract rating on the planet, lose his job, and be liable for damages. He would lose everything, and be an economic pariah.

However, to go to the extreme, perhaps the worst has occurred and Stan has been unjustly fined a million dollars due to DRO corruption. Well, he has three alternatives. He can choose not to pay the fine, drop off the DRO map, and work for cash without contracts. Become part of the grey market, in other words. A perfectly respectable choice, if he has been treated unjustly.

However, if Stan is an intelligent and even vaguely entrepreneurial man, he will see the corruption of the DRO as a prime opportunity to start his own, competing DRO, and will write into its base contract clauses to ensure that what happened to him will never happen to anyone who signs on with his new DRO.

Stan’s third option is to appeal to the contract rating agency. Contract rating agencies need to be as accurate as possible, since they are attempting to assess real risk. If they believe that the DRO ruled unjustly against Stan, they will lower that DRO’s contract rating and restore Stan’s.

Thus it is inconceivable that violence would be required to enforce all but the most extreme contract violations, since all parties gain the most long-term value by acting honestly. This resolves the problem of instant descent into civil war.

Two other problems exist, however, which must be resolved before the DRO theory starts to becomes truly tenable.

The first is the challenge of reciprocity, or geography. If Bob has a contract with Jeff, and Jeff moves to a new location not covered by their mutual DRO, what happens? Again, this is such an obvious problem that it would be solved by any competent DRO. People who travel prefer cell phones with the greatest geographical coverage, and so cell phone companies have developed reciprocal agreements for charging competitors. Just as a person’s credit rating is available anywhere in the world, so their contract rating will also be available, and so there will be no place to hide from a broken contract save by going ‘off the grid’ completely, which would be economically crippling.

The second problem is the fear that a particular DRO will grow in size and stature to the point where it takes on all the features and properties of a new State.

This is a superstitious fear, because there is no historical example of a private company replacing a political State. While it is true that companies regularly use State coercion to enforce trading restrictions, high tariffs, cartels and other mercantilist tricks, surely this reinforces the danger of the State, not the inevitability of companies growing into States. All States destroy societies. No company has ever destroyed a society without the aid of the State. Thus the fear that a private company can somehow grow into a State is utterly unfounded in fact, experience, logic and history.

If society becomes frightened of a particular DRO, then it can simply stop doing business with it, which will cause it to collapse. If that DRO, as it collapses, somehow transforms itself from a group of secretaries, statisticians, accountants and contract lawyers into a ruthless domestic militia and successfully takes over society – and how unlikely is that! – then such a State will then be imposed on the general population. However, there are two problems even with this most unlikely scare scenario. First of all, if any DRO can take over society and impose itself as a new State, why only a DRO? Why not the Rotary Club? Why not a union? Why not the Mafia? The YMCA? The SPCA? Is society to then ban all groups with more than a hundred members? Clearly that is not a feasible solution, and so society must live with the risk of a brutal coup by ninja accountants as much as from any other group.

And, in the final analysis, if society is so terrified of a single group seizing a monopoly of political power, what does that say about the existing States? They have a monopoly of political power. If a DRO should never achieve this kind of control, why should existing States continue to wield theirs?

Socrates16 posted:

Hey all, I've got an early flight that I've already stayed up too late for, so I'm off to bed. I'll be really busy this week so I'll be MIA from this thread until next weekend, try not to miss me too much! haha

jrodefeld posted:

jrodefeld posted:

I want to speak more broadly about private property rights. Many of you seem to think that enforcing private property rights (i.e. using force against a trespasser) is inherently an act of aggression rather than an act of defense.

jrodefeld posted:

If proof can be presented that property was stolen from you or your ancestors,

quote:

POLICE, COURTS, AND LAWS---ON THE MARKET



How, without government, could we settle the disputes that are now settled in courts of law? How could we protect ourselves from criminals?

Consider first the easiest case, the resolution of disputes involving contracts between well-established firms. A large fraction of such disputes are now settled not by government courts but by private arbitration of the sort described in Chapter 18. The firms, when they draw up a contract, specify a procedure for arbitrating any dispute that may arise. Thus they avoid the expense and delay of the courts.

The arbitrator has no police force. His function is to render decisions, not to enforce them. Currently, arbitrated decisions are usually enforceable in the government courts, but that is a recent development; historically, enforcement came from a firm's desire to maintain its reputation. After refusing to accept an arbitrator's judgment, it is hard to persuade anyone else to sign a contract that specifies arbitration; no one wants to play a game of 'heads you win, tails I lose'.

Arbitration arrangements are already widespread. As the courts continue to deteriorate, arbitration will continue to grow. But it only provides for the resolution of disputes over pre-existing contracts. Arbitration, by itself, provides no solution for the man whose car is dented by a careless driver, still less for the victim of theft; in both cases the plaintiff and defendant, having different interests and no prior agreement, are unlikely to find a mutually satisfactory arbitrator. Indeed, the defendant has no reason to accept any arbitration at all; he can only lose--which brings us to the problem of preventing coercion.

Protection from coercion is an economic good. It is presently sold in a variety of forms--Brinks guards, locks, burglar alarms. As the effectiveness of government police declines, these market substitutes for the police, like market substitutes for the courts, become more popular.

Suppose, then, that at some future time there are no government police, but instead private protection agencies. These agencies sell the service of protecting their clients against crime. Perhaps they also guarantee performance by insuring their clients against losses resulting from criminal acts.

How might such protection agencies protect? That would be an economic decision, depending on the'-costs and effectiveness of different alternatives. On the one extreme, they might limit themselves to passive defenses, installing elaborate locks and alarms. Or they might take no preventive action at all, but make great efforts to hunt down criminals guilty of crimes against their clients. They might maintain foot patrols or squad cars, like our present government police, or they might rely on electronic substitutes. In any case, they would be selling a service to their customers and would have a strong incentive to provide as high a quality of service as possible, at the lowest possible cost. It is reasonable to suppose that the quality of service would be higher and the cost lower than with the present governmental system.

Inevitably, conflicts would arise between one protective agency and another. How might they be resolved?

I come home one night and find my television set missing. I immediately call my protection agency, Tannahelp Inc., to report the theft. They send an agent. He checks the automatic camera which Tannahelp, as part of their service, installed in my living room and discovers a picture of one Joe Bock lugging the television set out the door. The Tannahelp agent contacts Joe, informs him that Tannahelp has reason to believe he is in possession of my television set, and suggests he return it, along with an extra ten dollars to pay for Tannahelp's time and trouble in locating Joe. Joe replies that he has never seen my television set in his life and tells the Tannahelp agent to go to hell.

The agent points out that until Tannahelp is convinced there has been a mistake, he must proceed on the assumption that the television set is my property. Six Tannahelp employees, all large and energetic, will be at Joe's door next morning to collect the set. Joe, in response, informs the agent that he also has a protection agency, Dawn Defense, and that his contract with them undoubtedly requires them to protect him if six goons try to break into his house and steal his television set.

The stage seems set for a nice little war between Tannahelp and Dawn Defense. It is precisely such a possibility that has led some libertarians who are not anarchists, most notably Ayn Rand, to reject the possibility of competing free-market protection agencies.

But wars are very expensive, and Tannahelp and Dawn Defense are both profit-making corporations, more interested in saving money than face. I think the rest of the story would be less violent than Miss Rand supposed.

The Tannahelp agent calls up his opposite number at Dawn Defense. 'We've got a problem. . . .' After explaining the situation, he points out that if Tannahelp sends six men and Dawn eight, there will be a fight. Someone might even get hurt. Whoever wins, by the time the conflict is over it will be expensive for both sides. They might even have to start paying their employees higher wages to make up for the risk. Then both firms will be forced to raise their rates. If they do, Murbard Ltd., an aggressive new firm which has been trying to get established in the area, will undercut their prices and steal their customers. There must be a better solution.

The man from Tannahelp suggests that the better solution is arbitration. They will take the dispute over my television set to a reputable local arbitration firm. If the arbitrator decides that Joe is innocent, Tannahelp agrees to pay Joe and Dawn Defense an indemnity to make up for their time and trouble. If he is found guilty, Dawn Defense will accept the verdict; since the television set is not Joe's, they have no obligation to protect him when the men from Tannahelp come to seize it.

What I have described is a very makeshift arrangement. In practice, once anarcho-capitalist institutions were well established, protection agencies would anticipate such difficulties and arrange contracts in advance, before specific conflicts occurred, specifying the arbitrator who would settle them.

In such an anarchist society, who would make the laws? On what basis would the private arbitrator decide what acts were criminal and what their punishments should be? The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of law, just as there is competition among different brands of cars.

In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of protection agencies agree in advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are determined implicitly by advance agreement between the protection agencies whose customers are involved. In principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of protection agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.

Before labelling a society in which different people are under different laws chaotic and unjust, remember that in our society the law under which you are judged depends on the country, state, and even city in which you happen to be. Under the arrangements I am describing, it depends instead on your protective agency and the agency of the person you accuse of a crime or who accuses you of a crime.

In such a society law is produced on the market. A court supports itself by charging for the service of arbitrating disputes. Its success depends on its reputation for honesty, reliability, and promptness and on the desirability to potential customers of the particular set of laws it judges by. The immediate customers are protection agencies. But the protection agency is itself selling a product to its customers. Part of that product is the legal system, or systems, of the courts it patronizes and under which its customers will consequently be judged. Each protection agency will try to patronize those courts under whose legal system its customers would like to live.

Consider, as a particular example, the issue of capital punishment. Some people might feel that the risk to themselves of being convicted, correctly or incorrectly, and executed for a capital crime outweighed any possible advantages of capital punishment. They would prefer, where possible, to patronize protection agencies that patronized courts that did not give capital punishment. Other citizens might feel that they would be safer from potential murderers if it was known that anyone who murdered them would end up in the electric chair. They might consider that safety more important than the risk of ending up in the electric chair themselves or of being responsible for the death of an innocent accused of murder. They would, if possible, patronize agencies that patronized courts that did give capital punishment.

If one position or the other is almost universal, it may pay all protection agencies to use courts of the one sort or the other. If some people feel one way and some the other, and if their feelings are strong enough to affect their choice of protection agencies, it pays some agencies to adopt a policy of guaranteeing, whenever possible, to use courts that do not recognize capital punishment. They can then attract anti-capital-punishment customers. Other agencies do the opposite.

Disputes between two anti-capital-punishment agencies will, of course, go to an anti-capital-punishment court; disputes between two pro-capital-punishment agencies will go to a pro-capital-punishment court. What would happen in a dispute between an anti-capital-punishment agency and a pro-capital-punishment agency? Obviously there is no way that if I kill you the case goes to one court, but if you are killed by me it goes to another. We cannot each get exactly the law we want.

We can each have our preferences reflected in the bargaining demands of our respective agencies. If the opponents of capital punishment feel more strongly than the proponents, the agencies will agree to no capital punishment; in exchange, the agencies that want capital punishment will get something else. Perhaps it will be agreed that they will not pay court costs or that some other disputed policy will go their way.

One can imagine an idealized bargaining process, for this or any other dispute, as follows: Two agencies are negotiating whether to recognize a pro- or anti-capital-punishment court. The pro agency calculates that getting a pro-capital-punishment court will be worth $20,000 a year to its customers; that is the additional amount it can get for its services if they include a guarantee of capital punishment in case of disputes with the other agency. The anti-capital-punishment agency calculates a corresponding figure of $40,000. It offers the pro agency $30,000 a year in exchange for accepting an anti-capital-punishment court. The pro agency accepts. Now the anti-capital-punishment agency can raise its rates enough to bring in an extra $35,000. Its customers are happy, since the guarantee of no capital punishment is worth more than that. The agency is happy; it is getting an extra $5,000 a year profit. The pro agency cuts its rates by an amount that costs it $25,000 a year. This lets it keep its customers and even get more, since the savings is more than enough to make up to them for not getting the court of their choice. It, too, is making a $5,000 a year profit on the transaction. As in any good trade, everyone gains.

If you find this confusing, it may be worth the trouble of going over it again; the basic principle of such negotiation will become important later when I discuss what sort of law an anarcho-capitalist society is likely to have.

If, by some chance, the customers of the two agencies feel equally strongly, perhaps two courts will be chosen, one of each kind, and cases allocated randomly between them. In any case, the customer's legal preference, his opinion as to what sort of law he wishes to live under, will have been a major factor in determining the kind of law he does live under. It cannot completely determine it, since accused and accuser must have the same law.

In the case of capital punishment, the two positions are directly opposed. Another possibility is that certain customers may want specialized law, suited to their special circumstances. People living in desert areas might want a system of law that very clearly defines property rights in water. People in other areas would find such detailed treatment of this problem superfluous at best. At worst, it might be the source of annoying nuisance suits. Thus the desert people might all patronize one protection agency, which had a policy of always going to a court with well-developed water law. Other agencies would agree to use that court in disputes with that agency but use other courts among themselves.

Most differences among courts would probably be more subtle. People would find that the decisions of one court were prompter or easier to predict than those of another or that the customers of one protection agency were better protected than those of another. The protection agencies, trying to build their own reputations, would search for the 'best' courts.

Several objections may be raised to such free-market courts. The first is that they would sell justice by deciding in favor of the highest bidder. That would be suicidal; unless they maintained a reputation for honesty, they would have no customers--unlike our present judges. Another objection is that it is the business of courts and legislatures to discover laws, not create them; there cannot be two competing laws of gravity, so why should there be two competing laws of property? But there can be two competing theories about the law of gravity or the proper definition of property rights. Discovery is as much a productive activity as creation. If it is obvious what the correct law is, what rules of human interaction follow from the nature of man, then all courts will agree, just as all architects agree about the laws of physics. If it is not obvious, the market will generate research intended to discover correct laws.

Another objection is that a society of many different legal systems would be confusing. If this is found to be a serious problem, courts will have an economic incentive to adopt uniform law, just as paper companies have an incentive to produce standardized sizes of paper. New law will be introduced only when the innovator believes that its advantages outweigh the advantages of uniformity.

The most serious objection to free-market law is that plaintiff and defendant may not be able to agree on a common court. Obviously, a murderer would prefer a lenient judge. If the court were actually chosen by the disputants after the crime occurred, this might be an insuperable difficulty. Under the arrangements I have described, the court is chosen in advance by the protection agencies. There would hardly be enough murderers at any one time to support their own protective agency, one with a policy of patronizing courts that did not regard murder as a crime. Even if there were, no other protective agency would accept such courts. The murderers' agency would either accept a reasonable court or fight a hopeless war against the rest of society.

Until he is actually accused of a crime, everyone wants laws that protect him from crime and let him interact peacefully and productively with others. Even criminals. Not many murderers would wish to live under laws that permitted them to kill--and be killed.

Socrates16 posted:

I've always been surprised by most Goons' vehement hatred for libertarianism, especially considering that the SA forums are a great representation of what people can do when they're allowed to freely organize themselves. I don't know how many of you are gamers, but if you are, think about how idiotic politicians are when it comes to videogames. They're totally uneducated about the issue, yet they make policy based off the emotions of voters who are also ignorant. What you need to realize is that they're doing the same thing for every single issue. They're uneducated and belligerent, and playing off of your emotions.

Socrates16 posted:

Out of curiosity, is it just me and jrodefeld that are libertarians in Debate and Discussion as far as you all know? I don't think I've ever seen another. I've poked my head in here from time to time but never posted until I saw this thread. Ancaps are all over facebook so its a bit of a shock being in a forum without more than a few.

jrodefeld posted:

The only acts of aggression we would have to concern ourselves with would be those against our physical bodies, since they would remain scarce. But since desired resources remain scarce we need to have a system of determining who gets to have jurisdiction over determining the use of what scarce resource. Thus we need private property rights.

jrodefeld posted:

Furthermore, being secure in the things that you homestead, i.e. having the right to defend that property that you have acquired, means that society can become more prosperous and produce more and more which benefits all members of society.

jrodefeld posted:

Now, if I acquire private property in a legitimate manner, then that means that I have the right to determine its best use.

jrodefeld posted:

What you are suggesting is that the libertarian should abandon private property rights and simply apply the non-aggression principle to actual physical aggression against the physical bodies of the citizens.

jrodefeld posted:

The predictable result of this is that conflict will exist EVERYWHERE. Since desired scarce resources exist everywhere, people will constantly be fighting over the use of those resources. Nobody is secure in anything he acquires because someone else can simply take it without consequence. The economy will never develop and humanity will be left at a subsistence level.

jrodefeld posted:

I cannot see any other rational principle by which a person can acquire property legitimately than the principle of original appropriation or homesteading. Some of you object to this principle because most usable and desirable land is not in a “natural” state. We have not had a history of respect for the libertarian principle of property rights and therefore land was stolen over and over again by colonialism, by States, by thieves and so forth. So how can any land be considered justly acquired?

jrodefeld posted:

I believe there is no legal statute of limitations on justice. If proof can be presented that property was stolen from you or your ancestors, then that property should be returned to you. However, there is a natural statute of limitations. The farther back in history you go, the harder it is to find evidence of theft or of property titles. The purpose of a rational concept of private property acquisition is not to atone for all the theft in the past (this is impossible) but to eliminate theft going forward.

jrodefeld posted:

Civilization itself depends, literally, on the enforcement of private property rights.

jrodefeld posted:

The reality of scarcity and the conflict that scarcity naturally produces means that the first owner, or the earlier owner of some scarce resource should have a better claim to authority over its use than anyone else. And the transfer of that scarce resource to a subsequent owner can only occur through voluntary sale, gift or trade.

How can any of you seriously take issue with this?

jrodefeld posted:

Now, if I acquire private property in a legitimate manner
...
I cannot see any other rational principle by which a person can acquire property legitimately than the principle of original appropriation or homesteading

jrodefeld posted:

Any enforcement of “law” is an act of force.

jrodefeld posted:

I believe there is no legal statute of limitations on justice.

jordefeld posted:

If proof can be presented that property was stolen from you or your ancestors, then that property should be returned to you.

jordefeld posted:

Many have asked about the feasibility of competing defense agencies and private dispute resolution agencies. You seem to think that we need a centralized monopolistic authority to provide "the law". I think this is a very dangerous concept that, as history has proven, is rife with abuse. I know some of you hate when I do this, but I am going to quote from Stefan Molyneux on this subject. I don't always agree with Molyneux but in this instance I think his insights are valuable. This isn't the final word, but I think it offers plenty of food for thought:

quote:

Not many murderers would wish to live under laws that permitted them to kill--and be killed.

Caros posted:

JRod. I for one am actually happy to move the topic beyond the racist tendencies of your philosophers. We've reached the point where everything has been said that can be said on the matter. No one reading this thread will be convinced by your non-arguments, regarding this issue, but the thread is becoming a bit of a circle jerk. In fairness of actually giving you a new topic to stick your foot in I'm actually going to offer you several options below as to what I think would be a good source of future discussion. you can pick from them if you want, or you can try something else, I'm just going to offer them to you. However, before that I do want to touch on one teeny, tiny little thing.

Stefan Molyneux.

I actually agree with you that a lot of those libertarians aren't especially racist, but that was never the point that every libertarian was a racist. I never accused you of being racist either to my knowledge, and if I did I apologize. What I said was that much of the libertarian school of thought in the united states, and the visible libertarian thinkers were racists I would point out that very few of them actually go as far on the spectrum as the An Cap craziness that you espouse. In fact, of the ones that I recognize I know that Gary Chartier is actually a left anarchist who would probably laugh you out of the room the same as any of us. However, if you are seriously trying to say that I can't find traces of controversial racial statements by Stephan Molyneux!?

You'd be mostly right. All I could find was this, this and this. Now to be fair, I only know for a fact that in one of those videos he excuses the murder of a child because that child was black. I'm also not sure which one since it has been a while since I last watched them and I just ate a big snack that I'd prefer not to vomit up in rage.

Seriously, in one of those videos he argues that black men have an obligation not to wear hoodies because white people might be afraid of them. I'm not even making GBS threads you.

Now this is outside of the topic we were discussing, but they don't all have to be racists do they? Sometimes good old misogyny is the answer.

To be specific, Stephan Molyneux was one of the keynote speakers at the first ever A Voice for Men Men's Rights Advocate's conference. This is because in the last year or so he has proven himself to be rabidly anti-women (he says anti-feminist with such video gems as:

The Friend Zone: A Sex Free Life Sentence
Feminist Hypocrisy Exposed! - A Conversation with Paul Elam
The Truth About Domestic Violence - You'll Never Believe... (And I don't!)
Not All Women Are Like That! Estrogen Based Parasites Critisim - Rebutted! (He calls women that a lot)

And believe me I can go on. I've only gone back as far as May and only picked out the ones with revolting titles. Any video he does on Men's Rights or Feminism is disgusting, but these say my point without even needing for you to watch them.

Stefan Molyneux is a huckster cult leader, undoubtedly misogynistic and likely a racist on top of it. That said I'd actually prefer you don't reply to this part of my post unless you really, really want to. I just want to make sure you know that he is this way, beyond that I don't see much point in arguing it unless you need to.

Aaaaanyways.

So here are my suggested topics for when you get back and want to kick the ball around some more:

How you became a libertarian - You never actually told us this story last time due to your computer crash and I'm still deathly curious. We actually started making up fanfiction about it, but Xylo sent the thread to the Gas Chamber rather than the goldmine so we can't get it back.

Justice in a Libertarian Society - We've touched on this in this thread already but I know a lot of people are interested. Can you give us a rundown of how you believe a libertarian society would work when it comes to a justice system. I understand that you are talking big picture stuff, and you aren't the guy designing this so its hard to say, but if it were Jrodefeldland, how would you set it up. What is your ideal justice system.

Transition - How do you see the transition from our current society to a libertarian society functioning. Again I know its focusing a little more, but how do we switch from government roads to private ones. How do we divide assets and determine who gets what. How do people who are systemically disadvantaged deal with the transition, such as the homeless. What if anything are you suggesting we do about income disparity based on historical crime... basically do you have any way of leveling the playing field so that people aren't hosed from the starting line. Do you care if people ARE hosed from the starting line.

This Post - I think a lot of people missed this one since it was late, but can you explain how it is consistent with libertarian ethics to take millions of homes from bankers and give them to homeless people. I think the thread would actually agree with you on this one.

Reason Magazine - On an early page of this thread you said "I don't know of Reason magazine and those articles you mention. So they had an article about Holocaust denial? And one that you characterize as "Pro apartheid"? I'd have to see a lot more specifics before I condemn them as racists." when I was talking about Reason Magazine's anti-semetic comments. Another poster however, brought this up from your post history.


Why were you recommending a magazine, only to blatently lie in thread and pretend that you did not know about it. Or did you recommend it without reading it. Or was it all just a weird bit of grammar failure that you didn't know of the articles I was mentioning?

I hope you address one, or all of these topics, since I'm sure your answers will be illuminating.

jrodefeld posted:

I don’t know how this concept could be made any clearer. Civilization itself depends, literally, on the enforcement of private property rights. The reality of scarcity and the conflict that scarcity naturally produces means that the first owner, or the earlier owner of some scarce resource should have a better claim to authority over its use than anyone else. And the transfer of that scarce resource to a subsequent owner can only occur through voluntary sale, gift or trade.

Somfin posted:

Which kind of amazingly ignores the historical fact of company towns where the residents are paid in scrip and all of the businesses are privately owned by the company. Also it nicely dodges the issue of cartels. Which, fair enough, cartels aren't even real.

Quantum Mechanic posted:

IIRC the last time jrodz curled out a thread into D&D he had literally zero knowledge of the historical fact of company towns and company scrip.

Also the standard libertarian boilerplate to cartel behaviour is that cartel behaviour can only exist because of the State, because Reasons.

CrazyTolradi posted:

But you no longer have a State, no central court, no central police, no central authority. How, then, can you enforce anything? Because not everyone is going to go along with your gentlemans agreement and accept the authority of Dispute Resolution Firm #46363. Wouldn't the enforcement of such a firm be against Libertarian principle anyway, since a third party is enforcing it's will on you and making you do things you don't want to.

icantfindaname posted:

"Resources are scarce, therefore the resources should belong in their entirety to a small number of wealthy individuals"

Either you think abrogation of property rights at all for any reason is a slippery slope and poses an existential threat to civilization, or you think poor people shouldn't get rich people's resources (defined by you) as a matter of moral principle. The first is unfalsifiable and dumb, the second means you're a bad person

Your philosophy is literally summed up in one line which makes no sense at all to a thinking person: "Upsetting the status quo of property rights is always the worst possible outcome and literally anything, up to and including letting an indefinite amount of people die unnecessarily, is preferable". That's ridiculous.

jrodefeld posted:

I am not surprised you wouldn't grasp my position even though I have spent one page articulating it and eleven pages getting massively offended by people calling my various libertarian jerk pillows racist.

fibblins posted:

How would the radio spectrum not become an overlapping clusterfuck of interference in a libertarian society?

jrodefeld posted:

I want to speak more broadly about private property rights. Many of you seem to think that enforcing private property rights (i.e. using force against a trespasser) is inherently an act of aggression rather than an act of defense. Then you go on to state that therefore libertarianism is not really about voluntarism and nonaggression but is in fact a justification for violence under the guise of “private property”.

But why does the concept of private property exist? Private property exists as a response to the reality of scarcity. Conflict exists in society because desired resources are scarce. If we lived in a society where everything existed in superabundance, then there would be no need for property rights at all, and there would hardly be any conflict in society. The only acts of aggression we would have to concern ourselves with would be those against our physical bodies, since they would remain scarce. But since desired resources remain scarce we need to have a system of determining who gets to have jurisdiction over determining the use of what scarce resource. Thus we need private property rights.

I am going to assume that you all agree with me that people should be free from aggression against their physical bodies. That people own themselves and that others cannot murder, rape or kidnap another. If you concede this point, and you also concede that desired resources are scarce, then you logically must defend some sort of property rights system. The reason to support private property rights is that we want to reduce conflict in society. If everyone has a clear understanding of who has the final say over the use of a scarce resource, conflict is minimized. Furthermore, being secure in the things that you homestead, i.e. having the right to defend that property that you have acquired, means that society can become more prosperous and produce more and more which benefits all members of society.

Someone earlier said that it was in fact an act of aggression to use force to remove someone who was trespassing on my private property if they weren’t aggressing against me. Now, if I acquire private property in a legitimate manner, then that means that I have the right to determine its best use. If someone comes onto my land without my permission and they refuse to leave when asked, then are committing a violation of my rights. You want to limit the definition of “aggression” to an act of assault or battery, but regardless I must have recourse if my rights are being violated.
Any enforcement of “law” is an act of force. If someone breaks “the law” then an agency of the law should be permitted to use force against them proportional to the offense committed. What you are suggesting is that the libertarian should abandon private property rights and simply apply the non-aggression principle to actual physical aggression against the physical bodies of the citizens.

The predictable result of this is that conflict will exist EVERYWHERE. Since desired scarce resources exist everywhere, people will constantly be fighting over the use of those resources. Nobody is secure in anything he acquires because someone else can simply take it without consequence. The economy will never develop and humanity will be left at a subsistence level.

Society needs private property rights to deal with the reality of scarcity and to limit conflict. I cannot see any other rational principle by which a person can acquire property legitimately than the principle of original appropriation or homesteading. Some of you object to this principle because most usable and desirable land is not in a “natural” state. We have not had a history of respect for the libertarian principle of property rights and therefore land was stolen over and over again by colonialism, by States, by thieves and so forth. So how can any land be considered justly acquired?

I believe there is no legal statute of limitations on justice. If proof can be presented that property was stolen from you or your ancestors, then that property should be returned to you. However, there is a natural statute of limitations. The farther back in history you go, the harder it is to find evidence of theft or of property titles. The purpose of a rational concept of private property acquisition is not to atone for all the theft in the past (this is impossible) but to eliminate theft going forward.

I don’t know how this concept could be made any clearer. Civilization itself depends, literally, on the enforcement of private property rights. The reality of scarcity and the conflict that scarcity naturally produces means that the first owner, or the earlier owner of some scarce resource should have a better claim to authority over its use than anyone else. And the transfer of that scarce resource to a subsequent owner can only occur through voluntary sale, gift or trade.

How can any of you seriously take issue with this?

fibblins posted:

How would the radio spectrum not become an overlapping clusterfuck of interference in a libertarian society?

jrodefeld posted:

You are a piece of work "icantfindaname", seriously. Your responses are juvenile and filled with hyperbole. I went out of my way to stress that if the "status quo" has stolen their resources then we absolutely should upset the status quo. In the United States in 2014, the status quo is literally drowning in stolen loot expropriated from the taxpayers by the State. The large banks are flush will stolen loot. The military industrial complex is flush with stolen loot. The big corporations are flush will stolen loot and ill gotten gains due to State granted monopolies.

You're drat right I want to upset this status quo. But your reading comprehension skills are lacking, so I am not surprised you wouldn't grasp my position even though I have spent a dozen pages articulating it.

Axetrain posted:

Dissolving the state will just allow these entities to keep their stolen loot by becoming the new power in the land. If all this stolen property should be returned to the people then who will enforce said redistribution?

Somfin posted:

Obviously a private arbitration company, which would have absolutely no conflict of interest given that it has to operate on free market principles and has just been entrusted with all of the wealth in the entire world.

Axetrain posted:

I get that you understand that this is ridiculous but how can Libertarians not understand that these "DRAs" or whatever just become the new government.

gradenko_2000 posted:

This is kind of from the first page, but as a general question, if a private company builds a road, then it seems to be a reasonable expectation to pay a toll to the company for using that road. If the state builds a road, why are taxes then not considered an acceptable means of paying for the use such state-built roads?

To expound the point a little further, if the problem with taxes is that they are used to pay for state-provided assets and services that an individual taxpayer might not need nor use, would the Libertarian viewpoint still have a problem with very specifically itemized taxes?

Somfin posted:

We've got one in the thread. Let's ask him.

jrodefeld, would you, could you, pretty please, explain the difference between a privately-owned dispute resolution authority and a government?

CrazyTolradi posted:

As a free market entity, the privately-owned DRA/DRO would clearly refuse any bribes..surely?