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Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

VitalSigns posted:

It's great how up their own rear end Libertarians are about how non-aggression is the only rational, universal, logically consistent principle on which to base our legal and moral systems, and everyone else's philosophy is some arbitrary self-serving mish-mash.

Well, if you lump everyone who believes in taxation into a big bin and write "Left-Progressives" on it, and then pull ideas out of the bin at random, you'd see how inconsistent those ideas are plain as day!

Though the pollution thing might be one of the best bits of doublethink in the whole of the last thread. "Why, sure, I can see how even small amounts of pollution in the air could be construed as aggression, but some impediments to personal liberty need to be accepted for the good of society."

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Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Nah, it's a completely fair non-racist and non-arbitrary and still-not-racist system.


Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:

Private property capitalism and egalitarian multiculturalism are as unlikely a combination as socialism and cultural conservatism. And in trying to combine what cannot be combined, much of the modern libertarian movement actually contributed to the further erosion of private property rights (just as much of contemporary conservatism contributed to the erosion of families and traditional morals). What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multicultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.

Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:

In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good."

Hans Hermann Hoppe posted:

Thereby, in order to illustrate one's theoretical conclusions, every attempt should be made to compare societies which, apart from the theoretical distinction under consideration, are as similar as possible. It would be an error, for instance, to illustrate my theory of comparative government by contrasting European monarchies with African democracies or African monarchies with European democracies. Since Caucasians have, on the average, a significantly lower degree of time preference than Negroids, any such comparison would amount to a systematic distortion of the evidence. By contrasting European monarchies to African democracies, the theoretically predicted differences between monarchical and democratic rule would become systematically overstated, and by contrasting African monarchies with European democracies, the differences would become systematically understated.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Why is it critics of libertarianism spend all their time harping on debatably racist/sexist things? Even if true, and they're not, such matters are tangential at best to what I came here to talk about, and furthermore-
*writes 40,000 more words in a single post focusing squarely on subjects of race and/or sex, somehow managing to confirm worst possible suspicions about libertarians by so doing.*


:sureboat:

Oh man, speaking of confirming our worst suspicions, remember the time that JRod said it would be morally okay for a Libertarian to be a literal Nazi concentration camp guard as long as he killed fewer Jews than his hypothetical replacement would? Like, he actually used Nazi prison guards as his example. It wasn't even in response to a hypothetical we suggested, it just sort of happened, out of nowhere.

edit: Found it!

jrodefeld posted:

I'll respond to this post because I think the criticism is misplaced. Libertarianism is NOT a universal system of ethics. It doesn't claim to have an answer to incredibly complex and difficult moral problems. Complicated problems like abortion do not have easy answers. There are continuum problems. When precisely does life begin and when is the taking of that life an act of murder? I don't think there will ever be one definitive answer. Or what about the legal drinking age? Why is it okay for a person at 21 to buy a beer but not at 18? What about at 17? Maybe a person at 16 or 17 should be able to drink beer but not hard liquor?

There are no easy answers to these questions. You don't have an easy answer and I don't either. Frankly to criticize libertarians for failing to have comprehensive and definitive answers to life's most challenging questions when you don't have any better answers is foolish, especially when libertarianism has never been sold as providing a perfect answer to all ethical questions.

I don't even understand these criticisms exactly. Are you saying that because we might morally excuse a starving child who steals a loaf of bread under extreme duress, that the principle of property rights is suspect?

What it seems like is that you are trying to use extreme examples to advance a radical form of moral relativism which is quite dangerous.

In a libertarian society, just as it is today, the courts and private arbitration will have to sort out very difficult cases and hopefully they will decide in favor of justice more often than not.

However, as a general law, we start with the principle that people who homestead property or acquire it from a previous homesteader have jurisdiction over that property and all other individuals deserve the same right over that which they have acquired in a peaceful manner.

The Non-Aggression Principle is not a complete and exhaustive system of morality. It is merely one moral rule that should determine the role of force and political action in a society. The use of force therefore is justified in order to defend ones person or property from violence and to provide restitution to the victim of any such invasion against person or property.

There are many other ethical questions that libertarianism does not attempt to answer. Libertarianism doesn't answer definitively whether or not abortion is murder and it doesn't provide perfect answers regarding how persons should act under extreme duress.

Property rights violations may be illegal in a libertarian society but courts can and should have a significant deal of discretion when it comes to dealing with different sorts of property violations.

I actually agree completely with Cemetary Gator when he says that "morality requires rationality". If someone is pushed into extreme duress and is thus not in any sort of rational state of mind and commits an act of aggression, the law can and should treat him much differently than they would someone who is in a rational state of mind.

I don't disagree with much of what Cemetary Gator wrote. He is criticizing libertarianism because it doesn't provide perfect answers to all complex ethical problems even though it never claimed to.

Walter Block speaks about a hypothetical libertarian concentration camp guard in Nazi Germany. The libertarian is under cover and the others don't know about his political and ethical beliefs. Now, he is ordered to kill 100 Jews a week. However, he can save 10 and only kill 90 per week. If he tries to save any more than that he will be discovered and replaced with someone who will kill a full 100 people each week. So he kills only 90 Jews a week until the war is over.

At the end of several months, the libertarian concentration camp guard has killed a massive number of people. However, his only goal was to save as many people as he possibly could without being discovered. He was motivated by good intentions and abhorred every person he had to kill and wished he could save them all.

At the Nuremberg Trials, he is brought up on charges of mass murder. He states his case that he is a libertarian and he saved several hundred people who otherwise would have been killed. He IS a murderer, but he is a good person and even a hero for saving as many people as he possibly could from being killed by the Nazis.

However, if the family of those he killed wanted him to pay for his action as a murderer with his life, even after hearing his explanation, then he would have to accept the death penalty or life in prison.

There certainly were extenuating circumstances, and the victim's families should have the discretion to wave the charges in light of evidence that he tried to save as many people as he could but justice demands that you make restitution for what you have stolen.


Similarly, if you are under great duress and then steal some food or water to survive it might make your action not unethical in a broad sense, but you still should be asked to pay back the owner of that food or water for what you stole. Nearly every decent person would not even press charges and would gladly give a starving person food or water.

However if they were callous, they are within their rights to press charges and the courts could force you to pay back the person for the value of the water or food that you took. Now, the reputation of the property owner would be diminished when people find out how petty and compassionate the person is.

If people are under duress and are temporarily irrational, they may be excused for their actions but they still ought to pay for property damage or theft that they commit once they have a rational mind again.

Certain individuals will be subject to lesser punishments due to extenuating circumstances. Children and the mentally disabled will never be held to the same standard or face the same punishment for their actions as rational Adults would.

Goon Danton fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Oct 28, 2015

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

How can anyone keep track at this point?

If they actually used the word "negroid," there's like a 95% chance it was Hoppe.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

It has officially been two weeks since the OP last blessed us with his wisdom. Elapsed time between his first and last posts: 6 days.

Literally The Worst posted:

so yeah let this play it, it'll last two weeks and he'll run away like a baby

You were too kind to him.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

The idea is that all "laws" are simply clauses in explicit contracts you've signed in order to do things like buy a house or get a job or simply have police protection. Basically, take the entire function of all governments and international bodies, and turn them over to HOAs. Because if you want a model for a legislative body that doesn't gently caress with people over stupid poo poo all the time, it's HOAs. Apparently.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

GunnerJ posted:

Hey, now. At least some of these are modeled on insurance companies, which sounds much more enjoyable as a basis for social order.

It's loving astounding how Libertarians manage to pick out all of the most frustrating and unpleasant bureaucracies in modern society and say "Yes, everything should work like these."

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

And here are the bits right before that!

quote:

Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and abolition of the IRS.

Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American.

We're not racist, we just want to destroy "civil rights" and the political power of the "underclass."

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

CommieGIR posted:

"We'll run the entire country on charitable donations! No, this is not a bad plan!"

It will work great! We had lots of mutual aid societies in this country up until the 1930s, when-- I would like to switch gears for a moment and talk about something else.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Animals act. Therefore, animals would naturally get along through voluntary exchange if it weren't for the presence of a state. Animals that hurt others would be shunned by the market, and quickly die out. Alpha predators don't exist without fiat currency or taxation to back them up.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Juffo-Wup posted:

If you think that libertarians actually reason from first principles, and happily follow inferences from their foundations wherever they may lead, then you will always find them confusing.

That's unfair. I logically inferred an entire worldview from first principles; it just happened to line up perfectly with everything I already believed and wanted to be true. It's not my fault I'm a perfectly rational economic actor.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

What's to stop someone from just claiming they're a DRO and printing out their own DRO card? Would there be an over-arching authority for DROs to be accredited, like doctors or teachers? What if you set up your own accreditation service?

e:For that matter, who registers doctors or teachers? Who handles stuff like 'working with kids' cards?

There's no accreditation system, and it's totally fine for you to run your own DRO. But DROs get to pick and choose which other DROs they recognize and do business with, so if you're in an area where one company or a small network of them control a sizable majority of the customer base, they have no reason to accept you and can bar you from using any services of any of their clients. This is different than a state because of reasons.

As for licensing schemes for doctors or teachers or people who work with children, it's called "the free market." Doctors who have no training at all will simply provide a discounted service for poorer clientele. And if a doctor fucks up and kills someone enough people, people will simply stop going to him and he will go out of business. This is not an exaggeration, this is a feature that libertarians brag about.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

So what would happen if you didn't have DRO coverage, were refused service at a shop, so you murdered the shopkeeper and when the DRO goons arrived, you were off the shopkeeper's property and didn't offer any resistance? Technically you would no longer be aggressing against them so self-defence would no longer apply and they have no voluntary agreement with you that would allow them to detain you.

You don't need to make an agreement to let a DRO punish you for aggressing against one of its customers. Aggression is the only crime, and there's no statute of limitations. And a DRO needs the ability to protect its customers from outside threats, or else what good is it?

Incidentally, this is the exact line of reasoning Nozick uses in his libertarian defense of the state, so well done there.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

GunnerJ posted:

This is supposed to be a point of contrast with a social contract model, but it ends up being an example of how libertarianism is so strongly modeled on the premise of the independent autonomous actor as the basic unit of social analysis that it can't really deal with the fact that humans reproduce: it is not at all clear how or why children would be bound to any of the clauses of any DRO contract. Are they considered competent to make their own decisions in this regard? That's unlikely at best in their teens and preposterous in younger childhood. Do they simply inherit the DRO contract of their parents? If so, how does this actually differ from a social contract, and leaving your parents' DRO for another once you are old enough differ from immigrating to another nation-state?

Never has the idea that "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction" been more true than in libertopia.

Well, let's find out!

[Googles "age of consent" site:mises.org]

:catstare:

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

I wrote a joke post about how working with politicians was the real evil there, but it just made me sad. :smith:

Seriously though, that is a solid and depressing example of why we can't expect the Free Market to assert itself without someone there to knock down anyone who breaks the rules.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

The answer is that the parents pay the weregild and add it to the ever-growing list of child-rearing expenses little Johnny will be expected to repay upon reaching adulthood. The neighbors would have the option of taking possession of Johnny if they wished, but his attached debt would be transferred with him, so this right is rarely acted upon.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Anchor Wanker posted:

I'm sure it's been asked before, but how does nuclear proliferation work in Libertopia? Do nukes become privately owned or what?

No one will interfere with your Market-given right to own as many nukes as you can afford. Unless you forfeit that right in your DRO contract. And let me assure you, not only do we at Valhalla DRO not have such clauses, but possession of such a weapon would qualify you for a Jarl-level membership automatically!

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Serrath posted:

Well to add to this, I know there probably isn't a satisfactory answer because the philosophy in general seems poorly thought out but how does libertarian philosophy deal with mentally incompetent adults? People with profound autism, mental retardation, schizophrenia or even transient conditions; severe depressive disorders can present with psychotic features, can you honestly argue that someone with bipolar in the manic phase of their condition can give meaningful consent sufficient to participate in this sort of system?

I work in psychology, my entire field of study and practice is entirely premised on the notion that people are not logically-driven automatons who make decisions vested in factual axioms and with due deference to their own (or anyone else's) best interests. People are emotional, people are ruled by personality and personal experiences shaped by their biology and social environment, to assume everyone starts from some equal place that grants equal capacity to participate in the world as a rational actor is ludicrous and to set up a system that can lethally penalize you for failing to act rationally ignores a lot of very fundamental tenants of human psychology.

Simple answer: they don't really give a gently caress. Even at the most charitable version of libertarianism imaginable, it's not a consequentialist philosophy. All they care about is if their non-aggression principle isn't violated. If their tax- and aggression-free world results in the profoundly disabled and mentally incompetent being forgotten and left to die, so be it. Charity might or might not pick up the slack, but they'd be happy either way.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

CommieGIR posted:

They don't even bother with actual data, either, and have been pretty clear that regardless of the data, their theories cannot fail only be failed.

Look, the history of philosophy goes Locke, whatever anarchists I feel like co-opting, von Mises, Rothbard, Hoppe. I don't see Karl Popper on that list, so all your "data" and "facts" can go gently caress themselves.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Alternatively, bodily harm doesn't need to be proven, only violation of your property rights, so anyone who puts unwelcome molecules into your air is guilty. All of them are aggressing against you, and you are allowed to do anything in your power to stop them. Some dude drives past your house in a non-electric car? Shoot out his tires. Your neighbor is burning leaves? Confiscate his daughter as compensation. A factory two counties over has a smokestack? Prep the war rig, motherfuckers.

Seriously though, both Captain and my arguments have been made by actual libertarians.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Halloween Jack posted:

They say you've lost when you start psychoanalyzing your opponents, but it's almost as if this philosophy mainly appeals to people who only care about the social contract insofar as it protects them.

Edit: Serious question, though: What is the libertarian definition of the state, since apparently having a monopoly of force throughout a geographical area doesn't count?

Monopolies are artifacts of the state, friend. If a DRO became overwhelmingly popular in one area, others would simply move in on their market share and no monopoly would occur. So that definition of a state you gave still applies.

As for your first paragraph, we can only lose the argument if there's one actually going on. Our esteemed opposition is a total coward who ran off when we caught him endorsing slave states inexplicably absent, and we need to do something to amuse ourselves until his return.

Goon Danton fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Nov 9, 2015

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.


Popular. Autocorrect is awful.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Oh, we're trying to bring him back, are we?

*draws alchemical symbol for gold on the floor in chalk*

Chant with me: The Civil Rights Act was an unambiguous good. Praexeology is pseudoscience. The Civil Rights Act was an unambiguous good. Praexeology is pseudoscience...

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Who What Now posted:

Good news, I, several other people, and one public notary all saw it happen.

And that notary's name was Albert Einstein.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

He truly is the best worst poster. There are never signs of trolling or genuine mental illness to ruin the fun, just a bottomless fountain of pure stupidity from which we can drink as much as we please.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Well there is a third possibility: he just copy-pasted that list from mises.org without really reading it. Given his known history of plagiarizing things he's not entirely read, I'd not rule it out.

This, except he took it from the Cato Institute.

jrodefeld posted:

Cato puts out a yearly report where they rank the countries of the world according to their "economic freedom", i.e. correlation of policies with libertarian ideology. This year, the United States ranks 16th.

These are the top countries ranked by their adherence to policies that promote economic freedom:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Switzerland
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Mauritius
7. Jordan
8. Ireland
9. Canada
10. United Kingdom
11. Chile
12. Australia
13. Georgia
14. Qatar
15. Taiwan

All these nations are deemed to be more economically free and thus closer to libertarianism than the United States. Interestingly, both Canada and the United Kingdom are ranked higher than the United States. But Progressives frequently cite those countries as the sort of "socialist" nations the "free market" United States ought to emulate.

Let's focus our analysis on the top four most libertarian economies according to Cato. Do you suppose they have widespread starvation in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand or Switzerland? Obviously not. If one looks at this list, it becomes clear that the more economically free nations have greater general prosperity which doesn't just accrue to the rich, but benefits everyone.

Here is the full report:

http://www.freetheworld.com/2015/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2015.pdf

What this should tell you is that we don't need to invalidate private property rights or embrace so-called "positive" rights (the right to healthcare, the right to a house) to create a prosperous society with a vibrant middle class and very few poor. If we embark down the path of fiat money, growing State debt and redistributive welfare, society will become much poorer in the long run. This is what the United States is teaching us, and Sweden as well. Both were vibrant and prosperous free market economies earlier in their history but later they became mired in repeating economic bubbles, increasing public debt and stagnating or declining growth. Then there is the insidious damage done by inflation which hurts the poorest while incentivising a parasitic class to mooch off the State rather than earn a living off honest, productive labor.

He was just citing it as "data" to prove that the UK and Switzerland are actually libertarian, so we can be like those European countries you progressives love so much if we just do whatever he says. He probably didn't even notice that Qatar and the UAE were on the list.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Twerkteam Pizza posted:

Hong Kong is now a country independent of China, so sayeth the great Cato Institute.

Edit: where in the gently caress is number 6?

Mauritius is a little island in the Indian Ocean. They're a parliamentary democracy without much in the way of human rights abuses as best as I can tell. Looks like a beautiful place too, if google images are to be believed.

It's on the list because it's a tax haven :ssh:

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

JRod, let me tell you a little story. A while back, I wrote a computer model for my research to model how light passes through certain materials. It was simple and elegant. Also, about 10% of the time it predicted I'd get more energy out of the material than I put in, which is a blatantly absurd result. Did I present the model to my boss and get mad at him for "nitpicking" when he noticed the problematic results? Did I toss the embarrassing data points and claim the rest of the model was valid? Of course not. I tossed the model in the garbage where it belonged and started in on one that doesn't have the same problems.

Because that's how these things work. If you carefully set up all your assumptions and logically follow them through to their conclusions, and those conclusions are loving insane, you have to go back and figure out which of your assumptions are wrong. Cato made a model of economic freedom, and that model gives high ratings to countries where huge swaths of the population have no economic freedom at all. That doesn't mean there are weird outliers, that means that the model is worthless, and you need to acknowledge that.

And this keeps happening. Every time you cite somebody who shares your philosophical premises, we do a little digging and it turns out they use it to endorse the most heinous poo poo imaginable. After a certain point, you should start questioning why you trust these people, or even why you believe in their premises in the first place.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

We've been over this, homie gives no fucks for Nozick. Anarchy State and Utopia endorses the existence of a state, however minimal, so JRod doesn't acknowledge him as part of the fold.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

God, that Cato model is breathtaking. I just can't stop looking at it. Top marginal income tax rate makes up 5% of the score, all other income tax rates are not considered. Standard deviation of inflation is on the list as an acknowledgment that inflation has a lot of inherent variance, and then "gently caress it, what was the last data point on the graph" is right afterward and weighted just as heavily. It just gets dumber the more I look at it.

Also, I assume subsection 5(B)(iv): "Extra payments/bribes/favoritism" dings the slave states a bit. Some people being hereditary nobles who run businesses while others are literal property seems like favoritism to me. Good thing that's only 1.1% of the score, though! I would hate for that to outweigh "Freedom to own foreign currency bank accounts" (5% of total).

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

And at this point Jrod will disappear into the ether until the day he randomly decides to come reward us with is presence by telling us how smart and handsome he is once again.

I'd talk to Jrod and ask him questions and debate him but he has literally never responded to a single one of my posts. Ever.

I've given in-depth responses and I've also made snide jokes about him redefining words. The rule I've learned is that he only responds if you give him those "inflammatory substance-free replies." People respond to incentives, whoda thunk.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

He actually finally denied being a watermelon fucker during his last bout of posting!

Everything else he's ever posted has been wrong. Why would this time be any different?

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

And even assuming your ancestors had OCD slave owners and everyone had their claims appropriately resolved, that only causes more problems. How many different slaves worked that land over the 200+ years of our Peculiar Institution? And how many descendents do they have today? Any given black person would be lucky to get a square foot of land in a hundred different former plantations. And that's not even getting into figuring out who gets which square foot.

And then, oh poo poo, the Native Americans whose land was stolen in the first place show up with a solid argument that the whole of that land should be returned to them! If the land was stolen from one group and used to exploit another, how do you divvy it out? It goes back to the point raised earlier: the crimes committed in the name of property are so vast as to be completely impossible to address by handing out land.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

:byodood: AND ANOTHER THING

jrodefeld posted:

To state the obvious, it is not only libertarians who value private property rights. All political ideologies have a strong conviction on private property. Marxists have a deeply felt conviction that the product of the worker's labor is their property and therefore the Capitalist is a thief by pocketing a profit from the product manufactured by the worker. That is why they feel it is justified for the workers to rise up and take control of the factories, taking them away from the Capitalist. It is not a random whim that is used to justify re-appropriation of property from the perceived thief to the "rightful" owner, but a consistent if mistaken concept of just property rights.

This got mostly lost in the shuffle because it got posted during your """defense""" of the Cato study, but I'd like to take a moment to marvel over how loving ludicrous this is. EvanSchenck already pointed out how wrong you are about Marxism, so what other philosophies are putting all this value on private property rights?

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

Nessus posted:

More like "people who are whiter" :v: Wasn't there some movement which actually argued that all land should be nationally held, and instead of an income tax, everyone would pay basically some rental tax because they didn't make that planet they were using, but they DID make/buy/whatever their various improvements?

Georgism?

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

:downs: "Here is a Cato freedom study that says what I want it to!"
:eng99:"There are two slave states they rank as more free than the USA, and also Cato is a garbage organization for idiots."
:downs: "Oh, okay. Here's a Heritage study instead! Those slave states are only in the top quintile this time!"

Never not post, JRod, you magnificent imbecile.

Also it would be cool if you could link that second study too, so we can mock you for their methodology and results like we did for the last one.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

GunnerJ posted:

I think jrod should read David Graeber, who is an anarchist who hates state regulations and restrictions and initiatory violence just like him (note: actually not at all like him)! It would be a mind-expanding experience, in any case.

Not just jrod. Debt: the First 5000 Years is a great book and anyone who actually gives a poo poo about theories of property should read it.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

jrodefeld posted:

And I don't think Walter Block makes a very persuasive case at all. But this has absolutely nothing to do with libertarian objection to slavery. Slavery is a historical phenomenon (which unfortunately persists to the present day in certain parts of the world) that all decent people oppose. Walter is describing a completely theoretical contractual sort of slavery that has never actually existed anywhere. So to cite Walter Block and then infer that libertarians are not sufficiently opposed to actual slavery, i.e. the sort that has actually historically occurred and continues to occur where people are kidnapped against their will, beaten and killed if they disobey is disingenuous in the extreme.

Well well well, look who doesn't know poo poo about poo poo! Look up "debt slavery" somewhere other than Mises or Rockwell. You might learn something for a change.

jrodefeld posted:

I really think that this attempt at claiming libertarianism is somehow not opposed to slavery or indifferent to the issue is incredibly dishonest. You are not arguing in good faith. Even Walter Block's theoretical future "voluntary" slavery system is not supported by almost any other libertarian and, more importantly, is completely distinct from any actually existing phenomenon.

The Cato study that you brought up, unprompted I might add, gave two states where slavery is completely legal an explicit endorsement of being more free than the USA. Its methodology that you repeatedly linked allocates 10% of its total score to taxes on the rich, and 0% to "is slavery legal." The study you brought up to correct the previous study after we called you on it kept Qatar and the UAE in the top quintile. The Walter Block argument that you're defending/dismissing here is a libertarian endorsing an extremely common form of slavery that, again, you brought up unprompted. We're not making anything up or trying to trap you, we're just looking at things you've brought to us and pointing out how incredibly hosed up they are.

edit: "Well, I completely skipped 35 pages of my own thread because I'm pretty sure everything you all said was worthless. Now stop arguing in bad faith, guys!"

Goon Danton fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Nov 20, 2015

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

GunnerJ posted:

It's worse than that, it just straight up abandons the idea of self-ownership. It's like saying I can sell you my car and then later decide I want it back. Well, too loving bad for me, it's your car now and you don't have to give it to me unless you want to. Suddenly, when the concept of "self as own property" is carried through to considering the right to sell property, you are not your property, your rights are not the rights of a proprietor, they are the rights of someone with an inalienable will. Because if you were your property and all your rights derive from your self-ownership, you should be able to transfer your self-as-property to a new owner and with it all the rights you enjoyed as a self-owner. Otherwise you do not have property rights in yourself.

I've tried this argument with him at least three times. He will never respond, because he is a coward.

bokkibear posted:

I had to read this Rothbard quote twice, because as far as I can tell this argument can be perfectly generalised to any contractual agreement where one person agrees to do something in the future. Observe:


Rothbard says that agreeing to slavery is only voluntary if you don't later change your mind, therefore "voluntary slavery" is impossible. How does this reasoning not apply to a contract under which I agree to pay you $100 next year? For extra credit: is this what going mad feels like?

This is correct, and hilarious.

Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

jrodefeld posted:

I am frankly astonished at the amount of time you all have spent focusing on this particular post and then inferring that it proves libertarians don't care about slavery. Caros was the only one that touched upon any actual substance regarding this claim, but even he didn't go into much substance. To be clear, we are speaking about immigrant workers who don't have enough rights vis a vis their employers (union leverage) which is being called "slavery". We are not, by and large, speaking about actual chattel slavery in which human beings are legally sold as physical property and cannot disassociate from their masters, correct?

That is not to say that workers rights are not important, but you've got to have a pretty clear definition of what we're talking about when referring to a term like "slavery". And I am open to being educated on this topic because I admit to not knowing a great deal about the internal policies of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

Also, how about you not "mock" anyone but instead try to have a good-faith discussion, okay? If you're only goal is to dig up the smallest detail to nitpick and criticize your opponent, it amounts to an admission that you are not debating in good faith.

The single point I was trying to get across was that when we look at our un-libertarian world, the general trend is that those nations that have policies that are closer to laissez-faire libertarian free markets have greater prosperity, larger middle classes, less poverty, and higher general living standards.

Hardly anyone has actually responded to this claim and this general trend. Instead all you want to talk about is the workers rights abuses of immigrant workers that you claim are occurring in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Okay, you've addressed two out of the two hundred or so nations of the world but this is a textbook example of missing the forest for the trees. You're so desperate to validate your view of libertarians as sociopaths who only want to prop up the very rich and stomp on the poor that you'll be as dishonest and disingenuous as needed to maintain that narrative.

I might be drunk at the moment too, but gently caress that and gently caress you. You do not get to talk about good-faith discussion, you wouldn't recognize a good-faith argument if it took a poo poo on your chest. I spent plenty of time trying to get you to engage honestly in the last thread before you ran away from it with your tail between your legs, and I learned a simple lesson: the more effort and facts and logic we put into a post, the more likely you are to ignore it. So if you don't like it, engage with the effortposts, and maybe people will make them more.

As for your Qatar/UAE points, look at this. Look at these things you wrote:

You posted:

I am open to being educated on this topic because I admit to not knowing a great deal about the internal policies of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

You, in the same goddamned post posted:

To be clear, we are speaking about immigrant workers who don't have enough rights vis a vis their employers (union leverage) which is being called "slavery".

"I don't know anything about what we're talking about, but I'm sure you're just bitching about unions not being powerful enough." People have tried to educate you, but you're apparently incapable of reading a basic sentence unless it has a Mises.org header at the top. It's actual, literal, no-poo poo slavery going on there. The slaves can't leave the country, they can't quit their jobs, they can't travel or open bank accounts or countless other things. They're being beaten and raped by their owners. And the slaves are pushing half the population of Qatar at this point. That's half the country with literally no rights.

It's astounding how much you distort anything and everything to fit your cultist viewpoint. You write up a half-dozen paragraphs about how income taxes are literally slavery, but when you're presented with your own study endorsing countries where slaves are dying in droves to build soccer stadiums, the word slavery gets scare quotes and dismissals about :byodood: unions :byodood: instead of actually looking into it.

And guess what? Once slave states get high marks on a freedom list, the entire methodology behind that list absolutely must be scrapped, regardless of anything else on it. If I was at work and made a model for electrical conductivity, and concrete ended up near the top of the list? You had better goddamn believe my boss would hone in on that! And he wouldn't take kindly to my response if it consisted entirely of me whining about it. It points to a severe deficiency in the model itself. As we've pointed out, that deficiency is incredibly obvious to any non-cultist who looks at it: the model only factors in the experience of rich business owners and could not give less of a gently caress about anyone else. We've pointed this out over and over, and your only response is to re-post the exact list we're criticizing, as if it changes anything.

I'm not with Caros on this one. You're not a child who can't be blamed for believing all the crap your mother taught you. You've had ample chances to change your mind, and countless people have tried to talk some reason into you. You aren't a poor misguided soul deserving of pity. You are an idiot coward deserving of nothing but contempt. You aren't even worth violence, because you and your entire movement are powerless cowards who will never, ever have the power to enact your depraved ideology on others. So gently caress you, gently caress Mises, gently caress Rothbard and Hoppe and all the Walters you can muster. Your whole movement is a worthless pile of self-justifications, and it will be thrown into the garbage where it belongs once its ultra-wealthy funders finally die off and leave the rest of us to clean up their mess.





PS You're a racist

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Goon Danton
May 24, 2012

Don't forget to show my shitposts to the people. They're well worth seeing.

paragon1 posted:

I hope you'll all participate. :unsmigghh:

Is there a portion of the debate where we just hurl obscenities at him? Because sign me up, I have a real annoying voice and I was raised by a carpenter and a truck driver who taught me the right way to swear at people.

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