Anarchy, State, and Market Failure
What, if anything, could constitute an effective argument for libertarianism? ‘Libertarianism’ in the modern right-wing sense (a philosophy of private ownership and non-aggression) has had more objections levelled against it than one could possibly count. One may conclude, having levelled one such objection, that the legitimacy or at least the necessity of the State, or of collective ownership, is thereby vindicated. Not so, logically.
Suppose, for example, that one were to raise an objection against the libertarian position, and that this objection hits the mark: perhaps there really are problems which would plague a system of private ownership and non-aggression, and that it would be genuinely extremely difficult to deal with the problem from within that system. Suppose, however, that this same problem, or one closely analogous to it, would still exist even in a system of collective or State ownership. Perhaps the problem would be even worse under such a system. Would this be an effective argument against libertarianism? Clearly not. Or, suppose that a system of collective or State ownership does have the exclusive means to deal with the problem at hand. But, such a system is also plagued by its own unique problems, problems which outweigh those which we would face in a ‘libertarian’ world, and which that libertarian world would be better equipped to deal with. Again, the argument would fail.
The point here is this: simply to point out a problem or potential problem in a system is not in itself an effective critique of it. If one’s own alternative system also does not have the means to deal with the problem, or if the alternative creates far greater problems even as it deals effectively with the first, the critique is unsuccessful. Recognising this fact allows us to determine, in advance, what an effective argument for libertarianism could look like.
Libertarianism is a non-utopian philosophy. It is perhaps misleading to think of it as a ‘system’, since it does not propose any kind of structural model for society. It seeks simply to lift away, as far as is possible, the constraints which prevent individuals from pursuing their own interests, on the understanding that a world of peaceful voluntarism is a good and just world in which to live. Whether the recognition of private ownership and the right not to be aggressed against would produce such a situation is, of course, open to dispute. But this, notionally, is the goal. Now, libertarianism faces problems. People are imperfect. We (far be it from me to exclude myself from this) are ignorant, greedy, liable to corruption. Would problems result from this, in a libertarian world? No doubt they would. And, no doubt they would abound in any alternative system, too.
Suppose that it would be possible to argue the following: it is conceded that a system of private ownership and non-aggression would face difficulties, perhaps many, and perhaps great; however, for any alternative system one might wish to propose, that alternative will either (a) face the very same problems, or (b) face different problems, which are greater, or more numerous, or both. This argument, if in fact it could be made, would, as far as I can tell, constitute a persuasive defence of the libertarian position. Can such an argument be made effectively? I believe that it very probably can.
In 2018, economist David D. Friedman came to Oxford university to give a talk on market failure. Having reviewed and digested the substance of his argument, I believe him to have hit upon a vindication of libertarianism which is elegant in its simplicity. For this reason, I would like to reconstruct what I take to be the high points of his presentation, and make some application. Friedman’s thesis, in brief, is as follows.
The basic argument for liberty is that, in a system of private ownership, individual persons are generally best acquainted with their own situations, and are generally the immediate bearers of both the costs and the benefits of their own actions. It stands to reason, then, that people should be left alone, as far as possible, to pursue their own separate interests without interference. So far, so good. But there is a problem. The problem is ‘market failure’. Market failure is defined by Friedman as a situation wherein each individual acts correctly in his/her own interests, taking the course of action which maximises the benefit and minimises the cost to him/herself, and yet the net result is that everybody is worse off. Moreover, such can most certainly occur in a free-market situation. Non-excludable ‘public goods’ not being produced because they are insufficiently profitable is one prominent example.
One may argue, then, that either an agency of coercion (i.e. a State) or an alternative system of ownership (collective ownership, with a democratic decision-making process), is justified, on the grounds that it corrects these problems of market failure: either a State may coerce individuals, via a confiscationary levy (taxation), to fund a ‘public good’, or else the collective may decide as a unit to fund a cause from which everybody benefits. On the face of it, the anti-libertarian argument looks compelling. A system of private ownership and non-aggression generates market failure, especially in its failure to produce public goods, and the alternatives correct the problem by being able to produce public goods more easily. Is this decisive?
No, says Friedman, and the reason is simple. Contrary to what its name might suggest, ‘market failure’ does not only plague what we would ordinarily call ‘the free market’. It is any situation in which individual rationality is not conducive to group rationality in the final analysis, and the State is itself subject to this very phenomenon. Friedman’s defence is to concede that a system of private ownership may well be subject to certain problems of market failure. But so is the State. Indeed, Friedman asserts that, whereas market failure is a rarity in the private market, it is commonplace in the political market, and with far worse results. Moreover, I believe Friedman’s argument can be strengthened further. Though his main target is the State itself, I believe that most of his argument is equally applicable to even a directly democratic decision-making process. In a nutshell: whatever objection might be levelled against the free market, the very same objection, or else some other objection of even greater force, may be levelled against the alternative. If he is right, then this would satisfy our criterion for an effective libertarian defence.
What is the cause of market failure? According to Friedman, it is caused by my taking an action such that the benefits go to me and the costs go to other people, or my not taking an action because the costs would go to me and the benefits would go to other people. Immediately, the whole of the political process faces a problem: virtually everyone in the entire political process takes actions, most of the costs and benefits of which go to people other than themselves. It stands to reason, then, that market failure is commonplace in the political sphere. Getting the majority of people to act in favour of the common good is going to be virtually impossible. Certainly, it cannot be expected to happen reliably.
To quote Friedman directly:
‘The voter who makes himself well-informed in order to know who to vote for provides benefits mostly to other members of his polity. The legislator who passes a bill is producing both costs and benefits for other people. The lobbyist who gets a bill passed is producing benefits for his customers, and will sensibly ignore any costs imposed on people who are not his customers. And the judges who make decisions, who in the Anglo-American system make a good deal of the law by setting precedents, are setting precedents whose costs and benefits are almost entirely borne by other people. It follows that there is no reason to expect political actors to take the actions that maximise net-benefit for all.’
The common-sense or ‘naïve’ model of democracy is that our elected representatives will reliably do the right thing because, if they don’t, we vote them out. But in order for this to work, voters have to be well-informed. Unfortunately, it is simply not rational for any individual voter to take it upon him/herself to become well-informed. Suppose you live in a society, virtually all the voters in which are well-informed already. Probably, then, everybody else apart from you can already be relied upon to elect the right person. Your vote will have a negligible chance of making a difference. Or suppose you live in a society in which virtually no voter is well-informed. Here, again, your vote is hardly going to make a difference, no matter how well-informed you choose to become. So it looks like, regardless of what everybody else does, taking it upon yourself to become a well-informed voter costs you more than it benefits you. This is the case in any kind of collective decision-making process, whether ‘representative’ or ‘direct’. From the perspective of any given individual, it just makes more sense to be an ignorant voter than an informed voter, because becoming an informed voter produces more costs (to you) than benefit (to you).
Now, the natural response is to say, ‘But if everybody does that, we are all worse off. And if everybody becomes well-informed, we are all better off.’ Just so. The problem, of course, is that I don’t control what ‘everybody’ does. I only control what I do. This is why this particular ‘market’ has failed: everybody acts correctly in their own individual interests, and everybody is worse off. What is more, such a failure is implicit in the democratic process itself. It is ‘baked into the cake’.
Friedman enumerates several more examples, the details of which I will not dwell on here. He argues, persuasively I think, that a collective decision-making process (in distinction from a private ownership system) will tend to consider short time-horizons at the expense of longer time-horizons, and will tend to benefit concentrated special-interest groups at the expense of society as a whole.
But what of private ownership, and its own market failure problems? I would simply say that these should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and that the market in its endless ingenuity tends to find ways around the problem. Many so-called ‘public goods’ problems have been effectively solved by tying the good together with an advertisement and giving away the bundle, the source of profit to the service-provider coming from advertising revenue (this is how private radio broadcasts can exist). My undergraduate dissertation was an investigation into the viability of ‘assurance contracts’ which, I believe, have enormous potential (when properly implemented) to deal with most public-goods problems, and go a long way towards effectively eliminating market failure in a system of private ownership.
My conclusion? No doubt unpalatable to many. The basic argument for liberty is still a good one: leave people alone, let them engage with one another by way of peaceful voluntarism, and generally this makes the world a better place than if there is an agency of coercion invading their lives, or a vast collective into which each individual is effectively swallowed up. Is a system of private ownership and non-aggression flawed? Yes, but not uniquely so. Whatever problems a libertarian world might face will also plague the non-libertarian alternative, but with far greater frequency, and with graver results.
Suppose, for example, that one were to raise an objection against the libertarian position, and that this objection hits the mark: perhaps there really are problems which would plague a system of private ownership and non-aggression, and that it would be genuinely extremely difficult to deal with the problem from within that system. Suppose, however, that this same problem, or one closely analogous to it, would still exist even in a system of collective or State ownership. Perhaps the problem would be even worse under such a system. Would this be an effective argument against libertarianism? Clearly not. Or, suppose that a system of collective or State ownership does have the exclusive means to deal with the problem at hand. But, such a system is also plagued by its own unique problems, problems which outweigh those which we would face in a ‘libertarian’ world, and which that libertarian world would be better equipped to deal with. Again, the argument would fail.
The point here is this: simply to point out a problem or potential problem in a system is not in itself an effective critique of it. If one’s own alternative system also does not have the means to deal with the problem, or if the alternative creates far greater problems even as it deals effectively with the first, the critique is unsuccessful. Recognising this fact allows us to determine, in advance, what an effective argument for libertarianism could look like.
Libertarianism is a non-utopian philosophy. It is perhaps misleading to think of it as a ‘system’, since it does not propose any kind of structural model for society. It seeks simply to lift away, as far as is possible, the constraints which prevent individuals from pursuing their own interests, on the understanding that a world of peaceful voluntarism is a good and just world in which to live. Whether the recognition of private ownership and the right not to be aggressed against would produce such a situation is, of course, open to dispute. But this, notionally, is the goal. Now, libertarianism faces problems. People are imperfect. We (far be it from me to exclude myself from this) are ignorant, greedy, liable to corruption. Would problems result from this, in a libertarian world? No doubt they would. And, no doubt they would abound in any alternative system, too.
Suppose that it would be possible to argue the following: it is conceded that a system of private ownership and non-aggression would face difficulties, perhaps many, and perhaps great; however, for any alternative system one might wish to propose, that alternative will either (a) face the very same problems, or (b) face different problems, which are greater, or more numerous, or both. This argument, if in fact it could be made, would, as far as I can tell, constitute a persuasive defence of the libertarian position. Can such an argument be made effectively? I believe that it very probably can.
In 2018, economist David D. Friedman came to Oxford university to give a talk on market failure. Having reviewed and digested the substance of his argument, I believe him to have hit upon a vindication of libertarianism which is elegant in its simplicity. For this reason, I would like to reconstruct what I take to be the high points of his presentation, and make some application. Friedman’s thesis, in brief, is as follows.
The basic argument for liberty is that, in a system of private ownership, individual persons are generally best acquainted with their own situations, and are generally the immediate bearers of both the costs and the benefits of their own actions. It stands to reason, then, that people should be left alone, as far as possible, to pursue their own separate interests without interference. So far, so good. But there is a problem. The problem is ‘market failure’. Market failure is defined by Friedman as a situation wherein each individual acts correctly in his/her own interests, taking the course of action which maximises the benefit and minimises the cost to him/herself, and yet the net result is that everybody is worse off. Moreover, such can most certainly occur in a free-market situation. Non-excludable ‘public goods’ not being produced because they are insufficiently profitable is one prominent example.
One may argue, then, that either an agency of coercion (i.e. a State) or an alternative system of ownership (collective ownership, with a democratic decision-making process), is justified, on the grounds that it corrects these problems of market failure: either a State may coerce individuals, via a confiscationary levy (taxation), to fund a ‘public good’, or else the collective may decide as a unit to fund a cause from which everybody benefits. On the face of it, the anti-libertarian argument looks compelling. A system of private ownership and non-aggression generates market failure, especially in its failure to produce public goods, and the alternatives correct the problem by being able to produce public goods more easily. Is this decisive?
No, says Friedman, and the reason is simple. Contrary to what its name might suggest, ‘market failure’ does not only plague what we would ordinarily call ‘the free market’. It is any situation in which individual rationality is not conducive to group rationality in the final analysis, and the State is itself subject to this very phenomenon. Friedman’s defence is to concede that a system of private ownership may well be subject to certain problems of market failure. But so is the State. Indeed, Friedman asserts that, whereas market failure is a rarity in the private market, it is commonplace in the political market, and with far worse results. Moreover, I believe Friedman’s argument can be strengthened further. Though his main target is the State itself, I believe that most of his argument is equally applicable to even a directly democratic decision-making process. In a nutshell: whatever objection might be levelled against the free market, the very same objection, or else some other objection of even greater force, may be levelled against the alternative. If he is right, then this would satisfy our criterion for an effective libertarian defence.
What is the cause of market failure? According to Friedman, it is caused by my taking an action such that the benefits go to me and the costs go to other people, or my not taking an action because the costs would go to me and the benefits would go to other people. Immediately, the whole of the political process faces a problem: virtually everyone in the entire political process takes actions, most of the costs and benefits of which go to people other than themselves. It stands to reason, then, that market failure is commonplace in the political sphere. Getting the majority of people to act in favour of the common good is going to be virtually impossible. Certainly, it cannot be expected to happen reliably.
To quote Friedman directly:
‘The voter who makes himself well-informed in order to know who to vote for provides benefits mostly to other members of his polity. The legislator who passes a bill is producing both costs and benefits for other people. The lobbyist who gets a bill passed is producing benefits for his customers, and will sensibly ignore any costs imposed on people who are not his customers. And the judges who make decisions, who in the Anglo-American system make a good deal of the law by setting precedents, are setting precedents whose costs and benefits are almost entirely borne by other people. It follows that there is no reason to expect political actors to take the actions that maximise net-benefit for all.’
The common-sense or ‘naïve’ model of democracy is that our elected representatives will reliably do the right thing because, if they don’t, we vote them out. But in order for this to work, voters have to be well-informed. Unfortunately, it is simply not rational for any individual voter to take it upon him/herself to become well-informed. Suppose you live in a society, virtually all the voters in which are well-informed already. Probably, then, everybody else apart from you can already be relied upon to elect the right person. Your vote will have a negligible chance of making a difference. Or suppose you live in a society in which virtually no voter is well-informed. Here, again, your vote is hardly going to make a difference, no matter how well-informed you choose to become. So it looks like, regardless of what everybody else does, taking it upon yourself to become a well-informed voter costs you more than it benefits you. This is the case in any kind of collective decision-making process, whether ‘representative’ or ‘direct’. From the perspective of any given individual, it just makes more sense to be an ignorant voter than an informed voter, because becoming an informed voter produces more costs (to you) than benefit (to you).
Now, the natural response is to say, ‘But if everybody does that, we are all worse off. And if everybody becomes well-informed, we are all better off.’ Just so. The problem, of course, is that I don’t control what ‘everybody’ does. I only control what I do. This is why this particular ‘market’ has failed: everybody acts correctly in their own individual interests, and everybody is worse off. What is more, such a failure is implicit in the democratic process itself. It is ‘baked into the cake’.
Friedman enumerates several more examples, the details of which I will not dwell on here. He argues, persuasively I think, that a collective decision-making process (in distinction from a private ownership system) will tend to consider short time-horizons at the expense of longer time-horizons, and will tend to benefit concentrated special-interest groups at the expense of society as a whole.
But what of private ownership, and its own market failure problems? I would simply say that these should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and that the market in its endless ingenuity tends to find ways around the problem. Many so-called ‘public goods’ problems have been effectively solved by tying the good together with an advertisement and giving away the bundle, the source of profit to the service-provider coming from advertising revenue (this is how private radio broadcasts can exist). My undergraduate dissertation was an investigation into the viability of ‘assurance contracts’ which, I believe, have enormous potential (when properly implemented) to deal with most public-goods problems, and go a long way towards effectively eliminating market failure in a system of private ownership.
My conclusion? No doubt unpalatable to many. The basic argument for liberty is still a good one: leave people alone, let them engage with one another by way of peaceful voluntarism, and generally this makes the world a better place than if there is an agency of coercion invading their lives, or a vast collective into which each individual is effectively swallowed up. Is a system of private ownership and non-aggression flawed? Yes, but not uniquely so. Whatever problems a libertarian world might face will also plague the non-libertarian alternative, but with far greater frequency, and with graver results.
Comments (209)
You can take an easy Sunday drive from, say, Philly, and in little more than an hour or so observe their customs, habitat and culture.
What you’ll observe elementally is a return to the distant past. They drive horses and buggies, wear modest attire and live in farms or plain houses. They like to live off the land. They are a type of cloistered sect (with exceptions), as indifferent to modernity, technology and social media as is possible.
It isn’t a reach to say they are a libertarian paradigm by your standards. Private ownership and non-aggression are the sine qua non of their social order. They seek to be left alone, pacifistic (and, well, spiritually guided.)
They have managed, somehow, to endure. Their secrets solitude and sanctity remain. But when I see them, while a part of me wonders what hidden majesty they might own insofar as dutifully rejecting or ignoring social advances with putative success, I ask myself if they are somehow simply beneficial heirs of that which they eschew; I.e., the “State” and authority.
What would their libertarian enclave be without the very State entity which safeguards and protects them? Who amongst them, as they turn the other metaphorical cheek, has secured their liberty and defended their desire to remain passive?
It’s an easier thing to live in peace when the other guy is taking the bullets.
A few questions:
How is the playing field leveled to start this utopia? Do we confiscate the Koch brothers’ assets and distribute them equally so we can all start from square one? Or do the Koch brothers get to keep their assets which they gained through state-sanctioned laws when this utopia is started? Who pays for the infrastructure? Who pays the workers to build the infrastructure? Private capital? (This takes us back to the first and second questions above.) Who enforces private property rights? Private security? (This also takes us back to the first two questions.) If it’s a limited state that enforces contracts, then how is the state established?
I expect All of these questions to be taken seriously and addressed in full.
If we all get to start off from square one with equal property, who’s to stop me from breaking Charles Koch’s teeth when I punch him in the mouth? Who’s going to run the jails?
Your argument so far does not support this conclusion though. What you have argued is that human psychology has general flaws which make it difficult for humans to act rationally, especially where the "common good" is concerned. That is common knowledge. What you have not argued is why a libertarian system purely relying on self-interest is the best system to address that problem.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This claim first requires justification.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This, also, requires justification. I would argue that at least the second part is wrong. In an existing society, all actions affect other members of that society. The actions of the father affect the child. The actions of the employer the employee and vice versa. It is in the rational self interest of people to try to avoid the costs while bearing the benefits of their own actions. So it is a natural result of a "market".
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
But there is. Humans are not self-interest automatons but social animals. Moral considerations have weight with humans.
Thanks for this.
You note quite rightly that I justify a presumption in favour of liberty only very briefly. The primary reason is that it is not the main subject I wanted to address, the argument being concerned primarily with market failure. Few people, it seems to me, would say openly of themselves that they are ‘anti-liberty’. Maybe I am wrong about this. But I think that there is a widespread intuition that a world in which individuals have a substantial measure of freedom to pursue their own interests and satisfy their wants is preferable to a world in which, say, most people have the trajectory of their lives dictated to them by others. That a world in which most people are free is preferable to one in which most people are enslaved is a proposition that I didn’t feel the need to justify at any length. Maybe a project for another time. Rather, most people are sceptical of libertarianism, not because they are ‘anti-liberty’ as such, but because they believe that a system of peaceful voluntarism faces limitations which only an alternative (such as coercive Statism or collective ownership) can overcome. This is the subject I sought to address.
If I were forced, however, to argue for a presumption in favour of liberty – if I were compelled, in other words, to answer the question ‘Why, in general, is liberty attractive? – I would appeal to two things, mainly. One is the nature of knowledge. Knowledge is de-centralised; it is specific to time and place, to specific situation. The reason why ‘Freaky Friday’ body-swap comedies make sense to us is because we realise that, if I were put in charge of your life for a day, and you of mine, we would probably both make a mess of things. I am most acquainted with my own life, and therefore best situated to make the best decisions for myself. This is only a generalisation, but the generalisation holds. I am a better judge of my own affairs than I am of yours. No one should trust me with running their life for a day. An elegant argument for liberty on the basis of the nature of knowledge may be found in Friedrich Hayek’s essay, ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, which everybody in the world should read (twice).
The second argument I would make is that, in a system of private ownership, we generally bear the costs and benefits of our decisions. NB: I don’t say that no one else might be affected by our decisions. Moreover, I am once again only speaking in generalities. But, in general, it is the case that, as far as private ownership goes, one reaps what one sows. Consider the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’. There is common land, ownership of which is shared by the community as a whole. Because nobody is individually responsible for its upkeep, it goes to ruin. If everybody other than me works to maintain the land, it is not necessary for me to join in and help, because the land will probably be kept to a suitable standard without me. On the other hand, if nobody else works to maintain the land, it still does not make sense for me to do so, for my work alone will make negligible difference, and it will require me to assume great costs while most of the benefit goes to others. This problem is typical of collective ownership.
Now consider the private-property solution. Everybody, by some system or other (a topic for another day), has a piece of land, and is personally responsible for cultivating it. Someone who works the land to the full and gets the most out of it, (if he is permitted to keep what he produces) will receive the benefit from it, and therefore has a realistic incentive to be productive. Some people might cultivate their land only to some degree, producing less but also having more leisure. And somebody who adopts the same ethic of laziness that he did under collective ownership will starve. Moreover, when you and I engage in voluntary trade, we both benefit in net terms. That which I receive from you is of greater psychic value to me than that which I traded away, and ditto for you. Our decisions will, no doubt, ‘affect’ others to some degree, but we as individuals are the most immediate bearers of the costs and benefits of what we do when we deal in that which is our own, exclusively.
This is the main reason why collectivism, not individualism, is ‘utopian’. Because of the problems of market failure which it is liable to generate, collectivism relies on individuals engaging in what is, in effect, self-sacrificial behaviour for the sake of the common good. Individualism makes no such assumption.
As you point out, some people, perhaps many, might take it upon themselves to work for the common good, even at great cost to themselves. To which I would respond that, if such is the case, then there is no reason why this may not happen in a private-property system, too. We must have a fair and consistent standard, in our estimation of human nature. What one finds is that there is an excessive scepticism of human nature when it comes to considering the risks of private ownership, and an excessive optimism when considering the risks of collective ownership.
Where does this leave us? Contrary to your objection, I believe that the argument does indeed support the conclusion. I have argued that there ought to be a presumption in favour of liberty, where liberty is defined in terms of private ownership and the absence of aggression. There are good reasons to think that this general posture is one which makes us better off than the alternatives (namely, being aggressed against by a coercive institution, or being a negligible element in a much larger collective). From here, the argument is that, while peaceful voluntarism does exhibit certain limitations in terms of what it can easily achieve, which I have grouped together under the category of ‘market failure’, the alternatives to peaceful voluntarism are themselves subject to market failure, though with far greater frequency, and with fewer possibilities to overcome it.
The problem presents itself in the form of those already with a strategic advantage (patent trolls, monopolies, oligopolies, and everything that economics hates but has to deal with). One may begin to see the whole appeal of libertarianism by those nefarious elements that promote it.
How would you resolve this issue?
These are important problems (though, it is rather question-begging to prejudge them as 'incurable'), but, since they take us far afield from the topic of market failure, on which I have already written so much, I would sooner address them in a future thread, if it's all the same to you. I would simply point out that, since the State is itself is coercive monopoly, which is the very agency which allows for patent trolling and which controls the barriers to entering an industry (through licensure, for example), it is not a reasonable alternative.
Not really question-begging. If you have any formal training in game theory, these are simply outcomes derived from inherent forces within human nature, as far as I am aware.
I will wait for another thread then. Market failure is used so stipulativly here that I have no idea how to address it.
I just assumed you were asking me in good faith. If you have prejudged it as incurable then there's scarcely any sense in having a discussion, is there? 'How would you solve this problem, which I am already persuaded is insoluble?' is poisoning the well entirely.
Yes, well I'm also not entirely sure if your ad hoc analysis is compatible with the notion that libertarianism would solve these pre-existing issues that already plague regulated markets. I think that's what I'm trying to point out.
That's fine. As I said, stay tuned.
:blush:
I was in two minds as to whether to respond to this. The subject of the thread is market failure, and its significance vis-à-vis libertarianism and the State. I presented an argument that the concept of market failure vindicates the libertarian position, over against its alternatives. Given that you did not engage with the argument at all, I did not care much for:
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
In the first place, it is disappointing to see the libertarian position characterised as ‘utopian’, not only because I pointed out why it is not utopian, but also because it is simply prejudicial to assume that it is utopian in the grammar of your question. You have, in effect, prejudged it to be a practically impossible dream right from the start, so that any attempt to persuade you of its workability is doomed to fail.
Not only this, but, since you raise many questions, each of which would take us off-topic and would require a separate discussion in its own right, and since you have conceded in another context that your knowledge of right-libertarian literature in limited, I feel that it would be best to direct you to some existing treatments of the issues you raise, rather than reinventing the wheel. The questions you pose are not particularly problematic, but require space to unpack, and I can do no better a job than, e.g., Friedman’s own discussion of how services like rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution would be provided in a voluntary society:
http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
For more detailed discussions of property rights and how they are generated and allocated, especially in relation to criminality, the best treatment is Rothbard's:
https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty_0.pdf
Are my questions not relevant to your system? I’m trying to engage you in discussion.
As to market failure, you fail to justify in your system that there would be “liberty,” and also how people would adhere to “non-aggression.”
Maybe you're just accustomed to having things your own way, I don't know. But it's not unreasonable to expect some give-and-take here. There is plenty for you to be getting on with - I'm not sure what you are expecting of me, exactly. I suppose I could copy/paste material that is already easily accessible to you in the literature with which you are not familiar, but that doesn't help anybody in particular. You have raised, not so much challenges or problems for libertarianism, as much as queries about it, queries which are addressed in the material with which I have furnished you. In order to understand a position better, is the published work of its advocates not the first port of call? If, having become familiar with libertarianism, you have specific objections to its specific proposals, you are perfectly at liberty to start thread of your own. But, in the meantime, it seems as though the 'cowardice' only goes one way. The fact that you don't bother to deal with the substance of the argument I presented isn't even taken into account.
My second set of concerns were raised. What is the libertarian definition of “liberty?” How do inherently aggressive humans fit into this system?
These seem to be foundations of your argument about market failure. I will not accept your answer to defer to the experts.
It's not a matter of appealing to authority. It's simply a matter of sending you ad fontes so as not to multiply material unnecessarily. Why do you need it to be 'filtered' through me in order for it to be palatable? Is all this not interesting to you?
It is important that 'liberty' not be defined too specifically, at least initially, except to say that it is a general posture by which individuals are able to pursue their own interests and satisfy their separate goals. This, of course, must have clearly defined limits, but these limits must be worked through carefully, rather than prejudged, for fear of begging the question. Right-libertarians define these limits negatively, in terms of non-aggression against persons and property (persons, of course, really being just a specific kind of property).
Unusually aggressive persons would, presumably, be criminals and rights-violators in any kind of society, be it Stateless or Stateless. So this is not a particularly libertarian problem.
I guess you’re right in questioning my interest in this topic. I’m not really interested enough to read the fundamental literature on the subject. I was just hoping you could provide me with some answers, so I could determine whether it was interesting enough to study further. As of now, to me it is not.
We all have our personal tastes. I’m sorry that I bullied you.
Well, thanks for the honesty.
No worries.
Thank you for this. You'd mentioned these two authors in a previous thread and I put them on my reading list. Having them available via pdf is preferable to having to go to Amazon.
No problem. Though I should say, there is a more recent and much expanded 3rd edition of Friedman, though you'll have to pay for that one.
Also, virtually everything Rothbard wrote is available for free at mises.org
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sound politically convenient. Yet is it really so simple?
I purpose an a mind experiment: Let's assume a new of technology emerges and creates a new market, where every major actor in the market is an optimist and a believer in "the cause". This aggregate optimism will create a mania and the stock prices of this new industry will shoot to the moon...until even your old aunt has invested in the 'new thing' and there is nobody left to buy at such astronomical prices and hence the prices collapse bursting the 'speculative bubble'. The crash will be then seen as a market failure.
Yet was it done only because of weasels trying to rip off innocent people? Do we need here really the market participants 'that take the benefits and costs go to others'? Sure, partly this is so, especially in the finance sector. Yet I don't think explains everything.
The question is not so much whether one is "anti-liberty" and more what one thinks constitutes liberty. Anarcho-socialists might consider wage labor not much better than slavery. They may be wrong in their analysis, but the core problem remains that "freedom" or "liberty" is a fundamentally contested term. Most people have their intuitions about what liberty means, but few have a systematic approach. I myself find Kant's notion of "liberty as duty", to put it very briefly, quite compelling. This is, presumably, quite a different basis than the one from which classical libertarians argue.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is, however, fundamentally a question of efficiency, not about knowledge. The libertarian approach is not that we should make use of market-based mechanism where those are most efficient, but that an approach based on individual self-interests is the right one - and the only right one - for all circumstances.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
But this example is extremely simplistic. We live in a capitalist society with significant division of labor. We are simply not self sustaining farmers, and we very likely don't want to be. And even if that example were at all applicable to a modern society, it leaves out all the complications. What if, in order to improve my yields, I divert a river that happens to flow across my land. Or use pesticides with significant effects on neighbors? There are all sorts of scenarios where burdens and profits fall apart. And I will repeat that if I act solely according to pragmatic self-interest, I will try to make it so that the burdens of my actions fall on others.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Right, but then I didn't intent to say that such reasons only exists outside of libertarianism, but that they exist at all.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
While the structure of this argument is logically sound, you haven't provided much of any justification for all the premises on the way. The premises you are setting up are the core points of debate where libertarianism is concerned.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I still can't figure out why libertarians use 'non-aggression' when they seem to mean 'non-violent'? If they actually mean 'non-aggressive' then I guess aggressive marketing campaigns (and a thousand other business ideas that can accurately - not figuratively - apply the word aggressive) are off the table? What am I missing?
England experienced a 'tragedy of the commons' in the form of the common agricultural land being enclosed and made private. The commons had been maintained by the community for a long time. Neglect wasn't the tragedy. The tragedy was the loss of the commons, not its neglect.
The management of common agricultural land was (is) well within the operational capabilities of ordinary people. Our distant ancestors lived "in the commons for maybe 200,000 years without ruining it. In more recent times, in England, it wasn't ruin, but a land grab, that was the tragedy.
Quoting ssu
It is probably worth saying something about monopolies, and clarifying a little more what we mean by this. One important distinction is that between ‘coercive monopolies’ and ‘efficiency monopolies’. Coercive monopolies are those which are established and maintained through acts of aggression. An example of this would be if I, a baker, were to beat up or kill all the other bakers in town, or set fire to their bakeries, and generally use force to make sure that nobody can compete with me. Apart from the fact that this is clearly impermissible behaviour, there is also nothing about this which tends towards consumer satisfaction. This is distinct from my baking the best bread in town and offering it for the best price, satisfying consumers better than all my competitors so that they patronise my business, such that my competitors go out of business. This is an ‘efficiency monopoly’. Efficiency monopolies are harmless in and of themselves. This is not to say that it is impossible for them to produce problems, but they are not problematic per se (all of this can be applied to oligopolies as well).
Whatever your feelings about natural economic monopolies, the State is not the answer. You correctly point out that the State has the power to grant monopolistic privileges to private firms, but that isn’t even the most fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the State is itself a monopoly, and a monopoly of the very worst kind: it is a coercive monopoly, existing on a scale that puts any private actor in the shade (except, perhaps, for those private actors who make privileged use of the State apparatus). Quite simply, you cannot sensibly be ‘anti-monopoly’ and ‘pro-State’. To be a Statist is, by definition, to be pro-coercion and pro-monopoly. That is what a State is, it seems to me. So, whatever your feelings on economic monopoly, Statism is no serious solution. It is simply rushing us towards the very nightmare that the market sceptic is trying to prevent.
So, the libertarian (or simply the economic) explanation for the way in which markets tend to produce a small number of companies holding a large market share is twofold: either the companies are producing a service which, for reasons of quality or price, do the best job at satisfying consumer wants, or else they are the beneficiaries of illicit State privilege. Probably some combination of the two. Obviously, the first is the less problematic of the two (indeed, there’s no reason in principle to consider it as problematic at all). And the second, you have to take up with the Statist.
Quoting ssu
Your thought-experiment is interesting, though I am not entirely sure for what it is intended to be an argument. Certainly, it cannot be an effective argument for Statism: if some substantial number of market participants (whether consumers, entrepeneurs of whoever) make poor or short-sighted allocative decisions with their own resources, how much worse would the consequences be when they are acting as voters, lobbyists, regulators and elected representatives in the political market, where the consequences of their actions are distributed among many others, and they therefore have far less reason to be prudent!
So I know you cannot mean this. Perhaps you are merely illustrating the fact that not everything which comes under the umbrella of ‘market failure’ is caused because of individuals taking decisions whose costs are borne by other people. This much I am happy to concede: it may well be that some examples of market failure are not caused this way. It is only a tendency. ‘Market failure’ is defined (at least for my purposes) as a case wherein individually rational actions produce a negative effect for almost or absolutely everyone. So your example would indeed be a case of market failure. As to its precise causes, this perhaps will vary from one case to the next. I would say, though, that since States, through their central banks, tend to control both the money supply and the interest rate, the whole financial system is so remote from a free market in money that none of the crises of recent times can fairly be blamed on ‘laissez faire’. Our monetary systems are market-hostile at their very core. From the libertarian point of view, it is not simply a question of ‘deregulation’; the whole monetary system needs gutting.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, I made this point with Noah de Stroete. One ought not to prejudge what liberty means; rather, one ought to develop a system of rights which seeks to preserve liberty, and the libertarian does this through private property rights and the non-aggression principle. That these principles are more conducive to liberty than any competing principle is (or should be) a libertarian conclusion, not a presupposition.
Quoting Echarmion
I am not sure that this really is a libertarian commitment … it depends on what you mean by ‘self-interest’. If you simply mean that we all always act in accordance with our highest want at any given moment, what Ludwig von Mises would call the ‘rationality axiom’, then yes indeed. But this is not a normative judgement. It’s simply a praxeological truth. But if you mean ‘self-interest’ in the sense that we shouldn’t give a care to the sick and suffering, but rather horde what we have for ourselves, then by no means. Nothing in the libertarian position demands such a commitment. Libertarianism doesn’t tell anybody how to live, or what to do with the resources at their disposal, so long as it is non-aggressive.
Quoting Echarmion
Both my examples were simplistic (both the collective ownership and private ownership one), because they are illustrative of a principle. The main cases I can think of in which what I do with my private property imposes unreasonable costs on others is when I am acting aggressively, invading the property of others in some way. If I pump out dangerous toxins which affect your health or pollute a river which runs outwith the boundaries of my land, then of course I must give compensation. So the non-aggression principle, if employed, covers many such cases. As I said, the fact that private-property owners tend to be the immediate bearers of the costs and benefits of what they do (assuming, of course, that they are not criminal aggressors) is true. It is only a tendency, but it really is a tendency. That establishing private property rights is an effective solution to the tragedy of the commons problem is well known.
Quoting Echarmion
Well, I think I have laid out some plausible reasons for thinking that market failure is a relative rarity in a system of private property, and is implicit in the entire political process (as well as in any collective decision-making process). The force of this observation can easily be underestimated, but I believe that it constitutes a powerful libertarian defence.
Aggressive marketing campaigns would not be considered as 'aggression' in the libertarian system. The reason why libertarians do not simply use the term 'violence' is because libertarianism is not pacifist. Violence is justified, for defensive purposes. 'Aggression' is that term which is used to designate the initiatory use of violence.
Your trimmed statement, as I quoted it, summarizes the human situation. The human species has difficulty living together when many share close quarters. The reason our distant ancestors (Homo sapiens, just like us) were able to live on the land for many millennia is that they were generally few and far enough between, and they maintained a very modest level of material aspiration. Hunter/Gatherers lived in some sort of equilibrium with the natural world. Were they saints? Of course not -- they probably killed each other quite a bit more frequently than we do because there were no over-arching state bodies to mediate.
Indeed, it was the creation of the state that seems to have been the critical cultural development that reduced violence among people (US -- not Homo Erectus et al. See The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker.
You probably have Idealist tendencies. That's not a criticism. The problem with us idealists--I'm counting myself in this group--is that we tend to privilege theory over the actual practice of the people. Thinking idealistically isn't a fatal flaw, as long as we touch base with reality regularly.
I admire the Amish lifestyle, though I'd probably choke on their theology. But Lord have mercy, they are not hearkening back to a long distant past. My father grew up with horses and buggies among ordinary Iowa farmers, and he died only 13 years ago (granted, he was pretty old when he died). They do live off the land, (they're farmers), they resist modernity, technology, up to a point, and social media probably entirely. But, you know, they consume modern health care services, and they finance health care as a community responsibility. They like to travel--by train, since that fits into their idea of acceptable technology, to their extended connections among the Amish who have spread out across the northern Middle America States. I've chatted with a number of Amish on the train over the years, and they're pretty down to earth people. It's not like talking to someone who just crawled out from under a rock.
I cannot speak to the historical particulars of land-ownership in Britain (and don't wish to). Needless to say, private ownership can be legitimate, or not (a thief who steals my bag is a 'private property owner'). Libertarians are not committed to approving of any and all private-property claims. Was the enclosure of English agricultural land illegitimate and aggressive? Quite possibly. If we are talking about the unilateral seizure of land from its estwhile owners, then it is criminal.
Moreover, libertarianism does not require us to oppose any form of collective or cooperative ownership. If you and a syndicalist commune can make a good go of it, then I have nothing against you. Though, I would say that we need to be clear about exactly what 'collective ownership' or 'public property' mean. In practice, these terms are not distinguished sharply enough from private property. If private property is essentially 'exclusionary' property, then, in order to distinguish public property from it in a meaningful way, it must be global. Many left-libertarians recognise the logic of this (they get it from Rousseau). Either you are anti-exclusion, or not. If you are, then ultimately everybody really has to own everything. So a small syndicalist commune with a field to call its own doesn't satisfy 'public ownership' quite crisply enough for me.
It's interesting: I have no idea whether your historical claim about the State being a critical development in wrenching us up out of a state of nature is true. But I do know that Chomsky would take serious issue with it. I believe he locked horns with Pinker on just this issue.
While I am a (non-pejorative) idealist, I certainly don't want to allow that the State is some sort of pragmatic concession, because this is the 'real world' that we live in. Statism does not work. It makes the world an immeasurably worse place. I believe this for reasons both pragmatic and principled.
I have been following the progression of this thread, and I do find it interesting. I’m eager to see where it goes!
I was wondering if you could explain in your own words how and why a State wouldn’t be formed to protect property rights and to set up markets. Is there still international trade under this system?
Pinker's claim is certainly debatable. He based it not on crime stats, but on archeological evidence of the number of found skulls that showed signs of a violent death (crushed skull bones, for instance) and the number of found skulls that were intact. Pinker's contemporaneous evidence indicates that where the state is weakest, and where the citizens disrespect the state, pursue justice themselves, and subscribe to an 'honor system' the rate of violence is highest. One of the places where these conditions apply is the American South. Violent death at the hands of one's fellow citizens is much, much higher there than in places like New England or the Upper Midwest. In New England and the Upper Midwest citizens tend to have a strong civil culture which respects civil institutions, the states are well funded to carry out their functions, DIY justice is anathema, and the prickly personal honor system is mostly absent.
Some how one has to account for one area of the country having one of the highest rates of violence, and another area -- with a different cultural heritage -- having a very low rate, about the same as Scandinavia.
I would submit that pro-state New England or the upper Midwest is a better place for libertarian politics to develop than the much more anti-state south would be, because the latter are just "crazier" than the former. Crazy libertarians will just kill each other off before the year is out.
“I admire the Amish lifestyle, though I'd probably choke on their theology. But Lord have mercy, they are not hearkening back to a long distant past. My father grew up with horses and buggies among ordinary Iowa farmers, and he died only 13 years ago (granted, he was pretty old when he died). They do live off the land, (they're farmers), they resist modernity, technology, up to a point, and social media probably entirely. But, you know, they consume modern health care services, and they finance health care as a community responsibility. They like to travel--by train, since that fits into their idea of acceptable technology, to their extended connections among the Amish who have spread out across the northern Middle America States. I've chatted with a number of Amish on the train over the years, and they're pretty down to earth people. It's not like talking to someone who just crawled out from under a rock.”
-Bitter Crank
Decent portrayal. I’m happy to stipulate that the “distant” past is stretching it. I didn’t mean to imply that the Amish (et al) are bedfellows with Cro-magnons; rather, just to say they seriously defer to non-modern approaches and applications in their routine affairs.
Yes, their religiosity is as perplexing as it is suffocating; it wouldn’t be so bad were it intellectually, independently, acquired. I might even accept revelation, some spiritual epiphany-speak if you will, but it’s just that their religiosity, like their education in general, appears Pavlovian. It smells and seems cultish. Their script precedes them.
The good news is, they’re harmless. They ain’t the jihadists in search of a Caliphate. They just want to ride horses and buggies, rest quietly in yesterday’s design, and, perhaps, pray silently that the 21st c. scoundrels amongst them keep the state in working order for them to enjoy their tidy Shangri-la.
The way the Amish live is, after all, the way pretty much everybody lived 170 years ago, before electricity, before telephones, before autos, airplanes, and all that. We won't live like we do now, if we emulate the Amish; I like telephones, electricity, television, computers, cars--all that stuff. It's just that once we exhaust oil, and once we really cut back on CO2 emissions (along with methane and other greenhouse gases) we won't have much of a choice. It will be back to reading books, playing board games, riding a horse if you are rich enough to afford one (they were expensive), working much harder than we do now just to live, never mind employment.
Am I looking forward to doing laundry by hand? Absolutely Not! Am I looking forward to tending a big garden? Not at my age, I'm not. Am I looking forward to heating with wood, if I had to? No indeed--more hard work. Am I looking forward to hauling water, using an outhouse, etc? I have, I could. Not looking forward to it.
Can we feed 340 million Americans with horsepower? No. 8 billion on earth? Clearly not. What will happen to all these people we can't feed? Let's talk about something else.
Joe Louis vs. Rocky Marciano, who was better? Never mind. That could get racial.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Constraining the fundamentally violent nature of life, is actually a feat in civilization.
Resource gathering is territorialist. This is "my plot of land", and "let's violently kick every competitor out of the picture", is one legitimate reason for the fundamentally violent situation in nature. "Let's tear all other males to pieces, if need be, and then coerce the females", is another fundamentally violent trait in nature.
[i]Competition is an interaction between organisms or species in which both the organisms or species are harmed. Limited supply of at least one resource (such as food, water, and territory) used by both can be a factor. According to the competitive exclusion principle, species less suited to compete for resources should either adapt or die out, although competitive exclusion is rarely found in natural ecosystems.
Aggression is overt or covert, often harmful, social interaction with the intention of inflicting damage or other unpleasantness upon another individual. It may occur either reactively or without provocation. Aggression between conspecifics in a group typically involves access to resources and breeding opportunities. One of its most common functions is to establish a dominance hierarchy. This occurs in many species by aggressive encounters between contending males when they are first together in a common environment ... Aggression is, thus, aggravated during times when high population densities generate resource shortages.
Violence and aggression are universal across human societies, and have likely been features of human behavior since prehistory. For men at risk of never finding a mate, the fitness benefit to engaging in aggressive, violent behavior could outweigh the potential costs of fightings, especially if fighting alongside a coalition.
While male-male competitionThe presence winning male suppresses mating behaviours of the losing males because the winning male tends to produce more frequent and enhanced mating calls in this period of time. can occur in the presence or absence of a female, competition occurs more frequently in the presence of a female. Before copulation, intrasexual selection - usually between males - may take the form of male-to-male combat. Finally, sexual conflict is said to occur between breeding partners, sometimes leading to an evolutionary arms race between males and females.[/i]
Non-violence and non-aggression is a relatively unstable, artificially constructed situation. It should never be considered "natural".
In the event of societal collapse, of inter-societal conflict, or any breakdown in the painstakingly constructed and enforced "law and order", then for reasons of sheer survival, we must immediately revert to assuming generalized aggression as well as inflicting generalized aggression. A healthy distrust of civilization and its ability to maintain itself, is absolutely necessary.
Therefore, any philosophy that considers non-violence and non-aggression to be "natural" is a dangerous delusion.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
The answers to these questions will vary depending on what kind of libertarian you’re talking with. Within the right-libertarian camp, we might distinguish between minimal-State ‘minarchists’, and anarcho-capitalists. Minarchists believe in ‘limited government’ (a phrase so vague that it is hardly helpful at all), usually reserving for the State merely a ‘night-watchman’ role. Anarcho-capitalists are obviously anti-Statists all across the board, and consider the so-called core functions of the State to be such that no one should be doing them (like, say, having the means of waging nuclear war) or such that a private alternative is preferable. So, for the anarcho-capitalist, services like rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution would be provided by competing firms in a free and open market.
Robert Nozick, far and away the most sophisticated minarchist philosopher, argued that a minimal State can be legitimate, and probably would be formed organically and without violating anyone’s rights. He spent the entire first part of his ‘Anarchy, State, and Utopia’ providing what is, in effect, a defence of Statism against the anarchist, which I find an interesting structural decision given that his book is a defence of libertarianism against Rawlsian egalitarian liberalism. So if you ask a Nozickian, he would say that we could and probably would have a State to protect private property and enter into relations with other States.
The an-cap would disagree, for reasons both philosophical and pragmatic. If the State violates the non-aggression principle by its very nature (and I believe that it does, contra Nozick), then it is illegitimate no matter what size it is, or what services it provides. More practically, David Friedman captures the point well enough: if we don’t trust the government to produce things like cars or food (and, in case there is any doubt, governments would indeed be totally incompetent at producing such things), why should we think that they have what it takes to produce and enforce a legal system with any competence? What is so special about these services, that they must be provided coercively and monopolistically, rather than consensually and competitively? The an-cap simply says, ‘There is no reason’, and therefore considers the market alternative to be preferable in practice, too. A ‘State’ is essentially just a coercive monopoly which forcibly prevents competition in certain services, like the hypothetical baker I mentioned above.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That is certainly an interesting take on things. I wonder what you could possibly mean by it.
Political philosophy is not my thing, but I just thought I'd bring that up, because anyone who's seriously researched these two principles, ought to have come across this notion. To declare ownership is an act of aggression. Libertarians cloud this issue, creating the illusion that we naturally own things. In reality we are born without private property. We are born with nothing.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is exactly the problem. A "right", such as the right to property, is something bestowed on a person from the State. It is a "service" provided by the state. If the State, by its very existence violates the non-aggression principle, and therefore ought to be dissolved because of this, then everything given by the State, including the right to own property will be lost with the dissolution of the State.
You do not seem to understand what a "right" is:
[quote=Wikipedia]Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory.[/quote]
Notice that a right only exists in relation to some sort of convention. It is not a property of a person, but of that convention. Further to this, the right to own property is a right which by its very nature requires enforcement, acts of aggression, because we are born with nothing. Perhaps you might avoid the necessity of force, by rewording the "right", as the right to give property, or sell property, but this implies that someone already owns the property which would be given or sold. Since we are born with nothing, we cannot get into the circle of ownership without acts of aggression.
If you're arguing that some particular governmental structure is going to solve or invite some particular problem that's another issue, but it's also not really decideable, because (a) it's usually purely hypothetical, and (b) even if it weren't, there are way too many variables at play to say that the governmental structure solved or introduced the problem.
I am always apprehensive when one talks about ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’, especially when this is contrasted with ‘civilisation’ or ‘the civilised’. The reason is that it suggests that something other than the course of nature brought us to (relative) civilisation; as though nature was trundling along in its immutable and ponderous fashion, and then some external invader ‘overtook’ nature, subjugated it, overcame it, and gave rise to civilisation. I would argue that, in a sense, smart phones are no less ‘natural’ than grass and trees. Smart phones are composed of materials which, if you go far enough back through their individual histories, are reducible to perfectly ‘natural’ resources. They are built up into something new by human productive ingenuity, but this, too, is a product of ‘nature’. The primitive past is often given this privileged status of being our ‘natural’ state, as though something other than other than nature – nature plus something else – got us to where we are. But this isn’t true. Nature is not always red in tooth and claw. Nature is just as responsible for producing peaceful cooperation as it is for animalistic aggression; just as responsible for smart phones as it is for fire. The forces which conspired to bring us to where we are today (wherever that is) did not come into nature from without.
Once we shake the idea that primitive aggression has some privileged status as our ‘natural state’, I see no reason to think that this is true:
Quoting alcontali
Moreover, I think that your analysis leaves some vital things out. First off, it is in the interest of virtually no individual in particular to exist in a state of nature. Even the ‘alpha’, who is fortunate enough to have those characteristics which make him unusually adapted to survive in a war of all against all, can still be taken out easily enough by a group of two or three who conspire to do so. The incentive to enter into a relationship of peaceful voluntarism with others is perfectly ‘natural’.
The free market – which I understand simply to be the totality or aggregate of voluntary associations – has done more to improve the material condition of humanity than anything else in this world, by an incalculable margin. Peaceful voluntarism generates a ‘discipline of constant dealings’, which gives rise to a stability that violent aggression can never enjoy. Arbitrary force is unstable in the extreme. How can it be otherwise? What, in a war of all against all, can one possibly rely on?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are quite mistaken on this. Right-libertarians almost always advocate for a Lockean theory of ownership, which understands all external resources as being originally unowned, and become owned through productive acts of transformation, or ‘homesteading’. This isn’t ‘clouded’; it is treated very systematically in the literature (some of which I posted above).
Moreover, it is simply incoherent to say that declaring an act of ownership is aggression. Certainly, it can be aggression (like in the case of theft), but it is not aggression per se. It is incoherent for the same reason as Proudhon’s dictum, ‘Property is theft’, is incoherent; as Marx himself observed, you have to first have a system of property in place before you can even recognise theft (or any other kind of aggression) for what it is.
Certainly there are those (left-libertarians and other collectivists) who will say that private ownership is aggressive, because all the resources in the world are owned by everyone, but even assuming they are correct (which I don’t), it would not follow that property itself is aggression. According to such people, ‘privation’ is aggression.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If rights do not exist prior to the State, then my first question would be: Where does the State get its ‘right’ to govern? Either this right comes from the State’s own declarative statement about itself, or else it is a precondition of the State. The former is simply circular: it is no more persuasive to argue for the State’s legitimacy by appealing to what the State declares about itself than when I declare myself to be the supreme ruler of the universe. If the legitimacy of the State is the very thing in dispute, then appealing to the State’s authority to justify its authority is begging the question. And if the State’s right to govern is a precondition of the State, then your assertion is simply false: at least one right can and does exist, prior to and independently of the State.
The third possibility, of course, is that the State really doesn’t have the right to govern.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, no: ‘aggression’ is used very specifically in the context of libertarianism. It is defined as the initiatory use of force against persons of property. As I explained above, a system of property rights is a precondition of recognising acts of aggression for what they are. I agree that rights do not ‘inhere’ with the material stuff of a person, that they are conventions, and that they require some means of enforcement. But, logically, this does not imply a State. The recognition and enforcement of conventions are both perfectly possible in the absence of a State (indeed, the State exists in violation of the system of rights that we all apply to non-States; that is why they are distinctive as ‘States’).
Is it aggressive to lock your doors so that you can keep all of your possessions and your home? Do we own our bodies? According to you the State has the power to decide what we can or can't do with our bodies.
Socialists create the illusion of infinite resources that can be shared by all and accessed by all whenever they want. This is a pipe dream. If we were to redistribute all resources and wealth on the planet every person would end up being in poverty. Google the GDP per capita of the world. It's $17,300, and much off that isnt cash, its locked up commodities and property.
There is also the illusion of the level-playing field. In order attain a level-playing field state would have to engage in genetic and social engineering which just erases individuality and diversity.
Some socialists may have good intentions, but their ideas are disastrous. The rest are just authoritarians in a liberal costume.
I do mean self interest in the sense of instrumental rationality - doing what seems best to further your own goals. Those goals can be altruistic, of course. The point is that the question that requires an answer is whether relying on self interest in that sense does actually always produce the best result, and how that is supposed to be established.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
That seems like circular logic though. If people follow their own interests and respect the principle of non-aggression, they will bear the costs and benefits of their actions. If people do not bear the costs and benefits of their actions then they did not follow the principle of non-aggression. If any detrimental effect an action has on a third party is an "aggression" towards that party, the principle of non-aggression is so general as to be useless.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
But who is going to decide when compensation is required and how high it should be? Who is going to enforce the collection of compensation?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You have said so repeatedly, but so far I don't see any argument for the claim. That private property avoids the tragedy of the commons is not equivalent to your claim.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If it possible that, being very familiar to the literature on LIbertarianism and obviously at least partially convinced by it, the truth of your claims seems self-evident to you, but not to others?
This is off-topic, but the GDP is the Gross Domestic Product, not the sum of all resources and "wealth" on the planet.
It's been discussed elsewhere on the internet, so you'll find plenty of links. But you won't find much of a difference in the number I provided. Everyone in the world will still end up in poverty.
When you trade, you need to give in return something of sufficient value to the other person. It is often cheaper to attack him and confiscate what you want. In fact, it is even better not to hesitate, because if you don't do it, then someone else will.
That otherwise absolutely sound strategy will not work, however, if some kind of stronger power creates a safe haven around himself that encompasses both of you, and prevents you from implementing the otherwise cost-effective solution of attacking and confiscating.
Trade only makes sense when violent confiscation doesn't.
When that stronger power gets disabled, all odds are off. People immediately start looting before someone else does, and they are right, because in those circumstances you can indeed expect shortages of everything, all over the place. So, if someone who looks weaker, carries food along, beat him up and make it yours, before someone else does.
You also need to be careful if you visibly have anything that someone else could want, because everybody else will want to rip it off before someone else does.
Of course, all of that works even better if you gang together. That allows you to attack and strip clean everybody who doesn't belong to a gang. When those easy targets are exhausted, the next thing to do is to ambush the weaker gangs and duly appropriate their loot too.
The situation will eventually stabilize when the biggest and most violent gang has subjugated all other gangs and appointed their leader to Big Brother of the New Safe Haven. Now that Big Brother is watching you, and prevents you from ambushing, attacking, and violently confiscating stuff from weaker-looking suckers, trade can resume again.
Conclusion. Trade doesn't work without Big Brother watching you.
Big Brother watches me specifically so that I don’t put someone in the hospital again but also to ensure my safety that people don’t wrongly accuse me. I’ve learned to love Big Brother because the alternative, a mental institution or jail, would afford significantly less freedom. “Slavery is freedom” is literally true in my case.
It seems obvious to me that I own what I worked to get, where "worked" doesn't entail stealing from others, or oppressing others, rather it entails providing a service or product to the rest of society that you are part of.
A government is only necessary to provide protection against external and internal threats to the free system, and to build and maintain a system of roads and bridges to make the free market more effecient. Those are the only powers a government should have.
Is this just an opinion of yours or do you have justification for these assertions?
This seems like it could be justified, possibly, by the meaning of “necessary.”
Quoting Harry Hindu
This cannot be justified, or I at least don’t see how it could be.
The number I found was 34.000. Having 34.000 dollars in assets is not "poverty" according to any definition I am aware of. It's also for every single person, not household assets. For the vast majority of the population, that would be significant wealth.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Ownership is a social convention though, so you cannot necessarily enforce your own view on what you own.
That would be very good for the millions of people who have negative net wealth.
Quoting Echarmion
The rationality axiom is not a libertarian recommendation. It is a praxeological axiom. At any given moment, we are always acting in such a way that aims at satisfying our highest want. It is inconceivable that we could prioritise a lesser want over a higher want, for what could this ‘prioritising’ possibly mean, but that it is itself the higher want? Moreover, this is not even a distinctively libertarian claim. It just happens to be that libertarians (especially in the Austrian school) are the ones who tend to observe this. I don’t believe that the notion of self-interest plays a particularly important role in the argument I have presented. It seems like a red herring.
Quoting Echarmion
I don’t see what is circular. What I said is true: acts of aggression are predatory, such that one party benefits at another’s expense, and voluntary trade yields mutual benefit. So the fact that the non-aggression principle prohibits the former while permitting the latter goes a long way towards alleviating market failure.
Quoting Echarmion
In the absence of the State, services like rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution would be provided by private firms, competing for consumer patronage.
Quoting Echarmion
The degree to which private property alleviates market failure is a relative one. We must always ask, ‘Compared with what?’ What I have argued and tried to illustrate is that collective or State ownership tend inevitably towards market failure, and a system of private property tends to alleviate these problems. Will it do so perfectly? Of course not, and it is not reasonable to expect it to do so. We are choosing from finitely many imperfect options. That it is conceivable that private property produce market failure problems is not a defeater of it, nor is it a vindication of any alternative in particular. That really was the whole tenor of my argument.
Your analysis is much too simplistic. For one thing, it is not clear to me at all that attacking someone and looting them is cheaper to me than trading with them. Not only is a fight to the death almost always a net loss for both parties in terms of the risk you assume, but the discipline of constant dealings makes it such that back-stabbing somebody today denies you an entire future of trading with them. The fact that some other aggressor might get to them first is not enough to outweigh these considerations, it seems to me. This is difficult, because we are discussing game-theoretic notions concerning a state of nature, with which we are not experientially acquainted in the least. But the very fact that we do not still all exist as atomised looters today means that it must obviously be in our interest to enter into non-violent relations with other persons over long periods of time. If this weren’t the case, the state of nature would still obtain.
About the only thing that I can see actually follows from your analysis is that an individual is unlikely to resort to aggression if the costs of doing so outweigh the profits he is likely to make from it. Indeed, there must be a ‘stronger power’ (stronger than any given individual who is considering becoming an aggressor) set in place in order to dissuade aggression in the first place. But there is no reason to think that this has to be a State.
It is interesting that you suggest that individuals might ‘gang together’, even if it is only for criminal purposes. Whatever their purposes may be, these gang-members must have a peaceful arrangement with one another. Each individual benefits from being in the gang because he has the protection of his comrades, and it is not in the interest of any given member to back-stab any other member, because he has the rest of the gang to answer to. So the inner-dynamic of the gang demonstrates why the leap that you make to Statism is unwarranted: the gang itself may well be perfectly egalitarian with respect to its members; the ‘stronger power’ is not so much a monopoly at the top as much as the rest of the gang. Recognising this gives us a clue as to how aggression can successfully be prohibited in a Stateless society. Each individual treats peacefully with everyone else, because if he doesn’t, he has the rest of the society to answer to; at the very least, they will not associate with him thereafter. So the discipline of constant dealings creates an incentive to treat peacefully with everyone else in perpetuity.
What is more, Statism is no serious solution to aggression, since the State is the aggressor par excellence. Your solution to the problem of criminality, it seems, is to place our trust in a criminal gang of unparalleled scale. Needless to say, this is not very convincing.
It is not the declaration of ownership, 'this is mine' which is an act of aggression, it is the declaration of a right to ownership, 'people have the right to own things', which is an act of aggression. So it's not comparable to 'property is theft' it is inherent within the concept of "right", the declaration of a right is an act of aggression against all those who do not believe that the declared right ought to be a right. This is the problem with Locke's concept of social contract, it is not a contract which we willingly agree to, and therefore rights are imposed and enforced. Locke's idea that there are natural rights is what is incoherent.
And it is a false premise to assume that a system of property is required to recognize an act of aggression, because many acts of aggression have nothing to do with ones property, they are attacks against the person.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Your options here are not exhaustive, some might say God gives the right to the State. Regardless, people have rights, a State is not the type of thing which could have a right. So we agree on your third option, I think it's incoherent to say that the State has the right to govern. The problem though, which I mentioned in the last post, the rights which individual people are said to have, are given by the State, or some other social convention. If we abolish the State, we give up what is given by the State, and this includes rights. There is no such thing as "natural rights", this is incoherent. You yourself have dismissed talk of "the natural" as providing no useful distinction. So, would you agree that rights come into existence (naturally) as a product of human conventions, such as the State, and do not pre-exist such conventions, which bestow upon the individual human beings, various "rights"? And, since "rights" are commonly associated with "the State", and you advocate for removal of the State, why not dismiss rights altogether as an archaic concept produced for the purpose of gathering support for the State, and opt for a completely different sort of convention, without 'rights'?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The phrase "person of property" appears to be incoherent.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Again, this is incoherent, because you are defining "aggression" in relation to property, rather than in relation to people. It is very obvious that many acts of aggression occur against people regardless of the person's property. You cannot define "aggression" merely by reference to a person's property, or else you would have a decrepit principle of non-aggression which would only apply to property-related acts of aggression. You are merely subjugating you definition of "aggression" to the concept of property rights, to create the illusion that there is no incompatibility between "non-aggression" and "property rights". 'Aggression is an act against a person's property'. That's nonsense, and if we define "aggression" properly we see that the convention of "property rights" is itself an act of aggression.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see how this is relevant, or how it is, as you say, according to me.
It is the number one instrument currently in use for that purpose.
It amounts to circling the wagons, so that the level of violence inside the perimeter becomes drastically lower than outside. This in turn facilitates trade, which in turn tends to increase income and wealth inside the perimeter, which in turn increases the potential pay-off of a successful attack.
Maybe, maybe, maybe it is possible to lower violence and aggression within the perimeter by other means, but I would first want to see that in practical operation.
In the meanwhile, awaiting a successful example of how such alternative could work, I am not much of a fan of removing the legions sitting on top of the outer boundaries of the perimeter or shutting down the patrols within the perimeter, because otherwise I would need to quickly resort to looting all the good stuff before anybody else does.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Ganging together makes you more successful at looting and pillaging anything that is not too hot or too heavy. No doubt about that. Once the gang exists, it will not disband itself for as long as there is stuff to confiscate from non-gang members. If everybody within the perimeter has become a member of the gang, the gang will still not disband itself, because then it can protect the outer boundaries of the perimeter and also patrol inside, in exchange for a fee, or so.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The gang will simply coerce these people, in successive rounds of face fisting. It will be a case of "give me what I want, or else!" That strategy works like a charm, seriously,
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Well, I don't really trust them either, and it obviously does not solve the problem gracefully.
What @Virgo Avalytikh doesn’t seem to get, and this is probably because she has no concept of the riff raff, living the privileged life of an Oxford grad (forgive me if I didn’t peg you right, but I’m pretty good at this), is that most of the poor would go looting without a State-sanctioned police force to stop them. I have lived in the ghetto, both in Madison and in Chicago (although it wasn’t the worst part where it wouldn’t be safe for a young white boy to go), and I know my people.
I use "self-interest" intentionally here, as a replacement for the use (misuse, in my opinion) of the term "market" that is preferred by libertarians. When everything is supposed to be governed by "market forces" or "market systems", what this actually means is that everyone is supposed to act according to their own rational (as in instrumental rationality) self-interest. This is then supposed to produce the "market", and thereby prosperity for all. I find this highly questionable, and that is why I bring it up. Since "market failure" is a significant part of your argument, I think the role of self-interest in libertarian models is very much on topic.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
It's circular because the conclusion that "self-interest combined with non aggression usually leads to a fair (paraphrased) distribution of burdens and profits" is reliant on defining non-aggression as "whatever rules lead to a fair distribution of burdens and profits". The conclusion is inherent in the premise, that is in the way non-aggression is defined.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And the problem here is that you haven't provided justification for the claim that the non-aggression principle does so, you just use that as a premise. Which leads me to my above criticism.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The obvious problem though is that private firms don't enforce rights - they provide a service. It is entirely irrelevant to the service provide whether or not that service happens to coincide with a right. So what you are talking about is not enforcement of "rights" but of "interests". And naturally the interestst of the strongest will end up being enforced most effectively.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Right, but in that case your argument boils down to "no system is perfect, all systems have their problems to deal with". That may be an insightful realization, it just doesn't do anything to argue for any particular system.
Because she drank the Kool-Aid of the billionaire class that funded her educational curriculum. Perhaps daddy is rich, too? States seem particularly coercive to the rich when they don’t want to pay taxes.
As I pointed out above, it is not possible to determine an action as definitively ‘aggressive’ unless one already has a system of rights in place by which to make that judgement. ‘Aggression’ is not a property which inheres in an action; it is a relation of an action to a specific (property) right. Consider something ostensibly aggressive, such as my punching you in the face. Does this constitute an act of ‘aggression’? That depends. Perhaps we have both signed up for a boxing match. Perhaps we are acting and this is part of the scene. Or consider something ostensibly innocuous, like simply standing. Is this aggression? Again, it depends. If I am standing in my own living room, then probably not. If I am trespassing in your living room, and have been asked to leave, then yes. To say of any particular action that it is ‘aggressive’ presupposes a background schema of rights. Therefore, rights are a precondition of aggression. Therefore, declaring a right of ownership in the first instance cannot be aggression. That is to put the cart before the horse.
Invasions of one’s person are just a sub-species of invasions of one’s property in general. Property rights begin with the right to self-ownership. Obviously, I must first own myself before it can be determined what (else) I may own. All rights are ultimately just rights of use or ownership over scarce resources that have alternative uses, whether these be our own bodies, or whatever.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not to nit-pick, but ‘divine right’ would come under the second category I mentioned. It seems to me that my categories are indeed exhaustive. And I agree that the third option in fact obtains.
I have agreed with you that rights are conventions. Moreover, conventions can and certainly do exist independently of the State (take language, as an example), and to this degree, are ‘natural’. The leap you make from this to a justification of Statism is completely unwarranted, logically. You simply insist that, if we do away with a State, we would have to do away with rights too. But I see no reason to think that this is so. The fact that rights are commonly ‘associated’ with a State is not particularly decisive. There may be a ‘common sense’ that the State is the source of rights, but I think there is an equally strong ‘common sense’ that it is possible for States to commit rights-violations of their own, implying that there is a higher standard of rights to which States are subject. It is probably the case that most people’s common-sense intuitions just are not terribly refined on this point.
I don’t really know what more there is to say. A defence of Statism, it seems to me, must be of one of two kinds. Either, the State is defended on the grounds that it is legitimate, that its coercively monopolistic position is rightful, or else it is defended on the grounds of its necessity, that we simply must have such a thing and that it would not be possible to function without it.
I have not seen you make any substantial claim for the former. You seem to be making a purely pragmatic or consequentialist case. But I see no reason to think that the State is either the only possible way in which services like rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution may be provided, nor that it is the best way. All that it really has going for it is that it happens to be the status quo.
On the other hand, I see some very good reasons for thinking that the State is a poor solution. The answer to aggression is not to have an enormous agency of aggression ‘encircle’ us. There does seem to be an unwarranted assumption here: that this enormous criminal gang is not itself corrupt, that it can be trusted to protect our rights, and that will not itself break the peaceful ‘perimeter’ and aggress against us in the way that it prevents others from doing. Indeed, this is precisely what States do. States are coercive monopolies by nature. Monopolistic criminality is not a serious solution to criminality in general.
Quoting Echarmion
But I never said that this was the definition of the NAP.
If I aggress against you, perhaps by killing, assaulting, or stealing from you, I win and you lose. If you and I trade peacefully, we both enter into such arrangements with the expectation of individual benefit. The NAP prohibits aggression, and allows for peaceful trade. So it prohibits the former and permits the latter. There is nothing circular about any of this. The NAP is simply a just and worthy principle.
Quoting Echarmion
They provide services, such as rights-enforcement. There might be criminal service-providers too, such as assassins or whatever else. But that doesn’t mean that the market will not or could not provide those services for which the State is usually considered necessary. All I am pointing out is that, just because the State does x, it does not follow that x would not get done in the absence of the State.
Quoting Echarmion
This is certainly true, but only one part of the argument. The vindication of libertarianism for which I have argued also involves the fact that there is good reason to presume in favour of liberty (in other words, that aggression is something to be resorted to rather than a starting point), and that, while liberty is imperfect, the alternatives are much more imperfect. This is the entire point of the argument I presented initially.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Could we maybe stop with all the ad hominem, please? I thought we were doing political philosophy here. You really don't know enough about my life to make these kinds of judgements.
She makes a valid point. And I respect her for not taking my bait.
Yes. You’re absolutely right to call me out. I respect your dignity.
dabs
I think I actually agree with this point.
Plus, I’m not really sure what this means. I assume it’s forgiveness? That seems like something a gracious person would do, and that’s how I now think of you.
Nothing. A dab is a kind of pose. It's meaningless.
Ah. Well, I still think you’re gracious for not being vengeful. You are true to your philosophy, something very few of us can say.
Well, yeah, we are waiting for someone to show that another solution would be viable. In the meanwhile, I indeed think that it is in our own interest to make-do with the existing mess.
I am a great fan of cryptocurrencies. I hold pretty much 99%+ of my own financial assets in bitcoin, except for a small amount of physical gold and a small revolving buffer of USD.
So, it's not that I would particularly be in favour of State-orchestrated fiat bankstering.
I feel that a system of (tit-for-tat) trade -- within the perimeter of lowered aggression and violence -- is necessary, because giving everyone else hamlet-style sharing rights on your assets, does not scale properly.
Still, tit-for-tat trade needs to be supplemented with mandatory and voluntary charity; simply, because not everybody seems to be equally able to adjust to the requirements of commerce, and may also not be able to draw assisting resources from extended family. A good example are stranded travellers, or even people who have had to flee their native "perimeter". I draw heavily on Islamic views here.
So, I am not --completely-- in favour of the status quo, because I do reject fiat bankstering and State-controlled social security. I also reject involvement of the State in education and healthcare. In fact, I am wary of State involvement in practically anything, except in duly monitoring the security perimeter.
This is clearly false. There is no need for "aggression" to be defined in relation to "rights". You are just making this up in order to subjugate "non-aggression", thereby creating the illusion of compatibility between non-aggression and the right to property.
An act of aggression is an act of offence. There are offensive (aggressive) acts which do not violate another's rights. But sometimes if such behaviour becomes extremely hurtful, human beings will enact rights to protect people from it, as is the case with hate speech for example. Hate speech is an aggressive act.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Clearly, a punch in a boxing match is an act of aggression. Most sports are aggressive, and much competitiveness in general, is aggressive.
I see that you trying to qualify "aggression" for the purpose of your argument. I think that to define "aggression" in relation to "rights" is really a mistaken enterprise, because aggression existed long before rights. Life forms other than human are aggressive, but they do no have human rights, so "aggression" is the wider category. Therefore there is aggression which is not relative to rights. This is extremely evident in acts of aggression which do not amount to an infringement on an individual's rights. To limit "aggression" to "right infringement" does not give a clear description of what aggression really is. And, as I told you, "right" is a concept which has emerged as a form of aggression itself.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I didn't attempt to justify Statism. What I am arguing is that non-aggression is incompatible with the right to property. I even said that saying a State has the "right" to govern is incoherent. where does it look like I am trying to justify Statism?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am not saying that it is necessary to do away with rights if we do away with State, but why not do away with rights? If "rights" are the means by which some aggressively oppress others, "right" is a harmful concept.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Again, I see no reason to call this "higher standard" by the word "rights". If it is a higher standard, then it does not categorize as rights.
This is why I don't engage in ethical and political discussions much. Ethical and political discussions always comes down to feelings, or opinions. There is no such thing as an objective morality. It makes no sense to ask questions like, "what is the best way to live for everyone?" or "What is the best government for everyone?" There is no objective answer to such questions, so it makes no sense to ask for justification for the way everyone should live or be governed. It is personal, so how I want to live and be governed may be different than how you want to live and be governed. This is the basic foundation of Libertarian thought - that I know what is best for me, not what is best for everyone else.
Sure, there are many people in the world that can't live their lives without being told how to live them or what to think, just as there are many people who can't live their lives without telling others how to live their lives and what to think. Then there is everyone else who know how they want to live and what they want to think without anyone else's input, and don't feel the need to impose it on everyone else (Libertarians).
Quoting EcharmionSure, that was the upper range of the numbers that I saw. I saw numbers as low as $10,000. I thought I would be a little less biased by putting up a number in mid-range. You also ignored the fact that most of that money is tied up in commodities and property. So, using your number, people would get around $10,000 cash, and then they would own a fraction of a beach house on the California coast. They would have a place to stay for two weeks out of the year, but then what would they be able to own with just $10,000?
Quoting Echarmion
LOL. Isn't this what we are discussing - which version of "ownership" is "better" for everyone? If you have to share everything, do you really own anything?
I could enforce my view by physically defending what I own. Sure, there could be a larger group of people (ie a government, because that is all a government is - a group of people with a social contract and the resources to defend it) that come and take what I own, but then does that make it "right" or "wrong"? Is there such a thing as an objective "right" and "wrong" way to live and be governed?
The issue here is an uninteresting semantic one. 'Aggression' has a specific meaning in the context of libertarianism: it is the initiatory (in distinction from 'defensive') use of force; hence 'non-aggression principle'. Whether an instance of force is initiatory or defensive is determined by the relevant property rights. If I grit my teeth and growl at you, this may be 'aggressive behaviour' in a common sense of the term, but it does not constitute 'aggression' in a sense that is relevant to our purpose here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, if justifying Statism is something you have no interest in doing, then you're not presenting anything that is particularly threatening to my thesis.
So far, no good arguments have been given for Statism over Anarcho-Libertarianism regarding market failure. It’s just a matter of the proven, tried and true, for protecting relative freedom, and the unproven of Anarcho-Libertarianism.
But, that only addresses the thesis. The practical matter is, there isn’t enough real estate to divide up the world equitably to start this project out from the beginning. That’s why, I believe, the billionaire class loves this idea of Anarcho-Libertarianism. They seem to get that they would get to keep their shares that were gained through the State because there is no practical way to start from a blank slate. The powers that be JUST SIMPLY WON’T ALLOW IT, anyway. And the riff-raff would rebel in a system without a centralized propaganda machine if the billionaire class got to keep their property.
This all, of course, doesn’t address the OP, so I wouldn’t expect Virgo to respond to these points if she doesn’t want to.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
This is certainly a refreshing concession. Though, I would point out that there is a growing market in private justice. The US presently has nearly twice as many private security guards as there are police officers, and more and more civil cases are being devolved to private alternative dispute resolution, like arbitration. This is especially common for in-house disputes within a company or within a particular industry. The basis of a system of private justice is already in place. The situation is simply that there is one agency, the State, which presently has an enormous market share with respect to these services and uses its coercive power to preserve this monopoly.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
One thing that the right-libertarian and the Marxist have in common (one of the few things) is that they are both sceptical of the unholy and totally corrupt alliance between the State and private business. ‘Corporations’ (which are themselves a legal construct) benefit far more from the State’s existence than they would from its absence. It’s not at all difficult to see why. The State is an agency of aggression. Aggression is a predatory activity which can only benefit one party at another’s expense. It follows that the State can only ever be a weapon to be wielded by some against others. If you don’t seek to exploit its advantages, others will, and they will do so at your expense. It stands to reason that those who will benefit most from the State are those from whom the State itself will benefit the most: those who are already rich and powerful. Libertarianism is not the philosophical contrivance of billionaires. Statism is. Don’t be under the misapprehension that the State and the capitalist are bitter rivals, locked in epic struggle for influence. They are intimate bedfellows, and I don’t see how it could ever be otherwise.
That’s also a good point that I don’t immediately have a retort to.
That's the problem libertarians define "aggression" in a way which suits their purpose, not in a way which represents the thing which we refer to as aggression. Then they hijack the non-aggression principle, applying this definition of "aggression", to create the illusion that the non-aggression principle is compatible with the right to own property. With a proper definition of "aggression", the illusion is shattered.
The libertarian has the right to use force to defend the ownership of one's property which has been obtained through aggressive means that do not qualify as "aggression" under the libertarian's definition. Simply put, the libertarian may use unethical, aggressive means (aggressive sales, aggressive trading, lying, cheating, fraud, etc.) to obtain property, as these do not qualify as "aggression" for the libertarian, then use force to defend the right to own this property.
Trade does not even exist outside a "perimeter" of lowered aggression and violence.
Biological life does not "trade" in the wild. Everything in nature revolves around confiscation.
If I think that the flesh around your bones would be better off in my stomach, I am not going to ask for your opinion, and I am certainly not going to ask what you would like in return.
A commerce-friendly "perimeter" of lowered aggression and violence needs to be created at great effort, and then painstakingly maintained.
Libertarians seem to believe that such "perimeter" would naturally materialize out of the fricking blue. That is why I am a bit wary of libertarian views. These views are simply too naive to my taste.
Read Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". Aggression and violence are naturally inhibited because to allow them to proliferate is a detriment to any society made up of any organisms. Natural selection has filtered out unfettered aggressive and violent behaviors because if these were common behaviors, then they would lead to extinction. Aggressive behavior by all organisms of a society is no different than an organism feeding on itself. Eventually it will die out and leave no offspring.
Altruism is the result of a social organism acting in social ways in order to propagate its genes.
I still see many people conflating libertarianism with anarchism. Libertarians support the existence of government - a limited government. Libertarians do not eschew from the notion that they are part of a society. Libertarians understand that we are a social species and to be part of a society means that altruism is a viable means of obtaining what one needs.
Humans are inherently non-aggressive compared to other species as a result of our larger brains with longer memories of other people and their actions, and our ability to share our experiences of others with others (leaving reviews of our interactions with others). Being a social species means that aggressive behavior is at a minimum within that species. If not, then we wouldn't be labeled as a social species. It really is that simple, but of course morality and politics muddies the waters and makes things complicated.
Libertarianism is the default skeptical understanding that one doesn't know what is best for everyone else. If you think that you know what is best for everyone, then don't you have to justify that reasoning? How do you know what is best for everyone else?
Notice how I am elevating myself above the political fray into a more objective mindset and hitting political debates from a scientific angle. No one is going to be able to justify some political ideology from within a political perspective. It is going to take a more objective perspective to understand what humans need in order to sustain our existence. This is why political debates are so drab.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
These kinds of semantic discussions are never productive, and always uninteresting. They’re certainly not philosophically impressive. Libertarians define ‘aggression’ in such a way as to express a concept of particular relevance; namely, the initiatory use of force. There just is no reason why the semantic domain of this usage ought to be perfectly coterminous with that of the casual usage. Ask an economist how he uses the word ‘land’, or a logician how he uses ‘validity’. These terms have a technical significance. All that matters is that these words be assigned a clear and consistent meaning, which ‘aggression’ certainly is.
It is absurd and fundamentally confused to speak of libertarians as having ‘hijacked’ the NAP. The NAP is a libertarian principle. It is like saying that the Marxists ‘hijacked’ historical materialism, or the logical positivists ‘hijacked’ the verification principle.
Put a pin in the word ‘aggression’ for moment. There is a philosophically and practically meaningful distinction between the initiatory use of force which invades that which belongs to another, and the defensive use of force used to protect that which belongs to oneself (or some other victim of initiatory force which one wishes to aid). What the libertarian is seeking to do via the NAP is to distinguish these two things, prohibiting the former and permitting the latter. So the word ‘aggression’ is used to designate the initiatory use of force. Another word might easily have been chosen, but this one is perfectly suitable. There is nothing ‘improper’ about it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are wrong. As you discover if you read libertarian defences, fraud is considered a form of theft and is assuredly prohibited under the NAP, as an invasion of one’s property. Lying and cheating too, if they be relevantly fraudulent. I don’t know what you mean by ‘aggressive sales’, but if you are talking about bringing a gun to the negotiating table and forcing a sale under duress, then of course this is in violation of the NAP; it is a ‘hold-up’!
Not to be unkind, but I just don’t get the impression that you are sufficiently familiar with libertarianism as it is expressed by libertarians themselves to throw these kinds of arguments about. They are quite muddled. Most people form their beliefs about libertarianism based on what non-libertarians say about it, and it certainly seems that you have arrived at your position in this way.
I will be honest: this is quite disappointing. There really is nothing here that I have not responded to already, and it has been largely ignored.
You give ‘the wild’ a privileged status that I see no reason to give it. There is nothing uniquely ‘natural’ about our primitive past, relative to our (somewhat) civilised present. ‘Nature’ produced them both. No doubt, aggression has decreased since this primitive past, but as I observed above, this is not due to nature’s being invaded by some alien force. Nature got us here, and, with any luck, it will take us further still.
With this in mind, can we really say that libertarians believe that a ‘background perimeter’ is going to ‘materialize out of the blue’? That depends entirely on what you mean by it. If you mean that it is going to occur ‘naturally’, then yes, and in this case we are in the same boat together. Everything that happens is what nature produces. It is not naïve to believe that nature tends towards a spontaneous order; indeed, the very fact that we are not atomised individuals eating one another’s flesh demonstrates this conclusively. You may say, ‘But we needed a State to get us here’. Whether or not that is true, the fact is that a State, if it is understood as being a ‘gang’ such as you have spoken of, is itself an example of individuals treating peacefully with one another (if not with others) for mutual benefit. And nature produced this. So, when pressed, you too must concede that nature can indeed give rise to spontaneous peaceful voluntarism – if this weren’t the case, no State could ever have formed in the first place!
I have agreed with you that, if aggression is to be discouraged, the costs of aggression must outweigh its likely profits. But, logically, this does not imply Statism. It does not imply Statism for the two main reasons I have given: first, because a State is not the only kind of agency which can provide such a service, and second, because the State is itself an agency of aggression, which violates the ‘perimeter’ in myriad ways. You may well be sceptical of some alternative way, but I would argue that, since the State exists in violation of the ‘perimeter of lowered aggression’ which it is allegedly responsible for maintaining, I could scarcely imagine how a system of private justice could do a worse job.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
As I said, the question actually is about oligopolies. It's totally different from monopolies...
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is one of the main arguments of libertarian economic thinking. Yet there aren't so many 'natural monopolies' if any. Some might argue that this is because of there existing various states and regions, but I disagree. The market simply naturally evolves into an oligopoly situation. There can be a 'dominant' company, but the demand side typically wants there to be at least a couple of companies providing the products or services. Above all, the dominance of the leading company typically is only in an narrow segment of the market that leaves room for other large companies. And this leaves to the current problem: there are effective simple models for perfect markets or models that show the inefficiency of a monopoly, yet the most common market situation isn't much described by economists or economic models.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I think you get my point, at least partly. The thing is that the market is constantly moving somewhere and it actually doesn't find a 'perfect state' or a 'general equilibrium'. To think that if only left alone, the market would find this 'general equilibrium' is as false as to think that nature left alone will create an optimized 'perfect harmony'.... and all problems of famine and loss of species etc. is because of man. History of the Earth has shown on many occasions that evolution and the interaction between plants and animals doesn't lead to a tranquil harmonious state. It's similar with the market mechanism. It works in many cases, but that doesn't mean it works perfectly and fundamentally will be in a state of correction.
As attack is the best defence, which has been shown well in history with the examples of "pre-emptive attacks" like the Six Day War, the issue of war and the military is very complex for the libertarian.
Libertarians, even the anarcho-capitalists, often make very casually the exception of defence in their ideal society. Yet they obviously understand the total incapability of a simple market mechanism to handle the defence of the society. It's not a simple 'service' that you pay for. It's a very crucial issue as it simply shows that not everything is taken care by the markets and there is this very real collective effort on the shoulders of the society, not the individual.
I am sorry if I mistook your purpose at all. It seems to me that monopolies and oligopolies are subject to the same inner logics, that the former are in effect more problematic versions of the latter (ceteris paribus), and that almost anything that is true of a monopoly is a fortiori true of an oligopoly, too. But if I am missing something here, feel free to fill me in.
What you say is true in the sense that ‘market equilibrium’ is a perpetual tendency of the market, and not a real final stopping point. The market tends perpetually towards an equilibrium, but ‘perfect market’ models are of course unrealisable. What I find, however, is that it is the mainstream economists (who are Statists down to a man, as far as I can tell) who tend to think in terms of ‘perfect markets’ and, recognising that they are unrealisable, argue for government intervention on that basis. Meanwhile, it is the heterodox Austrian school economists (many of whom are anarcho-capitalists) who point out the invalidity of such an argument, basically for the same reasons as I have mentioned: either, government does not solve the problem, or else government is itself subject to its own ‘market imperfections’ which make it a less than ideal solution. I have actually not argued that natural monopolies are unlikely to occur. All I really have an interest in arguing is that, given that the State is itself a monopoly of the most dangerous kind, it is not a reasonable solution. Indeed, any argument for Statism on the strength of its ‘monopoly-busting power’ is self-referentially refuting.
Quoting ssu
This is incorrect. While many libertarians (minarchists) agree with you, others (anarcho-capitalists) do indeed believe that the market is not only capable of providing these services, but insist that it does so much better. See, e.g., Friedman and Rothbard, which I posted above.
The problem, Virgo, is that you are taking for granted ownership of property, "that which belongs to oneself" in your definition of aggression. If you properly define "that which belongs to oneself", you will see that this is one's body, and nothing else. The properties of "oneself" is one's own body and nothing else. To extend "belongs to oneself" beyond the limitations of one's own body, requires principles of justification. How do you justify your assumption that property beyond the limits of one's own body belongs to oneself?
So, when someone makes an initiatory use of force, to invade a property which is not a part of your body, but you claim as belonging to yourself, you have no principle by which to call this an act of aggression, because you have no principle justifying your claim that this property belongs to your self. All you have is a claimed "right" to ownership, without any State to support this right. Your NAP allows you to view an act as aggression if it is force against properties of "oneself", but what principles relate oneself to other things, allowing one to own others?
That's why I say you've hijacked the NAP to use it in an unethical way.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I've gotten my knowledge of libertarianism from you, in this thread. Are you non-libertarian? Perhaps your ideas are quite muddled.
Quoting ssu
If everybody's priority for ownership of property, reasons for claiming ownership of things, was the same, then things might be taken care of by the markets. But there is a big discrepancy between owning capital and owning things for personal subsistence. Any reasonable convention designed to give a right of ownership needs to respect this difference.
There exist successful strategies that rein in the excess power of the State.
A first solution is to first and foremost direct the individual's loyalty to his extended family instead of the State. It apparently works like a charm:
{In Iraq} the extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here. Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of "autonomous individuals committed to a public good", but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world.
There is a good reason why strong family ties have disappeared in the West, allowing the State to lord over thoroughly atomized and ultimately helpless individuals:
Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions -- like the church.
The Church had mistakenly hoped that they would become the main beneficiary of thoroughly individualizing and isolating individuals in society. It did not work, because it is the State that cashed in on the benefits instead. Just temporarily, of course.
Once you start peeling the onion, there is no stopping it. So, the destruction of the innermost layer of onion, i.e. the nuclear family, was clearly inevitable. Without some form of nuclear family, sexual reproduction becomes a rather difficult proposition.
Republicans in the United States expected a quick, orderly transition to democracy in Iraq. But one writer who investigated the practice warned fellow conservatives to stop expecting postwar Iraq to resemble postwar Germany or Japan.
Successful anti-Statism requires strong intermediate layers between the individual and the State, which drastically reduce its power. Furthermore, the religious community is yet another layer, this time above the State, that further delegitimizes and reins in the State's power. It is these additional layers that turned the occupation of Iraq into a complete failure for the occupying forces.
Pretty much like libertarians, I am certainly not a fan of an overly powerful National State. Still, I am only willing to use instruments against excess State power for which there is historical evidence that they really work.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It’s not a ‘problem’ at all. In a system of thought, some beliefs are relatively basic and some are derived. I have made no secret of the fact that the NAP presupposes a system of property rights; this is a point I have made numerous times.
As I observed above, fundamentally all rights are really just rights of use or ownership over scarce resources which have alternative uses. The right to do anything in particular is really a right to do what one wants with a resource which might have instead gone to serve someone else’s ends. So the whole question of ‘rights’ in general is really just a question of resource allocation to someone or other, to serve someone or other’s separate ends.
In regard to the concrete question of how a specific property right is generated in the first instance, there are two main competing views in the literature. Right-libertarians in the tradition of Locke argue that all external resources are originally unowned, and come to be owned as individuals engage in productive acts of transformation (‘homesteading’). Thereafter, just property titles are transferred through peaceful exchange, or gift. Left-libertarians, by contrast, and more in the tradition of Rousseau, consider all the resources in the world to be owned by everyone in an egalitarian manner. The arguments both ways are voluminous and technical, but if you can get your hands on ‘Left-Libertarianism and its Critics’ (Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne, eds.), there is nothing better out there for exploring these issues.
I’m not sure how to respond to this, except to say that it seems entirely wrong-headed. Since I am sceptical of the State tout court, it is little comfort that there may be ways of keeping the power of this coercive monopoly ‘reined in’. I would say, cut out the middle man, and do away with it. Since the State is an agency of monopolised aggression by nature, it will always violate the ‘perimeter’ to some degree. Given this – and, given that it is not the only option available – I am much more enthusiastic about the private alternative, which is consistent with the NAP, rather than the Statist solution, which violates it. But I feel like this is just an impasse.
They have a different logic.
The simple fact is that so-called natural monopolies don't emerge on the free market. In a free market, it simply doesn't happen that one company would be so awesome, so much better than any competitor that it could dominate alone the global market and no other competitor would seriously compete with it. Monopolies have to have a state entity or some legal foothold to enjoy a monopoly on some narrow field. A medical company might have patents to a revolutionary new treatment, but that will unlikely make it a 'natural' monopoly, especially when the patents expire.
Whereas monopolies are typically related to government actors, the other type of market condition isn't. An oligopoly situation is very different from a monopoly. Take any market, production of cars, smart phones, shipping, the chemical industry, whatever, and you can see that there are about ten or so large companies that actually take care of the majority of the supply side. That is an oligopoly situation.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And that's what I said: it's all the time making the correction. To think it will stay in an equilibrium is wrong. Likely it will be this oscillatory movement that simply continues on and on as things change.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Speaking of 'mainstream economists' isn't productive. Far better to refer to specific economists, not refer to stereotypes. And what is market intervention? One could argue there being laws and a legal system is 'market intervention'.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
States have the monopoly on violence. This comes down to the issue of defence and security. I think Max Weber put it aptly, actually.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Is it incorrect? At least you admit "many libertarians" think so and I do agree that surely there are those ridiculous fundamentalists who think that absolutely everything can done better with the private market, perhaps even their own personal life starting from having a family could be better done by the market...
Yet there obvious problems with this idea of private defence starting from things like unified command of the military during wartime. Defence simply isn't a hired guard that keeps your property safe. Trade and violence are two separate things. If you have direct quotes it would be interesting.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And just where does it then put (the cost) of your own life?
And so I predict that this thread isnt going to go anywhere until we start to do just that. When you're stuck with trying to explain or define "aggression" from a political perspective rather than a scientific one then you're not going to have a proper definition. When you don't put humans in perspective of other organisms, then you're going to have a skewed understanding of aggression.
Quoting ssu
‘Mainstream economists’ actually does have a fairly refined designation. The spectrum of economic opinion is typically divided into (from left to right) the Marxists, Keynesians, Chicagoans and Austrians. The ‘mainstream’ typically incorporates the Keynesians and the Chicagoans. This includes everyone from Paul Krugman to Milton Friedman. I understand ‘market intervention’ in a political context simply to be any State action; any service a State provides (which is funded by tax revenue or debt) or any kind of regulation is an intervention into the system of peaceful voluntarism which characterises the ‘free market’. But, since the State is just an agency of monopolised aggression, I can certainly imagine non-States 'intervening' in markets as well, such as a mafioso criminal organisation (not all that different from a State, actually).
Quoting ssu
You seemed to be saying that it is simply ‘known’ among libertarians across the board that certain services, particularly those which are typically understood to constitute the State’s core functions, are such that a market cannot produce them, and that even an-caps share in this commitment. Yes, this would certainly be incorrect. I posted on the first page two important an-cap book-length contributions which explore all of these issues. I don’t cite them as an authority, merely to show what is out there.
Quoting ssu
Sorry, I don’t understand what this question means. ‘Costs’ are forgone opportunities. Can you explain?
How?
So, say that we get rid of Khadaffi. No problem. We just cut out the middle man.
Then, what happens next?
The Second Libyan Civil War is an ongoing conflict among rival factions seeking control of the territory and oil of Libya.
Many Libyans blamed the GNC and the interim government for a continued lack of security in the country. The interim government struggled to control well-armed militias and armed groups that established during the revolution. Libyans in Benghazi especially began to witness assassinations and kidnapping and perceived the GNC to be turning a blind eye to the deteriorating security situation in the east.
As of February 2015, damage and disorder from the war has been considerable. There are frequent electric outages, little business activity, and a loss in revenues from oil by 90%.
It is the militias operating across the country, thought to number nearly 2,000, who are really calling the shots.
[i]Neighboring countries.
Algeria. The Algerian military said it was engaged in an operation aimed at tracking down militants who infiltrated the country's territory in Tamanrasset near the Libyan border.
Egypt. Egyptian authorities have long expressed concern over the instability in eastern Libya spilling over into Egypt due to the rise of jihadist movements in the region.
Tunisia. Post-revolutionary Tunisia also had its share of instability due to the violence in Libya as it witnessed an unprecedented rise in radical Islamism with increased militant activity and weapons' smuggling through the border.[/i]
Is all of this really better?
Yet we typically then just end up attacking caricatures painted typically by those who oppose the school of thought. Anything called 'mainstream' is typically seen in a somewhat negative light, because otherwise the word wouldn't even be used. I've especially come to be very critical to how "Keynesians" or "Austrians" are depicted in this way. I don't know where the emotional detachment comes from, perhaps from the political nature of economics, but in the end economics isn't about 'good/correct' and 'wrong/bad' economics. It is far better and more accurate to refer to exact economists and what they have said. Typically this way you get far better answers.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The strict (and quite ideological) juxtaposition to a "State" and the "peaceful voluntary free market" isn't a good model as you simply need institutions starting from simple rules for a market to work even without any 'State' involvement (or a State even to exist) in order for any market to operate. The market participants have to agree on basic rules, starting from the definition of what is a "peaceful and voluntary" transaction and what is "theft" or "involuntary". And this is basically a totally similar collective "intervention" to someone who can think he or she can do otherwise. If you accept that such rules are needed, especially in an advanced market, then where do you draw the line with "good" market intervention and "bad" intervention? Sorry to say, but markets do need rules.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You write above that "all rights are really just rights of use or ownership over scarce resources which have alternative uses." So what about your right to live? Can someone own you? If that is not so, then not all rights are just about use or ownership of scarce resources which have alternative uses.
Quoting alcontali
I am not sure what I am being asked to defend, exactly . . . as though my only options are choosing between endorsing this or that form of aggression. There really is no categorical distinction between a formally recognised 'State' and an aggressive faction. Becoming a 'State' is simply the prerogative of the winner. I have not argued here for any kind of 'program' for liberty, and I suspect that such a program will be multi-faceted and gradual; it probably will not consist in an overnight coup, and I shouldn't be thought to advocate for such a thing. The road away from serfdom is a long one but, in many ways, the trajectory is a good one. Several of the services which States provided in days gone by are now being provided by private agencies (especially in those important services of rights-enforcement and dispute resolution). In my humble opinion, the death knell for the State will be the gradual realisation that, in fact, those things for which most people are convinced that we simply need a State can be provided by alternative means. I don't feel the need to choose between aggressive States or aggressive soon-to-be States. The dichotomy is quite false.
Quoting ssu
Markets require a system of property rights, which are conventions, but not institutions. Peaceful trade does indeed require a convention which is generally agreeable to both, but this does not imply a State or anything like it. We can see this by looking at the nature of peaceful interaction on a small scale. David Friedman whom I referenced above has invoked the concept of Schelling points to explain persuasively how coordination can occur in the absence of communication. This concept can be pushed, I think, to account for a generally accepted convention of ownership even in the absence of a formalised institution like a State. What you say about rules (or, as I would sooner put it, a system of ownership rights) is nothing that I haven’t talked about already (I don’t know how closely you have been monitoring the thread). I just don’t make the leap thence to Statism.
Quoting ssu
Most certainly, someone may own me: me. This is a very common starting point in philosophical treatments of rights, left and right, libertarian and non-libertarian. (Property) rights begin with an individual’s right of ownership over him/herself. Marxist (i.e. very non-libertarian) philosopher G. A. Cohen bemoaned the fact that the idea of self-ownership is not given adequate treatment in Marxist literature. It is often expressed thus: the right of self-ownership means that an individual has over him/herself the same natural (i.e. institution-independent) rights as those legal rights which a slave-owner has over his/her chattel slave. My body is mine to use, abuse and exploit to my heart’s content. It seems to me most plausible that a system of ownership rights should start here, since, before we can establish what (else) I may own, we must first establish who owns me.
Actually no. You can say conventions are institutions.
Hence 'property rights' is exactly a very specified institution and those kind of things what historians and sociologists refer to when talking about institutions.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
That's the problem with libertarianism: the extremely passionate emotional hatred of 'statism'. For me, statism is more like the common definition: "a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs."
I notice there in the definition "substantial centralized control". For me, there is a leap from let's say "loose minimal control" to statism, but for some libertarians the state itself is this kind of evil, an incarnation of socialism and a threat to liberty and capitalism. This drives the narrative to describe 'libertarian' society to be this fantasy-like 'nation' filled with equally fantastic people living in it.
But you do see the difference between property (that can be owned by many) and your body.
You're going around in circles, we've covered this already. The NAP does not presuppose property rights, that is your twisted interpretation. You have explicitly stated what is protected by right according to the NAP as "that which belongs to oneself". I grant you one's own body as "that which belongs to oneself". You have disavowed the State, so you cannot turn to any legal principles of ownership provided by the State. How do you get from here to a system of property rights?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
OK, I'll go with this, it sounds reasonable.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You propose here two distinct perspectives on property rights, Right-libertarian versus Left-libertarian. The two are not reconcilable. But from what I said above, we have an NAP which, contrary to your belief, does not require a system of rights. So why dwell on this issue of property rights? There is no need for property rights, it's a distraction from good governance.
I am sorry if I didn’t perfectly grasp the connotations of ‘institution’ relative to ‘convention’ (English is not my first language). I just mean to say, a formally recognised State is not necessary in order to have a set of conventions in regards to ownership. Such conventions can exist independently of a State. That’s all.
Quoting ssu
Hatred really has nothing to do with anything. I don’t ‘hate’ the State. I am opposed principally to aggression for philosophical reasons, and the State is an agency of monopolised aggression.
Quoting ssu
Yes, I do.
I don’t think this way.
This is Murray Rothbard, prolific libertarian theorist and the first anarcho-capitalist:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
The encyclopaedia of libertarianism:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
And everyone from Ayn Rand to Robert Nozick define it in the same way. The purpose of the NAP is to distinguish between two uses of force: that which is intiatory and that which is defensive. And, as they all recognise, it presupposes a system of property rights.
I flagged a while ago that what is going on here is an uninteresting semantic disagreement. Your initial assertion was that the NAP is incompatible with private property. The only justification you have for this claim is that the definition of ‘aggression’ with which I have been operating is improper or ‘twisted’. In fact, I am using this term perfectly consonantly with how it is used by libertarians, in their expression of what they mean by the terms they use, in distinguishing their own philosophy. The NAP is a libertarian principle. It is an article of their philosophy. You don’t get to come along after the fact and redefine their terms.
If it weren’t for right wing libertarian judges declaring corporations as people with rights, then the State wouldn’t be oppressive. We are supposed to live in a constitutional representative democratic republic. That means that the government IS the people. They are supposed to be answerable to the people. It only got coercive because of right wing libertarian judges.
But I suppose you could say that these judges are not truly right wing libertarian. They think they are, however.
There is nothing 'libertarian' about (i) the State having a monopoly on dispute resolution, (ii) 'corporations' (which are a legal fiction), (iii) special government privileges for said corporations (or indeed for anyone). The State is an agency of monopolised aggression by its very nature. ssu brought up Max Weber's definition of 'State', which is still the most widely cited, as far as I can tell. The State is ‘a compulsory political organization with a centralised government that maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain territory’.
There is no significant sense in which the government 'is' the people. These are just empty words. There is no reality to which these words correspond. I do not even consent to being governed, so how can it be said to 'represent' me?
I do consent to being governed, so I guess that’s where we differ. The US government is supposed to be answerable to the people, but that was until the judiciary was filled with conservatives, which one could argue was from the get go.
We've come back to the same issue we started with. You disavow the State, which gives a system of property rights, but at the same time you presuppose a system of property rights. Unless you produce an acceptable statement of property rights, you have no system of property rights, and therefore your presupposition is void, false. You've shown me two, very distinct and incompatibles systems of property rights, claimed by libertarians, the left and the right. Clearly the incompatibility between these two indicates that there is no such thing as the libertarian system of property rights, and your presupposition is void, false.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
To be more precise, I said that the NAP is incompatible with the right to private property. You have shown me the fundamental disagreement between right and left on this issue of property rights, such that you have demonstrated that there is no such thing as convention on property rights. Therefore there is no "system of property rights". The NAP presupposes the existence of something which does not exist, a system of property rights. The convention required for there to be a system of property rights does not exist, yet the NAP presupposes such. That is why the right to private property (something recognized as non-existent, by lack of convention) is incompatible with the NAP which presupposes the existence of that right.
You’re going to shatter her reason for living.
I introduced two major streams of thought in contemporary political philosophy concerning how property rights are generated, so that you can see what kinds of views are prevalent in the literature. There's no secret about the fact that they are mutually incompatible; that is why there is a distinction between them. Within the larger thoughtworld of libertarianism, there are certain varieties of opinion, as there are with all political philosophies. It doesn't follow in the least that therefore libertarians 'don't have' a system of property rights. They are there to read, if only you take the time to do so. I would say that a major task of political philosophy is to determine in a reasoned way what kinds of conventions in relations to property are worth recognising and which are not. The fact that there are differences of opinion on this question is not to say that there are not or could not be such conventions; it simply requires us to do the hard work that political philosophers do. Moreover, to say that, because one is a Statist, one simply doesn't have any basis on which to conduct such a discussion, is completely unwarranted and not convincing.
A lot of Native American tribes had communal property, and they were successful for millennia before the white man. I have no desire to read ad hoc arguments justifying the need for or the justification for private property.
Welcome to the real world.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Not reining it in, is even a worse approach.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
In all practical terms, what is a Libyan supposed to do now that he has been "liberated" from Khadaffi?
There is not even an aggressive soon-to-be State. The desire to lower aggression and violence within the Libyan perimeter has been unattainable for more than five years now. Trade and commerce have come to a standstill. There are shortages of everything.
Since the fighter jets who took out Khadaffi took off from France, I guess that the Libyans will soon have to jump into life rafts, cross the Mediterranean, and apply for welfare benefits on arrival in Marseille.
Are you sure that you want to replicate that scenario -- dismantling the perimeter -- elsewhere? Is there really a need to generalize this?
There's more to life than private property. I have a lot of possessions, and they mean a lot to me. Some I bought, some given to me, some I found, and there's probably a few that I borrowed and forgot to return. Each one is in my possession and is mine. But if I said I have the right to claim any of these things as my private property I'd be referring to the legal status given by the State.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
A multitude of different, incompatible philosophies of property rights does not constitute a system of rights. We've agreed already that rights follow from conventions. So when people do not agree there is no convention, therefore no rights. What you describe is incompatible philosophies, not conventions.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
OK, if we can pick and choose which philosophies of property rights we would like to recognize, and call these "conventions", doesn't that mean we can choose our rights? What good is the NAP if it presupposes a system of property rights, and is built on property rights as its foundation, but each individual is allowed to choose one's own system of property rights, depending on their preferred philosophy?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The problem though, is with the NAP. As you aptly demonstrated, it presupposes property rights, it requires them, and is meaningless, useless without them. Now you admit that such conventions (which establish property rights) don't even exist, and require philosophers to do the hard work of producing them. Therefore the NAP is meaningless, useless. So, let's dump the NAP as not worth the paper it is written on. Agree? Or, would you keep pushing the NAP creating the illusion that people who presently own property protected under rights given by the State, would maintain such property rights if the State were dissolved? I think that's deception.
I value my property, too. To call it a right that isn’t given by a State set up through a social contract would require some kind of ad hoc argument, I think.
I would think this would be a huge problem for anarchists. With anarchy there would be no single convention on property ownership, so to propose a form of anarchism which pretends to be based in a system of property rights requires that those property rights be explicitly expressed. If these principles of property rights were adhered to, then I think we would just end up with a State, and not a form of anarchy.
Obviously, because then the circularity would have been obvious. You didn't offer a specific definition either, and the form of your argument implied such a broad definition.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sure, but then trade and aggression are not the sum total of human interaction. Of course you can go ahead and define trade as "every interaction which allows for mutual benefit" and aggression as everything else, but then again your argument ends up circular.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sure, individuals could provide similar services to what the state provides, but individuals cannot provide "rights", because a "right" needs a higher order, that is something that supersedes the self-interest of individuals, to exist. That doesn't need to be a modern nation state, but it needs to be something with authority above and beyond that of individuals.
It is then conceivable that individuals could enforce those rights, but they'd need to do this explicitly not as a service to other individuals, or else it wouldn't be enforcement. They'd need to be bound to the right itself, and the authority it derives from, not to the self-interest of whoever hired them.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The problem is (and I am starting to repeat myself here) that as far as I can see, you haven't provided justification for the other steps in the argument.
Your claim was that, if all assets were divided equally among people, everyone would live in poverty. That is demonstrably false using any one of these numbers. That equally distributing assets is nevertheless impractical to the point of being essentially impossible is obvious. The vast majority of the population today owns way less than 10.000$ in assets. And as to where people live, there is rent.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Physically enforcing your assets is problematic, as you yourself are aware. That's why having a system where your assets are protected regardless of your ability to physically defend them is desirable. As to whether there is a "right" system, I do think so. Though it's not "objectively" right since there is no "object" to refer to. There is a system that is right between human subjects, so it's intersubjectively right.
That there is a plurivocity of opinions doesn’t mean that we should throw away the whole enterprise. People who disagree about the precise substance of rights may still agree that there ought to be a system of rights, just as two people may have completely different ontologies while still agreeing that ontology is meaningful and worthy. Moreover, the fact that there may be diverse conventions with regards to rights does not imply that all conventions are created equal. Some systems of rights are good and worthy, and some are not. This is where political philosophy has a role to play. By the same token, the fact that one system of rights might be recognised as ‘conventional’ does not imply that there is not a better system of rights that we might choose to employ.
‘Rights’ are nothing more than a set of principles which decide in favour of either you or me, where we would otherwise be engaged in conflict such that we cannot both achieve our own separate ends. If it were possible for all of us to achieve our own ends all of the time, there would never be any conflict, and no system of rights would be necessary. The ‘right’ allocates the scare resources over which we are in conflict either to serve your ends or mine. Coming at it from a slightly different angle (though it amounts to the same thing), rights determine the acceptable use of force.
The alternative to a system of rights is for there to be no principled system of resource-allocation, and no principled system determining the acceptable use of force. A system of rights is that which distinguishes us from a state of nature, in which all such conflicts are determined, not in a principled way, but by the arbitrary use of force. Statism is not a serious solution to this; indeed, Statism is simply an extension of the Hobbesian starting point, since the State’s use of force is no less arbitrary than anyone else’s. All that really distinguishes a State is that its use of force is successfully monopolistic.
What you have presented does not pose a particular threat to the worthiness of the NAP. Your argument seems to be that, since the NAP presupposes a system of rights, and since rights are conventions, and since there is no single, definitive convention regarding rights, the NAP should be abandoned. I don’t see how this follows. The world we live in is not a libertarian world. The NAP does not ‘obtain’ in the sense that the world is populated by States, and States are agencies of aggression on a dizzying scale. But all of this is quite independent of its worthiness. The NAP is a normative claim.
Quoting Echarmion
Either we interact in such a way that involves the initiatory use of force, or we interact in such a way that does not involve the initiatory use of force. These possibilities are jointly exhaustive, it seems to me. The distinction is also meaningful, and precisely the one which the NAP seeks to make. To be sure, not all interactions of the latter kind constitute ‘trade’ in the sense we ordinarily use this term, it is just an example of it (though, many social interactions such as friendships or marriages can certainly be analysed economically as kinds of ‘trades’; look at the stable marriage problem for example).
You keep making this charge of circularity, but I still don’t see exactly what it is that is supposed to be circular. ‘Circularity’ is a property of arguments, and it is that property by which the conclusion is assumed as a premise, implicitly or explicitly. What is the conclusion I am taking for granted, and where do I take it for granted?
Quoting Echarmion
Certainly, individuals do not ‘provide’ rights (though they can defend them). Rights are ‘higher order’ in the sense that they are principles, and therefore they are abstractions. You correctly observe that this does not have to be a State, but I would go further: it cannot be a State. There is nothing magical about ‘States’. A State, like any collective entity, is just a construct, composed of individuals like you and me. There is nothing ‘higher order’ about a State beyond the monopolistic status people tend to recognise in it, quite arbitrarily.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, you keep saying this, but I can do no more than direct you to my opening argument and subsequent comments. I’m not sure what step of the argument you’re taking issue with, exactly. What is it you object to?
These kinds of discussions really aren't worth having unless we have a clear distinction in place between 'private' property and 'communal' property. Private property is characterised, fundamentally, by de-privation; that is to say, exclusion. Private ownership is essentially exclusionary ownership. Consider a community of persons, in which there exists a wealthy property-owner. Suppose the other members of the community forcibly deprive him of his property, and distribute it according to some principle of egalitarian justice across all the members of this community. On the face of it, this looks like a straightforward case of 'communal' ownership.
Suppose, however, that there is a second community across the river, one which does not have a wealthy property-owner of its own to ransack. It may say to the newly enriched community that it, too, is entitled to its fair share of this wealth. But the first company refuses; 'It it ours', they say. What has really happened, then, is not so much the transferal of private property to communal property. The community is still practising private ownership rights. There is no difference in principle between the state of affairs before the ransacking and that which obtains after the ransacking. All that has changed is the scale.
The point is simply this: left-liberal egalitarians since Rousseau have recognised that the only consistent way to oppose private property is to endorse a system of global communal ownership. Either exclusion is per se objectionable or it is not. If it is, then a particular people with a patch of land to call their own is not really 'communal'; or, if it is communal, then communal ownership is simply a sub-species of private ownership.
Yes, they are jointly exhaustive if formulated that way. But this doesn't tell me how the NAP ensures that burdens and benefits are distributed according to responsibility.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I started this particular line of argument by questioning your assertion that, in the absence of outside coercive forces, burdens and benefits of an act would - generally - fall on the person(s) responsible. You responded by pointing out that the NAP would be violated if burdens and benefits fall apart.
You have positioned the NAP as the principle that ensures, for lack of a better word, fairness. But the NAP, in it's general formulation, is vague and does not reference distribution of burdens and benefits at all. It's details are also debated, and you have offered no definition of your own. From this I conclude that you're taking for granted that the NAP will ensure a "fair" distribution of burdens without actually defining a specific NAP and showing how it works.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
There is also no difference between a human being and any other configuration of matter beyond the special status people tend to recognise in it. It also doesn't follow that because a state is a construct, it cannot provide rights.
You have also completely skipped my point about self-interested contractors not "enforcing rights".
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I would like you to justify your premises beyond the first one. A libertarian system can suffer from "market failure", but other systems can suffer similar defects - fine. Your next premise was that market failure is less severe in libertarian systems than for other systems, especially any form of statism. Please provide an argument for this premise.
Well actually, of course they would. The overall definition of 'aggression' does not change just because libertarians have claimed one specific meaning. Even if we concede the libertarian meaning, the old definitions still apply when they are applicable.
And in world foreign policy, what counts as "initiatory use of violence"? If your grandpa killed my grandpa is my use of violence against you justified?
How about domestically? If I see a police officer tackle a peaceful protester (who refused to move off private property), and I beat up the police officer? I know you will count the refusal to move from private property as an act of aggression (but careful, because there is no violence in this example - unless you redefine violence as well), but what if I don't? Then the police are initiating violence.
Is there ANY chance that the phrase "initiatory use of violence" means the same thing to everyone?
For the purposes of my argument, I have defined market failure as a situation wherein each individual acts correctly in his/her own interests, and the net result is to make (almost or absolutely) everybody worse off. One element of my argument is that such a phenomenon is a relative rarity in a system of private property and non-aggression. Both of the conditions are important: the NAP is senseless without a system of property (because, in the absence of ownership rights, ‘aggression’ cannot be recognised definitively as such), and private property is also important for avoiding the problems of market failure which plague a collective system of ownership. I understand ‘right-libertarianism’ to be the conjunction of these two principles (in distinction from, say, ‘left-libertarianism’, which upholds the latter but rejects the former).
If market failure is as I have defined it, then a system will successfully avoid market failure if, generally, individuals acting correctly in their own interests serves to improve their own situations as well as other peoples’, and does not make people substantially worse off than they would have been under some alternative system. I have provided a number of reasons for thinking that right-libertarianism satisfies these criteria.
I have argued that, since individuals tend to be best acquainted with their own situations, it is reasonable to expect people to do what is best for themselves if left to their own devices, rather than being forcibly coerced into living in a particular way, or being co-owned by everybody else. I know what is best for myself better than I do for any other person in this world, and I also know what is best for myself better than anybody else does, whether individually or collectively. I think that this principle is reasonable, and it stands in support of both private property and the NAP: private property, because ownership rights begin with the right to own one’s self, and the NAP, because I am more likely to know what is best for myself than someone who wishes to coerce me into living in a certain way.
I have also drawn attention to the nature of voluntary trade. Voluntary trade is win-win; the only way in which a trade can occur is if we each value what the other person has more than what we each presently have. Notice that this applies, not only in commercial ‘market-place’ situations, but for non-aggressive interactions in general. If you and I become friends, it is because you and I would each rather be friends than non-friends. This principle can be pushed very far, I think. Again, this serves as a vindication of both of our right-libertarian principles. ‘Trade’ cannot occur in a system of collective ownership, and therefore requires private ownership, and the NAP is that which secures the mutually beneficial result of the interaction (contrast this with an aggressive act, such as theft or murder).
Third, I drew attention to the way in which private property rights tend to eliminate the market failure problems inherent in a collective system of ownership. Collective ownership tends towards market failure for numerous reasons, but one reason is that no individual is personally responsible for that which is owned. In a system of collective ownership, an individual who puts that which is owned collectively to profitable use may not receive the profits him/herself, instead losing most of it to the central pot. An individual who does not put that which is owned collectively to profitable use is negligibly worse off than he would have been otherwise, and enjoys far more leisure. This becomes more and more the case as the scale of collective ownership increases.
Not so under private ownership. A private owner who puts his property to profitable use receives that profit, and bears the cost (e.g. forgone profit) if he does not. Moreover, unlike collectivist situations, markets have an astonishing capacity to function on a scale that is simply dizzying (I strongly recommend Leonard Read’s short essay, ‘I, Pencil’, which illustrates this point marvellously). Not only is private property important, but of course the NAP is a vital ingredient here, too. That I bear the profits and costs of doing what I want with what I own presupposes that I am not subject to predatory aggression.
Contrast all of this with Friedman’s observation in my opening argument, that virtually everybody in the political realm take decisions whose costs and benefits go to others. The differences are striking and, to me at least, impressive (which is why I am an anarcho-capitalist).
Quoting Echarmion
The NAP is that principle which prohibits the initiatory use or threat of force against (persons or) property. I don’t believe I have invoked the concept of ‘fairness’ in defending the NAP, and I am not convinced that there is a perfectly coincidental connection between them (if I give a gift to all of my cousins bar one, this strikes me as unfair, but not a violation of the NAP). The NAP has many virtues, however, and I think that most people hold to it quite intuitively in all cases except the State (a quite arbitrary exception).
Quoting Echarmion
If a right is something of ‘higher order’ than individual persons, and if collective entities (like States) are, ontologically speaking, nothing above and beyond the individuals which comprise them, then States are no more capable of creating or bestowing rights than anyone else.
Quoting Echarmion
I am not sure what this means. I can enforce my own rights (by defending myself against an aggressor), a friend can help me to do so, and a private service-provider can help me do so as well. Why can't I pay someone to enforce my rights, or help me to do so?
Quoting ZhouBoTong
It may be 'aggressive' in some sense, but not in the sense that is relevant to our purposes. Libertarians aren't interested in altering the definition of 'aggression' tout court, erasing all other possible meanings from history. The word is simply chosen to express a particular idea: the initiatory use of force.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
No, it is not justified. I have not used force against you, so when you use force against me, it is initiatory. Our grandparents are a red herring.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Is the protester an aggressor, or not? You describe him as 'peaceful', but if he is a trespasser then he is violating someone's rights and stands in violation of the NAP. The police officer may simply be protecting the rights of whoever owns the property on which the protester is trespassing.
OK, we can probably all agree that there ought to be a system of property rights, but this doesn't make such a convention magically appear. But the NAP, as described by you, presupposes the existence of such a system. So it is the NAP which ought to be thrown away, because its principal prerequisite does not exist. Once convention on property rights is established, then we might decide whether something like the NAP is called-for.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
But you have been proposing a completely different angle, one in which the State has been abolished. At this point, there are no rights, that's the important point which you do not seem to be grasping. At this point we cannot say "rights determine the acceptable use of force" because there are no rights, the revolt is against the State which is the support of the existing rights. At this point, the use of force will be inevitable, it will be required to abolish the State. Furthermore, the use of force will play a role in determining which rights are acceptable, not vise versa.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
That situation follows inevitably from the anarchist induced abolition of the State. It is inevitable because of disagreement. There will be disagreement concerning the need to abolish the State, therefore disagreement as to whether such force is "acceptable use of force". The NAP which might be touted by those who abolish the State will not be respected because the Statists will declare wrongful use of force. And, as I pointed out, if the State is abolished, the NAP would then have no system of property rights to support it, so it becomes completely meaningless anyway.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Try looking at it this way. Suppose we have a principle which states "if we are good, we will not act aggressively". Notice that "we will not act aggressively" requires "we are good", just like the NAP requires a system of property rights. Trying to get people to not act aggressively is impossible and a useless exercise if the people are not good. What is required is to make the people good. Likewise, trying to get people to respect and obey the NAP is impossible, and a useless exercise without an agreed upon system of property rights, because the NAP requires that. So what is required to work on is an acceptable system of property rights. That's how normative principles work, it's pointless to push a principle without the necessary conditions for application of the principle.
I disagree. Your family/country/ancestors potentially make you culpable. I will try a libertarian perspective:
If my grandpa steals all your land then leaves it to me in his will, would you and the courts be the aggressors when you try to get your land back? I didn't do anything wrong?
Any chance we can take this beyond our opinions? I don't see how?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I disagree (how is the trespassing MORE aggressive than the ownership?).
Quoting ZhouBoTong
I am still leaning toward 'no'.
There's a salient difference between theft and murder. In the case of the former, some form of compensation, or even restitution, is possible. In the case of the latter, it's plainly not. If my grandfather was a thief, I may justifiably lose property I possess that originated in his acts of thievery, provided solid evidence of such acts. If my grandfather was a murderer, I may not justifiably lose my own life.
Regarding "aggressive marketing campaigns", I have to confess that I am having a hard time grasping just what in the world the argument is supposed to be. Yes, things can be colloquially described as "aggressive". No, that doesn't mean that they are aggressive in the philosophically relevant sense. One might as well accuse libertarians of illicitly "changing the language!" because the libertarian principle doesn't prohibit "passive-aggressive behavior" and doesn't compel us to be particularly kind to our fellows.
I wonder if Virgo isn’t actually an older white male billionaire? She’s certainly a cheerleader for their cause.
Conflating laissez faire capitalism with regulated capitalism is the problem, and, no, I don’t live in an ivory tower. I’m from the ghetto. Go back to your white men cigar and Scotch parlor.
Weird you say that since Socialism is viewed more positively and Capitalism more negatively by adults with family income less than $30K than Adults with a family income of more than $30K. So much for being removed from the "common man". Also weird how Bernie Sanders has the largest number of individual donors who live all across the United States.
Ah, yes, the ghetto, where they usually develop theories about "regulated capitalism" or "laissez faire capitalism". I think that that's where John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin are originally from. As for "white men", just who do you think is coming up with communitarian/egalitarian/socialist thought? People from the Congo?
Your accusations are both rude and intellectually vapid, but the delicious irony is arguably the best part of it all.
That respondents don't view capitalism and socialism in "either-or terms", despite the fact that these are clearly incompatible economic models, might tell you something about the validity of such results.
Just giving it back!
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
Interesting. I will just let that stand as an insight into your sensibilities.
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
I’ve read arguments for laissez faire capitalism and for socialism. BOTH come from the ivory tower. I do not. BOTH are wrong-headed, except laissez faire capitalism philosophy is driven by selfishness of the capitalists, while socialist philosophy is driven by altruistic impulses. Like I said, both are wrong.
That fact isn't relevant to your original claim. You claimed that Capitalism is an "obviously desirable thing", and that those who oppose or "vehemently oppose" it are exclusively out-of-touch academics perched within their ivory towers. As I've shown, that's simply not true. There is sustained criticism and skepticism of Capitalism that exists across incomes and demographics.
I am pretty sure that you were first to call someone's sex into question because they disagree with you.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Take a trip to any political philosophy department at any Ivory League institution and describe what you see. Or just even compile a list of the most influential egalitarian thinkers. I'll spare you the suspense: You're gonna find copious amounts of white affluent males. Those who live in glass houses...
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
I think that you might be confusing "reading someone" and "psychoanalyzing someone".
This is of course not what I said. The fact that I said "misled by arguments" and not "progenitors of such arguments" makes it clear that I am not talking solely about ivory tower academics.
The inability to even grasp that we're talking about rival views calls into question the validity of an answer given by someone who harbors said inability.
It was a joke between friends. I apologize.Quoting Constrained Maximizer
One cannot critically read political philosophy without also taking into account motivations. Political philosophy deals with “ought” conclusions.
Do you sincerely believe that adults making less than $30K annually are reading arguments laid out in the works of academics? Or do you think they are able to understand their own material conditions and see how Capitalism doesn't work in their favor? And what of Sanders' wide network of donors who live across America. Not going to let you circumvent that one.
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
I've heard drunks ramble more cogently than this sentence.
Don’t pick on someone who is constrained by regulation to maximize his personal profits.
Your reading comprehension deficiencies are most unfortunate, but no major concern (or fault) of mine.
Quoting Maw
Why are these people convinced that they're living under capitalism to begin with? Why not any other "ism" that one might throw around? Such views don't pop into existence out of thin air. You don't have to read the works of academics to be influenced by views that originate in the works of academics, so much should be fairly obvious.
You mean the completely unverifiable claim about Sanders' network of donors? You will excuse me if I don't find "Bernie said so" terribly convincing.
By the way, I wonder who was funding the Sanders Institute. And that, by contrast, is a question to which there is a definitive answer. Hint: Not exactly the meek and the poor.
https://nypost.com/2019/03/14/sanders-institute-suspends-operations-amid-criticism-over-donations/
Virgo claims to be a cheerleader for the wealthy, but really acts toward removing the rights to ownership with anarchism. That's why I call it deception. No State, means no universal convention on property ownership, means the NAP is inapplicable. It's deception to circulate the NAP as if a billionaire's right to ownership would be respected without the State to support it. I think Virgo is seeking financing for the anarchist cause. Give to anarchism, we guarantee your property rights with the NAP, at a cost much less than taxes.
This is tortured reasoning. You just refuse to accept the fact that low income adults are capable of understanding how the socio-economic system they live in doesn't work in their favor.
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
Individual donations made to presidential campaigns are required to be reported to the FEC, idiot.
Donations under $200 don't have to be reported, so it's an unverifiable claim unless Sanders would be kind enough go willingly disclose the information. Check your facts before insulting anyone else, you utter nincompoop.
This is fair enough, and I have no problem accepting, at least in the context of this thread, your argument to this point.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I think this is where my main problem lies. You are claiming that, in the grand scheme of things (ignoring fringe cases) any interaction that is not aggression - initiatory use of force, as you put it - is beneficial for everyone involved. The only way I can see this claim working is if you bend aggression to encompass a whole lot more than just the initiatory use of force. Even concerning the main example of trade, things aren't as clear cut as "everyone will only agree to things that are beneficial to them". Sure, if you engage in trade that means you value what is offered, but only insofar as it has value to you in your present circumstances. If your present circumstance are that you are starving, you might sell your house for a loaf of bread. This is an extreme example, but people are definetly in differing bartering positions, and that will how beneficial the trades are. There are also all kinds of other factors from outright fraud to misinformation, from addiction to brand loyalty. There is plenty of room to enrich yourself to the detriment of others without resorting to force.
Then we get into things like labor or housing and the whole "win-win" claim breaks down further. There are lots of examples, both past and present, of people being locked in an exploitative situation without any clear way out. You may not always be able to look for "better conditions" elsewhere if you have mouths to feed, an illness or are simply too poor to move.
And if we want to push the NAP even farther, we get into things like pollution, usage of scarce resources, long-term environmental damages and there is simply no ground to stand on. Who is going to decide, and on what basis, what level of environmental degradation constitutes an "aggression" towards your neighbors, for example?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
But Anarcho-Capitalism and collective ownership are not the sum-total of economic systems. There are plenty of different ideas for free-market socialism, for example, that do non advocate fully collective ownership or a more powerful state than the current one.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Ontologically speaking, a state is nothing other than an idea, something inside someone's head. However, the parliament, the agencies and all their employees are real enough. It used to be that people had a higher authority by divine providence, now the idea is that we hand it to them by voting. The point is that everyone agrees that there is a higher order above the individuals, and that that higher order is actually effective in practice.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If you pay someone explicitly to enforce your rights, sure. But who would do that if they could pay someone to enforce their interests instead?
You'e rude, your reading comprehension skills are atrocious, and you're a fucking moron to boot. Good grief.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Well, this is a different case from the original one, so the result may well be different. There is no reason, from a libertarian perspective, why I should be culpable for an act of murder that somebody else committed, and the fact that the murderer just happens to be the parent of the person who just happens to be the parent of me doesn’t change this fact. Murder is the act of a personal agent, and I am not the personal agent who committed it. So any retributive force that is implemented against me is initiatory, and is in violation of the NAP.
If my grandfather steals property from somebody, he is not the rightful owner. He therefore has no rightful basis to bestow it upon anyone else. I, perhaps an innocent beneficiary, do not own it rightfully so long as the rightful owner (let’s say, the person from whom it was stolen) is alive, or some clearly identifiable heir (like, for instance, someone to whom the theft-victim left all his worldly possessions upon his death). If there is no clearly identifiable heir, then it is essentially unowned, and therefore free to be appropriated by a new person. No doubt this will appear rather ad hoc, but it is in fact the natural outworking of a system of Lockean private property theory and can be found explored at some length in Rothbard’s ‘The Ethics of Liberty’, which I posted above.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Because ‘ownership’ is not per se aggressive. Indeed, since the question of whether a given instance of force is initiatory or defensive is determined by who owns what, there must be a system of property in place before ‘aggression’ is possible. I made this point in more detail above:
“‘Aggression’ is not a property which inheres in an action; it is a relation of an action to a specific (property) right. Consider something ostensibly aggressive, such as my punching you in the face. Does this constitute an act of ‘aggression’? That depends. Perhaps we have both signed up for a boxing match. Perhaps we are acting and this is part of the scene. Or consider something ostensibly innocuous, like simply standing. Is this aggression? Again, it depends. If I am standing in my own living room, then probably not. If I am trespassing in your living room, and have been asked to leave, then yes. To say of any particular action that it is ‘aggressive’ presupposes a background schema of rights. Therefore, rights are a precondition of aggression. Therefore, declaring a right of ownership in the first instance cannot be aggression. That is to put the cart before the horse.”
There is a leap being made here, and I do not make it with you. You seem to be saying, ‘We need to establish a universal convention of property rights first, and only then can we start talking about the NAP.’ The relative priority of a system of property rights, and the relative posteriority of the NAP, is a relation that is logical, not temporal. The NAP does not ‘come along later’; it is implementable (and should be implemented) synchronically with the system of property upon which it (logically) depends. There’s no reason to hold off on talk of the NAP until later. No reason – that is – unless the NAP poses a threat one’s own position.
Alright, so let us say that ‘being good’ is a logical precondition of ‘not acting aggressively’. Does this mean that we cannot even have a discussion about the worthiness of non-aggression, until we have got a suitable number of people in the world to be good? I don’t see why. We can develop a system of thought with numerous logical steps, before we seek practically to implement the first, or before we have successfully done so. Of course we may.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, a complete non sequitur. That the State is the only possible ‘source’ of rights has not yet been justified. Indeed, that the State even can be a ‘source’ of rights has not been justified. It is simply assumed. There is nothing special or mystical about States. They are associations of human individuals, who hold a successful monopoly on the use of force over a historically arbitrary territory. And this leads into another point which ought to be clarified: I do not begin with an opposition to Statism. That is an incidental consequence of libertarianism. It is because the State exists in violation of the NAP that it is objectionable.
You begin in the opposite direction. You begin with the State, taking for granted both its legitimacy and its necessity, as well as affording it the unique privilege of rights-bestower, and from these assumptions you take it that the libertarian alternative is impossible. But this is not convincing. Rights are principles, abstractions, and to leave the question of which rights are worth recognising, and which are not, to the State is simply un-philosophical. It is nothing short of ‘might makes right’.
Quoting Echarmion
If you take issue with my thesis that voluntary trade works for mutual benefit, then what I would expect you to do is to provide a counter-instance. But the example you have given actually isn’t. If you trade away a house for a loaf of bread, it is because you value the loaf of bread more than you value the house. You are better off for having made the trade rather than not having made it. This is perfectly compatible with what I have argued. I have not made the claim that both parties are going to be in position of equal negotiating strengths (not least because I haven’t the faintest idea how ‘negotiating strength’ could be quantified in units). I have only argued that, if our interaction be peaceful rather than coercive, we are both better off for it.
This analysis is true, but makes no claim to comprehensiveness. Being in the position of having to sell one’s house for bread is regrettable, but I would simply say this of it: if you want to help the poor, what you certainly should not do is look at the option that they have actually chosen, and deprive them of that option (advice from which a good many legislators would benefit).
Fraud (and misinformation, if it be relevantly fraudulent) is prohibited under the NAP (it is really just a form of theft). As for addiction and brand loyalty, these are not counter-instances to my thesis, either. The addict who pays for heroin values the heroin more than the money. Just so with the brand-loyalist, and the particular brand of something (heroin?) to which he is eccentrically attached. Value is a subjective relation; different people value different things differently (trade could not occur except on this basis). You might think that my commercial decisions are poor, but you aren’t the one making them.
It is perhaps worth clarifying: when I speak of mutual benefit, I am speaking from an ex ante rather than ex post perspective (this is an important distinction when trying to understand the rationality axiom in Austrian economics). Voluntary trade is mutually beneficial because we both enter into a transaction with the anticipation of personal benefit. It is possible that our preferences may change after the transaction and we regret our decisions.
Quoting Echarmion
Why ‘no ground to stand on’? There would be rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution services in a voluntary society; they would simply be private competing firms rather than an agency of monopolistic coercion. The question ‘Where does negligible pollution end and meaningful damage to property begin?’ is a difficult question, but not for distinctively libertarian reasons. Whatever answer one gives is no more or less arbitrary in a Stateless or Statist society. Practically, it would be determined by whichever arbitrator settles a dispute if it came to it. Any court – Statist or private – must draw the line, and that line will no doubt disappoint some people. So this isn’t a ‘libertarian’ problem.
However, a virtue of the private justice system is that it is polylegal. It may be that A and B take their dispute to one arbitrator, and A and C take their dispute to a different arbitrator. ‘Law’ is simply a function of dispute-resolution administered by the arbitrator. So there is no need for a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Multiple crossing lines of legal rules may apply over a single territory, which is of course far more conducive to the satisfaction of justice-consumers than a single set of legal rules being imposed uniformly over an arbitrary territory.
Quoting Echarmion
This is true enough. But the observations I made about private property, communal property and the State, and their relative tendencies towards market failures, are true regardless of scale (though, the problems associated with communal property and the State become more and more prevalent as the scale increases).
Quoting Echarmion
An ‘idea’ does not have agency. If the State is nothing more than an ‘idea’ then it cannot engage in concrete instances of purposeful action. ‘Ideas’ cannot tax, or implement justice, let alone bestow rights. The things we refer to as States are human associations, (the members of) which act in ways that are impermissible for non-States. I still do not see what is supposed to be so special about a State that it has unique right-bestowing capabilities. This has not been made clear at all.
Quoting Echarmion
I’m sorry, I’m not being difficult. I just really don’t understand what you’re getting at here.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Then your body, your liberty isn't property in the similar way and cannot be explained in the same way as something that's value is defined by the market and can be sold and bought (and I don't mean here people selling services). And when you look just what Murray Rothbard said about the 'libertarian creed', this difference is quite evident even from your quote from Rothbard:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This 'central axiom' is quite clearly a social insititution, a very collective axiom, a general law accepted collectively. And any individual thinking that he or she doesn't have to abide with this 'central axiom', or that this creed limits his or her freedoms (like enslaving other people) obviously will not be tolerated. And this DOES make it blurred, even if you deny it. Because typically a state is there to uphold exactly these kinds of freedoms.
Hence Metaphyisician Undercover makes this argument:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because what else other is the state as an collective effort of it's citizens? People that adhere to the "libertarian creed" do form in a way a proto-state themselves. If they enforce collectively this creed, what is so different of them acting as a state? Or is the thinking here so naive that states just 'exist' and are formed from people who get their salaries from the 'state', hence occupy a governmental position?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And this is basically what a state does...
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Again this hatred of 'statism', which you deny to have, which I don't know where it comes. So 'philosophers' can thinking about 'political philosophy', but if they reach some universal agreement (or close to it), they wouldn't be... politicians?
Quoting Virgo AvalytikhAnd just who is saying that?
Quoting ssu
Self-ownership is a sub-species of ownership in general. My right of ownership over my self is more basic than other forms of ownership, as it is a precondition of them, and it is also not the result of any productive or commercial activity. So there is a difference. But they are both ownership rights of some kind.
Quoting ssu
A State is an association of persons who hold a successful monopoly on the use of force over a geographical territory. Whether there is more to it (and there may well be), it is not helpful to simply use ‘State’ as a stand-in for any obtaining social organisational principle. States are agencies of force, force that is wielded at the behest of some (historically, a monarch or ruling class) against others. It can never be ‘representative’ of the people as a whole, for precisely this reason. Even if it is notionally ‘democratic’, the logic of predation (as Michael Huemer aptly calls its) is such that, in a Statist society, there will always be winners and losers, exploiters and exploited. This is what the initiation of force results in.
To address your argument head-on, one important feature which distinguishes States from non-States is that the States of our acquaintance engage in activities which would be clearly impermissible if a non-State agent were to act similarly. If I were to ‘tax’ people this would be theft/extortion, if I were to raise my own army and engage in acts of war this would be terrorism, and so on. States violate the NAP. They initiate force and invade property. Supposing that ‘Ancapistan’ is ushered in and a voluntary society is realised – one in which private property and the right not to be aggressed against are observed – there would be nothing like what we now know as a ‘State’. If you use ‘State’ simply to stand in for ‘any situation in which individuals organise themselves in some way’, then I suppose you could describe anything other than a Hobbesian state of nature a ‘Statist’ society. But I do not use the term in this way, and I do not think that it is at all a conventional or helpful usage.
Quoting ssu
Again, not in anything like the ordinary sense in which we use this term. I am (humbly) a political philosopher. I am not a politician. I really hope we don't go down an interminable semantic road where these terms are given non-standard meanings and the goal-posts are shifted ad hoc. Please, let's not do that.
Quoting ssu
Virtually everybody? I don’t begrudge your not reading the entire thread (I haven’t). But if you do, you will see what I mean. It is an unwarranted assumption being made tacitly left, right and centre. It is the number-one philosophical prejudice that I am gradually trying to gnaw away at.
Why not? Especially when looking at history this divide becomes very problematic. How do you define a tribal community? These communities surely did have laws of their own and could be very advanced.
And what does the libertarian society with the 'libertarian creed' do to enforce this creed? Or it isn't needed to be enforced?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And what's the difference between a tax and a payment for services, especially if you provide me a service I need?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I have to remind you of the definition of statism:
Now what I don't understand is that you are talking about just this 'Statist' nations and seem not to show any interest or accept even the possibility that the state wouldn't have 'substantial centralized control' over social affairs and the economy. That those classically liberal/libertarian elements are there in many countries curtailing the power of the state. A lot of people simply don't think that all countries are so centralized. In my view a Statist nation was the old Soviet Union, which I had the opportunity to visit just when it was falling apart. Western countries simply aren't similar to Soviet Union.
A tribal society may or may not have a State; it would depend on how it is structured. I don’t know if you are using ‘tribe’ in a vague way, or if you have a specific kind of social/political structure in mind. It may well be difficult to determine just where non-States end and States begin, but there is certainly a meaningful distinction between States and non-States. I am not a State, and my scrabble club is not a State. There must be certain distinguishing characteristics which distinguish States from non-States, and I have attempted to draw attention to some of them (most notably force, monopoly and territorial sovereignty). The fact that a society has law does not make it a Statist society: law can exist under anarcho-capitalism as a function of dispute-resolution provided by private competing firms. But such a society would still be Stateless (hence: ‘anarcho’).
Quoting ssu
Yes, it may, must and would be enforced. The important point to note here is that the NAP applies equally to everyone, everyone should be subject to it, and anyone should be able to enforce it. But the State is an aggressor, which reserves for itself (coercively) monopolistic privileges. This is where the difference lies. It violates the NAP, and uses force to reserve for itself the monopolistic privilege to do so.
Quoting ssu
Taxation is a confiscationary levy, meaning that it is implemented under the threat of force. It is implemented whether or not I consent to it, whether or not I receive a service (e.g. redistributive taxation) and whether or not I even approve of that which tax revenue goes on to fund (war). It is not the same thing as payment made for services rendered, on the basis of a peacefully negotiated contract. One is an act of aggression, and one is an act of peaceful voluntarism.
Quoting ssu
‘Substantial’ isn’t nearly refined enough to get any philosophical purchase on it. All major States of my acquaintance have ‘substantial’ control by the standards of the classical liberals. The United States government, that bastion of capitalism (apparently), has its money supply and interest rate determined centrally, and has (without exaggeration) recognised a good half of the stipulations of the communist manifesto, from government-controlled education to the inheritance tax. States which reserve for themselves monopolistic privileges and maintain this monopoly by force (which is what they all do; otherwise, we couldn’t tell them apart from non-States) already have ‘substantial’ control.
What is more, 'limited government' is utopian. Once a government exists, its growth is inevitable. There are good reasons for this, and Michael Huemer's 'The Problem of Political Authority' explores them quite well (ch. 9).
I think we need a real world example of how anarcho-libertarianism would work. How would it deal with hate speech, radicalization on the Internet, leading to terrorism?
Haha. Because 'trespassing' is not per se aggressive? (I am just standing there). I get that that libertarians would respond:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
one of my best friends is libertarian. I have had these arguments for dozens (hundreds) of hours. This paragraph above is just rhetoric (as is most of what I am saying of course).
I am not trying to say libertarians are wrong (I think they are, but so what), just questioning the certainty of their convictions.
That's right, that's why I mentioned to Virgo other forms of aggression, aggressive sales and aggressive trading on the market. When we are confronted with such "aggressions" we often make mistakes in our decisions. And these mistakes result in trades which are not mutually beneficial.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is your claim not mine, the NAP "presupposes" a system of property rights. Therefore there needs to be a universally accepted system of property rights before the NAP can have any merit. Otherwise the NAP is useless because it would be applied differently according to different conventions of property rights. This is obvious. I am just following the logic of your claims. The NAP refers directly to the right to ownership. You have stated this clearly. But if what I believe is my right to ownership is different from what you believe is your right to ownership, we would each apply the NAP differently. So the NAP would be meaningless in this case, useless. And when the land is full of people claiming that you have no right to ownership of what you claim to own, the NAP does nothing for you.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sure we can discuss such things, but what force does a discussion impose upon our actions if we fail to agree with one another? When we discuss things and fail to agree, we will each retreat and resort to our own means. Since we haven't agreed on property rights, the NAP could not be relevant.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
We've been through this already. I don't claim "the State" as the source of rights. I thought we agreed on "convention". But the State upholds the conventions with the means of force when necessary. Notice I say "when necessary". The majority of conventions are upheld by the State without the use of force, through institutions, because we readily agree to them. But without the State we do not have the institutions, nor the means to uphold the conventions, and the conventions fall apart. "State" and "conventions" co-exist.
That the State violates the NAP is simply an indication that the NAP places the right of ownership higher up in the hierarchy of rights, than the conventions which the State is bound to uphold places that right. The State upholds a multitude of rights, and there is a hierarchy of rights which itself is conventional. That the right to private ownership is limited, restricted, even forfeited in some cases, because other rights are of greater importance, according to the conventions which the State is bound to uphold, is evidence that the NAP is not a good principle. Why ought the right to private ownership be given such priority when the conventions which are presently accepted, and upheld by the state, assign a lesser priority to this right? The State can force one to give up ownership (fines) when that individual has committed offences not covered by the NAP. Clearly there is reason to believe that some rights ought to take priority over property rights. In this case the State is right in forcing one to give up one's property. Valuing private property higher than what is provided for in the conventional hierarchy of rights, validates the use of force against oneself, in contravention of the NAP.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
No. this is not all what I've been arguing.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I've already given you examples of such, aggressive sales, and aggressive trading. They refer to the means by which one takes advantage of another in business transactions. If one takes advantage of the other, yet it is not fraud, you cannot call this "mutual advantage". Are you not familiar with these terms?
These are fair questions, though I would hasten to point out that libertarianism does not present itself as a structural model by which to organise a society. It is a set of principles which are considered to be just and, if recognised, can reasonably be expected to make the world a better place relative to its alternatives (as per my opening argument). To ask a question like ‘What would libertarianism do about x’ is therefore slightly wrong-headed, since libertarianism is not a recipe for how to organise ourselves; it is a fairly modest set of principles, on the basis of which we may then choose to organise ourselves. The limits of what a libertarian world could look like are the limits of human imagination and ingenuity, operating within the framework of private property and non-aggression.
With this in mind, I really do not know enough about the internet to offer a quick-fix ‘solution’ to the problem of online radicalisation. As regards the principle of it, I would point out that online radicalisation of a kind that results in terrorism is essentially conspiracy to murder, and is prohibited under the NAP. How these particular aggressors would be dealt with is beyond the expertise of a recluse like me (analogously, I know the world is a better place where people are free to manufacture computers, but I haven’t any idea how to build one myself).
Speech is easier. ‘Hate speech’ is not a helpful category, at least when it comes to the question of rights. The right to ‘free speech’, just like all rights, is really just an ownership right: the right to do as one likes with one’s own property. There is no such thing as an unqualified ‘right to free speech’; your right to say what you want to say is always qualified by the property in relation to which you are standing. If you are sitting in your own house, your right to ‘free speech’ is nothing other than the right to use your property as you see fit. If you are sitting in my house, and you engage in speech which I dislike, and I tell you that you must leave if you continue, your right to ‘free speech’ is limited by the limitations that I have placed upon the use of my property. If you continue with this speech against my wishes, you have made yourself a trespasser and are now in violation of the NAP. It may surprise some people, then, to discover that libertarianism does not imply free-speech absolutism.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
No, trespassing is aggressive, and prohibited under the NAP. Notice that ‘trespass’ presupposes property rights. I am trespassing on someone’s land because it is their land. If the land were unowned, or owned by me, it would not be trespass. This is actually rather a tidy illustration of what I have just argued.
I thought we had come to the agreement together that the NAP presupposes property. After I drew attention to the fact that this is universally acknowledged among libertarian theorists (the NAP being a libertarian principle, after all), I thought this was an agreement we had reached. Is this not so? My claim, in any case, is that the dependence relationship between the NAP and a system of property rights is one that is logical and not temporal, so I am not committed to holding off on ‘NAP-talk’ until after I have successfully realised a particular system of property rights in the world.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is true, different people may have different conventions regarding rights. I responded to this point here:
Moreover, the fact that there may be diverse conventions with regards to rights does imply that all conventions are created equal. Some systems of rights are good and worthy, and some are not. This is where political philosophy has a role to play. By the same token, the fact that one system of rights might be recognised as ‘conventional’ does not imply that there is not a better system of rights that we might choose to employ.
I might believe that I have a rightful property claim to x because I traded for it peacefully with somebody else. You might believe that you have a rightful property claim to x because it is a full moon tonight, and on a full moon all x’s automatically pass to you. We may disagree, and it may come to blows. But this does not mean that our respective claims are equally reasonable, implementable, liberty-conducive or prosperity-conducive.
Moreover, I am not sure to what extent Statism is supposed to solve such a problem. You and I may both exist in the same Statist society and have differing views regarding what constitutes a rightful property claim. The only sense in which a State may be said to ‘solve’ such a disagreement, as far as I can see, is simply by picking a winner, and enforcing a single system of rights upon everyone. But there is nothing to say that this system of rights is just, or reasonable, or generally agreeable. Indeed, it seldom is. It may choose in favour of my claim, or yours, and the ‘winner’ is simply the one which the State chooses to enforce. But there is nothing philosophical about it, nothing reasoned. Everything is settled by the arbitrary use of force. It is the view of Thrasymachus in The Republic: ‘justice’ is just the advantage of the stronger.
It is just not altogether clear what you mean by ‘State’, nor what kind of philosophical work the State is doing in your argument. The arguments you are attempting to level against libertarianism can only be successful if the State solves the problems you raise. But I am still in the dark as to how it is supposed to do so. Can you explain? As things stand, the work the State seems to be doing is to enforce one particular system of property rights upon everyone (within its territory, that is). But whether that system is the right one remains to be seen.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But if the State is not the source of conventions, and conventions can and do exist independently of the State, and if conventions can be enforced by non-States, I fail to see how you arrive at a State. Again, the State just seems smuggled in, and no justification for it has been offered. You earlier denied the charge that you are attempting to ‘justify Statism’. But you must, otherwise you really don’t have anything with which the threaten anti-Statism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not possible to prioritise a non-property-right over a property right, because all rights are fundamentally property rights. I made this point here:
As I observed above, fundamentally all rights are really just rights of use or ownership over scarce resources which have alternative uses. The right to do anything in particular is really a right to do what one wants with a resource which might have instead gone to serve someone else’s ends. So the whole question of ‘rights’ in general is really just a question of resource allocation to someone or other, to serve someone or other’s separate ends.
And it certainly appeared as though you concede this point:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The only outstanding question is which specific property-claims are worth recognising, and which are not. We may decide this reasonably, as many in the libertarian intellectual tradition attempt to do, or it may be decided by the arbitrary use of force, which is the solution of the thieves, murderers, States, etc.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You did indeed make this point, and I responded with:
You are wrong. As you discover if you read libertarian defences, fraud is considered a form of theft and is assuredly prohibited under the NAP, as an invasion of one’s property. Lying and cheating too, if they be relevantly fraudulent. I don’t know what you mean by ‘aggressive sales’, but if you are talking about bringing a gun to the negotiating table and forcing a sale under duress, then of course this is in violation of the NAP; it is a ‘hold-up’!
Maybe you need to refine what you intend by ‘take advantage of’. In a voluntary trade, we both ‘take advantage of’ each other, in the sense that we both benefit from one another’s existence. This is not an embarrassment or a counter-instance. I know I seem to have quoted myself a lot here, but we have now reached that point at which most of what you are presenting has been addressed in my previous responses.
Right, the relationship between property rights, and the NAP as libertarians propose, is logical. I've shown that the premise is false therefore the logic is unsound. The NAP is based in unsound logic, so it ought not be considered as a principle which could be applied in practise. Of course you can talk about it all you want, but I don't see the point in talking about it as if it is a principle which could be practised, unless your intent is to deceive.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I agree with you here, remember, I am not supporting Statism, so I am not going to say that the system of rights enforced by the State is necessarily reasonable or just. But the state has the institutions, courts, judges, police, by which "a single system of rights" might be enforced. The NAP presupposes such a system of rights, requires it, without the means to produce or maintain it. Furthermore, the system of the State is one agreed upon by the convention of those in the position of forming such conventions, and this is intended to create a representation of what is agreeable to the general population at that time. With all of the institutions in place, intended to ensure that the use of force by the State is restricted to those conventions which are agreeable to the general population, it is completely irrational for you, an individual person, to refer to this as "arbitrary use of force".
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Having a particular system of rights, which is intended to represent what is agreeable to the population in general, enforced by the institutions of the State, I believe is far better than having a multitude of systems of rights, enforced by the NAP, which would be absolutely impotent because the NAP requires a particular system of rights to have any practical application.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is where your faulty definition of "aggression" is at play in your little game. You assume, conventions can be enforced by non-States, which is fine. But your NAP, with your definition of "aggression" places the right to ownership as the highest right. This is a convention which I, as well as others, cannot agree to. Therefore it is very clear that as much as you might create a non-State entity which respects the NAP, others will create a non-State entity with no respect for the NAP. You assume to have the "right" to defend your property with force according to your principles, and the others assume a right to seize your property with force, according to their principles, and there is no peace. What good is the NAP if the vast majority of people refer to some other principle of rights?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
It's irrelevant whether the system is "the right" one. This is because organization and cooperation amongst people is better than disorganization and lack of cooperation, as it is conducive to a happy, peaceful life for the human population. Furthermore, if the persons charged with creating the conventions have a true respect for the general population, the State will have a good system, and be on track toward finding "the right" system.
If it is your claim, that the system of the State has as its end, something bad, and the organization and cooperation within the state is all going toward a bad goal, then you ought to be able to make a demonstration of this. Placing ownership of property as the highest goal of human existence, as your NAP does, and implying that the State's goal is to misappropriate the properties of individuals, therefore the goal of the State is something bad is just foolish, irrational talk.
If you want to demonstrate that the State is bad, get to some real principles, rather than playing with material objects like a child.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sure, I conceded that point concerning "rights", but didn't you also notice that I appealed to something higher than rights? It is through the appeal to a higher principle that we have the means to prioritize rights. Notice above, I am talking about goals, and good and bad. This is the basis of morality, and rights are grounded in morality, not property ownership. Don't you think that the latter (rights are grounded in property ownership) is a rather foolish opinion? Rights concern property ownership, but you cannot ground a principle in itself, that would be circular, and not a grounding at all. So we ground rights in morality, and produce a hierarchy of rights accordingly.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
If you do not recognize that there are transactions where one person takes advantage of another, or a group takes advantage of another group, and it is not by means of fraud or lying, and that these instances ought to be discouraged rather than encouraged, then I do not see any point in discussing this.
If I understand the essence of your argument, it seems to hinge on the issue of standardisation, or universality: in the absence of the State, there may be as many rights-conventions as there are individuals, and so uniformity is impossible. Given the existence of a State, however, it is reasonable to think that there would be a unified system of rights, which the State has the institutions to enforce.
There are few problems with this. First, I would ask how much standardisation you believe to be necessary. Must it be absolute? If it does, then not even Statism is enough, for a world with multiple existing States would be one in which there might be multiple competing systems of rights. If two nation-States both believe themselves (or their citizens) to have some sort of rightful claim over a territory, by what higher standard do they resolve their dispute? There is none, and so, just as two individuals with competing conventions would break out into violence and the winner would be determined by arbitrary force, so too would the two nations break out into war and, once again, justice would be the advantage of the stronger. Even a multinational political union could only ever be a partial solution. In order for a State to do the work you need it do philosophically, there really can be only one of them, and its scale must be global. Anything short of that, and the standardisation problem which you seem to be levelling at the an-cap position is equally applicable to a Statist situation.
If, on the other hand, the standardisation does not strictly have to be absolute, then there is no reason why a State is necessary at all to preserve and enforce it. Once we establish the precedent that a convention can exist and be enforced at something less than a global scale, there is no longer any in-principle reason why its enforcement can only be done by the kind of thing that a State is. This is especially the case since, as I have pointed out on a number of occasions, the services of rights-enforcement and dispute-resolution can be (and, to a significant extent, are) provided by private agencies.
Moreover, we ought not to underestimate the tendency of individuals to arrive at a spontaneous order in the absence of coercive institutions. While it is conceivably possible that there be as many rights-systems as there are individuals (as in my silly ‘all x’s pass to me on a full moon’ example), this kind of situation is praxeologically unlikely to obtain (and, even if it does, the formation of a meaningful State is going to be impossible). It is precisely because not all systems of rights are created equal, that some are conducive towards mutual advantage where others are not, that creates a tendency towards spontaneous (if imperfect) standardisation. Fairly rigorous game-theoretic explorations concerning how this standardisation comes about in a state of nature can be found in Friedman:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
(a more reader-friendly version may be found in the Social Philosophy and Policy Journal in which it was first published)
And more general treatments may be found in Hayek:
https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Individualism%20and%20Economic%20Order_4.pdf
Or for something more fun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvAbjfJ0x0
And, as always, Rothbard is excellent here too.
Going back to my opening post, from which we seem to have become somewhat uncoupled, a system of private property and non-aggression is not arbitrarily chosen. It has distinct and significant advantages relative to its competitors. Spontaneous order occurs because it is in individuals’ interests to enter into peaceful constant dealings with others, and it is private property and non-aggression which allows this to take place. And, while the integrity of such a system requires the means of enforcing one’s rights against aggressors, the very system of private property and non-aggression is capable of producing such services without violating anyone’s rights, by the standards of the system. The fundamental difference between this and a Statist situation is that the State reserves for itself the prerogative to engage in acts of aggression which it prohibits others from engaging in. This remains the fundamental philosophical problem of the State, and as yet I have not encountered any non-arbitrary justification for it (and if providing such a justification is something which you are not interested in doing, then I am not hopeful of hearing such a thing anytime soon).
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
ok? I can play it that way too:
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
No, ownership is aggressive, and prohibited under my understanding of the NAP (you use 'the NAP' like that means the same thing to everyone). Notice that 'ownership' presupposes property rights. Someone 'owns' the land, because there is a power that allows them to hold onto it. If land cannot be 'owned', then one cannot 'trespass'. This is actually a rather tidy illustration of what I have been arguing the whole time.
I use the NAP as I have defined it, and consonantly with how libertarians in general define it. There is some dispute over who coined the term; it was either Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard. But they both define it the same way. The NAP is a libertarian principle. If you want to know what it means, you go ad fontes.
This is Murray Rothbard:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
And the encyclopedia of libertarianism:
The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
You have every right to define any term how you wish. But we are discussing libertarianism, so I have defined it as libertarians define it. That's not to say that there aren't alternative and competing definitions (though, I have not encountered such a thing). They are just a red herring.
This is frankly absurd. You're not "better off" if you sell your house for a loaf of bread. The next day, you will be hungry and homeless. Being "better off" requires your objective material situation to improve. Using it to mean simply "you gain something that you currently value" is a sleight of hand and turns your argument circular again. What you're actually saying is "if you engage in peaceful trade, you will receive whatever you trade for" which is trivially true but also completely meaningless in the context of this topic.
Claiming that situational value is the same as overall well-being is simply false. Your argument rests on overall well-being, not on situational value.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You're also not making the poor "better off" by leaving things as they are, so this comment is irrelevant to the topic.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
It is nevertheless blindingly obvious that no-one is "better off" by trading their money for heroin that they intend to consume themselves. In case you are unaware, these kinds of addictions destroy lives and kill people. No-one is better off dead.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Value is subjective, being "better-off", i.e. material well-being is not. Your argument requires the latter, not the former.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The problem doesn't lie with ex-ante and ex-post. Buying heroin to fuel your addiction is not good for you from an ex-ante position either. If you sell your house for a loaf of bread, it's clear ex-ante that your material wealth will decrease sharply.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
There'd be no ground to stand on because there'd be no principles to apply. You need a starting point, some moral order that provides the axioms of the particular resolution. Usually, these are provided by constitutions or similarly central ideas, like environmentalism. Alternative dispute resolution mostly relies on the actors operating in some specific framework, like a business relationship, which had identifiable goals and overlapping interests. But what is supposed to provide this basis in the pollution example? How do you even start to formulate a rule?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is simply another claim.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
There is nothing "unique" about a state. It's just an actually existing human association that serves as the necessary higher order to grant rights and is able to enforce them. You were the one that made this about states, specifically. My argument is that rights need to be granted by some higher order.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The difference between rights and interests,very simply put, is that your interest is what you want, and your right is what you deserve. If you are going to pay someone to enforce, you'd pay them to get what you want, not what you deserve.
Who are you to say that they are worse off for making the trade? Why are they doing it, if they do not value the bread more than they value the house? I am not saying it is a prudent decision. I couldn’t imagine doing it. But I couldn’t imagine paying for all sorts of things that other people pay for. If a person trades away their house for a loaf of bread, it is because they value the bread more than the house. This is a self-evident praxeological reality.
Value is subjective, not objective. Value does not ‘inhere’ within the material substance of an object, like a physical quality. You cannot deduce the ‘value’ of an object from examining or dissecting it, as you could its mass or its chemical composition. It is a subjective relation, between (valuing) subject and (valued) object. It is a psychic phenomenon. As such, it varies from person to person, and (importantly here) from moment to moment. The only definitive measure of the ‘value’ of something is: how many units of some other resource is a person willing to part with in order to attain it? And this may change. As such, there is no such thing as value simpliciter. There is only value to a particular person at a particular moment.
Since value is a subjective praxeological phenomenon which determines that individuals will pursue this purposeful action rather than that one, the mutual benefit which results from voluntary trade is one that is ex ante, rather than ex post. Now, it is also true that there is a general tendency to ex post benefit, since, as I have argued, individual persons tend to be the best judges of their own affairs, but this is more of a tendency than a praxeological axiom.
Quoting Echarmion
This is simply paternalism. Do I think that taking heroin is a poor life decision? I certainly do. I think that paying hundreds of dollars (or equivalent) on vacations abroad is a poor decision. I think that eating at Macdonalds (ever!) is a poor decision. Other people might think that paying for an expensive degree is a poor decision. There might be a ‘right’ answer here, or there might not be. I’m not sure. But I have the humility to recognise that I don’t know what is best for other people. And even if I think that I do, I could very well be wrong. Reasoned humility is the essence of the libertarian position; it is precisely that which makes liberty important. My life is my business, and your life is yours. If someone wants to take heroin, I might make a private judgement about them, but it would be presumptuous for me to prohibit them from doing so. The right to self-determination implies a right to self-destruction.
Suppose that we agree that people sometimes do make decisions which make themselves worse off. What is the Statist solution? Preventing people who are in desperate situations from taking the decisions which they actually choose?
Quoting Echarmion
I don’t see how this has a bearing on the libertarianism/Statism discussion, for a number of reasons. Libertarianism does have principles to apply; the ones I have mentioned. To be sure, these principles do not yield a specific resolution to the question of precisely where negligible pollution drifts into meaningful damage to property, but neither does any constitution that I know of, nor a general commitment to ‘environmentalism’. Formulating a non-arbitrary resolution to such a dispute is no less difficult for a State’s judicial system.
One option available to a private arbitrator, in distinction from the Statist alternative, is to engage in market research so as to determine what kind of service justice-consumers are prepared to pay for. The profit-and-loss system provides a reasonable (though shifting) basis upon which arbitrators may make non-arbitrary decisions regarding what kind of penalties to administer. This is actually a really complex topic in the economics of law, and David Friedman is virtually the only person who works with the concept of economically efficient law, so if you are interested to explore how the nut and bolts of such a system would work, please do look at ‘The Machinery of Freedom’.
Quoting Echarmion
If there is nothing unique or special about a State, then there is nothing ‘higher order’ about it, which might afford it unique rights-bestowing prerogatives. I have long-since agreed that rights are higher-order in the sense that they are principles, and therefore abstractions. If we can also agree that such does not imply or require a State then I am happy to move on from this.
Quoting Echarmion
Fine, I already allowed that it is possible for interest-enforcing services to exist even if they violate rights (I used the example of assassins). But, also, rights-enforcing services can exist independently of a State. That is all I mean to argue.
Fair enough. But libertarians use the term with people who are not libertarian and expect them to arrive at the same meaning.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
And I am pointing out reasons why people who are not libertarian will not accept that definition (will not agree with the principle is perhaps more accurate). We are discussing the merits of libertarianism and most of the people in the discussion are not libertarian....if we were a bunch of libertarians hashing out the minutia of libertarianism then it would make sense to just throw that term around. But otherwise, the NAP is one of the main components of libertarianism that opponents of libertarianism disagree with (despite us all agreeing that not initiating violence is generally a good thing)...it is problematic to state it as a given.
Coercive aggressor, which has an inevitable growth and 'limited government' is utopian?
And then you say :smile:
Well, this seems not to be an economic debate, but simply an ideological debate where you put the NAP on a pedestal and treat it as a religious icon.
I've noticed that discourse nowdays tends to go in the way of a religious mantra. The state, central banks, large corporations, the free market all seem to become these incarnations of evil, just depending on what side you are (or sometimes on both sides). In the Soviet socialist bloc there was a perfect word for this. It was called a "lithurgy". All the correct words and endless nonsensical chatter without any true meaning. But it sounded politically correct (in the right circles).
Have you by the way ever read Max Weber?
Because your idea that "anyone should be able to enforce it" goes along the lines of Weber's thinking, and the most important issue is that the people accept the monopoly of violence, and this monopoly violence isn't only of the state. I agree with Weber in many cases and think he's one of the smartest philosophers/thinkers around in the late 19th Century early 20th Century (if you can depict him in that way).
The term 'aggression' is not as important as the concept it designates. The most important thing is for us to be clear on how we are using it. Libertarians are clear in how they use it (as per the citations I posted above). You may well observe that 'aggression' has alternative uses in other contexts. But this is a purely semantic observation, rather than bearing any real philosophical substance.
I said the concept of ‘limited government’ is utopian. My point is that a State with clearly circumscribed limits remaining within those limits in perpetuity is too much to reasonably hope for. The usual ‘checks and balances’ to which apologists for the State typically make appeal (the democratic process, the separation of powers, a written constitution) are not up to the task.
Quoting ssu
It is a philosophical and praxeological/economic debate, at least for me. I oppose the State because it is an aggressor, and there is no non-arbitrary reason why this particular human association should be able to use force in such a way that would be impermissible for any other agent. This isn’t hatred, I haven’t used words like ‘evil’ or anything with religious connotations. I aim simply at philosophical consistency.
Quoting ssu
I certainly have.
Those are simply the economic facts. Their wealth decreased, their ability to make future decisions decreased, their comfort decreased etc. Are you claiming there is no such thing as economic facts? That it's all just opions? Because in that case I think any philosophy of economics just implodes.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is simply a self evident truism. Circular reasoning in it's purest form. It tells us nothing at all.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Obviously. But we weren't talking about subjective value. We were talking about how libertarianism supposedly makes everyone "better off". In order for that claim to mean anything, it must refer to some kind of measurable state of affairs.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I still have no idea what you think ex-ante and ex-post have to do with this. This would only be relevant if we were talking about how predictable the outcomes where, but we are not.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This is not about poor life decisions. It's a scientific fact that Heroin is addictive and highly dangerous. Objectively, if you are taking Heroin, you are killing yourself, regardless of whether or not you think doing so is a good idea. This is not about what should or should not be legal or criminal. This is about whether or not you're "better off" if you take Heroin, and you very obiously are not. The talking point about self-determination is irrelevant.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
No, the statist solution is preventing desperate situations.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The way judges get to decisions is complex, but a lot of it has to do with the system they envision themselves upholding. Obviously the principles do not yield concrete solutions. But they tell the brains of people how to value things, and that ultimately leads to a decision. Since the LIbertarian principles are all about letting self-interest decide things, they would not provide sufficient ground to make value judgements.
When you don't have absolutely any example of the ideal state of the society (the non-state libertarian paradise) which you model and every state ever is too suffocating for you, isn't that idealism?
I've always seen libertarians as good and rather harmless people. Because in reality their society or state likely closest to their ideals would be a huge disappointment for... the libertarians. Social Democrats would enjoy very much a classic liberal state. What better environment for a social activist than a society with a functioning healthy economy and prosperity?
Let's face it, the society where Virgo Avalytikh would confine every one else here participating in this debate into a "re-education camp" where starting from the morning to the night the libertarian creed and NAP would be taught to us to mold us into true believers of libertarian values is simply an oxymoron.
Now totally oxymoronic societies can perhaps exist, but this case I find very unlikely.
how do our examples we have discussed NOT show that this semantic problem does indeed have philosophical implications? (I think trespassing is wholly non-violent - you think it is a definite example that violates the NAP - have you shown me I am wrong? or just pointed out that according to your definition, you are right?)
For thousands of years revenge was compensation. The concept has rightly been mostly rejected in modern society, but there are all sorts of things that one whose loved one was killed might consider 'compensation'. You are thinking direct, like for like, compensation. That doesn't need to be the only type.
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
No but maybe the property you inherited can be given to the descendants of the person your grandpa killed. It doesn't entirely compensate, but it does compensate. Considering murder is worse than theft, shouldn't this be the minimal compensation in that example?
Quoting Constrained Maximizer
I just think they used poor judgement in their word choice. When I hear, non-aggression, I do not think non-violent except for self defense. And this semantic problem highlights libertarians blindness to other instances of aggression.
That's good, few problems is good, many problems is bad.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Clearly, "absolute" in standardization is impossible.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I don't see that this is a good argument. Essentially you are arguing that if two nation-States come to war over an issue of territory rights, (like the Falklands Islands for example), this is no better than having all human beings acting like wild animals or very young children, running around fighting with each other over every single object which they seek to use. Notice that in the former case, the majority of people are living in peace for the majority of the time, with a few issues arising which might cause battles, while in the latter case, the majority of people are battling each other for the majority of the time. That is why I consider the former situation to be better than the latter.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Again, this is a very bad argument. You've mentioned the possibility of "as many rights-conventions as there are individuals", but that's not really possible because a "convention" requires agreement amongst individuals. So the issue is not enforcing the convention, it is a matter of creating and maintaining agreement. This is done through the educational institutions, not enforcement. Enforcement is only for the few who step out of line of the laws. If we stop funding educational institutions because they are an expensive State-run enterprise, and educate in other fragmented ways, standardized conventions will be lost to a multiplicity of fragmented conventions.
You really cannot portray conventions as being enforced, because conventions are a matter of freely agreeing. This is why the existence of conventions relies on standardized education, not the use of force. When I say that the State upholds the conventions through the means of its institutions, there are many more institutions than the ones I mentioned.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You might refer to educational institutions as "coercive institutions", but if you call this aggression, I think it is outside the NAP definition, so I think that would be equivocation. Anyway, the idea of "spontaneous order" was disproven by science in its original form of "spontaneous generation", though some people have rejuvenated the idea as abiogenesis. Regardless of how you present it, "spontaneous order" is illogical and inconsistent with fundamental metaphysical principles. I think that what you call "the tendency of individuals to arrive at spontaneous order" is really mostly the result of standardized education.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Here you go, wandering around in your circle, lost. You have explained the conventions as coming into existence through "spontaneous order", and now you say that the system of private property along with non-aggression is capable of producing the spontaneous order. See the circle? The system of property rights is a convention, which you have said could come into existence through spontaneous order. However, you here say that having a system of property rights is a condition which is conducive to such a spontaneous order. The "circle" is always a problem with this illogical concept of "spontaneous order". The so-called "spontaneous" order only comes into existence under the right conditions, but "the right conditions" itself requires an ordering. This ordering, to create the necessary conditions, is actually created by the thing which is supposed to come into existence from the spontaneous order. So the claim of "spontaneous order" really just reflects a completely different, unobserved ordering at a deeper level which is not immediately evident. In any case, I'm really surprised that a person of your intelligence would suggest the ridiculous idea that a system of property rights could come into existence through spontaneous order. And I'm even more surprised that you would also say that a system of property rights would be the favourable condition for such spontaneous order to occur.
I think we've made substantial progress towards understanding each other, though it's a slow process. Let me see if I can summarize where we stand. I dismiss the NAP as a principle which could be applied in practise upon abolition of the State, because the NAP requires a system of rights, which is provided for by the institutions of the State. You have proposed that the conventions required for such a system could come into existence through spontaneous order. I think that conventions consist of freely made agreements, and that people must be cultured in a particular way to be agreeable with one another in order for such conventions to exist. And, I think that this way of culturing people is provided for by the institutions of the State.
I will add, that I think this culturing consists of two important parts. One is a demonstration of unity, people working together in cooperation which shows that agreement is good, in Christianity this is referred to as love. The other is the standardized principles which are taught in schools, these help us to see things in the same way, facilitating agreement. So we have two levels of conditions which facilitate agreement. First there is the deep level, this is a disposition to be friendly, helpful, caring and loving. This provides the person with an attitude that agreement is good, and inspires the person to be agreeable. The first level provides the foundation, the conditions by which the second level may come into existence. When people have the underlying disposition to be agreeable, they will agree to having things in common, like schools and other institutions which are mostly State-run, or follow principles provided by the State.
The system of rights, which the NAP presupposes, requires both levels of agreement. Notice that the second level of agreement, from which conventions like "rights" emerge, already requires agreement on having things in common, which emerges from the first level of agreement. Therefore any proposed system of rights, with any real applicability, must be based in a principle of having things in common. To base a system of rights in private ownership would undermine the foundation, (what is provided for by the first level, having things in common), leaving all conventions such as 'rights" which are derived from the second level, as untenable. Agreement on having things in common is necessary to any system of rights.
Since you seem not to see the significance of some of the concepts of which I have made use in this discussion (I don’t mean this in a condescending way, I’m just reading this off what you have said), let me restate the argument in more detail.
I have made the claim that voluntary trade works towards mutual benefit. This is true in at least two (related) senses. One of these senses corresponds to the perspective of entering into the trade in the first place (this is the ex ante perspective), and one of the senses corresponds to the perspective of having made the trade (ex post).
At any given moment, conscious agents are engaged in purposeful behaviour. Man acts. Action is motivated by purpose, by a desire or want, which we aim to achieve, even if such a purpose is not always at the forefront of our conscious awareness. Purposeful action may be distinguished from involuntary action, like a muscular spasm. There isn’t much to say about involuntary action, since we cannot (directly) control it, so I will just restrict myself to purposeful action. At any given moment, we have a multitude of wants, and these wants are, in a sense, in conflict with one another. My desire to take a sip from my coffee cup and my desire to type a message are in conflict, in the sense that they are both competing for my time. No doubt there are at least two activities which I could conceivably engage in simultaneously without compromising either, but the important point is that I cannot do everything I want; my wants are insatiable, and resources (time, attention, physical space) are scarce. This is the fundamental economic problem.
So why do I end up doing what I do? Because my wants exist in a hierarchy, and, at a given moment, I will always act in such a way that aims at realising my highest want. This is the doctrine of ‘demonstrated preferences’. And it is self-evident: it is senseless to speak of someone prioritising a ‘lesser’ want over a ‘greater’ want, for, if it is prioritised, it is not really the ‘lesser’ want at all. It stands to reason, then, that in a trade, we each act in such a way that aims to attain something we value more at the expense of something we value less.
This is axiomatically true (which, I assume, is why you have used words like ‘circular’ and ‘trivial’ to describe it). But, to say that something is trivially true implies that it is true. There would be no need to repeat the fact that it is true if no one ever denied it. It is the fact that it is disputed that creates the need to repeat it. If you are happy to concede its truth, then I am happy to concede its triviality, and we can drop the point. But, until then, its axiomatic self-evidence is a point in its favour, not a point against it.
‘Value’ is an important concept here too. Value is subjective, as I argued above. To speak of a ‘material worsening’ of someone’s condition presupposes an objective theory of value, which is wrong. If I trade away a house for a loaf of bread, it is because ‘having a loaf of bread’ was higher in my preference hierarchy than ‘having a house’. You might think that I am crazy for making such a trade, but that is beside the point. The question of what I value is demonstrated by my preferences.
Having said this, there is still a meaningful sense in which I might be said to make ‘bad’ decisions. But this requires us to shift our perspective from ex ante to ex post. Our preferences may change from moment to moment, and this is especially the case when what was previously my highest want has been satisfied. Having traded away my house, I may immediately regret my decision. I might now have a whole host of new wants which only my old house could satisfy, and which my bread cannot. This does not serve as a counter-instance to what I have just argued about the logic of purposeful action. My claim is that purposeful agents aim at satisfying their highest want at a given moment. This is perfectly compatible with the fact that we might change our preferences, change our minds, regret past decisions, and so on. So we now have the question, ‘How likely is it that people are going to trade and interact with each other in such a way that they will not regret their decision later?’ And this returns us to the question of who knows what is best for me. And the answer is: me. I know what is best for myself better than anybody else does. I believe you were happy to agree to this point earlier.
With this in mind, we can see that there is also an ex post sense in which voluntary trade works towards mutual benefit. If I know what is best for myself, then I know better than anyone else which trades I should enter into. This claim is weaker than the first, for it is a contingent generalisation with possible counter-instances, not a praxiological axiom. But it is true, and on this much we seem to have previously agreed. If, in general, individuals know what is best for themselves, then a fortiori they know what is best for themselves with regard to trade (and other interactions).
So what is to be done about the fact that some people make decisions which are ‘bad’ for themselves? In the first place, we must have some basis upon which to recognise such a thing, and this is not as easy as you seem to think it is. That heroin is addictive and dangerous to your health does not imply that it is always ‘bad’ for someone to consume it. All it implies is that there is a cost to consuming it. But there is a cost to all actions, and often there are benefits too. Someone who desires to take heroin will no doubt make appeal to its recreational use; the pleasure it brings, or whatever reason people take it for (I don’t know). So now it has been complicated by the fact that there are net-considerations of benefit and cost. This is where subjective value is important: you might value the recreational benefits of heroin less than avoiding its costs, but someone else may not.
What you say of heroin is also true of fast food. It’s dangerous and it’s addictive (which is why I avoid it). Not to the same degree, of course, but in a way, this is precisely the point. This is a relative issue, and not an absolute one. And it is impossible to draw a line in a non-arbitrary way. The only natural resting point is simply to allow people to do what they want with their own lives.
What is the alternative? Only paternalism: only the use of ‘benevolent’ aggression, ‘kindly’ initiating force against people for their own good. Remember, I have been invoking the mutually beneficial nature of voluntary trade as an argument for private property and the NAP. If you think that my argument for these principles is undermined by the fact that some people make bad decisions for themselves, this only has any bearing if you are going to propose the 'kindly' use of force. Can I at least nail you down on this? Are you arguing paternalism here? If not, then all of this looks moot.
No, for the simple reason that libertarianism is non-utopian (or non-paradisiacal). I don’t know what is best for you, I don’t know how you should be living your life, educating your children, parting your hair, or what you should be having for dinner. Individuals tend to be the best judges of their own affairs (I explore this in more detail in some of my responses to Echarmion). This is why coercion is, in net-terms, unlikely to make the world a better place (relative to non-aggression). Libertarianism is not so much a structural vision for ‘fashioning’ an ideal society, so much as a set of really very modest conditions on the basis of which it is possible for individuals to fashion their lives largely as they wish. It’s not a matter of opposing all existing societies because they are sub-optimal or unideal. I am simply making consistent application of the non-aggression principle. Libertarianism is not a paradise, it does not claim to be a road to paradise, its defenders frequently deny that there is such a thing as a realisable paradise, and someone who believes otherwise just needs to read the libertarians more carefully (it’s worth pointing out: the ‘Utopia’ in Robert Nozick’s ‘Anarchy, State, and Utopia’ is facetious).
Quoting ssu
Is it just my imagination, or are you getting steadily more ad hominem each time?
Simple: I have defined ‘aggression’ in a particular way, in a way that is consonant with how the term is conventionally used in the libertarian tradition, and have argued that trespass does indeed constitute aggression on that definition. You may respond that you are defining ‘aggression’ in a different way, and that, on your definition, trespass is not aggression. To which I respond, ‘That’s fine’. I’m not claiming that trespass is aggression in the way you are defining it. I am claiming that trespass is aggression in the way I am defining it (and the way in which libertarians define it). I happily concede that, if I were defining ‘aggression’ in the way you are, I might be wrong. But since I’m not, I’m not.
Let me use an analogy. I once witnessed a debate between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant. The Catholic argued that his church, the Roman church, is single and unified, and has never throughout its history experienced schism or division. Meanwhile, Protestantism is divided into more than 33,000 denominations around the world. Christ’s church is unified and not divided, and therefore the Roman church is the true church. The Catholics all stand together in a unified tradition, and the Protestants are scrambling all over the place, unable to agree on even the minutia of doctrine. Unity beats division, Catholicism beats Protestantism. Only, the source from which the ‘33,000’ number came from, some encyclopaedia of world Christianity (I don’t know which, I believe the editor was someone named Barret) also listed 214 Catholic denominations (e.g. Dominicans, Franciscans, Sedevacantists). This point was brought up by the Protestant apologist. To which the Catholic responded, ‘Well, there you go: 33,000 versus 214. Protestantism gives rise to greater disunity than Catholicism.’ Now, he may be right, and his argument may even be a good one, but it is also obvious that he is now making a new and different argument, and that his first argument has been defeated. Either the Roman church is a unified church or it isn’t! And, according to his own source, it isn’t. It is no longer a question of ‘unity versus division’. Now it is a question of degrees of division.
This is why I asked if the standardisation to which you make appeal must be absolute. If the argument is something like ‘standardisation beats disunity, the State breeds standardisation, anarchy breeds disunity, therefore the State beats anarchy’, then the argument is defeated fairly definitively simply by pointing out that Statism gives rise to its own kind of disunity. So if the debate is set up as one of ‘standardisation versus disunity’, both Statism and anarchy are equally embarrassed; neither is vindicated over the other. They are both equally non-absolutely standardised (there aren’t degrees of non-absoluteness). Now, you have clarified that this is not the argument you are making, that standardisation does not have to be absolute, in which case we can drop the point. I raised it as a possible interpretation of your argument, so as to clarify your position. You must be making the weaker claim, that the degree of standardisation which is made possible by the State is greater than that which is possible in the absence of a State.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I really never did say this. If it were true that Statism gives rise to an adequate degree of order, and that conflict and disorder are exceptions under Statism rather than the norm, and if it were true that, in the absence of the State, we would all be wild animals constantly engaged in a war of all against all, then the argument would have some mileage. But these two premises are precisely what are in dispute.
I made the point above that the fundamental philosophical objection to the State is that it apparently has license to engage in acts of aggression which it prohibits others from engaging in. I cannot tax, I cannot wage wars, I cannot pass laws or execute my own private justice (except within the limits which the State permits me to). The State reserves for itself the monopolistic prerogative to do all of these things, and it uses force to do so. It is undoubtably a coercive monopoly, and it is so essentially. I doubt that it would be possible to distinguish States from non-States, were it not for these particular characteristics which they exhibit. A State persists by perpetually aggressing against its citizens. This is not necessarily to say that resorting to physical force is the State’s first port of call, but it is always the background threat. A highwayman may never actually shoot anyone, but, in demanding ‘Your money or your life’, he is an aggressor nonetheless. This is clouded by the fact that the State has its own distinct vocabulary for describing its activities. The State taxes, I steal. The State defends the homeland, I am a terrorist. The State conscripts or subpoenas you, I put you to forced labour. It is propagandistic double-think from start to finish. The State cannot be an effective protector of rights, for one very simple reason: if we judge the State’s actions by the standards of a non-State, we would consider it a rights-violator on an unparalleled scale. I have not even talked about the war on drugs, the prison-industrial complex, paternalistic bans on life-saving drugs . . .
Supposing we ignore all of this, and consider the State to be an effective maintainer of order most of the time, occasionally engaging in acts of conflict. Anarchy produces perpetual aggression, Statism produces occasional aggression, so Statism is preferable to anarchy. This is what I understand you to be arguing here:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But there is more to it. What if the aggression to which Statism gives rise is of a scale that no anarchistic situation could ever dream of? Just look at the 20th century, the bloodiest century in history. 40 million dead in WW1, 85 million dead in WW2, and (estimates vary) probably more than 90 million deaths across various communist regimes. These are Statist phenomena. If anarchy obtained, and this was the death toll that resulted, I am sure you would see this as proof-positive that anarchy tends towards animalistic aggression. No doubt, this is passed off as a ‘blip’, as Statism ‘going wrong’. After all, not all States are created equal, and ours are the good guys. We can trust them to use their monopoly on force in the right way, rather than in a corrupt or murderous way. Well, the numbers are what they are, and this century is still young. We may see worse still before we’re through. By the time we do, it will be too late to recant. Send the ring back to Mordor and destroy it. No one can be trusted with it. That is just wisdom.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
One of the reasons why the State’s monopoly on force has perdured for so long is because it has successfully persuaded the vast majority of people that a State is absolutely necessary, and that there could not be a functioning society without one. Its success in so-persuading people is owing to its involvement in shaping the minds of the young. It is plain as can be that for the State to have any involvement whatsoever in the education of the young (which, presumably, is when most of our ‘conventions’ are formed) is an enormous conflict of interest. I would no sooner have a government department of education than I would have a government department of language. A minimal requirement for a functioning democracy (not that I concede the existence of such a thing) is the possibility of directing independent intellectual criticism towards the State. For that very State to be the principal agent of ‘educating’ entire generations of people is as bone-chillingly Orwellian as the State dictating the language by which we may formulate such criticism.
(This is all leaving aside the fact that government schools are quite simply terrible; see Bryan Caplan’s ‘The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money’).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In effect, you have simply been making Hobbes’s argument: human interaction, in its natural state, is a war of all and against all, in which everyone aggresses against everyone else to benefit at another’s expense, and the only escape from this situation is for there to be a State which maintains order. There is already ample reason for doubting that States do in fact maintain any adequate degree of order, given that they are agencies of aggression, and are responsible for more violence and death than any private agent could dream of. But there are at least two other reasons why this argument is dubious. First, one must explain how a State may first form, if it is really the case that order cannot occur spontaneously. If the State is a human association with a unified purpose, and if such associations are impossible in the absence of a State and its various institutions, then in order for such an association to form there must have already been a State in existence, to allow for it to come about. But this is not the case, since we are talking about how a State first formed. In other words, the very existence of the State serves as a counter-instance to the Hobbesian claim that spontaneous order is impossible. Indeed, we know that spontaneous order is possible, because if it were not, we would still be atomised aggressors engaged in perpetual war.
This is why I posted the essay by Friedman. ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’ is concerned precisely with the question of how individuals bargain themselves up out of the Hobbesian state of nature. We know that it did happen, because we couldn’t be where we are now otherwise. The question is ‘How?’, and Friedman invokes the logic of Schelling points to explain (persuasively, to my mind), how property rights can be recognised and enforced by societies of organisms in the absence of a formalised institution. This is praxeology we are discussing. ‘Spontaneous generation’ and ‘abiogenesis’ are complete red herrings, and there is nothing metaphysically objectionable about what I have argued, either. The video I posted about the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is actually a very nice illustration of how the discipline of constant dealings tends towards self-enforcing arrangements (we might think of them as proto-contracts) which work towards mutual advantage.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not so much a circle as an iteration. Looking again at the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, we can illustrate in game-theoretic conditions how, in a community of aggressors, one or two peaceful agents very quickly spread their example to others, so that peaceful voluntarism becomes firmly established and very difficult to dislodge, whereas aggressors cannot get a foothold. In the complexity of the ever-growing 'market' of peaceful interaction, it may not be entirely clear whether x is a precondition of y or y is a precondition of x. But it does happen, and so the circle is a virtuous one rather than a vicious one.
If nothing else, please read Friedman’s essay and watch the video on the iterated prisoner’s dilemma (10 minutes only). I will happily read or watch whatever you would like to send me.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvAbjfJ0x0
I don't think our disagreement is due so much on having different concepts of ex-ante and ex-post, as it is due to the way one establishes mutual benefit, either individually or on the scale of entire societies. I think that in order to make the claim that a certain system is beneficial, you have to present the impact the system has on measurable factors (like, say, GDP) and then make a reasoned value judgement as to why this change in measurable factors i desirable. It is not sufficient, in order to establish mutual benefit, to simply state that people will have made the decision that had the highest subjective, situational value.
This is precisely because the latter is a self-evident "praxeological axiom", as you call it. One cannot discuss self-evident axioms, one can only state them. If that is all you're doing, philosophy is impossible. I will go into more detail when adressing the points you brought up.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
What I mean to convey when I call this axiom "trivial" is that it does not get us anywhere. It provides no insight and advances no argument. All deductive logic, no matter how complex, can only rephrase information that was already inherent in the premises. It cannot generate new information. So the difference between a useful logical deduction and a trivial one, or truism, is that one rephrases the information in such a way as to provide some non-obvious insight, while the other merely repeats the same information.
What I see in this praxeological axiom is simply this: Humans act in the way humans act. The highest want is, by definition, simply the thing any given actor ends up doing. You do whatever is your highest want, and whatever you do is your highest want. All we are doing is renaming "the reason for doing X" to "the highest want". But what do we gain from this exercise? Does it provide some novel insight? Does it advance some argument? None that I can see.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I do not disagree that value, understood as market value, is purely subjective, that is, a preference. What I do not agree with is that there is nothing beyond this. Goods that are traded have values beyond their market value. They may have instrumental value, they may have value in terms of the labor invested in them. Similarly, we are not limited to viewing a persons situation purely through the lens of their preferences. We can also measure various indicators concenring their material, physical and psychological situation. We can then use these indicators to make reasoned judgements about their situations.
This process, gathering data and then making reasoned value judgements about the data, is at the core of any moral philosophy, and therefore also of economic philosophy, which is ultimately a subset of the former. The results of such a process are not "objective", since they do not refer to objects. Asking for objective standards in this context is really just nonsense. They are judgements which are accessible to human reason, and if they are ultimately reasonable, they are a form of truth distinct from empirical truth.
It is not possible to have any economic philosophy if all you rely on is preference. In that case, your statement that "libertarianism makes people better off" is no different from stating "blue is my favorite color". Neither statement would be accessible to reason.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The ex-post view, as you outline it, has the same problem that I outlined concerning subjectivity. You're still only looking at preferences, and the logic of these preferences is not accessible to human reason. If all we are talking about is preferences, it's not just that you know what is "best" for you better than anybody else does. You are actually the only one who knows what i best for you. "Best" in this context only refers to a contingent preference you had in a specific situation.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
In addition to what I said before, there is a futher problem here. Even if I know what is best for me, i.e. what my current preferences are, that still doesn't mean I will be able to actually realize these goals. But then of course for every preference I cannot realize, a new preference, contingent on me failing the previous one(s) will pop up, and this will then be what is "best". This is as self evident as it's, again, trivial. The term "best" becomes completely meaningless if it can apply equally well to any conceivable outcome.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I think it's useful, in this context, to draw a parallel to moral relativism. I think what you are arguing here is a form of complete economic relativism that ultimately boils down to a complete moral relativism. If there is no way to assess "bad economic decisions", this must be equally true for "bad moral decisions" in general. If I cannot argue that taking Heroin is bad for you, I cannot argue that selling Heroin to people is morally bad. If I cannot argue that it's bad economically to have to give away your house essentially for free or starve, I cannot argue that it's morally bad to let people starve. If this is your stance, all of this really is moot, because there is no way to argue with complete relativism.
What I argue is that we can form certain intersubjective truths, by looking at the facts and making reasoned value judgements about these facts. I think this is distinct from paternalism. Paternalism is, to me, a stance that enfeebles others by making them unable to participate in a decision. It's arguing from authority. What I want to do is argue from reason. Reason is not enfeebling but empowering, because it opens up the process to everyone with the ability to understand human reason.
In conclusion, what I argue is not merely that people make bad decisions according to my personal preferences. What I argue is that, even in voluntary trade, people can end up worse off, and that it's possible to establish, with sufficient clarity, what being worse-off means between humans. Your theory seems unable to even recognise negative outcomes, and thus I think it cannot be reasonably argued that it will produce positive outcomes.
I don't refer here to an utopia being equivalent to paradise, when I talk about utopia here. Perhaps better would be to talk about a fictional or a theoretic model of a society, because there is no record of this kind of non-state society having ever existed or emerged and the idea that it would (or could) emerge seems doubtful.
Quoting Virgo AvalytikhSo it's modest for you to say there cannot be a state that is more closer to the minarchist state than to a totalitarian state, that all states are statist? That limited government is utopian, cannot happen because every government ever has simply grown and grown?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I haven't made or intended to make any ad hominem attacks to my knowledge. What's so bad in saying that a libertarian society simply cannot morph into totalitarianism?
Quoting Virgo AvalytikhBut is that true? You do have the right to use violence for self defence. And isn't a State made from people that uphold the idea of that State so much, that even others also accept the existence of the state?
Quoting Virgo AvalytikhPerhaps this Roman Catholic ought to be reminded of the Schism of 1054, which has lasted and divided the Christian Church since then. (And likely there are many Protestant Churches that have never throughout their own history experienced schism or division after their emergence, just like the Roman Catholic Church.)
I can't see the point of the analogy. Consider a deck of 52 playing cards. You might argue that the 52 parts of the deck are all divided and distinct, and not parts of one deck. But then you are not talking about a deck anymore, you are talking about a bunch of distinct things. You can emphasize the separation between the parts which constitute the whole, or you can emphasize the union of the parts which make up the whole, but if you deny the union, you have no right to talk about the whole. So if you deny the union between Protestants and Catholics you have no right to talk about Christians.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
So this is false. The "disunity" which you refer to here is artificial, manufactured by your way of speaking. You are talking about Protestants and Catholics as if they are not unified in Christianity, and you imply that the distinct forms of Protestantism are not unified as Protestant. That's like talking about the 52 distinct playing cards as if they are not one deck. Sure, you can talk about things in this way, but your conclusion that the parts of a whole are a "kind of disunity" is completely unacceptable because you have simply chosen an inappropriate description. The unity exists whether you recognize it, or choose to talk about the parts as distinct, calling them a disunity.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
All these killings and yet many would argue that the world has already passed into overpopulation.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
You talk about the State as if it is a person with the power of persuasion. It is not, and this is another good example of your doublespeak. People persuade other people, groups of people persuade people, the State doesn't persuade anyone. If people are persuaded that a State is absolutely necessary, they have persuade each other. But this is to be expected, as I explained the learning institutions ensure that we see things in a similar way. And that's what learning is, learning is standardization. So I wouldn't really call this persuasion, it's just a matter of learning the accepted conventions.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
More of the same doublespeak. The State is not an agent, nor does the State educate people. People educate each other, and they generally follow the conventions. But even the conventions themselves allow people to go outside of the conventions. These are conventions of freedom. So when we educate ourselves for example, we are free to consider things which are unconventional. This is why anarchism may be discussed and explored, it is unconventional, but the conventions do not force us to remain within the conventions. The conventions actually allow for freedom of thought and expression.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
That is not what I have said at all. I said this:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The State only emerges in the second level. Prior to this, at the first level, there is cooperation, people being helpful, caring, loving and agreeable. But this attitude only exists if it's cultured. From this general attitude of caring for each other, comes communion, sharing, having things in common. A State can only come from this, having things in common.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Clearly I do not agree with the Hobbesian description.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Well, I looked over the essay, I can't say I read it thoroughly. It doesn't seem to say anything about loving, caring, sharing, developing an agreeable attitude, and having things in common, which as I described is necessary for the existence of rights. The author seems to be obsessed by some Hobbesian fantasy.
I said that I would happily concede the triviality of the rationality axiom if you concede its truth. I was hoping that you would cooperate with this and concede its truth so that we can move on. Instead, you have simply restated its triviality, which doesn’t advance us at all. As I pointed out, its axiomatic self-evidence is only an objection if the principle is accepted uncontroversially. It is only because it is disputed that it bears restating.
Contrary to your characterisation, the rationality axiom is not simply that ‘humans act in the way humans act’. If it were, I would have formulated it that way. It might be an implication of the axiom, but that is nothing special, since all tautologies are implications of everything (including contradictions). Humans act is such a way that aims at achieving their highest want at a given moment. Is this new information? Is this a valuable insight? That depends on whether you already knew it. If you did, then surely it is trivial. If you didn’t, then you have achieved a new insight. So let us just agree ‘The rationality axiom is true’, and then move on to more interesting insights (of which there are many; see Ludwig von Mises’s magnum opus, ‘Human Action: A Treatise on Economics’).
Quoting Echarmion
Economics is relative in the following sense: an economist is able to tell you (fallibly) that a particular course of action will boost GDP, but they cannot tell you that boosting GDP is objectively a ‘good’ thing. Or, if they can, they can do so only in reference to some higher criterion that has been stipulated. Whether that criterion is objectively ‘good’ is, again, a judgement that lies outwith the purview of the economist qua economist. As any introductory textbook will tell you, economics is a Wertfrei discipline. It is analogous to how natural science can tell you that putting arsenic in your mother’s drink will kill her, but not whether or not you should do so. This does not imply moral relativism at all, nor have I argued for moral relativism. My focus has been predominantly on rights, which is a different logical sphere. There are many things which I consider to be morally wrong, but not rights-violations (like committing adultery), and even certain things that are clear rights-violations, but are still probably the right thing to do, all things considered (like fraudulently over-charging somebody by a penny if doing so would prevent World War 3). Moral relativism is a red herring here, since I have not argued for it, nor is it an implication of anything I have argued. I am not a relativist in the moral sense, so we can just drop it there.
Quoting Echarmion
Hold on – there is an equivocation here which needs to be ironed out. It is one thing to imagine somebody foolishly trading away a house for a loaf of bread, and then using this as an example of how, sometimes, people enter into voluntary trades from which they emerge ‘worse off’. It is another thing to speak of someone being in a position where they have to give away their house for a loaf of bread, due to the desperation of their situation. They are two completely different points.
Supposing that we establish some criterion by which a house is ‘better’ than a loaf of bread, so that trading away the former for the latter is ‘bad’. This is something that anybody may do, poor or rich, desperate or not. Alright, then it is logically conceivable that somebody might enter into a peaceful trade and emerge ‘worse off’, by the criterion we have stipulated. So what? For what would this be an argument? I have used the fact that people typically know what is best for themselves as a pro-liberty argument, as an argument for the non-aggression principle. So the only way in which these unusual counter-instances actually have a bearing on the discussion if you are going to use them as an argument for aggression, i.e. sometimes, people must be forcibly protected from themselves, and coerced into doing the right thing. This is why I raised paternalism. Paternalism is the placing of limitations on someone’s liberty or autonomy for their own good. A paternalistic government does not recognise the right of individuals to engage in self-destructive behaviour, but considers it necessary to coerce them into doing the ‘right thing’. I am not sure if you are endorsing this, but if you are not, then such counter-instances are moot.
Suppose, on the other hand, that we are talking about somebody being in a position where they ‘have to’ trade away their house for a loaf of bread. Again, for what is this an argument, exactly? If you are on the brink of starvation, and the only way to save your life is to make such a trade, then you are better off for having made it, and this is consistent with my thesis. We might bemoan the fact that someone might be in such a desperate situation in the first place, but I don’t see how this has any immediate bearing on our discussion. Unless you are just taking for granted that the only way of alleviating poverty is through the instrumentality of the State (which is false).
We can conduct similar thought-experiments about violations of the NAP. For every conceivably possible case in which someone enters into a peaceful trade and emerges ‘worse off’ by whatever criterion you care to stipulate, I can give you one in which an act of aggression make one party ‘worse off’ by that same criterion. We are talking about tendencies. Relatively speaking, mutual benefit is a norm and unilateral loss an exception when it comes to peaceful trade. The reverse is the case when it comes to aggression. You were happy to agree that individuals tend to make decisions which are best for themselves, on the grounds that they are better acquainted with their respective situations than anyone else is. All I am doing is deducing the implications of this. If we look at the kinds of things which the NAP permits, they tend to work for the benefit of all voluntary participants (e.g. trade, friendships), and if we look at those things which are prohibited by the NAP, they tend to produce a clear loser (e.g. rape, murder, theft). I see this as being very difficult to argue with.
But you used the word 'paradise'
Quoting ssu
right there.
Quoting ssu
This actually isn’t true. Iceland was anarchistic for the first three centuries of its existence, and had quite an elegant justice system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth#Legacy
Quoting ssu
Libertarianism is modest in the sense that it requests only that persons not be aggressed against; a modest request indeed. It’s really not much to ask.
Quoting ssu
I took this as rather ad hominem, as it was directed at me, and not at any argument I have presented:
Quoting ssu
Quoting ssu
Yes, it is true. You quoted the first sentence of a paragraph in which I give numerous examples of such. This understanding of the State, by the way, is perfectly consonant with Weber’s.
Let’s forget the analogy. I used it as an illustration of one possible interpretation of your position which turned out not to be the correct one. We needn't dwell on it.
Your argument hinges on the claim that the State gives rise to a greater degree of standardisation than does a Stateless situation; that, under Statism, peaceful order is the norm and aggression is the exception, and that, under anarchy, we are wild animals engaged in perpetual aggression. It would be helpful for us to remind ourselves that the ‘standardisation’ we are concerned with is of a specific kind, namely a system of rights. This is the only reason why ‘convention’ entered the discussion, because rights are a convention, and convention requires at least some measure of standardisation for it to be meaningful. So the question before us is whether a State really does do the job that your argument needs it to do, in terms of creating a standardised system of rights, relative to anarchy.
I have attacked your argument at both ends. First, I have argued that the State is a miserable candidate for being a rights-standardiser, rights-protector, rights-bestower, or however you would wish to phrase it. I argued that States are engaged in perpetual aggression towards their citizens (a point to which you have not responded at all), and that the historical record excites serious distrust of the claim that battle is some sort of occasional exception to a State’s normally ordered activity. The hundreds of millions of deaths which I enumerated in my previous post are to be accounted for by wars between States, and States murdering their own citizens. Does this give you a moment’s pause? It seems not. all you have to say is:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Astonishing. Are you saying that the death toll isn’t yet high enough?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To be sure, the State does not have its own inherent agency. Only individual persons have this. There is nothing objectionable in speaking about ‘collective agency’ so long as we recognise that it is an abstraction, and that we be careful not to smuggle in any untoward ontological commitments (like the idea that groups have their own independent capacity for purposeful action). As Murray Rothbard says, ultimately, there are no ‘governments’; there are only certain individuals who act in a manner that is recognised as ‘governmental’. Recognising this is much more of a threat to Statism than an apologetic for it. It dispels the notion that there is anything peculiar about a State (or the individuals comprising it) which grants it license to engage in activities which non-States do not. You yourself have spoken of the State as though it has agency, on numerous occasions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your argument resembles that of Hobbes in the sense that you have claimed that, in the absence of the State, we act like ‘wild animals’ (i.e. a state of nature), and that it is the State which brings order. Maybe you are not really arguing this, but it certainly seems that you are, and if you are not, then as I pointed out above when you denied that you were seeking to justify Statism, you are not really threatening my thesis.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So it looks like we agree on this much: peaceful cooperation, and standardisation regarding rights, are possible independently of the State. You extoll the virtues of education in further cultivating this standardisation, but there is no reason why this education could not occur under anarchy (indeed, hardly any education really occurs under Statism, see Caplan’s book I mentioned).
Where does this leave us in the trajectory of the discussion? We began with the principles of right-libertariansm, private property rights and the NAP. You claimed that the NAP was useless (deceptive!) in the absence of a system of rights. ‘Rights’ are a service bestowed on an individual by the State, a service provided by the State (there is the State as agent!). I have agreed that the NAP does depend on a system of rights, and that rights are conventions, which of course require a certain measure of standardisation. The disagreement from this point has seemed to involve the question of whether I can sensibly hold to a system of rights, given my disavowal of the State. My response has been to point out that, not only is the State a truly miserable candidate for rights-bestower (or whatever job it is supposed to do here), it is also perfectly possible for spontaneous order and cooperation to arise in the absence of a State. This latter point is one which you now seem prepared to concede. So, as things stand, I feel like my position is vindicated.
Gotcha. Let's see if I can try another approach:
Do you think the NAP is a perfect principle with no flaws, inconsistencies, ambiguity, or potential loopholes?
Do libertarians care whether property was originally acquired according to the NAP, or was that centuries ago, so it doesn't matter?
If a country takes land using aggression, do all of its citizens have the right to that newly acquired property?
What percent of owned land was acquired without aggression? (obviously this is not answerable, but I am suggesting that a significant percent of the 'owned' land on earth was acquired using aggression)
Medieval Iceland? Likely Iceland was then somewhat anarchistic (likely not as much as present Hollywood with it's silly biker-gang Vikings depict the societies to be). So was my country, definately! After all, here there was no king, no formal state, and no feudalism, yet the Vikings didn't conquer this place (hence a common defence existed).
But Iceland, a community of 50 000 people of basically settlers that came to an uninhabited island in the Middle Ages? Seems that it has been found by right-wing libertarians, who have noticed some resemblance to an anarcho-capitalist legal system. However, from the link you gave, Friedman himself writes: "It is difficult to draw any conclusion from the Icelandic experience concerning the viability of systems of private enforcement in the twentieth century. Even if Icelandic institutions worked well then, they might not work in a larger and more interdependent society. And whether the Icelandic institutions did work well is a matter of controversy; the sagas are perceived by many as portraying an essentially violent and unjust society, tormented by constant feuding. It is difficult to tell whether such judgments are correct." Tip my hat for Friedman that he understands that it's difficult to compare a medieval society to later more modern ones.
So that's your refutation to my argument that there hasn't been an historical example. I was hoping that you might give as an example some British colony (for a brief period of time, at least) perhaps in the 17th or 18th Century, but there seems to be none. This just enforces my thinking that this whole discussion is far more about ideological issues of especially anarcho-capitalism and isn't so much about actual historical facts (or classical liberalism for that matter).
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
This isn't an answer to my question at all. I asked if a state can be more closer to the minarchist state than to a totalitarian state, or if you argue that all states cannot be anything else than statist.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Sorry then for trying to make the point that libertarianism cannot lead to totalitarianism.
This is doublespeak. Sure, you are "better of" not to be starving at that moment in time, than to be starving at that moment, but If there is someone else around the corner, willing to trade two, or five, or ten loaves of bread for that house, you are not necessarily "better of" for making that trade. You could have walked around the corner and gotten a much better deal, in which case you would be even "better off"..
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Try saying this to an aggressive person. Please, don't be so aggressive. I'm just making a modest request. Good luck with that!
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
No, you don't seem to get my point. I am not arguing for Statism, I've told you this already, I am arguing that your principles are wrong. I did not say that without the State we are wild animals engaged in aggression. In fact, I said the very opposite. I said that in order for a State to come into existence, we must have an attitude of loving, caring and sharing, and having things in common. A State can only come into existence from these prerequisite conditions, because it requires agreement amongst people, and this can only occur if people are agreeable, and this requires the attitude I just described, not an attitude of wild animals engaged in aggression. Therefore, prior to the existence of the State, the conditions which were conducive to bringing the State into existence, and these conditions were therefore in existence without a State, were conditions of loving, caring, and sharing. These are the only conditions which could bring a State into existence, because a State requires agreement amongst its members.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Right, "standardization" is part of the second level of agreement which I referred to. This includes State, as well as rights. These things, State, and rights, can only come into existence following the first level of agreement which I described as loving, caring and sharing, generally having the disposition of being agreeable.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am not defending Statism, I am showing that your principles are wrong, so this ranting against States is irrelevant. As I already explained, your principles are wrong because loving, caring, sharing, and generally having things in common, are fundamental necessities for the existence of conventions (which are agreements), including conventions on rights. Therefore, sharing and having things in common must be the top priority of any system of rights because caring and having things in common is necessary in order for any system of rights to exist. Your NAP which gives top priority to personal ownership is inconsistent with this, it doesn't pay respect to having things in common. In fact it opposes this. It is therefore the proposal of a right designed to support the things which are incompatible with the existence of rights. It is an unacceptable proposal.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
OK, if you respect this, then you ought to quit talking about the State being an aggressor. Or is it that difficult for you to quit the doublespeak? I've tried not to speak of the State as if it has agency, though it is difficult because it is common parlance. I think that the closest I've come is to refer to things like state-run institutions. The common parlance tends to make us blame the faults of human beings on the State. The State has bad laws. If we separate these, we can ask whether a State is really a bad thing, or whether a State (which could be a good thing) is overrun by bad people.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I really don't see the principles here. How is it possible to have standardized education throughout a vast land without an organization like the State? The anarchists could set up an organization like a State, and call it something other than a State, but how would this be different?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
The point is that making the basis of the hierarchy (the principal right), the right to private ownership, undermines the very thing which makes a system of rights possible, and this is having things in common. So the NAP is backward. It belittles the very thing which makes a system of rights possible, yet it requires a system of rights itself. A true system of rights must start in (be based in) commonality (that which strengthens any system of rights because rights are agreements), what we all have in common, and proceed from there toward the properties of individuals. it cannot start from the properties of individuals.
I do not at all concede to your concept of "spontaneous order". I think it is illogical. As I said, in the absence of State, can come people with a loving, caring, and sharing disposition, and this must be cultured, it is not spontaneous. Further, a claim to the right of private property is inconsistent with this loving, caring and sharing, and so is not conducive to any cooperation.. That's why the NAP is fool's play, it induces disagreement.
I feel like we are starting to talk past each other here. My argument in the last post, which to me seems more or less still unadressed, is that in order to support the claim that "market failure is less common and less severe in libertarian systems compared to any other system", you need to establish some measurable criteria for the overall well-being of an economy and show how these criteria are improved. That people are actually "better off", and not just "gaining something they contingently value given their current options".
It seems to me your argument can be briefly summarized as: People are the best judges of what they value the most. When engaging in trade, you will always get something that currently has value to you. Since you always get something you value, and you are the best judge of value (for yourself), you will always be "better off" by trading.
The problem with that argument is that it's always true. That is to say, given this logic, any conceivable outcome is being "better off". If the label "better off" can apply to any possible situation, it's meaningless.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Disputed by whom, exactly?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am not quite sure how one is supposed to "know" that "Humans act is such a way that aims at achieving their highest want at a given moment". The statement is not "information" at all. It tells us nothing about actual human behavior. But sure, it's still true.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I agree. I was talking in the context of economic philosophy, but I didn't quite make that clear. The philosophy of economics is not "wertfrei", would you agree? I'd say it's a subset of moral philosophy, since it deals with what economic system we ought to adopt.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am aware you have not explicitly argued for moral relativism. My argument was that your argument parallels that of moral relativism, just in the sphere of economic philosophy, and that it would ultimately lead to moral relativism.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am not sure how my example of a starving man that trades his house for a loaf of bread can be seen as anything other than an act of desperation? Obviously if you are starving, you are forced to accept almost any trade in exchange for food. That circumstances can be exploited by people with a better bargaining position to force other people to make bad trades is exactly my point.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I think you analysis here is - literally - one sided. You don't seem to be considering that there is another angle to look at these "bad trades". Not as bad decisions someone happens to make, but as exploitation of the weaker by the stronger. Protecting those in vulvnerable positions from being taken advantage of is not paternalism. And this is relevant to our discussion because this protection is not something that the NAP covers. So while you can say that a state is not required to protect people from desperate situations, something in addition to the NAP is nevertheless necessary.
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
Listing examples would be a context of creativity, but not an argument. I am still not sure what standard you apply for "mutual benefit", either. Is "mutual benefit" distinct from "everyone received something they contingently value"?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
I am not seeing the deduction. Could you spell it out for me in more detail?
Quoting Virgo Avalytikh
It is difficult to argue with, but it's also not the thing we're arguing. I am not saying aggression is better than non-aggression in principle. I am questioning whether just non-aggression is sufficient to actually produce positive outcomes.