I said the concept of ‘limited government’ is utopian. My point is that a State with clearly circumscribed limits remaining within those limits in per...
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. Liberta...
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 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...
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 m...
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 acknowl...
No, trespassing is aggressive, and prohibited under the NAP. Notice that ‘trespass’ presupposes property rights. I am trespassing on someone’s land be...
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 ...
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...
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 pr...
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. B...
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...
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 s...
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...
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...
These kinds of discussions really aren't worth having unless we have a clear distinction in place between 'private' property and 'communal' property. ...
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 f...
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 o...
I introduced two major streams of thought in contemporary political philosophy concerning how property rights are generated, so that you can see what ...
There is nothing 'libertarian' about (i) the State having a monopoly on dispute resolution, (ii) 'corporations' (which are a legal fiction), (iii) spe...
This is Murray Rothbard, prolific libertarian theorist and the first anarcho-capitalist: The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no m...
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 s...
Markets require a system of property rights, which are conventions, but not institutions. Peaceful trade does indeed require a convention which is gen...
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....
All you say of monopolies and oligopolies are fine with me. I don’t think we disagree too much here. I’m just not sure what the argument is into whose...
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 com...
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 th...
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 ...
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...
These kinds of semantic discussions are never productive, and always uninteresting. They’re certainly not philosophically impressive. Libertarians def...
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 tw...
The issue here is an uninteresting semantic one. 'Aggression' has a specific meaning in the context of libertarianism: it is the initiatory (in distin...
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 ...
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 yo...
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...
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 w...
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 tradin...
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 a...
You are quite mistaken on this. Right-libertarians almost always advocate for a Lockean theory of ownership, which understands all external resources ...
I am always apprehensive when one talks about ‘nature’ or ‘the natural’, especially when this is contrasted with ‘civilisation’ or ‘the civilised’. Th...
The answers to these questions will vary depending on what kind of libertarian you’re talking with. Within the right-libertarian camp, we might distin...
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, o...
Aggressive marketing campaigns would not be considered as 'aggression' in the libertarian system. The reason why libertarians do not simply use the te...
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...
It is probably worth saying something about monopolies, and clarifying a little more what we mean by this. One important distinction is that between ‘...
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, virtu...
Comments