'Male' and 'female' are genetic classifications, determined (in humans) by the presence or absence of the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is the male-m...
A frequent defence of the State's legitimacy is that its legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed. There are a number of problems with such...
Governments, in essence, are tax farms, which claim for themselves the unique prerogative to initiate force and invade private property, and use their...
The university standard text is Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy. It is a good starting point, though not nearly as comprehensi...
Why are you making your objections here? If you want to debate the principles of libertarianism, do it in a libertarianism thread. I am happy to respo...
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Are you suggesting that I am incapable of responding to the latest objections which my thread's dialogu...
fdrake and I have exchanged many thousands of words, and we both think that it is has been quite productive so far. The suggestion that I have 'walked...
I am not sure what this is referring to. I have defended libertarianism at length and in depth elsewhere. I have also challenged and rebutted the sugg...
I am by no means the first person to point this out, but the 'left-right' divide is not fit for purpose, for all sorts of reasons. That is not to say ...
How on earth do you get from here to here ? For one thing, there is no such thing as abolishing 'inheritance'. The only in way in which inheritance wo...
Codex Quarendae - just looks a little pretentious to me. The subtitle is good though. Also, I don't believe this is grammatical, since codex is mascul...
The way I learned it, when I was leaning English, is that 'an' is correct, in British English, before a word beginning with 'h', if the accent lies on...
One of the problems we are having here is the fact that you are making unwarranted assumptions, and taking for granted that for which you have not off...
This is not true. In my original post, I cited an article of David Friedman’s, ‘A Positive Account of Property Rights’, in which he argues – convincin...
I have to confess some disappointment with how little you have engaged with the argument I presented. I have denied precisely the identification which...
On the understanding that that which is expropriated by taxation is the rightful property of her who is taxed, taxation would indeed be coercive, for ...
The main problem is that you are hypostatising or reifying the free market, as though it were presented as a kind of subsistent ‘thing’. But it does n...
It's not inevitable. Nuclear States might eliminate the human race before it happens. It is 'natural', in the sense that there is a tendency for poore...
There is no need to 'start over'. When you successfully repel a thief from your home, or incapacitate a mugger, you needn't step back and ask yourself...
You haven't understood the point I was making. My point is that the source of (at least this particular kind of) inequality is the State itself. 'Down...
Society is not the State. States, as coercive institutions, are precisely anti-social in their working. The fact is, those whom you identify as 'downt...
This is not to engage at all with the argument which I have presented, but simply to ignore it. The assumptions you make in this argument are precisel...
I think we are talking past each other. This was my initial statement with which you took issue: we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'St...
The distinction I have made is simply that between human activity which involves the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and tha...
Just write like a human being. English is not my first language, and I'm not going to take the time to read something that's purposefully obscure. But...
This is not correct. A State is a particular kind of human association, one which holds a monopoly on physical force over a given territory. It is not...
I have defined ‘State’ in a way that is quite conventional in political theory. There are alternative definitions, but they don’t alter my analysis in...
Currency certainly would not function as it does now, in the world of central banks, fiat currencies and periodic financial crises. But this does not ...
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