Eh, that’s fine, it’s internet communication and I’m arguing (poorly) while also editing a document haha
You know what I find interesting about Ayn Rand fans and detractors alike? Neither of them seem to have read her books.
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It’s like trying to speak to a parakeet in a foreign language.
How did you get that from anything I wrote? I specifically took issue with the libertarian conceptions of the terms “voluntary” and “non-violent”. That is, I don’t think your definitions of those terms reflect reality. That is not at all saying that I find “coercive, non-voluntary interactions superior”. It’s saying – literally, with no use of metaphor or obfuscatory language – that I don’t agree that your model of “voluntary, non-violent interactions” actually describes what I would consider to be voluntary and non-violent interactions.
As an example I used having a job. Not owning a job but just having one. You would claim that taking a shitty Walmart job (because you can’t find anything better) is a “voluntary, non-violent interaction”. However, since food, shelter, clothing, and physical security are not optional I do not actually consider taking a job required to fulfill the basic physical requirements of existence to be “voluntary”.
You may have to step out of your tiny, insular model of the world to try to understand the perspectives of others once in a while. Sticking your fingers in your ears and assuming people are saying what you want them to say is not really a great way to convince anyone of the brilliance of your preferred economic system.
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Well? we’re waiting…
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It’s the initiation of force which is important. Are muggers and the person they mug on an equal ethical level? Is the mugger’s use of force ethically equal to the defensive use of force the person being mugged might use?
If individuals can’t own property then what else is there? Is everything, including oneself, the property of the collective? Who would decide how to allocate resources? Wouldn’t whoever was the allocator essentially own the resources thus defeating the idea of collective ownership?
That’s why libertarians advocate either very small constrained governments or no government at all. I like the idea of a central government funded by voluntary taxes/fees which would compete with private entities to provide services.
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That’s a false dichotomy. The problem is that property in principle arises from the same sort of interactions as taxes. To quote Robert Reich:
In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on. These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t ‘intrude’ on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t ‘free’ of rules; the rules define them.
Personally, I can’t imagine taking libertarians seriously unless they:
a) recognize that property is defined and secured by social contracts, which right now normally means governments,
b) notice that the countries on earth that are currently the best to live in - in terms of health, happiness, freedom of opportunity, and even risk of actually suffering violence - are the ones that rely on social programs and regulations.
Because without an answer to those, it’s only poor and unrealistic philosophy.
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There WAS some informative discussion on Charlie’s blog, but the Rand-signal went up. Not as fast as it did here, mind…
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You say ‘evolving’, I say ‘metastasising’.
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Since humans require certain things to survive work will always, at least until post scarcity, be required. You’re arguing that life requires struggle, OK, so what? Employers didn’t create the need for food or shelter. Business/trade is just a more efficient method for securing these requirements than hunting or gathering. If you can think of a better method feel free to offer it up.
Perspectives like what?
Instead of giving an example of some philosophy that would compete with the Non-Aggression Principle you attempted to redefine what force is. I think we can all agree that having to sustain a physical body is tiresome and requires actions we would rather not undertake. But there is no bogeyman rail against, just the mindless physical laws in our universe.
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I didn’t say anything about outlawing private property or making everything the property of “the collective.” (Cue scary music I guess.) Can you argue with what I’m actually saying instead of what you’d prefer I was saying?
The point of the scare quotes was to try to get you to think critically about the concepts you’re employing (yeah, I know, it’s really hard to think critically about stuff you believe in with the force of religious conviction). What does it mean to own something? It means that if someone else tries to use it you can call men with guns to use force against that person.
When applied to your mugging example that sounds hunky dory. After all, the mugger is using force and so calling men with guns sounds pretty proportional.
But suppose instead you have a starving person stealing a loaf of bread from someone who can easily afford another loaf of bread. Do you really think that’s ethically indistinguishable from a mugger in a dark alley?
I like the idea of a central government funded by voluntary taxes/fees which would compete with private entities to provide services.
There’s a joke that we have “the best justice system money can buy.” You prefer a system in which that’s not even a joke but just a literal description.
Let’s suppose under your system Smith and Jones have a property dispute. Smith protects his property using Acme Security Services and Jones protects his property using Standard Security Services. Acme accepts Smith’s claims uncritically (because he’s a good customer) and Standard accepts Jones’ claims uncritically (because he’s a good customer). Whose property is it? Seems to me it belongs to whoever’s security company can make a more compelling threat of force.
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Rather it’s proven a more efficient way of enriching some at the expense of many others. Also, citation please.
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Yikes!
Of course not. It’s the idea of non-voluntary rules that upset many who follow libertarian philosophies. I challenge you to find a libertarian who advocates no rules. Reich either doesn’t understand what libertarians mean when they say free markets or he’s being purposely wrong.
Well, I just explained that libertarians do in fact recognize that trade/markets require rules. Your move.
Subjective. But if I agree that many of these nameless countries do in fact offer a better life I would argue that they all got to where they are through wealth creation via markets/trade. Just because government instituted rules doesn’t mean they helped the process. It would seem that those who create and enforce said rules would do so to their benefit. Non-voluntary market rules don’t sound like a recipe for a healthy economy.
Plus you can have theft without any force at all. You’re on the way back from the store and put your bread down for a second while you grab bus fare, and I run by and grab it. Finders keepers, right? Because anything you do to get it back at this point is probably going to involve initiation of force, and if stupendousman is against redefining the term to include general damage to a person’s situation, he can’t possibly think force is appropriate in response to me taking bread off the ground.
I’m afraid that except for the vague and incomplete non-aggression principle, I missed that. Where do you think the rules that create markets come from, and what enforces them?
As a standard example I offer the Scandinavian countries. If you don’t think they have a high quality of life by any reasonable standard, or that the government hasn’t had a major role in creating that, you simply don’t know much about them. Which, as I said, means I will not be able to take your position seriously.
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I think that’s a bad comparison. Libertarian philosophy is fairly consistent, your apparent lack of guiding philosophy seems more in line with metastasising cells. A grab bag of ideas often in conflict with one another.
This is an oversimplification (what else could I possibly have expected?). It’s not merely that work is required. It’s also that since land is considered a form of property people can’t voluntarily opt out of the market economy and engage in subsistence farming or hunting/gathering if it works better for them. That’s right – the market economy forces people to engage in the market economy (or else get put in cages by men with guns for trespassing/stealing).
You say that business/trade is “more efficient”. That’s fine, but “efficiency” does not provide any moral justification for forcing people to participate in the market economy. If a person can’t obtain the money they need for food and shelter from the labor market then what moral onus could possibly apply to them to comply with your notions of “voluntary, non-violent interactions”? Should the person be OK with starving to death because that’s what your economic system says they should do in such a situation? How is that any different from demanding that this person sacrifice him or herself for the good of “the collective” (in this case referring to the market economy).
It seems more ethical to me to require someone to give up money for the general welfare than to demand someone with no money give up his life for the general welfare. But you’re essentially advocating the reverse.
It is hilarious that you follow up this question with this:
No, I didn’t “redefine what force is”. You’re using a highly constrained and domain-specific use of the term “force”. That is, you have a particular perspective on the meaning of “force.” I have a different perspective. Your use of the term “redefine” is a transparent rhetorical ploy to suggest that your perspective on “force” is somehow more valid than mine. Nope, they’re both just opinions.
But there is no bogeyman rail against, just the mindless physical laws in our universe.
That would be true if we were all subsistence farmers with no market interactions. But back here in reality the “actions we would rather not undertake” are not determined purely by “the mindless physical laws in our universe” but also by the actions of other human beings interacting through a market economy. The structure of that market economy plays a large part in structuring the “actions we would rather not undertake” and that structure is, in turn, a result of cultural constructs such as private property, debt, interest, etc.
Thus, to the extent that this structure does not promote good ends we may reasonably criticize that structure. If you wish to characterize such criticism as “railing against a boogeyman” then that simply shows that you’re an ideologue and unwilling to consider perspectives different from your own.
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Lots of philosophies are internally consistent. So are lots of paranoid fantasies. Now what? Am I supposed to vanish in a puff of logic or something?
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So what are you saying?
Pot meet kettle…
No, it means I can ethically use proportional force to stop them, Persuasion being the first method.
Nope, different ethical burdens.
Nope, that’s what we, at least in the US, have now. I’m completely against the idea of incarceration or forced remedies. A reputation economy would resolve most disputes, IMO.
Seems unlikely, who would use services that undermined market rules?
Private police and military sold to the highest bidder. What could go wrong?
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Hopefully Americans will, not oligarchs, their think tanks, lobbyists and the libertarian toadies that carry water for them.
Except that they’re both. Voluntary=/=frictionless or free of consequence. One can not pay the tax, amend the law through legislation, one can leave . . . or one can incorporate and get massive tax breaks, even. Also note that violent=/=compelled by law: you might not like something, but that doesn’t make it violent. Taxes aren’t violence. Howard Roark blowing up his building is violent.
I love the I-don’t-understand-this-thing-I’m-refuting meme. The point was that libertarians often take a small-bore issue and make it a large-bore one: a discrete flaw becomes a referendum on all government, for example. Indeed, a basic assumption of a lot of libertarian rhetoric is that it’s precisely since humans are flawed that we need much less or no government because freedom. Which is a terrible argument: removing a flawed government could conceivably cause much worse problems than said flaws, for example.
Would love to see ideologies and polities that don’t fundamentally rest on some kind of force, at least, the ability to use force in the defense of said polity. Would we all voluntary pay taxes without the possibility of consequences? By “we” I mean real folks in this world, not Roarktypes in Fantasyland.
Indeed, genre fiction excels at getting crazy ideas into print: that’s one of its chief merits as a genre of literature, be it SF, fantasy, what have you. But that’s not an argument for the validity or interest of said crazy ideas. And there’s a world of difference between exploring ideas and using fiction, badly, as a mouthpiece for political ideology. If Rand actually dialogued with the complex ideas she strawmans into TYRANNY and FASCISM and COMPROMISE then she’d not only be a better writer, she’d be a better thinker as well, but I think dialogue and complexity are . . . threatening?
Sorry, will replace Atlas is a Harsh Mistress with The Moon Shrugged, perhaps you’ve read that one? It’s about Freedumb and Tyrannie, two mighty opposites, check it out!
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