Much Libertarian economic theory depends upon everyone except This Property Owner being an NPC in every scenario.
Life isn't a video game, tho. Other humans are also humans and they also have natural rights and agency.
Discussion
Libertarians seem to believe property rights are God-given, immutable and an end in themselves.
I agree with them on most things, but I see property rights as a collection of useful "social algorithms". Most are mostly useful, most of the time. #anarchy
God gave property rights to us to serve His own purposes, not ours. If we raise our own purpose above His, we are raising ourselves above Him.
Property rights and a non violence. Cool.
On stolen property taken through violence.
Whoopsie!
Other people's needs do not trump your rights.
But if you sell water, I'm your neighbour, we're in a disaster zone, and a mob of what were our fellow citizens are desperate, can't pay your asking price for water and might try to take it any minute...
I'm gonna be "Bro, make a deal man, let them clear rubble or something if they don't have $$$. I don't want today to be the day I shoot an inadequately-prepared suburban dad trying to steal water for his crying kids..."
Is looting ever good? No, it isn't. But I'd rather see looting intermittently in extremis, rather than every day as part of normal government business.
It’s more a cheeky reference to the USA (and other former colonies) being built on stolen land. I’m not planning on looting anywhere, well not at the moment at least.
Property belongs to whoever can defend their right to it. That's why it can exchange hands, without being sold.
We call this "theft". Most cultures condemn it and many societies have developed (usually coordinated, martial) means for retrieving it, but that doesn't change the facts on the ground that someone else now has it in their possession and might be able to defend their right to hold it.
Posession versus ownership have an important distinction. You did hint at it but it is better to make it clear
It's a whole thing. We had to learn about it during my apprenticeship because various laws apply in one case or another.
Possession is "having actual control over something", whereas ownership is "having a legitimate right to control something". "Legitimate" defined as "conforming to the law".
So a person who rents a house is in possession of the house. The person they rent it from owns it. An eviction is when the landlord wields violence or the threat of violence to dislodge the renter from the house.
Without legal enforcement, possession and ownership quickly collapse into one, such as in more primitive societies.
So take a modern day scenario. The IDF kick in the door of a Palestinian’s house and use their weapons to force the land owners out the house.
The land has been owned by the Palestinian family for many generations.
Now the Israeli government, defend it.
Whose land is it?
In libertarian world surely that breaks the non aggression principle, even if the Israeli government defend that land and rewrite law to benefit themselves?
It doesn't actually matter what anyone thinks about it or what principle it breaks. Principles and rules you can't enforce are just blah blah.
The house is now possessed by Israel and they can just legalize that state and become full owners. That's how lots of people gained land as property, historically, after all, and squatters still do this in Europe. Just occupy a house for long enough that you gain a legal claim and can't be evicted.
Same thing with women and children and cows and silver candlesticks. Go on a raid. Drag beings and objects home. Beings and objects now yours. Winning. Congrats on your new property. 🤷♀️
That's my point... Then maintain 'libertarian non aggressive principles' because it's now their land and they don't want the same to happen to them.
The concept of property rights seems somewhat flawed.
Yeah, humans tend to hypocrisy.
It's not merely a concept. It's simply humans describing what they see.
One principle that can be enforced is Total Kike Death, as in, you kill all who belong to one of those ethnicities+all who practice talmudic judaism.
Preserving private property by itself is great.
Libertarianism however fails because it does not account for race and other social issues.
A libertarian would say dykes and niggers are allowed to have children, an absurdo notion.
Like, in any scenario where "property rights over things" clash against "the right to life", Libertarians will claim that the rights of the Possessor of Things should be paramount and everyone else should just die.
That didn't happen.
That is not the way Natural Law works.
Human life is the most valuable property. The right to property only exists in order to create the Order and prosperity necessary to sustain human life and even promote human flourishing.
In an ideal world, there would be no case in which the two things clash, as markets would be flawless and contracts would be perfect, but we do not live in this Utopia.
For the record, "property rights always trump right to life" is the classic pro-euthenasia and pro-abortion argument.
This is why so many people on here claim that I'm a Marxist or socialist.
In case, you were wondering.
They say that I care about people too much and things too little, but I am convinced that things only exist in order to allow us to care for the people or to allow people to care for themselves.
The things were put here for a reason.
You’re never going to understand libertarianism as long as you believe violence is necessary in human interaction lol
You're never going to understand human existence if you think the violence is never an option.
It is an option when it comes to self defense. And the only time it is considered self defense is when it’s protecting property (e.g. your body or things that belong to you).
To make it simpler, there are two types of violence. Self defense and an attack. Self defense is okay and an attack is wrong.
This is the simplest explanation of libertarianism. Don’t aggress on my property (which includes my body). When you argue nonsense like natural rights or whatever, you’re basically justifying an attack on other people. The only rights that matter are property rights. You have no right to food. No right to healthcare. No right to an education. Why? Because in order to have a right to these things, someone else’s rights must be violated through violence. You can’t get a right to healthcare, food, or education without violence (e.g. aggressing on my property). So if you can’t use violence, then your only option is to peacefully acquire these things. You grow your own food or pay for it. You educate yourself or pay for an education. You pay for healthcare.
If you still disagree then you are simply an individual that believes in violence to steal things that don’t belong to you.
Natural rights are not a justification, they simply are. That is why they are natural.
The right to property is one of those rights. It simply is. It doesn't have to be justified.
The right to life is another one. It simply is. It doesn't have to be justified.
The right to free speech is another one. It simply is. It doesn't have to be justified.
But exercising your rights can conflict with other people exercising their rights, and Natural Law allows for conflicts occurring and Order eventually being restored, preferable through peaceful means.
Natural Law does not assume or demand pacificism. It doesn't demand adherance to theology. It doesn't take sides in any particular conflict. Natural Law is self-evident, observable law.
It ascribes a very high cost to the use of violence (because violence does carry a high cost, this is self-evident), so that beings are disinclined to use it. Also, it can be used to uncover what is the most orderly outcome, that will assert itself naturally over time, so that individuals can simply pursue that outcome and be ahead of the curve.
It also assumes that different actors can view the same situation differently, so that both sides see themselves as the most-aggrieved party. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, for example. Both sides can plausibly and convincingly claim self-defense.
Natural Law demands that we accept this moral ambiguity because we have no chance, but to accept it. Because it simply is. Because humans are complex, life is messy, and we are not omnipotent.
It’s amazing how many libertarians and libertarian adjacent people don’t understand that people don’t process information the same way at a fundamental level. This means that even people who use the NAP to govern their actions will not interpret the NAP the same way in a given situation. So yes. Both sides in a conflict can actually think the other side violated the NAP on them and they are acting in self defense. Both sides. At the same. The chaser? You probably aren’t changing most people’s minds about their interpretation. Especially if their wellbeing is tied to their interpretation.
Nothing stopping you from defending yourself in any situation of course but when you and yours have to bear all the costs win, lose or draw against them and theirs, I hope it was worth it. Especially if your talking about a group local to you. The reality is if someone decides to end you and isn’t a complete moron about it you are done. It’s a rifle shot from 300 yards. Its a ball peen hammer to the back of the skull while you are walking down the street. Don’t forget that the family of the person you self defensed is still in the area and their response will be governed by their interpretation of events. We lose sight of that several generations into a society where the government has power enough to put the kybosh on most of that and people being used to using the state to handle disputes with one another and retaliating for wrongs.
Just like it’s easy to say this injustice or that injury should be righted when you get to have that action subsided by society. Absent that? Every resource even time you put into those actions costs you and your family resources. Ukraine? You sending your sons to fight? Leaving them without a father or cutting them down to one meal a day to pay someone else to do it? Israel and Gaza? Same thing. On either side.
That kid down the block that’s getting beat by his parents? I mean *beat*. You risking getting shot in the face trying to take him from his parents? That’s a significantly different ball game than calling CPS and the cops. You taking the kid in and feeding and clothing him? Can you afford to do that and feed and clothe your own kids? Does the kid want to leave or is he going to run back. You probably don’t have the ability to make him stay gone or continuously recover him.
Yes, of course. Violence is very easy, but so destructive and prone to retaliation in kind, that it carries a high cost, so people usually avoid it.
It's "cheaper" for a group of individuals to avoid violence or arrange their environment (including society) to reduce the temptation to resort to violence. Agreeing to have conflicts presided over by a mediator, for instance, or having a standardized culture of restitution for wrongs. Religion or culture can also play into limiting violence, by blessing the peacemakers and awarding those who prevent or refuse to engage in violence a higher status. Violence can also be reduced by raising the cost further, through feuds (making one person's act of violence a problem more people have to suffer from, so that the violent person is discouraged from violence by his peers/relations).
Peace, in other words, can pay dividends.
Yes and those systems are kept honest by the knowledge that if they stop being honest Clan A might very well decide to burn it all down if you push them far enough. Sure they might lose but that sort of fight is likely a Pyrrhic victory when you don’t have a large outside force coming in to spread the costs out or wipe out Clan A before they can kill enough members of the other clans to make it a Pyrrhic victory. Leaving aside of course that most of the clans are probably interrelated at some level if they have been in the area any length of time.
That would also be where duels come in. Sometimes people just have to have it out. Doing so in a culturally proscribed and accepted manner lets the kin of both parties accept what was done. There might be hard feelings but a feud? Probably not. There likely would be over a lynching or back-shooting.
You say all this but you are clearly pro violence. It’s very weird I don’t understand.
It’s not about being pro or anti violence. It’s about the fact that violence is inevitable to the human condition even if everyone lives by the NAP. By virtue of the fact that there will always be different interpretations of circumstances. Sometimes one or both sides will walk away because they think it’s not worth the cost. That won’t always happen though.
Are you a violent or a peaceful person?
I’m peaceful. That doesn’t change the facts though. In the absence of a large force with a monopoly on violence people will be there own protection. Which is fine as far as it goes. You don’t get that without having conflict when two parties have different interpretations of how property rights are applied in a given situation. Like I said sometimes one or both sides will decide not to enforce their claim to the property right. But that won’t always happen. For instance if someone came up and said they had a claim to acreage that’s been in my family for centuries we got a problem. I use that example because in my view property rights are established by homesteading specific acreage. Not by roaming through an area without ever approving it. The descendants of people who roamed that land hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago before the groups that were here then might feel differently about it. In the absence of the governments of Lexington County, the state of South Carolina and the United States of America there is nothing to stop either side from using violence to enforce or defend their claim as they see fit.
You can’t think of a peaceful way to resolve this acreage dispute?
They give up or got us outgunned. There was never a settlement on the property prior to us as far as I know. If they can’t provide proof of one I would never view their claim as legitimate so we won’t be leaving.
Are there no individuals that can assist with conflict resolution as a service?
What’s to resolve? If they think they’re claim is legitimate and we don’t? Not because we dispute the facts of the case but because we interpret them differently. I would freely acknowledge, depending on the tribe, that they were in the area previously. That would not be the same thing as acknowledging their claim of ownership to the specific land in question. If they think being in the area prior to my family does mean that then there is an impasse and if neither side is willing to relinquish their claim a conflict. And once the first person is killed then it’s about murder. Specifically if they killed a member of my family that’s murder as far as my family is concerned since my family member would have been defending a legitimate property claim in our eyes. Likewise if my family member kills one of them in self defense, defending in our eyes, our legitimate claim that’s murder to them since their person died attempting to protect their legitimate in their eyes claim. Then we would really have something to fight about.
And how does the state solve this?
A system with a state is inherently violent. A state is merely an organization with sufficient means of violence that no one challenges them. It’s just not worth it. Until it is.
In the absence of a state each individual/group gets to decide when it is or is not worth it for themselves. And in the absence of the state would have all the weapons they want and likely be more skilled in the use of them than is the norm under the jurisdiction of a state that has a functional monopoly on violence.
Great. So in the absence of a state, with everyone (or nearly everyone) being very skilled at using weapons. Are people more or less inclined to violence?
Depends on the circumstances. And the individual. Some will be. Some won’t be. That is different people will have different thresholds on when it’s not worth exercising violence to defend themselves. I can’t answer that question for anyone but me. I’d generally be more inclined because it’s less likely a group would have sufficient power to make resistance to their aggression futile.
I’d have the same right to use violence to stop someone stealing an apple from my tree if I catch them at it as I would to use it to stop them if I caught them at digging up the gold that is my life’s savings buried under that same apple tree. In one case I probably won’t consider it worth it. In the other? Depends on if I’m armed.
Bro it’s a simple question. Are people more inclined to use violence when more people are armed and trained with those weapons or not? Generally speaking are people more violent in a place with very loose gun control like Florida or very strict gun control like California?
In the absence of a state which completely changes the equation because people can’t contract their violence out to the state? Dunno. Some people would likely be more violent. Once those people are likely killed, they likely won’t be jailed which is a continuous drain on resources that is less likely to occur in the absence of taxation, the violence drops off. That’s the problem. We don’t see the violence now because it’s all one sided and we call it things like taxation.
In the absence of a state you have to respond to all sorts of things that not responding to now is an option. If you look like a coward that’s a giant come fuck with me sign. So the answer is likely in some ways more violence and in some ways less.
If we’re talking about in the presence of a state the violence is spread out. The state handles it all and has enough power that most people are forced into compliance which is violence when used in a way that would be violent if done by other people. Taxes. Fines for things like allowing smoking in your restaurant. People that support having that state as the alternative to an anarchy get to own all that though as the cost of doing business. Whether they work for the government or not. None of us get out clean. Whatever the system the piper has to be paid.
“The piper has to be paid.”
I think that’s the important conclusion that nostr:npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl fails to make. I still pay a price to protect myself from violent people even with the existence of the state. But when the state doesn’t exist, the price I pay is cheaper. Why? Because 40% of my wealth is not extorted by the state, I have one less violent entity to deal with (the state), and the free market competes to provide me the best service at the cheapest cost (the opposite of the state). We also all pay a price in avoiding the violence of the state. People use privacy tools to avoid being spied on by dangerous people. Most of the time, it is the state doing the spying as Edward Snowden has shown us. People setup alarm systems in their homes and put steering wheel locks on their cars for a reason. Banks hire private security to transport their money not cops. Concerts and music festivals hire private security not cops. When you go to mall you’ll private security driving around keeping everything safe. And the biggest one is your neighborhood. Most people do their best to live in safe neighborhoods to avoid violent people. Libertarianism doesn’t stop violent people from attacking you and it never claims to do so. But everyone is already doing countless different things trying to protect themselves from violent people all the time. Libertarianism is just an ethical system based on the simple non aggression principle. There will be violent people but there will also be solutions to dealing with these violent people on the free market. The free market will always provide better solutions to problems than a compulsory state can provide. This is a fact. When you accept this fact, everything you believe a state is good for is easily replaced by a superior and cheaper service in the free market.
Going back to your example from before about property disputes. When you accept the premise that a free market always provides better solutions than a state, it becomes clear that arbitration becomes the go to for such disputes. In fact, most disputes over property rights today are resolved outside of the state by independent arbitrators because they are more efficient. If the individual fails to accept the ruling of the arbitration, he can appeal to another arbitrator. He can continue appealing until he runs out of money. Or if he chooses to ignore arbitration, you can hire security and protection yourself. You can provide the rulings of these arbitrations to the agency because they don’t want to damage their own reputation by wrongfully killing the owner of the actual property. Notice the difference here with the state. The agency cares about its reputation and does extra due diligence to make sure not to wrongfully harm someone. In the current system, cops kill people all the time and the state doesn’t receive any consequences. The state doesn’t lose customers over their mistakes. What about the other person’s security agency? Wouldn’t they battle with yours? No because the false owner of the property’s security agency also has a reputation they need to preserve and they don’t want to waste unnecessary resources (e.g. lives of their men, ammunition).
One flaw that people immediately point out is that these entities function like a state and therefore will eventually centralize power and act as a state. But this ignores the fact that the free market always competes with the shortcomings of other businesses. If any of these services try to abuse their customers, an opportunity for a new service to step in and take those customers has just opened up. The best checks and balances for a society come from the natural functions of the free market.
Couple things. Some of us won’t have security agencies. At least at anything beyond a basic tier. There’s other options. For some of us anyway. I got thousands of relatives in this county and the adjacent one. Call it a 50 mile radius. We’ve all got weapons. That can be a ready built equivalent for those eligible for membership but one based on the honor system. Settling it in court also assumes both parties, whom presumably think they are in the right, are willing to accept part of the whole as a compromise or abide by a ruling against them when no one can really intimidate them into it. It also assumes they value giving up what they see as their legitimate claim over spilling blood. Small stuff? Sure. Big stuff? How much blood we talking? How much of it is on the other side? How much is on your side? What are your chances of victory? Those conflicts happened all throughout history in the absence of a state. Maybe they don’t if we get rid of the state but I wouldn’t count on it.
I was talking more about paying the piper in terms of the blood on one’s hands. Government advocates being culpable for everything the government does to keep order. Anarchists like myself being on the hook morally for things like duels and feuds that might very well be inevitable under our preferred system when we could prevent them by exercising violence against everyone on a lesser scale constantly to prevent large flare ups here in there by having an organized force with an effective monopoly on force. Us anarchists making the decision that a certain amount of blood being spilled in disputes where both parties think they are in the right and have sufficient force projection to prevail flare up as the cost of our system being in place. Just like statists should accept the moral negatives of the state as the cost of implementing a system that puts the kybosh on those flare ups.
This is a question that only makes sense to you.
No. It’s a very simple question. You’re either inclined toward violence or peace. Which one is it?
All humans are inclined to peace. Otherwise we'd just go around shooting each other all day and bopping each other on the head.
There is nothing that prevents violence.
Correct there is nothing that prevents violence. Not even the state. So how is the current system run by the state better than libertarianism?
False dichotomy.
What is the other option that an individual may be inclined toward (if not violence or peace)?
You know the peaceful absolutism is ridiculous right? You follow that line and all you'll get is the peace of the grave the second someone who is violent comes along...
That's why they used to kill all of them, way back in the mists of time, can't get payback if you are all dead... 😂
Yep. That’s a great plan if you’ve the stomach for it.
How can two people follow NAP and still lead to violence against one another? Give an example
We have to define libertarian first...
People spergier and more economically liberal than I.
Official definition.
That's the USA perception of libertarian. The other is totally different or the opposite.
You can get a glimpse here
Heh, those are just commies playing ideological dressups. 😂
And this is why the British Isles & Europe can't live together & should stop trying, why keep making each other miserable, both need to just stay in their own corner. 😂
I want to rejoin the European citizen entry queue at borders, it’s like a Disney fast pass you don’t know how much you enjoyed it until it disappears!
That's the normal. USA is the exception. I am talking about the definition of what libertarian is.
So, far right capitalists are making the ideological dressup to justify their unjust profits, someone could say. But that's irrelevant perhaps.
Let me make it simple, leave me the fuck alone & don't steal my shit or else. 😂
And at least two of us in this thread have the training to make good on the or else. 😂
Yeah, me. I've gone through some military training and won awards for rifle.
I like this philosophy.
Some threats require neighbours to work together, though.
And while its everyone's right to be a prick, its also everyone's right to prioritise which pricks they stand up for.
Thou shalt not covet...among those 10 great rules to live by....