Why don't you just get to the point you think you're going to lead me to, where you demonstrate the moral inconsistently in democracy? I'm sure it's going to blow my mind!

Then the question will have to turn to: who decides what those easements are, and what the consequences are if they're not afforded? Then you find yourself in a bit of a pickle: you either admit that the landowner, and his security forces and the disaffected people who don't want to be thrown in the ocean have to work it out on the street with violence to sort of the easement of the right. Or you just stop being utopian and accept something like a democracy where these rules for easements can be hashed out in a uniform way.

You are conceding an easement on Peter's property rights, though, which is violative of Rothbard's natural law principles. Which is fine. I believe such easements must exist, as well. But I'd argue this is a fatal blow to anarcho-capitalist political theory, more generally if you think through the implications of granting this easement based on circumstances. It means the NAP and self-ownership model is not completely self-consistent, and special accordance's need to be made at the limit. So you've really conceded my point.

I understand those things, too! https://twitter.com/brockm/status/1512610095221424129?s=46&t=YsbiLl4x-Kdjfyc37LRu9Q

You'll note that I'm not arguing "the more state, the better". So you're essentially making a straw man argument, here.

I have blocked zero people on Twitter in all my years. No person engaging with me, no matter how caustic and irritating has roused me to the level of blocking them. I am willing to be proven wrong or be persuaded! If someone wants to have a respectful debate with me about how anarcho-capitalism is the future and the philosophical liberals like me are just wrong, everyone knows how to reach me!

🫂

I choose to believe (maybe for my own ego) that they are afraid to debate me, given my status as a former AnCap, and the fact they really don't have a good retort to my arguments against the pathological cases around self-ownership and NAP, so they just wave their hands, say these pathological cases are "unlikely" or "absurd" and then proceed to ignore me.

It's interesting to me that their only response to my arguments is to make an argument from *likelihood*, as if this is an intellectually defensible position. It's no more of an interesting argument than me responding to an AnCap, dismissing all their arguments and saying "well, anarcho-capitalism is highly unlikely, and you can't see that, it's not worth my time talking to you."

That's literally how they're responding to me, while somehow believing they've taken the intellectual high ground. 🤣

I don't know if anybody has noticed, from following me on Twitter: but I don't fear debate. I got panned by many AnCaps for going on WBD to make my anti-AnCap case, instead of going up against a well-armed AnCap to argue against me. But when I responded to these people and offered to jump into a Twitter Space or Clubhouse to debate them, they dismissed the prospect as uninteresting to them. Lol.

I think smart people should be willing to debate smart people of any persuasion. Only being willing to exist in your own intellectual safe zone is not the sign of a confident position.

Oh, and they're supposedly "anti-elitists" to boot, who reject the cult of experts. But when challenged, such challenges are below them, because of how certain they are of their worldview and objectivity. Unlike other experts, their arguments and pronouncements are beyond reproach! The irony. It hurts!

So yes, I tend to believe their wholesale dismissal and refusal to engage is not for the stated reason that I "don't know what I'm talking about". But that they're afraid that I do, and that the debate will not go well for them.

Yeah, I mean, if it would be as trivial as they claim to make an ass out of me, and show, with their superior intellect and grasp of the subject-matter, that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about, I don't get why they demur by saying it's not worth their time to even give my arguments the time of day.

I mean, if it's that easy to take my arguments down, given I'm a pretty high-profile bitcoiner, you think they'd take the opportunity to put me in my place and strengthen their position.

But no. They just block me on Twitter and declare my arguments below them.

*and/or

Oh, he's already declared that listening to my arguments and/is engaging with me is not worth his time! He has already declared I have no idea what I'm talking about.

FWIW: I think you need to first stake out a normative claim, before you can answer the question of whether or not government-intervention is helpful for unhelpful to achieving that goal. I reject the idea that human progress is naturally more fruitful in the absence of the state. There's literally no empirical evidence to believe this is true. It *could* be true. But there's no historical or contemporary examples that would support it, that exist outside pure rational inductions inside of people's minds.

The problem I have with economists talking in terms of "distortions" as a criticism of government-intervention in the economy, is it presupposes the existence of an ideal state of nature. Usually, there's no attempt to describe the basis for this ideal state of nature, other than it's just assumed to be there, emanating from metaphysical claims about natural laws.

The argument then becomes that *all* government interventions are ipso facto a negative distortion that takes you further away from the ideal equilibrium that would emerge if not for the interference of the government.

The problem is, there's absolutely no empirical reason to believe this moral maxima is just floating out there, being distorted away by the existence of states, taxes or even forms of money. My favorite whipping boy, Rothbard, actually kind of realized this, and it's why he detested empiricism so much and disliked both Popper and Hume. Because their philosophical arguments undermined this metaphysical claim, which he believed could be proven to exist through pure reason.

While Rothbard and his contemporary, Hoppe both acknowledge Hume's is-ought dilemma, which is actually quite apropos here -- their routing around it with praxeology and wits Hoppe's "argumentation ethics" is wholly unconvincing and I would argue is borderline intellectual woo woo.

Because other ideologies, like liberalism, don't pretend to be a completely universal, internally consistent, axiomatic moral framework. Liberal philosophers, from Mill to Jefferson, understood and accepted that the balancing of rights equities was not something that could be achieved through *a* *priori* rationalization. But that, it would need to be reevaluated over time, and evolve.

AnCaps mostly cast this insight aside and say: that's wrong. All you need is self-ownership and the non-aggression principle.

Then, when someone like me intuits pathological cases that can emerge from those axioms, dismissing those cases as being incredibly unrealistic because of the human propensity for "cooperation" is just inadequate.

If humans already had this in-built propensity in our nature, then why are we even where we are right now? Humans seem to have just as much of a propensity for seeking out alphas, developing in-group/out-group biases, and falling victim to demagoguery, as they have a propensity to cooperate in groups.

When people start saying things like "no, that's just due to the distortative influence of the state and/or fiat currency" -- without providing a rigorous challenge to the counterfactual, I start to just assume I'm dealing with dogma, goal-seeking and confirmation bias.

Luckily, I was able to isolate the leaks myself. Have a roof deck, and has a hose up there, so it was trivial for me to access my roof and do some leak-testing.

Took me like two hours on New Years Day morning, but I found them!

One of the major downsides of living in drought-ridden Southern California, aside from it being drought-ridden, is if you have a leaky roof, you can go a long time without realizing that your roof has leaks. Probably haven't had a major downpour on my house for two years. And then on New Years Eve, we got nearly a half-inch of rain in about a one hour period.

Well, the water damage is pretty bad, and there's going to be some serious repair work in my bedroom. The nice thing is the developer of my house is already on it, and is warrantying their work.

Which is good. Because apparently a whole bunch of people have simultaneously discovered they have leaky roofs at the same time as me, and roofing companies are currently overwhelmed. 🤣