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Also, I want to clarify something. In my post to gvg I said (blue highlighted):

"By the way, have you ever heard of a tenant claiming that they shouldn't have to pay their apartment owner rent because they own the apartment, not the apartment owner? Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if it happened before, but my point is that despite the issue of ownership not being completely black and white, I think you would agree that it's much clearer that the apartment owner owns and not the tenant, than it is "clear" (to you) that the government owns peoples' land, not the people."-UtF

As highlighted in blue, I said that it wasn't "black and white" if the person "owned" the apartment or if they were just "renting" it. Really whether you want to say if you're renting something (i.e. you're a tenant) or if you own something (as you actually "bought" it, is just a matter of word preference that doesn't really matter. In reality the degree to which one "owns" something and the degree to which one is "renting" something is clearly defined in the contractual document in which the person "bought"/"rented" the something from the prior owner.

To clarify, while we generally say that people "own" condos, but merely "rent" apartments, the person who "owns" the condo doesn't really own it in its entirety (and is thus still "renting" it in a sense) due to the fact that the condo owner is obligated to pay a regular fee to the condominium complex owner (company). An example of someone owning something in its entirety would thus be someone who owns a house, as that person is not obligated to pay any condo fees to any "real owner" of the house, in the way that a condo "owner" and an apartment tenant is obligated to pay condo/rent fees to the "real owner" of the condo/apartment.

So while condos fall between houses and apartments on the spectrum of complete ownership to complete rent. In some senses we say that condo owners "own" their condos because failure to pay the condo fee does not result in a quick eviction in the way that failure to pay rent fees to your apartment owner results in a fast eviction. So in reality though, the degree to which the house owner vs the condo "owner" vs the apartment tenant ""owner"" owns their home is clearly defined in the contract that the person agreed to when they purchased/rented their home. A home owner owns their home completely because they are not obligated to pay any regular fees (e.g. taxes (as they're illegitimate), or condo fees, or rent fees). The condo owner only owns their condo to the degree defined in their contract in that they are required to pay condo fees and there are certain defined consequences for not paying the condo fees. The same is true for apartments except that in general since one does not generally pay an up front cost to "buy" the apartment, but rather pays for it 100% as they go with rent, then we generally say that the degree to which they "own" the house is less than the degree to which a condo owner owns the house. So while this "degree" may seem to be a gray area rather than something that is "black and white" (as I said above), the truth of the matter though is that this gray area is very well defined in the contractual agreement in which the person buys the condo, apartment, etc.

So while I said earlier that it wasn't "black and white" really what I meant is that you can say that someone rents and apartment or buys and apartment or rents a condo or buys a condo and it doesn't really matter--it's just a preference for words. What matters is the defined obligations in the contractual agreements for the apartment tenant and condo "owner" defining what they are obligated to pay on a regular basis, etc, and importantly what the consequences for not pay will be.

So while we take the fact that the consequences of a condo owner not paying the condo fee as not as severe as the consequences of the apartment owner not paying the rent as a reason for saying that the condo owner "owns" the condo whereas the apartment tenant is just "renting" the condo, what really matters is not whether we use the term "owns" or "rent" but rather what is the defined obligations to the condo owner and apartment tenant to pay and what the defined consequences are for not paying.

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Also, gvg, I haven't forgotten about your earlier post, but given the amount of what I just wrote and the large amount of unfinished discussion on the subject quag and I are currently on, I'm going to postpone replying to your post (as it will surely bring up more topics again for a larger discussion) until later.

EDIT: Although really in your post you just restated things (monopolies, etc) that you think can't be dealt with without governments that necessarily violate the Non-Aggression Principle, and while there is definitely more than I can say that we haven't already covered, we have covered such issues before in this thread and I'm not too sure what good it will accomplish for me to rant on about the many ways to deal with such issues as monopolies without using aggression again.

Also, you wanted me to outline my general objection to taxation being legitimate, but really as the government uses force to collect taxes (note: an apartment owner could possibly use force (although would not necessarily use it... non-forceful means could be use to get tenants to pay rent such as systems of economic ostracism) to collect pay from a tenant if that force was defined and agreed upon in the contract) the burden of proof is thus on the government-legitimacy side to justify that use of force as a non-aggressive use of force that is acceptable under NAP. And as quag has tried out some arguments in justification of this enforced imposition of taxation ranging from his benefit argument (which he dropped) to his current contractual obligation argument, all of which I am already providing the criticisms for, I don't see a need to restate all of the criticisms again in a post to you. For the latest criticism, for example, I've already stated to quag in recent posts that his contractual obligation argument fails because when I bought my house I wasn't under any obligation to meet anyone's requirements of pay except for the person I bought my house from (i.e. not the government as the government doesn't own my property and didn't own my property (i.e. I didn't my house from the government)).

Edited by Use the Force
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My stuff's in red, but before I begin with the line by line:

Who the hell was the first to legitimately own it then? The Native Americans? I could see that, of course, but then you should be arguing to give the Native Americans back all their land. Are you fighting for that? Because think about it, you say that even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land (yes, they got screwed in the deal, no one disputes this, but you think voluntary contracts are OK, and since they were voluntary, it's exactly like the bad deals homeowners made recently with the mortgage stuff.)

Now, to the specifics...

It's not unarguable at all. How did the US government gain ownership of the territory of Louisiana? Buy buying it from another government that claimed ownership of that land (the French government) without legitimacy meaning that the US government didn't legitimately own the land after they paid the French for it. The French's claim of ownership over the Louisiana territory was no more legitimate than a claim by some Joe Shmoe living on the east cost of the US or a Joe Shmoe living in Europe that they owned the land. The US government then went in to the territory and committed genocide against the native Americans living there and used force against people who didn't accept their claim of ownership to violently gain physical "authority" over the land. In reality though they didn't have actual authority over the land, only the "authority" of superior force. And also don't forget that the US government financed the land purchase with taxpayer's money. If Mafia A sells "their" territory to Mafia B, not only does Mafia B still not own the territory, but also Mafia B bought the territory with stolen money adding another reason why it's not legitimate.

OK, a couple of things. First off, even though you may not like it, conquest is a legitimate means of getting land, otherwise you have to give your land back to the Native Americans. After all, the entire reason you can even think to own it is because of previous conquests. Also, the Native American genocides were horrible; again, no one disputes that. What would I have done? I would have encouraged the settlers to live among the Natives peacefully. Obviously that would ave been wonderful. Thing is, it wasn't happening because the settlers were being attacked, and vice versa. The government made the wrong decision, but it thought at the time (supported by the populace) that what it was doing was helping their people. They were wrong, obviously. Also, the government used taxpayer money... to give taxpayers more places to live. It's not like they didn't benefit (the taxpayers I mean). They got land, and they got it gratefully.

The French had authority because they conquered it (and if you don't think conquering something means legitimate ownership, you go ahead and return you land to the natives. But do realize that that would mean a redrawing of the world maps and the collapse of the US (including the return of all US citizens back to Europe, because after all, we aren't here legitimately.

Again, the English government's claim to the land consisting of the thirteen original American colonies was again just as empty a claim. At this point I'm guessing that Dawh is going to want to reply to my post saying that by my standards of legitimacy nobody can then have a legitimate claim to own land, but this isn't true. The American colonists living in the American colonies agreeing on trades of land with each other voluntarily free of any violence most certainly had much stronger claims to owning the land then the government that tyrannical ruled over them. But you forget how they got this land: By it being granted to them by the same British Empire that took the land. Therefore, they didn't have it legitimately either. Once again, a return of all land to the Natives.So while the concept of ownership may not be black and white it is still certainly clear that some claims of ownership are much more (or less) legitimate than others. And when it comes to the English government's claim of owning the American colonies or the French's government claim of the territory of Louisiana, or even the US government's claim of owning all of the geographic United States, it is clear that while we may not be able to say with black and white certainty that they had no claim to the land, we can still say with confidence that their claims to the land lacked a lot of legitimacy, at least in comparison to the individual's claims of owning the land that they lived on and acquired and began using peaceably and voluntarily without using coercion.

Actually, they are equal, since the latter could not exist without the former. The only ones who can claim full legitimate ownership of land if you do not include conquest as legitimate are the Natives.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! ??? You said "Or conquered in the Mexican American War" and yet you're acting as if that is a legitimate means of gaining ownership of the land? Seriously, a war?? What about the Mexicans who were living on the land before the US decided to attack with force? Why do you think there claims to the land are illegitimate? Well, according to you they are because they got it after revolting from the Spanish who took it from the Natives. Again, back to the Natives Because they were too weak to defend themselves against the mighty US government? Ha, wow. I know the concept of ownership isn't a black and white issue, but in cases as blatant as this it's hard to believe that you'd look at the war and then say the US government justly acquired the land.

Once again, we are left to conclude that we must return all land to the natives. You first.

Again, the British government's claim to the land wasn't legitimate in the first place. Although, for the sake of argument, even if we say it was legitimate, can you really say that the trade of the land from the British government to the US government was just? Yes. Revolutions are legitimate ways of getting land. Otherwise, again, we must return all land to the natives.You could say that the British "voluntarily" agreed to give up the land in the Treaty of Versailles, but that would be dishonest as you'd be ignoring the war that proceeded the treaty. For example, if I went to your house with a few of my friends and some guns and we had a nice battle between us and then eventually you said, "Wait! Cease fire! Okay, I'll give in! You can have my land!" then certainly it would be inaccurate to say that you "voluntarily" gave up your land to me. And thus, even if you legitimately owned your land in the first place I wouldn't be able to honestly say after the battle that I owned the land, as my means of getting you to sign the treaty to get you to give up the land involved using force against you and thus wasn't legitimate. Again, that's fine if you don't want to include conquest in your definition of legitimate ownership, but then you have to give you land back to the Natives. And besides, your going to roll your eyes when you read this, but your group of friends is not a nation. If France attacked the US and took the East coast, I'd either have to accept being under French rule or I'd have to move West. Or we do as you say and return the land to the Natives.So despite the superiority of my force to yours my claim to your land still wouldn't be justified, just as the US government didn't justly "acquire" the land from the British government (presuming the British justly owned the land in the first place remember, although of course I reject this claim).

So again, no, essentially for the two reasons that:

1) The former "owners" of the land didn't justly own the land in the first place and so any act of selling this land to another entity does not make that entity a legitimate owner of the land, and

2) In the case of the Treaty of Versailles and the Louisiana Purchase (among many other cases that you didn't specifically mention), the US government used force against the British government and Native Americans(/other people with claims to the land) respectively to forcefully either make them "voluntarily" (not really voluntarily) give up the land (Versailles's Treaty and Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and other treaties following the Indian Removal Act of 1830) or just plain violently forced them out of the land (or killed them on it) (referring to Native American genocide). The Native American genocides were obviously horrible, but it has nothing to do with land ownership. the only reason it really happened was because of 1. Racism and 2. The settlers didn't like continuing to live next to people who were trying to kill them. It was badly handled (it may have been better to say that any attack on the settlers would be met with equal force or something, I dunno), but is irrelevant to the ownership part, since the US already had the land. (Or we go by what you're saying and accept that we must return all land to the Natives.

So no, the government is not renting out the land I live on. Rather, the mafia (a slightly nicer mafia than the mafias people usually call "mafias", although still a violent, coercive, tyrannical mafia)Yes, because a democratic nation that protects your rights is so horrible because it takes some of your money is using its far superior amount of violent force to get people like me to pay taxes against our will simply for living on land that we believe we have a far greater claim of ownership for than the government (<-- acknowledging that the issue of property ownership is not completely black and white, but still saying that it is quite clear that private individuals own their land despite the governments that tax them under your justification that the governments own the private peoples' land). Again, the latter could not occur without the former

By the way, have you ever heard of a tenant claiming that they shouldn't have to pay their apartment owner rent because they own the apartment, not the apartment owner? Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised if it happened before, but my point is that despite the issue of ownership not being completely black and white, I think you would agree that it's much clearer that the apartment owner owns and not the tenant, than it is "clear" (to you) that the government owns peoples' land, not the people.

And a last point for now, in a stateless society if a property ownership dispute were to arise (as I'm sure they would since the issue isn't black and white), nobody would tolerate the people involved in the dispute battling it out with force. On an individual level, and even internationally now for those in the UN, they don't. unless you count going to court as violent, in which your DRO is quite violent.Instead, if some tenant claimed that he owned his owner's apartment, rather than using force against that tenant (to get him to pay his rent) like governments do in our current society, non-violent alternatives to dealing with the problem such as economic ostracism would be used instead. This is one of the things I forgot. The rich look at this sentence and think, 'Oh goodie! I can do whatever I want!' Why? Well, if they are ostracized, they simply move to another DRO jurisdiction, either by private jet or whatever. The poor are screwed. What can they do? Assuming it's a HUGE DRO area (that it 'controls'), they couldn't do anything. Heck, even if it was small enough that they can get to a neighboring one, the news of their crime would reach the neighbor. The rich guy can avoid this, he'll just move to California.For example, people could put economic pressure on his employer to get him to fire the tenant employee unless he paid his rent. Also though chances are the apartment owner would have put in the contract with the tenant something about what would happen if the tenant didn't pay his rent so as to deal with the possible dispute before it happened. For example, the contract could say that as a condition of renting the apartment that if the tenant refused to pay at some point (e.g. for the reason that the tenant now thinks he owns the apartment) then force could be used against him to make him leave the house (the force would likely be defined) given X days/weeks of warning after the failure to pay. And so, as the tenant would have agreed to this use of force before moving in then it wouldn't be an initiation of force and would be entirely consistent with NAP. Anyways, I'm just mentioning this because in the past on this thread you all have doubted that such simple disputes as these are solvable without initiating violence against people Court isn't violent. The government doesn't shoot people over rent fees and so I just wanted to remind you again that there certainly are ways of dealing with these problems without violence and so again there's no reason for you all to support such violence. Initiations of force are not necessary, but rather are immoral, When did this become objective morality? They ARE occasionally necessary, though things should be done to avoid them, and they AREN'T necessarily immoral (for instance, let's say we knew that some country was going to fire nukes at us tomorrow. Would we wait until AFTER they attacked us, or would we attack now to make sure we aren't blown to bits? and you all don't have to go on continuing believing that they're not always immoral due to the false reason that sometimes initiating violence is necessary to get society to function properly (i.e. avoid collapsing and spiraling into chaos, which is still, at this point in the thread, what you all seem to think will happen in a free society).

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As for your most recent post that I just saw: What if I reject NAP? Because not for nothing, but I'm not entirely sure that it works. For instance, the only reason Ghandi's actions worked is because it was against a government that wasn't totalitarian/screw the populace, and that accepted the world's criticism. If he had done that against, say, China or NK, we would leran about the futile attempts of an Indian man to break away peacefully, which led to his death and a bloody revolution (of course, according to you, that would then mean India wouldn't legitimately have its land).

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GVG the NAP like the logic to his arguements exists only in UTF's mind.

He continues to spout BS and pretend black is white, up is down. Sorry I will not bother with this anymore as UTF is so far down the rabbit hole he will pobably never find his way back.

If you want to start a thread on what govt should do about debt/deficit that could be interresting to discuss. though Im not american what happens to you guys has an imprtant impact on us up here, so it kinda does concern me.

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Again, the English government's claim to the land consisting of the thirteen original American colonies was again just as empty a claim. At this point I'm guessing that Dawh is going to want to reply to my post saying that by my standards of legitimacy nobody can then have a legitimate claim to own land, but this isn't true.

Well, you knocked that one out of the park. Except for that last clause. So I guess it was a foul ball. :mellow: Still 13-0, bottom of the ninth.

The American colonists living in the American colonies agreeing on trades of land with each other voluntarily free of any violence most certainly had much stronger claims to owning the land then the government that tyrannical ruled over them. So while the concept of ownership may not be black and white it is still certainly clear that some claims of ownership are much more (or less) legitimate than others. And when it comes to the English government's claim of owning the American colonies or the French's government claim of the territory of Louisiana, or even the US government's claim of owning all of the geographic United States, it is clear that while we may not be able to say with black and white certainty that they had no claim to the land, we can still say with confidence that their claims to the land lacked a lot of legitimacy, at least in comparison to the individual's claims of owning the land that they lived on and acquired and began using peaceably and voluntarily without using coercion.

You haven't provided any basis for ownership in any of your arguments. If ownership is not intrinsic (and you agree that it isn't), then there must be some sort of agreement between people regarding how ownership is decided. As I've never met you or signed any contract with you (or anyone in your community), what stops me from driving over to NH, visiting your house, taking whatever interests me and driving back home? I've never signed a contract with you saying that I recognize the legitimacy of your property "ownership." And if I don't recognized the legitimacy of your ownership, then I'm not even breaking NAP if I take things "from" you since there's no theft (and presumably no aggression if it's not theft).

Your whole premise relies on ownership, so without a workable definition, you really have no argument at all. We frown on "stealing" from each other in this society because we have an implicit contract with each other. Do you deny that? You don't steal from me because you implicitly understand that I "own" the stuff in my house, and I don't "steal" from you for the same reason. So these implicit contracts do exist, right? I would call these implicit contracts "Social Contracts."

One more time: we've decided as a group that the world is far too complicated for each of us to handle individually, so we've banded together in communities to strengthen ourselves. We are smarter and stronger in groups, so we recognize the benefits of forming societies. But once the community gets too large for everyone to know every other individual, we need some underlying basis for interacting with strangers. We obviously can't all sign a document affirming our acceptance of the rules because there are just too many people. So we have to decide on a course of action based on general consensus. The Social Contract.

All of our rules dealing with each other are based on artificial constructs. Some people believe in "Natural" or "Heavenly" laws, but none of us have been talking about those here. Therefore, every rule that we've discussed here is mutable. There is no rule here that can be universally "immoral" without some sort of Natural or godly law passed down to us from some higher authority. If we deny Natural law exists, then we have to make our own rules, which may change with changing circumstances. But there are far too many people and far too many ways in which we interact to delineate all possible situations in a single document that everyone can sign. So we create implicit agreements to govern our interactions with the larger world. Do you disagree with this?

If it's possible to have implicit agreements ruling our interactions with each other, why is it impossible to have legitimate governments created to adjudicate over them (possibly created by another such implicit contract)? :unsure:

Though, as it stands, until you can satisfactorily explain to me why you "own" the stuff you claim as your property, I'm not really interested in the rest of your arguments, since they are all dependent on the premise of ownership. If no one owns anything, then there can be no theft (taxation or otherwise). If no one owns anything, they cannot be economically ostracized since there is nothing anyone possess to offer in trade. (Just for fun, if the US government economically ostracized you for not paying your taxes, would that make it okay? :P )

So until you explain ownership to me without Social Contracts, I'm through responding to you. -_-

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Who the hell was the first to legitimately own it then? The Native Americans? I could see that, of course, but then you should be arguing to give the Native Americans back all their land. Are you fighting for that? Because think about it, you say that even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land

Wait, what are you saying? I lost you when you said, "you say that even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land." I was going to say that certainly not all of the European settlers invaded America with force (i.e. many of them obtained their land in America by legitimate non-violent means), but then you said "even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land" and now I'm doubting that I understand your point so maybe my response isn't on target.

"First off, even though you may not like it, conquest is a legitimate means of getting land, otherwise you have to give your land back to the Native Americans."

No, it's not. Conquest is an act of aggressive violence--it's in clear violation of the non-aggression principle. As for the part about the Native Americans, again as I said above not all land in America was conquered violently from the Native Americans. Although, for the sake of argument, even if all of the land was forcefully seized from the Native Americans, that would not justify conquest as a legitimate means of gaining ownership of something.

"And besides, your going to roll your eyes when you read this, but your group of friends is not a nation. If France attacked the US and took the East coast, I'd either have to accept being under French rule or I'd have to move West."

I don't believe in states/nations. I disagree with you that if some of my friends and I conquered your house with force then that would be legitimate. It most certainly wouldn't be legitimate. If you say otherwise then we really can't argue with each other as the differences in are views are just a matter of differences in axiomatic principles. If I break into your house and point a gun at you and say get out, the house isn't legitimately mine. And similarly, when you come back with some other people with guns and force me out of your house, the house isn't now yours because you just reconquered it, but rather it is yours because it was yours originally before I forced you out with a gun.

If the act of conquest was a major war many years ago and the original legitimate owners of the property are long dead then there's really nothing else we can do but reestablish who the rightful owners of the property are. Hopefully that will be easy because the property will have been traded around voluntarily free of any violent conquest for a long time and so whoever happens to be the current owner of the stolen property that is traded around now becomes, in a practical sense that we must accept as we have no reasonable alternative, the legitimate owner. This does not mean that the original act of conquest was legitimate though, it just means that years later in order to retain are concept of ownership which is necessary to us to have a prosperous society, we have to settle on a new understanding of who legitimately owns what. So applying this to the European settlers who forcefully conquered much of the native American's land from them, now hundreds of years later we can say that you own your property and I own mine. It would also thus not make sense to say that the government owns our property due to the fact that it was the government institution itself that committed the illegitimate conquest of the land in the first place. To make another common sense analogy, if a thief steals something and sells it to you, and then you sell it to someone else, and then you use the money you make by selling it to buy something from someone else, and then that person uses that money to buy something from someone else, etc, the more time that goes on and the more transactions that take place, and the more that people can't possibly tell that they're buying and selling things that were stolen from somebody years ago, the more legitimate the transactions become. Again though, it's important to note that the original act of conquest or theft is still not legitimate even though we now call the current (many years later) owner of the piece of conquered or stolen property as the legitimate owner of the property. You can see this even in the short term actually. For example, if I steal something and sell it to you and you had no reason to suspect that I stole the property I was selling from you, then isn't your ownership of that property after you buy it from me more legitimate than my ownership after I stole it from whoever?

"because a democratic nation that protects your rights is so horrible because it takes some of your money"

It's "so horrible" because it initiates violence against people, just like all tyrannical governments and people. It doesn't matter if a thief goes into your house with a gun, demanding all of your money, your computer, your TV, your refrigerator, etc, etc, and then gives it all to people poorer than you--he still stole the stuff from you and thus it's still wrong. Also, what would you think of the thief stealing from you if he himself was living a semi-luxurious life? Wouldn't you say at the very least that before thinking of stealing stuff from you to give to the poor he should first give up as much of his own wealth as he could to the poor without dying from starvation himself, before going after you to steal your property to give to the poor? This guy makes the same point getting to the end of his article: http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

At the end of the article he finishes with the point:

"The problem, however, with violating libertarian law for special exigencies is that these occurrences are more commonplace than supposed. Right now, there are numerous people dying of starvation in poor parts of the world. Some are suffering from illnesses which could be cured cheaply, e.g., by penicillin. We have all read those advertisements placed by aid agencies: "Here is little Maria. You can save her, and her entire village, by sending us some modest amount of money each month."

In point of fact, many so called libertarians who have attacked the non-aggression axiom on these emergency grounds live in housing of a middle class level or better; drive late model cars; eat well; have jewelry; send their children to pricey colleges. If they truly believed in their critiques, none of this would be true. For if the cabin owner and the apartment dweller are to give up their property rights to save the hiker and the flagpole hanger, then they must give up their comfortable middle class life styles in behalf of all the easily cured sick and starving people in the world. That they have not done so shows they do not even take their own arguments seriously.

The logical implication of their coercive welfarist argument is far worse than merely being required to give a few dollars a month to a relief agency. For suppose they do this. Their standard of living will still be far greater than those on the verge of death from straightened circumstances. No, as long as these relatively rich "libertarians" have enough money to keep themselves from dying from poverty, the logic of their argument compels them to give every penny they own over and above that level to alleviate the plight of the endangered poor." - From http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

"On an individual level, and even internationally now for those in the UN, they don't ["tolerate the people involved in the dispute battling it out with force"]. unless you count going to court as violent, in which your DRO is quite violent"

No. Going to court does count as violent because the government enforces the court's rulings with violence. On the other hand, DROs do not violently enforce their rulings, contrary to your statement that they are "quite violent." Do you really not know this after our big discussion on DROs (and after reading my sentence following your quote: "instead, if some tenant claimed that he owned his owner's apartment, rather than using force against that tenant (to get him to pay his rent) like governments do in our current society, non-violent alternatives to dealing with the problem such as economic ostracism would be used instead.")? Surely after reading that sentence immediately after mistakenly writing "in which your DRO is quite violent" you should have gone back and corrected your mistake....

"This is one of the things I forgot. The rich look at this sentence and think, 'Oh goodie! I can do whatever I want!' Why? Well, if they are ostracized, they simply move to another DRO jurisdiction, either by private jet or whatever. The poor are screwed. What can they do? Assuming it's a HUGE DRO area (that it 'controls'), they couldn't do anything. Heck, even if it was small enough that they can get to a neighboring one, the news of their crime would reach the neighbor. The rich guy can avoid this, he'll just move to California."

I've told you many times that this is an empty fear you have, but you still go on thinking that initiating violence against people is necessary to resolve disputes... it's crazy. Anyways, didn't you (or was it just dawh?) say earlier that you thought wealth was power, not violence? How is it that these poor people you speak of are "screwed" if they can get the wealthy "powerful" people to move all the way to California without so much as even threatening to raise a gun at them and while being so poor? If some wealthy guy in town steals something you've just demonstrated that you yourself don't think that using violence against such rich thieves is necessary to deal with them. Unless by "deal with them" you want to use violence against them to lock them up or kill them or harm them in some other way as "punishment" for their crime then really the aggressive violence that you support isn't necessary. And again, you seem to be comparing my suggested non-violent methods of dealing with such criminals and disputes to a perfect world (nirvana fallacy). In reality you should be comparing it to what we have now, a state that acts as a monopolistic coercion apparatus that nobody can stand a chance to defend themselves against. What happens when the wealthy man steals something in this society? Can't he just pay off the law enforcement people (bribe them) to get himself free? What are the poor to do then? People are selfish--if you give a group of people (the state) the legal right to initiate violence against others they aren't going to protect the poor. They are going to inevitably accept bribes from wealthy lobbyists and wealthy criminals because its in their self-interests to do so. You can "reform" the system to reduce as much of this as you can, but you will never remove enough of the injustice as you would remove by removing the coercive institution itself that is responsible for providing the injustice to the wealthy people that can pay the coercive institution off for the favor to turn a blind eye to their crimes

"Court isn't violent. The government doesn't shoot people over rent fees"

The government generally doesn't shoot people over rent fees because people would rather be evicted from their apartments than be killed. When the police finally come to the apartment with their guns in their holsters and demand they get out they submit to the police's demands because they know that they stand no chance resisting it and would rather submit to it then die resisting. If you really still can't see that the government uses force (violence) against people in such instances though....

"When did this become objective morality? They ARE occasionally necessary, though things should be done to avoid them, and they AREN'T necessarily immoral (for instance, let's say we knew that some country was going to fire nukes at us tomorrow. Would we wait until AFTER they attacked us, or would we attack now to make sure we aren't blown to bits?"

Oh god, we're in trouble. Do you support the US government's bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki too? If there's something to be called evil it is the position that you support--the position that initiating violence against people can ever be moral or just. You really are a tyrant even though you think you are helping people.

"Oh, but he had good intentions."

"But he murdered countless innocent people."

"Yes, but with good intentions!"

'Good intentions' don't matter. It's what people actually do that matters. I'm not quite sure what made me feel that I should say this. Maybe it's because I think you have "good intentions" when you support attacking people in an effort to not get nuked and yet on the other hand the attacks that you support are utterly immoral. So again, it's what you do that matters, not your "good" intentions. If you support such utterly immoral things as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I can't pretend to use your "good" intentions as an excuse to tolerate your support of such evils. What you actually support is wrong even if your intentions are good and thus I can't and I don't tolerate what you're saying.

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Well, you knocked that one out of the park. Except for that last clause. So I guess it was a foul ball. :mellow: Still 13-0, bottom of the ninth.

You haven't provided any basis for ownership in any of your arguments. If ownership is not intrinsic (and you agree that it isn't), then there must be some sort of agreement between people regarding how ownership is decided. As I've never met you or signed any contract with you (or anyone in your community), what stops me from driving over to NH, visiting your house, taking whatever interests me and driving back home? I've never signed a contract with you saying that I recognize the legitimacy of your property "ownership." And if I don't recognized the legitimacy of your ownership, then I'm not even breaking NAP if I take things "from" you since there's no theft (and presumably no aggression if it's not theft).

Your whole premise relies on ownership, so without a workable definition, you really have no argument at all. We frown on "stealing" from each other in this society because we have an implicit contract with each other. Do you deny that? You don't steal from me because you implicitly understand that I "own" the stuff in my house, and I don't "steal" from you for the same reason. So these implicit contracts do exist, right? I would call these implicit contracts "Social Contracts."

One more time: we've decided as a group that the world is far too complicated for each of us to handle individually, so we've banded together in communities to strengthen ourselves. We are smarter and stronger in groups, so we recognize the benefits of forming societies. But once the community gets too large for everyone to know every other individual, we need some underlying basis for interacting with strangers. We obviously can't all sign a document affirming our acceptance of the rules because there are just too many people. So we have to decide on a course of action based on general consensus. The Social Contract.

All of our rules dealing with each other are based on artificial constructs. Some people believe in "Natural" or "Heavenly" laws, but none of us have been talking about those here. Therefore, every rule that we've discussed here is mutable. There is no rule here that can be universally "immoral" without some sort of Natural or godly law passed down to us from some higher authority. If we deny Natural law exists, then we have to make our own rules, which may change with changing circumstances. But there are far too many people and far too many ways in which we interact to delineate all possible situations in a single document that everyone can sign. So we create implicit agreements to govern our interactions with the larger world. Do you disagree with this?

If it's possible to have implicit agreements ruling our interactions with each other, why is it impossible to have legitimate governments created to adjudicate over them (possibly created by another such implicit contract)? :unsure:

Though, as it stands, until you can satisfactorily explain to me why you "own" the stuff you claim as your property, I'm not really interested in the rest of your arguments, since they are all dependent on the premise of ownership. If no one owns anything, then there can be no theft (taxation or otherwise). If no one owns anything, they cannot be economically ostracized since there is nothing anyone possess to offer in trade. (Just for fun, if the US government economically ostracized you for not paying your taxes, would that make it okay? :P )

So until you explain ownership to me without Social Contracts, I'm through responding to you. -_-

Oh gee, okay. I'll try tackling this tomorrow (I'm about to go to sleep in a minute), but I'll post my initial thoughts first. A summary of my initial thoughts is that I can't argue for ownership (how can I if I don't think the concept is intrinsic?), but I don't think you can either even using the "social contract" (I'll try refuting your social contract argument clearly tomorrow). I realize in your last sentence of your post though used the word "explain" rather than "argue for." To that, I think I can "explain" ownership to you: individuals decide on their own subjectively who owns what and then act accordingly (either violently with force or non-violently with non-forceful actions or both). I think this is a perfectly reasonable explanation in comparison to your social contract explanation in which you essentially say that the government is an entity that represents a "social contract" in a society and that government entity then subjectively decides who owns what and acts accordingly. Having a government doesn't solve the problem of who owns what being subjective. And I don't think that having a government helps with making ownership more fair (i.e. help make there be less theft) because what makes the government entity special is that it has far more force/power than any other entity in its geographic region thus eliminating competition of enforcement of property ownership. I think this inevitably results in corruption, abuse of power, and thus "theft" by the government as there are no other competing entities of physical force in the government's geographic region to deter the government from abusing its power. Who watches the watchers? Other watchers. I think it's best to distribute physical power as widely as possible in order to avoid this abuse of power, meaning no central government for sure and ideally many private security businesses with competing power over single geographic points. Currently no entity stands a chance standing up against the US government with physical force anywhere in the geographic United States, but ideally no entity should have a monopoly of force in any geographic region, even if that geographic region is much smaller than the geographic US or even if it is as small as a single town. The only monopoly of force in a geographic region which would be a good thing would be a monopoly of force over private property like one's house. It would be fine if you had a monopoly of physical power over your home, but if you have a single entity with a monopoly of physical power over a town or city or state or whole nation or the world, then surely there will inevitably be abuses of that power, and in general the larger the monopoly the more abuse there is going to be. And also, you might again think that by anarchy society would decay into civil war, but I insist that just like the fact that competing nation entities of physical power refrain from civil war in North America or Europe so can competing armed security businesses and armed individuals refrain from breaking into civil war. In fact, I think that the more localized the physical power becomes (the more widespread the physical power is) the less actual violent conflict there will be. I think nations go to war quite often because the wars don't show their effects on the people in government waging the wars too personally. On the other hand, if you and your neighbor both were armed and you had a dispute over where your property ended and your neighbor's property began I think you would be much less likely to go to violent war with your neighbor than countries having the same dispute would be due to the fact that you and your neighbor would feel the costs of war personally whereas the people in governments who fight wars offload many of the negative costs of wars to others and manage to not feel them personally too much. So anyways, I was planning on being asleep right now, but I guess I said a little more than my initial reaction.

A few more quick things:

You haven't provided any basis for ownership in any of your arguments. If ownership is not intrinsic (and you agree that it isn't), then there must be some sort of agreement between people regarding how ownership is decided.

I'm not sure what you mean by "there must be." Does there really have to be an agreement? What if people don't agree? Then isn't there clearly not an agreement on who owns what and who gets to decide who owns what? This is one reason why I don't see why you say it is meaningful to say there is a "social contract." Where's the contract if two people disagree on who owns what? There clearly is no contract (agreement) ("social contract") about who owns what if they explicitly disagree on who owns what and clearly they don't agree on who gets to decide who owns what either (presumably they both think that they each get to decide who owns what themselves).

As I've never met you or signed any contract with you (or anyone in your community), what stops me from driving over to NH, visiting your house, taking whatever interests me and driving back home? I've never signed a contract with you saying that I recognize the legitimacy of your property "ownership." And if I don't recognized the legitimacy of your ownership, then I'm not even breaking NAP if I take things "from" you since there's no theft (and presumably no aggression if it's not theft).

You're right that you wouldn't be breaking NAP. While I have said many times throughout this thread that I think NAP is correct absolutely, 100% of the time, due to the non-absoluteness of the concept of ownership this does make NAP not the most useful of concepts because as you said, if people disagree about who owns what, then the people disagree on whether the use of force is an act of aggression or not.

On to the question what stops you from taking my stuff: Force and non-forceful deterrents are stopping you from driving over to my house and walking away with my stuff. Whether this be people threatening to go after you with guns if you take "my" stuff or whether it be people threatening you with non-violent actions such as your friends threatening to stop being friends with you for doing what they consider stealing (even if you yourself don't agree that it's theft as you disagree on who owns the items). This is true with or without a government and with or without either you or I believing in the concept of a "social contract." It is peoples' actions and words describing what their actions may be that deter other people from "stealing" peoples' property.

We could have a government to provide the violent forceful deterrent for taking "my" stuff or we could have non-governmental people threaten the same force against you for taking "my" stuff. As governments have monopolies of physical power/force in their geographic regions, however, then as I said earlier there aren't any "watchers" to watch them and thus I think that this inevitably will result in abuse and corruption of that power because people are selfish and so if they have the physical power to benefit from acts of "theft" then they will. I don't see how the government helps the problem of who owns what at all and in fact I think it hurts the problem due to the fact that the government has a monopoly of physical force and thus corruption and abuse of that power is inevitable. Whether it be congressmen taking bribes to redirect the government physical force in one unjust way or another or whether it be police taking bribes to turn a blind eye to a crime, it will happen inevitably in some form or another because people are selfish and thus giving people monopolistic physical power with governments will lead to corruption and abuse of that power. You can say that government should be reformed to provide "watchers" within the government itself so that various people in the government don't abuse its power, but it won't happen as it never has happened in any government in history. Governments always grow into corruption and abuse of power due to humans' selfish human nature and the nature of governments to have monopolistic physical power over people living in certain geographic regions.

Anyways, that was supposed to just be my initial thoughts. I'll try actually arguing the exact points you wanted me to argue more hopefully tomorrow.

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Wait, what are you saying? I lost you when you said, "you say that even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land." I was going to say that certainly not all of the European settlers invaded America with force (i.e. many of them obtained their land in America by legitimate non-violent means), but then you said "even though the Native Americans oftentimes sold the land" and now I'm doubting that I understand your point so maybe my response isn't on target.

"First off, even though you may not like it, conquest is a legitimate means of getting land, otherwise you have to give your land back to the Native Americans."

No, it's not. Conquest is an act of aggressive violence--it's in clear violation of the non-aggression principle. You know, you really are assuming that everybody here accepts NAP. I'm still not sure I do, since I seem to be 'violating' it in multiple ways. As for the part about the Native Americans, again as I said above not all land in America was conquered violently from the Native Americans. Which does include the East Coast. All the settlers did was fight back if they were attacked, but most of the actual deals were made on the East coast(if you find something saying I'm wrong, I'd be glad to hear it). SO then, according to you, the English had the East coast, so when the Revolution happened, and the ownership switched over, the US now owned the land. So then, you living on the East Coast, should be paying 'rent' Although, for the sake of argument, even if all of the land was forcefully seized from the Native Americans, that would not justify conquest as a legitimate means of gaining ownership of something. Then I guess we have to return the land to the Natives. They would love the news. Because if it isn't legitimate ownership, then the Natives should have all the land.

"And besides, your going to roll your eyes when you read this, but your group of friends is not a nation. If France attacked the US and took the East coast, I'd either have to accept being under French rule or I'd have to move West."

I don't believe in states/nations. Well the thing is, they exist. And your friends are not a nation. So once again, your hypothetical is irrelevant. I disagree with you that if some of my friends and I conquered your house with force then that would be legitimate. It most certainly wouldn't be legitimate. If you say otherwise then we really can't argue with each other as the differences in are views are just a matter of differences in axiomatic principles. Well, if we replace your group of friends with nations (since once again, your friends aren't countries), and you still don't consider that legitimate (as you don't, from what I'm getting), then I guess it is a difference in axiomatic principles If I break into your house and point a gun at you and say get out, the house isn't legitimately mine. And similarly, when you come back with some other people with guns and force me out of your house, the house isn't now yours because you just reconquered it, but rather it is yours because it was yours originally before I forced you out with a gun.

If the act of conquest was a major war many years ago and the original legitimate owners of the property are long dead then there's really nothing else we can do but reestablish who the rightful owners of the property are. OK, so what if I reestablish that it's the US government? After all, the Natives are, like you said, long dead.Hopefully that will be easy because the property will have been traded around voluntarily free of any violent conquest for a long time and so whoever happens to be the current owner of the stolen property that is traded around now becomes, in a practical sense that we must accept as we have no reasonable alternative, the legitimate owner. I see a reasonable alternative. The US government. This does not mean that the original act of conquest was legitimate though, it just means that years later in order to retain are concept of ownership which is necessary to us to have a prosperous society, we have to settle on a new understanding of who legitimately owns what. So applying this to the European settlers who forcefully conquered much of the native American's land from them, now hundreds of years later we can say that you own your property and I own mine. We can, but we can also say that we only own it in the sense of 'renting'. Of course, you have to accept conquest as a legitimate means of getting ownership, and if we can't agree on that, then you're right, this piece of the argument is going nowhere.It would also thus not make sense to say that the government owns our property due to the fact that it was the government institution itself that committed the illegitimate conquest of the land in the first place. Only if you think it's illegitimate To make another common sense analogy, if a thief steals something and sells it to you, and then you sell it to someone else, and then you use the money you make by selling it to buy something from someone else, and then that person uses that money to buy something from someone else, etc, the more time that goes on and the more transactions that take place, and the more that people can't possibly tell that they're buying and selling things that were stolen from somebody years ago, the more legitimate the transactions become. Again though, it's important to note that the original act of conquest or theft is still not legitimate even though we now call the current (many years later) owner of the piece of conquered or stolen property as the legitimate owner of the property. You can see this even in the short term actually. For example, if I steal something and sell it to you and you had no reason to suspect that I stole the property I was selling from you, then isn't your ownership of that property after you buy it from me more legitimate than my ownership after I stole it from whoever? But again, this is on an individual level. Not nations.. Nations run differently, because they are NOT individuals. So yes, your analogy is common sense for individuals- and only that.

"because a democratic nation that protects your rights is so horrible because it takes some of your money"

It's "so horrible" because it initiates violence against people, just like all tyrannical governments and people. It doesn't matter if a thief goes into your house with a gun, demanding all of your money, your computer, your TV, your refrigerator, etc, etc, and then gives it all to people poorer than you--he still stole the stuff from you and thus it's still wrong. Also, what would you think of the thief stealing from you if he himself was living a semi-luxurious life? Wouldn't you say at the very least that before thinking of stealing stuff from you to give to the poor he should first give up as much of his own wealth as he could to the poor without dying from starvation himself, before going after you to steal your property to give to the poor? This guy makes the same point getting to the end of his article: http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

At the end of the article he finishes with the point:

"The problem, however, with violating libertarian law for special exigencies is that these occurrences are more commonplace than supposed. Right now, there are numerous people dying of starvation in poor parts of the world. Some are suffering from illnesses which could be cured cheaply, e.g., by penicillin. We have all read those advertisements placed by aid agencies: "Here is little Maria. You can save her, and her entire village, by sending us some modest amount of money each month."

In point of fact, many so called libertarians who have attacked the non-aggression axiom on these emergency grounds live in housing of a middle class level or better; drive late model cars; eat well; have jewelry; send their children to pricey colleges. If they truly believed in their critiques, none of this would be true. For if the cabin owner and the apartment dweller are to give up their property rights to save the hiker and the flagpole hanger, then they must give up their comfortable middle class life styles in behalf of all the easily cured sick and starving people in the world. That they have not done so shows they do not even take their own arguments seriously.

The logical implication of their coercive welfarist argument is far worse than merely being required to give a few dollars a month to a relief agency. For suppose they do this. Their standard of living will still be far greater than those on the verge of death from straightened circumstances. No, as long as these relatively rich "libertarians" have enough money to keep themselves from dying from poverty, the logic of their argument compels them to give every penny they own over and above that level to alleviate the plight of the endangered poor." - From http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html

Of course people should. I will give what I can when I actually make a steady income (considering I'm 15, I have none, so...) But the government does give money, since your dollar bills are its money, which it then gives to foreign places, its own people, etc. (noting of course that the number one job of a government (well, at least our's) is to protect its people, so it may not give as much to other nations as it does to itself). And actually, this goes against what you say- if people would give enough of their money to help the poor, why are there still such issues?

"On an individual level, and even internationally now for those in the UN, they don't ["tolerate the people involved in the dispute battling it out with force"]. unless you count going to court as violent, in which your DRO is quite violent"

No. Going to court does count as violent because the government enforces the court's rulings with violence. On the other hand, DROs do not violently enforce their rulings, contrary to your statement that they are "quite violent." Do you really not know this after our big discussion on DROs (and after reading my sentence following your quote: "instead, if some tenant claimed that he owned his owner's apartment, rather than using force against that tenant (to get him to pay his rent) like governments do in our current society, non-violent alternatives to dealing with the problem such as economic ostracism would be used instead.")? Surely after reading that sentence immediately after mistakenly writing "in which your DRO is quite violent" you should have gone back and corrected your mistake....

What I meant by that if you think court is violent, then DRO's must be violent, because it is court. But your right, it wasn't worded right. Now, remember of course that the government 'violently' enforces its laws because you know, as a citizen, that if you break the law, this is what will happen. It's like what you were saying about contracts before- people know what will happen if they do it. they are well informed. And if they disagree with a law, they vote for people who agree with them to change it (think about this: Many states, like colarado, are slowly accepting commercialized drug use, and there's a bill in congress now that will make the Federal government stop enforcing drug laws (I forget if it was for all or just Marijuana, but either way, it's a step in the right direction. Change takes time after all)

"This is one of the things I forgot. The rich look at this sentence and think, 'Oh goodie! I can do whatever I want!' Why? Well, if they are ostracized, they simply move to another DRO jurisdiction, either by private jet or whatever. The poor are screwed. What can they do? Assuming it's a HUGE DRO area (that it 'controls'), they couldn't do anything. Heck, even if it was small enough that they can get to a neighboring one, the news of their crime would reach the neighbor. The rich guy can avoid this, he'll just move to California."

I've told you many times that this is an empty fear you have, but you still go on thinking that initiating violence against people is necessary to resolve disputes... it's crazy. Anyways, didn't you (or was it just dawh?) say earlier that you thought wealth was power, not violence? That was Dawh, actually How is it that these poor people you speak of are "screwed" if they can get the wealthy "powerful" people to move all the way to California without so much as even threatening to raise a gun at them and while being so poor? Well, first off it isn't fair that they can't do the same and if they, say, steal a loaf of bread or something because otherwise they can't survive, then they will have to suffer the punishment while the rich don't. If some wealthy guy in town steals something you've just demonstrated that you yourself don't think that using violence against such rich thieves is necessary to deal with them. Unless by "deal with them" you want to use violence against them to lock them up or kill them or harm them in some other way as "punishment" for their crime then really the aggressive violence that you support isn't necessary. I think it is. If some rich guy, or anyone really, murders someone, I sure as hell want him put in jail, violently or otherwise, for life, or maybe even the death penalty depending on the circumstances. Absolutely, to do otherwise is just not fair to the victim, especially if they are rich and just avoid the penalty anyway.And again, you seem to be comparing my suggested non-violent methods of dealing with such criminals and disputes to a perfect world (nirvana fallacy). In reality you should be comparing it to what we have now, a state that acts as a monopolistic coercion apparatus that nobody can stand a chance to defend themselves against. Well, the Arab nations have been having success. You just have to have enough people convinced. The masses can do many things. And either way, you have voting. that is a way of defense. What happens when the wealthy man steals something in this society? Can't he just pay off the law enforcement people (bribe them) to get himself free? Uh... well yes, but that wouldn't be any different. It'd be easier in your society actually, since private firms don't answer to the people. And if you don't think it's an empty fear now, if you think people bribe people (which is true, I'm not saying it isn't), why would it be any different with private firms? It'd be worse. What are the poor to do then? People are selfish Woah! So you admit it. So then i return to something said earlier: If you admit that people are selfish, and you want to help the poor, how does that add up? Because if people are selfish, no one will.--if you give a group of people (the state) the legal right to initiate violence against others they aren't going to protect the poor. They are going to inevitably accept bribes from wealthy lobbyists and wealthy criminals because its in their self-interests to do so. You can "reform" the system to reduce as much of this as you can, but you will never remove enough of the injustice as you would remove by removing the coercive institution itself that is responsible for providing the injustice to the wealthy people that can pay the coercive institution off for the favor to turn a blind eye to their crimes. At least the government answers to the people, and when such a travesty is discovered, people are arrested and such. What makes you think this won't get worse with a private firm (the DRO) running the show?

"Court isn't violent. The government doesn't shoot people over rent fees"

The government generally doesn't shoot people over rent fees because people would rather be evicted from their apartments than be killed. When the police finally come to the apartment with their guns in their holsters and demand they get out they submit to the police's demands because they know that they stand no chance resisting it and would rather submit to it then die resisting. If you really still can't see that the government uses force (violence) against people in such instances though....

Yes, I do see it. However, considering the fact that the government makes it very clear what will happen if a law is broken, i don't care, because they knew what would happen.

"When did this become objective morality? They ARE occasionally necessary, though things should be done to avoid them, and they AREN'T necessarily immoral (for instance, let's say we knew that some country was going to fire nukes at us tomorrow. Would we wait until AFTER they attacked us, or would we attack now to make sure we aren't blown to bits?"

Oh god, we're in trouble. Do you support the US government's bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki too? If there's something to be called evil it is the position that you support--the position that initiating violence against people can ever be moral or just. You really are a tyrant even though you think you are helping people.

"Oh, but he had good intentions."

"But he murdered countless innocent people."

"Yes, but with good intentions!"

'Good intentions' don't matter. It's what people actually do that matters. I'm not quite sure what made me feel that I should say this. Maybe it's because I think you have "good intentions" when you support attacking people in an effort to not get nuked and yet on the other hand the attacks that you support are utterly immoral. So again, it's what you do that matters, not your "good" intentions. If you support such utterly immoral things as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki I can't pretend to use your "good" intentions as an excuse to tolerate your support of such evils. What you actually support is wrong even if your intentions are good and thus I can't and I don't tolerate what you're saying.

You're right, that is a tough thing to think about. First off, the issue isn't as black and white as that. We did warn the Japanese Emperor both times (we told him before Hiroshima and Nagasaki that if he doesn't surrender, we'll do this). There was only one other choice: A land invasion of Japan, which very likely would have led to the deaths of far more American troops, Japanese troops, and Japanese citizens than the bombs did. If we stopped attacking altogether, they would have attacked us again. This was known. Therefore, only the two choices I stated above were possible. The president at the time (I forget who it was...) chose what he thought would be the option that saved the most American and Japanese lives, and he repeatedly warned them about what would happen. The bombs did end the war, saving a lot of lives that would have been lost. Plus, we've been helping Japan with everything ever since, and were (to my knowledge) their biggest donator when the tsunami hit.

Now, it definitely could have been done differently. For instance, there was a petition that wanted it to first be dropped in the ocean, showing Japan its power without killing anyone, and then bombing elsewhere if they didn't surrender.

Add to this the atrocities Japan committed to Americans and Filapanos when about 80,000 in total were killed during a POW march that was against the Geneva Convention, and the other atrocities committed...

In truth, I dunno. I will not condemn it outright. Maybe the petitioners' plan would have been better.

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I'll just add that Truman was President at the time and there is some question regarding how well Truman knew what the bombs would do. Obviously, he would know how bad it was with the second bomb, but he may not have realized how devastating the bomb was going to be before the first one... :unsure:

I've also heard some people argue that the Japanese people were already getting tired of the war and they might have surrendered without a land invasion or the bombs, but it's just speculation at this point. Controlling interactions between over 6 billion people is hard. It's far too complex for any simplistic set of axiomatic principles to work. You have to examine the situation and modify your expectations with changing circumstances. Some things acceptable in the past aren't any more. Things that we accept today, won't be acceptable in the future. The world is always changing, so our expectations of it are always going to have to change.

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Truman was fairly well infromed as he was already VP when he took over, though the scope was pretty much impossible fro anyone to comprehend BEFORE the bombs were dropped.

Ive never heard anyone but extreme anti nuclear people say that japan would surrender without the Allies (yes mor ethan just hte USA fought the Japanese) needing an invasion of mainland Japan. Yes the exploding of the bomb in the sea was a possible alternative but then as it was the japanese high command refused to believe the fisrt bomb was the result of 1 bomb so Im not sure. I Will agree it is kinda Grey but to state that it was EVIL for the USA to use any and all means possible to win a war that started with a sneak attack on the USA (and Britain, you guys werent alone ya know) is kinda nuts.

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In reply to gvg's post:

As I read through your post there were a bunch of little things I wished to say after nearly every line, but I don't feel like writing another long post so I'm just going to reply to a few things.

One of the parts of your post where I thought you were way off the mark was here:

My quote with gvg's comments in red:

"What happens when the wealthy man steals something in this society? Can't he just pay off the law enforcement people (bribe them) to get himself free? Uh... well yes, but that wouldn't be any different. It'd be easier in your society actually, since private firms don't answer to the people. And if you don't think it's an empty fear now, if you think people bribe people (which is true, I'm not saying it isn't), why would it be any different with private firms? It'd be worse. What are the poor to do then? People are selfish Woah! So you admit it. So then i return to something said earlier: If you admit that people are selfish, and you want to help the poor, how does that add up? Because if people are selfish, no one will.--if you give a group of people (the state) the legal right to initiate violence against others they aren't going to protect the poor. They are going to inevitably accept bribes from wealthy lobbyists and wealthy criminals because its in their self-interests to do so. You can "reform" the system to reduce as much of this as you can, but you will never remove enough of the injustice as you would remove by removing the coercive institution itself that is responsible for providing the injustice to the wealthy people that can pay the coercive institution off for the favor to turn a blind eye to their crimes. At least the government answers to the people, and when such a travesty is discovered, people are arrested and such. What makes you think this won't get worse with a private firm (the DRO) running the show?"

You say that the private firms don't answer to "the people" while the government does answer to "the people." In reality governments benefit some people while hurting other people while the private firms would hurt far fewer people and thus help more people.

You say that bribing would be worse with private firms, but I think you are mistaking because you forget that no private security firms have a monopoly of coercive force in a geographic region in the way that governments do. So while some wealthy criminal may be able to bribe someone in the government to get away with his crime (or to commit his crime using the government's ability to create and enforce laws), the same would not happen in the private sector because there would be competing entities of physical power and so there would be no single firm to bribe in the way that the monopolistic government can be bribed. In the stateless society the criminal would have to bribe all of the security firms and DROs who would ordinarily deal with the criminal unlike in our statist society where the criminal only has to bribe the government. In other words, if you don't have just one group of "police" in a geographic region then the criminal would have to bribe all of the security firms and DROs who look out for criminals rather being able to just bribe the police.

When you said "Whoa! So you admit it" in reply to me saying that people are selfish, I'd like to remind you that this has been my view the whole time and I have never denied it. When you asked, if people are selfish who will help the poor? No one will, I reply that by saying that people are selfish I don't mean to say that they only ever care about themselves. You and I agree that people are self-interested in general, but surely you realize that people don't only care about themselves all the time. We've been through this in the thread already. Your parents, for instance--they generously raised you, correct? Anyways, whatever amount of wealth people will choose to charitably give to the poor voluntarily, nobody should try to increase that amount by pointing guns at people to coerce them into giving up more of their wealth. I'm not going to bother trying to convince you any longer that if you stop pointing guns at people to get them to give up their wealth to the poor, then all the poor people won't die left and right in the streets. Restating the principle for you that it's wrong to point the gun at the person to steal their things even if you want to redistribute it to someone with less wealth should be enough for you.

What makes me think the problem of bribes won't get worse with a private firm (the DRO) running the show? Well, as just said above, there is no private security firm or DRO running the show, but rather there are many (note: By the way, I envision DROs and security firms to be two different types of organizations, not one single organization performing both services.). Because there are many firms with competing physical power/force in any given geographic region, rather than a single government with a monopoly on physical force, criminals wouldn't be able to just bribe the police, because there is no single entity that acts as the police, but rather there are many entities acting as "watchers." So again, who watches the watchers? If your "watchers" are a single government monopoly then there is bound to be corruption, injustice, abuse of power, etc.

"Yes, I do see it. However, considering the fact that the government makes it very clear what will happen if a law is broken, i don't care, because they knew what would happen."

This is what quag has been repeating, but again, as I said to him, if the mafia or some other random group of people made it clear ahead of time that if person X did X then violence would be used against them to punish them, etc, then surely you wouldn't see it as just. You're using the fact that the government tells people that it will use force against them for doing certain things as a reason to say that that use of force is legitimate when in fact you can easily come up with many counterexamples (e.g. the mafia example) that illustrate that this is an invalid justification of the use of force. So, also as I said to quag, I think you're begging the question. Your reason is a logical fallacy. You're assuming from the beginning that the government's uses of force are legitimate and then you are trying to justify the government's uses of force as legitimate after already presuming them to be legitimate by saying things like what you just said above--that the government warns people ahead of time that it will use force against them for doing X, Y, Z. In reality, as many counter examples make it clear, that is not a valid justification to use force against somebody for.

"You're right, that is a tough thing to think about. First off, the issue isn't as black and white as that. We did warn the Japanese Emperor both times (we told him before Hiroshima and Nagasaki that if he doesn't surrender, we'll do this)."

:-) Look at that. I read the very next part of your post just after saying how your argument that the government is justified in using force against people (e.g. to evict them from an apartment) because it makes it clear to them ahead of time that if they do X, Y, or Z, then they will use force against them is fallacious and yet you use the exact same fallacious reason here to at least partially defend the actions of the US government bombing Japan. So again, the fact that the US government warned the Japanese emperor that it would bomb the cities if he didn't surrender is not at all a justification of the bombings. If you do something, X and then I use force against you, that is not legitimate and it still isn't any more legitimate even if I say first, "If you do X then I will use force against you."

"There was only one other choice: A land invasion of Japan, which very likely would have led to the deaths of far more American troops, Japanese troops, and Japanese citizens than the bombs did. If we stopped attacking altogether, they would have attacked us again. This was known. Therefore, only the two choices I stated above were possible."

No, that's a false dilemma; those aren't the only two choices. Again, I want to say something about good intentions, that it was good that they choose to bomb Japan instead of a land invasion, but that would be dishonest to the fact that the US government did not need to initiative violence against Japanese people in either of those two forms. They could have not attacked.

"Plus, we've been helping Japan with everything ever since, and were (to my knowledge) their biggest donator when the tsunami hit."

You've made this same point many times on different issues before. For example, you've said that the government helps the people using the peoples' tax money. I reply to what you're saying now about Japan in the same way as I replied to your statements of support of the government's taxation: Just because you help them later does not justify you hurting them in the first place just like the fact that the government helps some people does not justify stealing from people in the first place either.

"Add to this the atrocities Japan committed to Americans and Filapanos when about 80,000 in total were killed during a POW march that was against the Geneva Convention, and the other atrocities committed..."

To comment on this in a more general way (for I've noticed you've done this sort of thing quite often throughout not only your last post, but throughout the thread): You seem to group individuals into single agents. While some of the time this is quite reasonable (e.g. we can speak of "businesses," "organizations," "governments," etc sometimes perfectly fine), oftentimes it leads to fallacious reasoning because the circumstances become different when you look at the group of people as what it really is, just a group of individuals. So specifically here you are saying that some Japanese people killed a bunch of other people and thus it is okay to bomb other Japanese people as a sort of act of defense or retaliation in response to an act of aggression, in order to get these Japanese people to stop fighting the war. The thing is though, if you break down the group of people called the Japanese into individuals, you will realize that the US government bombed many thousand innocent people (non-aggressors). You try to justify that by categorizing those people into the same group that contains murderers who killed people in POW camps, but in reality the innocent civilians living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not responsible for the murderers who killed people in the POW camps, etc. So while grouping people together is okay sometimes, you should make sure to break down the group of people into individual people to make sure that you're not using poor reasoning to justify things that are really immoral. How would you like it if some Americans went and murdered some people and then those peoples' family members and fellow countrymen came and attacked you and your family? Surely you wouldn't think their attacks on you or your family were justified as you and your family are not responsible for the immoral actions of the other Americans. You could argue that maybe the terrorists in the 9/11 attacks thought their attacks were justified for this reason. If the people working for the US government go and commit some war crimes and this makes the victims retaliate with a terrorist attack on a US city, wouldn't you say that the attack was completely unjustified? Anyways, I've noticed you group individuals together into a single entity in fallacious ways before this so I'm just letting you know that I think you should be careful not to group people into single entities when it is not logical to do so. It makes your reasoning become fallacious and before you know it you may end up supporting killing a ton of innocent people. It won't matter that you'll have good intentions as you'll still be a murderer. So watch out on treating individuals in a group as a single moral agent.

"In truth, I dunno. I will not condemn it outright. Maybe the petitioners' plan would have been better."

I'm glad you don't condone the actions. And I know you already know this, but I think it would be good for you to look into being strictly opposed to such actions, for I really think that they are utterly immoral.

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I'll just add that Truman was President at the time and there is some question regarding how well Truman knew what the bombs would do. Obviously, he would know how bad it was with the second bomb, but he may not have realized how devastating the bomb was going to be before the first one... :unsure:

I've also heard some people argue that the Japanese people were already getting tired of the war and they might have surrendered without a land invasion or the bombs, but it's just speculation at this point. Controlling interactions between over 6 billion people is hard. It's far too complex for any simplistic set of axiomatic principles to work. You have to examine the situation and modify your expectations with changing circumstances. Some things acceptable in the past aren't any more. Things that we accept today, won't be acceptable in the future. The world is always changing, so our expectations of it are always going to have to change.

I strongly disagree with the sentence that I made bold. In fact I think that having a set of simple basic moral principles is the only way to have interactions between over 6 billion people work well. I agree with you that the world is very complex, but I take that as a reason for making the exact opposite conclusion that you make. No one person (the president?) or group of people (governments?) can possibly know well enough what the best actions to make are as the world is too complex. There's a knowledge problem here that makes direction by some group of masterminds impossible. It's the same reason why communist/Marxist governments fail. The central governments try collecting the wealth and redistributing it fairly, but the few people in the government can't possibly know what things everyone wants/needs and how much everyone needs, and can't possibly know enough to figure out how to get all of the stuff to them at the right time. Thus, I think the complex world will prosper only because of individuals following basic principles. Free markets with things like the price mechanism manages to get everyone what they needs. It's Adam Smith's invisible hand. The world is too complex to try to have one small group of people try to direct the actions of these many people--they can't possibly know enough to be able to successfully redistribute the wealth. For this same reason of a lack of knowledge that makes it so central governments (or any small group of people) can't succeed in directing economies, they also can't have enough knowledge to forcefully "control interactions between over 6 billion people." Have you read the short essay, "I, Pencil," by Leonard E. Read? It's very much related to this point and I think you'd enjoy reading it. Here's a link to it (you can skip by the introduction): http://fee.org/library/books/i-pencil-2/ .

Here's an analogy from part of the essay to the point that you made in the above quote that I strongly disagree with: The complex world of 6 billion people is like a tree. The tree is far too complex for anyone to know enough about it to be able to direct it's growth. In reality, the only thing that manages to direct it's growth is its DNA code, analogous to a "simplistic set of axiomatic principles." From the essay:

"It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!"

The world is too complex for any group of people (government) to direct--only individuals interacting voluntarily will allow for society as a whole to prosper. And as an individual, I think having a basic set of moral principles is extremely helpful in directing my own actions and I think if more people followed such principles and if fewer people (governments) tried coercively directing people the world would be better off.

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I Will agree it is kinda Grey but to state that it was EVIL for the USA to use any and all means possible to win a war that started with a sneak attack on the USA (and Britain, you guys werent alone ya know) is kinda nuts.

I certainly wouldn't say it's nuts. I would say it's a way of making sure that you don't accidentally go commit an utterly immoral act with good intentions. For example, as I said to gvg, perhaps the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 thought their actions were justified as they were fighting back against people who were attacking their country. The US government similarly often thinks that it is justified in fighting its wars due to such terrorist attacks against the US, but this still isn't justification for the US government to go kill innocent civilians in the Middle East (an inevitable result of going to war there). For the same reasons despite how some people attacked Pearl Harbor that does not justify killing thousands of non-aggressors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By the way, have any of you noticed the general (or perhaps almost absolute) trend that wars seem to happen because of governments? Can you imagine a bunch of guys in planes flying over and bombing Pearl Harbor in the absence of governments? Why would they ever do such a thing? Can you imagine someone flying a plane over Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropping an atomic bomb on them in the absence of governments? Again, I couldn't at all, because all of their motives for doing so would be lost. Without governments the motives and funding for wars would be gone. I'm sure there would still be some violent conflicts (anarchy is not a utopia), but there would be nothing even close to the wars that governments have waged throughout history.

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By the way, have any of you noticed the general (or perhaps almost absolute) trend that wars seem to happen because of governments? Can you imagine a bunch of guys in planes flying over and bombing Pearl Harbor in the absence of governments? Why would they ever do such a thing? Can you imagine someone flying a plane over Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropping an atomic bomb on them in the absence of governments? Again, I couldn't at all, because all of their motives for doing so would be lost. Without governments the motives and funding for wars would be gone. I'm sure there would still be some violent conflicts (anarchy is not a utopia), but there would be nothing even close to the wars that governments have waged throughout history.

http://www.rmprofessional.com/rm/survey-puts-somalia-top-of-terrorist-attack-league.php

Um, yeah, i could. It's called terrorism. or do the terrorists count as governments? People always have motives for killing. Religious, economic, social, etc. Absolutely such things could happen. A bunch of planes were flown into the twin towers by a fundamentalist group. not a government. A group of terrorists. Somalia, an anarchic country, is number one on the most terrorist attacks list (the link). Now your just blaming everything on governemnts. War has been around since the first human (hell, even animals; ants wage war) took a rock and hit someone upside the head for a mate. Blaming such things on governments is ridiculous. War will be war, regardless of there being a state or not. Like what i said before about the private organizations being bribed (ill reply to your other stuff tomorrow): Obviously they may not have a monopoly on violence. but does that matter? What if it the company that has 60% of the market? Backed by some greedy rich aristocrats who want power? Civil war will easily run rampant, and any peace will be fragile. Seriously, war will always exist as long as the quest for power contnues. Which will be as long as humans exist. The companies will fight amongst themselves. Rich aristocrats vs other rich aristocrats. Shareholders vs shareholders. The companies that were attacked by any other rogue one would retaliate, obviously, because why should the sit and do nothing? And in an era without governments, the same ones that made the Geneva Convention and POW rules, war will be worse. No battle field news, since reporters will haev no protection. Thus, no knowledge for the population about human rights violations and what not. Saying that full-scale war, like that seen in the past and present, will suddenly disapear when governments do, is being naive. people cause wars. Any agent of warfare, private or otherwise, will be exploited if power is at stake.

And i'm noticing that you seem to think we should have stood their and taken it when japan attacked us and when the terrorists did. That's BS if I'm understanding you correctly. If I'm attacked, I'm fighting back. The stories of the Gandhi's are wonderful when they work. but seriously think about it: Imagine that was the N. Korean government. Gandhi and the revolutionaries would have disapeared.

And saying the dilemna with Japan was a false one is to not understand the predicament. if we didn't attack, Japan would have; there is no question of that. So it was either attack or be attacked. I dunno about you, but I'll take the former. After that it becomes morally fuzzy territory that I won't even begin to try to solve, and thankfully such things won't have to happen again (drones now make sure that military targets are exclusively attacked. They do much more damage, and hopefully will allow for less use of actual humans in warfare, lowering further the possibility that any civilians will be harmed).

But if you say we shouldn't have attacked and instead should have taken it, well, then i simply can't agree with that. And if that's what NAP is, then I'll take the plunge and say NAP is not fully for me. if it means waiting to be attacked even if we can attack first to stop it, if it means being Gandhiescue for everything, and if it means that in WW2 we should have let Japan beat the crap out of us- than NAP is not the greatest thing to use.

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To dawh on the concept of ownership:

It's late again, but I've thought a little bit more about your post and I realized that I was slightly confused last night when I wrote my response to you. So to clarify on everything I'll say this:

I can't argue that I own X or you own Y and I don't think that you can either, with or without using social contracts. Property rights / the concept of ownership (the same thing) are not intrinsic.

Therefore, when you asked me to "explain" ownership what I really should have said is that with or without governments or social contracts, individuals and groups of individuals subjectively decide on who owns what (and some people don't even bother deciding on who owns what). A lot of people may agree on the owner of certain things, but they may also disagree on who owns what as well.

When people disagree on who owns something, they may choose to use force (either aggressive or non-aggressive force depending on whose perspective it is, so NAP becomes pretty useless here, although I would argue not completely useless *) to defend the property from people who they believe are not the true owners of that property. They may also choose to use non-violent means to protect the property and deter others from taking it as their own.

So then the central question to the debate as seen by me is not whether or not we need a "social contract" to have a successful practice of the concept of ownership (I still don't see how this concept helps the issue of ownership at all (what authority does this supposed "social contract" give to the government's subjective opinion of who owns what to make its opinion better than others' opinions?), so you can try explaining it more if you want), but rather is whether or not there should be a monopolistic institution of physical power in control of a broad geographic region.

Unlike you I don't believe that the government's declaration of who owns what is any more "correct" than any other entity's subjective opinion on who owns what. I don't buy your "social contract" argument as an argument saying that the government's opinion on who owns what is the best opinion out there. Rather, I see the government as just another group of people with an opinion on who owns what among many groups of people and individuals with their own opinions on who owns what.

What makes the government special thus is not that the government's opinion on who owns what is better than anyone else's opinion due to some magical "social contract" making that so, but rather is the fact that the government has a monopoly of physical power/force in its geographic region. This results in the government's opinion on who owns what being enforced basically absolutely with little regard for people who disagree with the government's view on who owns what. If someone disagrees with the government's opinion on who owns what then they can try discussing the disagreement with them in a court or something similar to try to get the government to change it's opinion, but in the end if the government still disagrees with the person then the government forcefully enforces its view of ownership on the person who disagrees.

I imagine that in a stateless society the situation would be different than the above. I think that due to the absence of a monopolistic institution of physical power like the government, property ownership disputes would much less often be dealt with using violence. If two entities had a dispute over the rightful owner of a piece of property, then unlike in our current system, there would be no single physical force organization with a monopolisticly large amount of force to come up with an opinion on who the rightful owner is and then force that view on everyone who disagrees with it. So because of the absence of such a government, I think that such property disputes would much more likely be resolved non-violently by voluntary means. I thus think that this kind of society, a stateless society, would have a fairer practice of the concept of ownership, the fairness measured by the amount of property that people declare is stolen from them or seized from them with force (forceful theft).

So I think that's about it. You asked me to explain ownership without social contracts, but really I think I can explain all ownership even in our current society. Ownership is just a subjective thing. People decide on their own who owns what (and sometimes just take others' opinions) and then act accordingly to their views either using force or not using force or both. While a lot of us may agree on who owns what most of the time we may also disagree at times. It is this disagreement that makes me reject your "social contract" explanation as an argument for why the government's subjective opinion on who owns what is more legitimate than the opinions of the people who disagree with the government's opinion. You justify the government's forceful enforcement of its subjective view of who owns what by saying that it's opinion is better than anyone else's due to this idea of a "social contract," but I don't believe that the supposed "social contract" makes the government's opinion any more valid than anybody else's opinion. Thus, I don't think that the government should violently enforce it's subjective view of who owns what, at least not in the absolute sense that it does. I envision a society free of such a central institution of force, instead replacing that void with many competing entities of physical power to provide competing providers of physical force to defend peoples' property ownership. I think the absence of a single entity with a monopoly on physical power/force in a geographic region will mean that no such organization will abuse its power and use force to steal from people who disagree with its view of who owns what. I think that having competing entities of physical power rather than a single monopolistic entity will also mean that people will seek non-coercive (thus voluntary) agreements to resolve their property disputes far more often than in a society with a state because nobody will be able to overpower their opponents with force to enforce their subjective view of who owns what due to the fact that nobody will have the monopoly of power needed to overpower the people who disagree with them using the threat of force only. The government manages to enforce its view of who owns what using only the threat of force the vast majority of time due to the fact that it has such a superior amount of force than anyone who disagrees with it's view of who owns what. If physical power was more widely spread throughout a society meaning there were no such monopolies of power in a given geographic region then I think entities would be far less likely to try to out-force the entities who disagree with them to impose their view of ownership on them because the lack of monopoly of power would mean that actual violence, rather than simply the threat of violence, would likely have to be used. Because such actual violence is costly, unlike simply threatening violence, I think people would be less likely to use force to try to deal with their property ownership disputes. They would thus be more likely to seek non-violent resolutions to their property disputes, giving rise to the more just, more fair society, with less theft than in our current society with a state.

So did I answer your questions? Reading your post again to make sure I noticed this which I may not have answered yet:

"We frown on "stealing" from each other in this society because we have an implicit contract with each other. Do you deny that? You don't steal from me because you implicitly understand that I "own" the stuff in my house, and I don't "steal" from you for the same reason. So these implicit contracts do exist, right? I would call these implicit contracts "Social Contracts.""

Actually, I don't agree on the existence of such implicit contracts, at least not all the time. I agree that some (much) of the time we agree (without expressly saying that it is our view) that Person A owns A, etc, and thus we shouldn't take A from Person A, but when you think that Person A owns A and I think that Person A owns B, which doesn't include all of A, then surely there isn't a "social contract" here--do you agree? Due to the fact that I've taken your support of the concept of the "social contract" as a reason to make the government's subjective opinion on who owns what more legitimate, correct, or just better than the other opinions, I don't accept this idea of the "social contract" because I don't agree with many of the things that the government claims that it (or other people) owns through its actions. So there is no implicit contract between me and the government in which I agree with the government's view of who owns what. In reality, there is an explicit disagreement by me that I do not think that the government owns the things that it implies it thinks it owns with its actions.

So on the same note of your quote, you can say that's the reason why I don't steal from you and I would be fine with that, but I think that would be true with or without the existence of governments. If I implicitly agree that you own what you own and thus don't steal it from you, that would be true whether or not there is a government. So I suppose I don't see what the connection is between these "social contracts" and governments despite the fact that you seem to say there is a connection. Maybe you can clarify this?

Also, I replied to this yesterday in my post, but I'll reply to it again now that I've hopefully clarified myself on everything else:

"One more time: we've decided as a group that the world is far too complicated for each of us to handle individually, so we've banded together in communities to strengthen ourselves. We are smarter and stronger in groups, so we recognize the benefits of forming societies. But once the community gets too large for everyone to know every other individual, we need some underlying basis for interacting with strangers. We obviously can't all sign a document affirming our acceptance of the rules because there are just too many people. So we have to decide on a course of action based on general consensus. The Social Contract."

If by "so we have to decide on a course of action based on general consensus... the social contract" you mean we have to establish democratic governments with subjective opinions on who owns what that strive to reflect the view of most people most of the time and then have such democratic governments violently enforce their view of who owns what on everyone else, then I certainly disagree. I don't think that we have to establish an organization that will provide us with a single view on who owns what, defining who owns what across the entire country. I think that individuals can decide on their own who owns what and resolve disagreements without a coercive majority-of-people-representing-(supposedly) state violently ending the disputes. Do you see my position? You and I don't know each other and yet I would argue that we still don't need a state to define what you own and what I own. If we have a dispute--if you claim you own the stuff in my house--that's just fine. We can choose to use force against each other or try resolving our dispute non-violently. We don't need a state to tell us which of us has the "correct" view of who owns what and then enforce that view violently against whichever one of us disagrees.

So based on your definition of social contracts as implicit agreements between you and I that I own what I own and you own what you own, then I could agree with you that they exist, although I still don't see how it is helpful to our interactions to say that they do. When you apply your "social contract" concept to justifying the government's view of who owns what, however, I would argue that there is no "social contract" between me and the government due to the fact that I explicitly disagree with what the government really owns vs what it implies that it thinks it owns with its actions. So based on your definition of "social contract" as an implicit agreement, no such implicit agreement exists as I explicitly disagree. So the problem I have with your social contracts is the connect they have with the government. I don't think they legitimize the government's subjective opinions on who owns what in any way. The government's opinion is no more "correct" than anyone else's subjective opinino on who owns what. The only reason why I would ever say the government's opinion has more authority is because I would say it has more "authority" of force. This isn't real authority though and in reality, since ownership isn't intrinsic and is thus something subjective, I don't think that anybody's view is "correct" or "wrong" on who owns what.

So to me the real question on this debate involving ownership is not related to "social contracts," but rather is the question of whether or not there should be a state, an institution with a monopoly of physical power in a geographic region to enforce one view of who owns what on everybody in that geographic region. My view is that there shouldn't be. Property ownership disputes shouldn't be dealt with by calling on a single institution with a monopoly of physical power to look at the dispute and then violently enforce whichever side of the dispute it subjectively thinks is more "correct." Instead, they should be dealt with non-violently as much as possible, and if they are to be dealt with using violence, the violence shouldn't be provided by an institution with a monopoly on violence for the simple reason that having an institution with a monopoly on violence will inevitably mean that that institution is bound to end up becoming corrupt, abusing its power, violating peoples' property ownership (theft), etc. And note it's theft there because the government's not always right about who owns what--its subjective opinion is not any more "correct" than anyone else's.

* One use of the concept of NAP when people disagree on who owns what may be the understanding that to the other party a use of force by you is viewed as aggressive force, which may compel people to seek non-violent resolutions to the property ownership dispute so as to avoid being tyrannical from the perspective of others even if from your own perspective you do not see a use of force as an an act of aggressive force.

Edited by Use the Force
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http://www.rmprofessional.com/rm/survey-puts-somalia-top-of-terrorist-attack-league.php

Um, yeah, i could. It's called terrorism. or do the terrorists count as governments? People always have motives for killing. Religious, economic, social, etc. Absolutely such things could happen. A bunch of planes were flown into the twin towers by a fundamentalist group. not a government. A group of terrorists. Somalia, an anarchic country, is number one on the most terrorist attacks list (the link). Now your just blaming everything on governemnts. War has been around since the first human (hell, even animals; ants wage war) took a rock and hit someone upside the head for a mate. Blaming such things on governments is ridiculous. War will be war, regardless of there being a state or not.

Certainly many of the motives will still exist and certainly there will still be some violent conflicts, but wars run by governments as the 20th century has shown us would not exist. It is because the funding for these wars are governments. Right now my taxpayer money is helping the US government fund a war in Afghanistan. If the government wasn't taxing me there would be no way that I would fund that war. In general the amount of funding for wars would be greatly diminished if people were free to voluntarily choose to fund wars or not fund wars.

And when you said that I'm blaming everything on governments even though there are terrorists fighting people who don't represent governments, would you mind looking up how many people terrorists have killed vs how many people have been killed by government soldiers?

Saying that full-scale war, like that seen in the past and present, will suddenly disapear when governments do, is being naive. people cause wars. Any agent of warfare, private or otherwise, will be exploited if power is at stake.

No, it's not. Do you know anybody who owns any tanks or fighter jets or aircraft carriers or submarines other than governments? Do you think people like your parents (taxpayers) would voluntarily pay for million dollar cruise missles if they weren't taxed for such missiles?

In the absence of a state there would still be some violence and even some "war," but nothing of the scale of what history saw in the 20th century. People would still fight but a vast majority of the funding would be missing.

And i'm noticing that you seem to think we should have stood their and taken it when japan attacked us and when the terrorists did. That's BS if I'm understanding you correctly. If I'm attacked, I'm fighting back.

You can fight back if you want then, I won't wage war against you to stop you.

And saying the dilemna with Japan was a false one is to not understand the predicament. if we didn't attack, Japan would have; there is no question of that. So it was either attack or be attacked. I dunno about you, but I'll take the former. After that it becomes morally fuzzy territory that I won't even begin to try to solve, and thankfully such things won't have to happen again (drones now make sure that military targets are exclusively attacked. They do much more damage, and hopefully will allow for less use of actual humans in warfare, lowering further the possibility that any civilians will be harmed).

But if you say we shouldn't have attacked and instead should have taken it, well, then i simply can't agree with that. And if that's what NAP is, then I'll take the plunge and say NAP is not fully for me. if it means waiting to be attacked even if we can attack first to stop it, if it means being Gandhiescue for everything, and if it means that in WW2 we should have let Japan beat the crap out of us- than NAP is not the greatest thing to use.

The main NAP objection to the war that I am making to you is not to the war itself (as I said, go fight it if you wish... I doubt you will though if you have to pay for it yourself), but to the funding of the war in which governments blatantly forcefully take (steal) peoples' money to pay for wars. If you didn't have taxes Americans wouldn't give up $700 billion dollars each year to fund soldiers and tanks and missiles, etc. If you had to pay for the wars yourself (along with the other people who want to fight them and pay for them) I doubt you would be waging them as you'd have to pay too much. Also on this note, if you're worried about other tyrannical states coming to attack you, realize too that Nazi Germany wouldn't have been able to build up their military like they did if it wasn't for governments and their taxation. They wouldn't have voluntarily formed together and agreed to all pool in a ton of their money to build tanks and planes and guns to go invade other countries and round up the Jews. If people had to pay for these acts of aggression themselves they would realize that it costs too much and wouldn't pay for them. They wouldn't wage the wars or exterminate the Jews. So even if you want to fight these wars, bomb Japan, etc, that's not the main point I want to stress to you. Yes, I believe that all of those things are in violation of NAP and are immoral, but I don't think that the main reason why such things are going to end is by getting people to see that they are immoral. Rather, I think the primary reason why they are going to end is by getting people to see that their funding is immoral. Their funding, taxation, is theft and what allows these mighty wars to take place. If there were no taxes to fund wars or the military or guns or fighter jets, etc, then I'm certain that people wouldn't voluntarily fund those things to a degree anywhere near their current funding under taxation. So go retaliate to Pearl Harbor or go drop a bomb on Hiroshima if you wish. I think it's utterly immoral of you, but I'm not going to stop you. I just ask that you don't force others to fund such wars in retaliation of Pearl Harbor, etc if they don't wish to. You'll have to fund the wars yourself along with the other few people who want to voluntarily fund them.

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No, that's a false dilemma; those aren't the only two choices. Again, I want to say something about good intentions, that it was good that they choose to bomb Japan instead of a land invasion, but that would be dishonest to the fact that the US government did not need to initiative violence against Japanese people in either of those two forms. They could have not attacked.

I was gonna ignore UTF but this one is too funny. According to UTF's non existant NAP the USA was justified as they were replying to force with force. IE Japan attacked the US and the US responded with force. Now how is that immoral according to UTF's NAP? I highlited the red where you seriously screwed up on your history lessons.

the idea that the USA could have done nothing while i suppose is true would have resulted in Japan winning the war with all the negative consequences for the USA and its citizens. Seriously why is the bombing of nagasaki and hiroshima so much worse than the other things that happned in the war? Did it cause more deaths than any other attack? nope, was it the first and only instance of civilians being killed? nope. the only novel thing about them was that they were accomplished in each case by 1 plane dropping 1 bomb. would it have been ok if it were 1000 planes dropping 10000 bombs?

BTW UTF as i Know you are seriously deficient in history, FYI Japan was on a war of expansion while the USA and Britain were fighting wars of self defence, in Asia at least, Britain went to war with germany to defend poland, Germany declared war on the USA after pearl harbour. The USA didnt even annexe japan after the war. Only Russia who joined at the very very end did that (some small islands to the north), but then they were expansionist.

No, it's not. Do you know anybody who owns any tanks or fighter jets or aircraft carriers or submarines other than governments?

Yup there are lots of people they just dont own as many as most govts.

You say that bribing would be worse with private firms, but I think you are mistaking because you forget that no private security firms have a monopoly of coercive force in a geographic region in the way that governments do. So while some wealthy criminal may be able to bribe someone in the government to get away with his crime (or to commit his crime using the government's ability to create and enforce laws), the same would not happen in the private sector because there would be competing entities of physical power and so there would be no single firm to bribe in the way that the monopolistic government can be bribed. In the stateless society the criminal would have to bribe all of the security firms and DROs who would ordinarily deal with the criminal unlike in our statist society where the criminal only has to bribe the government. In other words, if you don't have just one group of "police" in a geographic region then the criminal would have to bribe all of the security firms and DROs who look out for criminals rather being able to just bribe the police.

If you understood basic buisness practices you would realize that without govt regualtion there is nothign stopping DRO's and private security firms (aka MAfia) from gettign together and making exclusive geographical regions to reduce competition between them, lower overhead and increase profits. This is fairly obvious and happens over and over even with regulation but at least with regulation the govt can make sure the consumer doesnt get screwed. under your system there is no checks or balances. corruption will become widespread. In fact you also claim DRO and private security fiorms would be seperate. WHY? what is to stop the owner of a dro from buying a security firm or vice versa. Again it seems liek increadibly smart buisness practice add that to geographical monopolies arranged between the DROs and security firms you end up with the owner fo the DRO/Mafia not being above the law but actually being the law.

Of cousre all is moot as DROs would be ignored by all. I only see 3 options for someone going to a DRO and for both sides (or more) they all have to fit 1 of 3 or you wont get them all to the table and the DRo loses its very tenous legitamacy.

1. You are not sure if you are right and accept what you consider an impartial view

2. you are 100% certain of being right and are 100% certain you will win

3. You are 100% certain you can bribe the DRO.

if you do not fall into 1 of 3 categories you are a moron to even talk to a DRO. again they only work for non criminal disputes.

If you rape my daughter and we are in your system i would not spend any money on a dro or private security firm, a bullet only costs a dime. I guess that doesnt follow your NAP but i dont give a crap about your NAP if you rape my daughter. In present system i trust the justice system to do its best and would not risk depriving my daughter of her father to end her rapists life.

Ill say it again UTF you seem to be backwards on every single one of your assumptions/assertions.

Honsetly I cant believe I still reply to this thread but the last posts were so far off the mark of reality i couldnt resist.

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I was gonna ignore UTF but this one is too funny. According to UTF's non existant NAP the USA was justified as they were replying to force with force. IE Japan attacked the US and the US responded with force. Now how is that immoral according to UTF's NAP? I highlited the red where you seriously screwed up on your history lessons.

Actually no, you made the mistake of grouping people together into "Japan" and the "USA." When the people in the US government dropped their atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki they killed thousands of people who had never initiated force against anyone. These innocent civilians cannot be blamed for the other Japanese peoples' actions of attacking Pearl Harbor. If people in the Canadian government started waging some immoral war against some people, would you think it would be justified for those people to then go kill you in retaliation to your government's attacks simply because you're a Canadian? Of course not; you're not responsible for other peoples' crimes.

the idea that the USA could have done nothing while i suppose is true would have resulted in Japan winning the war with all the negative consequences for the USA and its citizens. Seriously why is the bombing of nagasaki and hiroshima so much worse than the other things that happned in the war?

Did it cause more deaths than any other attack? nope, was it the first and only instance of civilians being killed? nope. the only novel thing about them was that they were accomplished in each case by 1 plane dropping 1 bomb. would it have been ok if it were 1000 planes dropping 10000 bombs?

The bombings aren't much worse, if worse at all, than the other crimes committed in the war. I simply mentioned Hiroshima and Nagaski because gvg said something about how he thinks the US government should attack people who have nuclear weapons that they are likely to attack people with to prevent them from using the nukes and so the atomic bombs that the US dropped just came to mind. But, you're right: many other parts of the war were just as terrible, some even more terrible, than the US dropping its atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Although one reason why the bombings may be called worse than other terrible parts of the war is that most of the people who killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocent civilians, not members of the Japanese army who were fighting the war.

BTW UTF as i Know you are seriously deficient in history, FYI Japan was on a war of expansion while the USA and Britain were fighting wars of self defence, in Asia at least, Britain went to war with germany to defend poland, Germany declared war on the USA after pearl harbour. The USA didnt even annexe japan after the war. Only Russia who joined at the very very end did that (some small islands to the north), but then they were expansionist.

World War II is one aspect of history that I know fairly well. And again, I just want to say that you mistakenly group people together into single entities like "Americans" or "Japanese" and try to justify the "Americans" attack on the "Japanese" people as justified under NAP because the "Japanese" attacked the "Americans" first. In reality, just because some Japanese people attacked some Americans does not make it okay to go attack any Japanese people back. The vast majority of the Japanese civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not responsible for the attacks on Pearl Harbor or any other attacks.

Yup there are lots of people they just dont own as many as most govts.

My point exactly. Without governments and governments' taxation the funding for these weapons and wars would be much reduced.

If you understood basic buisness practices you would realize that without govt regualtion there is nothign stopping DRO's and private security firms (aka MAfia) from gettign together and making exclusive geographical regions to reduce competition between them, lower overhead and increase profits. This is fairly obvious and happens over and over even with regulation but at least with regulation the govt can make sure the consumer doesnt get screwed. under your system there is no checks or balances. corruption will become widespread. In fact you also claim DRO and private security fiorms would be seperate. WHY? what is to stop the owner of a dro from buying a security firm or vice versa. Again it seems liek increadibly smart buisness practice add that to geographical monopolies arranged between the DROs and security firms you end up with the owner fo the DRO/Mafia not being above the law but actually being the law.

:-) "DRO/Mafia." Very amusing, but with this comparison of a business composed of secritaries and lawyers and accountants and statisticians (not soldiers or police whatever you're imagining that made you compare DROs to mafias), just like an insurance company or some other typical company you answered your own bold question: what is to stop a DRO from merging with a security firm or vice versa? Consumers. Many consumers, yourself included as is evident by your fear that DROs will become tyrannical mafias, would fear that a business that makes rulings on criminals to make it easier for people to react to people who commit crimes might take on the role of enforcing those rulings with force (sort of like what governments do). People wouldn't want this to happen because they know it could possibly lead to corruption and abuse of power. So, the many consumers who would fear an organization that both makes rulings on criminals and enforces those rulings with force would want to make sure that such an organization doesn't come into being, so naturally they would make sure to seek the services of a DRO that does not enforce its rulings on criinals with force and would seek any security services that they may want from a separate business organization.

Of cousre all is moot as DROs would be ignored by all. I only see 3 options for someone going to a DRO and for both sides (or more) they all have to fit 1 of 3 or you wont get them all to the table and the DRo loses its very tenous legitamacy.

1. You are not sure if you are right and accept what you consider an impartial view

2. you are 100% certain of being right and are 100% certain you will win

3. You are 100% certain you can bribe the DRO.

People would already have DRO memberships before having a dispute with someone or before committing a crime. By what you said above it seems to me that you envision people having a dispute, or committing a crime, and then going to look for a DRO to represent them. This isn't the concept of DROs that I described at all. What I described was a system in which people would ostracize or shun people who didn't agree to a prominent DRO because they would know that if that DRO-less person went and committed a crime or if tha DRO-less person had a dispute with their employer or employee, for example, then there wouldn't be an easy way to resolve the dispute or otherwise deal with them. If for someone reason you don't agree that people would voluntarily seek DRO memberships or would ostracize others for finding a DRO and agreeing to use them to resolve any disputes that they may have, then I suggest that you take a look at what Somalis do in their system under Xeer, for that is a very good comparison (interestingly, it is the best real life comparision I can think of to the theoretical DROs and it may be due to the fact that there is no state is Somalia). If you think of having a DRO membership as an assurance to others that they can interact with you without fear that you will have a dispute with them and will be unable to resolve it reasonablly and non-violently (a decent description of the function of DROs), then DROs are similar to Somali clans. Somalia clans range in size, but in general they consist of an extended family or a few extended families of people. When a clan member has a dispute with someone or when a clan member commits a crime, the elders of the clan come up with the ruling for what the clan member has to do to pay for his crime, etc. If the person does not follow the elders' ruling then force is not used against the person, but rather they are removed from the clan and become a sort of outcast. Now that he is an outcast people won't work for him or hire him or trade with him as much because they know that if he is not honest in his agreements (e.g. he doesn't pay what he agreed to pay for someone's work, etc) then he does not have his clan as insurance to back him up. So because of this, Somali criminals in the Xeer system agree to follow by their clan elder's rulings because it's better to them than being ostracized (the result of not following the rulings). Similarly, people would voluntarily seek DRO memberships, thus agreeing to follow their DROs rulings should they ever have a dispute with someone that they cannot resolve on their own or should they ever break a contract with someone or commit a crime, because doing so is better for them then facing the ostracism that people would employ against them for not having a DRO. And again, just like with the Somalis lnot having their clans as a sort of "insurance", people would ostracize people who don't have DROs (a kind of "insurance" you could say) simply because they wouldn't have a way of resolving disputes with that person should a dispute arise during their interactions with them. So, for example, you would never work for someone without a DRO membership because without having a DRO membership (or something similar; again, DROs as I have described are just one proposed method of resolving disputes in the absense of a coercive state that ends disputes by making rulings and enforcing them violently) your employer would have no deterent stopping him from just not paying you your wage or salary after you finish your work. Even if he says he will pay you for doing your work, if he doesn't pay you, how would you react? If he never agreed to follow the rulings of any DRO then it won't be easy for you to deal with him, but if he does have a DRO membership then you would be able to bring your case to his DRO and get his DRO to rule that he has to pay or else face the defined consequences that were agreed upon earlier by your employer.

if you do not fall into 1 of 3 categories you are a moron to even talk to a DRO. again they only work for non criminal disputes.

If you rape my daughter and we are in your system i would not spend any money on a dro or private security firm, a bullet only costs a dime. I guess that doesnt follow your NAP but i dont give a crap about your NAP if you rape my daughter. In present system i trust the justice system to do its best and would not risk depriving my daughter of her father to end her rapists life.

If I rape your daughter? It sounds like you're implying something that I don't like with that specific example. Despite it being inappropriate, I'll go one: If someone is raping someone then that is clearly an initiation of force (thus in violation of NAP). There is no disputing that because there is no property ownership involved. NAP only gets merky when you're talking about theft, because the ownership problem is subjective and thus it may or may not actually be theft and thus may or may not violate NAP. If someone is raping someone though, then you would be justified under NAP to use force against them to stop them, even if that meant shooting them to stop them.

As for your claim that DROs would only work for non-criminal disputes, I against suggest that you look at the Somali Xeer system to see how such non-violent dispute resolution systems can in fact deal with criminals. Read the last paragraph of this article for an example:

http://www.somalianinfo.com/xeer-legal-system.html Being part of a Somali clan can be compared to having membership with a DRO. Both act as a sort of insurance so that if you have a dispute or commit a crime others can more easily deal with it. If you are disowned by your clan or your DRO drops your membership for not following a clan ruling or DRO ruling or whatever the reason, then you are ostracized and become an outcast. Xeer is a real life example of this sort of system in practice showing that it works. The system of DROs that I have described can work in much the same way, relying on individual's desires to have a society with a system to resolve disputes and deal with criminals easily and non-violently. This desire to have a system with these benefits will cause individuals to ostracize criminals who don't follow their DROs rulings (the DRO drops their membership when they don't follow their rulings and then the people ostracize them for not having a DRO) in the same way that Somali clans disown people in their clans, make outcasts of them, for repeatedly committing crimes or not abiding by the elders' rulings. Here's another article on the subject you should read: http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=891

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Dawh, not to rush you in your reply or seem impatient, but I just want to make sure that this isn't an issue:

So until you explain ownership to me without Social Contracts, I'm through responding to you. sleep.gif

I believe I have explained ownership without social contracts. If you don't think I have I'd appreciate you saying so rather than just not responding to me. Although again, if you just haven't gotten around to reading my long posts don't misinterpret this post as me being impatient or trying to rush you. I just want to make sure that you understand that I think I have fulfilled your request.

Also on a related note, I still don't see why you think the concept of social contracts adds to the "explanation" of ownership. Specifically, it seems to me that you think these social contracts somehow add to the government's subjective opinion on who owns what to make it more legitimate, or better, or more "correct" in some way somehow. I don't believe that this is true, so could you clarify if you think it is true or not to clarify what you think the relationship between these social contracts and the role of the government with regard to property ownership is.

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Dawh, not to rush you in your reply or seem impatient, but I just want to make sure that this isn't an issue:

I believe I have explained ownership without social contracts. If you don't think I have I'd appreciate you saying so rather than just not responding to me. Although again, if you just haven't gotten around to reading my long posts don't misinterpret this post as me being impatient or trying to rush you. I just want to make sure that you understand that I think I have fulfilled your request.

Also on a related note, I still don't see why you think the concept of social contracts adds to the "explanation" of ownership. Specifically, it seems to me that you think these social contracts somehow add to the government's subjective opinion on who owns what to make it more legitimate, or better, or more "correct" in some way somehow. I don't believe that this is true, so could you clarify if you think it is true or not to clarify what you think the relationship between these social contracts and the role of the government with regard to property ownership is.

I don't really know what to say in response to your assertions. (I have to admit that my eyes glazed over for most of it as it was just the same arguments rehashed with a new veneer.) You always seem to expect the best result of your world. It just seems to me that using your system, all I need is to find 12 people to insist that I own what you "own" and then people will be more likely to back my claim because I seem to have sufficient backing. "My client couldn't have committed those murders. I have sworn affidavits from 15 gentlemen who all saw him boarding the plane to Barbados." If you admit that property disputes are gnarly, he said, she said affairs, then I don't see a clear method to resolve them without some entity with the power of discovery to investigate the facts. Based on your suggestions of DROs, it seems unlikely that a DRO would have the financing to investigate claims without backing from donors or funded by the interested parties.

Of course, if the interested parties are paying for the resolution of the DRO decision, then it seems that the party willing to pay more is more likely to get the result that they want. The whole conflict-of-interest angle. By adding a layer of abstraction between the funders and the users of a service, you can help mitigate conflicts of interest because a taxpayer funded entity doesn't have to rely on funding by the interested parties directly (though we would assume both pay taxes into the system). So its judgment is more likely to be uninfluenced by either party in terms of funding, and if it becomes apparent that someone is paying the decision-maker, in our current system, there are remedies for that as well.

To try to briefly change direction to talk about DRO/security mixing, have you ever heard of S.C. Johnson or Koch Industries? How about Glade or Brawny? S.C. Johnson and Koch Industries are huge conglomerates that have bought up other, smaller companies and control their funding from behind the scenes. Glade is a subsidiary of S.C. Johnson and Brawny is owned by Koch Industries. If you didn't know that, don't be too hard on yourself since it isn't common knowledge.

So if I own "DROs Anonymous" which owns "Services 'R' Us" and you hear about a pending merger of "Services 'R' Us" and "Security Services Inc." how likely are you to be upset with the merger? From the public information available to you, you don't know that the company buying "Security Services Inc." is controlled by a DRO company. And I doubt there will be public disclosure "laws" that would insist on all owners of the merger to be disclosed since that would infringe on the company's privacy.

So as soon as you add a few layers of indirection, it would be easy for these companies to merge without anyone seeing anything out of the ordinary on the surface. I agree with quag that conglomeration is the most efficient form of business (less competition means more price-fixing :P ), so the companies would quickly find ways to merge even if the consumers objected to such mergers. They would just join up with a generic-sounding service company that is in fact a front for a larger entity. And of course, no one has the right to look into the owners of a company without their permission in a contract and once a company is well-established, why would they have the incentive to sign a contract with someone granting that person the right of discovery against them when there are plenty of people already contracted with them that don't have that stipulation. Without consumers working together, it would be very easy for companies to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers since most won't realize the potential of a problem. :(

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I don't really know what to say in response to your assertions. (I have to admit that my eyes glazed over for most of it as it was just the same arguments rehashed with a new veneer.) You always seem to expect the best result of your world. It just seems to me that using your system, all I need is to find 12 people to insist that I own what you "own" and then people will be more likely to back my claim because I seem to have sufficient backing.

Whoa, what? "My assertions"? "My system"? "My world"? What are you talking about? If you disagree with the description I gave of reality at least mention what you think is wrong with it along with your alternative description. (Note: Your above statement regarding "my system" (again: ?) and "12 people" appears to be complete nonsense to me unrelated to what I said in my post to you.)

I can't argue that I own X or you own Y and I don't think that you can either, with or without using social contracts. Property rights / the concept of ownership (the same thing) are not intrinsic.

Therefore, when you asked me to "explain" ownership what I really should have said is that with or without governments or social contracts, individuals and groups of individuals subjectively decide on who owns what (and some people don't even bother deciding on who owns what). A lot of people may agree on the owner of certain things, but they may also disagree on who owns what as well.

When people disagree on who owns something, they may choose to use force... to defend the property from people who they believe are not the true owners of that property. They may also choose to use non-violent means to protect the property and deter others from taking it as their own.

This is not "my assertion" or "my system" or a description of the nature of "my world"; this is a description of the reality of the world that both you and I live in. If you disagree with it, please say so and offer your argument for why Person A owns X and why Person B owns Y, etc. Don't say your eyes glazed over at my description of reality as if that made the description wrong and then not offer an alternative description. If you want to call my description of reality "my system" then at least tell me what "your system" is. How can you rationally/objectively prove that one person owns this and another person owns that? I thought you agreed earlier that you can't as ownership is not an intrinsic property and yet now you're referring to my statement of this view as an "assertion" rather than a description of reality that I thought we both agreed on.

As I thought we agreed on my description of reality above, I moved on to the question of whether or not an entity with a monopoly on physical force/power in a geographic region (i.e. a state) should exist or not, given that we want a society with as fair a practice of property ownership as possible. But, you didn't say anything about this instead claiming that my "assertions" (that you said you seemed to agree with earlier) were nonsense.

"My client couldn't have committed those murders. I have sworn affidavits from 15 gentlemen who all saw him boarding the plane to Barbados." If you admit that property disputes are gnarly, he said, she said affairs, then I don't see a clear method to resolve them without some entity with the power of discovery to investigate the facts. Based on your suggestions of DROs, it seems unlikely that a DRO would have the financing to investigate claims without backing from donors or funded by the interested parties.

And here you switch back, contradicting what you just said above. "If you admit that property disputes are gnarly, he said, she said, affairs..." If I admit? Don't you mean, if you agree with UtF that property ownership is a subjective thing rather than an objective thing in which you can rationally prove the true owner of a piece of property...?

What is the point of the rest of your sentence? You don't see a "clear method" to resolve property disputes without having an entity (presumably the kind of entity you were referring to:) with a monopoly on physical power in a geographic region to subjectively decide who owns what and then violently enforce that view on everyone who disagrees with it? While I wouldn't call that "resolving" property disputes, is your statement supposed to be an attempt to justify such a tyrannical entity? If so, I don't see how you imagine that it justifies such an entity at all.

If that's not the kind of entity that you were referring to when you said, "some entity with the power of discovery to investigate the facts," them what kind were you referring to? Another kind of DRO other than the image of the DROs that you seem to have? Anyways, I disagree with your view. I do think that people could resolve disputes without "some entity with the power of discovery [(again, whatever that means... coercive state or competent DRO?)] to investigate the facts." For example, two people with a property dispute could agree to flip a coin to decide who owns the piece of property if they wanted. I do agree with your general notion that in most cases individuals who couldn't resolve a dispute between themselves who instead wanted to seek the services of a third party (e.g. dispute resolution organization) would likely want that organization to take a look at the facts of their situation/dispute rather than arbitrarily coming up with some random resolution. I don't think most people would find such a random DRO ruling on who owns what a useful or satisfactory service.

Of course, if the interested parties are paying for the resolution of the DRO decision, then it seems that the party willing to pay more is more likely to get the result that they want. The whole conflict-of-interest angle. By adding a layer of abstraction between the funders and the users of a service, you can help mitigate conflicts of interest because a taxpayer funded entity doesn't have to rely on funding by the interested parties directly (though we would assume both pay taxes into the system). So its judgment is more likely to be uninfluenced by either party in terms of funding, and if it becomes apparent that someone is paying the decision-maker, in our current system, there are remedies for that as well.

I don't know how you're seeing these DROs, but it's certainly not what I'm seeing. "If the interested parties are paying for the resolution of the DRO decision, then it seems that the party willing to pay more is more likely to get the result that they want. The whole conflict-of-interest angle." ...seriously? The two parties could just agree to not pay the DRO more than half the cost of the dispute resolution service each if they were each worried about each other trying to bribe the DRO to bias their resolution. If you want to see conflict-of-interest look at the state with it's monopoly on physical power. It can just say, "Your money belongs to this soldier," and when I reply "No, it doesn't it; belongs to me," the state will just "resolve" (more like "end" in a practical forceful sense) this dispute by pointing its guns at me to tax me and then redistributing my money to the soldier in the form of paying him his salary. The state-man's conflict of interests are that he might increase his odds of being re-elected if he forcefully redistributes peoples' money in this or similar ways and also that perhaps he can redistribute peoples' wealth to himself in some way (steal their wealth and give it to himself, or "resolve" (really "end violently" a dispute with me over my property) by directing the state's guns' "dispute resolution" services (god, it's not a beneficial service and I can't honestly call it dispute "resolution") at people in the form of giving himself a salary (congressmen) or perhaps in the form of a regulation that would benefit his business or a lobbyist's business who will pay him some bribe for passing such a coercive refulation.

To try to briefly change direction to talk about DRO/security mixing, have you ever heard of S.C. Johnson or Koch Industries? How about Glade or Brawny? S.C. Johnson and Koch Industries are huge conglomerates that have bought up other, smaller companies and control their funding from behind the scenes. Glade is a subsidiary of S.C. Johnson and Brawny is owned by Koch Industries. If you didn't know that, don't be too hard on yourself since it isn't common knowledge.

So if I own "DROs Anonymous" which owns "Services 'R' Us" and you hear about a pending merger of "Services 'R' Us" and "Security Services Inc." how likely are you to be upset with the merger? From the public information available to you, you don't know that the company buying "Security Services Inc." is controlled by a DRO company. And I doubt there will be public disclosure "laws" that would insist on all owners of the merger to be disclosed since that would infringe on the company's privacy.

I certainly hope nobody tries imposing such coercive laws to insist (at gun point) all of the owners of the merger to be disclosed. Then again, as consumers may be worried about such mergers taking place they may non-coercively demand that all such owners are revealed when such mergers take place and then threaten severe economic ostracism against such companies and the (main) people in them should anyone ever find out they lied about the true owners of the company. Anyways, you're saying this stuff as if it were an argument for the state--it's not. And also, of all people, why would you, a statist, claim to be worried about such mergers? The state that you advocate now has already merged "dispute resolution services" and physical power and it already exhibits the possible problem of merging both of those services into one entity in that it already violently enforces it's rulings on who owns what, and does so often against the will (without the consent) of one or more of the parties involved in the dispute. So if you really thought these two services should be provided separately as I think then you should be strongly opposed to the state.

So as soon as you add a few layers of indirection, it would be easy for these companies to merge without anyone seeing anything out of the ordinary on the surface. I agree with quag that conglomeration is the most efficient form of business (less competition means more price-fixing :P ), so the companies would quickly find ways to merge even if the consumers objected to such mergers. They would just join up with a generic-sounding service company that is in fact a front for a larger entity. And of course, no one has the right to look into the owners of a company without their permission in a contract and once a company is well-established, why would they have the incentive to sign a contract with someone granting that person the right of discovery against them when there are plenty of people already contracted with them that don't have that stipulation. Without consumers working together, it would be very easy for companies to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers since most won't realize the potential of a problem. :(

Wow, you're talking down on the free market for reasons that you should be opposed to the state that you advocate. Imagine if your worst fear in the free market on this issue was realized in that not only did the DRO merge with the security business but it then opened up about this fact publicly simply because it knew it could without any negative consequences. In other words, imagine it opened up about this merger fact to the public because it knew that even with the public knowing about it the public would not be able to stop it from violently enforcing it's "dispute resolution" rulings tyrannically due to the fact that it had a monopoly of physical power in its area. While I assure you this would not happen in a free market / stateless society, if it did, all you would have is the very state that you now support.

"I agree with quag that conglomeration is the most efficient form of business (less competition means more price-fixing)." Again: the state. Not only does the state stiffle competition with its coercive monopoly violent court system and not only does it fix its prices, but it violently forces people to pay for its fixed-price services whether they want its "services" or not. In a stateless society, even if the worst happened and a DRO merged with a security business and started tyrannically enforcing its "dispute resolution" rulings on people violently, at least the masses would scorn these tyrants (for their tyrannical organization that they sneakily created somehow using generic company names) rather than become brainwashed and claim that such a tyrannical organization was the good and necessary alternative to competing non-tyrannical DROs and security businesses.

"Without consumers working together, it would be very easy for companies to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers since most won't realize the potential of a problem." It appears the wool is over your eyes regarding this same problem that the state already exhibits. You are worried that such a problem might arise in the free market, but you're unaware that it's already occurring in full in the form of the state that you support.

Note: If you don't actually state your positions (first on reality and then on the existence of states) and try actually arguing for them in your next post then there's a good chance I won't seriously reply. I've endured enough of such nonsense from quag for one summer.

Edited by Use the Force
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