Remember what it was called? I’ll look it up.
Lol, okay.
Surely you don’t claim to know my motive by that statement, and surely you understand a difference between a consequence and a motive. I think a state could be built that would not be aggressive in any sense. Were that to turn out to be true, one would have to say that it redeems the idea of the state, or should do so, in the eyes of those who, like you, have continually accused it of being only capable of aggression in the long term.
Where’s my intention in that statement? My intention is to create a free society without aggression.
As I said, and as you ignored, if I were convinced we didn’t need some minimal form of societal cooperation then I wouldn’t advocate for one.
Not sure how I missed that, I’ll look it up.
It depends on the particular non-state replacement being advocated. As an example, the idea that those who breach contracts will be ignored and thereby punished, the ostracism method, strikes as particularly laughable. It relies on a small, insular community with whom cooperation is far more useful than would be betrayal, thus on incentive to remain honest.
In a large society, where one could meet a hundred new strangers for the rest of the days of your life, I see no incentive to not cheat, because that person can simply walk away to cheat another day.
It also seems to me that such a solution creates incentive for a particular kind of what you might call honesty-arbitrage. The incentive would be to build up as much faith as possible, such as say a banker. In the ostracism method, the owner of a bank could simply wait until everyone trusts him, then walk away with a couple billion in reserves, that one act making him wildly rich to the point where anyone’s ostracism means nothing to him–he doesn’t intend to conduct business anymore. Ignore him all you want.
Only a court of last resort, with the ability to force a wealth transfer out of his private accounts back to the wronged parties can provide justice in that situation.
But, iirc, I’ve said all this to you before. So.
You keep saying that, but not explaining why in principled terms. I counter that the NAP provides ways that coercion can be used ethically, so it remains theoretically possible for a state to not aggress. Which seems to invalidate your per se argument. Yet you’ve never followed up on this thread that I know of.
That’s fine, really doesn’t bother me. You may yet find some argument I consider compelling enough to abandon my idea.
It’s questions like this that make it hard to take you seriously. If your point is that nations are simply groups of people, just make the point and let’s skip the asking for a definition stage.
Yeah, those are examples of ‘societies,’ they often use this term explicitly in fact. They are also entitled to defend themselves as a group, say, were the chess club attacked by the football team.
They are, but that didn’t suddenly make tyranny possible. Tech suddenly does make autarchy possible.
If you could refute my NAP-argument for an ethical role for governemnt you would’ve done it by now :\ I’ve yet to see it. IIRC, your typical feint has been that all governments must eventually coerce. However, my parry is to talk about locus of control and the abandonment of the socialist-ethic of majority rule which is innately aggressive, and without which a society may not in fact be innately aggressive or tend towards aggression at all, but the reverse.
I did not disagree: “electing representatives with more or less power to negotiate on their behalf.”