Just a brief question. If there’s nothing wrong with gated communities (including the fact that people can’t secede from them and thet can raise ‘taxes’), what’s wrong with a state?
- Person A joined the gated community voluntarily, whereas he did not voluntarily join the state.
Whilst I think that anyone who would join this type of oganization would have be incredibly foolish they still agree to it. Libertarians aren’t against welfare because they want the poor to starve, they’re against it because it doesn’t work well and it’s forceful. This situation is similar.
I assume that people in a gated community can still have babies 
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Whether it works or not is an economical dispute, and hence doesn’t imply justice or injustice. Involving the use of ‘force’ is of no help either, since libertarians also agree that force can be used legitimally. Hence, the question is when the use of force is justified. That’s where the difference of opinion kicks in, isn’t it?
“I assume that people in a gated community can still have babies ?”
???
Your OP is doesn’t give enough information and you should define your terms.
What does it mean for someone to not be able to secede from a gated community? What do you mean by “taxes?”
What are the contractual terms for living within the gated commmunity?
Is this gated community one big rental property? Or do the people individually own the homes, but have some sort of homeowners association.
Your OP is kinda like asking: “Was it okay for my neighbor to have punched me in the nose?” Well, did you give your neighbor permission to do so?
We needs more info!
If the state would morally come to own the land it claims (purchased it without stolen funds) there would indeed be nothing wrong with it.
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regarding the babies, people can be born in a gated comminuty just like they can be born in a state. In neither case would it be ‘voluntarily’.
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further, you can make the gated community look like the US in all its contractual arrangements. In both cases, people are born in it, people come to live there, people leave it. You can disagree with what is decided by the ‘government’ of your gated community, but where does the injustice come from?
Here I may differ from my libertarian colleagues. I think there is something wrong with a gated community if one can’t secede from it. Essentially, any association where, upon joining, one can’t voluntarily leave at any time is not exactly a voluntary association, now is it?
I think he means secede and retain the land. They are, of course, permitted to leave with their possessions. I think we have to realise that in such gated communities, the inhabitants do not actually own the land and/or house where they live. They simply have a contract with the landlord - and either party can choose to discontinue the transaction. If this is not the case, preventing secession is indeed serfdom.
Of course, tracing back the original acquisition of the land by the landlord may reveal that it simply ocurred by fiat under the state - but that is not necessarily the case.
I consider a person to actually own real estate if he has allodial title to it. This, of course, means that hardly anyone in the world owns real estate, even though many people think they do.
My understanding is that, in a stateless society, ownership of land would mean holding allodial title and nothing else. If the members of a gated community don’t have allodial titles to the real estate each of them “owns”, then they have been defrauded and essentially put into bondage as serfs. The only ways out of this situation are for each member to have allodial title to his real estate, which implies that the gated community is a voluntary association and nothing more, or for there to be no actual ownership of real estate perceived by any member of the gated community, at which point the gated community is a glorified rental complex. Either way is fine by me.
Right, but I see a problem in modern statist legal systems involving equivocation of the word “ownership” when it comes to real estate.
Yeah, I was viewing it as a ‘glorified rental complex’. But such things might not even come about in a stateless society.
And the babies would not be subject to the contract, that would be slavey.
Also, there is nothing contractual about the United States. Period. You are not asked to sign a contract in your entire life as a United States citizen, you’re forced to go to a school where you are taught a U.S version of history. When one becomes an adult he will not recieve contract saying asking him if he wants to pay taxes, he will recieve a tax bill.
The United States was never a contract for anyone, the only one it was, was for a handful of representatives out of millions, and this would not not apply to their children.
You cannot force your offspring to do things through contract, that is born slavery, I cannot sign a contract saying “My first child will be forced to follow these rules” any more than I can sign a contract saying “My firstborn child will be a slave to person ______” or that he would “owe 10,000 dollars to _____”
Libertarians only support force in defense of one’s person and property. Everyone supports force, this does not mean that you can then support nonsense like “killing is wrong” or any other nonsensical derivative
also, OP , read Spooner. (No Treason)
Xandervereist, as a child you don’t have a choice of being born in the first place. I guess that means I’m being “coerced” by nature. You hardly have the capacity for voluntary choice upon birth to begin with. Once you are able to make voluntary choices, then I think you should be afforded all the rights that everybody else gets.
The injustice is that the government is making a fiat land claim. “Pay the mafia that controls this land from latitude X to latitude Y and then longitude A to longitude Z, or else we won’t hurt you. And this applies all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains to the Appalachian Mountains.” It’s easy to see that this is an obvious overclaim when it comes to territory.
Now I think you could retort that the United States came about by small organic states banding together. But even when it comes to those States, (Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, etc.) I think these were overclaims. There was no way that these lands were homesteaded by the agents that called themselves The State. This idea of a gated community thing would most likely work on a microscale. Also the thing that defines the State the most is the monopoly of force, so you are barred from using a competitor when it comes to legal options.
Now I guess you could also say that a tycoon could acquire a bunch of land and then say, “in order to operate on my property, you have to follow these rules and, by the way, you can’t use a competing legal service other than the one I demand.” The point is that you have a choice to enter the property or not. And the overclaim is the key point here. This basically amounts to a “love it or leave it” type of argument, but the fundamental difference is the ease of entry and the ease of leaving. If I could escape the U.S. government by driving 30 miles west and setting up shop there, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Plus if you wound up having these micro-states with autocratic capitalist land holders (something I doubt would even happen in Ancapistan), you would still have competition in attracting “citizens,” so they couldn’t really abuse their control.
My understanding is that, in a typical gated community, the members believe that they actually own their homes.
Technically, most people in the US do fill out W-4 forms in order to be able to work somewhere. However, this doesn’t really qualify as a contract, because it’s essentially forced upon employers by the IRS. Plus it only applies to federal income and FICA (Social Security and Medicare) taxes.
Interestingly enough, most people have historically believed otherwise. It starts with one’s parents, who are presumed to have authority (even the power of life and death, in some cultures) over him. This authority is superceded by their parents, and so on, until one gets to the oldest living member of the clan/tribe/whatever. One could see this as a form of ownership over one’s offspring. To me, the question is whether this is an inherited human condition or whether it was somehow acquired over time. Anyways, my point here is that the state is essentially a really extended family.
Well, now you’ve changed the subject. There are plenty of threads on here about babies. Do a search and engage those.
That’s not the point, they are free to leave the gated community (unlike slaves), but they would not be free to acquire property inside the gated community and suddenly declare that they no longer abide by the rules of that gated community and, e.g., let strangers in.
You cannot contractualize everything. The very notion of a contract rests on huge shared assumptions concerning language, meaning, rules, promises, obligations, etc. Hence, the absence of a formal written contract is not crucial. You know very well what the risks, the rights and the obligations are when you either come to the US or stay in the US. I don’t see where the written contract would make much of a difference. I guess most people who come to the US would gladly sign that contract, and most people who are in the US would gladly sign it as well.
Well, I don’t see how “the ease of leaving” (which is a matter of costs) can amount to a “fundamental difference”. If I want to switch from MacOS to Windows or Linux, there are also costs involved, and I also have a choice. What’s the difference? There’s a difference of degree for sure, but where’s the fundamental difference? Why would your ability to leave the US by driving 30 or 300 or 3000 miles amount to a “fundamental difference”? Does the injustice of a state vanish for people living less than 30 miles from the border?
And I also don’t see how the monopoly of force makes a fundamental difference. In my house in a free society, I would presumably have the monopoly over the use of force, right? But there would be nothing wrong with that. Or I could join a monastery and accept the monopoly over the use of force from the Abbot. Again, I don’t see the fundamental difference. Sure, the ‘costs’ of leaving a state are huge, but why does that amount to a fundamental difference?