Are these forums representative of the Mises institute?

[nirgrahamUK]

@Brainpolice

No, it isn’t feasable at all, it’s batshit insane. It requires things such as (1) every square inch of the planet has been homesteaded or (2) every single owner in the world voluntarily sells or gives up their property to this single person. The second one is simply impossible, it requires uniformity of desires and suicidal tendencies. As to the first one, it is physically impossible for an individual to homestead every square inch of the planet, and practically speaking the entire human race has yet to even approach accomplishing this. Furthermore, if you cannot see why a single person or organization claiming dominion over the entire world is dangerous, I don’t know what to tell you. World government anyone?

(2) its perfectly analgous to a row of terraced houses being sold off and ending up with a single owner owning the whole row of terraces, just on a grander scale. nothing ‘impossible’ about it. (1) you are seriously ascerting that evvery inch of a property should be homesteadable, why inch? why not an arbitrarily smaller division. so much so that a farmer throing grain on the ground might have rights to the square millimeteres that his footsteps covered and his grains fell, but not in the soil space between them,. perhaps re-evaluate your homestead criterion?

@Brainpolice

if someone owned a small army of robots and set it to plant corn all over some far flung green ball floating in space, who are you to say that he has not homesteaded it all?

Haha. What does that have to do with anything? The fact is, right now, these are silly thought experiments.

of course any thought experiment that weakens your argument is silly. how silly of me.

[Brainpolice]

If you are going to have a market-based society, then yes, rights will be commodities just like everything else.

I want a liberty-based society. A market follows from that, but isn’t what comes first. Rights are what provide the context for a market society. Rights are not commodities. The will is not a commodity and people are not commodities (hence why libertarianism opposes slavery). The right to life and liberty are not commodoties (hence why libertarianism opposes murder), they are interpersonal norms.

So if you want to exercise your right to eat pork and drink beer while walking thru the Muslim side of town, you’ll have to pay a lot of money for security when they get pissed off at your infidel ways and decide to stop you. Or, you’ll have to bribe the PDA’s that they hired in their turn to enforce halal.

When I talk about rights, I’m not talking about eating pork. That’s a ridiculous analogy. I’m talking about basic things like not enslaving, robbing and killing people. You know, negative rights. Now the strict enforcement or protection of these rights might, in some sense, be commodities (although organizations are free to not charge for them if they want), but not the rights themselves, they are interpersonal norms. And, for the most part, such enforcement is in reaction to rights violations. Prior to this, all that is required for rights is that people abstain from violating them.

The alternative, of course, is a state-based society, where the central state can wield sufficient power to regularize all manner of rights regardless of their utility.

I’m sorry, but you’re establishing a false dichotomy between commodifying rights and having a state. Rights are an interpersonal norms. They do not require a state, only social interaction. You’re giving us a false dichotomy between democracy and fuedalism, in essence. In either case, your conservatism is highly authoritarian and does not qualify as not being in support of a state. You merely prefer a conservative state.

[nirgrahamUK]

@Brainpolice

but no one disputes this. so why bring it up. ???

Because it’s precisely what I’m saying more or less, and you are disputing it and being reactionary towards it.

your inability to backdown over the most trivial, poor positions that you strike , makes the prosess of engaging you infuriating.

you claim here that I am on the record as having said that there is no object that is not currently under the control of its rightful property owner. this is absurd . good luck with that.

[nirgrahamUK]

@Brainpolice

in brief you were saying that The Power To Tax exemplifies a ‘bad right to do something that someone might have over someone else’. if you are bringing it up because you are opposing it to someone elses views on this thread, then you are simply WRONG, because no-one hear has said its legitimate to do anything to a non-consenting party. but you keep imagining that that is what you read.

I’m, I only brought up the power to tax as a basic example of a power of the state that defines it that isn’t just a question of who is the owner of the land. You’re taking me way out of context.

well, thanks for admitting to having strawmanned us yet again. because NOONE HAS SAID THAT STATES TAXING PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO CONTRACT WITH THE STATE IS LEGITIMATE

[Brainpolice]

@nirgrahamUK

@scineram

@Juan

Self-ownership is just a metaphor.

Indeed. Property presupposes owner. The right to life does not come from ownership. This proves not all rights are property rights.

In libertarianism.

im amazed that people dont recognise that there is no-such-thing as a ‘right to life’. right to life is only a metaphor. a body owner has a right to not have his body property transgressed. ergo, he should not be butchered and beaten, he sohuld not be killed. this is negative rights.

you guys keep positing a right to life like its a positive right. by extension you must believe in rights to food, shelter, medicine, and you must believe that the ‘right to life’ owner can place obligations on everyone else to provide for their life sustenance.

ergo. abandon this ‘right to life’ nonsense. property rights are all you need. or else stop talking about rights all together. seriously, sheeeeesh

I’m sorry, but you’re simply not understanding the arguments and establishing a strawman or non-sequitor. No, positive rights does not follow from what anyone is saying. You’re not grasping the point. The right to life is a negative right - people must abstain from murdering you.

You seem to have some serious confusion about libertarianism. Reducing everything to a vague “property rights”, with no real integration in your theory of property rights, reduces “property rights” to virtual meaninglessness. The notion that “property rights are all you need”, in the attempt to act like “right to life” is irrelevent, is just ridiculous. You keep viewing these things as exclusive, which is fallacious. The entire point is to integrate them together, not to have some absolutist and vague “property rights” that destroys any meaningful concept of justice.

[hayekianxyz]

@Brainpolice

Sorry, your “social covenant”, as put foreward by you, is indistinguishable from the social contract.

The comparison fails from the go, what I suggest is not unilateral. That is the defining characteristic of a social contract.

@Brainpolice

You cannot contract away someone else’s right to exist.

No, nor have I suggested that.

@Brainpolice

The implications of your idea is psychopathic, kicking babies out of communities because of a communitarian law about skin color. It’s ridiculous. Are you going to kick the mother out too?

Don’t like it, buy me out.

@Brainpolice

What about her property rights? Does she lose her property rights over her home for the sin of having a black baby?

That depends on the contract now, doesn’t it?

[Brainpolice]

(2) its perfectly analgous to a row of terraced houses being sold off and ending up with a single owner owning the whole row of terraces, just on a grander scale. nothing ‘impossible’ about it. (1) you are seriously ascerting that evvery inch of a property should be homesteadable, why inch? why not an arbitrarily smaller division. so much so that a farmer throing grain on the ground might have rights to the square millimeteres that his footsteps covered and his grains fell, but not in the soil space between them,. perhaps re-evaluate your homestead criterion?

No, it is not analagous, because the entire point is that a row of houses is nowhere near on the scale of the entire planet as a whole. The idea that the entire planet can be voluntarily aquired by a single individual is not realistic, and even if it were to come about, it would be horrible and constitute an apt pretext for a global state. That should be glaringly obvious. Every single person in the world isn’t going to voluntarily give up their portion of property to one man. That simply is not how people work. Neither is one man going to realistically direct a “world homesteading” campaign that gets him legitimate dominion over everyone in the world. That you dont see how dangerous such a notion is (an individual with the world under their thumb) really baffles me.

The part about inches is retarded semantic nitpicking. You know what I meant, it’s a figure of speech.

of course any thought experiment that weakens your argument is silly. how silly of me.

You haven’t weakened by argument, you’ve yet to even comprehend it.

[hayekianxyz]

@Brainpolice

The analogy doesn’t hold. There’s a huge difference between owning a house, and owning a city (including all of the people within it). It’s as if I compared “the nation” to a house to defend state borders and state immigration restriction policies. The analogy simply doesn’t hold. “The nation” has no discernable owner. Neither does a city. It has multiple owners within it. If we want to talk about decentralization - decentralize the cities! Decentralization ends at individual choice, not city-states.

That’s called special pleading.

[Brainpolice]

@nirgrahamUK

@Brainpolice

in brief you were saying that The Power To Tax exemplifies a ‘bad right to do something that someone might have over someone else’. if you are bringing it up because you are opposing it to someone elses views on this thread, then you are simply WRONG, because no-one hear has said its legitimate to do anything to a non-consenting party. but you keep imagining that that is what you read.

I’m, I only brought up the power to tax as a basic example of a power of the state that defines it that isn’t just a question of who is the owner of the land. You’re taking me way out of context.

well, thanks for admitting to having strawmanned us yet again. because NOONE HAS SAID THAT STATES TAXING PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO CONTRACT WITH THE STATE IS LEGITIMATE

Sorry, you’re just being an immature fool right now. I didn’t strawman anyone. You took a tiny portion of my post out of context to strawman me. I wasn’t argueing that people were for taxation. You’re simply nitpicking over something you took out of context. It’s lame.

[nirgrahamUK]

ok, so lets go back to that paragraph in which you mention Tax. (it only appears once and is easy to find). and justify your use of the phrase, given the context of your argument in that section. and i will honestly reconsider if you were making a legitimate point in the discussion.

[ladyattis]

@Byzantine

The alternative, of course, is a state-based society, where the central state can wield sufficient power to regularize all manner of rights regardless of their utility.

Or perhaps a universal convenant for which each given community can sign on that respects all human rights (life, liberty, and property), but expresses it differently through each one of them?

I think there’s a false dichotomy being setup by both Giles and Byzantine, and even Brainpolice, that some how rights must be subverted in one fashion or another. Whether it’s the right to life, liberty, and property as Giles and Byzantine seem to suggest or by the restriction of the right to property on land as Brainpolice suggests, both seem not to gel logically from the context that rights are the baseline of a society, regardless of time or place. And that subverting any one part of these rights is to subvert the very capacity of a culture to flourish. Here’s the fact that both need to accept: everyone has their own take on existence, but since no one will ever have the absolute knowledge of reality, each one of us accepts only that authority begins and ends at our own individual capacities to exercise it (on ourselves, specifically). So, it doesn’t follow in any situation to assert that a collection of equally limited human beings will have a special power that a single one does not. Otherwise, we’re right back to square one with Statism (where the State has special powers and rights beyond the people that compose it). So, what will be it? Rights or no rights?

[Brainpolice]

@GilesStratton

@Brainpolice

The analogy doesn’t hold. There’s a huge difference between owning a house, and owning a city (including all of the people within it). It’s as if I compared “the nation” to a house to defend state borders and state immigration restriction policies. The analogy simply doesn’t hold. “The nation” has no discernable owner. Neither does a city. It has multiple owners within it. If we want to talk about decentralization - decentralize the cities! Decentralization ends at individual choice, not city-states.

That’s called special pleading.

Individual sovereignty = “special pleading”? You’re a joke.

[nirgrahamUK]

special pleading is when a row of terrace houses owned by one man, gets just tooooo long. its in a different category.

[krazy_kaju]

@Byzantine

If you are going to have a market-based society, then yes, rights will be commodities just like everything else.

You know, I don’t really distinguish myself from right or left libertarians, but I seem to be siding more with the right libertarians here. Rights are commodities to be contracted out. For example, when you work, you contract out your right to your labor.

[Brainpolice]

@ladyattis

@Byzantine

The alternative, of course, is a state-based society, where the central state can wield sufficient power to regularize all manner of rights regardless of their utility.

Or perhaps a universal convenant for which each given community can sign on that respects all human rights (life, liberty, and property), but expresses it differently through each one of them?

I think there’s a false dichotomy being setup by both Giles and Byzantine, and even Brainpolice, that some how rights must be subverted in one fashion or another. Whether it’s the right to life, liberty, and property as Giles and Byzantine seem to suggest or by the restriction of the right to property on land as Brainpolice suggests, both seem not to gel logically from the context that rights are the baseline of a society, regardless of time or place. And that subverting any one part of these rights is to subvert the very capacity of a culture to flourish. Here’s the fact that both need to accept: everyone has their own take on existence, but since no one will ever have the absolute knowledge of reality, each one of us accepts only that authority begins and ends at our own individual capacities to exercise it (on ourselves, specifically). So, it doesn’t follow in any situation to assert that a collection of equally limited human beings will have a special power that a single one does not. Otherwise, we’re right back to square one with Statism (where the State has special powers and rights beyond the people that compose it). So, what will be it? Rights or no rights?

Your first sentence is what I’m for. I’m accepting no dichotomy. I’m integrating all of them. I’m for upholding the right to life, liberty and property, in a consistant way in which they do not contradict one another. I do not think, that when our concept formation is proper, they contradict at all. So I do not suggest doing away with the right to property at all. That is a mischaracterization or misunderstanding. My only point is: property rights have to be integrated/consistant with the right to life and liberty at the same time, they do not grant the power to arbitrarily start taking away liberty and murdering people. It’s a pretty simple matter.

[hayekianxyz]

@Brainpolice

Individual sovereignty = “special pleading”? You’re a joke.

Owning a house entails setting the rules for living there. Owning a multi tenant plot of land entails setting the rules for those that live there. Yes, it’s special pleading.

You can tone it down now, boy.

[ladyattis]

@krazy kaju

For example, when you work, you contract out your right to your labor.

For exchange of a commodity to replace it. Therefore, rights are never subverted in the exchange. For example, if you attempted not to repay me for my labor, I could to go to a repossession firm and have them take some property by you, be it a car or cash in the bank, to make me whole (minus their fees). Otherwise, I could freely report your dishonest actions of theft to the public, for which it would be equally possible for others to deny you access to their products and services equally, as part of a reciprocal recognization of rights. In such a situation, you would either pay me or you would be effectively in exile. There’s no contract that can ever exist that one party can violate its terms and get away with it.

[Brainpolice]

@krazy kaju

@Byzantine

If you are going to have a market-based society, then yes, rights will be commodities just like everything else.

You know, I don’t really distinguish myself from right or left libertarians, but I seem to be siding more with the right libertarians here. Rights are commodities to be contracted out. For example, when you work, you contract out your right to your labor.

I think that’s a confusion of what’s meant by rights. Rights are interpersonal ethical norms that provide the context for a free market to form in the first place. A market that has a basis in prior theft is not a free market. A free market is “free” precisely because rights are respected. If rights are not respected, then the market is not consistantly free in the first place. The right to life and liberty is the context out of which we form free market interactions, as something consistant with our already existing, inalienable rights. My point is merely that rights are inalienable, and hence not commodities.

Furthermore, this isn’t strictly a left-libertarian/right-libertarian issue at all. It’s an issue of concept formation and thin/thick libertarianism. Neo-aristotilean libertarians would tend to agree with me on this, not on explicitly left-libertarian grounds so much as broader philosophical grounds. Neo-aristotilean libertarians reject an axoimatic approach to libertarianism, and all I’m doing is rejecting an axoimatic approach as well.

[nirgrahamUK]

ok great, so you reject an axiomatic approach, so of course there are no axioms that we might examine, critique, and that can ground a further elaboration of your themes.

what ‘approach’ do you take?. intuitive perhaps? transcendental? clue me in buddy .

[Conza]

Need some be reminded, the enemy is the state.

And not others within the movement?