This is an absurd misinterpretation. Gun owners are potential heroes, drunks and drug users have the potential to sit at home harming nobody but themselves, etc. A gun or line of coke won’t off someone by itself. That is the nature of these res. The nature of a child is different. If we’re to afford a certain set of negative rights to adult humans of all varieties, it is again because of their nature as moral agents. If a race of super-intelligent and technologically advanced aliens encountered humans, we would hope that they respected our human rights (of course, all human rights are property rights), rather than treating us like people are suggesting we’re to treat feeble infants. A lot of the ideas being expressed here are similar to antiquated ones used to justify slavery or treating wives as property. Read von Mises on this here.
Thanks for the post ER. I’m not sure who the following statement was directed at but I don’t think anyone here is trying to justify or condone such acts. What I am trying to argue is the fallacies of arbitrary law enforcement.
I think provocative posts are fine, but this one is pretty low rent. Put a little effort into framing it better.
How’s this for an answer:
I would kill you on the grounds that if you do it to your own children, then I can’t imagine what you would do to mine.
There; that’s nice and final.
My point was that children are like you said, “potential moral agents.” Everyone has the potential to be something that they are not. Should a gun owner be treated as a murder or a hero? I would say that to answer this question you would have to observe their actions.
This is still one area that I’m not convinced in either way in. I don’t know if and when children should be afforded the same rights as an adult. On one hand if children are to be treated as property it would allow their owners to do horrible things to them (which is what this thread is about). On the other hand if children have the very same rights as an adult it would be perfectly legal for a parent to leave their child to alone to fend for itself.
And then my family would kill you. Yup, seems pretty final to me. Now your children have no father either.
Maybe you should put more thought into your answer?
Socialtdk, please think through things fully and don’t bother me with this anymore. Children are human. Their case is different enough that we use the term ‘guardianship’. Children will undoubtedly become adult humans rather than adult whales or llamas. Adult humans may very well become heroes or murderers, but this is entirely irrelevant. We still afford other humans rights even though they may do either harm or good. Adult humans are potential invalids or potential sleeping adult humans. Would you like to have zero negative rights when you are asleep or become old? Would you like to be slaughtered like a cow?
A gun owner should be treated like any other person. If we ignored potentiality as you want to, it would be wrong to shoot a man holding a gun to someone else’s head. It throws the whole concept of ownership on its head. Read my last link or Kinsella on self ownership or latecomer ethics. I said that children have similar but not identical rights as adults. If children were mere res, we could also go around homesteading sleeping adults. Specifically, I mean things like that pre-rational children cannot own property. It is though legal for adults to abandon children. You must remember though that your action of abandoning the child would need to be accompanied by a reasonable effort to make it known. You could not abandon a child by locking them in a box. This is forestalling.
Also, “abortions” in a libertarian society would have to take place in a much different way. The fetus could not be run through a wood chipper or have hooks stuck through its skull as occurs today. If such technology advances like the use of a pig uterus as artificial wombs, it would be forestalling to deny Friends of Babies access to the fetus. If parents had innate positive obligations to their children, it would then be unfortunate for women who know their child would be born with some disease making them permanently unable to care for itself.
I agree with the first point. I wouldn’t call it a problem though. The content of private law depends on the opinions of consumers. That’s a good thing.
The second point is not necessarily true. The abusive parent may willingly hand over the child, if he knows he’s going to lose it anyway. But yes in some cases, the PDA may need to trespass into his house in order to rescue the child. This is acceptable. It’s no different to a PDA forcing entry into someone’s house to arrest them for robbery, or any other crime. As long as the defensive coercion used is proportional to the crime, it’s OK. I think most people see trespassing as a minor crime relative to child abuse.
That’s strange. I never mentioned voting. And mob rule is what democratic governments are, not free markets. Also, PDA’s would not operate geographically: two neighbours could easily subscribe to two different PDA’s. It would be like broadband services, for example, with every individual choosing the service which suits them best.
I suspect this is because most libertarians do not oppose all coercion, only aggressive coercion. See http://freenation.org/a/f12l2.html. Learn the difference between libertarianism and pacifism.
Have you read much about how polycentric law works? Scenarios such as the one you mention are often discussed, such as by Rothbard, Friedman, Tannehill, Hoppe, Benson, Stringham, etc. They all explain why two PDA’s would be far less likely to go to war than two governments. I can provide links if you need me to. We should take this to another thread if you want to discuss it further though, as this is quite off-topic.
That’s a shame. I thought you were genuinely interested in learning about and understanding how child abuse might be dealt with in an anarcho-libertarian world. What was the purpose of your original post?
I already know how it will be dealt with. Nothing will happen to the parents, unless their neighbors take action. The point is to help other people understand this.
PDAs will not exist. Individuals do not need massive protection, only government do.
This is a concise statement of the problems libertarians have faced since Rothbard. But here is Kinsella on the subject:
Looking at it this way, both child abuse and child neglect are against libertarian law. Here’s some Block:
[quote=“Walter Block - [Libertarianism, positive Children’s rights, obligations and property abandonment: children’s rights]
(http://www.walterblock.com/wp-content/uploads/publications/block-children.pdf)”]In effect, the mother “homesteads” the baby within her body, with a little initial help from the father. Babies, of course, cannot be owned in the same manner as applies to land, or to domesticated animals. Instead, what can be “owned” is merely the right to continue to homestead the baby, e.g. feed and care for it and raise it.
[…]
The only way to attain homestead rights to the child after giving birth to it is to bring it up in a reasonable manner. Were the parents to instead abuse their child, this would not at all be compatible with homesteading it. If so, they would lose all rights to continue to keep the child.
[/quote]
Are you saying there would be no interpersonal conflicts in a world without government?
So why wouldn’t a division of labor develop so that neighbours could call in a service, rather than having to take the risk themselves?
Insurance companies dealing with ordinary theft won’t exist either ?
They vote not in the sense your thinking of but on the market. People will choose and purchase a PDA which co-align’s with their ideological beliefs.
Thats true but broadband services cannot force anyone to do anything where as your PDA has a leg up somehow granting them special market privileges where they can break private property laws. People will purchase a PDA service which correlates with their own world view. Furthermore I have no doubt that people would actually rather choose a PDA willing to violate private property as opposed to a PDA not willing, this is ofcoarse the whole reason we have the government we have today. PDA’s will naturally become political. Anytime an avenue of coersion exists people will exploit it.(For the supposed greater good).
Take the term more literally. Mob rule means just that, mob rule. When a group of like minded individuals use coercion against someone else. Your system specifically advocates that. People will gravitate to PDA’s with whom they ideologically align with and those PDA’s will do whats best for business, by pleasing their customers and exploiting anyone’s property they feel necessary to keep their customer base happy. If you think this isn’t true look at the number of right winged radical’s in this country that continuously justify war.
What you are advocating is aggressive coercion, not defensive. You cannot defend another person indirectly or on their behalf without explicit consent via contract. Being a criminal does not mean you forfeit your rights as the criteria of being a criminal is arbitrary and subjectively decided. When you invade someone else’s property that is not defense, that is offense. Your using the Ends justify the means argument here. Your system basically justifies our war in the middleast. Also your definition of defense grays into offense all too easily.
Argumentum Ad Populum. Plus, personally, I haven’t heard very many libertarian’s argue this point. Your whole premise sounds more like the hypocrisy which floats around in the conservative movement. The idea that offensive action becomes defensive when someone’s moral views are different.
Your having a hard time discerning large situations with small. Just because the middleeast is far away doesn’t mean the same scenario can’t be played out on a smaller geographical scale.
And no, I have possibly not read as much as you have on the topic but for the same reason’s I don’t like reading the theoretical successes of marxism.
Conservativism
Argument against Free markets and so called Pacifism.
I call you out on this. I believe your stance is anti free-market and anti-individualist. Your argument is cloned from the conservative movement.
It just dawned on me that the entire premise for your argument cooreligns completely with the conservative movement. The US is essentially a rogue PDA but only from your perspective where you are unable to move to another PDA. To the conservative and republican base all of their actions in supporting war are vindicated and the US is not a rogue PDA at all, at least in their eyes. They are doing exactly what they want, invading another country because they find them offensive. The conservative base is justified in their war as they feel that their rights have been violated and therefore must support a war to bring justice.
To someone who understands the difference between offensive and defensive it’s obvious that our war in the middleast is 100% offensive. Your system justify’s an offensive method of law enforcement. It doesn’t uphold the rights of member individuals rather it enforces it’s beleifs on non-member individuals because non-members may have offended the members of said PDA.
Has it not dawned on you that your entire argument is basically a cloned argument that the republican’s use to defend the justification for their war?
Pacifism on the other hand, or as I would rather you call it “true Free-market”, where coersion is not allowed to exist punish’s individuals completely on a voluntary basis entirely without the need of violating property rights. I guarantee you a criminal would rather spend the rest of his days in a sponsored prison rather then starve in his house. You use the word Pacifism in a negative connotation as if it is wrong, and then argue that libertarianism uses an aggressive method of resolving disputes. This is EXACTLY the same argument republican’s use against anti-war demonstrators. They feel we are pacifists.
You also need to understand that we ALREADY HAVE monocentric law at an international level and it does not work any better. Coersion must be abolished for a true free society to function as a free society. Otherwise PDA’s will become agenda based and be exploited to enforce beleifs on others. It will be good business for PDA’s to do this and please their customer base.
The whole reason why lobbying exists today is because business’s know that buddy relationships with an organization which can legally use coersion is beneficial to it’s cause. When you create an avenue for coersion to exist exploitation will happen. Big business’s you can bet will buddy with large PDA’s. The biggest bidder is going to win in regard to a PDA and coersion against people in your system will be justified.
Let me put it in a different light. There is only one reason why the government of today exists as the single power that it is. It is completly due to permited and legally allowed coersion. If the government was not allowed to violate private property it would not exist. Period.
Free Markets and Coersion
You are attempting to compare a true free market entity like a milkman to a coersive market entity like a PDA that uses coersion. The two are not the same in your example. What would it be like if it were? Why is it that PDA’s get special privilages with Coersion where milkmen can not? Why can’t all business’s be given this ability? Perhaps MilkmanA feels that his milk is of more value and therefore more productive then MilkmanB. Perhaps he feels morally justified in using coersion to stifle his competitors. He could fabricate a silly argument as you have stated that MilkManB has not homesteaded his business appropriately and therefore he will take over his business by force and take the existing customer base.
When coersion is used corruption occurs. You don’t need coersion for a safe, free, and productive free market world to exist.
I don’t need to read books which try to justify the use of offensive coersion for the same reason I don’t need to read a neo-cons book on justification for war. Both are morally wrong. Quite frankly if what you say is true in the respect that most Libertarian’s agree with you I would be terrified for the ultimate result of libertarianism and hope that more people defned this cancer from becoming more set in stone in the libertarian ideology.
You don’t need coersion to have a healthy free society. When coersion is allowed there becomes no distinction between criminals and organizations simply performing the actions of their customer base. Criminals in this case will always be individuals meanwhile a banded co-opped PDA is somehow justified in performing the same actions.
If you agree that man himself is not allowed to have special coercive privileges over his neighbor, then you cannot logically come to the conclusion that somehow business’s get this special authority. If man is not allowed coercive privileges neither can business’s be allowed, regardless of their function.
Bottom line is we will never get the free society we want so long as we continuously attempt to create avenues for justified coercion. There can be only one case of justifiable violence and thats through direct defense, not indirect offensive forms of defense.
No, I am saying there will be arbitrators, with no threat of force to enforce their decisions. For evidence, look at how international companies resolve disputes. The only threats available to the parties at the dispute are what they bring.
Just for the record my viewpiont here does different from Spidey in the follow respects. I’m not saying PDA’s won’t exist. They most certainly will, especially in dense populated areas. My argument is a PDA, Insurence Provider, or arbitrator does not need to violate property rights to uphold the culturally accepted law.
I’ll quote myself from before.
Original Post
My responses
I would guess they would exist. They would probably investigate the claim, find the thief, and ask him to pay up. I am not sure what threats they could use, besides refusing to do business with him if he does not pay up. Maybe this would be too risky, and people would just have savings instead, which I think would also be very likely.
What risk? If my neighbor harms his or her child, I do not have to do anything about it.
PDA’s have no special privileges. Any individual could do what a PDA does. A PDA is merely a division of labor.
A PDA which violates property rights will a) be liable to be prosecuted by another PDA, b) have to raise its prices to pay for the aggressive coercion, c) be judged extremely harshly by free-market regulators and the media, and d) lose customers because of the increased prices and loss of reputation. So PDA’s will have strong incentives to use only defensive coercion. PDA’s will not “naturally become political”.
I wish I had your confidence that voluntary actions would be so effective, and that this would be sufficient for order.
Abolished by who? And how?
Wait a minute. “Direct defense” is justified? Is that not a type of coercion?
And please do read Roderick Long’s article. It’s really short and extremely helpful for understanding different types of coercion, and what types are consistent with libertarianism.