good thing I didn’t offer my comment as an argument; yet we could argue it, if you strongly disagree. start a new thread.
Well then what is it? An unsupported comment that the author did not bother to defend with an argument?
I provided no more argument for my position than you did for your position (on the relative superiority of state solutions), which was nothing.
I never stated anything for the superiority of state positions, did I? My argument here was for the necessity of objective law, that was all, and I did provide support for my thesis that objective law is necessary: I didn’t merely state: “To the contrary, objective law is superior to subjective law, which is an oxymoron.”
so perhaps there is no disagreement between us.
when you chided me for commenting without arguing you did not even hold the belief to which I stated a contrary.
I do not know why whatever you were commenting about necessitates your reply, though hence why arguing by assertion is a terrible way to argue/ comment.
you made some true comments, which spoke of the importance of certain factors. my understanding is that competitive solution is superior than monopoly solution for providing those factors and others.
Libertarians don’t assume this. They draw a distinction between defensive coercion (justified) and initiatory coercion (unjustified).
You’ve been raising a lot of questions. I think the best way to get answers is to read something that presents the libertarian doctrine in its entirety, e.g. Rothbard’s For a New Liberty.
Yet which society they live as a part of is not determined territorially any longer. Nevertheless, there is no reason to think there would be legal uncertainty.
Regime uncertainty. Unfortunately, as you probably know, law is not objective in practice.
There is a lot of circularity in the usual, popular defences of libertarianism.
I’m not sure that the logic is circular at all; it just seems to be people reading too much into articles, where the author seemed to have been ambiguous only because perhaps his readership already agreed with him, and so he didn’t feel the need to present a full philosophical exposé on why the State is illegitimate. Gene Callahan, who as far as I know is a “market anarchist” (and so, probably has some answers to his point of his own), writes:
But the ultimate cause was my much longer-term conviction that such reasoning simply begs a central question that political theory is seeking to answer, namely, just when is coercion justified and when isn’t it? After all, every wavelength of the political spectrum considers some coercion to be OK, and some to be “aggression.” Anarcho-capitalists believe that coercing a trespasser off of one’s property is OK coercion, and collecting taxes to be “aggressive” coercion;…
Clearly, this is rather simplistic within itself, as it does not recognize the fact that while the property owner is just that (an owner of his property), the State does not legitimately exercise power over other people’s property. So, if anything, the question for libertarians is not to show where the line is drawn in terms of aggression, because the line is already clear. Libertarians only must disprove that the State has any justification to their use of force when coercing others to agree to or do something that they otherwise wouldn’t agree to or do.
Well that is a big enough task. There is still a lot to go.
Callahan’s post is odd. Sure, Doherty’s quote, as stated, is circular. Presumably if asked, Doherty could point to theory of justice and property rights to back up his claim that taxation is unjust coercion. But as Jonathan pointed out, Doherty is writing for a libertarian audience, who likely already share his position.
If Callahan is chiding libertarians for not coming up with an account of when coercion is justified, then I’m baffled. Libertarianism just is a theory of justice; the whole enterprise is about determining when people are justified in using force. And in FaNL, Rothbard gives such an account. Maybe he isn’t successful, but he certainly isn’t begging the question.
Callahan writes: “After all, if Hobbes is right, and without Leviathan we are in the “Warre of all against all,” then the sovereign is justified in doing whatever is necessary to keep us out of that state.”
As stated, this is a non sequitur. This would be true for a consequentialist, but not for a deontologist, and it might or might not be true for a virtue ethicist. See my post here.
Of course, but then deontology and virtue ethics also have to be defended. They cannot be assumed.
Gah! Infinite regress!
Is knowing the law you are under a Boolean kind of thing that is either so or not so, or does it come in degrees? I ask this because I would be willing to bet that you DO NOT know all the laws in which you could be held by the legal system you are under.
Why suppose that people under private law codes (which might use standard law like web browsers use the same web standards) would have less certainty as to what the law is than under current monopolistic law? There is nothing that prevents people from using non-standard network technology on their own property, but in practice virtually nobody does. I think whether uncertainty is higher or lower under private versus current law is an empirical matter and cannot be settled by arguing only from principle.