I was hoping to get you to think outside the box. But you dont seem to be in the mood. My point was that yes it is possible for someone to engage in activity on thier property that is threatening to those who own property nearby, that however does not mean that the other property owners cant stop him. It seems your claim is that the other property owners are powerless to stop the activity or behavior. I was trying to get you to see that because you dont have the right to use force, does not mean you are powerless. What i gather is that because you beleive that some have no power, government is justified in taking freedom from everyone. But its not true. You do have the means to protect yourself.
You can say it all you want but your actions are limited to your own property. For example if you own the road from the plutonium enriching plant to his property where he is assembling the bomb you can say “I know it’s your property but you can’t do that” and then promptly ban trucks carrying plutonium from your roads. This type of action can be used to prevent or punish all sorts of anti-social behavior.
What’s not nice is to make generalizations, and not identify specific arguments, or their authors. I would be shocked, if there are more than a couple outliers here who hold the position you have attributed to the group, or a subset of the group.
Good idea. I try to identify what I believe. What other people believe is all over the place and isn’t even very good for purposes of illustration.
The intent of the designer is irrelevant. Only the intent of the user should be relevant. What more,any such alleged non-lethal weapons is media propagated nonsense. There is no such thing as a non-lethal weapon!
Anything can kill and be used as a lethal weapon. Rubber bullets kill! Even stun guns kill. A car can be far more lethal then a pistol. Any hammer, knife, screw driver, or ax can be used as lethal weapons. They are and they have been in the past.
The maker of a gun can have no intent other then deterrence. He can hope that his gun is never used to kill another man. From his point of view, it is designed purely for deterrence.
Point 1) The massive amount of time, energy, money, and resources required to build a nuclear weapon put it out of the reach of some 99% of the population. If someone is willing to put that amount of effort into producing a nuclear weapon, do you think a law will truly be able to limit this person or business?
Point 2) The False Safety Blanket- People will feel secure knowing such a devastating weapon is ‘unable to be produced’ (see point 1). Businesses which would otherwise be created to provide this security by searching for, monitoring, and exposing production of such weapons would no longer be in existence. Insurance companies would not consider the area you live in for coverage. You may have some overarching government bureaucracy, but do you really want to trust this service to the same guys who brought you the post office, the DPS, FCC, FICA, SS, homeland security, or any of the other miserable government failures? What about corruption and accountability? It is much easier to bribe a government official than someone who stands to lose a lot of money.
Point 3) If you fear your neighbor having a nuclear weapon (as I do), it is simple- live in an area which has contractual stipulations in land contracts which disallow ownership of nuclear weapons. A form of ‘voluntary publicly owned roads’, or ‘public health care’, etc. is possible if the original developer includes stipulations in land contracts he sells. If you want ‘public parks’, you buy land that has it included in the contract. The market will take care of these types of scenarios. The sooner you come to the understanding that the entire purpose of the market is to satisfy the wants and needs of people- whatever those may be, the better off you will be. The countless errors and problems of the state will NEVER provide a solution which will be equal to that of a market solution. Why? When choices are limited by violence, everyone (except for the thief) loses.
You seem to not get my entire point. A gun is created as a tool to kill someone, whether or not the holder of such a weapon has the same motive is irrelevant because the means to attain whatever ends he seeks is still a tool designed to kill someone. And yes, the intentions of the designers does actually matter when handling with their handiwork.
Oh please. A taser is not designed to kill, unlike a gun. A taser is designed to be a means of incapacitating an individual, and is therefore designed to be non-lethal.
What is in question here is not possible use, but what they are designed to be used for! Seriously, did you bother to read my original statement, or did you just decide to make an irrelevant tangent. My entire point was to make an analogy between guns, and WMDs in order to show by analogy that Rothbard’s theory against the very holding of WMDs is unsound.
Plain false. A gun-manufacturer must make the deadliest weapon possible, and it is because that weapon is deadly that it will be a deterrent. What kind of a deterrent is a gun that cannot kill efficiently? Its much like Vegetius’ aphorism (whose soundness I will not comment on): si vis pacem, para bellum - if you want peace prepare for war. The only efficient deterrent is one that would actually be able to do its job if ever needed - a gun can only efficiently deter if it is able to defeat the aggressor in practice.
That may be true, but it still does not mean that he did not design his gun to be used to kill men.
Honestly, if you want to reply, I would suggest that you read my original comments to which LS was responding, and respond to those for this is an unnecessary tangent.
This is confusing though. Are you advocating there be no guns? It’s naive to assume that men who want to kill will not persue such devices or create them. Does it not make sense to have a line of defense for the good guys as well?
I am using guns as an example of weapons used “no purpose but taking life” in order to show, by analogy, that Rothbard’s argument against WMDs is unsound. For, if weapons were to be banned based on whether they have “no purpose but taking life”, then it would follow, by Rothbard’s argument, that guns must be banned along with WMDs. However, this is an absurd result, which is both an implicit assumption and something I would hope a reader would realize, so therefore Rothbard’s proof must be rejected.
If you have any other problems with understanding my original post to Wanderer on the first page, respond with your confusion for my writing at times can be a bit muddled.
Isn’t the use-value of a good dependent upon the customer’s subjective preferences? I mean I could potentially by a gun to use as a piece of decor. Perhaps someone wants a western theme room and buys two colt 45 six shooters. A person bought these guns yet they are not tools to kill. They are pieces of furniture.
Since Rothbard, according to the argument as advocated by Stranger, takes the design of WMDs to be an objective fact, I also take the design of firearms to be an objective fact in a similar manner.
Nevertheless, the fact that a gun is designed to kill people is, in fact, an objective fact. If the gun-manufacturer designed the gun to kill, I can objectively state that the gun is designed to kill, and it is a fact that the vast majority, if not entirety, of guns in existence are designed to kill. Even if an individual makes furniture out of guns, it is still sound to state that his furniture was originally designed to kill.
And a chainsaw company made their design to be able to cut down trees yet it can be used to cut up bodies. I think you are neglecting use value being subjective.
I think there is some confusion here. Laminustacitus, from what I can tell, is simply criticizing Rothbard’s judgement of WMD’s. I think he draws a correct analogy and raises a good point
I don’t think he’s arguing subjective use. Could be wrong though!
The point is not that they kill but that they can’t be targeted at an aggressor without killing innocents or polluting the entire globe. Anyhow, one really doesn’t know what some stranger is capable of when he breaks into a home or something. Killing is not unjustifiable per se, but aggression upon innocent people is. We objectively know that the latter is the result of detonating nukes on this planet.
The only issue that I have with this paper is probably an unmentioned consideration and me being a bit constructivist. Of course, Man has different possible outcomes, such as his annihilation in a nuclear Holocaust, but please consider 3 possible places in the course of human history:
Present day and foreseeable future: Statist mythology dominates Man’s beliefs. The only nation to detonate nuclear devices in a metropolitan area uses democracy to legitimize its supposed moral supremacy. It marks its enemies as rogue nations and fights against them having equal legal footing. (Of course, all government is purely evil and criminal. The only rights those who administer it have are to equal justice as anyone else who threatens mass murder.)
Far future: Statist mythology has largely been shed along with other antiquated beliefs, such as that the sun revolves around the Earth. Libertarian law is prevalent, and aberrant systems exist on the scale of tribes and small communities, rather than as nation-states. Here it might be clear that owning a nuclear device is criminal, unless it is unarmed/unfunctional. There would also be less need for things like today’s large-scale military forces, probably not much past SWAT teams.
Transitional period: Somewhere somewhen, stateless areas are populated enough to warrant protection from nations still having nukes. Is it justified then for a PDA of this era to own a nuke as well? If this company’s reputation is solid and part of that is being able to prove that they monitor for hostile state’s nuke launches it might be. It might be possible that this is a grey area, and it is only justified to display capability and/or swear to retaliate but never do so.
I’m sorry, but this question makes no sense. A market is an aggregate of voluntary interactions. Iran is a state, an organization with a judicial monopoly over a given territory and an exclusive right to tax within this territory. A state and a market are mutually exclusive concepts.
So asking your question is alot like asking whether or not the perimeter of a circular triangle is equal to the sum of all its sides.
I do think that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons. This is just an extension of the rights of Iranian taxpayers to have the government defend them. Favourable public opinion and nuclear weapons are the only effective counters against an aggressor with overwhelming conventional military power. If Iran is going to defend its citizens against foreign aggressors, it will probably need to have nuclear weapons.
Absolutely, so long as they are not being reckless and endangering any innocent person.