And the sky is blue.
I’m not sure how the stance can be misconstrued. Byzantine and friends clearly stated that the only rights that would exist under anarchy, not a free society, are those rights enforced through warfare.
So if religious nuts want to lynch heretics, and can get away with it, they have the right to do so. Or maybe they don’t. But…it doesn’t matter.
Byzantine, you seem to be saying that no competitor exists to MS Word because MS has already bought out all competition, and would buy out all competitors that arise. Thus, no one will ever hire a non-MS programmer to write a WP that is better than MS Word, and if one did arise, MS will buy it out.
That presumes that a fundamental common law will not be the right to private property. I don’t see why abortionists would have to pay substantially more for security than anyone else. While the anti-abortionists who engage in violence are idiotic fanatics, they are not a serious threat to anyone. No more than animal rights fanatics, or anti-gay fanatics, or socialist fanatics etc etc etc.
Seeing as how the abortion clinic can price in the cost of security, I bet they can. Meanwhile, who will pay for the anti-abortion zealots? Who will pay their time away from work, their legal defense, their restitution costs, etc? Is their service so in demand someone will underwrite violence against abortion clinics? Who would insure someone who violates someone else’s property rights?
I’m not for abortion. But the market is going to make sure it is available. If you don’t like that, or have other social opinions that interfere with the rights of others, then support the state. You will go broke trying to personally pay to stop people from exercising free will.
My take is, the relief post-state for people who don’t like abortion (me) is that we won’t have to pay for it. It doesn’t mean we will be able to bully people who choose to do things with their body, their money and their soul we disagree with or even find morally abhorrent.
You are being silly. The government distorts the market. Your money is taken away from you to fund a bloated legal system – part of that bloat is IP nonsense.
The government enforces everyone’s contracts?!? Silly. Have you ever had to hire a lawyer??? Yeah, the contracts get enforced magically by themselves!
I guess taxation has no effect because the government taxes everyone, right?
Read the balance of the posts, I did provide clarification.
The strawmen are unnecessary, and just cheap demagoguery.
Hmm, after re-reading what you wrote, I think perhaps I misread the tone and got a little (a lot) lost in what you were attempting to say. I believe we may be on the same page with the issues.
Thought I’d clear that up. My apologies.
They would, simply due to the nature of their business. This is not to say that I personally agree with them being ‘required’ to pay more, simply that it will be the case. I think this is really more a discussion of terminology than anything.
Unfortunately, so many do. How do individuals defeat that aggressive idealogy? I definitely dont see it going away anytime soon. I wish we could force people to put their own money where their mouth is, and stop forcing others to fit their bill. Unfortunately that is exactly what they are fine with doing, so I have very little hope for this. Instead we need to throw off that blanket of false protection and realize that claiming universal rights won’t help us get to a state (heh :P) of non violence. (Dont take this to mean that I do not personally believe in rights, because I do. This is the backbone for any voluntary society.) They sound great in theory- but the practical repercusions always turn out to be horrible.
I’m still not seeing it. People who will attack a legitimate business doing uncoerced trade with others, will have a very difficult time getting insurance.
I think my right libertarian amigos (and we are amigos) often overlook the other party in every transaction. Social conservatism as a personal doctrine is a preference. Social conservatism as a way of selecting trade partners or validating aggression is market suicide.
I find myself agreeing more and more with Juan these days…
It depends on how much water you draw. If a business refuses to cater to homosexuals, it will nonetheless get along just fine since they are a very small minority of the population. Same with any other marginal activity, like professional writers who prefer WordPerfect. Their preference just doesn’t matter enough to justify the cost structure necessary to service them.
It does. And forgive me, but you have been drawing a lot.
I don’t have a problem with that. Driving across town to attack the business that does serve gays? That’s just thuggery, regardless of the ideological justification.
Where you see “marginal activity”, I see “long tail niche opportunity”. You see it as a market too small to exploit. I see it as a fantastic opportunity to serve people with a selective want that could be highly profitable because the market is not big enough to support heavy competition.
Maybe today. Or under the state. The thing about humans is, when they want to do something, like split the atom to create a doomsday device, or invade an innocent country and torture it’s citizens, or travel to outerspace, we find a way to pay the costs, financial and spiritual.
The long tail is highly profitable. You see these cost structures as having to stand alone, but you’re missing that the existing structures can be creatively applied to new problems. You don’t need a stand alone abortion clinic. You can have a clinic that serves all sorts of marginal activity (niches), abortion being only one of those.
And as someone who is against abortion, I’m telling you, there are far more people for it, or ambivalent to it, than there are people strongly against it. The people you think are the majority, are a loud minority, and in the marketplace, are going to self-limit their own choices, and suffer the consequences of a reduced trading pool as a result.
This is the exact same point I am making, only from the other direction.
If you have a reduced trading pool, then your cost per good sold is necessarily going to be higher, like the cost I’d have to incur to convince at least a majority of folks to use WP. If you can’t find enough customers at that price to pass on your costs, then you’ll go out of business. There is a niche market for classical music composition. How many wealthy classical composers do you know? There are very, very few even left alive.
Not really. Someone who does abortion, could provide blood tests, routine checkups and chiro. They aren’t limiting their trade partners the same way that a consumer who swears off the entire firm and all of it’s subsidiaries would. That’s how the long tail works. You don’t engage in one small market activity, you scale and engage in as many as you can, leveraging the same infrastructure for as many possible uses, no matter how niche or marginal, in order to get as much volume as possible.
Imagine if a bank machine only issued cash. Now imagine it only issues cash between 8 and 5 each day, closed on weekends. Now imagine if you can pay your bills, if you can deposit, if you can check your charge card balance. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Same capital good, perhaps a slightly higher maintenance cost, but the same security cost, property tax, rental expense etc.
Sure it will be higher. But high costs don’t deter people who are deadset on having something. That is why we have black markets. I think you need to check your premises on whether or not people really want WP, because if they were willing to pay for it, if it added that much productivity or utility to their experience, than I am pretty damn sure someone would give it to them and they would be happy to buy it. For the love of pete, there is a market for snuff movies. Don’t tell me market demand for a word processor is unfulfilled because the market for it is small.
Which is why you broaden your product offering.
A very different scenario I don’t want to get off topic pursuing right now. Suffice it to say, the consumer has access to more classical music, live and recorded than ever before, at very affordable prices.
Is that not what I have been arguing?
The contracts only exist because of the monopoly granted through patents.
Furthermore, the patents are enforced by a state-subsidized and monopolized legal system. The market is distorted.
No, you did not.
As long as the market is distorted, we can not conclude how people would otherwise spend their money. People who oppose those patents might otherwise outbid the IP supporters but unfortunately, their bid-money is collected as taxes. Any conclusions are aptly categorized as vulgar libertarianism.
It did happen in Australia and some other countries. But we’re talking about at least 80 million people, many of them have unregistered guns, many hate the big government (at least when it comes to defending the Second Amendment). I almost wish they did try something like this - it could be a spark that might start a new revolution 
People today have much more to lose than their ancestors, and they thank the government’s programs for it. There’s also too much information to process, from professional to entertainment, for people to stop and think where this is all going to.
The problem is, that even if there’s revolution, it might not necessarily lead to a libertarian society. Instead, it could result in terror and a totalitarian regime. Or, at best, a limited government the way it happened in the US, and we know how that’s going to end. Nothing good is going to happen until at least half of the people realize we don’t need any coercive government.
Keep on dreaming. Why do we need half? It’s just an arbitrary bull shit number. If half the people actually wanted no more coercive government, they would just bump up the number to 2/3, or 3/4 or whatever they choose. The transition to anarchy won’t happen by adhering to the current bull shit. That is akin to saying involuntary slaves should have begged and pleaded for their freedom from their masters. (Well, I guess its not akin, it’s the actual thing!)