Indeed. While I don’t know if she is a Randian, she argues like a Randian, and I don’t think she recognizes (while claiming rationality as a high virtue), that her position is irrational because it is based on false premises.
I am the one who is rational because I do not believe initiating force is a right at all.
Should I try putting the idea into French? I am in 100% agreement with this proposition. Have I not said? Nobody has the right to initiate the use of force. Not even government. I’ve been saying this in practically every post I’ve made so far.
You seem to believe it is, and we need a law against such a non-existent right.
WHEN DID I SAY THAT? However did you arrive at that conclusion? What does “We need a law to protect against the initiation of force” mean to you? What it means to me is that there is no right to initiate force.
Answers to your questions.
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No to definition. Your qualification of “interpretation” allows for private dispute resolution mechanisms, for example, which are already a fact of life today. Yes to enforcement.
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No.
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Yes. all citizens of that country.
your answers make no sense as they are contradictory.
you are coming over like a confused minarchist now.
liberty student, I advocate a voluntarily funded government based on the law that prohibis the initiation of force. It needs a name.
What is minarchy?
And what “false premises”?
eta: Show me the contradictions.
So you are for a monopoly on force but not on the definition of when to use force. Now there is a contradiction.
So this is unfunded? If people do not have to pay for the service, how is the service provided?
So you maintain that the state exists above free will.
Also, why delineate by country? A nation is an arbitrary fiction.
Minimal government.
Your premise that man needs government. That one law fits all. That enforcement must be monopoly.
Have been. As have others. You’ve avoided addressing them.
It’s contradictory to say that you believe man has rational free will, but then insist he submit to a monopoly authority.
If “definition” means “interpretation”, there is no monopoly needed for it. With one basic law it’s not so much the definition as the fact-finding, therefore there can be a private method of resolution of differences/disputes. It helps to have familiarity with how the courts work to understand what I’m talking about here.
If there is only the one basic law - nobody has the right to initiate the use of force - then it follows that what has to be decided in every dispute is who is in the wrong, and what the consequences should be. Working out how to resolve disputes is not necessarily something that has to be done by a quote unquote government official.
The legal monopoly on the use of retaliatory force should be governed by a strict set of rules, so in THAT sense my answer to Q. 1 would be yes - there should be a monopoly on definition.
“Interpretation” is something that is not a monopoly of government/courts now, so why should it be in a proper civilization?
You asked if all citizens are required to pay for it, and I said no. Wanna know why? Because to require everyone to pay for protection is to initiate force. It has to be left up to the individuals to decide when and if they need to pay for protection. Is it in people’s interest to pay for protection? Yes it is, but a strict adherence to reason and rationality means that those who wish to be employed providing defense services must persuade the public to pay for same. That is what I mean by the statement that the government cannot have the right to coerce the public into paying for it. People have to be free to decide for themselves if and when such expenses are necessary and how much. Of course the system would not be unfunded; it would be voluntarily funded by those who value the services.
Want some examples? One of my favorites is contract insurance, which is basically insurance to cover the costs of having to resort to some kind of dispute resolution services. Such insurance could be needed if one party reneges on a contract. Now, if you did not pay the insurance, you could still sue the reneging party, but you’d have to find the money to pay for it out of your own pocket, instead of having insurance pay for it. Of course, the more litigious you are, the higher the premium you will probably have to pay (unless you are successful at litigation, but that’s an issue to sort out with your insurance provider.) Contract insurance is something the government could run, or run in tandem with insurance companies, which would be set up so as to generate funds to keep the courts running continuously and also to generate profit for the insurance company. Claims on policies to launch lawsuits would cause funds to be made available to pay for those lawsuits. In order to launch a lawsuit, either you need insurance or you need your own funds or you need to convince a lawyer to take your case on a contingency basis.
All citizens would be subject to the Law that prohibits the initiation of force. Thus, the ones who disagree either accept the consequences of initiating force, or more likely they can just go live in one of the other 150 countries where force is still permitted.
Let’s face it - this new country is going to be the only one of its kind. It may well need a budget to provide for its own defense against bully nations which are unhappy with seeing this new free country. Paying for that defense is also something that has to be voluntarily done.
People who agree with the system are more likely to pay something for it, because they value their freedom and they value having a means to deal with those who don’t. The citizens who decide they have the right to initiate force are precisely the reason there needs to be a law against initiation of force in the first place. That doesn’t mean that people have the right to initiate force!!! It does mean that people have the right to retaliatory force.
As NUK said, you’ve done a masterful job of saying lots without saying anything.
First government is an absolute, now it is voluntary. Except it has to be a monopoly, but it doesn’t because people can choose. But it is the only agency that can use force, even though you recognize that government having a monopoly on the use of force is what makes it immoral.
You keep bringing up rationality, but there is no rational consistency in your responses from post to post.
Did you read the article Knight of Bawaa linked up thread?
i think stephanie has struggled due to infamiliarity with terminology, (i.e. the minarchy thing is an example of that)
if i am understanding right, her ‘one law’ is simply natural law, i.e. an objective formulation of property rights and the non-aggression principle. this is not ‘law’ in the everyday sense of the word, it is simply the ‘moral law’, i.e. morals/ethics.
if this is so, i agree entirely since i think that if there are to be morals and ‘right and wrong’ ‘permissable and impermissable(moraly)’ then the morality must be objective/universal as such it would be ‘natural law’.
as far as institutions that deal with law in the everyday sense of law i claim that;
workaday law should be produced as private law, and enforcement of the produced law should be done by private enforcement.
any produced private law that contradicts the moral law is illegitimate(morally)
this is a voluntary government system commonly know as market anarchy or anarcho-capitalism (ancap) or just plain anarchy.
It’s contradictory to say that you believe man has rational free will, but then insist he submit to a monopoly authority.
I see. Well, I haven’t said that man has rational free will.That is what you just said.
I have said that man’s rationality is volitional, which means he has to choose to use it. It is not the same thing as rational free will. If man’s free will were rational, there would be no need to have laws to guard against irrational choices. Man would automatically choose the rational. He doesn’t.
Volitional doesn’t automatically guarantee that the choice will be made to be rational or that having chosen to be rational, all choices will be rational ones. That is why even in the best of all possible worlds, it will still be worthwhile to have a mechanism to deal with misunderstandings and disputes.
please explain rational and irrational choices?
following Mises I tend to assume that rationality is only concerned with deciding on means, and whatever acting man happens to value as an end-in-itself is not subject for classification as rational or irrational
The law is absolute. No one has the right to initiate the use of force. That is why I advocate voluntary funding of government services, which services are concerned with providing defense against the initiation of force.
Having a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force is NOT the same thing as having the monopoly on the use of force. By omitting the word “retaliatory” you allow yourself to persist in misunderstanding me.
Nobody has the right to use coercion, i.e., initiate force.
In order for government to respond with retaliatory force, someone has to have initiated force in the first place.
What makes government immoral is its initiation of force. Govenrment having the legal monopoly on retaliatory force would be fine. To refer to an example, in the situation cited earlier, someone reneges on a contract. The two parties might go for private arbitration of the dispute, but to enforce the decision of the process would require involving government services - the courts and the police.
Speaking of things unanswered, how would you propose to handle a breakdown in contractual obligations using your anarcho-capitalist model?
The entire Institute is devoted to those solutions. Have you read any material here? Did you read the article Knight of Bawaa posted up thread?
true !
false!
in the last one you are saying at least two seperable things. (im going to swap out the loaded word government for the more palatable organisation)
an organisation having a legal right to engage in retaliatory (self-defence) foce would be fine /// that was the good part
an organisation having a legal right to exclude other organisations or individuals from the right to engage in retaliatory force would be fine /// false, this the bad part !
How can the government enforce this legal monopoly without the initiation of force?
The governemnt cannot outlaw competition without initiating force. What if another company offered “retaliatory force” services? Then What?
Any action that involves the initiation of force should be illegal because it represents the abridgement of the rights of others. Perhaps it would be helpful to differentiate between anti-rational and irrational. One cannot legislate against all irrational choices, although that is what government is trying to do at present. An action that doesn’t seem to make sense to you isn’t necessarily an irrational one. It could simply be that the other person has done a poor job of explaining it to you. Likewise you might consider an act to be rational, but it isn’t.
An irrational choice might result in your injury or death (such as trying to jump off a cliff without a parachute or windsail for example. This would not be an act that qualifies as an initiation of force, but it would quality as an irrational choice.)
A man who decides to pursue geothermal energy might be said by others to be pursuing an irrational end, or they might say he is proposing to use irrational means to achieve what could be a rational end. Simply because others claim one’s means or one’s ends are rational (or irrational) doens’t make it is so. This is where free will comes into the picture. A man should judge for himself whether the proposed course is rational and worthwhile. If it is irrational, the chances are the proposer will have difficulty in finding others to work with him. As long as that man does not use coercion to force others to work with him, the man’s choices are his to make and if he has chosen rationally his chances of success are greater than if he has chosen irrationally.
Whatever someone “happens to value” is not a guarantee that what he has chosen is rational. How are you going to decide whether to get involved with his project, unless you evaluate it? Note that it is not for “government” to perform that evaluation as a matter of course. In fact, the only time government would become involved is when there is an allegation that force was initiated.
It is something those individuals who are asked to participate ought to do for their own sakes. Those individuals ought to perform 'due diligence" in order to increase their chances of avoiding irrational choices and pursuing rational ones. So in that sense, what a man values as an end in itself is very much subject to classification as rational or irrational. The point for this discussion is that in the ordinary course, it is not something for government to involve itself in. What kinds of “ends in themselves” are you thinking of here?
I have read a lot of the Daily posts. Been reading them for the past few weeks, and going back through the archives to read them from the beginning. I’ve only been reading heavily in the last couple of weeks.
I don’t know if I’ve read the one at the link posted. Have to check it out later and get back to you.
However, I’ve not seen reference to anarchy or anarcho-capitalism in those Daily articles. And I’m asking you personally for a concrete example of how you see this working out - this idea that one private police force will provide defense against another private police force. How would it work in practice - please be as detailed as you like. Also, how do those private police forces organize their funding? Do they go round and make sure that everyone is paying someone for protection? Sounds a bit like the Mafia to me. Show me how it is different from the Mafia.
im trying to illustrate something that you yourself hinted at but havent acknowledge outright that
it is difficult for 3rd parties to make claims about whether decions that others make are rational or not, given lack of information.
yet in scenarios where we are assuming certain facts and relations, it would be possible to judge whether a given chain of reasoning is rational or not. i.e. if we know that the cup is above the table, and we know that the end desired is that of holding the cup, then we know it is irrational to stretch ones hand out (for the cup) under the table, given that its not there.
as for peoples ‘end values’ , what they want, the things to which their chains of rationality are geared towards helping them achieve,… these are beyond analysis into classification as rational or irrational.
rationality in human agents is only a meaningful and useful concept when it is restricted to an analysis of the means which themselves are aimed at certain arbitrary ends . if certain ends are only sub-goals, they can themselves be thought of as means to the yet more ultimate ends. whatever the ultimate ends might happen to be. having a jog in the neighbourhood on tuesday, getting to enjoy the taste of a strawberry in 5minutes, etc. unless we know of other ends to which they are subordinate there is no meaningful possibility to analyse them as being rational (or irrational) ends; they must just be treated as givens
a man that throws himself off a bridge to commit suicide, has rationally used suitable means to efficiently achieve his end. this is an argument for the rationality of his act. it would be ridiculous to claim that his suicide was irrational if that is just a reference to a societal norm, or some arbitrary belief, ‘suicide is irrational’ . if we posit further ends though, we are classifying his suicide goal as just another means. so if he wanted to go watch a film, the means of choosing suicide, because of its entailments, is irrational. yet if he wanted oblivion then suicide is a rational means. however the new end goal ‘oblivion’, again, is not subject to classification into rational or irrational.
i hope this makes clearer my understanding of the Misesian view of human rationality, that it is means -ends oriented
i found the following:
on mises.org
Customary Law with Private Means
of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing
Justice: A Description of a Modern
System of Law and Order
without State Coercion
by Bruce L. Benson
Enforcement of Private
Property Rights in Primitive Societies:
Law without Government
by Bruce L. Benson
Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society
N. Stephan Kinsella
Reciprocal Exchange as the Basis
for Recognition of Law: Examples
from American History
by Bruce L. Benson*
Anarchism and the Public Goods Issue:
Law, Courts, and the Police
by David Osterfeld
Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description Of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion
Bruce L. Benson
THE ROLE OF PERSONAL JUSTICE IN ANARCHO-CAPITALISM
KARL T. FIELDING
Justice Entrepreneurship
In a Free Market*
by George H. Smith
Forum for Philosophical Studies, Los Angeles
ORDER WITHOUT LAW:
WHERE WILL ANARCHISTS KEEP THE MADMEN?
JOHN D. SNEED
European Unification as the New Frontier of Collectivism: The Case for Competitive Federalism and Polycentric Law
Carlo Lottieri
CHAOS THEORY
Two Essays On
Market Anarchy
by
Robert P. Murphy
MARKET CHOSEN LAW
Edward Stringham*
he put together abook but cant find the whole thing online
http://store.mises.org/Anarchy-and-the-Law-P335.aspx
Benson’s website with more articles
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~bbenson/
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also, there are explanations by anarchists who are not Austrian, i.e. David Freidman (son of milton)
1989 (1973). The Machinery of Freedom.
which is interesting for a perspective from a different intellectual tradition. (this file is available as a zipped up html on filesharing sites, Kazaa etc.)
and theres the letter that Roy Childs wrote to Ayn Rand.
How does that answer my question?
OK. I was actually talking about the change in government size. Would replacing a totaliterian government (with extreme regulation) with a minarchist one be pro, or anti liberty?
Good point.
Profit and loss is subjective to the individual. People act to maximize their psychic profit and minimize their psychic loss. However, the actions used to achieve that vary.
There are people, that for whatever reason, use violence as a means to increase their psychic profit. If that was not the case, violence would not exist. While from our standpoint, it may seem irrational or self-destructive to use violence, to them, violence is an appropriate means to achieve their ends ex ante.