No it doesn’t prove your point. A free society by definition violates no rights. So called minimal government, by definition does violate some rights.
Wouldn’t the “common defense” agency need to be ruled, planned, controlled, and given orders?
Sage was not taking a contrary position to mine, he was merely demonstrating that a comparitive analysis will be nessecary in the event that a minarchist does not contradict himself right off the bat in his premises; and he’s right. If you can’t call them out for a contradiction, then you must compare the two by showing that anarchy is the better of the two in regard to rights violations.
Cheers.
Oh, the ever-incendiary Juan. May your torch never be smothered!
I don’t know. Maybe. At any rate a PDA, like any business, is self-managing, self-planned and self-controlled – and definitely doesn’t give orders to its customers, no ?
And how is it possible for a miniarchist to not contradict himself ? His system is just one big contradiction.
Did you read my previous reply ? I guess not ?
Not necessarily; however, the PDA would have jurisdiction over the lands of the landowners.
I don’t think so.
Why not? I already established in my scenario that the landowners would come together to form a “government” or “agency” or whatever for the purpose of providing for their common defense. I am implying that the PDA or “common defense” agency has “jurisdiction” (for lack of a better word) over the lands of those landowners who came to together for the purpose of providing for their common defense.
Are you playing devil’s advocate ? Or just…uh…confused ?
Indeed a bad word. What do you think this ‘jurisdiction’ is ?
yet another poor choice of words.
[:^)] Now I know why others accuse you of starting flamewars.
So I can’t get an answer ? You’re only going to make faces ? I take it you’re yet another ‘voluntary government conservative collectivist’ or somesuch ?
Yes, I am the collectivist with Rothbard as my avatar. [:D]
Yes, there’s a good deal of collectivists here who think that ‘voluntary government’ is in line with their confused views. And you can always invoke Rothbard ranting about ‘vulgar individualism’. Anyways, I see you keep on evading. Are you seriously talking about this bunch-of-landowners, common-defense, voluntary-government stuff ?
The problem is that it’s sleight of hand. They do this: under anarchism, not all rights violations will be prevented (true, no one said they would.) Under minarchism, the “defence” provider coerces its clientele into paying for its services and not patronising competitors. So then they argue both systems have “coercion”, it just depends on which minimises it, as if the anarchist legal order is premised on a coercive monopoly of defence. Clever rhetorical trick, weak argument, and it still gets them nowhere because they’re in effect advocating a system which violates rights to “defend” them, whereas the anarchist system does no such thing. They can shift the discussion to which system “minimises” rights violations but will have to deal with the fact that theirs has them built in (so if they’re NR ethicists they still have a systemic contradiction to deal with, if not they have a plethora of other problems, like how a monopoly can by magic offer better services than competitive provision)… might as well sign over one’s protection to the mafia.
Precisely. This is what both myself and sage acknowledged earlier. Neither of us disagreed on this point, we were merely discussing structure of the debate. e.g. If he contradicts himself and says we need (government) coercion to prevent coercion, then you can dismiss the argument right away as invalid. If the minarchist claims that government coercion will be less than the private coercion, then we need a comparative analysis.
Of course, I’m just repeating what you wrote. There wasn’t really any disagreement on that. [:D]
Jon, basically what I’m saying comes down to this obvious point:
If a minarchist claims that anarchy has systematic rights violations (i.e. rights violations inherent in the system, as opposed to private crime), then it will do no good to respond that minarchy also has systematic rights violations. Rather, what we need to do is show that anarchy does not have systematic rights violations, whereas minarchy does.
In other words, give a comparative analysis, which is precisely what you’ve done.
Which thought-provoking question of your’s do I evade?