“if the majority of people vote for a party that then goes and commits aggression, then those who voted for that party share the liability”
Really? The communist party in the Soviet Union was guilty of many, many aggressions, and every person in the Soviet Union “voted for them”, because they were required to under soviet law. This makes them all guilty?
You are assuming that the very machinery of the state is “voluntary” when, by definition, the state itself is aggression. Terms like “democratically voted for them” are meaningless when one was unilaterally forced to be a participant in the state. The US government commits all sorts of aggressions and claims that in some way I am responsible for them, even though I never agreed to be a part of their state and in fact I am considered so only because my mother’s vagina happened to be on some piece of land that was determined unilaterally ahead of time by them as “theirs” when I popped out of it. For that, I’m guilty of their aggressions?
Note that in the situation you laid out, any one who was a participant in the “democratic elections” was guilty of the crimes of the people voted in, no matter who they actually voted for.
“But I just do not see how someone can logically argue against waging war to prevent tyrannical dictators creating large scale murderous rampage.”
I’ve always found these libertarian arguments about what the military should and shouldn’t be used for to miss the mark when they start saying “Cmon, such and such was a bad guy, he had to be taken out.”: yeah, probably.
But how does that justify violating the contract that the people had with the military when they agreed to fund it only for their defense? IOW: just because some tyrant needs to be whacked, it does not follow that it’s the government that needs to whack him. It’s like paying some security firm to put alarms on your home, and then they go off and whack Hussein and charge you for it. What? That’s not what I paid you for, that’s not in my contract. My contract with you is strictly immediate defense of my property. You are welcome, of course, to go whack Hussein if that’s what you feel like doing, but to then charge me for it would be theft just as if I walked up to your yard, mowed your lawn, insisted you now owed me 100 bucks for doing so, and upon your nonpayment stole it from you.
If you want to do good in the wide world, however it is you define it, please do so. If it’s a really good cause, you will get a lot of people to help you out. But as soon as you start demanding that others who do not support that cause have to participate or pay for it, you’ve violated the NAP.
“Biggest problem I see is the Palestinians desiring a state.”
In fact, it’s the concept of “states” at all that is the biggest problem. Remove this notion of “contiguous geography” from the definition of “nation”, so that “nation” is just a group of people bound contractually like any other group of people, and you remove a huge percentage of the cause of wars. It’s hard to have wars when there isn’t contiguous geography.
“Is it just a matter or what people think, or is there some objective standard for finding out who’s right? Libertarian property rights theory is pretty clear…and largely sides with the Palestinians.”
Property is owned by people, not states. Libertarian property rights are clear: the person that owns the property is the person that bought it. Any other argument is a political/statist argument. No wonder they are impossible to adjudicate and end up only in wars.
Abolish the state, and then property will be only an economic concept, not a political one.
It comes to the question of why in wars you want to act according to the non-aggression principle. If this is because you are opposed to aggression in principle, then I’d call you naive. If this is because you think you will achieve better results by doing so then I’d have to call you clueless.
Why naive? Because you simply can’t win a war without hurting innocent civilians. You also can’t win a war by being overcautious. According to the strict non-aggression principle you can’t even kill enemy soldiers because they were drafted by force and because you can’t know whether they are the aggressors or simply use a libertarian approved retaliatory force (perhaps they only retaliate against the aggression of someone from your side).
Why clueless? Because about 99% of the people in the world don’t care about the non-aggression principle, in most likelihood they never even heard of it. They will probably interpret your attempt to reduce civilian causalities as weakness and will use this weakness against you. For example Hamas smuggles weapons in ambulances and fires from hospital rooftops.
The non-aggression principle holds when there is the possibility of due process. When it comes to power struggles between armed forces this principle can no longer be applied. Trying to apply it in such circumstances is contradictory, silly, and will lead to very bad results.
Wow, great response. I am far from a neocon but hey, if you want to believe that, even in a war in which about 60 million had already died, non aggression will always solve everything than go ahead.
You can not be taken seriously when you demonstrate your ignorance like this. Kuwait was 1990-91. The Coalition of the Willing was 2003. First learn things, then get an opinion.
You are clueless about libertarianism and are dreaming up problems that do not exist in fact so as to be able to “justify” the despicable things you support.
Oh sorry. All you would-murder-tens-of-thousands-of-children-in-a-hellish-inferno types look all the same to me. What should I have called you then? A Nazi? Communist? Anti-Christ?
There is no such thing as “defenssive war”. In all human history, none (at least to my humble knowledge). I am talking here from libertarian perspective. State murderes (soldiers) can not defend its citizens by killing innocent people (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example). It’s like NAP 101. Especially with atomic bombs which DO NOT CHOOSE who is guilty of crime and who is not. It is impossible to distinguish in such scales, so one must be insane to call mass murderers commited by US soldiers in 1945 “a deffensive war”. That is just insane.
Christ, did you read my post? Why do people struggle with the fact that if the bomb had not been dropped more lives would have been lost. By arguing against it you are saying that the hundreds of thousands who were dying in China, Vietnam, etc. and the hundreds of thousands that would have been lost in an American invasion is preferable! Come on, let’s be objective here and look at the facts. As for your question I’d prefer it if you didnt impose a petty label on me based on one post thanks.
Lemme ask. How do you CALCULATE? Or is it some kind pseudoutilitarian philosohpy, to kill thousands in order to save (questionable) millions? As if there was only one answer, either war or surrender. That’s statist myth, propagandised for hundreds of years.
“Lemme ask. How do you CALCULATE? Or is it some kind pseudoutilitarian philosohpy, to kill thousands in order to save (questionable) millions? As if there was only one answer, either war or surrender.”
This is exactly right: the claim that these are the only two options is the fallacy of the false dichotomy. On top of that is the fallacy of the 100% accurate prediction: you never know exactly what is going to happen in the future. This is what is wrong with all of those stupid scenarios like “if you knew that a terrorist had hidden a nuclear bomb in the city and a million people were going to die if you don’t find out where it is in time, isn’t torture justified?” Well, no, it’s not, at least not in any structural way*: because you can’t ever “know” that. A terrorist may tell you that he has hidden a nuclear bomb, but you’ll never know for sure if he really did, or if he built it correctly, or if it’s really just an M-80, etc.
*: my “caveat” on this is that I might personally choose to torture someone in this circumstance if, say, my family were at risk. But if I did, I would fully expect to be prosecuted and convicted as a torturer; I might deem that a cost worth paying for what I percieve to be the lives of my family. In the end, “law” -whether it is decided and implemented by a monopoly (guhvment) or a free market - is still just a “cost” to the offender. There are times when someone might well choose to pay that cost. But that’s a much different statement that saying that in some circumstances, there shouldn’t be a cost.
Well, it is thought that about 200,000-300,000 were dying in Asia alone every single month in 1945. Obviously we cant know for sure how long the war would have raged but it would have been a great deal longer had the bomb not been used. And then consider the inevitable alternative; a US invasion. Estimates would say that would have led to up to a million deaths, it probably wouldnt have been that high but it would be close, due to the nature of the war with Japan. Surely the bomb is therefore the preferable alternative?
What do you suggest the US should have done then? Just do nothing? I suppose that perhaps the Soviets would have defeated Japan but, again, at a greater cost of lives. So go on then, if all this is just a Statist myth, what would have been a preferable alternative to the bomb?