Ruben, you seem to think that the government must do some things, say control natural parks. In order for the government to do things you like and you arbitrarily regard as ‘important’, the government must use violence against people who don’t see things the way you and the government do.
But according to you there’s no right or wrong. So why should your government be obeyed at all ? Certainly not because the government is right, since you’ve just said that the concept is effectively meaningless.
Exactly, we can’t handle freedom but we can be trusted to set up a functioning government to “help us” and then successfully elect the people to run it every few years.
And of course this political class in turn can be trusted to not violate anyone’s rights (too much), even though they could easily get away with it with total impunity…
Well, maybe not. But hey, anything’s preferable to the horror of self-government.
I really hope Obama does get elected simply because I rather curious as to what the voters will be saying in 4 ( or 8, god forbid) years time. When the economy is even worse, we’re at war with a few more countries and have to pull out of Iraq and when we have even less freedom.
Of course by then this years election will have gone down the collective memoryhole and Obama’s calls from “change” will long by forgotten and some new politician (from Asia perhaps?) will be promising change. Or perhaps we’ll have simply got to the stage where you get sent the gulags for doubting Komrade Obama.
It amazes me how people seem able to criticise every politician and then the moment one points at perhaps the system that puts them into power is at fault, they’re horrified.
I managed to read Hoppe’s introduction of The Ethics of Liberty. I can see where this reasoning is leading, but I wonder if this logic is really objective why it hasn’t become mainstream already.
On another note, I have downloaded about thirty books and find no time to read all of them as I would wish, as replying to these posts also takes a long time and dealing with normal life also takes time… anyway that is a topic for another thread.
You have not followed the National Parks post lately. In my last post I partially reversed my position and mentioned an example where a private concession of a national park functioned much better than when it was reverted back to the State. Please go back to that post before making uninformed judgments about my views.
I am not saying there is no right and no wrong. I am just saying they are subjective. Mainstream society has functioned with standardized subjective opinions of right and wrong which form the basis of judiciary systems. I recently learned that there are claims by Rothbard of an objective ethics, but I am just beginning to read about it and have no opinion on it yet.
I am not saying anywhere that the concepts of right and wrong and ethics are meaningless. I am not a nihilist.
What kind of statist nonsense are you talking about? I have carefully followed your posts and your main interest seems to be refuting anything, be it sense or nonsense, be it from me or from anyone else. Why don’t you start contributing some ideas of your own rather than to try unsuccesfully to put people down?
More important things… such as… keeping on the nonsense of refuting for the sake of refuting?
Ruben, I used national parks as an example, but the point is, if you believe in government, then you believe that people can be forced to pay for things they don’t want to pay and do things they don’t want to do.
If A and B believe that taxation is evil, but the government believes it’s good, why should the subjective views of government trump the subjective views of A and B ?
This is objectively false. Economics should be vertfrei. Block always emphasizes an Austrian economist could unlibertarian or even nazi, you don’t have to have certain vaues.
Yes, but I didn’t say anything about vert of any sort. Austrian Economics shows that the best arrangement of a society (if one desires efficiency and prosperity) is one in which there are no initiations of force or coercion, and that brings us to market anarchy. Since I know of nobody who doesn’t want efficiency and prosperity, I think it’s safe to say that AE suggests market anarchy.
Or to put it another way, if one desires a peaceful and prosperous society, then one ought to support the removal of the state.
I don’t think there’s any mystery about it – I don’t know what MVP stands for, but the MVP label is the administrator’s label – I’m guessing you got it because there was some sort of mistake/bug. So, it looked as if you were an administrator but at the same time you were making all sorts of comments that only a social democrat would do. I suppose people found that strange. At least I did.
I don’t think so. It think it was just a mistake.
Now, can you explain why government gets to impose its dictates on its subjects, sorry, ‘citizens’ ? Why do the subjective opinions of politicians carry more weight that the opinions of ordinary mortals ?
I disagree with Juan. I don’t think it was an accident. Do you know one of the administrators here? IMO, someone thought they were honoring you, and they did you a big disservice by choosing to favour a relative unknown who isn’t polished on the topics as an MVP.
But then when the MVP tag came out, I protested it. Absentee administrators suffer from making insensitive decisions. Running a board, or community or business is about knowing the environment and players intimately, not imposing will by brute force or decree.
I have no idea who did it. I’ve been busy finishing my dissertation, so I haven’t been following the forums much. I imagine it was added on accident and then removed when the mistake was realized. You might try asking HeroicLife. MVP stands for “Most Valuable Poster.” It’s something new, the criteria for which haven’t been fully worked out yet, but it is my understanding that it is a recognition of building up a good record of valuable, informative, productive posts.