Liberty is not the ultimate value

Miscellaneous General
61

thetabularasa,

I can assure you that I am not Autolykos. I don’t see how my post would give anyone that idea.

62

ok getting back to the topic .liberty is natural i think because slavery is unnatural. anyone agree

63

I agree but I don’t think it proves much… after all, there’s no necessary reason why people need to have moral latitude. Perhaps we’re all better off by virtue of the reduction in the degrees of moral freedom, kind of like how it’s easier to read in a library where everyone is required to keep quiet versus in a subway station where people are free to be basically as loud as they want.

Clayton -

64

I’ve never heard of him, so must be coincidence. Thanks for the research lead. Let’s see here…

Panarchism is a political philosophy emphasizing each individual’s right to freely join and leave the jurisdiction of any governments they choose, without being forced to move from their current locale.

Wow, I’m impressed so far.

Although, I’m still not sure if it would be practical to truly allow people to remain in place when changing jurisdictions. I currently assume that a jurisdiction must have contiguous borders. Still considering consequences of any other system. In such cases, my default position has been to leave it up to the city charter of what they want members to agree to going in. I assume most would ask seceders to leave the contiguous boundaries simply for practical reasons.

The system I propose does rely heavil on foot voting as a limit on government power and even the slightest whiff of aggression or overreach:

"Here’s Milton Friedman’s perspective on foot voting…

The second broad principle is that government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations. [Capitalism and freedom](http://books.google.com/books?id=iCRk066ybDAC)

Here’s Friedrich Hayek’s perspective on foot voting (via Alan O. Ebenstein)

He put forward his conception of optimal realizable utopia for humanity as he saw it in Law, Legislation and Liberty - "the transformation of local and even regional governments into quasi-commercial corporations competing for citizens. They would have to offer a combination of advantages and costs which made life within their territory at least as attractive as elsewhere…To re-entrust the management of most service activities of government to smaller units would probably lead to a revival of a communal spirit." He remarked in The Constitution of Liberty on "competition between municipalities," and said in an interview, "I'm inclined to give local authorities power which I would deny to the central government, because people can vote with their feet against what the local governments can do." [Friedrich Hayek: a biography](http://books.google.com/books?id=Kp8Uq8ve3EsC)"

The section on the Tiebout model is especially interesting, a quick section:

Tiebout describes municipalities within a region as offering varying baskets of goods (government services) at a variety of prices (tax rates). Given that individuals have differing personal valuations on these services and varying ability to pay the attendant taxes, individuals will move from one local community to another until they find the one which maximizes their personal utility. The model states that through the choice process of individuals, jurisdictions and residents will determine an equilibrium provision of local public goods in accord with the tastes of residents, thereby sorting the population into optimum communities. The model has the benefit of solving two major problems with government provision of public goods: preference revelation and preference aggregation.

The Tiebout model relies on a set of basic assumptions. The primary assumptions are that consumers are free to choose their communities, enjoying perfect mobility and perfect information. This essentially means that they can move from community to community at no cost, and that they know everything they need to know about services provided by local governments and the tax rates of all local governments. The Tiebout model has been shown to be most accurate in suburban areas with many different independent communities.[citation needed] Moving between communities in these areas tends to have the lowest costs, and the set of possible choices is very diverse. In areas subject to rural flooding, Tiebout sorting explains why more affluent residents live in communities protected by river levees, while poorer residents tend to live without those expensive and rarely utilized protections.

The exact assumptions Tiebout made in his first statement of the model were:

  1. Mobile Consumers: Consumers are free to choose where they live. There are no costs associated with moving.

  2. Complete information.

  3. Many communities to choose from.

  4. Commuting is not an issue.

  5. Public Goods do not spill over in terms of benefits/costs from one community to the next.

  6. An optimal city size exists: Economies of scale.

  7. Communities try to achieve “optimal size”.

  8. Communities are rational and try to keep the public ‘bad’ consumers away.

Now, what I find interesting here is that a oceanborne community with internet access, such as the seasteading society I suggest, fulfills most and perhaps all of these assumptions:

  1. My concept of easily created micro-jurisdictions established at no cost. And moving property that floats is the cheapest way to move anything, a floating house or a factory or the like moves cheaply, whereas costs would be prohibitive on land to move large installations.

  2. Closest we can humanly come to this is open information available online from anywhere.

  3. My system would facilitate and encourage this, and I think it would arise naturally.

  4. In a floating community without property tax or rent and more space than you know what to do with, it makes sense to move your floating house close to your place of employment, thus commuting could be absolutely minimized to basically nothing. Ignoring the increasing numbers telecommuting as well.

  5. Since public policy is individually decided upon, something like welfare cannot be forced upon anyone, much less other outside jurisdictions. You’d likely have many cities with the equivalent of leftist and rightist jurisdictions living next door and not interfering in each other’s governance concepts (and with no one to blame but their own ideas when things go wrong).

  6. Optimal size would change based on many factors and there would be no artificial limits either way.

  7. Since communities wouldn’t be forced to accept members, this is possible.

  8. I assume many communities would expel bad neighbors, polluters or law-breakers otherwise, and because there’s no communal property this would be possible.

  • Polycentric law: this I’ll need to research more in depth, sounds interesting, dunno if it gels with my autarchic concept yet.

  • Also my first time seeing anything written on open source governance–I’d come to the same conclusion myself in terms of methodology, though I wouldn’t combine it with democracy.

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@gotlucky:

I have one caveat for you, which is that in the system I will propose, because most of the character of a jurisdiction is set forth in its founding charter, much like the US sets up its states, and most law is made at that same level, you’d be free to setup a jurisdiction which had no court of last resort and pursued the legal system you set forth in your reply to me.

I was merely setting for how I would setup a jurisdiction I wanted to live in.

A primary goal of this society is conceptual competition in politics. To be an experimental ground for political ideas of all stripes–as long as they remain voluntary.

Which is why I’ve always maintained that people would be free not only to change jurisdictions at will, but to refrain from joining any jurisdiction at all, in which case they’d be only under the national label and left alone as long as they maintain voluntaryism within their borders.

That, I think, is the closest anyone could come to creating a real ancap society that would survive long-term.

I hope at least someone can appreciate that aspect of my idea.

A libertarian system can tolerate not merely anarchy, but even communism. I’m sure under the system I propose that some would setup communist charter systems. Honestly, neither I, nor I think you or anyone else here, would have any problem with people trying to live communistically as long as they do so willingly, do not prevent dissenters from leavint their sphere of influence, and do not try to force it on the rest of us.

66

Okay, but do you plan on ever responding to the other ones?

My point was that people are bound by no law of nature to use gold, silver, cockle shells, etc. as their medium of exchange. As far as whether it’s a coincidence that certain things have been preferred over others in that area, it depends on the definition being used for “coincidence”. What’s yours?

If you’re accusing me of not properly understanding the is-ought problem, the least you could do is say so explicitly. I’d also appreciate it if you’d go on to show just how my understanding of it is improper.

That could very well be true. What definition for “objective” are you using?

Well, I think it’s more complicated than that. I see an ought-statement as really expressing the speaker’s expectation about something. “You ought to eat something” then would mean “I expect you to eat something”. The implication of this, as I see it, is that no one is physically bound (i.e. by some law of the universe) to do what one expects him to do. So for example, I can tell someone all day that, if he’s hungry, then I expect him to eat something, but that doesn’t mean he will. Even simply telling him that I expect eating something to satisfy his hunger doesn’t mean he will eat something or that he’ll even want to eat something. Does that make sense? It’s an issue of expectations vs. reality.

Would you take the statement “it’s wrong for a tree to have green leaves” to be subjective or objective? I would take it as subjective, because there’s no way to determine objectively (i.e. empirically) whether something is wrong or not (I don’t mean “wrong” in the sense of “incorrect”).

I think phrases like “the value of goods comes from…” can easily be taken as objective statements - i.e. that even if the value of a good doesn’t come from the nature of the good itself, it nevertheless necessarily has a particular value (i.e. its value can’t change). But certainly two people can value a good differently, so it makes no sense to me to even say that a good has a value (i.e. one that’s independent of any mind/observer).

Here I’d say that certain commodities became widely used as media of exchange because people valued the characteristics those commodities had vis-a-vis media of exchange. That doesn’t mean people were bound to value those characteristics to those extents. The characteristics in those commodities were inherent, but the values that people imputed to them weren’t.

However, it seems we might be using different definitions for “morality”. My own definition for it has nothing to do with choosing correct means for given ends.

Hopefully I haven’t jumped around too much with the above. Please let me know if anything I’ve stated seems inconsistent or unclear to you.

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That’s absolutely not true. GotLucky and I are different people.

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Anemone:

First off, do you plan on responding to me in the other thread? It seems you’re ignoring my last post there.

Second, what Clayton believes has no necessary bearing on what I believe. His beliefs are ultimately his own.

First off, It’s possible for anyone to avoid justice. There are many different forms of “power”.

Second, on the one hand there’s the fact that aggressors, by definition, do not seek peaceful, voluntary resolutions to disputes. On the other hand, it’s possible for the aggressor to miscalculate his chances of success. It’s also possible for the aggressor to not be successful at all, either immediately or ultimately.

I think the above muddies the waters quite a bit. The notion of a world where “the strong prey on the weak” is a simplistic Hobbesian fantasy. Things are much more complex than that in reality.

Your use of strawmen continues unabated, I see.

If the judgement is in favor of the plaintiff, why wouldn’t the plaintiff himself actually possess the right to enforce the ruling? He’s the injured party, after all. By ruling in favor of him, the court has granted legitimacy to the plaintiff to recover damages, forcibly if necessary. That doesn’t mean he now has a license to use any amount of force he wishes, of course. If he and/or his agents are overzealous in recovering the damages, then the original defendant now has a cause of action against the original plaintiff and/or his agents.

The court is (or at least is supposed to be) the neutral third party. Certainly there’s no reason that, after the court has ruled in favor of the plaintiff, either the plaintiff or someone on his behalf - including, perhaps, the court itself - couldn’t peaceably sanction bank accounts or other property in order to recover the damages. To maintain their reputation as “upstanding citizens”, bankers and so forth would certainly be motivated to comply with court requests. Indeed, their refusal to comply could be considered obstruction of justice (I never thought that term could be used in a legitimate way in a voluntaryist society).

Presuming that the court actually made the correct judgement (which may be impossible to determine), then I agree. But that’s beside my point. It’s not this coercion that I find necessarily aggressive - it’s the coercion that the single “court of last resort”, in order to maintain its status as such, uses against those who (would) try to compete against it.

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It’s only limited like that. Research estimates that 80% of soldiers will avoid killing an enemy directly unless driven into a corner or aroused in anger about something. Shooting to kill a stranger on sight is something less then 20% of soldiers would do.
Mercenary armies have the historical reputation of being pretty useless, just leaching the money of those contracting them. They also become a liability acting as a plague on ordinary force. Folks defending their homes are a quite different story. But that get’s problematice once you are getting politically strangulated, where you have to lose the grip to get into a save position again.

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I’d call that a good-faith summary of previous statements of yours and others along the same lines. Seems to me you’re prone to labelling anything not a direct quote as a strawman, but w/e. I don’t see anything unfair to your position or ridiculing it or unfairly diminishing it in that quote.

I never said nor implied they couldn’t. But most wouldn’t because they aren’t equipped for it. Those who tried it would likely step over the line into aggression and face repurcussions. In practice then, a retribution market would arise, as I suggested.

So you’re supporting the idea of a court order? That is in fact a publicly sanctioned use of force. I didn’t realize you agreed with me on this issue.

Not necessarily. And here’s where you need a court of last resort. In a situation where anyone can set up a private court and try to get any conflict into it, businessmen would be foolish to accept any court’s order to give up property for a judgment, because that would be too easy a scam.

That’s not an easy problem to solve unless you have a recognized court with public sanction for use of responsive coercion.

Neither do we have arbitration courts today handing out court orders to banks to pay up. At least, I don’t think we do…

It’s a question of how you make any court order legally binding. It can be done through a court connected explicitly with the law of that society, and not so much with a private court.

Well, good, but such can never be known ultimately. If your goal is perfect cosmic justice, then we will never see it. Closest we can get is to have a reasonable standard of justice and not outright miscarriages.

In the autarchic society I will propose, a court comes about because of voluntary agreement between two or more people whom can setup a court in their charter for a new city-state (or not). The court has jurisdiction over only those whom accept that jurisdiction explicitly by joining that city-state. The court ceases to exist when the last citizen repudiates the jurisdiction and walks away from the charter leaving it member-less.

Thus, in an autarchic society predicated on voluntaryism, a court comes about as a result of voluntary choice, has jurisdiction as a result of voluntary choice, and ceases to exist as a consequence of voluntary choice.

There is no room in there for your theory of ultimate coercion to maintain its position.

I agree that your definition would apply to other currently existing political systems, both in theory and in practice, but at least in theory it should not apply to my proposal.

71

So you did not intend the following to ridicule my position? “Then would then show up at the defendant’s place, army in tow, and threaten them into paying. Apparently.” Really? I don’t believe you. Hence I stand by my accusation.

Possessing the right to enforce the ruling says nothing about being “equipped” to enforce it. So once again, you’re barking up the wrong tree, perhaps intentionally.

Here you seem to be more concerned with reassuring yourself rather than convincing me. Tell me, what makes you think that those who tried to enforce rulings in their favor would likely step over the line into aggression?

I don’t really understand your point here. It would ultimately be the plaintiff (if the ruling is found in his favor) who in effect has public sanction to use a certain amount/kind of force against the defendant. What effectively gives public sanction there is his case being heard in a reputable court.

Well why not?

I agree that they would be foolish to accept just anyone’s request to give up property in their care. But ultimately it’s up to them, isn’t it? In any case, I see no reason why only a single (i.e. one and only one) “court of last resort” could mitigate this. There could just as well (at least) be many courts that are considered reputable.

So what? I don’t see how that’s relevant, as we live in a highly statist world today.

Have you looked into common law? Do you understand what it is? I fear that you’re trying to carry over the statist concept of statutory law into a libertarian culture, because you think that the concept of statutory law itself is legitimate.

Even if “cosmic justice” or (better IMO) “perfect justice” is ultimately unattainable, I don’t see why it’s therefore not a goal worth striving for. It could be treated like an asymptote. But that doesn’t really address my point, which was that I think there still could be moral grounds to oppose coercion which was believed to be defensive but is actually aggressive.

Why can a court only come from a charter for a new city-state? Indeed, why must a new city-state be chartered (and chartered to who)? Who or what enforces these things?

What constitutes joining a city-state? Can a person leave a city-state without having to leave land that he owns?

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Of course Liberty is not the ultimate value. Liberty like commerce is a product of two, if not ultimate values then pretty high up the importance scale, values being:

  1. Non-Aggression

  2. Respect for Private Property

If people have these values and act according to their precepts then society will be prosperous, peaceful and have a vibrant commercial life, otherwise there is violence, destitution and misery.

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The absolute right to property is a fundament of libertarianism. That the real world application of absolute rights over property would devolve into retardation necessitating a foregoing of that right in order to meaningfully interact doesn’t detract from the flaws of having it as a keystone of the philosophy. To whit, even though the real world consequences, in libertopia, of shooting someone for stealing my bread would be that i would be shunned and probably murdered by my community, the community wouldn’t be able to arrest me or posse up to hunt me (or the rights respecting equivalent) because the killing would be in self-defence (of the labour imbued in my bread).

To disagree with this implies that it is acceptable to take some portion of my labour if it will save another person’s life - in fact, it justifies taxation.

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Liberty or is the result of selfreliance. Freedom just means mastering your life - Mastering your life is achived by nurturing certain virtues and it requires some inherent characteristics and personality traits as well. On that bases you will be able to engage and enjoy liberty. Sure piece and certainty of respect for your property will help you with that, too. This is however not a given as it is often assumed.

I agree that these are necessary ingredients and that a society were people act respectful for the property and lifes of others will be more properous then one where that is not the case. Another important norm would be honesty and I think there are others as well. Unfortunately something like this can be easily disrupted by a relatively small set of players on the field that do not play according to the rules.

Uhm, then there is a problem. Since there is no absolute right to property. Something like that is just legal fiction with no real base in reality.

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I’d hope the right to property isn’t an absolute. Good response, by the way.

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I’d hope the right to property isn’t an absolute.

Absolutely not. Property is an elastic concept. I would go so far as to say that looking at any property right as some “absolute” would fly in the face of Misean calculation, Hayekian knowledge problems, and post Keynesian / Chapter 12 Keynesian / Austrian uncertainty concepts.

A system of property as a value would be a return to LTV and neo-Ricardian economics

77

Can you explain more on this, please? For example, how Austrolibertarians and animal spirit Keynesians disagree with LTV theorists on whether property is absolute?

78

Mustang, what do you even mean by “the absolute right to property”?

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It’s a good question, Autolykos. I’m wondering what he means too.

80

The right to defend your property to the fullest extent. What did the other guy think I meant?