ACFT, did the thief deprive his victim of all of his rights? If not, then why does the thief nevertheless deserve to be deprived of all of his rights in response (by killing him)?
Not necessarily. Violent self-defense might be the most reliable, or even the only effective, option for ensuring the thief gets caught.
Not entirely- you’ve arbitrarily valued the thief’s life over the shopkeeper’s property, for one thing. Which one thing the “values of taxation”, whatever that means, can accord with.
Sure. But violent self-defense is not the same as violating the thief’s rights. Maybe you will find this helpful/interesting:
PUNISHMENT AND PROPORTIONALITY: THE ESTOPPEL APPROACH by Stephen Kinsella
No, I have not arbitrarily valued the thief’s life over the shopkeeper’s property. My beliefs stem from the golden rule/NAP. How I view the situation has to do with the NAP. Perhaps the case could be made that I arbitrarily value the golden rule/NAP, but this is not the same as saying I arbitrarily value the thief’s life over the shopkeeper’s property.
Apparently got banned for a third time, so another alt.
I’m not going to split hairs here. Certainly hitting someone with a big enough stick blurs the distinction between violence and attempting to kill them.
Okay, if we go with that semantics, in order to decide what a proportionate response is you have to make value judgements. One of them is that a person’s life is more highly valued than property. Or at least some property. That allows you to say murder is a disproportionate response to theft.
Well, isn’t that the question? What exactly are someone’s rights regarding the defense of their property? Violence per se does not violate anyone’s rights. Call it splitting hairs if you want, but that doesn’t change anything. Anyway, the typical libertarian viewpoint is that coercive self-defense must be limited by the principle of proportionality. Anything that violates this principle would then constitute aggression itself, and therefore the original victim is now behaving criminally.
I don’t recall making a judgement that any particular person’s life is necessarily more highly valued than property. Property rights are created and assigned through the process of law. The only reason anyone goes to court is because they prefer it over the other possibilites. Yes, this is the case even today in a statutory system. Most people who are arrested don’t have shoot outs to the death with the police. They prefer to take their chances in court or go to prison and serve their time to the alternative of fighting it out. Anyway, the system of law is how property rights (which are the only way rights are defined) are assigned. As I said, the reason people take part in the process of law is because they prefer it to the alternative. The alternative to partaking in the process of law is to not be a part of the process of law, and this is known as outlawry.
So you can see here, that pretty much anybody who partakes in the process of law makes the value judgement that life is the most important right (or certainly that their own life is the most important right to them). After all, this is why people take part in the system of law. They value resolving disputes and conflicts that would otherwise turn to violence, and this violence could very well end their life.
I will repeat, anybody who partakes in a system of law necessarily values their own life more than any other property. This is not at all similar to values regarding taxation.
With some mod constantly banning me, this’ll probably be my last post for a while.
Taxation doesn’t require anyone to value someone else’s property over one’s own life by any means. What do you think of the Heinz Dilemma (should I steal medicine if I need it to save my life)? Is any life-preserving person in this situation unable to “partake in a system of law?” Never mind. Don’t answer that. Just think about it.
@mustang
Let’s compare the two cases (bubblegum thief and taxation). For the sake of my point, I will consider the bubblegum thief a bread thief.
Bread Thief:
1- The shopkeeper own the bread, it is his rightful property
2- The thief stole the bread, the shopkeeper now had his property violated
3- The shopkeeper is in his right, as gotlucky explained, to use proportional force to retrieve his property.
Taxation:
1- Each person have some property, some have more, some have less.
2- The state (or thief, if you will) stole some of their property; their property now was violated
3- The state has the power to create laws and enforce them, so anyone who tries to retrieve his property with proportional force will be shot down, and they will call it a day.
As you can see, in both cases property was stolen. I would argue that the second scenario is much worse, because people aren’t even aLAWed (damn, that was bad…) to try and retrieve their property. Sure, the bread thief may be trying to feed a starving kid, and the state is trying to feed lots of starving kids (very ineffectively). That doesn’t change the fact that both thieves are in their wrong, as gotlucky explained, according to libertarian law. In fact, according to any law today. Well, except that the state arbitrarily retains ultimate thieving power. Why only the state have the right to play Robin Hood? Why can’t I break into Obama’s house, steal his property and give it too the poor? Talking about arbitrariety…
I, too, am worried about people’s lives and starving people, lets just not go ahead and say that the only way to feed the poor is tru taxation. Today, my friend impressed me, he simply bought a $4 dollar (8 brazilian reais) sweetroll to a homeless guy that was hungry. He let the guy choose… Imagine if the state didn’t steal our property.
I don’t recall stating otherwise. Taxation requires valuing aggression as a means to an end. That I do recall saying. Many times.
You seem to not understand what outlawry is, so this leads me to assume that you didn’t bother reading the link. Outlaws are by definition criminal, but not all criminals are outlaws. Just because someone has stolen medicine does not make them “unable to partake in a system of law”. The only way for this person to be an outlaw would be for him to steal the medicine and then evade the court system once caught. That or have the court system declare him an outlaw.
Furthermore, this kind of dilemma is outside the scope of libertarianism. As Walter Block has pointed out before, the NAP is a matter of law, not morality. All I can say is that if the man steals the medicine, he owes the pharmacist the value of the medicine. This would make him in debt to the pharmacist until the debt is paid off.
You should probably follow your own advice. You have a pattern of not reading or even attempting to understand the literature that we provide for you. It would probably be for the best if you took the time to “just think about it”.
@Michel
Well put, and that Bob Murphy article was great. Concise.
I see that, I and I know that you think Food Stamps and subsidized school lunches starve children. I disagree, but if you want to read up on these programs effects on fighting child hunger (or Fome Zero and Bolsa Familias in Brazil) that’s up to you.
My point is that these proportionate repayment legal systems we’re discussing place life as too important to take as a punishment for theft. Life (or whatever other term you want to use for it) is more important than property in this particular instance.
No, I don’t think that’s necessary if you’re saying what I think you are. You’re able to consider that the Heinz dilemma “theft” can be legally wrong but morally right. Indeed, individuals can keep stealing and returning property back and forth with no net consequence. I understand your position a bit better now. Still strange to me, but it works.
The theft is certainly morally wrong. But that doesn’t mean that the husband is going to care at the time. What I’m saying is that if the husband steals the medicine, he owes the pharmacist the value of the medicine at the very least. Don’t forget damages to the store from breaking and entering. And then what happens if the pharmacist is present at the time of the theft? Well, the husband now has to threaten and maybe assault the pharmacist in order to steal the medicine. None of these actions are moral actions.
But, which situation would the husband prefer? A dead wife but he acted morally, or a living wife but he is now indebted to the pharmicist for his various crimes?
The key to this unfortunate situation is to realize that the husband is liable for his actions should he resort to aggression. To go ahead and say that he is not liable for his crimes because of his sick wife is a terrible answer.
Regarding the idea of “no net consequence”, this is simply not true. At the very least, criminals are liable for the damage they did. See Punishment and Proportionality by Rothbard for more. I can’t say that I agree with everything that Rothbard says, but I know that I certainly agree with principle of the matter, and I know I agree with most of it.
That distinction between “murder” and “manslaughter” definetly preceeds the modern state in fact it is old beyond measure for certain culture. The Germanic wergeld could pay you out of a man slaughter, it wouldn’t help you with murder. To qualify as murder the deed had to be dishonorable i.e. by hiding the fact of killing someone:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html
Even so, 1) the typical modern-day (Western) state makes that same distinction, and 2) it’s not the same as the definition for “murder” that I explicitly used in my post. Surely you can see that.
Alright. So I think I’ve established some of your positions here.
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Killing a thief for stealing property, even possibly a great amount of property up to the point where you deem execution proportionate to the theft, is wrong.
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The husband with an ill wife is also wrong if he steals to save her life.
So we have the thief alive, and the innocent wife dead.
You know, Fome Zero and Bolsa Familia look a lot more vote-buy programs than anything else. You can say whatever you want, like “they give a little money to people, but it’s better than nothing, and it keeps them from dying”, but it is very easy to be president and create this program, since you pay for them with tax money, and if tax money is not enough, the central bank prints the difference (that’s pretty much it). There is a lot of truth in the saying “don’t give the man a fish, teach him how to fish instead”. There are parents in Brazil that openly say in public schools, when the teacher tell them that their kids don’t know how to read (in 4th grade), “well, they don’t have to know how to read, they just have to be in school for me to receive a minimum wage from the government” (I know that because I know a teacher who went throught that; anedoctal, still…). Is that how you think things should be handled?
In which stone is written that the only way to help poor people is throught taxation? There are PLENTY of articles in this site describing how the private iniciative handled welfare before the government put its hands on it.
Was poverty and hunger lower under these initiatives? Not saying that private charity is bad, far from it, but I don’t think it’s always enough.
Law care not about consequences, people do. There is no way to know every possible consequence of an action. What if taxation kills people, for it stops them from buying food that otherwise they could if it weren’t more expensive? What if the man in this case could buy the medicine if it weren’t taxed?
I don’t have statistics of hunger of that time, but, according to this article on mutual-aid (a kind of private welfare), “By the 1920s, at least one out of every three males was a member of a mutual-aid society.[in the US]”.
I assume that by “enough” in mean ZERO hunger and ZERO poverty. Does the state acomplish that?
Regarding the Heinz Dilemma:
Stealing the medicine would certainly be morally wrong, as that is a gross property violation.
But people find it difficult to blame such a person whom steals something just to live, as life is among the highest of values generally. But it’s still morally wrong to steal. Stealing bread or water when dying of hunger or thirst is still an act of aggression under the NAP.
If everyone simply stole every new medicine that came out, there would be greatly reduced or zero incentive to create new medicines and we’d all suffere thereby.
Keynes did not need the facts to change at all when he simply ignored the commonly know ideas spelled out in the “Broken Window Fallacy”, Say’s Law and in the description of the “Socialist Calculation Problem”.
Auto said :
“ACFT, did the thief deprive his victim of all of his rights? If not, then why does the thief nevertheless deserve to be deprived of all of his rights in response (by killing him)?”
Because he initiated aggression. For the sake of looking at the principle of aggression, and whether or not one should tolerate it, let us assume the other two big crimes are taking place.
I would say that the big three crimes are theft, murder and rape. In my experience, these are usually agreed upon as being “real” crimes.
In a rape situation, does it matter if a rapist fully penetrates the victim or only sticks the tip in? At what point, while the victim is pinned, are they allowed to pull a derringer and shoot? Does a rape victim have to wait until their clothes are pulled off to stop an act of aggression? Do they have to wait for the assailant to disrobe?
Assault and murder
In the case of assault, and murder how many times does someone have to be shot to count as a situation where they can shoot the aggressor? Or what if they have a knife instead of a gun? Can I shoot someone with a knife who has tried to stab me outside of his range?
Theft
And so, in the case of theft, what does someone have to steal to enable you to defend your property? A piece of bubble gum? A car jacking at gunpoint? Maybe a home invasion, where they tie your family up and take everything?
I think that when someone initiates theft the principle of self- defense enables that person to defend their property as they see fit. In the case of rape, it means you can do whatever you need to do to stop people from raping you. When someone tries to kill you, you can do whatever you need to do to stop them from killing you, up to and including killing them.
Can you imagine a woman who shot an assailant who was ripping off her clothes being judged as using too much force because she wasn’t “raped enough”? Why does this not apply to theft. Is there some arbitrary amount of worth to an item after which it is OK to use lethal force to defend?
I do see your point, yes it may seem asinine to shoot someone over a piece of candy, and I am not endorsing this extreme. However, from a philosophical point of view, once you initiate force or fraud you take the risk of being retaliated against, otherwise, it seems that it is being suggested that someone take a loss because they have to respect the criminal’s rights.