Exactly [H]
I’m not sure you understood Friedman’s argument; you have not contradicted anything he wrote. His point is that some libertarians believe that some simple statements, like the non aggression axiom, are the proper bases for their libertarian beliefs. He follows those statements to absurd, but consistent, conclusions (like claiming that one has no right to exhale if any CO2 molecules trespass). If you are unwilling to accept those conclusions, you should be unwilling to accept the initial statement as a complete explanation of your beliefs.
This is unrelated to whether the situation in question would be likely or not. He even leaves open the possibility that the correct statement, which may just be a more complex and subtle version, just hasn’t been thought of. You may not be among the libertarians he is criticizing, but they do exist.
I’ll deal with some of the stuff he posted.
Many libertarians are in favor of national defense, police, courts, etc. However, today’s government radically oversteps those boundaries by waging undeclared wars (Iraq, Vietnam, Kroea, etc.), setting up police states and supporting existing police states (i.e. Nicaragua, Pre-Castro Cuba, Shah’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Vietnam before it was annexed, South Africa for a long time, etc.), violating our basic rights (i.e. Gitlow v. New York),
The ACLU is an organization that many libertarians support… after all, they are a “civil libertarian” organization.
Libertarians aren’t claiming that we are the people you want to join if you want to fight for your rights, we are claiming that we are the only group of people who want to maximize your civil AND your economic freedom.
Appeals to emotion are always more effective than appeals to logic and reason.
Taking over unused, unclaimed land and proclaiming it as your own is not theft. Does it include violence and coercion against those who wish that land? Yes, but it isn’t theft.
It’s like saying that self-ownership of your body is theft from people who want to rape and murder you.
That doesn’t change the fact that taxes are theft. The government is coercing money out of you for services you don’t want. Even many minarchists (i.e. Randroids) don’t support taxation.
The point is that you are coerced into giving money for services you don’t want - which is theft.
A lot of times, you and your parents cannot choose where you are born. What if you’re too poor to move from, say, Kansas to Mexico? That’d be a lot of money that you would have to spend to move all of your valuables just so you can escape the USA’s “social contract” into Mexico’s “social contract.” You can, however, choose to go to or to abstain from a restaurant.
A social contract is comparable to being forced to go to the same restaurant to eat day in and day out without any choice because you were born within 5 miles of it.
Leaving from America is not as easy as leaving company A for company B or moving from apartment A to apartment B.
Translation: “I believe that no such thing as property exists. Other people have the right to your property and to your body and you cannot do anything about it. Also, I don’t have an argument against property rights so I will appeal to your emotions instead of to your logic.”
Wage falls would only be temporary. You might as well argue for 10%, 15%, or 20% unemployment so the rest of us can have higher wages.
The problem with taxes aren’t that they take away your money so much as that they take your money and use it for something else that is not efficient (i.e. paying off debts with interest for wars that didn’t benefit our economy at all). If our money was taken away and destroyed, that would at least lead to deflation causing our dollar to appreciate. However, our money is taken away and given to foreign governments via foreign aid, wars, debts, etc. so we end up with less money that isn’t even circulating in our own economy.
On top of that, government regulation of certain sectors like energy and health care raises the prices even more, meaning we get less “bang for our buck.”
Another appeal to emotion, not reason.
Libertarians know that the private sector can function much more efficiently than the government, and they want that to take over the normal roles of government, which would also allow us to choose between what kind of services we want (instead of moving thousands of miles to another government we don’t like).
Ireland, Iceland, Pennsylvania, to name just a few.
Murray Rothbard plz, kthanxbai.
Granted, I’m not great at debating the moral justifications of libertarianism. But I still don’t see how he really refutes anything. He uses extreme thought experiments, which don’t really strike at the roots of what he is criticizing, but merely nibble at the ends of the branches.
For example, consider the CO2 thing: his criticism only works because he has detached the issue from reality. Who in real life would be in a position to claim property violations due to others breathing, when anyone alive - and thus everyone who has property rights - is breathing as well?
He just regurgitates the most pathetic, ill thought out nonsense offered by social democrats and the like. They’re puny pseudo-intellectuals - and he hasn’t demonstrated that he differs much. Sad really.
Strawman, and bad reasoning at best. More rubbish from intellectually deficient pseudo-intellectuals. Huben is an intellectual fraud who will use any arguments to get his way - even if they undermine his own cherished ideology. He will embrace Marxism in one breath, and denigrate it in another. The most amusing bit from that sermon of his is the social contract - one of the most viciously circular arguments in all philosophy.
-Jon
The problem with this specific argument is this: so CO2 ‘trespasses’ on someone else’s property, but did this ‘trespass’ cause any harm? In reality, no one’s going to be too concerned about things that are not harmful, or at least have some kind of risk attached to them. Thus, the principle of non-trespass is either being misunderstood, or needs to be modified. I have great respect for David Friedman and his work, and I’d like to think that his criticism of deontic libertarianism is constructive criticism. Why shouldn’t we use both principled and pragmatic arguments?
Taxation is theft.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but doesn’t the concept of theft presuppose the existence of property?
Property is Theft!
Living is Murder!
Then perhaps Proudon should be understood in context?
It’s probably true that this argument is only interesting and important to a small subset of libertarians, but those include some important libertarians. He’s directing this line of argument against those who claim to have “derived” libertariansm out of something like natural rights. That does have some serious implications about his politics, and where he gets those politics. Also, he isn’t claiming that “rights” as such do not exist, he’s just doubtful about claims by some (who, I’m not exactly sure, maybe Rothbard, among others?) to have proved them.
I’ve seen him take a similar line of argument against objectivists. There, as here, he is not generlly attackng the policy conclusions of objectivists, merely some of the premises and observations that they are alledgedly derived from.
I think I understand the arguments being presented, but I think they are problematic. The response that has been presented here is not “well, no one cares about that.” Rather, it is to point out that he hasn’t necessarily pointed out trespass that libertarians don’t want to prohibit, but may be pointing to things instead that aren’t trespass at all. We have to logically distinguish trespass from other sorts of activities. One starting point, on the Austrian view, could be time-based. Another could be that if no one complains, it isn’t trespass. The second response leaves open the possibility that someone could complain later, and prove his case in court - at which point the libertarian would probably want the court to do something that isn’t justified on the logical argument.
My own view is that these problems are best handled by not throwing out Locke’s provisio.
One of his points is that simple statements of libertarian philosophy (like the non aggression axiom) offer no way of drawing lines on many questions, some of which may be practical questions about what property rights people ought to have (on things like air pollution, noise, and the like). My question to you is: can you demonstrate why exhaling, in the circumstances he talks about, is not a violation of property rights as derived from natural rights theorists, and if so, where along the continuum something along these lines stops being trespass (or littering, or vandalism)? Throwing a beer bottle in your neighbors yard is pretty clearly a violation of property rights, so is an oil refinery emitting significant amounts of dangerous smoke into my property. Exhaling, as far as I can tell, is the same thing on a massively smaller and less harmful scale; in fact, it’s probably not harmful at all. But if harm is the relevant distinction, as someone on this thread has suggested, how do you not end up at something like utilitarianism? If you do end up there, that’s fine I suppose (though a careful reading of Friedman shows that he is not a utilitarian as such), but many libertarians in the natural rights school are hostile to utilitarianism.
What I have is sketchy, but as I said, I rely on the Lockean provisio. Land ownership, acquired through homesteading, can exclude many, even most things, but cannot carry with it claims that violate the provisio. One example, well accepted throughout libertarian theory, is right-of-way and variance. Another is breathing - land ownership cannot carry with it claims that make it impossible for others to live on their own land - the key word there being live. Your land ownership is only absolute insofar as it doesn’t make it impossible for others to use other land. Claiming damages for Co2 emission (through breathing) does that; claiming damages for a beer can doesn’t, since it is possible to live on your own land and not throw beer bottles onto other people’s land. In other words, I’m not permitting exhalation because the harm is less, but because allowing others to exhale is part of the very system of assumptions you are making use of to acquire land in the first place.
The survival qualification may rebut the example of exhaling, but what about sound? If I am your next door neighbor, I can probably live without you hearing me, but is that an implication you are willing to accept? Clearly, few if any people would object to my talking with my wife in the front yard at 3:00pm, but does Locke’s provisio imply that if my neighbor DOES, for some reason, object, I ought to respect his request, and shut up to the best of my ability? Most libertarians, minarchist or anarchist, would probably want a society that gives me the right to prohibit my neighbors from blasting music at 3:00am, but not from talking casually in their front yards in the afternoon. The survival caveat may solve some of the problems raised by Friedman, but not, I think, all of them. And if there is one example that runs counter to a general theoretical explanation, that explanation must be false. That doesn’t make the explanation irrelevant, because it may still be CLOSE to the right answer (which I think is what Friedman believes about both natural rights AND utilitarianism, though he leans more to the latter).
Well it’d help if anyone arguing against natural rights actually read the literature on the matter, for example articles by Rothbard on what constitutes trespass or not. Most natural law theorists are not naive and have studied how legal systems worked. If anything, it is utilitarians who are new to the game. Rothbard’s paper on air pollution, the law etc. covers nearly every objection Friedman made. It’d also help if people realized natural rights are action-guiding principles, not detailed prescriptions to handle each and every situation. Mind-boggling to modern ethical theorists, I know. It is a lot more complicated than merely hurling seemingly difficult cases at natural-rights theorists.
-Jon
I’m gonna look for the Rothbard article you talked about, but assuming I can’t find it, will you provide a link, or t least a title? I’d be very interested in the article if it did rebut Freidman’s points (and I’d be pleasantly surprised if it succeeded).
Okay, here it is. The article isn’t a response to Friedman - in fact it seems to be written without any particular regard to it, but it covers how the law will handle these problems, and is consistent with how natural law operates.
-Jon
This link just sends me to a contemporary article on bugs producing oil as waste.
Okay, I just read this which was one of the links on the site.
The movement [Austrian Economics] does not exist on its own scholarly merits.
LOL? Scholarly merits being what, state subsidies on research?
That seems to summarize quite well the extend that mainstream proponents can attack Austrian economics (even on the academic level sometimes). Once you point out the problems with a math/statistical heavy approach, arguments tend to turn into ad hominems on the mainstream side.