Pretend for a moment that you do not subscribe to the NAP.
Would you still want a Minarchical government, or would you prefer something different? Would your ideal society have Nat’l defence, infrastructure, and courts & police? Or only one or two of those, or more than the three of those? Would you add branches of government beyond the ‘nightwatchman state’ because you believe that a more desirable outcome could be attained? Or do you just reject the idea of ‘designing society’ from the start as an inherently elitist concept?
EDIT: To rephrase: do you believe the NAP ‘holds you back’ from envisioning an optimal society? Or is a society which abides by NAP the optimal one.
You don’t have to reject libertarianism, non-interventionism, or free markets simply because you reject the NAP. David Friedman for example, does not believe in it yet is an anarchist.
There aren’t any ‘parts’ of NAP. murder rape and theft are all categorically acts of aggression. Anyways if you aren’t interested in discussing the original topic of this post , please let’s not talk about this anymore as I’d like the thread not to be derailed.
@ Aristippus - So can you not think of any one function, granted identical starting conditions for state and anartopia, that the state could perform more desirably?
Keeping true to the original point of the thread, I’d like to say that in order to examine what I would believe in if I didn’t subscribe to the NAP, I’d have to take a look at my mindset towards governance before I learned anything about libertarianism. Before I discovered this wonderful thing called libertarianism, I could best describe myself as having a progressive mindset, however you have to remember that before this I was extremely young, so I really didn’t have any room to think about the consequences of what I wanted to see in the world. Regardless, if I didn’t believe in the NAP today I would probably still have that progressive mindset of “other people should do things MY way.” The NAP is, in my opinion, the very foundation of what libertarianism is, and without it’s proper understanding I would still be blindly encouraging coercion by promoting the monopolies of the state as you listed.
I don’t subscribe to the NAP. The NAP is a trick, because it’s actually not opposed to aggression. To borrow from cab21, it’s really just another in a long line of ‘aggression principles’ that seek to use aggression to enforce some moral standard.
I still wouldn’t want a government, because I’m a person and I know what it feels like to be used as a resource against my will. I don’t wish that anyone should experience that.
I apologize for being unclear. The NAP is just a rule for property, to be strict it’s a negative rule, indicating what isn’t acceptable but not saying what should be done if it’s violated.
What I meant to communicate was that the NAP is almost universally invoked as a basis for some aggressive system of morality-enforcement. I actuallydon’t support the NAP so I don’t have to pretend, and I still wouldn’t support statism because I know what it feels like to be used and hurt and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
this is exactly the case. Its actually an entirely separate argument that recommends violence in response to aggression. I presume you reject that argument, can you say why you dont feel that an aggressor estops himself from a claim against you if you use violence to dissuade him?
“Would you still want a Minarchical government, or would you prefer something different?”
Nah brah, I’m mostly in it because of the good that it does for society, not because of the NAP. Up to a point anyway.
So I’m for the ladder, even though I think that you’re going to have people argue that the NAP society is inherently the optimal society, and that you’re going to actually have to define yourself some terms before real discourse actually occurs.
Someone who has assaulted me cannot coherently object to my assault of him. To deny that violence in the act of self-defense is moral requires a belief in some authority greater than the individual.
@ Malachi - What if one could prove that it was necessary to engage in a certain degree of aggression against someone in order to prevent a higher degree of aggression?
@ Neo - By optimal I mean most desirable in terms of outcome for all the constituents of the society/state. I don’t think I can coherently ask for a metric other than your subjective preferences for a society which would/might result from certain institutions.
I guess I just really don’t understand what you mean or how it’s relevant. Note, I’m not saying you don’t make sense and that it is in fact irrelevant.
can you say why you dont feel
Maybe if you point out how I implied that I didn’t feel such a way it would start to become clear, but I’m still unclear on what you mean by the rest of it.