Petition to stop being an anarchist

You don’t really have a point. Just knee jerks reactions to anything that offends your egalitarianism.

Stop stating it like it’s a fact, or prove it. As you’ve been unable to do the latter you’re going to have stop with the former. Furthermore you’re going to have to prove what’s wrong with authority in the form of natural elites, seeing as it is entirely natural when one takes into account the uneven distribution of certain qualities amongst humans.

The state can pretend to support religion in the family, yes. You’d be correct in saying that. However, it can only ever coopt and weaken these two pre state institutions, so I fail to see how this has any significance. In fact, this is just a red herring.

Racism and national can be used, but for obvious reasons democratic states tend to avoid using them as a justification. Nor can they be used by themselves to justify the state, whereas egalitarianism can.

Anyway, you missed my point. First I was merely showing that the idea of natural elites is not compitable with statism, so to claim that states use the concept of natural elites in their defense is silly, since they always will and always must do everything in their power to suppress them. Secondly,egalitarianism is distinctly statist. Private property is inherently inegalitarian, hence it follows that the negation of private property, the state, is egalitarian.

No, democracy thrives off egalitarianism and its corollary: redistribution.

I don’t think that it’s strictly true that we can’t use praxeology to analyze it, but as it’s neither here nor there I’m going to leave it at this.

Wait, when did I say that the poor are actually represented? That’s just a silly strawman. The opposite is true, I agree with that. There’s a good reason the poor are poor, they’re less intelligent than the wealthy. You might not like it, and before you post some strawman, it isn’t always true. But large it is, the stupid rich and the intelligent rich can lose and gain wealth respectively, perhaps economic mobility is not what it would be in a free market, but society isn’t divided into castes. Hence, it doesn’t make sense to think that the poor could outsmart the rich via the ballot box.

The rest is another strawman (you are rather keen on them), I’ve said neither that all the poor are morally and intellectually bankrupt nor that environment doesn’t play a part. Not all of the poor are morally bankrupt because there are many minorities, the less wealthy one, that shun welfare and if a member of the minority should accept it they would be frowned upon significantly by the community.

Nonetheless, a vast majority of the poor do accept welfare and have no problems with voting for it. We’re getting sidetracked here though but I’ll continue. Very few poor individuals have any problem with welfare and seem to assume that as a result of having less money they are entitled to some of that of the more wealthy amongst society. At the very least very few of them except those of certain minorities have any issues with accepting welfare. They’d rather take money from the government than go out and earn it themselves. Moreover, they’re too dull to realise, through long chains on deductive reasoning, that by accepting this welfare they’re hurting themselves more than anybody else. Or, to put it more succintly they’re morally and intellectual weak.

As for your second issue about me allegedly dismissing the environment in all of this. Well, you simply can’t say that this is purely the result of the environment since that would beg the question, and as I wouldn’t go so far to say that this is entirely the result of their dullness or the fact they’re morally bankrupt (many of them anyway), we’re going to have to settle somewhere in the middle. The fact is that we do live in a market economy, there are vast amounts of government intervention to be sure, but many poor people rise out of poverty and the rich occasionally end up losing large sums of money. At the end of the day, the poor are often poor because they’re unskilled, this often entails a lack of intelligence. But I won’t deny that through public schooling, democracy and many other measures the government keeps them down.

Back to my actual point though: if the poor did not accept forced charity and the poor bothered to realise that the government is the institution holding them down, not private property. They wouldn’t vote, if they didn’t vote and if they rejected the government far fewer people would see it as just. As I said, government rests on consent (not unanimous), the poor make up a large portion of the population, the poor view the government as just. What’s so difficult about this? Why do you keep avoiding this point and posting red herrings.

No, you said people with different conceptions of property rights could live by one another. Don’t take my word for it:

(Taken from the anarcho socialist topic)

In which case, property rights would be meaningless. Now, I’m going to have the enjoyment of watching you backpeddle.

So what you’re saying is egalitarianism is “double plus good”. You’re essentially using the word egalitarian to mean good, I wonder if you might have any agenda in doing this (pandering to the left and your own sentiments that favour equality)? In which case from now on whenever I say “cultural conservatism”, “inequality” and “voluntary exclusion”, I mean “wonderful”, “great” and “brilliant”.

That’s funny, I don’t remember saying I needed an official age of consent. What’s also quite amusing is your blatant appeal to authority, actually if you read Rothbard’s Kid Lib or introduction to the La Boetie’s book (remember, the one you say you’ve read?) you’d see that does favour using violence against children because they’re not capable of rational thought.

And no, even this doesn’t imply equal negative rights for adults. Some adults, such as primitives, are not capable of rational argumentation and cannot be brought peacefully into the division of labour. Moreover, they have no conception of property rights nor any enforcable claim.

No, as children have the potential that would still be wrong. Their guardians would have temporary, limited property rights that are not able to be used in any way that would limit their ability to reach the age where rational argumentation is possible, which means they cannot murder them or severly assault them. In fact, the parents don’t just have the right to do this, they have the obligation to do it.

Moreover if the child is being abused he can run away and the parents cannot stop them.

Which is distinctly inegalitarian (unless you mean egalitarian = good).

Inegalitarian.

What do you think charity is? One party helping another. One party is clearly in a postion of authority in regards to the other. One is dependant on the other.

I disagree; wouldn’t the said voluntaryist who doesn’t support private property revert to a “social” voluntaryist? I thought property rights were fundamental to Voluntaryism?

I guess this page was wrong then: http://www.voluntaryist.com/fundamentals/introduction.php

I don’t quite understand. Was that aimed at me or BP and could you rephrase it more clearly?

Sorry to be a pain.

Yea, I could’ve quoted that better, admitelly. I was referring to BP.

BP said that one does not need to accept private property as legitimate in order to be a Voluntaryist, where I think accepting private property might be required in order to be a consistent Voluntaryist (i.e. if one doesn’t believe in private property & violates property of someone who does believe in private property, this kind of goes against Voluntaryist as the said Voluntaryist who “violates” said private property risks becoming coercive).

Everything I’ve read regarding Voluntaryism, & what I know, seems to support that, or at least doesn’t implicitly say otherwise. That doesn’t make me automatically correct, of course.

Annoyingly, this seems to go back to the possibility of a meta system as a possible means of resolving the conflict, I suppose.

I never claimed otherwise. I’ve merely disagreed with your sweeping demonization of a class.

I never said that. The straw men here are your own.

In the process of “merely stating that it is a better system than democracy”, he has belittled its problems and dangers. He paints a rosy picture of it.

You can repeatedly tell me to read Hoppe (which I’ve already done) until you are blue in the face, but it doesn’t change the fact that private property does not inherently equal or require cultural conservatism. This is nothing but a reflection of your personal preferances and culture and has nothing to do with libertarianism in general. You’re writting off half the libertarian movement.

I’ll repeat my statement: “Private property CAN overlap with cultural conservatism, but cultural conservatism is not necessary for there to be private property, and private property does not inherently imply cultural conservatism.” There is nothing you can say to refute this other than to basically insist on your personal cultural preferances as an absolute norm, which is absurd.

I don’t want to get dragged into another one of these debates, but I’ll just mention that it’s incorrect to say private property implies cultural conservatism. Hoppe does argue that for any long-lived libertarian society it’ll be necessary to embrace such a culture, and he does argue that private property is strictly inegalitarian in that owners tend to be far more discriminating as to whom they deal with (because their own resources are at risk now), but that certainly does not mean, by itself, that it implies cultural conservatism. That’d be up to the owners and their preferences. Hoppe is not saying all enclaves based on private property will be culturally conservative; just the most successful ones.

No, I’m making a perfectly valid point that doesn’t have anything to do with egalitarianism and has everything to do with the consistant application of libertarianism - there is no “natural elite” in the sense of a “natural elite” of people fit to be rulers. If there were, libertarianism (which recogizesthe individual sovereignty of people in general, hence rejecting any inconsistancy in the application thereof) is false by default.

I’m talking specifically about political authority. Noone is a “natural elite” in this sense, because noone has a legitimate claim to political authority (at least in the statist sense of the term).

Not really - I’m just applying your very same line of argument to other things, and now you’re hypocritically backpeddling when the things in question might be things you personally like. The fact of the matter is that through the bulk of history, the state has relied heavily on religion for its legitimacy. It’s only in the past few hundred years that this has changed significantly.

Nationalism is used in democracies all the time; each democracy is partially dependant on its own sense of nationalism. And nationalism and racism can be and have been used to justify states. Nationalism is one of the most fundamental ideologies that states can manipulate, by appealing to people’s sense of loyalty to regions. You’re simply wrong.

I was showing that the idea of natural elites easily can be used as an argument for the legitimacy of statism, by claiming those in the state to BE the “natural elite”. This isn’t irrelevant. Obviously you define the “natural elite” as being outside of the state, but that doesn’t mean that the concept of a “natural elite” can’t be and hasn’t in fact been used to justify the power of states and those in patronage with them.

Are you just going to brush off my point about conflict entirely? Are you denying that politics relies on identity-conflict? I don’t see what there is to disagree about!

I’m sorry, you’ve conflated two related yet not necessarily directly correlated concepts: redistribution and democracy. Redistribution is a particular type of state policy that exists in one form or another in ALL states. All states are redisitributive by their very nature. Secondly, democracy does not in actual fact lead to egalitarian distribution - all you have to do is look around yourself to see that.

We’ve already been over this. I don’t know how many times I have to repeat the same clarifications to you, because your generalizations are incorrect. Egalitariansm is not statist by definition (one can be an egalitarian anti-statist), and the state is not egalitarian, such a claim is blatantly absurd. The state does not represent equality, it is a power heirarchy! A political heirarchy is not egalitarian in nature, no matter how much it panders to egalitarian sentiments to justify itself. All states are predicated on economic and power inequality, and they do not make things in society more equal.

Once again, this classist elitism is indefensible and ridiculous. It does not necessarily follow from the fact that someone is poor that they are poor because they are less intelligent or capable, and it does not necessarily follow from the fact that someone is rich that they are more intelligent and capable. Some people are born into poverty, some people are born into wealth. Some people are negatively effected by environmental conditions, some people are positively effected by legal privileges. And correlation does not equal causation. To completely overlook the effect of the political system and intergenerational issues, and just act like whatever the status quo happens to be is purely based on merit, is naive. Your class analysis is no better than Marx’s; you’ve just reversed his class roles.

The “stupid rich” are constantly being bailed out by the government with billions of dollars (from the poor and middle classes) whenever they fail. The poor, in comparison, can declare bankrupcy or go on a welfare system that amounts to chump change and stagnation.

You have your facts wrong. The vast majority of the poor are not on welfare.

There’s no way for you to know the specific mental processes of people in this way.

I disagree. No government rests on consent. Only asquiescance.

No need to backpeddle, since you clearly have not understood what I’m saying yet, despite the fact that it has been explained in depth.

I don’t favor “equality” like a communist does, I’ve repeatedly made the point that I’m not talking about absolute equality, I’m talking about mutual aid for those on the lower rung. You’re misrepresenting me again.

I think that Rothbard’s views on children were incorrect.

I’m sorry, this is just you speaking from your own cultural bias to deny the rights of a group of people you don’t like. Your claim that such people are incapable of rational argumentation (mostly due to cultural walls to the extent that this is true) is ridiculous. Furthermore, the idea that one must have a conception of property rights to have any rights at all is ridiculous. One could argue that the natives in America had no concept of property rights and use this to justify just taking all of their land. The problem is that in actual fact they do have property that they actively occupied and labored upon. The criteria for just appropriation of property doesn’t go out the window just because a certain culture has its own customs that you don’t like. Sharing your culture is not a prerequisite to having rights.

Once again, you’re lapsing to a conservative position that is not libertarian in nature, a conservative position which justifies colonialism and land theft.

Then they DO have some rights! You can’t have it both ways.

What age is this where rational argumentation becomes possible? There is no such age.

When you say ‘we’ you should make clear that you mean ‘the hoppe cult’.

That’s not real history, just hoppe’s fantasies.

No need to refute the concept of ‘natural elites’, just like there’s no need to refute the concept of ‘flat earth’.

Wrong again. That will be handled by PDAs, not by a bunch of conservatives.

That’s the heart of the conservative creed and has nothing to do with libertarianism.

Utter nonsense.

This is more or less what I was saying. If it seemed otherwise it was more than likely because I was being antagonistic towards BP.

Which is just one more baseless assertion. What’s the objective and praxeological measure of ‘success’ by the way ?

Wealth.

Fine. Now it’s obvious that in a free-market the most wealthy people would be the ones better at running businesses. Why on earth would these people be also ‘cultural conservatives’ ? Hint: they won’t.

[quoteuser=“Juan”]

Which is just one more baseless assertion. What’s the objective and praxeological measure of ‘success’ by the way ?

[/quote]

I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you try reading Hoppe before you rant about him? Or is he too bourgeois for you or something like that?

No, no more baseless than anything you assert. Anyway. there is no need for such an objective measure. If the goal is longevity of the society in question, one has a hypothetical measure to work with. Problem solved.

Because being a successful entrepreneur in regard the buisness of maintaining towns will no doubt be profitable. Which towns will be more desirable to live in?

Hint: those note populated by savages.

People are not “savages” by virtue of not being strict cultural conservatives.

I’ve read enough hoppe to know his basic and baseless ideas. I take it that his nonsense about ‘natural elites’ is set forth in his ‘natural elites, intellectuals and the state’ – which I read.

The argument over which lifestyles in a stateless will perpetuate seems rather pointless to me :\

Of course there is. You’re attempting to make a scientific assertion of sorts. If there’s nothing objective about it then there’s no point at all in making it.

What all this boils down to is an attempt to justify conservatism on scientific grounds. That’s why ridiculous and positivistic assertions such as ‘teenagers are rebelious becuase of their age’ are made. It also explains the psychobabble hoppe comes up with when discussing the alleged motivations of ‘left-libertarians’ to oppose closed borders.

Now it’s social darwinism ?

In your mind.

It’s the argument upon which the whole hoppe cult is predicated.