Quick question about GeorgeOughtToHelp rebuddle

Economics Political Theory
1

I am arguing about taxes on Facebook and I posted the George video, and a guy responds with

I call fallacy by ambiguous middle term and incomplete comparison on that argument! Essentially (in the first logical fallacy) you take one case, consider an analog, then another, and another, until you are fairly far removed from the original situation. In the second logical fallacy you omit relevant details and/or appeal to emotion in place of details. I can make lousy arguments too:

You are friends with George. George just bought a chair from his friend Oliver’s son. Oliver’s son is 11 years old and his father keeps him home from school to make chairs. Do you feel comfortable telling George not to buy the chair because of who made it? Suppose that George refuses to not buy the chair, do you have the right to stop him? What if six out of ten of your friends agree to threaten George to stop him from buying the chair and supporting child labor? What if thousands of your friends agree to threaten George to stop him from buying the chair? Now suppose that the chair isn’t a chair; it’s a computer. And it wasn’t made by Oliver’s son, it was made in China in a sweatshop under terrible conditions. Would you still stop George from buying a computer? If we approve of buying things from sweatshops, don’t we also approve of child labor?

Should I pay any attention to this? He seems to be throwing around words and not explaining them (even after I asked him to).

He then went on with:

The point is that the will of the society must at times supersede the will of the individual. This is not a part of any doctrine; it is practically a tautology (using the definition of a society as a group which is organized and governed in some fashion). The link essentially makes the distinction between active crimes and inactive crimes (the former could be you stealing something, the latter is you refusing to do something the society has deemed necessary). Here’s the issue, morally the person who refuses aid when he can give it easily is just as responsible as the person who actively causes the situation. That is, having the ability to stop world hunger but choosing not to do it is just as bad as taking food away from starving people. The difference is in how we rationalize our actions, and we find doing nothing an letting people die more acceptable than doing something which causes them to die, so we ignore our responsibility in the former case.

Which should be easy enough to argue against. I forgot to even mention to him that government is not what holds together society.

2

This is it right here. “Society” does not have a will. Only individuals have a will. The closest thing to what he’s saying (and if you challenge him, what he will probably remit to) is “the will of most people”…as in “majority vote”…aka “mob rule”. If that’s what he is in favor of, he just better hope he’s never in the minority. The phrase “tyranny of the majority” exists for a reason. If your whole logic is “the will of the many supercedes the will of the few”, I suppose he’d be just fine if all the white people in the U.S. (still the vast majority by the way) decided everyone who wasn’t white should be enslaved.

Ah but he protects himself with the nice qualifier “at times”…the will of the society must at times supersede the will of the individual. So he doesn’t mean majority should rule all the time. Just sometimes. And I’m willing to bet the times that majority should rule…nay…“must” rule over the minority, are the times that he thinks it should. How convenient.

Another Wal-Mart Topic...
3

Very nice. I like it.

Yet what about the George part with him creating that example?

4

This is how he rationalizes initiating force on others. He is literally claiming that not doing something he thinks you “should” do is just as bad as actively invoking harm to someone…therefore he has the right to use force on you…because by not doing something he considers would make you a good, moral person, you are in fact made a bad or evil person. Therefore, he (as a good, moral person) has the right to force you to do what he thinks is good and moral…to force you to bend to his will…because he is good and you are evil.

I would hope the danger of this kind of reasoning would be evident to anyone. Suppose my religion says it is “good and moral” to convert everyone to my religion, and kill everyone who did not submit to my god. By his rationale I and my fellow cohorts could torture him until he agreed to prostrate himself before the alter of the flying spaghetti monster. And if we didn’t like the way he did it, we could…nay…must cut his fucking head off.

The problem with this entire line of reasoning is that it does not allow for universality…that is, universal implementation. The reality is you can choose what is good and moral all you want. You can say it is immoral to eat meat on Friday. You can say it is immoral for a woman to go through her period. You can judge people for doing those things all you want. You can refuse to associate with them, to do business with them, or to even talk to them. You can say they are going to hell, you can say that they will burn for all eternity for being unclean (dirty females and their ovulation). But the minute you say you have a right to force me to be (what you consider) “moral”, you are stepping into the realm of one person being superior to another…in essence, slavery.

Hoppe explores this in his “argumentation ethics”. And while many have criticized the solidity of some of the parts of the argument he makes, and there isn’t really one single place where Hoppe has outlined the theory, check here for some resources on it. I know for a fact the “Law and Economics” lecture from 2005 talks about this specifically.

5

He capitaulates quickly and then chooses a different line of defense:

Me: if a person discovers an easy and cheap cure to cancer and then burns all the evidence and refuses to tell anyone, do we have the right to torture him to get the info our of him?

Him: That is an interesting question. I do not condone torture, so I would say there are a few things society would have to do in this situation. First they must determine if the cure is real. If there is insufficient evidence the matter should be dropped. Then it must be determined if there is any evidence whatsoever that was missed (including the developer’s background, which could give hints as to a promising line of research). Finally, if no evidence exists yet the cure proves to be real, they would certainly have the right to question (not torture) him. Morally though, if you were to develop a cure for cancer that could cure everyone tomorrow, and you decided to destroy it for no reason (ie you don’t suspect that it will turn people into zombies or something like that), you would in many ways be responsible for those who died thereafter until the cure was rediscovered. You may not be legally responsible (unless of course the work was done for a university, under a government grant, or was in any way funded by someone other than yourself), but pragmatically, every cancer death thereafter would have been because you chose to destroy the cure.

Me: ‎"You may not be legally responsible", ah, so society doesn’t have the power of government to back it? Say that in my example that it is 100% certain that the man found the cure and proved it by taking 100 sick people and curing them and then sending them back out inot the public as proof.

You say that to not act is the same as to act, greedy rich people being responsible for the poor they don’t help. And we want to commence aggression against them to enforce your notion of fairness. But when a scientist refuses to reveal the cure for cancer, it’s all dandy.

Him: By “not legally” I do not mean that society could not back it, I mean that society in it’s current form would likely not back it. Those two are as different in meaning as the statements “1+1=3” and “x+y=3”.

Me: Do you think it should back it?

Him: Do we aggress against the rich? As far as I know the worst we do is confiscate their property up to the value owed and imprison them. We do not actively harm them. I would not object much to imprisoning (if there were a law passed to the effect of making this legal) a scientist who cured cancer and then refused to reveal the cure.

Me: Imprisonment is not aggression? Then neither is kidnapping.

Him: What I meant was aggress in the sense implied by your video (march in with guns and threaten their lives/well-being)

Me: Hm, if the person resists (and it is ultimately their property), they will get a gun pulled on them. Is this not aggression?

Him: If they resist generally speaking they will not be physically harmed. Their most valuable assets are not ones they keep in a safe at home (usually)

Here’s the thing, if you reject all law then things completely fall apart. You produce an arrangement which is significantly less just and significantly more darwinian in nature.

LOLOLOL. How can I best put it to him: government isn’t what keeps us from each others’ throats?

6

Me: An-archy: no-rulers. It doesn’t mean “no law”. In anarchy, there are 4 principles:

  1. Self-ownership: You and only you may do whatever you want to yourself.
  2. Contract rights: You may enter into voluntary contract with any man regarding your rights and property
  3. Property rights: You and only you have complete control over all property gained through legitimate contracts and homesteading of unowned or abandoned land
  4. Non-aggression principle (NAP): you cannot initiate aggression against someone else.
    In other words, a voluntary society without institutionalized violation of the NAP (which the government is).
    If interested in it or want some mental stimulus or just want to see whether your theories stand up to libertarian thinkers, check outhttps://forum.freecapitalists.org/forums
    There has been much work behind the idea of voluntary societies with solid evidence that they work (Murray Rothbard, Hans-Herman Hoppe, Walter Block, Stephen Kinsella)
    Quick rundown of some thoughts:
  • Democracy proves a voluntary society works. Through democracy we see that people want things done. The incentives to get those things done still remains when people are free. If in a democracy 51% of people vote for creation of an FDA, these same 51% of the people have enough clout in a free society to not buy from companies which do not live up to standards and refuse a voluntary inspection. The companies would go out of business and be replaced by companies which would follow “regulations.”
  • Government is not what keeps us off of each others’ throats. I say this because it’s true, though actually irrelevant: in a free society you still have police, courts, likely army, firefighters, etc.
  • Government intervention is what prevented capitalism from “correcting” itself in the 19th century: Sherman was used to bust unions. Note that unions by themselves are a completely legitimate capitalistic construct. The first union leaders in fact wanted to buy the means of production, not take them by force. The very existence of unions is a testament to how quickly a free market “fixes” itself: Large corporations in America were new (late 1850s) and the first unions sprang up in mid 1860s. This lightning fast response to a new form of company proves just how flexible the free market is and how well people can organize.
  • Government creates monopolies: so much aid to railroad companies, oil companies, etc. The government in fact created the AT&T monopoly: “potential competitors were forbidden from installing new lines to compete, with state governments wishing to avoid ‘duplication.’”
    Government creates monopoly every day through grants of patents. Furthermore, licensing creates monopolies as well, with start-ups being edged out of the market. Especially when big corporations are the ones which write the regulation. Big business wants regulations. That’s how it becomes a monopoly.

In a free society you have organizations which act as licensing companies and inspection companies.

Him: In an anarchy, how exactly do you fund the police, army, courts, etc.?

Also, what would happen if many companies decided to collude to keep prices high, quality down, and had sufficient clout to stop any inspection companies from cropping up?

Me: Well, it’s damn nice to have a police, don’t you think? In our society how come Walmart, this behemoth, exists? People think it’s nice, so they give it money. Same thing in a free society. We’d gladly pay for police, army, etc.

‎"what would happen if many companies decided to collude to keep prices high, quality down"

  1. Cartels don’t work. The incentive for just one of them to jump ship is humongous.
  2. New companies arise with a guaranteed market of all the people who don’t want to be “held hostage” by the companies.
7

Him: Ah but what if I owned a company that controlled all of the resources of the planet? What then?

Me: The public must be literally mentally retarded to allow that to happen in a free market. Literally.

It’s the same as asking “what if I suddenly patent all ideas for the next 5 centuries of tech advancement?”

It’s also the same as saying “what if 100% of the people in a democracy vote to get simultaneously shot in the face?”

Another Wal-Mart Topic...
8

Him: The thing is, history has proven you wrong. The ultimate judge of theory is experiment, and experiments with societies that allow what you’re talking about end up with poor quality food/medications/medical care, a lack of trust among citizens, and often times there’s significant hardship before people realize that having a society makes more sense than not having one. If I lived in an anarchy, what is there stopping someone from murdering me other than a police force I’ve hired? As the crime rate goes up those who have protection need more protection, and eventually spend all of their resources on it. It ends up being something of an oligarchy, where the only people safe from random murder and theft are those with the enormous resources required to hire protection.

9

Him: If you seriously think that that idea is so ridiculous, consider it a limiting case (in the limit as the resources of a company become a significant fraction of those of the planet).

Also, how do you enforce that everyone who is born will agree to those four rules? That’s not the free market at work. People should just naturally agree with them right?

Me:

‎1) “history has proven you wrong” Link please.

  1. “having a society makes more sense than not having on”
    No libertarian disagrees that society are awesome and that indeed they are a must for advancement. But you are still using the “government” form of definition for society. Society is a group of interacting individuals.
    Societies can create pseudo-laws. They can institute voluntary taxes by contract. Heck, communism could arise in a voluntary society. Regulations like the ones we have now could arise if companies allow others to come in and shut them down.
  2. “If I lived in an anarchy, what is there stopping someone from murdering me other than a police force I’ve hired”
    Um, the police that you’ve hired? What’s stopping people from murdering you now, besides the police (government) which you “hired” (takes money from you).
    Plus, if the people who pay for police decide that police is a thing which even those who do not pay should have, then they may extend the service to them as well.
  3. “If I lived in an anarchy, what is there stopping someone from murdering me other than a police force I’ve hired”
    Ah, so government is some “law of physics” which magically protects you from people killing you?
    Here is the thing. We have some concept of “natural rights” (the four I outlines). We’d like to find a way to maximize justice (the freedom to use these rights). Our options: 1) government like today’s, which is an institutionalized 25% theft rate, institutionalized kidnapping, institutionalized abuse for exercising freedoms (doing drugs, prostitution, etc) etc, etc (don’t forget the possibility of a draft to literally die and eminent domain to take anything from you, including fetuses) 2) A “minarchy”, where the government ONLY provides courts, police, and maybe army, which, ultimately, is still institutionalized theft and kidnapping 3) A free society, where we create a voluntary society where the is no institutionalized and monopolized initiation of aggression, a system which is flexible and, again voluntary.
    We see that institutionalizing violence is not the way to maximize justice. However,voluntary cooperation is.
    Will the system solve crime? No. No system will. What it will do is minimize it. To any argument beyond that, Nirvana fallacy: saying “the system is not perfect” is not an argument against adopting a better system.
  4. “If you seriously think that that idea is so ridiculous, consider it a limiting case (in the limit as the resources of a company become a significant fraction of those of the planet)”
    Aaaand? My logic still applies. The public must be stupid to allow it to happen. Plus, what sort of resources are you talking about? Rare earth metals to make cell phones? No natural entitlement to cell phones… Water, air? You cannot own water and air unless you physically improve them in some way (build an oil rig, build a sky-scraper). Look up homesteading, the explanation of how you become the owner of unowned property. It is pretty nice.
  5. " Also, how do you enforce that everyone who is born will agree to those four rules? That’s not the free market at work. People should just naturally adhear to them right?"
    How does government work? People naturally adhere to it, right?
    No, the government has a police force! Well, how does the police force work? People believe in the authority of government.

I am not claiming that pushing a button to erase away the government would solve our problems and immediately make us angels. The way to achieve Anarchy, or, more precisely, anarcho-capitalism (or voluntaryism), is through a change in culture, a general education of people. It is a tough thing, to do away with a history of institutionalized aggression.
But living at the expense of others is no nice way to go about living.

Erasing the government through democracy requires at least 51% of the people. If the ideas of liberty and non-aggression spread beyond 20% of the population, the rest is cake. In fact, research (I must admit, I think it’s poor despite being university level) suggests that you only need 10%:
http://earthsky.org/human-world/a-tipping-point-for-the-spread-of-ideas

Him: If you’re arguing that enforcement is based on having a police force, aren’t you endorsing agression against those who refuse to agree?

Me: Enofrcement of what?

Him: Enforcement of the four principles you outlined.

Me: Who would you be aggressing against?

Him: The nirvana principle does not apply; I am not arguing that it would be imperfect, I’m arguing that it’s been tried (see the societies of ancient mesopotamia as an example) and doesn’t work.

You would be agressing against anyone who disagrees with your four principles and violates them.

Me: Ah, so I would be aggressing if I decided to retaliate against someone who violates my self-ownership?

10

Does he even answer you? He seems to be just throwing accusation after accusation without backing it up. Why does crime rate go up?

11

I never knew cops protected me from murdurers. They usually respond after the fact. It is you or your bodyguard. Or if by luck, a patrolman who gets involved.

12

That’s precisely what leftists do. It’s a tactic for people who have no basis for, and therefore no way to logically defend, what they advocate.

13

Luckily he’s not asking any tough questions.

And I agree, I was about to say that he provides no rationalization for his system.

14

  1. Fixed some formatting

  2. I give the impression that I don’t like tough questions. I do like them. But it’s much nicer discussing tough questions with someone who agrees to the principles of freedom than someone who doesn’t. So if I can first convince him first of AnCap, then we may discuss the tough question :slight_smile:

15

Him: Yes.

Me: Non-aggression principle: No initiation of aggression ^

He is the one who has violated me to begin with. Only absolute pacifists would say no retaliation. You are within your rights to retaliate if someone aggresses against you.

Someone who violates self-ownership has no ideas of justice whatsoever.

Him: Ah but now you have started defining arbitrary standards under which aggression is allowed. How does that make you any different from the governments you argue against?

Me: Governments initiate aggression. Non-aggression means that you do not initiate aggression. Hey, if “government” only retaliated to aggression, then it’s all good and dandy. But then it wouldn’t really be “government”, would it :wink:

Do you disagree that if someone punches you in the face you are not within your rights to retaliate?

Him: I agree, but as you appear to be arguing devil’s advocate I felt the right to do the same… (pun intended)

Me: I am arguing devil’s advocate?

To back up a bit and consider your previous scenario: “The point is that the will of the society must at times supersede the will of the individual.”
Society has no will. Do you mean the will of the people, hence, the will of the majority?

Making your “opponent” (in quotes because we merely discuss, and do not fight, really, so there is no opponent, but more of a “discussion partner”) find your evidence is not 1) nice 2) practical:

http://www.unexplainable.net/artman/publish/article_7515.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia#Government
I am not finding evidence of the combination of “bad” and “anarchy.” Some random sources say that there was anarchy (I didn’t read to see whether they meant actually no rulers or simply the popular misconception of “chaos”) in some places, but do not say it was bad.
Perhaps you talk about people living their own lives without interference? And then suddenly a raiding party showing up and devastating their crops? A great argument for a police force. Not for a government.
But to compare, let’s consider the government which actually did exist:
Hammurrabi’s code (oh my):
“If anyone strikes the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-whip in public.”
I like it
“If anyone brings an accusation against a man, and the accused goes to the river and leaps into the river, if he sinks in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river proves that the accused is not guilty, and he escapes unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.”
Tell me more
“If anyone commits a robbery and is caught, he shall be put to death.”
Yes, yes, do continue
“If anyone finds runaway male or female slaves in the open country and brings them to their masters, the master of the slaves shall pay him two shekels of silver.”
Beautiful, now I may keep my slaves where they belong!

As I said before, https://forum.freecapitalists.org/forums/ is a good place to ask libertarians questions you think will stun and baffle them.
If you want a taste of what could be a possible law structure without government, I suggest the book “Chaos Theory” (by Stephen Kinsella), which happens to be available for free (as he is a libertarian and while he likes to make money off of books, he doesn’t retaliate against those who put it up online, likes spreading his ideas, and in fact sees that the open spread of ideas promotes cooperation and innovation):
http://mises.org/books/chaostheory.pdf
Do not be scared by the word “book.” It is not that long, but is quite nice to consider. It took me 2 hours to read half of it and found it great food for thought and discussion.

16

That’s the oldest trick in the book. “Aren’t you aggressing against me if I don’t think that aggression is wrong?” Some libertarians make a distinction with the initiation of violence versus aggression and this distinction should clear up any confusion. Besides, you can’t get anywhere with that type of argumentation. That would be like you telling him that if he agrees that he owns his body, it would be unjust of him to use force to prevent another from enslaving him because that would be telling somebody else what to do with their body. Yeah, it is telling somebody else what to do with their body, but the problem is that a conflict is arising from two agents exercising their self-ownership in a way where somebody has to win out. A rule of thumb would help sort out the conflict (i.e., NAP).

17

Chaos Theory is by Bob Murphy, not Kinsella.

Ask the guy whether or not he thinks you should be allowed to punch him in the face. If not, why not? Why does he get to decide? Get him to admit self-ownership etc. via elenchus.

18

I did ask him about the punch thing.

I think he is trying to use an absolutist argument of “where does non-aggresison come from.”

Hence I replied with “if someone doesn’t respect self-ownership then he doesn’t respect any justice”

And about the Chaos Thoery thing: woopsies. My bad. Pretty bad. Ouch. I will correct that.

19

But I don’t mean asking him whether one should be able to retaliate - rather if one has the ‘right’ at all. If he says they don’t, press him for the basis of this idea until he admits he believes that he exclusively owns himself. If he says they do have such a right, punch him in the face (as a libertarian you wouldn’t be aggressing since he has given you this right). Either way you will have got your point across.

20

I think, Aristippus, he could fall back on the ad hoc “well-being” utilitarianism that is in vogue nowadays in leftist circles. But even if he thinks that forcefully taking someone’s property is the best way to go about things, why would this theft have to be provided by a monopolistic agency instead of a polycentric legal order? Could you not convince a large majority of poor-ish people to use these agencies to steal money from wealthy people and redistribute it? While this question is ancillary to the debate, it would at least expose his ideology for being the reflexive and knee-jerk one that it is. This question doesn’t even come across the minds of a leftist. I don’t know if a monopoly with the use of force is best for coerced welfare or not, but they default to the State-as-deus-ex-machina fallacy.