Yes, killing may be justifiable under certain circumstances, though I cannot think of any circumstances where torture can be justified because torture is a depraved act.
I address the points that I feel are relevant. If there’s a specific point you strongly feel deserves to be answered, just call it out.
Clayton -
What exactly did Ron Paul own, that he now does not, as a result of this website existing under it’s current name? Or is it not an issue of theft? I don’t really get it unless he’s simply using whatever force he can to get what he wants.
I completely understand trying to claim the domains that are his own name and his name is a brand at this point. The owner would not hand over the .com domain and asked for an unreasonable sum for someone who is meant to be a fan. One thing to sell tshirts with Ron Paul face on it during an election but he has retired now, it can become a bit exploitative. Why he had to go to the UN I am not sure. He could have just filed a complaint against the ISP in his own country. In some ways using the UN gives credibility to the UN in this sort of case which I think is a bad idea.
I could see how this sort of case could exist even without IP. Although at this point IP is about the only argument you could realy use in a legal case like this. I think there could exist a form of identity branding outside of traditional IP laws. Some where between misrepresenting your identity and trademark.
- Are you familiar with libertarian thought on proportionality? There are various takes on it, but it’s pretty standard for libertarians to find torture not in proportion to theft.
Ok:
If, then, proportionality sets the upper bound to punishment, how may we establish proportionality itself? The first point is that the emphasis in punishment must be not on paying one’s debt to “society,” whatever that may mean, but in paying one’s “debt” to the victim. Certainly, the initial part of that debt is restitution. This works clearly in cases of theft. If A has stolen $15,000 from B, then the first, or initial, part of A’s punishment must be to restore that $15,000 to the hands of B (plus damages, judicial and police costs, and interest foregone). Suppose that, as in most cases, the thief has already spent the money. In that case, the first step of proper libertarian punishment is to force the thief to work, and to allocate the ensuing income to the victim until the victim has been repaid. The ideal situation, then, puts the criminal frankly into a state of enslavement to his victim, the criminal continuing in that condition of just slavery until he has redressed the grievance of the man he has wronged.[3]
So it is proportional to enslave a thief until the debt is paid, but it is not proportional to punch him in the face until he becomes cooperative? And if he refuses to work as a slave, I presume is it in proportion to kill him, or at least refuse to feed him until he starves to death.
I don’t buy it. You cannot arbitrarily graduate levels of legal force. As I just showed, even proportionality “in kind” fails if the criminal is uncooperative. The only non-arbitrary answer is that aggression justifies defensive force. Period. I don’t reject the morality of proportionality, only its legality under libertarian law.
Marko pretty much handled 2.
I can’t figure you out:
From the very piece that you quoted:
It’s plainly obvious that certain actions are considered to be out of proportion with the crime, and those actions are considered to be aggressive.
There is a world of a difference between defensive force and retaliatory force. Taking back your property is not defensive, it is retaliatory. I fully support reclaiming stolen property, though I don’t support aggression in doing so. I’m amused that you think that torture is somehow proportional to the theft of money. There is nothing defensive in torture.
I cannot think of any circumstances where torture can be justified because torture is a depraved act.
Yah, that is not circular at all. Torture is unjustifiable because it is [Morally corrupt; perverted].
I address the points that I feel are relevant. If there’s a specific point you strongly feel deserves to be answered, just call it out.
Well last I heard, you rejected my position that people are not responsible for the positive externalities they enjoy. And you asserted that ronpaul.com can only attempt to engage in voluntary exchange because of man-made laws. Do you still hold these absurd positions that fly in the face of NAP, or did you change your mind? (I think you forgot about homesteading regarding ronpaul.com)
And you also seem to have dropped the argument that ronpaul.com has no homestead claim to its domain.
Here is one argument I overlooked after my work was lost. Since I am calling you out for dropping arguments, I feel obliged to correct my oversight:
The armorer for the abusive and aggressive police department can argue the same, no?
Yes. So what? They have done no harm. They have engaged in voluntary exchange.
I assume you will argue that they are receiving stolen goods.
I am not sold that receiving stolen goods is always harm, especially if it without foreknowledge.
The burden of proof is on the people whose money was stolen to prove that it is their money being used to buy equipment. And since some state funds are voluntarily donated and since money is fungible, that would be extremely difficult to prove.
Your position is the one that I lean towards, which is why I stated that I disagreed with Ron Paul’s actions of using the state. What I wonder is what the situation would look like if domains were not awarded by a centralized organization. It may be, as Clayton claimed earlier in the thread, that accessing web sites would be so different in a decentralized utopia that the issue would be nonexistent. Maybe not. What I do know is that the system is centralized in a manner that it seems to actually create these disputes, as you have to follow their rules for domain names.
So if ICANN (and other government regulations) are creating a false scarcity in accessing web sites, I think it is reasonable to question if web domain ownership can even be considered legitimate in a libertarian sense. I don’t think the situation is the same as the patent system, but I think it might be a little similar. You patent your special design for a door handle, and ultimately you register your domain name through ICANN. What if the current method of website access only exists because of this centralized system? Ultimately you have to follow the rules of the game, right or wrong. If you don’t want your competition to patent your door handle, then you patent it (though a libertarian really should not sue the competition for infringing on the patent). If you want people to be able to access your website, then you have to register a name with ICANN.
I can think of two scenarios that might help get across my point:
Someone registers some land with the government and then homesteads it.
The government builds a network of roads and taxes people in order to pay for it.
So in the first scenario, it’s pretty obvious that the homesteader rightfully owns the land. But in the second scenario, who gets to rightfully use the roads? Do car drivers get to rightfully use it? What about bicyclists? Parades? Protesters? Almost everyone pays for the roads one way or the other, so who gets to rightfully use them? People have to register with the government in order to have the right to use certain roads for parades and protests, otherwise they will be removed by the police.
So is the ronpaul.com situation more like scenario 1 or 2? I think that’s a key question. Is “ronpaul.com” something that could truly have been homesteadable or is it a product of the governments regulations? While I think it is actually more like scenario 2, I do think that they used it first and really ought to be considered the owners under the present situation. But I think that this is a result of government centralizing something and creating disputes where there didn’t need to be any.
It’s plainly obvious that certain actions are considered to be out of proportion with the crime, and those actions are considered to be aggressive.
Forcing a man into slavery can cause his death if he refuses to cooperate. So to accept slavery is to accept a risk of killing the thief. You cannot partition your actions from their unknown future consequences. Exacting proportionality is a joke because it is beyond our ability to ensure proportionality at all. We are not gods. That cannot be the legal basis for society because legal, proportional uses of force can and will lead to consequences that would not be proportional. I suppose you could accept that imperfection as the best that man can do, but I don’t.
Further, it doesn’t even make sense from an enforcement perspective. If a thief uses no force to steal, how can it be proportional to use force to repossess? Really, proportionality can only be applied to the value of the things that are repossessed since one thief may require much more force to repossess from than another. One might be subdued by a warning, when another would choose to fight to the death. The whole system seems absurd to me. And where does it even come from? I don’t see it implied in argumentation ethics. But I have not studied that topic very well, so it may be in there somewhere. Who who says which acts are more or less proportional than the others? Value is subjective. I have view torture as less proportional than killing and you may think the opposite. So problematic…
Taking back your property is not defensive, it is retaliatory.
Pretty sure Rothbard disagrees. I can’t find the quote I want at the moment but goes along the lines of ‘repossession is defense of property because the thief can destroy what he has stolen’.
The counterargument is what if you temporarily torture someone to extract information to immediately save lives. Is that morally depraved? I wouldn’t think so. It’s exactly the same as in physically stopping (punch, kick, etc.) someone from killing you or someone else. The only differences are the duration and intensity of the pain. Just as killing is not inherently depraved, so is the infliction of pain. Indeed, pain is a good and proper thing in the human experience.
@GL: Awesome post.
I’ll give my illustration, slightly modified from yours:
The entire scheme is illegitimate from the outset. The parking spaces are not genuine property, they are artificial scarcity created by the government and then “sub-let” to private mini-tyrants, looking to make a profit on the speculation. Certainly, it’s not completely un-property - it would still be robbery for a person to beat somebody up and take their title to their parking space. Nevertheless, to naively apply the rules of originary appropriation and voluntary exchange to the matter as if this is how the land had been originally acquired and sub-divided is simply incorrect. Ron Paul is simply saying, “The rules - the very same rules by which you acquired this parking space and by which you deign to charge some large price for it - say that the space that corresponds to my birthdate can be purchased by me for $20. So I don’t have to pay your asking price.”
The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close. The whole enterprise is illegitimate, to begin with. So it’s incorrect to pretend that buying a government-allotted parking space is “the same as” or even “analogous to” homesteading unused resources… or that the government in originally acquiring and sub-dividing the lot had used original appropriate (the government is incapable of homesteading). Furthermore, for the owner of the lot to protest, “you’re using the government’s aggressive rules against me to take the lot from me at $20!” is contradictory because the current owner is using the government’s aggressive rules against the hypothetical birthdate-individual to claim the elevated price in the first place!
We’re playing in an environment of wholly-artificial scarcity here. There’s no need for there to be this scarcity in the first place[1]. ICANN is a government-created entity whose job is not unlike the government sales counter for the parking lots above. They sell domain-names at a fixed price of around $10-$20. Her sister organization, IANA, manages the absurd task of allocating blocks of IP addresses to highest bidders. The rules permit resale of these government-created “lots” to the highest bidder… thus, there is a large market in domain-name speculation. While there is nothing illegitimate in reselling these domain-names, there is neither anything inherently “property”-like about them beyond whatever scarcity has been imbued into them by this government-created system. Hence, if the rules had been that “you may resell this domain-name to anyone who is not left-handed”, why, that would be the rules everyone would abide by. Ron Paul is simply saying: The rules state that if your domain-name is a trademark, the name of a well-known entity, then I have the right under ICANN rules to supplant your DNS entries in the routing tables and redirect the domain name to my servers." Rules iz rules. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword… if you play by statute, then you get played by statute.
Now, this situation of artificial scarcity and faux-“homesteading” actually describes a great deal of property in society. Even many land titles can be criticized on precisely these grounds. In the US, public lands - to which the government itself never had any originary title - were sold to the “highest bidder” in closed and unfair auctions that violated the rights not only on the indigenous inhabitants, whose land and other resources rights were trampled in the process, but also of the public generally who was denied a fair chance to homestead the property by making use of it, rather than simply having the government claim it in their name and then “sell” it to them at some ridiculously low price.
But the lobotomized horde doesn’t want to think about complicated problems like this. They want a clean, Platonic world where they can dream up some new “rule” and have it rigorously applied upon everyone alike at the point of a bayonet in order to “make society free” or fair, or efficient, or whatever their pet collectivist obsession is.
Clayton -
[1] Some of the reasons why there is no need for this domain-name garbage: Distributed hash table, OpenDNS, VPN, Tor, MagnetURI, secure timestamping, etc.
I’m aware that Rothbard is inconsistent at times. I’m also not a Rothbardian. However, he explains the basics of proportionality rather well over all, and the idea of proportionality is hardly limited to Rothbard. Your points are precisely why a priori law is fundamentally flawed, yet you insist that there is only one right way of doing law.
The point of using law is to avoid further violence. If the thief refuses to go to a court of law, then it’s pretty clear he prefers using violence as a means to resolve the dispute. He just might end up dead, but his actions demonstrate that he is okay with that possibility.
Wiktionary defines these terms rather well: defensive and retaliation. Both can be nonaggressive, but not all nonaggressive violence is defensive.
I didn’t say “people are responsible for the positive externalities they enjoy”.
I also didn’t say that. You need to keep your facts straight and actually pay attention to what I write if you intend to have me respond to every one of your confused and contradictory arguments. I’ve been posting on debate forums since the mid-1990s… unless I’m just brainstorming and writing stream-of-consciousness, I choose my words carefully and only advance arguments that I fully understand. You would do well to ask for clarification before jumping to conclusions and putting words in my mouth… an exercise in futility on an Internet forum where anyone can simply scroll up and read for themselves what was written down.
ronpaul.com was not homesteaded because homesteading has nothing to do with domain-names.
I didn’t drop anything. I just usually don’t waste time responding to uncareful and frenetic posters like you.
Clayton -
This post shows some important misunderstandings of what a domain really is.
A domain-name is no different than a path-name to a file or directory on your computer’s hard disk. If you have Windows, click on the Start Menu, then select “Run”. A little box will pop up and you can type “c:\windows” and then press OK. This will open Windows Explorer. The “c:\windows” means, “Open the directory named ‘windows’ on the hard disk named ‘c’ in this computer.”
If you had typed, “c:\windows\system32\calc.exe” that would mean “Open the program (‘exe’) named ‘calc’ which is in the directory named ‘system32’, which is in the directory named ‘windows’ which is on the hard disk named ‘c’ in this computer.” But what if you wanted to refer to something that wasn’t on your hard disk, that is, something that didn’t exist anywhere in particular… you just wanted to be able to refer to it and allow the computer network to figure out where it is and how to go retrieve it and bring it to you?
This is essentially what an Internet URL is… except it’s not. When you type “http://www.google.com” into your browser, what that means is: “Please locate the server named ‘www’ in the domain named ‘google’ - as registered with ICANN and present in all Internet routing tables - in the top-level domain named ‘com’ - created and controlled by ICANN and present in all Internet routing tables - using the ‘hypertext transfer protocol’ and tell that server I want it to serve me an HTML page.”
Who has the right to control the routing tables? Why, the owners of the routers, duh! And who owns the routers? Zillions of different entities do, but mostly ISPs and major telecoms, as well as some universities, government agencies, and even private individuals and corporations. And why do they do what ICANN says? Because they will be ejected off the network if they consistently misroute packets. So why do we need ICANN then, since ICANN doesn’t even handle the enforcement of its own allocations?! In fact, this is the very thing that makes cyber-squatting, spoofing and various other domain-name attacks possible in the first place. ICANN is a dinosaur - it exists for the same reason government does (people believe we need it) and it is unnecessary for the same reason government is: we in fact don’t need it.
The whole thing is a sham and is a picture-perfect illustration of the tragedy of the commons.
Clayton -
Well here is what you said. I can’t read your mind.
And this applies directly to Ron Paul’s situation - it is only by virtue of the very laws that the owners of ronpaul.com are now protesting that they were able to ask for $800+k and now $250k.
Sadly, your tone towards me has become unpalatable, starting with your equating my ideals to those of a mass murderer. It seems you may have spent too much time in debate forums because that tactfulness that develops from actual human interaction seems to have faded from your written discourse. Please feel free not to waste your time responding to me. Since I am not a masochist, I think I might benefit more from that arrangement than the status quo. If I enjoyed flinging retaliatory insults, I might feel differently.
OK, (now) I understand where you’re coming from.
Your points are precisely why a priori law is fundamentally flawed, yet you insist that there is only one right way of doing law.
I guess I see your point. I can state moral positions on crime and forceful restitution, but I cannot say beforehand what would be legal in a future society?
My moral beliefs must be non-arbitrary, or they aren’t my beliefs at all. But law must be arbitrary (in the sense of 3rd party arbitration) in order to fulfill its function of preventing violence because that is the only way to develop laws that real people respect. Yes?
Cross-posting from LRC blog… I’m in complete agreement with Lew’s views on this. The MSM and the phalanxes of DHS’s anti-Ron Paul trolls are hitting the Internet with this bullshit about “Ron Paul using the GOVERNMENT to take back ronpaul.com”:
‘RonPaul’.com
Posted by Lew Rockwell on February 13, 2013 08:31 AM
There is so much disinformation on this issue that I will probably have to post more than once, but here are a few points:
–Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com. He could have brought a lawsuit in US government courts, but he did not. He is seeking to have ICANN enforce its own rules against cybersquatting, including the rule against registering a famous person’s name and making money off it. Anyone registering a URL agrees to keep all the rules, just as he must pay a recurring fee. A URL is not private property in the normal sense. It is a license, and ICANN is a private, non-profit organization.
–Ron is not calling on the UN. ICANN has four approved arbitration organizations. Because the RP.com guys registered Ron’s name in Australia, the international arbitration option must be used. Yes, it is associated with the UN. Too bad, but one must play the cards one is dealt. The UN itself is not involved, though note—whatever else is wrong with it—the UN is not a State.
–Why did Ron wait so long to bring this claim? He did not feel he could do so as a public official. Once he became a private citizen again, he was freed.
–This fight is not about so-called intellectual property, since it involves private agreements. But if it were, must one agree with Murray Rothbard–who discussed IP more than 50 years ago–to be a libertarian? I agree with Murray, but IP is hardly a make or break issue. Certainly Murray did not see it as such. In the same sense, one need not be an anarcho-capitalist to be a libertarian, though, like Murray, I am one. One can be a constitutionalist or otherwise believe in limited government. Oh, and need I note that Murray loved and admired Ron?
–Is Ron “attacking his own supporters” by his action? Apparently, the RP.com people have never given a dime to any of his campaigns nor educational efforts. Instead, they are attacking Ron. Some supporters. But it will not work. And it will soon be over, freeing Ron from this distraction as he steps up his fight for freedom. Really steps it up, in historic ways.
Go Ron Paul!
Clayton -
Sounds like a bunch of apologetics to me. First of all, the bottom line is Paul is attempting to have someone’s justly acquired property confiscated from them. People can dance around it all they want (like Lew does here, claiming “he’s not using the state, the UN is not a state, blah blah blah”). But the fact remains, these guys rightfully own the domain, and Paul is trying to unilaterally take it from them. And Rockwell and the other Paul worshipers are trying to find any way they can to defend him, simply because of who he is.
And what the hell is this “he could have filed a lawsuit in US courts, but didn’t”? Didn’t Rockwell admit just a few paragraphs later the domain was registered in Australia? Could Paul have actually filed a lawsuit? I thought this was the whole apologist argument…“it’s the only recourse Paul has…it’s not his fault the only governing body is an arm of the UN! Blah blah blah!” In fact, is that not the case Rockwell was trying to make here? Which is it? Is Paul backed into a corner with no alternative course of action, or is he just being a nice guy? You can’t have it both ways.
And this crap about how it’s the only option he has, and ICANN is a private organization, and “you agree to the contract when you register a domain”…The fact of the matter is, first of all, Paul has other options. He could, I don’t know, negotiate with the property owners? Or, perhaps, use another fucking domain? He has nearly 75k subscribers on his YouTube channel. (And of course anything he uploads will get mirrored). Over 400k followers on Twitter. Over a 1.1 million fans on his facebook page. And god knows how many millions of email addresses and other contact info. He would have no problem making sure everyone knew which page was his official one. This is nothing more than “Ron Paul wants what he wants and doesn’t want to bother doing with anything less that exactly what he wants.” Fuck that.
And what’s more, as I outlined earlier, the whole thing is monopolized, and you can’t get a domain without going through ICANN (and paying their fee, by the way.) So Rockwell might want to go ahead and start arguing in favor of taxation…after all he does use the roads and the public works system.
And his nonsense about it not being about IP is complete bullshit. Perhaps he needs to read the actual complaint? It’s right there. Even Kinsella pointed it out. The whole complaint is essentially based in trademark law. And actually I think Lew realizes this, which is why he doesn’t exactly spend the focus on actually supporting his claim that it’s not about IP: notice he makes that claim, and then goes right into trying to make the (poor) case that IP isn’t really that big of an issue (and pathetically uses an appeal to authority to do it.) Why would it be so important to state that “IP is hardly a make or break issue”, and that “you don’t need to be ancap like Murray to be a libertarian”? Why is that even relevant if “this fight is not about so-called intellectual property” anyway?
I think it’s obvious he’s trying to make it okay for ancaps to give minarchists and pro-IP people like Paul a pass…instead of recognizing the more probable reality. He knows he’s not going be able to make Paul out to be something he’s not (there’s already too much proof, and ancaps aren’t exactly gullible idiots)…so instead he’s trying to make the case that actually not following your stated principles through to their actual conclusions isn’t really so bad…it’s okay to be a “constitutionalist” or otherwise “believe in limited government”. No big deal.
Give me a break.
And of course, as if that weren’t bad enough, he just had to top it off: “oh did I mention Murray loved Ron”?
Is he f-ing serious? I’m supposed to agree with what Paul is doing because “the great Murray Rothbard” (who died almost two decades ago, when Ron Paul was 59 years old) “loved and admired” him? How stupid does he think his readers are?..
“Oh, well if Rothbard loved Ron, I guess that makes it okay.” Jeezus Christ. Not all of us are idol-struck morons like Bob Wenzel who will forever rubberstamp anything or anyone Rothbard agreed with. And I’m actually kind of annoyed that Rockwell would insult his readers like that. But I guess I can’t blame him. Gotta do what you gotta do when defending your friend’s bullshit.
I can’t believe Paul would do this…I don’t know if anyone has read the PolicyMic article that I posted in the low-content thread, but it’s clear evidence that Ron Paul has just thrown out a ton of breadbits for the leftist birds to scarf down.
False. The DNS entries in the DNS servers are the property of the server owners. They freely comply with the ICANN rules in part due to network effects and in part due to history.
There is no such thing as “owning” a domain. A domain is registered with ICANN, that’s it. My understanding is the current registrant has first right-of-refusal in renewing the registration by ICANN rules… but also by ICANN rules, a “well-known” name such as ronpaul.com can be supplanted by the individual. I doubt the use of trademark law in arguing this is novel.
Lew doesn’t say Paul has no other option. And, yes, ICANN is a private organization, a key point that those who want to say “Ron Paul is using the GOVERNMENT to seize blah blah blah” need to note, since they’re simply incorrect. The point of going to the UN agency is because that is how ICANN has said that the dispute is to be handled in cross-border cases.
So what? If he’s entitled to claim the domain under ICANN rules, why the hell shouldn’t he? Why does he have to pay $250K penance to these guys? I would be frustrated too, if I was in their shoes, but I would also at least have the balls to man up and recognize that the rules are the rules… when I first started paying $20/yr. for the domain back in whenever, I had to know that, if Ron Paul chose at some point, he would be able to displace me from the domain due to his status as a widely-known public individual whose name has essentially a trademark status. To come from that position and demand $250K is just… bad bargaining skills.
That’s precisely what he is doing! If the domain owners call him up today and say, “Ron, we’ll sell you the domain for $2,500” I’ll bet he’ll say “deal!”… because $2,500 is probably cheaper than the costs of paying lawyers, etc. to go through the ICANN procedures.
No, it’s a case of these first-users have no higher claim to the domain according to ICANN’s own rules, the very rules by which they sought $250K from Paul in the first place. I don’t see what they or you are bitching about. I understand being sore about it but whining is just bad form.
Whoa, hold on - how can you get so close to the point and still miss it??? “The whole thing is monopolized”! That’s the only reason the current owners of ronpaul.com could demand such an exorbitant sum for a “name” to begin with!! How can you miss that?? And wth does that have to do with taxes???
And the roads are a perfect example. The whole idea of “stopping for 3 full seconds at every stop-sign” is statist garbage. Yet if someone did roll through a stop-sign and hit Ron Paul’s car, is he supposed to say “Oh well, it’s a government road and all the rules are illegitimate anyway, so I have no basis to make any claim against you… and if I did, it would go through government-cartelized insurance companies, etc. etc. So this one’s on me.” Give me a break.
IP is not a make or break issue unless it’s push to extremes (i.e. RIAA/MPAA DMCA tyranny). And in any case, in terms of the dispute here, the claimants of the domain-name can only insist on their rights by virtue of assuming that portion of IP law that underpins the whole ICANN hierarchy! They can’t have it both ways. They can’t say, “This pattern of ASCII characters is OUR PROPERTY, so you have to pay us for it” AND say at the same time “You’re Ron Paul, you can’t use IP arguments, they’re illegitimate!”
Wha? Ron Paul has always stated he’s a constitutionalist that believes in limited government. While he’s not actively avoided the “anarchist” label, I’m not aware of anyplace where he’s applied it to himself.
Clayton -