Here is the problem with your argument, you are assuming that shooting people is the only act that will stop the thief…
I wrote earlier that if the thief were injured in abduction by the shopkeeper, that is the thief’s own damn fault, if he died, in his attempt to flee (not being shot, lets say hit by a car) that is his own damn fault…
I would even extend the leeway for the shopkeeper to pull a gun and threaten the thief, but not shoot him, or using rock salt shotgun slugs or rubber bullets to stop the thief
But for a $ .50 piece of gum, the argument that the shopkeeper is justified in taking life is a little more than weak…
If I bump shoulders with you are you justified in shanking my kidneys?
That is saying that if you have a child that grows up to be a serial killer you should be jailed for his crimes too…
The owner is responsible for reporting the trespasser and has the liberty to speak as to why he does not want the dealer there, if it is true or not is up to the police to investigate, with your ideas the property owner, if he does not report the trespasser is also responsible for every overdose that happens to the dealer’s customers. You paint a lose lose situation for the property owner, who just owns his property, the people who are responsible the state and the dealer are given a free ride.
Since we are neck deep in this hypothetical, what if the property owner calls the police to remove a trespasser and he happens to be a drug dealer and serves two years for state law violation (which is a non crime), is the property owner still liable for those two years?
Justice is served to the property owner, the loss of the criminal record on the part of the trespasser is all the restitution he will obtain, since the state no longer exists for him to file legal action against…
That is a fair assessment, but if it is not retroactively enforceable, why is this an issue?
Actually what I said was violence not shooting. However, shooting should be a part of that inventory of tools to defend your property. It is good that we agree that violence can be used to defend property.
I suspect you are one of these anti-gun people who have this notion that using a gun is somehow different than say hitting someone in the head with a baseball bat or something.
How are people supposed to know exactly what level of violence is acceptable? Let’s say that you say using fists are acceptable to prevent the robbery and the shopkeeper srikes the thief in the face and kills him. Is he guilty of murder? Is it ok to kill someone with your fists but using a gun is murder?
Your argument is just sentimental it has no logical consistency or anyway to determine what the correct course of action is for the shopkeeper.
Okay. So, the owner is just as criminal as the police. He’s responsible for kidnapping a peaceful person for two years.
How (on earth) did the dealer agree to be jailed ? Please prove your unfounded assertion ?
So ? At any rate I 'm not that interested in ‘proportionally punishing’ the owner, but in preventing the jailing of the dealer. I can’t see, at all, what this contrived hypothetical scenario is supposed to illustrate.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Can you rephrase that ?
Anyways, contracts don’t enter the picture. If we stick to the bubble gum thief example, it’s taken for granted that the thief did not sign a contract saying that he agreed to be summarily executed for stealing $1
In the case of the dealer he never agreed to be jailed either. The owner knowingly caused an amount of damage for which he is responsible - there’s no contract in place waiving his responsibility .
ps : of course the ‘drug dealer’ is liable for any damage his trespassing caused.
That would depend entirely on whether or not the parent in question intentionally employs a means that foreseeably leads to the child maturing into a serial killer.
The police are ‘civil’ servants. They’re not like real servants where you can ask them to do one thing but not another. They’ll decide what’s appropriate. You might just tell them there’s a trespasser. They’re not stupid. They’ll suspect what he was doing there.They’ll still more likely than not search him and charge him with possession. They like to make big arrests and lay serious charges. It makes them look good and advances their careers. The consequences of calling them and reporting the trespasser are foreseeable to any reasonable person.
No, that would imply positive obligations. No one has any obligation to divert the course of affairs away from negative outcomes. They only have an obligation to not cause others to lose the physical integrity or interfere with the control of other’s legitimate possessions. Besides, if addicts want to risk overdosing, that’s their own free choice. The owner would be culpable if he tried to interfere with their property rights to prevent that from happening.
There are some gramatical errors in your next statement so I’m going to interpret it as best and as generously as I can. It is not intentional if I get it wrong.
I suppose I do. Under a Rothbardian framework he is in a lose-lose situation. And so are many people today. What I am also attempting to do is provide a justified way out.
If the owner didn’t know that he was a dealer then it is not foreseeable that the police would lay drug charges. In this case, he cannot be considered culpable.
For answers to all of these types of questions, I strongly recommend Stephan N. Kinsella’s and Patrick Tinsley’s Causation and Aggression. Here’s a small quote from page 6 of the pdf file.
You are thinking of Natural law in the same terms as legislation. Right now state laws apply. After a libertarian revolution, libertarian laws will be enacted. And it would be unjust to apply libertarian law to cases which temporally precede the enactment of those libertarian laws.
I look at it entirely differently. Natural (libertarian) law is not enacted. It is simply there and timeless. If state laws run contrary to it, than they are illicit. It is impossible for Natural law to apply retroactively (to when it was created) because it has always existed.
The state is already operating illegally (according to Natural law) the moment it makes up its own legality with the intent to enforce it. State agents are not exempt from responsibility just because they make up their own set of rules to operate under. We also do not draw the conclusion that the Nazis were not exempt from mass murder because they were operating under Nazi law. If justice is to be considered nonarbitrary, there has to be an ultimate standard against which we can compare everyone’s actions.
It is not reasonable to assume punching someone once will kill a person, unless of course we are talking about a child or elderly person, which should not need such methods to detain…
The shopkeeper can do what ever he wants to protect his property, but unless his life was threatened I do not see the justification of lethal force
That is the drug dealers bad then, he knows the statist law is prohibative to his activity, he knows that the property owner wants him to leave, he refused, he knows the property owner could call the police, so in effect he did it to himself, because he is not stupid, he knows the possible course of events…
The Dealer has no claim on the property owner by virtue of your drug user overdose comparison…
I missed the comma between “responsible” and “the”
The justified way out is the dealer knows the state laws prohibit his actions, and should assume the risk there of…
So According to Kinsella and Tinsley, aside from killing the drug dealer as a trespasser there is no way for the property owner can have justice served without the drug dealer’s rights violated?
But is it possible for natural law to review the case after it becomes applicable once again, seeing as illicit state laws supercede it, regardless of our wishes, which really draws the dealer with a claim againstr the state and not the property owner…
That’s right. Just as an employer of hitmen is responsible for murder.
A case can be reasonably be made that the dealer understood and implicitly consented to being arrested and jailed as a result of selling drugs on the owner’s property and failing to leave after being asked.
It is more likely that you refuse to acknowledge what is being illistrated.
If it is understood by all parties and implicitly agreed to by all parties, than the owner and the police are off the hook for supraproportional punishment.
Only because you don’t think that entry onto a property can be considered a signal acknowledging a transfer of property. Really, what would and would not constitute entering into an agreement depends on convention. Signature, handshake, whatever. It depends on what is generally considered and can be interpreted as entry into an agreement. But whatever. Let’s say instead of entry, he must give a digital thumbprint on a scanner right below the posted conditions before an automatic door will open granting him entry. Now, did he enter into an agreement?
Same thing as previous scenario. Digital thumbprint and automatic door. “If you sell illicit drugs on my property, I reserve the right to call the cops and am not responsible for any excessive force they may use.” There you go. Does that take care of the “that’s not a contract” hang-up?
Okay. You are just another statist trying to justify statism. Love it or leave it. Frankly, can’t you come up with something a bit more sophisticated ? Oh, and I asked you to ACTUALLY PROVE IT, not to just make the baseless assertion that it can be proved.
You could have succinctly stated your statist position in a couple of sentences.
In your mind. Well, maybe it’s time for you to join STATISM.GOV. You know, all people tacitly consent to whatever happens to them.
Yes. You can put it in those terms, although I don’t need to parrot Rothbard. I’m just sticking to common sense and classical liberalism.
You know, I wonder if you have a bit of conscience left in you, or are just another amoralist trying to get support for your criminal preferences. Well, they are not crimes cause there’s no such thing as morals. Or morals can be overridden by an imaginary, unilateral, non-binding contract. But you pay a lot of lip service to ‘natural law’ too. Doubleplusgood.
Okay, I’m done ‘abusing’ your oh-so-deserving-of-respect person…Go shoot some petty thieves.
Well, he didn’t do it to himself. The owner and the justice system did it to him. What does knowing the possible course of events have to do with it? I know I will be jailed if I don’t pay taxes. Does that mean I jail myself?
Sorry, I should have been more clear. All of these scenarios are mine. Kinsella and Tinsley explain what conditions are necessary for a crime to take place. They go through what is and isn’t a crime and why in a very thorough manner.
The dealer can make a claim against the owner as well as specific state agents since he acted in concert with the police to have him arrested and jailed. And it wouldn’t be a review, it would be a separate case entirely.
You set the scenario to a statist world two years after going free…
The Dealer and the justice system did it to him, the owner said “leave”, he did nothing but use the justice system to evacuate the trespasser from his property, and as you said they are not servants, but civil servants, the owner could not control them…
As for taxes, who’s rights are you violating when you do not pay your taxes?
Then shooting at them is just designed to make them stop. It is incidental that they were killed.
So if we shoot at the legs we are ok? How about a karate chop to the neck? or a baseball bat to the chest? How is the shopkeeper to have some reasonable way of knowing what you the defense czar thinks is appropriate?
Ah, so you have adopted the current philosophy of most government’s, if the thief is running away with your property or destroying it then you have no reasonable way to stop him since any act of violence strong enough to make them stop will either be potentially lethal or if non-violent insufficient to make him stop.
What you advocate is already being applied by the state and we see what a wonderous effect it has on reducing crime. Leaving the victim defenseless doesn’t strike me as a libertarian principle.
Your philosophy give the shopkeeper no idea what he can do without potentially facing prosecution for protecting his property. If he is to rough and causes serious bodily harm or death maybe he wil be facing prison and not the thief and he has no idea where the line is.
He has control over whether or not the police come. The core problem is that his options are limited to supraproportional defense or being victimized. He has control in the situation and he is responsible for any foreseeable outcome he creates.
The point here is that your argument “that he knew it was coming” is not universalizable. You apply it in some circumstances but not in others. So, there must be some further justufication which applies in some cases, but not in others. And the additional condition, presented in the form of a rhetorical question, “when you violate someone’s rights” along with the old one “you know the consequences” is still not enough. You don’t agree in the case of the shopkeeper and the bubblegum theif, that the fact that the bubblegum theif is violating rights and knows the consequences is sufficient to establish supraproportional use of forces. So there must still be some further underlying conditions which must be met before something is justified.
What, in your opinion, is necessary for supraproportional force to be justified?
And why isn’t the drug dealer, he knows the only two options the owner has…
It is never justified, but placing the responsibility on the owner is not justified either, as the dealer could have left prior to the probably police involvement…
Dealers understand the risk of their profession, as I did when I was one, it is why we do not get ourselves in positions where the police are called on us, it is why Block labels them Heroes in Defending the Undefendable
If your computer has a virus, you could pay somene to remove it, or you could take an axe to your computer. Which one will leave you with a computer? See the point? Probably not.
Killing someone for stealing a pack of gum is a mockery of justice. What you p[ropose is the same as Stalin would do. Is that really what you want to advocate?