Should a free society allow for the viewing of child pornography?

Economics Political Theory
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No, the children don’t get a say in the matter.

If you offer a kid a lolly if it will lick your ***** for the camera and the kid says yes, then it’s OK?

Like I say, keep it simple, if adult, ie reproducing age, they have the only say that matters. If younger then it’s down to those responsible and in control of them - but you can’t they’re responsible, have power and in the same breath deny them that responsibility and power based on what YOU deem appropriate. For example many Americans feel it is OK to mutilate a little baby boy’s genitals and call it “circumcision” but those same Americans recoil in horror when Africans mutilate a little girl’s genitals and call it “circumcision”. They’ll argue about which is “worse”, mutilating little boys or mutilating little girls, while seemingly ignorant of the principle behind mutilating little children’s genitals, of either sex, be it minor, major or just cut their heads off and kill em why doncha?

My own view is leave their bits alone until they’re adults and let them choose if they want bits of themselves amputated - but I wouldn’t force you NOT to because they’re your children, not mine. Come anywhere near MY son with a scapel and you’re life would be at risk.

It’s a great example actually - anyone who claims you don’t own your children, how would you feel if I decided to circumcise your 6 year old daughter? If I give her enough lollipops and painkillers that she doesn’t object or even agrees, do you get a say in it or not? If you DO get a say in your daughter being mutilated - then by definition you get a say in your daughter being mutilated, geddit? To say “I do get a say but only if my say is no” doesn’t make sense.

If you’re allowed to physically mutilate your children I don’t think it’s a stretch to say you can photograph them. If the pics are digitised then there’s no “scarcity” so if I take pics of your daughter naked and post them on the internet is that any business of yours or not? IF you can claim intellectual property and IF you own your child then yes, if not then no - but again, please don’t ask me to accept that you believe 2 different things at the same time.

202

Have you ever actually read Kinsella on this issue? Or even become acquainted with the arguments? Because, to be perfectly honest, I find it extremely hard to believe that someone who is a libertarian can be shown these arguments and remain pro-IP. There’s a reason Kinsella is highly respected as a legal theorist in the liberty movement - his critique of IP is seminal, outstanding. So, I think the only options are: 1) you haven’t heard the Kinsellian case, 2) you aren’t actually a libertarian, or 3) you haven’t heard the Kinsellian case and aren’t a libertarian. Given what you wrote after this, I’m leaning heavily towards the latter - no offense.

People, at least those concerned with rights, object more to the actions carried out than the filming of them. Rape, after all, is a crime.

This is the part where I begin to think you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. There are two reasons to object to inflation. First and foremost, it wouldn’t be much of a problem if the government didn’t force us to use their money, through legal tender laws, taxes, and so on. Second, if you view bank notes as properly being warehouse reciepts (as many libertarians do), then inflation is fraud - the new bank notes come from nowhere and have no backing.

What “power” comes with your responsibility not to murder or rape or steal?

Positive, uncontracted obligations stand in direct opposition to liberty - this is basic. The strikes against your knowledge of libertarianism are mounting.

This is the kind of idiocy that comes from assuming that parents own children. This analogy to property is completely unwarranted - a child is an independent rights-holder and violating the child’s rights is not acceptable.

How utterly unrigorous. What if I define “human rights” to include a right to healthcare, a right to food, etc? What if I’m a masochist and what I want “done onto me” is beatings and stabbings - can I go out and do that to others? Why should humans be considered special? Just because that’s the species we belong to? Would it be okay for an alien race to murder us, since we’re not part of their species? Etc.

Further evidence that you have no clue at all as to what you’re talking about, perhaps some evidence that you are trying to be a nuisance.

I think we may need to create a new name for this fallacy: maybe “appeal to trite, vacuous platitudes”?

Because puberty has no connection to rationality or the ability to consent.

False dichotomy, and, I find it terribly amusing that the defender of intellectual property rights is calling out “statists.”

Oh, and welcome to the forums.

203

Hm…But According to you parents own their children…So if parents think mutilation is OK and the idea of children having rights is alien to you…then it follows…

Yeah, I think that’s called hypocrisy.

Of course you’re not ‘allowed’ to mutilate anybody and taking photographs is not the same thing as mutilation anyway. And is not what’s being discussed either.

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Oh I see, I don’t bow down and agree with the great Kinsella, thus i must be wrong. Funny, I thought this was a discussion rather than religious dogma?

Telling me I “don’t understand” doesn’t answer my points in the slightest. I do understand the concept of scarcity and why we came to develop private property back in the old days - but also consider it a logical extension that we should embrace intellectual property with the same vigor. What works for physical property works for digital or similar too, for all the same good reasons - without needing an justification such as “only a certain amount does or can exist, THEREFORE private property is a good thing”.

No, private property is a good thing, period. That it came about via old-fashioned scarcity is irrelevant.

Same applies to money. That it came about as warehouse receipts does not mean that paper and digital money are somehow wrong in and of themselves if not actually connected to something in a warehouse. The issue is that because they are NOT connected certain parties, ie central banks in cahoots with government, tend to over-produce and thus devalue. IF they did not do that then I’d have no objection. That a crime is easy and you won’t be punished doesn’t make it right, be it some kid downloading illegal music or a govermnent printing up “extra” money to wage a war.

As for paying taxes in, for example, dollars, why not earn in rupees and then buy dollars to pay your tax? Then you’d LIKE the dollar being devalued, no? The problem is more a practical one, including that the Indian government also over-produces rupees.

People in Belgium value US dollars, not because they must hold them or pay tax with them or anything else (though their oil companies and government may like them or even need them is irrelevant). The average Belgian wants dollars because they buy stuff, period. That aspect IS the free market, the market in currencies and capital.

Don’t get me wrong, I consider government-led (or plain bank led) inflation to be fraud, theft and evil - but I don’t get the idea it’s bad when they do it but just peachy when you do the exact same thing to other “intangible” items. Lack of tangibility is NOT the issue, it’s the devaluing via unauthorised non-exchange reproduction that’s the issue.

This website wouldn’t exist without intangable electrons and digital code but it’s real and we’re writing on it. Should digital money only have value if backed by paper money? Should this website not exist unless it exists on paper somewhere? Perhaps every keystroke must be carved in stone? No, get with the times, the modern world is digital and digits have value and are property. They don’t HAVE to be tied to anything physical as long as they’re not reproduced outside of rightful ownership and exchange.

Yes I’m familar with the idea that a license doesn’t extend to someone who didn’t sign it - but on that basis you cannot complain about child porn by someone who didn’t film it.

It’s not that I don’t understand the issue, I’ve been reading Lew Rockwell for years and have seen many attempts at the argument. I just don’t consider it logical, rational or up to date with modern technology. I’d go so far as to say it’s dishonest, panders to the rebellious spirit of youngsters and is as ignorant and as damaging as any other form of communism or attacks on private property and the right to make, and enforce, contracts.

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Sceptic: do you believe that people can justly own other people in any way or to any extent?

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Juan, your response is incoherent. My argument WAS that you own your own children and can mutilate them if you wish - much as it may anger and disgust me or others. There’s no hypocrisy on my part, I’m pointing out the hypocrisy of those who claim ownership rights over other people’s children and claim to know or state what other parents can or cannot do.

At everyone -

There has to be some cut-off point between being the responsibility of others or responsible for oneself. Puberty is an ideal and biological marker and distinguishes children from reproducing adults. Otherwise we just get into long drawn out arguments over exactly just how rational, self-aware, God-fearing or some other arbitary criteria counts as ‘adult’, or even ‘human’.

I base my libertarianism on logic, not ancient beliefs in the magical qualities of gold, lovely as it is, not on some blind faith in Rothbard, Mises and certainly not Kinsella. “Do unto others as you’d have done onto you” is the perfect, indeed “golden” rule. That a few may enjoy pain or whatever doesn’t dilute it any more than complaining that absolute pure 24k is virtually impossible. Let’s settle for 23.6506504060490k and grow up. The Golden Rule makes human rights instantly accessible, universal and coherent, while proven to be by far the best approach to take in almost all circumstances over the long term. Sure, short term gain can be made via theft or violence but the rule is best long term and thus should be universally embraced.

The problem is how often we break it, not that it’s ‘selfish’ or unfair to furry things.

Private property is “selfish” and unfair to cattle - but it WORKS. Thus I can logically embrace it.

It’s amusing to come here and be told I’m not a libertarian, when I’m so often the sole defender and explainer of the principles elsewhere - but I’m afraid I cannot embrace a logical and moral framework that falls apart the moment it involves furry animals, cute babies or where crimes can be easily gotten away with. That’s not logical, it’s not a principle, it’s just common or garden sentiment and opinion with the usual “but doesn’t apply to me” immaturity of a child.

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McFall - “Sceptic: do you believe that people can justly own other people in any way or to any extent?”

Yes, if they produced them, ie if they are the parents. Children are unique in that sense.

You can purchase another persons’ time, labor or products but not their person (morally and within my take on liberty). However if a person actually IS the result of your time and labor, you own them.

Likewise your parents own you.

For true freedom there has to be a point where you own yourself and as I’ve stated, I consider puberty, ie the dramatic physical and mental changes that occur as a child develops into an adult capable of reproduction, make the perfect market for that point. You are then an adult and no-body has the right to own you.

If you’re an orphan then perhaps you can be homesteaded by the first person that finds you - but you can’t homestead an adult…

208

Ah, I see now, sorry.

Agreed – my post was poorly edited/written. So, you start with a wrong premise and draw a logical but wrong conclusion. The idea that children can be mutilated because they are mere property is hardly libertarian IMO…

209

No, not in your opinion but if that’s libertarianism then it’s not logical.

If you don’t own the child then on what moral basis do you have any responsibility to it or for it?

Some cultures don’t believe in giving blood transfusions. Am I justified in forcing them to? Some believe it’s OK to mutilate. Am I justified in forcing them not to? Some believe it’s wrong to mutilate. Am I justified in forcing them TO mutilate?

The issue is am I justified in forcing other parents to raise or treat their children in the way that I approve of? If I’m not then you are not, nor is anybody. If we in general or not justified in forcing our opinions upon others then we do not have responsibility, for either the parents or the child/ren. However someone DOES have responsibility to and for the child, ie the parents that produced it.

That doesn’t make the precious gift of a child’s life “mere property”, it makes it very special, highly valued and extremely precious property. IMO… yours may vary.

Again, if like me you consider private property damn-near sacred, then what’s “mere” about it?

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I’m not sure what you mean by responsibility. The fact is you have negative obligations to the child, just like to anybody else. If you don’t want to feed your child, fine, put it up for adoption. However, if you feed it that doesn’t mean you ‘own’ it and can violate its rights.

The issue is : children have rights and those rights are to be respected. Are you justified in preventing a parent from offering his child as sacrifice to the gods ?

My point was you can only own objects, not people, regardless of age. The idea that children have been ‘created’ or homesteaded by their parents is a bad metaphor.

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You’re contradicting yourself. Puberty does not make you any more or less a product of your parents, you just find it convenient. Either your parents own you or they don’t.

212

“Oh I see, I don’t bow down and agree with the great Kinsella, thus i must be wrong. Funny, I thought this was a discussion rather than religious dogma?”

He was asking if you have actually read Kinsella’s argument. If you have, then surely you can offer up a critique that refutes his claims.

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All I said was that it seemed highly unlikely that you were both a libertarian and did not agree with Kinsella on IP. Much like it would be highly unlikely for you to be a mathematician and not think that .999… = 1. That wouldn’t necessarily disqualify you as a mathematician, but it might put your credentials into question. The same is the case here.

Indeed not, it just points out that perhaps your argument is either totally irrelevant or has already been answered. Like, for example, your continued attempts to use physical property as a metaphor for IP. However, it has been demonstrated by Kinsella that not only is this metaphor totally off, but, furthermore, IP directly threatens rights over real, physical property.

This makes me question very deeply whether you know any libertarian theory regarding property at all. As Hoppe points out, the reason for a system of property rights is to reduce or eliminate conflict over the possession and use of property. Thus, it matters very much whether scarcity exists. If scarcity didn’t exist, there would be no possibility of conflict. Again, if you’d actually read and understood the Kinsellian case against IP, you’d already know this.

It does if they are claiming to be warehouse reciepts. That’s called fraud.

Well, there are several problems here. First of all, the government could set an official exchange rate which was utterly unconnected with reality, and thereby increase the exploitation. Second, this still means you are forced to use dollars, and thus are subject to the arbitrary changes the government makes to the supply of money. Third, the government doesn’t just magically change dollars into goods and services - it buys from people. Which means whatever the tax is paid in is going to be circulated and, thanks to legal tender laws, your hand will be forced when someone wants to use them to pay you.

I can’t say I even know what you mean here. It seems like you are saying that any “unauthorised non-exchange” reproduction is wrong. Which raises the question - is all manufacturing wrong? All mass production? Is agriculture wrong if the farmer uses the seeds from one season’s crop to grow the next?

Again, this “get with the times” thing. Appeal to trite, vacuous platitudes. You are question begging.

As to your second post, where you address “everyone,” the “Golden Rule” remains completely unrigorous and gets into a ton of trouble when any sort of hard case is presented to it. And your appeal to utility - i.e., “it WORKS. Thus I can logically embrace it.” - is contradicted by your support of IP, which, as Kinsella mentions, has never been shown to work in any study of its effects. It is always either neutral or destructive.

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This is going in circles.

No, not “just like animals”. In their case there is hardly any prospect of a development of a rational faculty. And again: absence of consent does not equate licence to do whatever one wishes to a child. That is nuts.

Yet it does. The existence of vagueness does not mean everything and anything is justified so stop acting as if it does.

Bullshit. The courts are the institutions which decide whether a property right is to be enforced or not. All they need to do is refuse to recognize that a parent is acting in a child’s interests, and for the PDA to thus refuse to continue enforcing their claim, and the child’s custody will be up for grabs. No interference is even necessary - all the court need do is refuse to grant the defendants standing, and stop protecting their “right”.

Anyway, I’m done with this, as it’s not going anywhere. I’ll be taking a break for the next few days, so see you all then…

To Juan, yes, I agree, the child can leave at any time, so ultimately I suppose the only way a parent can get it to abide by certain rules is to set conditions for remaining on their property.

215

“Either your parents own you or they don’t.”

I’ve already said, they do. They just quit owning you once you’re old enough to own yourself. I personally look at puberty as that moment, as it’s a universal physical change that does indeed mark adulthood.

“You haven’t read Kinsella” or variations thereof. I have, and many others, I am just not swayed by the argument. I agree that private property originally stemmed from scarcity, I just disagree it must therefore always be so.

Imagine a world of nanotech where anyone could create anything they like? Do we just abandon the division of labor and hope the nanotech can continue, forever, to produce machines that can repair, maintain and improve upon the machines? Or do we continue to reward people for producing better machines, better designs and for the time spent learning such stuff? Your route leads to a world of unskilled vegetables staring blankly at technology they don’t understand that just went wrong.

Again it’s like money. Many of the reasons why reproducing vast quantities of “dollars” are bad apply equally to reproducing vast quantities of other people’s IP. You cannot print or copy/paste wealth. Sure, it works and feels great in the short term but long term you distort the marktet, motivation etc.

As for “studies” I’m a sceptic remember? Just as you cannot measure wealth and progress that didn’t happen due to government interference you cannot measure wealth and progress that didn’t happen due to the belief that piracy etc would destroy the activity’s profitability thus the activity didn’t occur etc. Studies of the unknown and unmeasurable don’t impress me much. Yes, that works in reverse too, we cannot know what wonderful utopia there would be if we were able to steal everything either - but I’m not swayed by any argument or study I’ve ever seen that somehow we “know” or can prove utopia would be closer in a world where people know in advance their ideas or creativity would be ‘freely shared’ the moment it was produced.

You may recall the dot com bubble burst, which itself was heavily led by the “make it free and figure out some other way of monetizing it later”. It doesn’t work on a universal level. For example many websites “work” on the basis of “free but with adverts”. How can everything be “free” and yet still have people willing to advertise stuff that costs money?

As for the government buying stuff etc, I agree and have already said government led inflation is theft and evil - but still see IP theft as evil and I don’t buy the “lesser evil” argument here any more than voting for lesser evil politicians. The fact is contracts should be enforced - including upon co-conspiritors in the crime.

Saying child porn is wrong and you shouldn’t watch it (I agree btw) doesn’t make sense under the argument that only the first person broke society’s contract but all other perverts should be free to distribute it because it’s their VCR or DVD drive and they’re “not hurting anybody”.

It doesn’t make sense to say that reproducing money is evil theft because it steals others savings and productivity - and in the same breath claim that it doesn’t matter a damn if you’re doing to to music or software producers because somehow THEIR productivity and value doesn’t matter huh?

The profit motive, the price mechanism, the essential greatness and civilising factors of private property and the division of labor, all wonderful things - unless we are likely to get away with the stealing, in which case stealing is “freedom”? Sorry, I don’t buy such hypocritical BS.

Anyway, how does one stop the emails, as I’m out of this ‘discussion’?

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It’s ok, found the link.

217

Of course not, you don’t have children (although, neither do I at that).

I just think you’re clueless. Really now, do you actually believe that parents will be comfortable living in the same community with the people we’re talking about? Of course not.

Why isn’t it realistic?

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Strawman. Typical leftist you seem very keen on defending this “right” of yours Juan, one must wonder why that is…

219

That’s irrelevant to the question, and it doesn’t follow that because one has children one favors total exile for people who watch child pornography.

I’m not claiming that people will necessarily be comfortable with it, I’m claiming that it’s absurd to assume that absolute exclusion from the entire community is what logically follows. Furthermore, this isn’t the type of thing that one likely knows about in the first place, this is something that most likely takes place in the privacy of one’s home without anyone else knowing. So “the community” isn’t likely to even know who is watching child pornography to begin with. The fact of the matter is that the people that one lives around is quite circumstantial, we can’t just arbitrarily choose who lives in society.

It isn’t realistic because of the incentives towards social cooperation and the benefits of trade. It does not follow from the fact that everyone is free that they suddenly become atomists. It isn’t realistic for the same reasons that primitivism isn’t realistic, I.E. it bumps up against the division of labor and greatly limits the availability of resources. In a more modern and healthy society, economic incentives start to trump cultural identity group concerns. It simply is not in my rational self-interest to isolate myself to such a degree. If I desire a given resource or service, I’m going to pursue it regaurdless of cultural identity.

It also is unrealistic because it’s unsustainable to try to maintain such absolute cultural isolation in light of economic incentives. It’s impossible to absolutely stop natural trends towards inclusivity and integration, and some degree of inclusivity and integration follows from the mere existance of a society. No society or community is a total bubble that is purely isolated. It always relies on the importation of resources to sustain itself and grow, and this inevitably leads to a higher degree of social cooperation among different identity groups. Cosmopolitanism simply follows from an economic approach to society.

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Usually it does, that is, if the parents don’t hate their children.

That’s just a red herring.

Of course we can, don’t be so silly.

What’s your point? It doesn’t follow from “I don’t like you” that “I refuse to trade with you”. I have no qualms with trading with you, it’s exactly as Mises said, the division of labour does not result from any propensity to trade. Rather, it arises from self interest. On the other hand, who I live with has nothing to do with the division of labour and everything to do with whether or not I like these people.

Strawman. I’ve never claimed such a thing, rather, I’ve claimed that upon abolishing the state communities won’t suddenly start the morning by gathering in a circle and holding hands with one another.