So you mean, there is nothing wrong to use force against individuals if they are not going to accept what you suppose is a superior society?
Wow, a real libertarian point of view.
Remember, a society is nothing but a convenient category for individual humans, you put into that basket.
Such a viewpoint can validate any atrocity that ever has been done to people including, the holocaust, the russian starving, pol pot and well, for sure, 9/11 and whatever will come.
This is why I’m constantly critisizing Stranger and a few others, because the actual implications of what they are saying constitutes an extreme form of conservatism and elitism, and I don’t understand how they can reconcile such notions with libertarianism at all.
Maybe it is “my liberty” on the cost of your liberty .
I agree it really has nothing to do with libertarianism, or if that is claimed to be libertarianism I better look for another term for the “packaged deal” I mean when using the term libertarianism.
Or… even better give it up wholly and, as you proposed elsewhere, stick with the basics and not with the categories.
Dmitry, it seems like the Ruritarian philosopher would be correct only if we did not extend some notion of rights to the individuals in Waldavia. That is, if it were not the case that individuals have inherent worth, and therefore are entitled to being treated in certain ways which would almost certainly rule out the Ruritarian invasion, then on Utilitarian or consequentialistic grounds, I see no problem with the Ruritarian philosopher’s argument. However, it does seem to me that individuals are entitled to a certain measure of respect, and that this respect entails that we do not sacrifice them or their ways of life to simply make ourselves better off. This seems true even if the Ruritarians would be made substantially better off by doing so. One of the critical objections to Utilitarianism, that it does not take proper account of the separateness of persons, seems to apply here, and so the Ruritarian philosopher (or the real-world individuals attributing a position to him) would need to provide a reason to reject this objection.
Suppose their xenophobia extended to even trade with foreigners and they believed themselves better off for not engaging in trade with those who they feared and hated.
Truth and virtue is higher on my heirarchy of values than blind devotion to Ludwig Von Mises (not to mention while simultaneously trying to maintain a position that contradicts Mises’s minarchism, and proceeding to appeal to him as an authority on libertarianism rather than economics). Indeed, the latter isn’t a value at all.
I have immense respect for Mises and like him as an economist, but not so much as a political philosopher. He’s not someone I’m going to turn to when it comes to libertarianism or anarchism in any broad sense. He’s someone I’ll turn to for economics. But you are aware that there were some rather sharp disagreements between Rothbard and Mises over political philosophy, right? I side with Rothbard in such conflicts.
Also, going on your appeal to Mises, I don’t recall that he shared the Hoppean view on immigration. From what I have gathered, he was very much for open immigration, and of course none of us would be here to talk about him without his own act of immigration.
Going by what you’re saying, Roderick Long doesn’t belong here either.
The society you are describing does engage in trade. It simply makes the choice to avoid trade with outsiders. Thus, no amount of force can produce trade with them.
If you take the case of Commodore Perry’s bombardment of Edo, then the Japanese people were very willing to engage in trade but were forbidden from doing so by a local state. Overthrowing the state thus opened trade with those Japanese who desired trade.
We’ve been speaking about trade as in trade with outsiders this entire time. Let me quote you from earlier:
It is obvious here that the Amish need not be colonized because they will trade with us and the hallmark of a primitive society is one which will not trade with us. What other interpretation of your statement could there possibly be?
It now seems your position has shifted to that where primitive societies consist of those societies with a State which forbids trade. However, many modern states forbid trade. Would, say, Iran or North Korea be justified in making war on the USA simply because our government does not allow us to trade with them? To some extent, all nations limit/restrict/forbid trade - may we, as libertarians, advocate a war of all against all to consume the world?
You have not understood anything. The hallmark of a primitive society is one which cannot trade with us because it has not yet instituted trade. It is literally incapable of trade.
There are certainly many individuals in North Korea who could be recruited to overthrow the state in exchange for recognition of whatever state property they could claim, including many in the upper hierarchy. The reason that other states do not engage in this activity is that their own legitimacy relies on upholding the principle of sovereignty in others.
What does it mean to “institute trade”? Are you suggesting that primitive cultures do not know how to cooperate? To help others in exchange for help for themselves? I submit to you that no such society exists anywhere on the face of the planet, nor has there ever been one in the history of humankind. Even apes cooperate.
It sounds like what you’re trying to say is that primitive societies are defined by a lack of private property rights. But that has nothing to do with whether or not a culture is primitive, nor does it have anything to do with whether a society engages in trade which could potentially be mutually beneficial. It might mean that individuals in a propertyless society wouldn’t be able to unilaterally divest material possessions in trades, but there are plenty of other ways to trade with people which have nothing to do with property rights.
Stranger is being characteristically opaque so I’m not sure what his point is (I assume “his” since, as we know, there are no women at mises.org). But I’m thinking of the Indians who gave away Manhattan Island for some glass beads. The Indian tribe simply had no concept of trading rights of possession in land. They just existed on it as animals do: when the land is abundant, they eat; when it’s not, they starve. The only things they can think of possessing are what they can hold in their fists. The subsistence society simply has no way to deal with the market society. It’s like a five-year old doing a business deal with an adult.
In a stateless society, immigration would be strictly a matter of private license, and a sharp, academic mind like Mises’s could command a premium from high-end clients who would want him on hand, or even from intellectual aristocrats who’d pay him just to be part of their court. This is the antithesis of open immigration, which presupposes that everybody has a public right to live wherever they want, and can take advantage of a vast governmental framework to enforce that right. As an elitist, I doubt Mises would have favored open immigration.
No, open immigration does not presuppose that everybody has a public right to live wherever they want. Rather, it means that the government does not have the right to prevent people from crossing its imaginary borders. Open immigration supporters, those who are natural rights libertarians (and anarchists) at any rate, uphold private property rights. And I think Mises was in favor of open immigration. If you think otherwise, please provide a quote along with a citation.
Bostwick, I don’t think that’s entirely right regarding the oil fields. One objection might be that the government’s actions make it so the oil fields are no longer “unowned commons” in the sense envisioned by homesteading theorists, though they may have been illegitimately appropriated by the government, and so it’s not fair to apply the logic of the commons to these resources. Additionally, all the objections to “privatization” of natural resources and public goods apply here as well (there’s a lot of really interesting literature on the subject coming primarily from the fields of environmental studies and geography, especially regarding Neoliberalization; the Marxian charge of dispossession is also worth noting).
Byzantine, trade doesn’t have to involve monetary exchanges. And further, trading property with people who don’t understand the terms of the transaction is only dubiously acceptable by free-market standards.
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