While I don’t mean to advertise (well, to some degree I obviously do), I thought people on this forum would be interested to chip in their two cents on the concept of voluntary government. I wrote this “response” (a simple picture to make a point, more than a long written thesis, in any case) (“Democracy as Voluntary Collective Action”) to a post made by another economist here.
I made few comments. Couldn’t resist. Hah
I see the quote link still doesn’t work.
I made few comments. Couldn’t resist. Hah
Yea, I think you nailed it when you said that we could repeat the same thing over and over again but it still wouldn’t be accepted by the opposition.
“Voluntary government” is an oxymoron. If it’s voluntary, it’s not government. If it’s government, it’s not voluntary.
Clayton -
You link to ‘Tom Woods’, but it’s Tom DiLorenzo that you link to.
Also:
I will state here. The problem with voluntaryists is that the requirement for all relationships to be consensual is only applied to the government. I have never seen it applied to property, which is also never voluntary. Why?
Because voluntary means peaceful. This means aggression against a person is involuntary. So is aggression against his claims. The only “involuntary” aspect of this is that we don’t get to choose a definition of claims.
But many anarchist communities have chosen to voluntarily abolish private property, which is fine, so long as they don’t attack other’s.
But the protection of property is aggression against a person. Therefore involuntary.
Libertarians are always going nuts over this stuff. The point of propertarianism and customary law is to create a framework for social order, integration and commerce. Whether or not people submit to it ‘voluntarily’ is beside the point. If the Communists don’t like it, they can get stomped on.
Hahah that guy on the comments totally got owned by you guys, kudos
No. Its defense if they don’t have a claim to it. You are right that they must be coerced into accepting property rights, the same way they must be coerced into respecting my person. Voluntarism and freedom are about respect for rights, not just ‘everyone do whatever they feel like’.
It’s true: combatting lawbreakers might mean employing coercion.
The analysis of force can be a bit simplistic among “fundamentalist libertarians”, that is, those who take the NAP to be the sum of justice. My view is that the NAP is a great first-order approximation of justifiable violence but only a functioning, competitive law market can actually discover what is, in fact, justifiable violence. Norms regarding the appropriate uses of violence are stunted and often contradictory in a territorial two-tiered law system (one law for the State, another law for all others). I also reject the Rothbardian thesis that establishing the norms of justifiable violence is merely a matter of the application of reason. Social norms are too complex to be derived from any simple set of axioms and so reason alone cannot get us from here to there. There is no substitute but a system of competing law courts under a unitary law system (in other words, not a territorial dual-law system).
Clayton -
Do you mean using PDA violenc for example against outlaws? if so I agree with you.