It’s clear to me, at least, that victimless crime laws are illegitimate. For example, DUI laws are illegitimate. You aren’t directly physically coercing someone when you drive under the influence. You just increase the probability that it will be the case.
In the same vein, there’s nothing illegitimate about using someone else’s identity to commit fraud. The only law of the land in a truly free society is protection of property, and when someone commits fraud, they aren’t stealing their identity since those people would still have it. It’s just that you use it to commit fraud.
Please note that I’m referring to identity fraud, not to credit card or other fraud which steals something. You can register a fraudulent company with somebody else’s identity without the other person loosing anything.
You can copy information without stealing it. Copying is not stealing. For example, many offshore banks have an online registration option which only require a photo of your passport and driving license. There is nothing wrong with impersonating another individual as long as personal property is not violated.
You basically just said, “anything goes, as long as it doesn’t involve aggression or violation of property rights.” I’m not sure you’ll get much of an argument here.
Fraud should be legal. Many of my so called “libertarian” friends disagree. They don’t seem to realize that impersonating someone to set up a bank account or life insurance claim in someone else’s name does not violate the property rights of anyone and is both a moral and legitimate action.
Well, there I have to go with your “libertarian” friends. If you put some water in a bottle and advertise that it’s from a glacier in Alaska, and I buy it from you, and then find out you got it out of your faucet, I should have legal recourse. Not only to reclaim my stolen property but to punish you for your fraudulent act.
You don’t seem to realize that those things affect your credit score, which affects your property.
When was property stolen in your example? You purchased the bottle voluntarily and unless the buyer somehow takes it back without your permission, there is no theft occuring. You don’t have an entitlement to punish people for “fradulent acts”, and if you did, who would do this “punishing”? What institution would exist in a free society to enforce these antifraud laws you propose?
I realize there are a lot of things which, as you put it, “affect your property”. That’s not a reason to deprive individuals of their right to commit fraud.
What you said could be taken to undermine freedom of speech. If someone says anything bad about another individual’s credit, this should be, according to your logic, illegal, because it “affects their property” by whatever meaning you attach to that phrase.
You need to separate fraud from identity theft. Fraud is generally wrong, and indentitiy theft is only wrong if it causes harm. Effecting a credit score might not rise to the level of harm. But other acts of identity theft would, like commiting murder in my name.
Edit: I guess fraud is always wrong, depending on your definition.
I just want to point out that fraud could be murder if you sold/gave someone a bottle that had some poison in it and told them it was koolaid, implying it was pure koolaid.
This is an arbitrary, statist determination. In a free society individuals have the right to property, not entitlements to violate other’s property rights as punishment for “causing harm”.
in a free society there are consequences to aggression, including acts like depriving one of property through fraud. Dont piss on me and tell me its raining, kthxbye
So, just to be clear, in a free society, you don’t think one has a right to defend hisself or his property from harm? One has no right to have his stolen property returned? If so, I think the anarchy you speak of is really more of a society with no set of norms or customs at all, which it would be likely that in such a society, no one would respect the “rights” of anyone, property or otherwise. This, of course, would make a market much less likely to develop, meaning no capitalism, no division of labor, and essentially no trade. Every man would live off of what he could produce himself, or plunder from others. That is not anarcho-capitalism.
Where is anyone depriving another person of property when they set up a bank account in someone else’s name? You keep asserting this is happening.
A free society allows people to defend their property from physical damage and intrusion. This is not what you mean by “harm”.
Treating “harm to property” as some abstraction involving credit scores and other indirect effects of other people’s actions is a slippery slope. When someone opens a fradulent bank account, they are not “harming someone’s property”, they are “harming someone’s credit score (according to JJ)”. No property is being directly harmed. Even if it was, there is no way in which a credit score or bank account might “harm” property, by the vague, undefined meaning you attach to that term.
It might harm a person, but then you are trying to justifying an entitlement based on the “harm” caused to another person.
I purchased a bottle of water that the seller maintained was from a glacier in Alaska. It in fact was something different. I did not get what I was paying for. I paid my money for one thing, and was given something else. He has stolen my money by defrauding me. I transferred title to my property to him under the understanding that he was transferring title to me of glacier water from a specific region. He did not hold up on his end of the bargain. He has stolen my money.
He still owes me either the glacier water I paid for, or my money back (plus redress).
Yes you do. And (probably) private agencies would exist to enforce these laws. (The same ones who enforce pretty much all of the laws in such a society. I’m curious how you think any laws would get inforced in a free society.)
I suppose it all comes down to how you define “fraud”, (of course, somepeople find this defining of terms useless and unnecessary, but still). But by the “libertarian definition”, there is no such thing as a “right to commit fraud”.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. If you make an insurance claim as someone else, you’re obviously taking property that is owed to someone else. I would assume that would be clearly recognized as theft. But even making a bank account using someone else’s information…there are costs involved with this. You are footing this person with the bill, effectively stealing from him. But even if you somehow pay the costs directly involved in what actions you take while impersonating someone else, there are still going to be indirect costs and future costs. I’m not sure one could possibly impersonate someone else to open a bank account, and never end up having the person get stuck with any bills or fines or any other costs.
I suppose if you could somehow accomplish that, and you never deprived them of any property, then I suppose there would be no harm done…but then I’m not exactly sure why anyone would go through the trouble of committing the fraud in the first place.
This type of reasoning could be used to justify the Food and Drug Act and truth in labeling regulations. These laws are illegitimate, because value is subjective. You are not entitled to know the production process any given product or hold it against the manufacturer, either. The seller did not “steal” your money any more than you “stole” a different product than what was paid for.
Yet the entire transaction was voluntary, and only became a coercive entitlement when the buyer changed his mind and declared that the product he purchased “was something different” than what he actually bought.
I am not going to pick any one system, but free association and non coercive agreements are the only basis for a free law system.
Notice the “effectively”. This is not theft as the person can stop payment and cancel the account at any time. They can only pay if they consent.
In the insurance example, the fraudulent person may not have the right to use the actual car, but there is nothing illegitimate about them registering the insurance and collecting any payments as long as the fraud performer owns the insurance policy (which is a contract between the fraudster and the insurance company, and third parties like the car owner have no entitlement to this contract).
The right to fraud is a legitimate exercise of the right to present oneself as another person. There is certainly no aggression taking place when an individual prints a counterfeit banknote, club membership card, or so forth; who is having their property physically destroyed or physically removed? Remember that intellectual property is illegitimate; one cannot merely say that the banknote is “copyrighted” in a certain way.
No, it couldn’t. Demanding restitution after being defrauded is not the same thing as using violence to preemptively lower the potential for fraud. You are correct, you are not entitled to know production processes or whatever, however if you enter into an exchange contract with another party where you trade X for Y, and they give you Z, then there are damages. If you disagree with that basic premise then there isn’t much more to the coversation.
Also, those laws (or fraud in general) have nothing to do with value being subjective.
Again you are making invalid equivalences. Presenting yourself using whatever name you please is not the same thing as fraud.
There is no “theft” taking place during fraud any more than music piracy is “theft” of “intellectual property”. “Identity theft” is a frequently used justification for statist intervention because it is an excuse to use force against true, physical property. Since no physical property is stolen during fraud, one can only conclude that “intellectual property” is being stolen, and the latter is an illegitimate concept.
You have to be trolling. Fraud is theft. As others have stated, if you trade X for Y and receive Z, the person you traded with has stolen from you. They have taken X from you and did not give you what was agreed upon in return.Your physical property X was stolen during the fraudulent transaction.
Now, maybe there could be a case that not all identify theft is fraud, but to go ahead and claim that all fraud is not theft is wrong, at least so far as the NAP and libertarianism is concerned.