I do see it as a good comparison, as state/government has a specific definition. Trying to re-define state/government to something other than what it is constitutes willful deceit.
They’re voluntary funding, hence the state can’t be said to have stolen all of “its” property.
And how does that address the definition of government which I provided? Answer: it doesn’t.
Try again.
Yes because it’s willful deceit if I was just genuinely curious about a certain argument that I haven’t seen much of, & wanted to learn more about it & whether or not it had been argued and if it was valid. [:P]
*Edit: No worries, I didn’t really make much of an argument, just lazily pointed to one lol.
Suppose someone in a free society bought land under some preagreed terms (let’s say, paying some “taxes” for public goods), has children and then dies. The children, if they choose to inherit his property, they automatically inherit those preagreed terms. So the argument of no legitimacy holds, but it isn’t convincing when we presuppose the state was voluntarily formed.
However, the question is why should those terms change at the whims of the state. Buying a property that comes with the obligation to observe not only current, but future laws as well, is a more general instance of selling oneself into slavery. So I believe the correct way to tackle this is to question the enforceability of such contracts.
The interesting thing is contracts under state laws aren’t 100% enforceable either. You can’t force someone to work even if he agreed to a contract, and you can’t imprison people for refusing to deliver. Instead, a court decides you have to pay damages. And all contracts can be rescinded.
The question is: if, in theory, all states have been voluntarily created (in consensus), can a property owner rescind “the contract” and still keep his property? The question seems to be quite difficult to answer in these conditions.
Why are you taking what I wrote so personally? It wasn’t addressed to you personally. It was addressed to the argument. Don’t take it personally.
Bonds are not voluntary funding. They are investment in criminal enterprise. In order to repay the bonds, taxes must be appropriated from people in the future.
It’s no different than lending money to an extortionist, who promises to repay you with interest after the next time he makes his rounds.
Governments are not funded voluntarily. Whenever the coercive power of the state is withdrawn, people voluntarily stop giving those states money.
It’s also interesting to note that even if a state may have done harm onto the original, ancestral inhabitants, it may not have done harm onto the current property owners. Of course, all property is tainted by such wrongdoings, but wouldn’t this invalidate all future agreements regardless if a state is implied?
This somewhat gets harder and harder to answer if we play the devil’s advocate.
Please explain how does the state manage to pay its bonds at maturity ? I’ll do it for you : in order to pay back what it borrowed, the state steals money thru taxes and inflation. So, in reality the state is not funded voluntary, but partially financed voluntarily. It still has no legitimate title to the property it controls. Btw, people who lend their money to the mafia or buy bonds from a criminal government should perhaps rethink their moral position…
What are you talking about? Neither of them can legitimately own the property in question.
so you support the seizure of property based on moral outrage. it will start at the fringes (taking away the homes of people who who everyone hates, like sex offenders) and slowly creep up on you.
right, everyone “understands them” in their own way. when you say legitimate you probably mean that you personally think something is justified. But if we go by that system we just have collectivism. whichever actions are thought of as legitimate by the majority are de facto legitimate.
Wouldn’t it be simpler just to point out the fact that the argument is historically untrue?
But bonds are voluntary funding, in the sense that one party voluntarily gives money to the state. Granted, government bonds rely on theft and coercion but it doesn’t mean that the money they receive isn’t voluntarily given to them.
Not necessarily. It might well be the case that if the state were to collapse some arrangements might arise resembling the current statist arrangement albeit voluntarily. There exist individuals who can’t throw enough money at the state who are simply misguided into beleiving it helps. By the way, the word government is probably not the best to use, since it needn’t be coercive.
The word government isn’t necessarily the correct one. I agree with you that the state on the other hand is coercive, so what? It doesn’t mean that all of its money is stolen.
I know this, you’re stating the obvious. It doesn’t mean that all of the money the state receives is stolen. Granted, the vast majority of it is and if the state were forced to pay back what it had stolen it would quickly go bankrupt. But that’s besides the point.
Yes, it does, it merely owes a lot of people a lot of compensation. As you pointed out, people are perhaps entitled to demand this compensation in form of breaking the state’s rules, but this doesn’t mean they’re not breaking legitimate rules.
Yes it is, and it doesn’t matter, in that order. Try thinking about the nature of it, and not focusing on something out-of-context.
i just wanted to hi-5 liberty student on this, cause its a post i was itching to make but then i saw he’d beat me to it…
The entire scheme is based on fraud and theft. Thus it is invalid.
Please line a birdcage with this. That is the only way it will achieve any value.
Cheers. Although it doesn’t look like it is enough to wise Giles up. He’s continuing to make the argument that if people voluntarily choose to steal, than the voluntaryism makes it valid. This is what happens when people take bad positions, and then use that as a foundation for the rest of their understanding. One bad decision at the beginning, can badly twist everything that comes after it.
Yes, and I’ve never said otherwise. My argument is not that government bonds are valid, rather, that they are voluntary funding in the sense that people are, out of their own free will, giving money to the state. However, little this is in comparison to the money they steal it is still enough to say that some of the money is given to the state voluntarily. If you like we can forget bonds and claim that the state receives money voluntarily from a number of people that support the state’s redistributionist policies.