Zionism and Libertarians

Miscellaneous General
61

On the whole I completely agree that private property is the only way to secure a person’s desire to live as he pleases, and I also hold-fast to the Mises line that intervention in the economy is inefficient. But I think tying this to unproven notions of ‘natural rights’ is fallacious.

  1. We have self ownership. [This is a fact and no value-judgement is made.]

  2. From self-ownership we have the right to property. [This is not a fact and is indeed a normative statement in violation of the is-ought principle.]

If 2 is true (and philosophically speaking it is not) then why should the Rothbardian theory of property rights be adhered to? Why not the Rawlsian theory? We can have some degree of private property coexisting with taxation and redistribution, yet libertarians argue against this. Why? The answer, I think, lies in purely consequentialist grounding. We know that capitalism and private property with little/no tax results in economic prosperity and a greater ability for man to pursue his rational and selfish ends - as Mises affirms in Human Action. And our ultimate justification for absolute property rights lies in consequentialist grounding.

I can’t remember exactly where I read this but I have it on my clipboard so I’ll just paste it. “The rule and its two conditions have intuitive appeal but, like the value of freedom that is self-evident to lovers of freedom but not to nonlovers, this appeal too lacks universality. However, two other, less relative arguments support it. One is epistemological. There are two rival presumptions: “everything is admitted that is not specifically excluded,” and “everything is excluded that is not specifically admitted.” Whichever hypothesis is adopted, either the list of excluded, or the list of admitted actions is sufficient for identifying any action as either admitted or not. Both are not needed for guidance in choosing actions. However, the list of feasible actions is indefinitely long. Compiling the full list of interdictions is, under ordinary circumstances, a less onerous task than compiling a full list of permissions; enumerating what we must not do, and monitoring that we do not do it, are less exacting than listing what we have no right to do, and monitoring that we do not do what we have no right to do. However, if no lists of either kind are readily available, distinguishing between what is admitted and what is excluded becomes a matter of probabilistic inference, and in the extreme case where neither a priori grounds nor indirect, circumstantial evidence favor certain actions over others, putting one’s proposed action in one category rather than another becomes a random choice. Discovery of admissible actions, then, is more likely, and the risk of mistaking an excluded action for admissible is less likely if the first presumption prevails than if the second prevails. The worst of both worlds is if there is a list of excluded actions, a list of “rights,” and an unspecified zone about which no clear presumption exists, allowing free play to political discretion. Such a configuration is typical of para-totalitarian government. The other argument is that the presumptions of admissibility and of inadmissibility are not morally equivalent. In a borderline case, the first presumption permits a proposed action to take its course unless a good cause is shown why it should not. Harm and contrary obligation constitute such causes under the suspensive conditions of the “feasible is free” principle. If the action is harmless and breaches no obligation, it is free. Harm or obligation has to be proven to stop it. The second presumption stops the proposed action unless good cause is shown why it should be allowed to take its course. Let us suppose for argument’s sake that there is symmetry between the suspensive conditions of the two presumptions. Both presumptions are suspended only with respect to harms and breaches of obligation, and nothing else. For the second presumption, this means that unless it can be shown that the proposed action is harmless and breaches no obligation, it must not take its course. If the universe of harms that the particular action must not cause is not clearly and unambiguously bounded, it is impossible to prove (i.e., verify) that the action would be harmless. The universe of imaginable harms is too vast and ill defined for every possible harm to be enumerated, examined, and its chance eliminated. Likewise, if the universe of obligations is not strictly circumscribed, it is impossible to prove that there is no obligation that the action would be in breach of, i.e., no right that it would violate. If both universes are properly and narrowly bounded, proof is possible in principle but hard to produce in practice.”

What this basically means is that a “right to X” is completely redundant if, should this “right” not exist, it is permissible to have/do “X”. In this case (where “X” is already permissible), what does a “right to X” actually do except function as emotive rhetoric? So for a “right to X” not to be redundant, “X” must be considered impermissible by default, and “a right to X” overrides this. Since “rights” of this kind can be expanded to include everything, everything must be considered impermissible by default, and the list of “rights” is a list of exceptions to this.

Unfortunately for us libertarians, “natural” rights theories are a load of nonsense. But the epistemological arguments for the presumption of liberty AREN’T nonsense. De Jasay should be required reading for all libertarians.

Lol, this is very off-topic.

62

Yes.

You can’t homestead a ‘term’. It does not belong to anybody, which is why both Stossel and you can label yourself ‘libertarian’, and Obama can claim he’s a ‘voluntarist’. You and I don’t own that term either. But we are assuming certain meanings and definitions commonly associated with these terms when we begin to use these terms in argumentation. And this means that given a certain definition associated with a term, one can begin to contradict himself and engage in logical fallacies.

I’m sorry but who used the term first is totally irrelevant to the question of whether the miniarchist (or anarchist) contradicts himself or not. The first to label himself as such does not enjoy some immunity from self-contradiction. That was after all your initial objection. If he contradicts himself then there can be no such thing as a miniarchist libertarian. You can have many elephants that call themselves giraffes but this does not mean they have long necks, which is why I would ask the elephant to define giraffe.

This is why I asked you 3 times, now it is #4, to define libertarianism according to how you think the miniarchist (the elephant) understands it.

Does the miniarchist contradict himself or not. If he does then there is no such thing as a miniarchist libertaian. And there is no such thing as an elephant with a really long neck no matter what he labels himself. I don’t understand why this is so hard for you to grasp.

63

If minarchists aren’t libertarians, what are they? Communists? Liberals? Progressives? Paleoconservatives? Neofascists? Anarcha-feminists?

Show me a political philosopher who defines minarchism as not being part of the libertarian ideology, and I’ll start considering your position.

Also, the comparison to Obama calling himself a “voluntarist” is nothing short of ludicrous. The term voluntarist has never, ever been used in an ideological context up until quite recently, when some anarchists (of both the Marxist and capitalist variety) decided to use it as an alternative to “anarchist” due to the negative public perception of that word. Walter Block, in my view the premier living anarcho-capitalist political philosopher, defines minarchy as part of libertarianism, and I’d be very surprised if Rothbard doesn’t too. You may disagree with minarchists (I’m agnostic on the subject), but like it or not, they are a significant (indeed, I’d say probably the majority) branch of libertarianism.

64

DD5,

There’s a reason I insist on the temporal priority of the minarchist use (and indeed coining) of the term “libertarian”. Whatever meaning the term “libertarian” has, it has acquired through the minarchist position, not the anarchist one!

So, whatever you think libertarian means, it cannot mean anything that would deny minarchists the term, for its is they which defined it!

Terms have no inherent meaning, Giraffe does not inherently mean a long-necked animal. If what we know today as elephants, had been called giraffes back in the days, they would indeed be giraffes without changing anything in they nature!

So again, when you emphatically deny that minarchists are libertarians, I invite you to retreat form this indefensible position.

65

Merlin, DD5, and everyone else: Can we please stop flooding our respective inboxes with this infuriating argument?

Minarchists are libertarians. So are the Objectivists whether they like to use the term or not. Henry Hazlitt, Ron Paul and freakin’ Hayek are libertarians. Its not a word that ever applied to one strand of libertarian thought, like the natural rights Rothbardian position as one person APPEARED to suggest, though I would appreciate him clearing this up. I have anarchist friends who would easily call natural rights nonsense on stilts. All kinds of diverse ideas abound within the movement and bring something positive to the table. I find Rand’s position of a VOLUNTARILY FUNDED minimal nightwatchman state interesting as well as the panarchist idea as I said earlier. If someone comes to anarcho-capitalism through cost benefit analysis I’m hardly going to abuse him or her for using the libertarian nomenclature.

Have a good weekend, Shabbat Shalom, etc.

66

According to DD5 no one that has run for president on the Libertarian ticket has actually been a libertarian.

For most folks those that desire a smaller government are libertarian while those that advocate no government are anarchists.

67

I agree with all points save one, thesystemworks. Objectivists derive their view of government from a much broader ontological and epistomological philosophy. The reason they detest libertarians is because they view them as merely taking their views on political economy and discarding everything else (I.E. A=A, atheism, egoism-as-virtue, altruism-as-evil etc.) To them, it would be like if, say, a new religion sprung up preaching Jesus-as-savior but without any mention of the Old Testament history, the Letters or the actual teachings of Christ. As such, Objectivism is a “theory of everything” of philosophy, and libertarianism, properly understood, is probably best defined by Walter Block’s “plumb line”, meaning dealing purely with questions of political economy, not on cultural or moral issues like tattoos, smoking or homosexuality, though off-shoots merge it with classical anarchist and anti-authoritarian tradition (mutualism) or with the Old Right and classical liberalism (paleolibertarianism).

68

Appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. Praetyre, you should know this by now.

All of you are missing the point. Everybody has the right to use whatever term he wants, and everybody can be caught in self-contradiction. Appealing to authority, majority, tradition, are all logical fallacies. What is the definition of libertarianism that miniarchists are generally adopting? Are you willing or able to answer this, or are you also going to insist you have an argument without defining the term under debate here?

69

Yes, the very suggestion that you are delusional, or may believe in things that do not and cannot exist, can be very infuriating.

By who’s authority? Yours? Ron Paul’s?

Or are you going to face the music (yes, once again since most of us, and I bet you too, had to make our way from total statism), and define what libertarian means?

70

True. However, none of this proves that the advocates of small government are libertarians. Define libertarianism.

71

Tartan, no personal attacks here please.

72

Several things:

  1. The term “natural rights” unfortunately conveys to many people the notion that the rights in question are things to be empirically discovered and verified. This notion is clearly an example of the reification fallacy, since rights cannot and do not exist outside of the mind. Anyways, given this semantic baggage with “natural rights”, I typically don’t use the term myself. I prefer terms like “natural law” or, even better, “natural order”.
  2. The above notion, along with being an example of reification, is also an example of the is-ought problem, as you rightly point out.
  3. However, self-ownership itself violates the fact-value rule, at least IMO - my definition of “ownership” is “legitimate control”. That definition obviously embodies a value ascribed to a fact. The essence of the is-ought problem is that a fact cannot logically entail a specific value. So the fact that someone does control himself (or controls his own body) cannot logically entail whether that control must be considered legitimate or illegitimate by anyone.
  4. Although facts cannot logically entail values, the latter can still be tested for logical consistency. For example, if I consider killing per se to be illegitimate, but I consider killing in self-defense to be legitimate, I’m contradicting myself, since the latter is one kind of the former. A way out of this contradiction would be for me to consider only killing that’s not done in self-defense to be illegitimate. (This really only works when values are considered to be binary, i.e. something is either X or not-X.)
  5. All rights are normative. They’re only factual in the sense that people either believe them or don’t. Strictly speaking, then, saying that “there ought to be a right” is like saying an ought ought to exist!
  6. Since acquiring control of something requires (in the base case) bodily actions, if one considers people to be legitimately in control of their own bodies, then he must consider them to be legitimately in control of things acquired by actions of their bodies - provided that no one else had already acquired them. This is, in essence, the homestead principle.
  7. Ironically, you earlier stated that, because appeals to natural rights don’t convince most people outside of libertarian circles, libertarians shouldn’t make such appeals. You yourself seem to be trying to derive an ought from an is there.
73

Hoppe’s argumentation-ethics theory proposes a neat solution to this. Private property is justified without ascribing value to fact. Now, I don’t want to divert the thread to an argument over Hoppe’s theory, but I think it is appropriate in this context to mention that there is a very compelling argument that claims to resolve this issue.

74

My own interpretation of Hoppe’s argumentation ethics is as follows: a person who argues that one should not own (i.e. legitimately control) himself is nevertheless acting as though he believes otherwise - because he is arguing and not simply employing aggressive force against his opponent. Of course, this doesn’t prevent that person from ceasing the argument and subsequently employing aggressive force.

75

Obviously. You were I believe referring to the problem of justification of property rights in argument due to the problem of a value ascribed to fact. The problem is not over what we can do or not do but over whether the action can be ethically justified or not. Obviously, people can choose to act in an unethical manner.

76

Words have no inherent meaning. Given that libertarianism is a political ideology, it is entirely appropriate to look to people learned in that field (political philosophers and scientists) to define it. You may as well accuse me of an “appeal to authority” for asserting that most biologists consider dinosaurs reptiles. If you so vehemently disagree with this definition (one I have never seen anybody, of any political persuasion, ever, dispute before this point), please provide your own, and tell me what ideological tradition minarchism falls under.

77

Okay guys, let’s keep things simple here.

The Israeli government is a government just like every other government, by it’s nature it opposes human rights, and is coercive. On top of this we must consider the fact that the Israeli state (just like the American state) murders and oppresses people. All this semantics talk avoids the real issue here: murder and coercion.

78

Who has claimed this?

So I asked you and others to define it. When a miniarchist says “I’m a libertarian”, what does he mean? For example, does he adhere to NAP? Does he not? Whatever, just define it.

79

I am under the impression that when Zionism is discussed in a libertarian forum, what is being discussed is whether the existence of an Israeli state is inherently un-libertarian, and not the actual situation of the Israeli government. And what I’m contending, is that to minarchist there is nothing inherently wrong about Zionism.

As for Israel as it currently is, I doubt that any minarchist would dare defend its internal policies. As for its foreign policies, I find those much saner than those of most other countries.

80

This is true, yet we must judge it in relation to other states. The USA, for instance, is far more libertarian than Cuba, just as Israel is much freer than those other countries around it and I daresay more free than the state which would exist there now had the Arabs won their invasion of 1947-48.