Why I’m a Libertarian — or, Why Libertarianism is Beautiful
In a recent email, Walter Block wrote, responding some pessimistic comments I had about our libertarian movement:
“Dear Stephan: I never feel like dropping out. Never. No matter what. To me, libertarianism is a most beautiful thing, right up there with Mozart and Bach. Illegitimi non carborundum.
I replied with some comments, and Walter encouraged me to post them, so here they are, lightly edited:
Walter’s email got me to thinking about why I’m a libertarian—why libertarians are libertarian. What is it about us that drives us, that makes us passionate advocates of it, and intensely interested in it? Some of us have been self-indulgent enough to write up how we became libertarians (e.g., my How I Became A Libertarian); but I don’t mean exactly that. I mean what is it about it that you love; that drives you; that attracts you?
Walter’s comment that libertarianism is beautiful struck a chord with me; I think I’d never thought of it that way before. It seemed just, and fair, and right, but beautiful—? but then, justice, and rightness, and fairness, and goodness are beautiful.
I think I’m a libertarian because for some reason I hate injustice; I hate bullies; I hate inconsistency; I love fairness and logical consistency and treating people correctly. I like answering the question asked, and not dodging issues: if someone asks how should this person be treated, I try to answer that question, rather than advert to some Marxian notion of utopia.
I like the ruthless logic of libertarianism and its unflinching honesty: how we are unafraid to say that people have a right to be greedy, or selfish, or rich, or not to hire people because of their race—because it is their property. I like the in-your-faceness of it … when it is simply a matter of venting or justice to hurl in the face of a soma-ridden mainstreamer the solid, bracing truth about things, even if it will do no good. I like libertarianism—I love libertarianism—because I think it is the outcome of goodness applied to human interaction. I do agree that libertarianism is beautiful. It is refreshing and cleansing to know that I am willing to respect the rights of all who will respect mine; and to take the responsibility to earn my own way, and to pay for my own mistakes—and the right to profit from my successes. I am a libertarian because it is obviously good, and I would rather be good than evil; and the more good, the better.
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Thoughts of others on your reasons for why you’re a libertarian are welcome in the comments.
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Mises blog comments (archived):
Comments (117)
It offered — and has delivered — a comprehensive scheme of human interaction, a set of relational terms and principles, that answered all of my unanswered questions.
It cut through the confusion and obfuscation and reliance on metaphor and propaganda that you find in conservatism, socialism, in both their hard and soft varieties.
These mainstream schools of thought are content to brush their inherent contradictions under the rug, their proponents resorting to appeals to national glory, or historical inevitability, or forever-vague concepts on which their entire philosophies depend. When you push these schools of thought to their limits, rather than address their own obvious signs of error, their proponents shrug their shoulders, wax romantic about things like paradoxes and conundrums and social problems that are unsolvable. Death and taxes, they say, without irony, as though taxation were a biological phenomenon.
Libertarianism made the world make sense.
It also shone the light on an avalanche of historical lies. Thomas Woods’s Politically Incorrect History and Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln represent only the tiniest beginning. Rothbard’s histories of economics and monetary laws, appearing here and there, are among his best writings.
I am open to any explanation or historical analysis that can supplant anarcho-capitalism, that can stand toe-to-toe with it in a match of logical rigor, and win. But I haven’t seen it.
Published: December 12, 2006 3:34 PM
Published: December 12, 2006 4:31 PM
Very well said, I agree with you completely!
RogerM
That is a nice way to say it!
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 12, 2006 5:11 PM
Its core principles are simple, moral and true. Once you understand the core, everything else just logically and harmoniously follows. That is beautiful and elegant.
It is beautiful because it is humble. It does not assume to know the right answers for you. Only you do.
Published: December 12, 2006 6:09 PM
Published: December 12, 2006 6:51 PM
Libertarian sum ergo cogito
instead of Descarte’s
Cogito ergo sum
(or Bill Clinton’s “Copulo ergo sum”)
Libertarianism is beautiful.
Stephan is a Libertarian
Therefore, Stephan is beautiful!
OK my logic leaves something to be desired, but come on – it’s Christmas!
Thanks for all the informative posts Stephan.
Published: December 12, 2006 7:52 PM
This cannot be overstated:
Libertarianism made the world make sense.
Published: December 12, 2006 8:17 PM
Published: December 12, 2006 8:23 PM
The statism and collectivism of any stripes work only when propped up by the incessant flood of propaganda and brainwashing – making otherwise intelligent people believe in the obvious nonsense and behave like a herd of scared sheep.
Notice how statist propaganda always reverts to the supposed will of some super-human entity, such as God (in theocracies and monarchies), Society and People (in fascist and communist regimes) or Democracy (in western social democracies) – and the need to submit to the will of this entity. As channeled by its acolites, of course.
Libertarianism does not require any belief – it only requires some thought to understand few simple truths. Once you understood them, and have enough strength to resist the massive assault of nonsense and seductive lies comprising the modern political discourse and education, – you never can forget them.
Published: December 12, 2006 9:50 PM
Since communes work in very small tribes could be proof that Communism would work if everyone tried properly. I would say Libertarian works when I see it implemented on a large societal scale.
Personally I believe Libertarian can only work when EVERYONE chooses to peacefully interact with each other. The fact that individual criminals have no respect for other peoples’ right to private property mean that life’s problems won’t automatically disappear when governemnt does.
Published: December 12, 2006 10:25 PM
Published: December 12, 2006 10:37 PM
Unless you’re a homicdal maniac, of course. Or a politican, which pretty much amounts to the same.
For some reason, I don’t think you are, and that means that you keep your dealings with other people voluntary, and do not aggress against their property and their persons.
That meaning that you and absolute majority of people around you de facto live according to the libertarian principles – at least most of the time (when you’re not voting or trying to grab a piece of government handoffs for yourself).
Published: December 12, 2006 10:46 PM
I heard that other Libertarian commentators have said that many native tribal folk who lived self-sufficiently off the land could have been regarded as a once living example of Libertarian values. However white imperialists with greater military strength abolished it and proceeded to erect their own Statist society. How long can any Libertarian society last when others are willing to believe they can profit from destroying such a society?
Similarly, individual criminals who keep robbing and cheating at every turn would cause others to start to view everyone as a potential criminal and trade might well stop to a crawl, causing a slow corruption and erosion of such a otherwise decent society.
Published: December 12, 2006 10:49 PM
Please, Sam, tell me what you mean by “work.”
What do you fear when you say that a more free, voluntary society would not “work”? What, exactly, do you see happening as the result of the abolition (or curtailment) of the modern State?
I submit that you may be responding to fears that governments incite and encourage, through various tools of propaganda, particularly about history.
Governments are in the habit of creating bogeymen in order to justify taking control over other people’s lives. Usually, the problem either doesn’t exist, is greatly exaggerated, and/or is not remotely solved by the government measures created to supposedly fix it. Typically, the government action creates several genuine problems for every phantom problem it purports to solve.
Published: December 12, 2006 11:03 PM
Perhaps my big fear is one of how does the proposed ideal Libertarian society going to stop individual criminal behaviour and outsider imperialist states, two types of people who could/would prey upon and ultimately could overrun and wreck it.
By ‘working’ I’m thinking that people could go about being libertarian without much problem or having to think about it. I’m not completely sure how ‘law & order’ is supposed to work in a Libertarian society. Since crime tends to go up when punishments get softer makes me wonder what the Libertarian alternative is. Likewise the Libertarian working expample for national defense.
Published: December 12, 2006 11:19 PM
In the real world, corporations and the rich can abuse power. But, only the libertarian philosophy has the wisdom and the balls to chain down their most abused tool: government. In the real world, making drugs illegal drives up prices making gangsters rich and rewards violence. But only the libertarian philosophy has what it takes to bring it out into the open where the problems can be addressed while stopping the violence. In the real world, social security is a ponzi scheme that exploits the elderly, and peoples lives get ruined when their money is watered down. But only the libertarians had the decency and dignity warn people about how their lives were being ruined. The other parties talk about helping the poor, but couldn’t even bring themselves to say these simple truths, but couldn’t even warn them like any normal decent human being would be expected to. In the real world, people immigrate for opportunity and freedom. But, only the libertarian philosophy treats this immigration like a gift instead of a resented curse or a burden.
One day I suspect that most people will reach a point in their lives where it seems like disaster, like there is nothing left, like there is no propose to go on, like all is lost, and when they are there they might ask themselves what really matters? What is there to grab on to? And the answer they may come up with is freedom, opportunity, and human dignity. I know, because many years ago it happened to me and that was the day I became Libertarian.
Published: December 12, 2006 11:54 PM
Published: December 13, 2006 8:28 AM
If you read some of Pope Benedict’s theology and what the Secretary of State of the Vatican has been saying specifically about free markets, they are making very powerful arguments against abusive states. And that’s where my libertarianism comes from. God gave man free will, and no man has the right to trample upon anyone’s God given freedoms.
Published: December 13, 2006 8:36 AM
Published: December 13, 2006 8:37 AM
Dragonslayer is … I don’t know what. Anarchy doesn’t mean chaos, in a libertarian context. It means “without -archy” — Be it an oligarchy, autarchy, or monarchy. No ruling state. Not lawlessness.
What you are not getting is that all the services you’re afraid to lose — police protection, the courts, accepted standards of behavior and civility, etc. — were never invented or established by the state in the first place, but rather were taken over and controlled by the state to ensure that it has an advantage in its dealings, and can maintain its power.
Libertarian thinking definitely abolishes government and laws, but does not abolish civility, punishment for crimes, adjudication, morality, ethics, or enforceable standards of behavior. To rid ourselves of those things would be to deny what it is within us that is human — the very polar opposite of libertarian philosophy.
Published: December 13, 2006 8:46 AM
In other words you’re a minarchist, not an anarchist. There can be no such thing as competing criminal and civil codes. Otherwise businessmen would be unable to bank on the enforceability of contracts and property owners would have no guarantee of personal security. So you are going to have a jurisdiction that will probably though not necessarily be geographically contiguous with one set of legal codes that residents must either abide by or be driven out or killed.
The difference under a more free society would be that these jurisdictions will arise out of the organic order of extended families or mercantile interests. Neo-feudalism, in other words, and that is what is coming whether self-styled republicans, democrats, or anarchists want it or not.
Published: December 13, 2006 9:20 AM
Apparently you missed the point. If in light of the other comments here, you still don’t understand I don’t know if I can help. I’ll try, though.
Most of us do respect each other, most of the time else even the current system of -archy would fail.
In any case, libertarianism is still the most (maybe the only) principled political philosophy out there.
Published: December 13, 2006 9:23 AM
I’ve heard the ideas about private police, private abitrators, etc., and find it convoluted. I’d think the only law & order that would make sense would be for individual’s discretion (some would call perhaps vigilante justice).
National defense is even trickery.
Oh, also, how does Libertarianism maintian the complexity of modern society without government/corporation intervention?
Published: December 13, 2006 9:24 AM
I fail to see how criminal and civil codes are exempt from competition. Two persons will agree to arbitration in order to prevent violence. The persons in conflict can settle on any reasonable arbiter to resolve the conflict in a non-violent way. If they fail to resolve the matter peacefully, it is assumed that the next step is violence.
People will give their custom, as is their right, to the courts that are most likely to use reasoning that resolves conflict peacefully and satisfactorily. Civil and criminal codes absolutely compete against each other, just as they do in international law today. The civil and criminal codes that provide the greatest benefits under the division of labor, the greatest degree of security in person and property rights, and promote the advancement of science and the arts, ostensibly, are those that are selected for.
Look at the current state of international affairs. It IS anarchy, with competing systems of law, ethics, and civil and criminal codes. There is no overarching, universal law that governs the interaction of nation-states, or of people from competing nation-states. The laws compete, and if no concensus can be made, then war ensues. Libertarian society would reduce the scale of such conflict by many orders of magnitude, from conflict involving millions of people and trillions of dollars, to conflicts among individuals, families, or business interests.
More importantly, it takes away the level of disjoint in the current system of international politics — VERY few people are willing to fight and risk their own lives, or the lives of their families, over property disputes. Furthermore, those that are willing to do so would be removed from society over time by that very mechanism. It’s a far cry from politicians who gain the power to make more war by winning wars where others fight and die in their stead.
Published: December 13, 2006 9:55 AM
In my opinion the culprit is democracy, not government, since government is a human institution. Practically speaking, you are probably going to have more restrictions on your behavior in a society run by property owners who want to maintain order and enhance their property values than in a society run by the lowest common denominator. The First Amendment, not libertarianism, is what keeps pornographers’ houses from being burned down.
Libertarianism implies a non-coercive society, whereby you can opt out in any event of disagreement, like, say, the local arbitrator determines that a casualty is NOT covered by the products/completed-operations hazard and therefore you and not your insurer must satisfy a judgment. No organic society is going to form where anybody can opt out against coercion by shopping for an arbitrator who will rule in their favor. So, at the end of the day, even in the minarchist city-state or patriarchy, a monopolistic code of behavior will be enforced because, again, nobody is going to hire an arbitrator that can’t assure the binding effect of his decisions.
Published: December 13, 2006 10:26 AM
And to give Sam some support, perhaps he is right in the sense that no perfect -ism ever exists, but our assertion the no perfect -archy exists either, and that maximum possible freedom exists in the tension between the -isms and the -archies. Jefferson noted that “revolution” (not necessarily bloody) was likely necessary under whatever constructed -archy as it was sure to lose its way and become self serving, and a reset toward freedom would take place. What better -ism than libertarianism/individualism should one have to maximize the reset?
The problem (perhaps to amplify Sam’s notions) is that nearly half the eligible voters are practicing libertarians. They don’t vote for anybody, and the more local the elections, the less they care. Of those who do vote, say 5% vote third party, leaving a near 50-50 split of the remaining 45% between Repubs and Dems. Eliminating the fringes and swing votes, that leaves about 35% core “Statists” split pretty much evenly, who “run” things. A loose assemblage of idealogies comprising 20% of the population has control of $2.5 trillion budgets and more laws than ever before. We are scattered and unfocused (by definition) so the aggressive minorty rules by default.
Regardless, one is left with is espousing libertarianism, even ideally, to throw a line into the debate and hopefully pull the leviathan towards freedom. I appeal to people to examine their notions of right and wrong and ask does it necessarily rise to legal and illegal. Defaulting to Force in answer to every perceived wrong does more damage than good.
I ask people to note just how much coercion and force is used on a daily basis, against whom, and why. Do they really feel safe? Is there a non-Statist solution? I basically ask people to think rationally, at least in their dealings with others, and to allow people to be irrational in their own affairs if they have a mind to. Honest inquiry usually reveals that Force is rarely curative, and normally harmful.
If that fails I point out our $47 Trillion accrual basis national debt, that it is patently fallacious, and is symbolic of the failure of Statism (as Statism is rarely based in economic reality). There is usually a response by those who have some margin of rationality and I gain some hope that an inroad has been made. The others simply shrug their shoulders, hang on to their Faith even harder, and evade giving any answer. Those people are lost causes. One can only hope to change the opinions of the swing voter types, and “by-default” type Statists, those who have never been shown reality and nonsense. If enough are turned against the hardcore, then perhaps some turning of the tide can take place.
Long and rambling perhaps, but the idea is that I have an ideology, I am more than willing to compromise, and that no perfect Libertarian Culture will ever likely exist. But the state of affairs we live in today is reckless and damaged. If people really are looking for another way, if people are getting more and more turned off and refuse to vote, and if people can see that their freedom, personal and economic, is being hijacked, then maybe there is some hope.
But it starts with showing that Force is rarely the answer.
Published: December 13, 2006 1:19 PM
Entirely possible.
As to Sam’s question, how the courts would operate on a private basis is really not a problem. Even in our government monopoly system we have today, there’s an enormous amount of private arbitration, through the National Assoc. of Securities Dealers, AAA and Mediation, Inc. It’s results are off the radar screen as far as the news and other press outlets go, but it is a fact of life in the world of commercial litigation. It works very well. It would simply be expanded.
These types of dispute resolution groups created contract law. Private merchant courts created the body of law that governs commercial transactions, and it was only later co-opted by the secular and religious aristocrats throughout the late medieval and Early Modern periods.
These governmental entities obviously had a lot to gain by forcibly asserting superiority over private dispute resolution — it ensured that people (especially rich people) would be more dependent on the aristocrats for favors and patronage.
You also have to realize that in a society that operates with less government control, people form private, voluntary associations to a much larger extent. Think about how, in the 18th-early 20th centuries, men would join clubs and societies. These associations would have their own resolution mechanisms. These associations would also have reciprocity agreements with others — the decision of one would be enforceable in others.
In such a society, a man who transgressed against another man, who committed a wrong or (even worse) failed to pay a debt! This man would soon find himself ejected, and thus unable to derive any of the benefits of membership, with his own or any affiliated group. Imagine being kicked out of your church, your kids expelled from their school, treated like a pariah by your profession’s trade group, etc., all because you didn’t pay your gas bill.
Nowadays, that doesn’t happen (except in a mild form — the credit report) because of the elephant in the living room — the all-powerful government courts that are supposed to be the only place to take care of that sort of thing. Only they do it badly and inefficiently.
Published: December 13, 2006 2:56 PM
I agree. I think private social mores and conventions would be a lot more strict in the absence of government.
Quite frankly, there are people alive today just because the government has made it against the law to kill them.
Published: December 13, 2006 3:45 PM
Published: December 13, 2006 4:47 PM
Individual criminal behavior would not stop, it would just be much less common than it always is when people fall under the unethical spell of socialism.
Plus, a libertarian society would try to stop outsider imperialist states in the same manner that societies have always tried to stop them. Hopefully, liberty would prevail.
Published: December 13, 2006 11:42 PM
You haven’t really answered my question.
Why would crime go down? How would crime be policed? If everyone was solely responsible for their own lives and property would that be a greater detterent? Or would criminal behaviour merely change to suit the new circumstances?
And how did societies repel imperialist societies? When the imperialist invaders have much better arms and numbers they tend to overrun the victim nation.
Could any one provide an answer that’s more specific and real-world practical please? 😉
Published: December 14, 2006 12:04 AM
Published: December 14, 2006 12:19 AM
Published: December 14, 2006 12:33 AM
I would have thought any one who would engage in such a crime was merely being selfish and violent. Their philosophy I would imagine is one of ‘I’m going to get what I want, when I want, no matter by what means’. Why would such a person suddenly stop being a criminal in a Libertarian society?
Finally I’ve been talking about violent criminal acts and what the Libertarian society would do about it. I don’t remember implying anything like homosexuality, Socialism, drugs, etc.
Published: December 14, 2006 12:51 AM
“If a mugger bashes you, takes your wallet, runs off, leaves you for dead, how it that Statism, Socialism, or anything ‘ism’? Why would such a person care that this scenario happened in a Libertarian society, Socialist society or any society?”
Exactly. “Society” only exists when libertarian principles exist. Otherwise, it’s necessarily an either/in this case the OR Hobbesian war or all against all.
What would a libertarian society do about violent criminal acts? The first thing it would do would be to not pretend violence isn’t violence if it’s initiated by individuals calling themselves “State” or “government”. Voting to take is no different than just taking. In a libertarian society a lot more people would be conscious of the fact that violent theft was occuring, even if it was couched in words like “taxation” or “welfare”.
But yes, such a criminal person would be a criminal no matter what the name of the rose. So why pretend it’s something it’s not? The action committed is the action committed. But true society only exists to the extent that people are freely voluntarily trading with one another. Just because there might be a person who might commit criminal actions in a majority libertarian society, is that a reason to throw in the towel regarding peace, is that a reason to embrace violence? Define criminal: Actions against voluntary action.
Published: December 14, 2006 1:11 AM
Indeed my question is how does a Libertarian society safeguard the descent of a decent society into a violent free-for-all?
Published: December 14, 2006 2:03 AM
Published: December 14, 2006 2:26 AM
1. Economic freedom – where people are free to trade using only peaceful means.
2. Rule of law – only laws that protect individuals from criminal behaviour (and I’m not talking about ‘religious crimes’ such homosexuality, abortion, divorce, etc.), such that people can about their business happily trading without constantly looking over their shoulder or spending large amounts of money into personal protection (which should be going into savings and investments).
Personally it I think it seems that when societies loses track of one of these standards things tend to go haywire. Am I right? Wrong?
Published: December 14, 2006 3:02 AM
Hippy nonsense. Liberalism enables anarcho-tyranny, with the civilized elements of society paralyzed by notions of “rights” from defending themselves against those elements of society that seek to destroy them.
Published: December 14, 2006 9:05 AM
Instead, let me point you to some of the best material on the subject. Try starting with Murray Rothbard’s ‘For a New Liberty’, the libertarian manifesto, which deals with everything that you have discussed and more. It is available free on Mises.org:
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty.asp (the book)
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty11.asp (a good chapter that addresses some of the particular concerns that you are bringing up)
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty2.asp (this chapter will likely address some of the questions that you might have if you jump straight to chapter 11 [the link above])
http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID;=87 (the [free] audio book — a great resource)
The questions that you raise are far easier to pose than to answer. If you are looking for serious answers, these links are a great start to how how liberty works in practice. If you are only coming to the comments to raise your questions, but are otherwise unwilling to take some time and explore the matter, I would suggest re-thinking the motivations behind why you are posting here.
Hope your inquiry into liberty goes well — it changed my life forever.
cheers,
Daniel
Published: December 14, 2006 9:32 AM
“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order.” — Proudhon
After all, every individual naturally seeks order in his life and indeed the more of it the better, meaning the HIGHER the better, as such order, being evolutionary in nature, builds not upon chaos but upon the order latent in it. And while natural evolution is built upon unconscious order (hence the geologic time necessary for its unfolding), human evolution is conscious in that it wills specific outcomes requiring specific actions. Indeed, this is what makes them HUMAN actions, precisely as Mises said, problems arising when those actions come under the control of a FEW humans, as this inevitably confounds the evolutionary process.
And as we have no less than Vladimir Lenin to thank for making the distinction clear between free order and regimented order — “While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State” — so does the libertarian understand that the state, being the embodiment of regimented order, is everywhere and always the enemy.
And that would be my answer to Sam with regard to crime (aggression): That is, the more each individual is free to seek order in his life through conscious interaction — i.e., free and open exchange — with others, the less he will be inclined to short-circuit the process via aggression, and the less time society will then have to spend defending itself against such behavior.
Conversely, as aggression is institutionalized via the state, the process of human evolution is accordingly thwarted, the irony being that while Marx assumed that regimented order would perfect human nature, it instead brought out the worst in it, to the point that where it was tried, the evolutionary process all but ground to a halt.
And now? Billions of people in the East are now rising from the ashes of regimented order to engage in free (or at least far freer) order, even as the global imbalances that their regimentation generated conspire with the West’s own brand of regimentation (the regulatory “welfare” state) to create the conditions for its demise:
http://www.energybulletin.net/23259.html
As one who believes that this catastrophe is all but unavoidable, the only questions I now ask are (1) how am I and my loved ones to survive it? and (2) will free order — libertarianism — be given sufficient rein in the aftermath of the catastrophe for the evolutionary process to continue?
I’ve got my ideas about the answer to the first question and am already putting some of them into effect.
As for the second question, either we answer it in the affirmative, or I have serious doubts about the survival of our species.
Published: December 14, 2006 11:41 AM
I don’t think you have to be an arnarchist to be a libertarian. Milton Friedman considered himself a libertarian and wasn’t even close to being anarchist. I’m not an arnarchist either and consider myself to be libertarian because I believe the government should be limited to maintaining law and order and national defense. Mises wasn’t an anarchist either and saw the state as necessary for those purposes.
I don’t have concerns over the morality or legitimacy or anarchism, just practal concerns similar to what you have mentioned, while anarchists have ethical/legitimacy objections with government.
Published: December 14, 2006 11:41 AM
It’s not. My objection is praxeological. It’s grounded in reality — the quality of any product or service declines when government monopolizes it.
Government courts and government militaries are inferior for achieving their stated purposes compared to non-aggressive, non-monopolistic alternatives. (They are, however, good at achieving their real purpose, which is to empower a small group of people at everyone else’s expense.)
It’s important to mention is that anarchism is not simply a political agenda — it’s a set of scientific observations about natural laws of human interaction. In other words, anarchism already exists; it’s not something that needs to be implemented or argued into existence. It is the reality of our existence.
This organization we call government is really just a bully that makes things worse for those whose lives it touches. It’s not really in charge, in a literal sense. Anarchy runs almost every aspect of our daily lives already.
The fact that our courts are terrible means that people are avoiding them, right now. They are finding other ways to solve their problems, most of the time. That’s anarchism in practice.
The effect of having a state declare a monopoly on criminal justice doesn’t mean that it actually gets a monopoly. It simply means that the unofficial, self-help means of resolving disputes end up being stigmatized and hidden, like drug use. They don’t go away.
Published: December 14, 2006 1:06 PM
One of his lectures here:
http://www.fee.org/!UserFiles/events/VSmith_0905.mp3
Published: December 14, 2006 5:13 PM
And, in answer to Sam, libertarianism condemns the initiation of force, not the use of force in general. The beauty of libertarianism is that it distinguishes between the immoral use of force and the moral use of force. There’s nothing wrong with defensive force or appropriate retaliatory force, nor is there a need for a monopoly on the use of such force.
Furthermore, I think the non-aggression principle leads naturally and logically towards anarchism instead of just minarchism, but it takes time to see that by studying the non-aggression principle and working out its full implications.
Published: December 14, 2006 7:37 PM
Yes, true, in the US the state takes currently about 40% of people’s incomes and in Sweden a little more than 50%. “Protection” seems to be extremely expensive. There seems also to be a need for a protection from the state.
However, there is no “should” here. If people would be protected from the state and wanted to hoard that money the state used to take or spend it on consumer products, are just as legitimate as well.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 15, 2006 1:59 AM
Or as Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it in his book “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property”, page 234 and 235:
“In the present situation of a world-wide crisis of governmental legitimacy, of the collapse of East Bloc Socialism and enduring stagnation of the Western Welfare States, the chance for Austrian rationalism to fill the philosophical vacuum that has appeared with the retreat of positivism and to become the paradigm of the future is as good or better than ever. Now as before it requires moral courage as much as intellectual integrity to propound the Austrian social theory – the opposing statist battalions still represent a formidable majority and are in control of a far larger share of resources. Yet with the total breakdown of socialism and the concept of social ownership staring everyone in the face, the antithetical Austrian theory of private property, free markets and laissez faire cannot but gain attractiveness and win support. Austrians have reason to believe, then, that the time has come when they may succeed in bringing about a fundamental change in public opinion, by reclaiming ethics and economics from the hands of the positivists and the engineering powerful and restoring public recognition of private property rights and free markets based on such rights as ultimate, absolute principles of ethics and economics”.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 15, 2006 2:01 AM
Ethical. You cant legitimize “a little bit of theft” without legitimizing “theft” itself. Taxation is theft. Either there is theft or not. There is no middle ground, grey area.
Practical. I am an anarchist hence I believe if I am taxed even very moderatly I believe it is theft, aggression against my property. Can I live with that? In practical terms I might. With little theft my incentive to rise up and repell a very small state would be low.
However, we all know even the smallest states tend to get bigger. Look at the US. History of the US is a crushing blow to the minarchist ideals. Or utopia we might say.
Published: December 15, 2006 7:04 AM
You may be right, but so far anarchists haven’t demonstrated it. As I’ve argued elsewhere, anarchism is based on an arbitrary choice to make property the absolute standard for the measure of all things. And it’s still highly theoretical. I realize that anarchists don’t want their ideas tested against reality or history, regarding such intrusions as mere decoration. But testing assumptions and conclusions against history is nothing but a test of the validity of assumptions and a guard against unwarranted logical leaps. So far, anarchists has resorted to highly selective and sometimes distorted history in order to buttress their arguments.
Published: December 15, 2006 8:42 AM
A. It’s not arbitrary.
B. If anything is the “absolute standard for the measure of all things” it’s liberty, of which property is merely a tangible expression.
Property arises from liberty because there are only two ways of acquiring a property interest in something: voluntarily or involuntarily. Voluntary transactions are mutually beneficial, and thus they increase the wealth of both parties (i.e., positive sum).
Every other type of transaction increases the wealth of one person at the expense of the other, and generally also entails a decrease in total wealth in the process (i.e., negative sum).
Government is a mode of organization that exists for the sole and express purpose of engaging in involuntary transactions, either for its own benefit or that of its sponsors. It is therefore an instrument of wealth destruction.
I realize that anarchists don’t want their ideas tested against reality or history, regarding such intrusions as mere decoration. But testing assumptions and conclusions against history is nothing but a test of the validity of assumptions and a guard against unwarranted logical leaps. So far, anarchists has resorted to highly selective and sometimes distorted history in order to buttress their arguments.
Then your understanding is incorrect.
There is a natural limit to the value of historical economic data — there is no such thing as a laboratory for economics.
Economics is the study of complexity, of dynamism, or adaptive systems so complex that they cannot be comprehended in the whole. In the realm of observable goods and services, the level of complexity of the world economy is massive. It is essentially impossible to analyze the interaction of the price of every good or service on the planet, at any point in time. I do not mean that it is really hard. I mean that if every molecule in the universe were made to operate as a massive computer, it could not process the data necessary to account for all the interactions.
As a result, economic phenomena cannot be reproduced. They cannot be modeled. Or, more accurately, the models can never fully describe reality. They can never prove what they seek to prove, not by a standard of rigorous proof.
If you are talking about a less scientific form of history, (i.e., narrative history in the liberal arts, not the scientific analysis of historical economic data), then the Austrian School is extraordinarily illuminating.
Here are a few historical topics that are explained by Austrian principles of economic liberty:
– Why housing prices have grossly inflated over the last 20 years.
– Why the price of college education has skyrocketed since WWII.
– How the Great Depression followed the inflationary boom of the 1920s.
– How WWI followed the founding of central government banks.
– How the aggressive conquering of the American West and Indian genocide immediately followed the War to Prevent Southern Independence and its massive expansion of federal power.
– How the tiny Dutch nation became, for a brief time, a world superpower.
– How the economic independence of the Genovese and Venetian cities made them extremely rich and gave us the Renaissance.
– How welfare (esp. military and gov’t pensions) caused the economic decline of Rome, and how monetary inflation destroyed it.
The conventional, Statist explanations of these periods pales in comparison.
Published: December 15, 2006 9:56 AM
Hoppe uses the implications of argumentation to derive self-ownership. So far so good. From that he derives the right to property. (Actually, I think he says that self-ownership implies pre-existing right to property.) Next he builds a code of conduct on property. However, self-ownership can imply other things in addition to property, such as the right to survival and rights of association.
Hoppe and Rothbard use natural law in a different way than it was used for over a thousand years and this underscores the problem of delibarately changing definitions to words; it causes a lot of confusion and destroys the purpose of language, which is communication. Until Rothbard, natural law meant that body of thought that began with Thomas Aquinas and ended with Locke, though some same Adam Smith. It had specific premises/presuppositions based on the existence of God and mankind as God’s creation and children, used reason, and had the goal of determining what principles caused mankind to survive and prosper, the same as Mises’s utilitarianism. Rothbard/Hoppe use the term “natural law” to refer to law developed by reason based on their own premise–the absolute inviolability of property.
Original natural law (now I have to add the word “original” in order to distinguish it from Rothbard/Hoppe’s version) tried to use reason derive those principles that cause mankind to survive and prosper. Rothbard/Hoppe’s natural law has the goal of preserving the absolute inviolability of property. Original natural law saw the state as necessary to survival and prospering, as did Mises. Rothbard/Hoppe’s version makes the state morally evil because of the absolute inviolability of property.
“Here are a few historical topics that are explained by Austrian principles of economic liberty:”
You should distinguish between Austrian history and anarchist history. Austrian history is real history, i.e., what actually happened. Anarchist history tends to be very selective and sometimes just plain wrong, possibly because anarchists see history as just decoration.
Published: December 15, 2006 12:08 PM
“It made the welfare of mankind the absolute, so it had room for the formation of governments.”
Björn Above statement is not a premise and an assumption because it doesn’t really say much. Anything can be derived from this “premise” and “assumption.” It is extremely vague and subjective and it cannot, therefore, be used to prove anything. Anything could be “concluded” as it is not derived from a fact.
My above example of Hitler’s murdering of Jews or Rothbard’s example of murdering of redheads could be justified in the name that “it promoted the welfare of the people.”
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005970.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 15, 2006 12:15 PM
Björn Without self-ownership, no debate could be made as we would not own ourselves and would not have the right to debate. But we are debating and this presupposes self-ownership. I want to add, that man and human life would not exist without any self-ownership; since any action would not be allowed.
Without self-ownership, property rights does not exist either.
A quote from Hoppe´s book The Ethics and Economics of Private Property:
“Furthermore, it would be equally impossible to engage in argumentation and rely on the propositional force of one’s arguments if one were not allowed to own (exclusively control) other scarce means (besides one’s body and its standing room). If one did not have such a right, then we would all immediately perish and the problem of
justifying rules – as well as any other human problem – would simply not exist. Hence, by virtue of the fact of being alive property rights to other things must be presupposed as valid, too. No one who is alive can possibly argue otherwise.”
http://www.mises.org/etexts/hoppe5.pdf
In other words, self-ownership and property rights are the very condition for life just as, for example, oxygen is.
By being alive we cannot argue against the existence of oxygen.
Analogically, by being alive, we cannot argue against self-ownership and property rights.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 15, 2006 1:14 PM
Utilitarianism means that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Intellectually the principle lets the door stand wide open for the use of physical violence and theft against people which happens to belong to the lesser number. If we grasp a state of things where the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people exists in using physical violence and theft everywhere and in all human situations and places (i.e. in the classroom, shop, street, airport, forest etc) against all those people that happened to belong to the lesser numbers, the human race would quickly perish.
As we have seen, the principle of utilitarianism if followed by all groups of people in all places would lead to human destruction and this, therefore, proves that the principle is destructive. Any crime could be done in the name of utilitarianism such as murder, theft, rape, slavery etc. The lesser number of people would always be at the mercy of the greatest number.
Private groups of people in society are therefore, naturally, not allowed to commit crimes in the name of utilitarianism.
The state has a “legal right” to commit crimes and the state nearly, always does it in the name of utilitarianism.
In the name of utilitarianism Hitler could have justified all the murdering of the Jews that he made. He probably, also, thought that he by doing those crimes achieved the greatest happiness for the greatest number of Germans.
Let us not forget:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-309490343652240839&q;=hitler+jews
Or, alternatively, as Rothbard wrote in his book For a New Liberty:
“Let us consider a stark example: Suppose a society which fervently considers all redheads to be agents of the Devil and therefore to be executed whenever found. Let us further assume that only a small number of redheads exist in any generation-so few as to be statistically insignificant. The utilitarian-libertarian might well reason: “While the murder of isolated redheads is deplorable, the executions are small in number; the vast majority of the public, as non-redheads, achieves enormous psychic satisfaction from the public execution of redheads. The social cost is negligible, the social, psychic benefit to the rest of society is great; therefore, it is right and proper for society to execute the redheads.” The natural-rights libertarian, overwhelmingly concerned as he is for the justice of the act, will react in horror and staunchly and unequivocally oppose the executions as totally unjustified murder and aggression upon nonaggressive persons. The consequence of stopping the murders—depriving the bulk of society of great psychic pleasure—would not influence such a libertarian, the “absolutist” libertarian, in the slightest. Dedicated to justice and to logical consistency, the natural-rights libertarian cheerfully admits to being “doctrinaire,” to being, in short, an unabashed follower of his own doctrines.”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty2.asp
The right path to follow is instead:
The Ethics of Liberty:
Hesselberg continues:
“But a social order is not possible unless man is able to conceive what it is, and what its advantages are, and also conceive those norms of conduct which are necessary to its establishment and preservation, namely, respect for another’s person and for his rightful possessions, which is the substance of justice. . . . But justice is the product of reason, not the passions. And justice is the necessary support of the social order; and the social order is necessary to man’s well-being and happiness. If this is so, the norms of justice must control and regulate the passions, and not vice versa.”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/two.asp
Or in other words and in a more rigid form: “that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else”.
I have written an essay about normative principles. Please go to:
http://normativeprinciples.blogspot.com/2006/12/normative-principles-pure-free-market_10.html
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 16, 2006 5:35 AM
Published: December 16, 2006 6:46 AM
Yes, it could, if original natural law didn’t have survival and the right to life as the foundations upon which to build welfare. On the other hand, Mises demonstrated that respect for life, law and order are necessary for prosperity.
“In other words, self-ownership and property rights are the very condition for life just as, for example, oxygen is.”
I agree. Property is a foundation of liberty. As Locke said, life, liberty and property!
I think Hoppe’s defense of property is weak and easily dismissed by most people. Original natural law offers a much stronger foundation.
“Utilitarianism means that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.”
That’s the definition I had always accepted, so that taking from the rich, for whom the marginal utility of a dollar is low, and giving to the poor, for whom the marginal utility is high, is the “ethical” thing to do, which is why I couldn’t believe Mises was utilitarian. But he seems to use the word in a different way. Today, I think Mises might say he was being practical instead of utilitarian, because he limited himself to showing what causes mankind to prosper, and that is life, liberty, and property.
You might say Mises worked backwards from original natural law. He started with prosperity and derived the rights to life, liberty and property as necessary to prosperity. Original natural law begins with life, liberty and property and derives the principles necessary for prosperity within those limits.
“Or in other words and in a more rigid form: “that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else”.
This is the only place where I part company with Rothbard and Hoppe. If, as Mises argued, the state is necessary to maintain order, then the anarchist principle of absolute property rights can’t hold. That doesn’t mean that Mises and original natural law destroyed property. No one defends property more. But Rothbard and Hoppe weren’t satisfied with original natural law’s respect for property, they had to make property absolute, and in order to do so, they had to fabricate an entirely new ethical system with property, and only property, as the absolute. I can’t accept that and I don’t think many people will.
Published: December 16, 2006 7:15 AM
It think that Mises thought that only liberal order can achieve survival of humanity in the future. Like he said that socialism would mean starvation for many and impoverishment for more.
Published: December 16, 2006 9:05 AM
Björn: My above example of Hitler’s murdering of Jews or Rothbard’s example of murdering of redheads could be justified in the name that “it promoted the welfare of the people.”
RogerM “Yes, it could, if original natural law didn’t have survival and the right to life as the foundations upon which to build welfare. On the other hand, Mises demonstrated that respect for life, law and order are necessary for prosperity.”
Björn You should understand that it is not a logical necessity for a government to have the goal to increase prosperity to a maximum. It can, as I have shown, have different goals that violate individual rights. Utilitarianism is a logical fallacy.
Björn In other words, self-ownership and property rights are the very condition for life just as, for example, oxygen is.
RogerM “I agree. Property is a foundation of liberty. As Locke said, life, liberty and property!
I think Hoppe’s defense of property is weak and easily dismissed by most people. Original natural law offers a much stronger foundation.”
Björn I cannot think of a stronger foundation of ethics than the statement that “self-ownership and property rights are the very condition for life just as, for example, oxygen is.” It seems that Hoppe is brighter than those you are refereeing to (joke).
I will post this again:
RogerM “What distinguishes moral systems is the starting points, the premises and assumptions. Both Rothbard/Hoppe arrive at many of the conclusions already reached by natural law because natural law emphasized property. But natural law didn’t make property an absolute; it made the welfare of mankind the absolute, so it had room for the formation of governments.”
“It made the welfare of mankind the absolute.”
Björn Above statement is not a premise and an assumption because it doesn’t really say much. Anything can be derived from this “premise” and “assumption.” It is extremely vague and subjective and it cannot, therefore, be used to prove anything. Anything could be “concluded” as it is not derived from a fact.
My above example of Hitler’s murdering of Jews or Rothbard’s example of murdering of redheads could be justified in the name that “it promoted the welfare of the people.”
In other words, your statement that “It made the welfare of mankind the absolute” is, I am sorry to say, rather naive and a logical fallacy.
I do not think you have analyzed Hoppe´s and Rothbard’s propositions at all. I will give you examples of that from your earlier posts:
RogerM “Rothbard and Hoppe start with property as the absolute and build upon it.”
Björn No, they start with the concept of self-ownership. That is the starting point. That is not arbitrary as self-ownership is presupposed in an argumentation like this and also, I want to add, in spelling out any ethical norms whatsoever. I can not think of anything more rational.
RogerM “This is where Rothbard goes wrong. Morality/ethics, like natural law, cannot be created by mankind, it must be discovered. Otherwise, like positive law, it becomes just another opinion.”
Björn Who said that an objective ethics can be created? Not Rothbard. The word “establish” is not the same as the word “create”. Don’t you think that Rothbard was very aware of the fact that an objective ethics must be discovered and not created?
Well, I will post Rothbard´s quote again:
The Ethics of Liberty:
“IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”.
Please, notice the word “discovered”.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005970.asp
Please, at least try to be honest.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 16, 2006 9:53 AM
Yes, I agree, both Mises, and original natural law agree with Hoppe on this. I focus on the next step in Hoppe’s reasoning because that’s where origional natural law and Hoppe diverge. The next step in Hoppe’s “ethics” is founded on property as an absolute, even though property is founded on self-ownership.
So while self-ownership in not arbitrary, Hoppe’s decision to focus on property as if it were the only possible implication of self-ownership is the arbitrary part. While self-ownership does imply property, it also implies other things, such as survival, or the right to life.
Rothbard saw the weakness in Mises practical approach to economics as the lack of a moral argument. I tend to agree because socialists often responded to the practical argument (capitalism works better than socialism) by taking what they considered to be the moral high ground. So Rothbard decided to attack that argument with another moral argument. But instead of reviving the sound principles of original natural law, he and Hoppe decided to create their own version and base it on property.
“IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”.
However, as I’ve written before, if the use of reason is all that’s required to have natural law, then all ethical systems from socialism, to radical Islam are natural law, too, because they all use reason to establish their principles. What distinguishes the systems is not the use of reason, but the starting points, the premises. Rothbard and Hoppe think that the use of reason makes their system natural law, but it doesn’t, because by changing their starting point from property alone to property plus survival, the same reasoning process arrives at different conclusions, one allowing for the state, the other opposing it.
Original natural law was discovered by reason from the basic inclinations of human nature (absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places),too, just as Hoppe claims for his ethics. As a result, original natural law “provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”, too, as Hoppe claims for his system.
So if Rothbard and Hoppe’s claims for their “ethics” is strong, those for original natural are even stronger. The only difference between the two is the insistence on Hoppe’s part that property is the only right that can be derived from self-ownership, while original natural law adds survival and prosperity. Original natural law allows for the existence of the state as well as for anarchy, the choice being determined by which causes mankind to prosper best. Rothbard/Hoppe allow only for anarchy and make the state evil, even if it could be shown, as Mises does, that mankind will prosper more under a proper state than under anarchy.
I am trying to be honest. The problem in our communcations lies in the different definitions for words. That’s why I hammer on the idea of using words in the commonly accepted meaning. It enhances communications significantly. It’s also why I get angry with anarchists when I think they’re inventing a new definition for a word. For example, this conversation would be considerably easier if Rothbard and Hoppe hadn’t labeled their system as natural law, which it isn’t.
When I wrote that natural law must be discovered, not created, I meant that it must be discovered using reason and starting from a sound foundation. Original natural law did that by beginning with God and assuming that God intended his creation to survive and prosper. Original natural law saw God as the necessary starting point because only God has authority over mankind.
I claimed that Rothbard/Hoppe’s system was fabricated because they didn’t begin with God, but with man, who has no authority over mankind. They created, or fabricated a new system because they changed the starting point. A false starting point caused them to arrive at false conclusions about the state. That’s what is fabricated.
Published: December 16, 2006 11:38 AM
RogerM “However, as I’ve written before, if the use of reason is all that’s required to have natural law, then all ethical systems from socialism, to radical Islam are natural law, too.”
Björn.
Ethics of liberty:
IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”.
Another misinterpretation, because reason is only one of the requirements.
Notice: “from the basic inclinations of Human nature… absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places”.
Socialism, radical Islam etc does not fulfil the requirements of being natural law.
RogerM “I claimed that Rothbard/Hoppe’s system was fabricated because they didn’t begin with God.”
Björn If you want to defend a rational ethic and to be “scientific”, you should not mix that purpose with religion.
It is nothing wrong in being religious, but to have “God” as a starting point as a defence of a rational ethic is irrational. You must understand that God’s existence is not at all rationally proved.
It would really be a fabrication to have “God” as a starting point in a rational ethical system.
Why not leave out all the “arguments” and instead only refer to the bible?
So here we can reach a conclusion. What, really bothers you is that Rothbard and Hoppe left out “God” as the starting point in their ethical system.
Well, you should accept that as religion is not the topic, rational ethics is (between you and me).
As I have said, the foundation of a rational ethic cannot either be satisfied with a starting point such as “the welfare of mankind”.
It is vague, subjective and completely nonsense. Anything could be “derived from that nonsense.” Nothing could be proved! That is the point!
To argue that Rothbard and Hoppe are wrong because their starting point in their ethical system started with the concept of self-ownership and not with “God” or “the welfare of mankind” is really too much. Is this a joke or what?
When this sort of situation occurs, I will tell you this. If you want to have fun, try incrediMail, it is really funny. When you receive a mail, an old-fashioned butler will appear on your desktop screen and inform you that “you have a mail sir”. It is also free!
http://www.incredimail.com/english/splash/splash.asp
You can combine IncrediMail with a free anti spam filter named “Cactus Spam Filter”, because spam is not that funny:
http://www.download.com/Cactus-Spam-Filter/3000-2382_4-10545523.html?tag=lst-0-1
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 16, 2006 1:43 PM
“Mises wouldn’t support view that Utilitarianism means “greatest happiness for greatest number” since he and economist Franz Cuhel demonstrated that utility is not measurable: it’s relation of preferences or actions. So any welfare proposition which somehow makes us to compare wellfare of different agents is obviously flawed. It’s our view about wellfare of different agents not necessarily their own and in a way very arbitrary.
It think that Mises thought that only liberal order can achieve survival of humanity in the future. Like he said that socialism would mean starvation for many and impoverishment for more”.
Björn Actually he did support the view that utilitarianism means “greatest happiness for greatest number” and your point is, therefore, well grounded. Rothbard criticized him for the same thing.
Human Action:
“But the teachings of utilitarian philosophy and classical economics have nothing at all to do with the doctrine of natural right. With them the only point that matters is social utility. They recommend popular government, private property, tolerance, and freedom not because they are natural and just, but because they are beneficial. The core of Ricardo’s philosophy is the demonstration that social cooperation and division of labor between men who are in every regard superior and more efficient and men who are in every regard inferior and less efficient is beneficial to both groups. Bentham, the radical, shouted: “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense.” [10] With him “the sole object of government ought to be the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of the community.” [11] Accordingly, in investigating what ought to be right he does not care about preconceived ideas concerning God’s or nature’s plans and intentions, forever hidden to mortal men; he is intent upon discovering what best serves the promotion of human welfare and happiness. Malthus showed that nature in limiting the means of subsistence does not accord to any living being a right of existence, and that by indulging heedlessly in the natural impulse of proliferation man would never have risen above the verge of starvation. He contended that human civilization and well-being could develop only to the extent that man learned to rein his sexual appetites by moral restraint. The Utilitarians do not combat arbitrary government and privileges because they are against natural law but because they are detrimental to prosperity. They recommend equality under the civil law not because men are equal but because such a policy is beneficial to the commonweal. In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law and human equality modern biology only repeated what the utilitarian champions of liberalism and democracy long before had taught in a much more persuasive way. It is obvious that no biological doctrine can ever invalidate what utilitarian philosophy says about the social utility of democratic government, private property, freedom, and equality under the law.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec8.asp#p175
The Ethics of Liberty:
“for the economist is supposed to be only a praxeologist, a technician, pointing out to his readers or listeners that they will all consider a policy “bad” once he reveals its full consequences. But ingenious as it is, the attempt completely fails. For how does Mises know what the advocates of the particular policy consider desirable? How does he know what their value-scales are now or what they will be when the consequences of the measure appear? One of the great contributions of praxeologic economics is that the economist realizes that he doesn’t know what anyone’s value scales are except as those value preferences are demonstrated by a person’s concrete action. Mises himself emphasized that:
“one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man’s actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man’s acting.”
Given Mises’s own analysis, then, how can the economist know what the motives for advocating various policies really are, or how people will regard the consequences of these policies?”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twentysix.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 16, 2006 3:52 PM
Lots of rules can be “enforced”, whether they coincide with individual rights or not. Naturally, rights need to be protected to have a reasonable, worthwhile society. However, a reasonable conception of rights helps to create the consensus you ask for, so that law-enforcement actually does coincide with rights.
Furthermore, the appropriate use of defensive and retaliatory force doesn’t require a monopoly on the use of force. And enforcement that coincides with rights will be easier and more cost-effective than enforcement of privileges.
And last, but not least, we’ve tried to make it clear that anarchism does not equal chaos. Given the above points, there’s little reason to assume that an anarchist society would be violent and chaotic. You’re the one who keeps making that assumption.
I’m all for trying to limit government to “merely” rights protection. By all means, let’s try to keep Dubya and his ilk (most politicians) in line. But then let’s go beyond that and understand why it’s so difficult to keep them in line (it’s because they have a monopoly on the use of force) and what it *really* takes to have law-enforcement that coincides with rights (remove the monopoly). A “privileged” system will never adequately protect rights.
Published: December 16, 2006 4:16 PM
Nietche, Camus, Sartre and many other great philosphers have concluded that without God, real morals can’t exist, because only God has authority over mankind. I object to Rothbard and Hoppe claiming to have created an ethical system without God because that’s impossible. Even Locke held to that view. I suppose you think they were all irrational, too.
How do modern “ethicists” get around the problem of morals without God? They don’t. They just ignore it, as Rothbard and Hoppe do.
Besides, belief in God is not irrational; atheism is irrational and unscientific. Read the recent book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” By Francis S. Collins, the head of the human genome project, who is a devout believer. Check out the writings of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schafer you’ll see why atheism is irrational.
But the main reason I object to Hoppe and Rothbard’s pretend ethics is their arbitrary choice of property as the absolute when other rights can be derived from self-ownership that are just as important as property.
“Socialism, radical Islam etc does not fulfil the requirements of being natural law.”
They certainly do, if the only requirement is to use reason, as Hoppe and Rothbard seem to think.
“As I have said, the foundation of a rational ethic cannot either be satisfied with a starting point such as “the welfare of mankind”.
It is vague, subjective and completely nonsense. Anything could be “derived from that nonsense.” Nothing could be proved! That is the point!”
That’s odd! Everyone from St. Thomas to Locke thought they could do it. So do C.S. Lewis, Francis Schafer and many other contemporary philosophers. Besides, I never claimed that “the welfare of mankind” was the only starting point. Re-read my posts and you’ll find others.
Published: December 16, 2006 4:18 PM
http://www.atheists.org/Atheism/cohen.html
http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~sencerz/Morality_Without_God.htm
Besides, belief in God is not irrational; atheism is irrational and unscientific. Read the recent book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” By Francis S. Collins, the head of the human genome project, who is a devout believer. Check out the writings of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schafer you’ll see why atheism is irrational.
There are any number of books about what theism is irrational nonsense, too. Or why Christianity is wrong and Hinduism is right. Or whatever. So what? Merely writing a book doesn’t make the content correct.
Published: December 16, 2006 7:18 PM
Almost all natural law writers after Grotius disagreed, for the reason that without God, no authority over man exists. You can derive ideas from human nature all day long, but none of them have any authority. They’re just musings.
“There are any number of books about what theism is irrational nonsense, too.”
Yes, there are quite a few. But I’ve found that Christians read both sides of the issue and can discuss them well. I’ve never read, nor met, an atheist who has read any of the great Christian books in favor of God.
Have you read Dostoevsky, Nietche, Sartre or Camus? What do you think of their arguments that real morals can’t exist without God? I’m not saying that people won’t act morally; atheists usually act morally. The argument of the great philosphers above is that atheists are acting irrationally when they behave morally.
Published: December 16, 2006 7:49 PM
Björn “Socialism, radical Islam etc does not fulfil the requirements of being natural law.”
RogerM. They certainly do, if the only requirement is to use reason, as Hoppe and Rothbard seem to think.
Björn I have pointed out for you before that Hoppe does not defend natural law. It is Rothbard that does that. Well, how can you assume that a great man as Rothbard thought that the only requirement that exist in defining natural law is the use of reason? It is really absurd to believe that. It also proves that you have not studied The Ethics of Liberty.
You seem to never learn. I will try again. I have posted several times this:
The Ethics of Liberty:
“IF, THEN, THE NATURAL law is discovered by reason from “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places,” it follows that the natural law provides an objective set of ethical norms by which to gauge human actions at any time or place”.
Please notice that Rothbard wrote: “the basic inclinations of human nature . . . absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places.”
This is meant to inform the reader that the use of reason is not enough in discovering natural law. The requirement is also that natural law is founded on “the basic inclinations of human nature, absolute, immutable, and of universal validity for all times and places.”
When you read a sentence you must read the whole sentence and not only a part of it. Are you able to grasp this or are you going to write again “that Rothbard only thought that the use of reason was enough to discover natural law”. Are you going to be dishonest again? Because it is you that are dishonest and not Rothbard and Hoppe.
In the book Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard explains in several chapters the criteria for natural law:
PART I: INTRODUCTION: NATURAL LAW
1. Natural Law and Reason (p. 3)
2. Natural Law as “Science” (p. 9)
3. Natural Law versus Positive Law (p. 17)
4. Natural Law and Natural Rights (p. 21)
5. The Task of Political Philosophy (p. 25)
You should really study those before you criticise. You will probably write that you already have, but then, study the chapters again as you obviously have done a lot of misinterpretations.
I will not argue with you about the existence of a God or not. I am not against religion, but I do not think that, for example, the police try to stop murders and thieves because they believe in the existence of a God. The reason for that murdering and thievery are battled against is because of the fact that those acts are destructive actions i.e. they are antisocial actions. That is also the reason for the fact that they are being condemned by society.
The Ethics of Liberty:
The Jesuit Suarez pointed out that many Scholastics had taken the position that the natural law of ethics, the law of what is good and bad for man, does not depend upon God’s will. Indeed, some of the Scholastics had gone so far as to say that: even though God did not exist, or did not make use of His reason, or did not judge rightly of things, if there is in man such a dictate of right reason to guide him, it would have had the same nature of law as it now has.[5]
Or, as a modem Thomist philosopher declares:
If the word “natural” means anything at all, it refers to the nature of a man, and when used with “law,” “natural” must refer to an ordering that is manifested in the inclinations of a man’s nature and to nothing else. Hence, taken in itself, there is nothing religious or theological in the “Natural Law” of Aquinas.[6]
Dutch Protestant jurist Hugo Grotius declared, in his De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625):
What we have been saying would have a degree of validity even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God.
And again:
Measureless as is the power of God, nevertheless it can be said that there are certain things over which that power does not extend. . . . Just as even God cannot cause that two times two should not make four, so He cannot cause that which is intrinsically evil be not evil.[7]
D’Entrèves concludes that:
[Grotius’s] definition of natural law has nothing revolutionary. When he maintains that natural law is that body of rules which Man is able to discover by the use of his reason, he does nothing but restate the Scholastic notion of a rational foundation of ethics. Indeed, his aim is rather to restore that notion which had been shaken by the extreme Augustinianism of certain Protestant currents of thought. When he declares that these rules are valid in themselves, independently of the fact that God willed them, he repeats an assertion which had already been made by some of the schoolmen.[8]
Grotius’s aim, d’Entrèves adds, “was to construct a system of laws which would carry conviction in an age in which theological controversy was gradually losing the power to do so.” Grotius and his juristic successors—Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel—proceeded to elaborate this independent body of natural laws in a purely secular context, in accordance with their own particular interests, which were not, in contrast to the Schoolmen, primarily theological.[9] Indeed, even the eighteenth-century rationalists, in many ways dedicated enemies of the Scholastics, were profoundly influenced in their very rationalism by the Scholastic tradition.[10]
Thus, let there be no mistake: in the Thomistic tradition, natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason-not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else.[11] In the contemporary atmosphere of sharp dichotomy between natural law and reason—and especially amid the irrationalist sentiments of “conservative” thought—this cannot be underscored too often. Hence, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the words of the eminent historian of philosophy Father Copleston, “emphasized the place and function of reason in moral conduct. He [Aquinas] shared with Aristotle the view that it is the possession of reason which distinguished man from the animals” and which “enables him to act deliberately in view of the consciously apprehended end and raises him above the level of purely instinctive behavior.”[12]
Aquinas, then, realized that men always act purposively, but also went beyond this to argue that ends can also be apprehended by reason as either objectively good or bad for man. For Aquinas, then, in the words of Copleston, “there is therefore room for the concept of ‘right reason,’ reason directing man’s acts to the attainment of the objective good for man.” Moral conduct is therefore conduct in accord with right reason: “If it is said that moral conduct is rational conduct, what is meant is that it is conduct in accordance with right reason, reason apprehending the objective good for man and dictating the means to its attainment.”[13]
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/one.asp
I think that you should study the works of Rothbard and Hoppe before you criticise them. The only thing you have proved is that your ideas are based on logical fallacies and misinterpretations. I have written all this so the honest reader can have a choice in deciding which ideas are objective and true. You have, actually, only answered in a way that I have expected from you in the very beginning of our debate when I wrote:
“I think that both Rothbard and Hoppe have rationally justified a libertarian ethic and I do not want to start a debate why this is so and why that statement you have made is wrong etc. Actually it would be a waste of time as you would not accept their justifications anyway and as I would still claim that they are true. If you, for example, “argue” that you do not exist and I would claim that you do etc, and you still go on “arguing” that you do not, it would also be a waste of time. That is how I would feel about debating already proved true ethical principles. I have also referred to valid writings in my above post”.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005970.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 16, 2006 7:51 PM
You’re so typical of anarchists. When you can’t defend your arguments with calm reason, you resort to insults.
The essential issue is whether the state is a legit institution. When Rothbard determines it is not, he has departed from the original body of natural law. It’s that simple. Original natural law determined that the state was necessary, as did Mises. So whatever Rothbard calls his musings about the state, they’re not natural law!
Yes, Grotius did not think belief in God was necessary for the development of natural law, even though he was a devout believer, a great theologian, and wrote commentaries on the Bible. Natural law writers after him disagreed for reasons I’ve given above.
Rothbard and Hoppe clearly disagree with all true natural law writers and most libertarian writers, even Mises, on the legitimacy of the state. Why do you think that reasonable men disagree on such issues?
Published: December 16, 2006 8:17 PM
Well said! RogerM is not aware of all the fallacies he has written. Take, for instance, “that without God, no authority over man exists”.
What authority is he referring to? If God rules the world and we are only helpless subjects, why argue and defend Christianity. There would be no need for it. If he, alternatively, mean that what is needed is that humans follow a Christian ethic for it being a powerful one, well, what about the authority of God? It seems that any ethic, rational as well as irrational, must be obeyed by a great number of people to have a powerful influence in society.
A libertarian ethic has “the authority” that it condemns destructive actions and is the very foundation of civilizations. It actually delivers a lot of “goodies”.
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 16, 2006 8:32 PM
Had you pointed some out, I would have addressed them. So far I’ve seen little but insults, distortions and misunderstandings.
Bjorn:”If God rules the world and we are only helpless subjects, why argue and defend Christianity. There would be no need for it. If he, alternatively, mean that what is needed is that humans follow a Christian ethic for it being a powerful one, well, what about the authority of God?”
What’s so hard to understand about authority? I’ll try to make it as simple as possible for you. Take the example of a family. The children instinctively understand that they have no authority over each other. Only the parents can tell the children what to do. In natural law, God is the parent; mankind are the children. No man has the authority to tell another one what to do.
Without God, mankind can, and has, used reason to discover a wide variety of so-called moral arguments. Just notice the many arguements among anarchists over the minutae of an anarchist society. But no matter how well reasoned, all ethical systems developed without God are nothing more than one man’s opinion over another’s. And reasonable people can disagree. So if someone violates a man-made (excuse me, man-discovered) rule, all anyone can claim is that such a person is unreasonable under that particular system. No one has the authority to punish a violator. Godless systems of ethics are no more than housing covenants in which violators must move.
Published: December 16, 2006 9:47 PM
The very fact that Libertarians thinkers are for pro-weapon ownership means they fully understand that with greater self-rule requires greater personal self-defence.
Published: December 16, 2006 10:45 PM
Posted by: Sam at December 16, 2006 10:45 PM
We would do well to resist the urge to group all libertarians together or assume them all to hold the same worldview and philosophical outlook. Some libertarians are averse to violence even in self defense.
http://www.voluntaryist.com/action/vol_resistance.php
http://www.voluntaryist.com/articles/027b.php
Published: December 16, 2006 11:56 PM
Austrians and the Private-Property Society
An Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe
AEN: In applying this a priori approach to ethics, were you attempting to supplant natural rights.
HOPPE: No, not at all. I was attempting to make the first two chapters of Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty stronger than they were*. That in turn would provide more weight to everything that followed. I had some dissatisfaction with rigor with which the initial ethical assumptions of libertarian political theory had been arrived at. Intuitively, they seemed plausible. But I could see that a slightly different approach might be stronger. Murray never considered my revisions to be a threat. His only concern was: does this ultimately make the case? Ultimately, he agreed that it did.
AEN: Yet Mises attacks anarchism in no uncertain terms.
HOPPE: His targets here are left-utopians. He attacks their theory that man is good enough not to need an organized defense against the enemies of civilization. But this is not what the private-property anarchist believes. Of course, murderers and thieves exist. There needs to be an institution that keeps these people at bay. Mises calls this institution government, while people who want no state at all point out that all essential defensive services can be better performed by firms in the market. We can call these firms government if we want to.
AEN: What do you say to the critique that the private-property society as you describe it appears quite authoritarian?
HOPPE: This is a left-egalitarian critique. They claim that authority should play no role in social life and that there should be no rank or position. But of course, there can be no society without structures of authority. In the family, there is always a hierarchy. In communities, there are always leaders. In firms, there are always managers.
But in a market, none of these authorities have taxing power. Their rule depends entirely on voluntary consent and contact. But the state attempts to break down these competitive centers of authorities and establish a single authority overriding all others. If you don’t comply, the state cracks down.
It is a ridiculous idea that we need the state to tell social authorities that they need to adhere to a uniform set of rules and obey a single master. Society does not need uniform modes of association. Market exchange makes social harmony possible even within the framework of radical diversity.
Today’s so-called multiculturalists don’t see that there is a difference between having a globe with many different cultures and imposing that diversity on each point on the globe.
It is a difference between a regime of private property and a statist regime where the rest of us merely obey. Ultimately, those are the only two systems from which we have to choose.
http://www.mises.org/journals/aen/aen198.asp
*Now I know Hoppe’s motive, before I guessed it.
He has confirmed my speculation. Hoppe is really something!
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 17, 2006 2:55 AM
Well, the same thing holds for all ethical systems developed with God, then! False premises.
Published: December 17, 2006 3:14 AM
Very true indeed, If Roger’s “opinion” (man made) was correct any ethical system, Christian or not, logically true or not, would only be an illustration of “some people’s opinions”. The same “principle” “could” also be used to abandon all rational thoughts and sciences whatsoever. Every opinion is only derived from flesh and blood so to speak, so why should we listen to that? This would also mean that it is the nihilistic faith which is the true one. But nihilism is a contradiction in terms, but that doesn’t matter at all, since it is only my opinion.
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 17, 2006 6:16 AM
Thus did virtually every culture the world over — including Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — come to embrace the “Ethic of Reciprocity,” otherwise known as the Golden Rule — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity.
And as the Golden Rule, especially in its negative formulation, is fully in keeping with the non-aggression principle and thus the self-ownership from which liberty and property are derived, this is really the only law that human society has ever needed, never mind that the state has utterly corrupted the law via legal positivism — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_positivism — run amok. For to disengage law from morality is to turn law on its head, all the more so as one positive law is heaped upon another and another until there is no law at all. (Think the US tax code.)
Thus, the only way to return to moral law is to return to the libertarian ethic, empowering the individual so as to reduce positive law, and thus the state, to the vanishing point.
And how interesting, by the way, that Time’s Person of the Year is any person engaged in the “digital democracy” of using or creating content on the World Wide Web, as this is individual empowerment on a truly global scale.
And no wonder, then, that the state is so afraid of it — http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/garris3.html
Published: December 17, 2006 10:42 AM
I’ve said this before, but it’s been quite a while. The difference between a conservative and a libertarian is that a conservative believes that someone, somewhere, *must* be the final authority on men’s actions. Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that there is no such final authority, although there may be plenty of not-so-final authorities.
Any argument about the existence of God would only be relevant here if one can show that the existence of God has an impact whether one believes in it or not, that is, an impact beyond one’s belief or disbelief.
Published: December 17, 2006 10:46 AM
Common Law which the american system use to be based upon is case-generated law. It is a decentralized, and depoliticized system in which those involved meet and negotiate. It was more horizontal, rather than vertical, or top down in nature. It evolved and worked well for hundreds of years until the modern state politicized, and monopolized it.
Short, concise essays that deal with this subject nicely, are
The Obviousness of Anarchy. by John Hasnas,
http://www.mises.org/journals/scholar/hasnas.pdf
The Myth of the Rule of Law, 1995 Wisconsin Law Review 199 (1995)
http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythFinalDraft.pdf
Also, listen to “Combining Objectiveness of Property Rights with Differentiation in Law” Simasius, Prague Conference on Political Economy, University of Economics, Prague and the Liberalni Institut
Published: December 17, 2006 10:54 AM
In Liberty We Trust.
You are true freedom fighters. Good points!
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 17, 2006 11:10 AM
One only has to imagine that one of us had such powers to know that this is true.
Published: December 17, 2006 1:06 PM
A common libertarian argument is that the means is not justified by the ends; an immoral means, in fact, makes it impossible to achieve a moral end. Thus, common or customary law is a moral means to achieve a moral end: objective law and the protection of natural rights.
You might say that objective law is like an evenly-rotating economy (ERE): an ideal that the proper system (or means) is constantly trying to reach, and thus is always in flux to accommodate the constant change of circumstances.
Published: December 17, 2006 1:10 PM
It was for reasons of self-consistency and correspondence to reality I originally started to study the Libertarian schools of thought. A great strength of such is that one is able to derive and validate the arguments or principles independently of an authority. Nothing needs to be taken on faith. In the case of religion this is not allowed, hence must be evaded.
When it comes down to it I prefer individualism to any form of coercive collectivism. Hence my interest in Libertarianism.
Sione
Published: December 17, 2006 2:42 PM
” Nothing needs to be taken on faith.”
Granted, the irony being that libertarianism is so intellectually satisfying that despite all the offenses against it, one gains a faith in the social enterprise, and thus in humanity itself, that is all but unshakable.
At least it is for me, especially as I exercise my “Person of the Year” status via this powerful, freedom-fighting forum.
Published: December 17, 2006 3:18 PM
Obviously, a lot of libertarians have supplanted the love of Truth with a worship of property and/or liberty, and as a result have blinded themselves to the Truth.
I didn’t invent the idea that morality is irrational without God. I learned it from the true natural rights writers, from Dostoevsky, and from great atheist philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, and Christian writers like C.S. Lewis, Francis Schafer, and Mortimer Adler.
I can’t do justice to their works with short posts like this, but those who continue to think they can develop moral systems without God should read the atheist philosophers mentioned above and try to understand why they came to the conclusion that morals without God are irrational. That conclusion wasn’t easy for them and they struggled with it for years. But at least with regard to the question of morals, they loved Truth more than anything.
Published: December 18, 2006 9:32 AM
Chapter III. Economics and the Revolt Against Reason
1. The Revolt Against Reason
“It is true that some philosophers were ready to overrate the power of human reason. They believed that man can discover by ratiocination the final causes of cosmic events, the inherent ends the prime mover aims at in creating the universe and determining the course of its evolution. They expatiated on the “Absolute” as if it were their pocket watch. They did not shrink from announcing eternal absolute values and from establishing moral codes unconditionally binding on all men.”
Published: December 18, 2006 10:03 AM
If morals are a product of reason as reflected in common experience over time — i.e., if they are sociological in nature, as E. O. Wilson surmises and as the evolutionary process as a whole would tend to support — then there would be nothing irrational about them.
What, after all, is irrational about the most universal of all moral principles, the Golden Rule, and why is it not just as likely that it arose sociololgically rather than being embedded a priori in nature by an outside agent?
Published: December 18, 2006 11:50 AM
Rationally, if you’re in a position to shield yourself from the reactions, then the Golden Rule is an unnecessary constraint on acquiring the objects of your desires.
Published: December 18, 2006 12:27 PM
Oh, yes, please, do tell us what the Truth-with-a-capital-T is.
I get this sort of thing all the time from the vile Left — that free-market proponents have made the market their God. Usually, they capitalize “market,” just as you have capitalized “truth,” just to emphasize the point, I guess, that it’s somehow different from regular markets and regular truth.
What a colossal waste of time.
Published: December 18, 2006 1:05 PM
Are you saying that if you can get away with doing unto others as you see fit that it would be rational to make it a universal norm of behavior? But of course, no society could function under such a premise, as it would be impossible for everyone to get away with doing unto others as they see fit.
As the exact opposite is the case with the Golden Rule — i.e., everyone can function under it — it would be perfectly rational to make it a universal norm of behavior, which is why virtually every society worthy of the name has done so.
Published: December 18, 2006 1:16 PM
“Are you saying that if you can get away with doing unto others as you see fit that it would be rational to make it a universal norm of behavior?”
No. I’m saying that rationally, if you can get away with violating the Golden Rule, then it’s nothing more than an unnecessary obstacle to achieving your desired ends.
Published: December 18, 2006 2:12 PM
Why I as an individual have to take some kind of norm as my greatest guiding principle if in sometime I’m in the position to (unfairly) take advantage. One may well believe that this Kantian principle is generally true but why bind yourself this way?
Published: December 18, 2006 2:51 PM
Never mind that there’s no real difference between the above two statements, the point is that stealing from or otherwise doing unto others as you would not have them do unto you (which of course you wouldn’t) is utterly irrational so far as making this a universal norm of behavior, i.e., as the moral basis of society.
Surely you aren’t arguing otherwise.
Published: December 18, 2006 2:53 PM
It is not “utterly irrational” because in fact, I can think of sufficient reasons to violate the Golden Rule, such as when I am in a position to shield myself from the consequences. Powerful and wealthy sectors of society in the US and elsewhere are based on these exceptions. You are trying to elevate reason into morality by its own bootstraps and it cannot be done.
Published: December 18, 2006 3:21 PM
OK, so you’ve figureed out a way to literally get away with murder. What does this have to do with rational morality?
As for “trying to elevate reason into morality by its own bootstraps,” I am doing no such thing. All I’m just saying is that the rationality of the Golden Rule (no matter how much the institutionalized aggression of the state has compromised it) is self-evident in that virtually all cultures the world over have embraced it. Why? Because it makes so much sense, which is just another way of saying it’s rational.
Published: December 18, 2006 3:44 PM
Published: December 18, 2006 4:14 PM
“Within the frame of social cooperation there can emerge between members of society feelings of sympathy and friendship and a sense of belonging together. These feelings are the source of man’s most delightful and most sublime experiences. They are the most precious adornment of life; they lift the animal species man to the heights of a really human existence. However, they are not, as some have asserted, the agents that have brought about social relationships. They are fruits of social cooperation, they thrive only within its frame; they did not precede the establishment of social relations and are not the seed from which they spring.
The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec1.asp#p143
“Man cannot have both the advantages derived from peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of labor within society and the license of embarking upon conduct that is bound to disintegrate society. He must choose between the observance of certain rules that make life within society possible and the poverty and insecurity of the “dangerous life” in a state of perpetual warfare among independent individuals. This is no less rigid a law determining the outcome of all human action than are the laws of physics.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap15sec6.asp#p280
Ethics of Liberty:
“For the assertion of human rights is not properly a simple emotive one; individuals possess rights not because we “feel” that they should, but because of a rational inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. In short, man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man’s capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social animal. No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor.
Thus, while natural rights, as we have been emphasizing, are absolute, there is one sense in which they are relative: they are relative to the species man. A rights-ethic for mankind is precisely that: for all men, regardless of race, creed, color or sex, but for the species man alone”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twentyone.asp
All organizations have a “code of conduct”. Even the mafia has it. It is the very foundation on which they last. It is an illusion to believe that this is not so.
In a society there must, also, be a “code of conduct” i.e. a legal code. A society cannot function without those norms. As Mises and Rothbard have pointed out, without a society we loose, so the great question is not a lawless society as it cannot exist and is therefore an illusion, but rather the question which we are, therefore, bound to answer; which legal norms or principles are Just and true?
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 18, 2006 5:40 PM
Hesselberg continues:
“But a social order is not possible unless man is able to conceive what it is, and what its advantages are, and also conceive those norms of conduct which are necessary to its establishment and preservation, namely, respect for another’s person and for his rightful possessions, which is the substance of justice. . . . But justice is the product of reason, not the passions. And justice is the necessary support of the social order; and the social order is necessary to man’s well-being and happiness. If this is so, the norms of justice must control and regulate the passions, and not vice versa.”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/two.asp
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 18, 2006 6:21 PM
What can I possibly add, other than to say that libertarianism is as just as it is true, as true as it is good, as good as it is beautiful, and thus as close to ideal as the human species can aspire, with faith in the process, wherever it takes us.
Published: December 18, 2006 6:40 PM
Yes true, very true and that is a very nice way to say it! But just now I am angry at myself! I wrote “loose” when it should be “lose”. Well, I am a foreigner.
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 18, 2006 7:01 PM
To say that finding a practical way to get away with murder, or any other violation of another person’s rights, is praxeological. It may be rational, in the sense that you find a way to get what you want without some retributional behavior to follow.
But it could never represent a form of moral or ethical reasoning (except, maybe, in a whacked-out system of ethical reasoning that no one’s ever heard of), and certainly not one grounded in reason.
Published: December 18, 2006 7:53 PM
Whatever you are, you are not a foreigner to the freedom upon which the human endeavor depends. For it is the loss of freedom that makes us “loose.”
And what I would give to speak your language as you speak mine (though I guess it’s about time I learned Spanish).
Published: December 18, 2006 8:00 PM
Yes, the fight for liberty is an international struggle.
A change in policy in the US would also influence the whole world.
Take for instance the great influence which the quasi libertarian Milton Friedman had. He influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and later on in time, the whole world.
In Sweden we had some deregulations during the 90s.
Sweden, 1990s:
“Economic reforms were enacted, including voucher schools, liberalized markets for telecommunications and energy as well as the privatization of publicly owned companies, privatization of health care, contributing to liberalizing the Swedish economy. Arguably, the subsequent budget cut-backs with the Social Democrates, and after 1994, continued spending cuts by the Social Democratic governement, did more to reform the Swedish economy and the Swedish model, than Bildt’s governments programme as such.”
http://www.answers.com/carl+bildt?gwp=11&ver;=2.0.1.458&method;=3
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 19, 2006 2:14 AM
What seems apparent to me, however, is that as the East has opened up its economies, the West overall has settled into the very fiat-fed welfarism against which Alan Greenspan, when he was a man of principle, so eloquently warned against — http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/Greenspan.html
The result, when coupled with the US’s out-of-control warfare state, is a global financial system teetering on the brink, as centralized, fraction-reserve banking has doomed the world to pay the awful price for this, the most massive fraud in human history.
And I fear that as a consequence of this and the immigration problem, the US is lurching headlong toward the creation of an EU-style superstate in the form of the already proposed North American Union under the auspices of the secretive but enormously powerful Council on Foreign Relations — http://www.cfr.org/publication/8102 — including replacement of the collapsing dollar with an euro-like “amero” — http://www.amerocurrency.com
This will be a disaster for freedom, of course, but as our dance of death with China plays itself out — i.e., as this addict-pusher relationship inevitably ends amid a collapsing bond market — the US will seek to stave off a hyperinflationary depression by essentially naturalizing 90 million Mexicans in a desperate effort to replace the cheap labor from Asia, which will in turn have turned inward.
Indeed, we can expect to see a globalization (make that “dollarization”) blowback in the form of regional trading blocs — European, Asian, North American, South American — that will then coalesce into the single-currency world state that has long been the banksters dream, with even more dire consequences for the cause of freedom.
What can possibly counter this ugly and terrifying prospect?
I look to Times’ “Person of the Year” — i.e., each and every one of us exercising our democratic rights through the digital dynamism of the World Wide Web, making it the most important issue we now face — http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/garris3.html
Published: December 19, 2006 7:49 AM
What exactly is the big deal with a global unified marketplace? Wouldn’t the world using ‘Libertarian recommended’ pure gold currency be exactly the same thing? I would think that when the whole world becomes trade-interdependent then war would become impossible destructive to bother waging.
Published: December 19, 2006 7:55 AM
There’s nothing at all wrong with “a global unified marketplace,” as long as it isn’t unified — i.e., corrupted — with fiat money, the question being how to transition out of the present system into a sound money system.
Fortunately, that is a work in progress, based on this concept — http://www.cipe.org/publications/ert/e32/e32_2.pdf — empowered by a next-generation Web — http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0689.html — that will hopefully outpace the state’s attempts to control it.
Published: December 19, 2006 9:17 AM
People are led to believe that trade restrictions between regions or countries “create jobs at home”, which they certainly do not. If people had the opposite belief that “free trade” between regions or countries “creates jobs at home”, that would also be an incorrect belief. Trade restrictions or free trade does not cause unemployment or cause employment in a region or country. Trade restrictions only lower the standard of living, hamper competition and restrict liberty. If for instance, the EU imposes tariffs on Chinese textiles, the Euro will appreciate against the Chinese Yuan (the value of the Euro will increase relatively to the Chinese Yuan). This depreciation (decrease in value) of the Chinese Yuan against the Euro, in this example, is caused by a smaller demand for Chinese textiles and therefore a smaller demand for Europeans to buy the Chinese Yuan. Because of this change in exchange rates, prices of goods from the EU to China will be generally higher and prices of goods from China will be generally lower (apart from textiles). As you can imagine, this will increase employment in the European textile sector, but decrease employment in other sectors. At the whole, unemployment will not change but trade between the regions will be lower. Specialization, competition and living standards in the EU region will be hampered. The tariffs will only serve special interest that is the textile manufacturers and their employees. Surely, we want our representatives to serve the common good and the common man and not special interests!
Someone might complain that the Chinese are intervening in the exchange markets to keep their currency artificially low and that they are not letting market forces to appreciate their currency, and therefore my statement about free trade, in this case, is not applicable. Free trade, someone might think, is presupposed by freely fluctuating currencies with no Government intervention (also called clean floating exchange rates). Certainly I do not want Governments to intervene in exchange markets, but actually it is the Chinese that are in this case the losers and we are the winners. We should be glad that China is suppressing the rise of its currency, and the Chinese people should be mad about it. When market prices indicate that, for example, a project is unprofitable; investors naturally stop investing in such a project. Otherwise, factors of production such as land, capital, and labour would be wasted. Every government manipulation of market prices is a step toward economic breakdown and chaos. Land, capital, and labour that are invested in the exporting business in China because of a suppressed currency, have changed the economic structure in China and are mal investments, unprofitable for the nation to undertake, and we are getting something free. We don’t need to export anything to pay for this “extra importation of Chinese products”. To make my statement more obvious, we could consider that if the Chinese currency would be suppressed to no value at all (which would not be possible to realize), the Chinese would be working for nothing and we would get goods and services from China for free (which is, naturally unprofitable for China to undertake), then the market forces in the EU (if market forces would not be hindered by Governments) would reallocate land, capital and labour for other uses and to those fields which the Chinese are not able to compete (even if the Chinese were working and exporting to full capacity, that will not, by far, be enough to satisfy all our wants, in other words, their GNP is by far, too small). The increases in production which mentioned reallocation of recourses leads to are our extra bonus. We should applaud this and the Chinese people should revolt!
If you want to know more about floating exchange rates, go to; http://www.hooverdigest.org/974/friedman.html
Productivity and trade will flourish more intensively with one currency* than with several different currencies, and even with one currency, market forces will smoothen out any imbalances between regions, cities or countries. We do not worry, for example, about the balance of payments between London and Manchester, Berlin and Munich, Paris and Bordeaux or Stockholm and Göteborg etc. If, for example, London exports more to Manchester than Manchester exports to London, the demand for goods and services will be greater in London relatively to their supply, and also relatively to the situation in Manchester. Because of this, prices will go up in London and therefore will exports from London to Manchester contract, as well as, imports from Manchester to London will expand. This happens all the time and we do not even know about it and therefore do not worry about it. Governments do create problems all the time.
If we really want increased competition, why not adopt free trade between nations. Why does the EU and the USA not follow that path? The reason is that they do not want increased competition.
For an example, I quote from answers.com;
“In the United States, the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s saw import quotas placed on textiles, agricultural products, automobiles, sugar, beef, bananas, and even underwear—among other things. In a single session of Congress in 1985, more than three hundred protectionist bills were introduced as U.S. industries began voicing concern over foreign competition”.
Go to;
http://www.answers.com/import+quotas?gwp=11&ver;=2.0.1.458&method;=3
Only Governments can be so silly to reject great offers and bargains. Individuals doing the same thing would be considered mad.
The essence with above statement is that Governments hinders competition, lower our standard of living, promote special interests and they make excuses for this with faulty theories and propaganda.
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg Sweden
* A gold standard. See also “What Has Government Done to Our Money?” by Murray N. Rothbard.
http://www.mises.org/money.asp
Published: December 19, 2006 1:59 PM
Thanks for the all-important asterisk, since even a lone fiat currency would still by definition be credit-based and thus inherently inflationary, robbing the people accordingly, while there can be no inflation with a metal-backed, 100% reserve monetary system.
And just as importantly, neither can there be mega-states built on the monetary fraud that is centralized, fractional-reserve banking.
Published: December 19, 2006 3:05 PM
Yes, I agree with you on that too!
I voted also against the EU. It is a mega-state.
It is a silly thing to believe that you need a mega-state to promote trade. A mega-state has more power to regulate than a small state. Please, see my next post.
Björn Lundahl
Published: December 19, 2006 4:13 PM
When companies compete in separate markets, different competitive measures are often taken by companies in those markets. People in those markets, because of culture, values goods and services differently and are willing to pay for goods and services in accordance with those values. For instance, in Italy, people are very willing to buy cheap cars made by the Italian car manufacturer “Fiat”. Volkswagen, decided to sell their cars in Italy to Italians for lower prices. Volkswagen, thought, that these measures were needed in that market to compete effectively. People from Austria and Germany went to Italy in search for bargains “offered by Volkswagen”. Volkswagen dealers said no. Low prices are only offered to Italian customers! For these “crimes” The European Union’s High Court upheld a $110.5 million fine for Volkswagen. This happened in 1998. Now, Volkswagen and other companies must have same prices in all markets to all people, otherwise they risk to get heavily punished. In other words, if people are willing to cross borders in search for bargains, it is better for a company like Volkswagen, to raise its prices* in Italy and lose market share. Apart from Volkswagen, the Italians will suffer. Alternatively, they could have the same low prices in all markets, but that might not be profitable or even lead to bankruptcy. In the very end, competition is hindered! This is only an example of Government in action and what it actually does “to promote competition”.
For more information about this case, go to;
http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/members/issue.tmpl?articleid=09220316204320
And to;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/821620.stm
For some further information, go to;
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_19/b3782014.htm
The flexibility of the market is needed.
Different situations in diverse markets need different actions, but Government agencies are guided by rigid rules. Governments do not know how to run an economy, they lack the essential tools; the free market. The more Governments intervene in the economy, the more chaotic will the economy be. Governments decision making is relied upon whims by the electorate, markets, on the other hand, are relied upon prices of supply and demand; recourses are allocated to those ends which are valued most highly by consumers. When mentioned destructive actions bloom, like in the former Soviet Union, the “destructiveness is revealed”. In the case I have mentioned, consumers have not gained anything if Volkswagen raised their prices in Italy because of this verdict. Rigid rules can lead to situations like that. Governments do not know the different circumstances that exist in diverse markets, to apply the same rigid rules in all markets do not gain anybody.
For example, in Sweden car manufacturers guarantee car bodies against corrosion for 6-12 years. Swedish consumers demand this, probably because of our climate. I do not actually know, but I do not think that the same manufacturers offer the same guarantees all over the world.
Naturally, weak companies that do not serve the consumers well will try out every possible way to use those laws to protect them against competition. As the anti trust authorities do not, as mentioned, know all different circumstances, their verdicts will probably be wrong.
If we really want increased competition, why not adopt free trade between nations. Why does the EU and the USA not follow that path? The reason is that they do not want increased competition.
For an example, I quote from answers.com;
“In the United States, the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s saw import quotas placed on textiles, agricultural products, automobiles, sugar, beef, bananas, and even underwear—among other things. In a single session of Congress in 1985, more than three hundred protectionist bills were introduced as U.S. industries began voicing concern over foreign competition”.
Go to;
http://www.answers.com/import+quotas?gwp=11&ver;=2.0.1.458&method;=3
*From the book “Antitrust The Case for Repeal”, by Dominick.T. Armentano, page 18:
“Governments antitrust suits against firms that price discriminate almost always result in the defendant firm raising some of its prices to comply with the law.”
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg Sweden
Published: December 19, 2006 4:40 PM
Thanks for these posts, Björn. I especially appreciated your defense of Rothbard on ‘natural rights.’ As someone who reads quite a bit of both Thomas Aquinas and Murray Rothbard, I lean toward the belief that the Rothbard-Hoppe defense of natural rights is quite compatible with Thomism. (I can’t speak too much to Locke and the other ‘natural rights’ thinkers that Roger M points to).
After all, Aquinas believed that Aristotle’s conception of social ethics were arrived at from sound principles, and Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ could know nothing outside of itself, let alone be the personal, moral-dictating God that Aquinas believed in!
Published: December 19, 2006 5:03 PM
Thank you!
Björn
Published: December 19, 2006 5:32 PM
Thus am I able to make the leap from the unconscious unmoved mover that Whitehead called “the primordial nature of God” to the conscious product thereof in what he called “the consequent nature of God” — i.e., a theology of process ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology ) that is fully in keeping both with evolution and with human freedom.
Published: December 19, 2006 5:47 PM
In the very early 80s I adored Milton Friedman and Monetarism. I ordered many books from the Laissez Faire books store in New York (which I also visited in 1989).
I received a flyer from the store and saw the book For a New Liberty, by Murray Rothbard, and read some information about it. Then I ordered it. When I had received and read it, a new world had appeared for me.
It is not an easy task to become a libertarian in a country like Sweden. One of the subjects in school was called “Samhällskunskap” which means “knowledge about society” and you might already guess what that “knowledge” was all about. It was some kind of information about the welfare state, democracy, parliament, “social problems” etc. In the end of the schoolbook also called “Samhällskunskap” there was a chapter about the USA and a chapter about the Soviet Union. Actually, I was quite good in that subject!
Our television was controlled by the government and in the late 60s we had two channels (TV 1 & TV 2). I learned a lot and I am still learning a lot about societal problems through public broadcasting (joke).
During the 80s the government was more and more unable to completely control the television, because of competition from cable TV networks. Before every Swedish guy bought a parabola antenna the government was very quick to allow a commercial TV station and a channel (TV 4). The government regulated the channel through a “contract” which expires, I believe, after something like 5 years. This so called contract or lease regulates in detail what TV 4 shall be allowed to broadcast. If TV 4 does not meet the government’s criterions the lease will not be extended. So, nowadays, we here in Sweden get taught in “samhällskunskap” also through TV 4´s broadcasting. By allowing TV 4 before the cable network was extended, TV 4 grew large and could reap most of the incomes from commercials and gain a large market share, and in that way hinder the development of the cable channels. For the government was unable to regulate the cable stations as they broadcasts from abroad. Quite clever and impressive! Still, the market broke the monopoly power of the government and we have, nowadays a lot of cable channels to choose from.
Well, in this environment it is quite difficult and hard to learn and comprehend libertarianism. There is always a psychological barrier to conquer, the barrier which I was brought up with. Later on in life, it was nearly impossible to understand that it was, for example, not the market but the government that was the very cause of the business cycles. I was always taught the opposite! I just couldn’t believe it!
Milton Friedman was easier to understand, because he blamed the Federal Reserve for not “doing their job properly” during the depression, but if his monetary “theory” was correct it was, really, the market that was to blame for the great depression as there was a need for a Federal Reserve “doing its job properly” in the first place.
Well, at last, I broke all the barriers and this because of an intellectual giant called Murray Rothbard.
http://www.answers.com/topic/laissez-faire-books
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 19, 2006 5:52 PM
In Sweden we have a Capitalist which might be richer than Bill Gates!
Ingvar Kamprad, an industrialist from Sweden, he founded IKEA, the home furnishing retail chain, which sell low priced furniture’s all over the world (235 stores in 33 countries). His business idea was: “We shall offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”
Go to;
http://www.answers.com/topic/ingvar-kamprad
And to;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA
Photo on a “typical store”, go to;
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:VillepinteFrance.JPG
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 20, 2006 6:14 AM
Mark Humphrey “I don’t want to precipitate trench warfare with devoted Rothbardians, but I strongly suspect that Rothbard owed his insight about “life as the standard of moral value” to Ayn Rand. I can’t prove this, of course. Sadly, in “The Ethics of Liberty”, (published in the early Eighties) Rothbard chose to, in a sense, blacklist Rand by claiming that NO ONE, other than himself, in the libertarian movement was working to develope a system of rationally defensible ethics. (Maybe Rothbard meant “at the moment I am writing this statement”.)”
Björn That life is an axiomatic value and functions “as the standard of moral value” in an ethical system, Rothbard could, alternatively for example, have gotten this insight from Mises himself through analyzing his statement in his book, “Human Action”, page 11:
“We may say that action is the manifestation of a man’s will.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap1sec1.asp
I am not saying that Rothbard did get his insight from Mises; I am only saying that it was possible. Surely, many other possibilities exist which we do not know anything about.
Mark Humphrey “It has been awhile since I’ve read Hoppe, and Rothbard; but I suspect Hoppe’s reasoning goes: either we all own ourselves, or everyone owns everyone else. Since the first proposition is clearly more defensible than the latter absurd proposition, one can affirm self ownership as valid. But if this is the argument, it fails. For that argument assumes that which it sets out to prove, namely that an ethical concept, “ownership”, exists. But on this basis, ownership remains unproven, so that one could just as well assert: “no one owns anything, and anything goes.””
Björn Self-ownership is a natural fact, since a man in his very nature controls his own mind and body (natural disposition), that is, he is a natural self-owner of his own will and person (having a free will) and if this was not true, neither could he effectively control any property and, therefore, not own it. In other words; “nothing could control and own something”.
Naturally, praxeology the science of human action, by itself logically confirms the natural fact of self-ownership, since praxeology is based upon “the acting man consciously intending to improve his own satisfaction” and I quote from answers.com:
“From praxeology Mises derived the idea that every conscious action is intended to improve a person’s satisfaction. He was careful to stress that praxeology is not concerned with the individual’s definition of end satisfaction, just the way he sought that satisfaction. The way in which a person will increase his satisfaction is by removing a source of dissatisfaction. As the future is uncertain so every action is speculative.
An acting man is defined as one capable of logical thought — to be otherwise would be to make one a mere creature who simply reacts to stimuli by instinct. Similarly an acting man must have a source of dissatisfaction which he believes capable of removing, otherwise he cannot act.
Another conclusion that Mises reached was that decisions are made on an ordinal basis. That is, it is impossible to carry out more than one action at once, the conscious mind being only capable of one decision at a time — even if those decisions can be made in rapid order. Thus man will act to remove the most pressing source of dissatisfaction first and then move to the next most pressing source of dissatisfaction.
As a person satisfies his first most important goal and after that his second most important goal then his second most important goal is always less important than his first most important goal. Thus, for every further goal reached, his satisfaction, or utility, is lessened from the preceding goal. This is the rule of diminishing marginal utility.
In human society many actions will be trading activities where one person regards a possession of another person as more desirable than one of his own possessions, and the other person has a similar higher regard for his colleague’s possession than he does for his own. This subject of praxeology is known as catallactics, and is the more commonly accepted realm of economics.”
http://www.answers.com/Praxeology?gwp=11&ver;=2.0.1.458&method;=3
Further:
The Ethics of Liberty, page 45:
Footnote:
“[1]Professor George Mavrodes, of the department of philosophy of the University of Michigan, objects that there is another logical alternative: namely, “that no one owns anybody, either himself or anyone else, nor any share of anybody.” However, since ownership signifies range of control, this would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.”
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/eight.asp
Or in my own words from the essay “Normative principles”:
“Why must anybody own anything?
In accordance with our objective test to find out if something is a condition for something else, we grasp a state of things where the following principle is none existent anywhere and at all:
“Everybody owns themselves and their Justly owned property rights”.
Nobody would be able to do anything, since nobody has the right to control anything. Not even themselves (see below about property rights in your own person).
This question is not only a contradiction it is also silly. You ask a question which means that you control yourselves (natural disposition), that is owning yourself (see below the excellent writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The other contradiction is that if nobody would own anything, nobody would be able to hinder anyone to own anything either since they would otherwise have an invalid control (having the disposition to) of everyone else, that is having an invalid ownership to everybody else (see below about valid property rights in your own person).
Ownership itself is, therefore, an objective condition for the preservation of human life.”
http://normativeprinciples.blogspot.com/2006/12/normative-principles-pure-free-market_10.html
Björn Lundahl
Göteborg, Sweden
Published: December 28, 2006 3:11 PM
JM
Independent Womens Forum
Published: March 11, 2007 7:26 PM
You enter the kingdom of life and believe that you stand above its rules and its very foundation. What right gives you the right to abandon my rules? If you do not like this dimension you can pass away from it any time you want. No one is forcing you to stay.
With the help of reason, consciousness and intelligence, you can observe that your fellow men strive to sustain their lives. They do what their nature calls them to do, namely to live. You are a threat against that! You are a threat against this dimension! This dimension would not exist if it couldn’t cope with what is threatening it. You wouldn’t have lived if murdering has been allowed, and despite of this fact, you place yourself above the very cause of your own life. How can you place yourself above the very cause of your existence!?
No organism or life can exist if it is not accommodated to what life demands, and that is partly to eliminate the very things that can cause that life ceases. It is the self-preservation that is the very cause for me to throw out the murderer from my kingdom. You never learn! You are parasites of life! You are saying that you did not choose life because you didn’t create yourself, but no one has, for all men are participants of an eternal process and this fact does not declare your irresponsibility.
The process in nature that created me, demands that I follow its rules or else the process would never had created me and would never had risen, for it would be doomed to die from the very beginning. It is created in such a way that it avoids death, which is the reason for me having self-preservation, for death I else would not have avoided. My nature is thus such that the murderer’s actions shall be rejected and punished until such destructive threats ceases to exist.
My lawbook is the existence’s law, life’s law, our kingdom’s law, this dimension’s law or my nature’s law, because I am the nature, a part of cosmos and I must play by its rules for nothing else exists for me.
With a good conscience I will now consider if you also shall be thrown out from my dimension and return to the unconsciousness. If I judge to not throw you out, I will do it with a bad conscience since I have the insight about this dimension’s utmost playing rules which I then will have denied.
Björn Lundahl
Published: May 8, 2007 1:57 PM
Men visit my kingdom for a time and then later leave it. I observe this species that with its reason, consciousness and intelligence protects her values and purposes. They cultivates harvest where the wind blow the very least, they build greenhouses to protect the harvest against frigidity; they spray the harvest to protect it from insects. With their reason, consciousness and intelligence some men observe that the harvest can be stolen and out of this reason men defends their harvest with the might of weaponry, for the self-preservation and man’s purposes are then protected.
You can steal due to the fact that man to some extent succeeded to keep down the theft and you can live because man has to some extent succeeded to suppress the theft. Human beings became human beings the day they started to create and you belong to this species. You enter the kingdom of life and believe that you stand above its rules and its very foundation. What right gives you the right to ignore my rules? Since childhood you have learnt that theft is wrong and despite of this, you steal. You are a parasite of life, motives and objectives because theft is a parasite of life, motives and objectives! The day man no longer succeeds in her effort to suppress theft, that day motives, objectives and life ceases to exist.
The process in nature that created me, demands that I follow its rules or else the process would never had created me and would never had risen, for it would be doomed to die from the very beginning. It is created in such a way that it avoids death, which is the reason for me having self-preservation, for death I else would not have avoided. My nature is thus such that the thief’s actions must be stopped and punished until they cease to exist.
My lawbook is the existence’s law, life’s law, our kingdom’s law, this dimension’s law or my nature’s law, because I am the nature, a part of cosmos and I must play by its rules for nothing else exists for me.
In the name of true Justice, as it is built upon the insight about this dimension’s utmost playing rules, you will now be sentenced for the crime you have done and for the compensation to the victim and this to its fullest extent.
Björn Lundahl
Published: May 8, 2007 1:59 PM