Potpourri
==> Lew Rockwell explains why he’s an anarcho-capitalist.
==> The Pope, Mario Rizzo, and Tom Woods walk into a bar. Then they start arguing about capitalism.
==> Brad Birzer (the guy who let me give a guest lecture to his Hillsdale class on anarchy, incidentally) reviews Man of Steel.
==> Yet another post from me on the tax interaction effect, which might be easier if you are not a trained economist.
==> I totally get what Jason Brennan is saying in this post, but I still think it’s useful for libertarians to point out that taxes are theft. (Or if you think that’s a loaded statement, then: …for libertarians to argue that taxes are theft.) I mean, take just about any systematic social injustice. The only reason it exists is that a bunch of people think it’s morally OK. So the only way for opponents to argue the morality of it, is to try to show these same people that it actually conflicts with their moral code; they just need to think about it. Would Brennan have criticized the abolitionists, telling them, “Look, stop writing pamphlets that say, ‘It’s immoral to lock up a human being against his will’ or ‘It’s wrong to split families up at auction.’ That’s precisely what the argument is about, so you’re not helping, you’re just embarrassing yourself.” ?
==> At first this story–about a guy showing you how to take “selfies” that make it look like you have a girlfriend–is funny. Then it just gets depressing.
==> The Nullifiers have a plan to smoke out, er, thirst out, the NSA.
==> I admit I don’t read the site very much, so perhaps I’m way out of line, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen ThinkProgress take the side of the church against the State.
Incidentally, if you’re a public official trying to justify why you’re not letting a church feed thousands of homeless people, it’s probably a wakeup call for your life when you find these words coming out of your mouth: “If I want to cook and poison my own family and friends that’s OK, but when you’re open to the public that’s implying a certain standard of safety,” Walker said. “That’s the standard we have in place for all the homeless shelters in the city.”
Brennan,s point is that most Libertarians don’t argue it, they take the NAP as a starting point. This is different from the abolitionists, Who argued that slavery is incompatible with the principles of Christianity that opponents already subscribed to. Your opponents do not already subscribe to the NAP. How would you counter socialists who quote Proudhon that property is theft? At least that’s witty; but you’d try to show that that was a conclusion and a wrong one I bet. Just crying ‘help help I’m being repressed now we see the violence inherent in the system’ over publicly funded sidewalks comes across as crankish.
Ken B. wrote:
Brennan,s point is that most Libertarians don’t argue it, they take the NAP as a starting point. This is different from the abolitionists, Who argued that slavery is incompatible with the principles of Christianity that opponents already subscribed to. Your opponents do not already subscribe to the NAP.
I agree Brennan’s post title makes it sound as if he’s saying that, but he’s actually not, Ken B. Brennan is NOT saying
“Everyone agrees taxes are theft, you dumb Rothbardians, but they think theft is OK when the State does it. So you need a new argument.”
That’s not what he’s saying. Rather, he’s saying that if you think the State is justified in taxing people, then taxes aren’t theft. So the NAP doesn’t apply the way Rothbardians think it does. You would be initiating aggression against the IRS by not complying, the same way you would be a thief if you ordered a restaurant meal and then didn’t pay when they gave you the bill.
As far as I can tell you’re agreeing with my comment agreeing with Brennan … But disagreeing with something. I won’t suggest an axiomatization, but something got scrambled in translation.
Would you accept the socialist quote from Proudhon as an obvious premise? No, you’d look behind it and shows it begs the question. You see that clearly, right. You’d make Brennan’s argument, with Star Wars allusions, mutatis mutandis. Many libertarians, whose argument is perfectly symmetrical, do not see that.
Ken, what I’m saying is, Brennan is actually saying EVERYBODY agrees with the NAP–it’s wrong to initiate aggression against somebody. It’s just that (some) libertarians think taxation is initiating aggression, whereas others don’t.
So he’s saying you can’t use the NAP as an argument against taxation or the State more generally.
You were interpreting Brennan as saying that Rothbardians need to first establish the NAP, but I’m saying that’s actually not what he is saying, even though his title makes it sound like that.
Ok, i think i see the mistranslation. Mea culpa. I used NAP more as a code for the usual thing we hear from the claque: the state is aggression, taxes are theft, “law is crime” to echo Proudhon, its the be all and end all stops debate. Valuepraxism. Brenna’s premise 2 more or less. That was a bad on my part as you (reasonably ) read that as his premise 1.
If you mean most people except the map as a statement that it would be nice to be able to follow I agree. If you mean most people think it can serve as the basis of moral reasoning I disagree. For example some people think prayer is a morally loaded activity.
The Proudhon quote is something I’ve never been clear on. (and don’t get me wrong here… I’m not being snarky, I’m just asking). I have always been confused how property can be theft, if the idea of theft itself implies property. How can you steal anything from anyone if no one really “owns” anything?
Again, this isn’t snark. I haven’t read much Proudhon, so if there’s an easy response to this I’d be interested to hear it.
It’s a clever way of saying that everything should be shared. If you mark off a piece of property and label it yours you’re depriving me of something which is rightfully mine.
Countdown to win Ballonte doesn’t notice that I’m explaining Proudhon and thinks I’m speaking in my own voice, 3, 2,.1 …
Right, but if it’s rightfully yours, what distinguishes it from being your property?
It’s rightfully ours and I am excluding you from it. That’s what Proudhon is saying property laws are doing.
“Everything should be shared and so any law which is used to enforce an exclusion of one person from the enjoyment of anything to the benefit of or at the whim or behest of another is a form of deprivation that should be forbidden” just isn’t as snappy as property is theft.
Ah okay. I still think this implies that everyone has an equal “share” in what ever is in question, which seems close to the idea of “property” to me, but I kind of see where it’s coming from.
I appreciate the explanation, Ken b.
This sandwich is rightfully ours. By eating it, I have deprived you of it. Wat do?
I mean, I guess the objection is that it’s “everyone’s property,” but what distinguishes that from just “shares” in all property?
I feel like this is a legitimate counterargument, unless I’m just descending into semantics
I’ll try one more. Property is exclusion. That’s what it is right? I can exclude you from it. So if you believe that exclusion is wrong…
A starving Proudhon grabs one of major freedoms apples. Major freedom cries hang him that’s my property what he’s done is theft, by which I mean deprived me of whatl I have a right to. Proudhon replies no your claim to exclusiveness of the Apple is what you are using the word theft to describe. what you call property is actually the deprivation you call theft.
Yeah, I’m on board with all of that, I just think that also implies a form of property
If Proudhon took the apple then clearly there was no exclusiveness. There might have been some imaginary right of exclusiveness, but the physical evidence is that Proudhon ate the apple.
So now we are no longer talking about exclusiveness, we are talking about future action that might retrospectively restore some imaginary right. Hanging Proudhon won’t bring the apple back, but it will prevent one guy from taking any more apples.
Assigning a debt to Proudhon rather than hanging him might be a more productive approach, but I suppose if he continued to run up debts without repaying them we would have to look down on him like we do the US government.
Suppose I am starving and the apple is the only food I have.
Is Proudhon still justified in stealing my apple?
But by taking the apple, and eating it, Proudhon has now made it exclusive in the other direction! Holy contradictions, Namtab!
The Proudhon quote is something I’ve never been clear on.
Wikipedia has a nice explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_Property%3F
“How would you counter socialists who quote Proudhon that property is theft?”
I usually just quote other things Prudhon said. Typically that makes the Marxoids stop whoring out Proudhon for their own agenda. Proudhon also wrote:
“Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words.” – Proudhon, What is Property?, pg 261-2.
“But these same deputies, — so jealous of their privileges whenever the equalizing effects of a reform are within their intellectual horizon, — what did they do a few days before they passed the law concerning judicial sales? They formed a conspiracy against property! Their law to regulate the labor of children in factories will, without doubt, prevent the manufacturer from compelling a child to labor more than so many hours a day; but it will not force him to increase the pay of the child, nor that of its father. To-day, in the interest of health, we diminish the subsistence of the poor; tomorrow it will be necessary to protect them by fixing their minimum wages. But to fix their minimum wages is to compel the proprietor, is to force the master to accept his workman as an associate, which interferes with freedom and makes mutual insurance obligatory. Once entered upon this path, we never shall stop. Little by little the government will become manufacturer, commission-merchant, and retail dealer. It will be the sole proprietor. Why, at all epochs, have the ministers of State been so reluctant to meddle with the question of wages? Why have they always refused to interfere between the master and the workman? Because they knew the touchy and jealous nature of property, and, regarding it as the principle of all civilization, felt that to meddle with it would be to unsettle the very foundations of society. Sad condition of the proprietary régime, — one of inability to exercise charity without violating justice!” – ibid, pg 302-3.
“Property is freedom.” – Proudhon, Théorie de la propriété, pg 26
In other words you just treat it as an argument from authority. So you haven’t answered my point at all.
No, I’m not using argument from authority, but rather just smelling out socialists who do…
You’d be surprised how many stop citing Proudhon to justify their socialism, after I post quotes such as those. If they change their ways, then that would only be a mark against their behavior.
At any rate, I did answer your question. You asked how I would counter socialists who quoted Proudhon. That is how I would initially respond, to filter out the poseurs from the serious.
If they still cite Proudhon’s “Property is theft!”, then, realizing what Proudhon actually meant by that statement, namely, that it does not include ALL property, but only include products that wage earners help produce (which they believe is only produced by wage earners), and land, I would then typically ask them this:
“What would you do if I agreed to be paid a fixed income from the Smith clan, in exchange for helping produce living quarters to be exclusively owned by the Smith clan once completed?”
The response to this will then filter out the practising Proudhonists from the idealistic “I just want to appear this way to others” Proudhonists.
I’ll ignore the idealistic ones as hypocrites.
For the ones who say they are willing to use force to stop myself and the Smith clan, I would simply point out that the practising Proudhonist is introducing a coercive hierarchy of control of himself over me and the Smith clan, thus contradicting his own stated premises.
That will filter out the sane from the insane. I will ignore the sane, who realize their error. For the insane, protective defensive force is the ONLY response they deserve.
I remember reading a few years ago about attempts to shutdown a soup kitchen in Paris France because it was serving pork soup. The claim was that this was discriminatory. I cannot recall if they succeeded in shutting it down.
They tried the stopping people feeding the homeless w/o a permit here in a part of Miami but it never got anywhere.
I fail to see where ThinkProgress took sides. In fact, they gave the government criminal the last word.
Indeed. It’s one of the most impartial pieces of the few I have read there!
Taxes are not theft. Theft implies the use of stealth and tax is not stealthy.
Taxes are armed robbery, or protection money depending on whether you consider sparing your life is a service.
Bob you wrote “Would Brennan have criticized the abolitionists, telling them, “Look, stop writing pamphlets that say, ‘It’s immoral to lock up a human being against his will’ or ‘It’s wrong to split families up at auction.’ That’s precisely what the argument is about, so you’re not helping, you’re just embarrassing yourself.” ?”
With the exception of the embarrassing yourself part, I think that yes Brennan would have made that criticism and been right. The point is to show that slavery is wrong and immoral, within a system of justice. So Brennan would say to abolitionists “Stop saying it’s immoral, since that presupposed the system of morality. Instead say that slavery is incompatible with Christianity [or whatever the moral system slavers claimed to have] and is immoral by the standards of Christianity [or whatever moral system the slaves claim].” Just saying “slavery is immoral” is meaningless, just as saying “taxation is theft”. Libertarians have to show that taxation is incompatible with the system of justice that people who are pro taxation claim to hold.
I’ve been saying over and over that everyone who isn’t a violent criminal already respects the property and person of others in their personal lives which approximates the NAP. It is not as though we have to create the wheel and re-invent private property and contractual relations. We have to convince the public that the alleged crises claimed by the statists are either non-existent or were caused by statist policies in the first place.
Part of the problem Bob is that many here do want to reinvent that particular wheel. Major freedom denies all the laws of contract and property. He denies the common-law. He denies French civil law. he denies the constitution. He wants to derive property from some mystical imaginings. This puts people off.
I have very low expectations.
It’s not mystical.
The Lockean notion of homesteading is quite Earthly.
What do you do to correct past thefts? Like if Europeans took ivory off of African elephants centuries ago, without their owners’ permission, are Africans today entitled to get back all the ivory in the world? Or do you just let bygones be bygones?
That’s just an example, but I imagine that relatively little of the private property in the world today was acquired through homesteading and a series of Lockean transfers. Do you just ignore all the past transgressions?
“What do you do to correct past thefts?”
For one thing, not introduce more theft.
If the robbed people are long since dead, then let bygones be bygones. If anyone robbed is still alive, give the land to them.
“Like if Europeans took ivory off of African elephants centuries ago, without their owners’ permission, are Africans today entitled to get back all the ivory in the world?”
Of course not.
“Or do you just let bygones be bygones?”
Only if the victims are dead.
“That’s just an example, but I imagine that relatively little of the private property in the world today was acquired through homesteading and a series of Lockean transfers.”
Thanks in large part to your government heroes.
At any rate, there are still vast swaths of land in the world that have not been homesteaded at all.
“Do you just ignore all the past transgressions?”
If the victims are dead, then yes. If they are not, then no.
And the victim’s children? including the posthumous ones?
the Moral basis of your system is the inherited justice of the arrangement from some putative homesteading state through virtue preserving transfers. Absent that why should we prefer your arrangement of property to some other arrangement property? Even if we like the idea of property rights why must we respect your particular version of them? You say laws die with their creators, but Wynot property configurations?
What do you do to correct past thefts?
Well, my hometown of Detroit has almost been wiped off the map by “progressive” anti-property social democratic policies. Much of Africa has been destroyed by similar policies and love of “social democracy”. I’m all for some retribution and restitution.
Homesteading is thoroughly mystical. If I work some follow land then there is a reasonable case I should be entitled to the produce of that plan. However with Winterfall and now in the spring Casherid comes along and wants to use the land. According to homesteading my previous mingling of my labor with the land has made mine in perpetuity. Not just the produce that my efforts engendered, but the land itself. This is mystical.
Not just the produce that my efforts engendered, but the land itself. This is mystical.
For one, the land is not the same as it was when you found it, it’s now cultivated. The cultivated land is something you produced.
Disclaimer: this has nothing to do with economics.
There’s a theory of mating that women will tend to be attracted to whatever other women are attracted to, regardless of whether that selection is any good. Thus, you are more likely to pick up in a bar if you wear a wedding ring, and even more likely if you already have a few girls sitting at your table paying you a lot of attention (never mind the fact they are hired actors). I’ve known of this as the “Rubber Grouse Theory” (RGT) based on this research:
http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/articles/how_females_choose.html
It can also be seen as a grandchild optimization strategy on the basis that a woman knows that half of her offspring will be male, and whatever this guy has that attracts females, her sons will be able to make it work for them. If you want to feel depressed about the Japanese, be depressed about Abenomics.
I’ve mentioned my larger than usual number of ex-wives haven’t I ….
Do they hang around your table at the pub?
Bob, I think the heart of Brennan’s point is as follows: libertarians often try to express the non-aggression principle in a way that makes it sound as if it’s an innocuous moral principle that everyone would agree with. (who would disagree with “don’t hurt people”?), and indeed, expressed in that way, it is a moral principle that pretty much everyone accepts, but the way in which libertarians deploy it does not logically follow from the bland statement that everyone agrees with. In other words, the actual principle that is at the heart of libertarianism, involving self-ovenership and homesteading and so on, is a more controversial moral principle than the non-aggression principle as commonly stated.
“who would disagree with “don’t hurt people”?”
Faithful readers of most scriptures.
Bob, while we’re on the subject of the non-aggression principle, on a previous thread you said that you believe that the government should not legislate morality, and that the reason the government should prohibit property rights violations is not because property rights violations are immoral, but for some other reason that made property rights violations special. Can you elaborate on what that reason is? You cited a book by Rothbard, but for those of us who haven’t read it, can you summarize its position, or your position if you disagree with Rothbard?
rothbard did say it was a moral choice.
What does that mean? What is “it”?
to protect property rights. i quoted him on that thread.
This is just my interpretation of events, but Dr. Murphy can clear it up if I’m wrong:
Dr. Murphy was not arguing that something that we might think of as mystical and amoral was sufficient for legislation in addition to moral claims. He was merely saying that a special type of morality, namely, moral rights are both necessary and sufficient while plain morality is only necessary but not sufficient. Technically, rights fall under morality, so it is not something beyond morality but rather a specific type of morality.
See here for the relevant quotes from Rothbard.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2013/12/04/papal-bull-why-pope-francis-should-be-grateful-for-capitalism/
Catholics, Protestants, tax and wealth redistribution.
Re TIE. It makes sense that introducing a new tax to reduce another does not make sense unless the deadweight loss is lower with the new tax. Are we sure that carbon tax is less efficient than income tax? Do we have a proper analysis that shows carbon is worse? It seems possible from a lay perspective that it might have a broader base, or at least taxes consumption only, which is perhaps a good thing?
When emotional responses to experiences can not be expressed in the healthy way when they arise, they get stored within the tissues with the
body, the muscles, bones and organs. There are two major reasons that cannabis extract medicine
is much better than smoked cannabis. All the above mentioned figures are actually furnished by Wyeth, who introduced
the drug towards the US market. The little sprout bursts through
and grows toward the sun.