I guess you’re an anarcho-cynicalist 
There is no exception to property rights. The key question in your hypothetical would be what the remedies to the property owner are. If there is a impenetrable wall that surrounds the property, it’s unlikely the hikers will be able to pass without permission. The injured person may die. No rules/laws were violated therefore there is no further action.
If it’s an open field, I’m guessing the hikers will trespass and seek the medical attention they desire. Trespass would be a minor crime as it is today and reasonable remedies to the property owner would be available. These could include civil damages to recover any value lost by the trespass.
I’m not seeing any conflict here either.
What part of Libertarianism guarantees that trespassing would be a minor crime and that any remedies would be reasonable? I’m not saying it isn’t there-I just want to make sure that these aren’t just blind assumptions.
Keep in mind I’m discussing small L libertarian thinking.
Nothing guarantees anything. However, these remedies would be set as part of the agreed upon government in this hypothetical. ‘Reasonable’ as a matter of law would be defined as what the community establishes. By definition the remedies would be reasonable. Similar thinking for the minor crime part. I suppose you could argue that the we’d be in some Wesley Crusher Justice scenario where tramping flowers is punishable by death, but I just don’t see that as realistic. In any event, however the violation is categorized, it would be one that the community has agreed to.
I don’t think the rules surrounding trespass and civil damages for the same would be very different in a libertarian ideal.
Nor is there any reason to believe that the legal defense of necessity would not be available to the hikers:
@Sam Stone: This is in response to your comments in general in #158 – and also to those of XT in #157 – so I’m not going to quote any specific part of it. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about you think I believe, and you may be surprised to know that I basically agree with most of the free enterprise ideology that you describe. What I don’t agree with are the specifics of what the peons of the industrial revolution could realistically have done about their plight through the kind of individual action promoted by libertarianism, or indeed what many exploited workers in the lower echelons of the workforce can do even today – and I shudder to think what their plight would be like without modern labor laws.
I don’t know what the point was in describing the tyranny of communism as I fully concur. Kind of reminds me of the annoying TV ads that Thomas Peterffy was running during the last election cycle; Peterffy is a Hungarian immigrant who escaped from communist Hungary, started a brokerage that made him a billionaire, and is now using his financial clout to run ads suggesting that anyone who votes for a Democrat is helping to turn the US into another socialist tyranny. That’s the problem with extremism.
And that’s my problem with libertarianism: like Marxism, its ideas are so basic that if you compromise on them you have nothing left at all. I wonder, for instance, how may libertarians would support labor laws, workplace safety laws, a minimum wage, social welfare and a social safety net, universal health care, environmental regulation, anti-trust laws, anti-discrimination or hate crime laws, or any of the myriad other forms of what is indisputably government intervention in individual freedom – yet the kind of intervention that most of us non-libertarians would agree is necessary for a civilized society.
In fact, just a quick glance at the Libertarian Party platform, which is clearly designed to put their beliefs in the best possible light and gloss over its glaring deficiencies, reveals the following gems – I just picked these out in a quick run-through, I’m sure there are many more. Welcome to Libertarian utopia…
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(1.0) no government may ever use force against any individual, group, or other government – for any reason (yay! no violence, no more wars! Why didn’t someone think of this before?)
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(1.1) no communications media or technology may ever be regulated by government (had this been in place years ago, it would effectively mean that the Bell system would now have iron-clad monopolistic control over all communications – a little further on they expressly endorse monopolies!)
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(1.2) there can be no laws governing the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes (a terrific system for those who like to self-prescribe antibiotics, anti-depressants, morphine, Oxycontin, or, on a bad day, go down to the local heroin shop!)
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(1.6) there can be no laws whatsoever regulating or limiting in any way firearms and ammunition (the vision that comes to mind here is the guy totally zonked on self-prescribed Oxycontin, amphetamines and heroin, per the previous Freedom, running around with a bazooka and a couple of machine guns – and remember, we are not allowed to use force against him!)
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(2.1 and 2.7) there can be no laws governing or regulating business and commerce in any way (welcome to the 18th century!)
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(2.2) a clean environment is a Good Thing, but government must stay the hell out of it. The free market will take care of it. (That would be the free market, I assume, in the form of coal companies, power generation companies, and Exxon Mobil; there is also a thinly veiled assertion that AGW is just a myth – “our planet’s climate is constantly changing”.)
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(2.4) repeal the income tax and disband the IRS (this sounds better than “disband the government”)
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(2.5) there must be no restriction or regulation on banking (welcome to a repeat of the savings & loan collapse of the 80s, the housing market collapse, oh, hell – welcome to the Great Depression, Part 2!)
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(2.8) abolish public education (no further comment necessary!)
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(2.9) the government must not involve itself in health care in any way (as Ron Paul so astutely implied, people must be free to not have health insurance and die)
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(2.10) abolish Social Security (in combination with item 2.9, this ought to rid the nation of the pesky elderly population in fairly short order!)
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(3.1) the US has no obligation to help any other nation (the correct US response to the Allies in WW2 apparently should have been “good luck, chaps!”)
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(3.3) allow unrestricted free immigration, except for Really Bad Guys like terrorists (also of money and goods – basically, abolish the borders)
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(3.5) we condemn bigotry (but we’re not going to do anything about it)
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(3.6) political parties and candidates must only be financed privately, and without any restriction (the rich should own the government – not altogether different than the way it is now)
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(3.7) if all of the above results in an unmitigated disaster, then go ahead and overthrow the government (good thing they thought of that!)
I’m a little late to the party, but I think the simplest answer here is that, essentially, the ideas of voluntary association, political freedom, and individual liberty are derived from the concepts of self-ownership and property rights. For example, if I own myself and I can do with my property as I please, then I am free to associate with anyone who is willing to associate with me, hence free association.
As for the specific scenarios, I don’t even see them as loaded, though I would say they have a complicating factor of including business. That is, typically, libertarians are free-market capitalists, but that is not necessarily true. Still, I don’t see any meaningful contradiction in the scenarios as presented that in any way violates these ideas.
A business is generally considered property, so the business owner can do with it as he pleases, provided he doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Similarly, the workers can choose to form a union, as that is free-association. The factor that you’re missing is that employment is also a form of free association. This could get complicated by specific clauses in a contract for employment, but without that, I’d say the employees can quit at any time and the business owner can fire them at any time. To argue that the business owner cannot fire them because of their free-association choices is to argue that the business owner does not also have the same right to free-association.
The basic idea in this construct isn’t that the union can freely form and then bully the business owner without fear of being fired, but rather that they get a bargaining chip that if the business owner gives them poor working conditions, they won’t trickle off, perhaps at a rate at or below replacement, but he risks losing a significant number of employees and damaging his business. In either case, the business owner and all the employees are free to associate or not with eachother however they please.
That all said, there certainly are moral and ethical issues at play here, and I think that those should temper whatever decisions both the employer and the employees choose to make, but the idea of libertarianism is that it is only about the rights, and it is up to those involved in the free-association to decide on a common moral and ethical code amongst themselves.
I don’t see this as much different, other than involving an external party. So I’d argue that there’s no conflict here at all as both the employer/employee relationship and the political affliations are volunary associations.
I think I see that the biggest issue here is that individual liberty isn’t unlimited, the idea of libertarianism would argue that, yes, you have liberty, but your rights end where another person’s begin. That is, I don’t get blanket freedom to do whatever I want, that’s anarchy, rather, I can do whatever I want with my property, provided it doesn’t interfere with others doing whatever they want with their property. To argue that individual liberty means that anyone can do anything they want whenever and wherever they want seems, to me, to be such a excessively broad definition so as to be deliberately ridiculous.
The analogy I like to use is a bubble. As bubbles float through the air, regardless of their size, their shape is still more or less spherical. Think of that as the natural state of our rights, and the volume of that bubble is our property, including our bodies, our lives, our land, whatever. However, if that bubble comes into contact with another bubble, they don’t remain spherical, they deform and they have a shared boundary. As more and more bubbles get crammed together, they get more and more deformed, but their volume remains the same, and if the shell of the bubble is penetrated, the bubble bursts.
So, in the same way, our fundamental rights of self-ownership and property rights remain the same, but the context is still vital. I can freely associate with anyone, but that is only true in the context that they want to freely associate with me. I can do whatever I want, with my property, hell, I could punch myself in the face or tear down my house, but could anyone reasonably argue that individual liberty means I can go around punching whoever I want in the face or tearing down their homes? If one person’s rights don’t end where another person’s begins, we no longer have libertarianism, we have anarchy or might makes right.
Again, there are different kinds of libertarians. Some would say that the property owner could shoot the trespassers dead. Others are more moderate…
However, how does a community agree to any kinds of terms, save by meeting as a government of some form? If they can define “reasonable,” then what stops them from defining “legal” or “permissible” or “illegal” and “impermissible?”
If you allow the community to make laws – even if subject to supermajoritan limitations like the Bill of Rights – then where is the real difference between that variety of libertarian government and what we have now?
Many libertarians would accept this doctrine…but some would not. There are definitely some libertarians who would argue for the property owner’s right to shoot and kill the trespassers, no matter what their needs might be. Pursued by criminals? Fleeing a prairie fire? Tough. One step over the boundary, and deadly force will be employed. (Did I mention the minefield?)
All of this is very similar to working with the many varieties of atheism. Given 20 million libertarians, you probably would encounter 45 million different overall viewpoints!
Are you under the impression that the libertarian ideal does not include a functioning government?
It would be similar in a number of ways, and vastly different in others. It’s a shame that the OP chose not to explore any of these.
Unless there is someone on this in this thread, or on this board even, that advocates for this position, asserting this is no different than the strawmanning that the OP does and refuses to acknowledge.
It depends on your definition of “functioning.” Many libertarians argue for restrictions so tight that the government could not, in fact, function at all. The early history of the U.S., with the Articles of Confederation, point in this direction.
Also: most libertarians argue for limitations on what the government can do – but have not yet given us a clear idea of how these limitations are to be enforced. If a libertarian government has the ability to define what is “reasonable,” how can anyone be sure that their rules actually will be reasonable? What is the mechanism of limitation?
The U.S. Constitution specifies this: the three branches of government will each have an interest in limiting the powers of the other branches. I’ve never heard a libertarian proposal that is as clear-cut as this.
I disagree. There is a significant presence of this viewpoint within libertarian thought. The SDMB is wiser than that. But it is valid to mention Creationists, for example, when speaking of Christianity, even if none of the SDMB Christians are (currently) creationists. Libertarian thought is extremely diverse. It isn’t a straw-man argument to observe this, specifically since it isn’t an argument at all, only an observation.
The argument comes in the form of a challenge: how are we, outside of libertarian thought, to discern and reject the extreme views? From the outside, it looks not unlike a UFO convention. One meets reasonable believers (“There must be something out there”) and raving loonies (“I was anally probed by aliens from Zeta Reticuli III.”)
I’m happy to discount the loonies, but I need help identifying and defining the core beliefs.
What part of your favored legal system guarantees this? Do you understand what I mean when I say this is a policy issue, not an issue of principles? You might have 10 different Libertarians states and 10 different penalties for trespassing. Just like any other system. Point being, there is nothing about Libertarian philosophy that would mandate the death penalty for trespassing, contrary to what some people here might think (not you, but some people).
Absolutely not true for Libertarianism. Liberty is the starting point (there’s a hint about that in the name, btw), and everything else derives from that. Property rights are derived from the principle of individual liberty, not the other way around.
Not necessarily if the ‘truly libertarian government’ operated and existed primarily by the consent of a governed majority of unenlightened libertarians who firmly and dogmatically believed that negroes were a human-like form of livestock and thus their private property - bought and sold like any other form of livestock.
But they have a magic out for these and any other problems with libertarianism! All they have to do is say “all libertarians don’t believe that” or “that isn’t what real libertarians believe”. Presto- they “win” the argument.
Their philosophy is both morally bankrupt and intellectually juvenile. Anyone who considers this philosophy for more than 30 seconds before rejecting it needs to spend some quality time with reality.
I said that the mechanism for freeing the slaves is a policy issue, not the fact that the salves would be freed. For example, would the slave-owners be compensated? I can see that in some instances they might be. Remember, we were not talking about slave owners who somehow managed to exist, under the radar, in Libertaria, but a society where slave-owning was legal and that then transitioned to Libertaria.
Meh. All true believers, be they Libertarians, Conservatives or Progressives think their system is the best that can be. True Progressives aren’t racist!! Of course not! If ever there is a Progressive who is found out to hold racist opinions, then he’s not a True Progressive.
But you’ll see that many of us on this MB who are sympathetic to the idea are well aware of the problems, and freely point them out.
Spoken as a true believer!
Okay, I stayed out of the thread for a day as a cooling-off period. I didn’t want this to just be people shouting at each other. I’d rather have an exchange of ideas.
So, getting back on what I wanted the topic to be: the priority of property ownership as the source of rights in a libertarian system.
Can any libertarians (or anyone presenting the libertarian view) explain to me the principles under which a libertarian government would restrict the rights of a property owner’s use of his property? Or give examples of situations where this would occur? And please explain the authority under which the government derives its power to implement these restrictions?
Nice try, but no. Conservatism and liberalism/progressivism are at their core different views of the optimum organization of economic systems. Racism or lack thereof is pretty much orthogonal to their beliefs; either one could with equal merit and consistency adopt a system of social justice that opposes racism. The adoption of particular social views like those on abortion or gay rights are often historical accidents and reflect the contemporary beliefs (and sometimes the political opportunism) of a specific political party. They don’t stem from any fundamental ideology, and often change with time. Libertarianism, in distinct contrast, presumes to be able to draft an ideology that governs every aspect of life.
Emphasis mine. So we have an entire political philosophy derived from a single word. It doesn’t get any more dogmatically idealistic than that! Even Marx needed a few complete phrases to sum up his version of utopian idealism.
What are the minimum number of words required for a philosophy to be founded upon, where is this rule written, and by whom?
But saying “We’re in favor of liberty” is a pretty content-free declaration. Everybody is in favor of liberty as a principle. The difference between ideologies is what they define as a liberty, how they resolve disputes between conflicting liberties, and the means they use to support liberty.