From the parallel thread:
And just who, exactly would pay for this lots and lots of therapy? Has no one explained to you that money doesn’t grow on trees? That analysts don’t offer treatment for nothing? That you don’t have the right to seize someone else’s property (their money) just so you and your majority mob can do your social experiments?
If you’re going to force (probably worthless) therapy on the guy, I sure hope you plan to make him pay for it.
I think the government would pay for it. The government does have the right to take your money, legally, and spend it on any silly-ass thing they want. It may not be ethical, but it’s not in their interest to be ethical.
But more importantly, what do you have against therapy? It does have its uses. It may not be the panacea that Freud had hoped, but it’s better than nothing.
Coming along as a devil’s advocate for just a moment:
Assuming for the sake of this argument that therapy can probably ensure he won’t re-offend, is it not in society’s best interest to spend the money and remove a potential future danger from the world?
Lib, a long time ago I started a thread which quickly exploded beyond my control – as, indeed, some threads are wont to do. But what I was going to do then was lead up to the following basic argument. And if it’s been made elsewhere, I didn’t see it, and apologize in advance for being duplicative.
Under the Libertarian system, I could, as I understand it, form a consortium of businessmen, let us say. We could jointly purchase a large parcel of land, fence it in, and build houses, stores, parks, movie theaters, and the like. Sort of a planned community, if you will.
And within those boundries, my partners and I could create a set of rules that would bind all those who entered - because, after all, it is our property. Those rules could include a system for modifying the rules. They could (I assume, but please correct me on this point) include a set of covenants that go with the land. That is, if someone else were to buy a small parcel of land in our enclave, they would be bound by certain rules with respect to its use.
And in every way, then, my little planned community could, under Libertarin principles, duplicate a town or even a state, with laws much as we have now. Presumably, with respect to the OP, (to avoid hijacking 
) they could include contractual language agreeing to provide therapy, jointing bearing the cost, for any person adjudicated a molester.
The difference, you would undoubtedly contend, is that all of the people in that community have agreed to be subject to its rules. In our society at large, they have not, and this is where my analogy fails.
Before I continue… may I ask for your reaction thus far?
That’s like saying that when I give my money to the check-out clerk at Wal-Mart, it is my hand that pays for the goods.
What madness is this?
What mystical power of God or nature has bestowed rights upon a concept? And what does the law have to do with ethics? This is an ethics perspective, not a legal perspective.
No shit. Unless, of course, you consider expedience to be an ethic.
Absolutely nothing, so long as the therapist is paid by her client’s own hand.
Rick
Sounds like a plan to me.
So long as no one is forced against their will to join you in your venture, then it is perfectly libertarian.
One nit, if you don’t mind. It is the context of your system (volunteerism) that is libertarian, and not your system itself. So long as all are volunteers, any system exists in a libertarian context.
Lib,
Let me then propose two models for your consideration.
The first is the concept of the social contract, the idea that we implictly “volunteer” and agree to be bound by the strictures of law and government. I assume you don’t buy this.
The second is perhaps a bit more illustrative. Let us return our consideration to my enclave, my planned community. Let us imagine that two peaceful, honest people, being one each male and female, decide that they like my enclave and what it stands for. They seek to purchase, from me, a small tract of land therein. Naturally, it comes with certain covenants, by which they agree to be bound.
And let us further assume that, happiness and light filling this land, and these peaceful and honest people heeding God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, do so, and in due course produce a boy. And this boy grows up, attending the schools in Enclavetown, which are a benefit contractually guaranteed by me and my partners, as an inducement for people to live here.
And let us assume, further, that one day, at age fifteen, this boy brings an aspirin to school, in violation of the contractual terms set forth for attending same. And for this, my partners and I, or our duly designated representative, forbid him from attending school for six months, as a sanction. Of course, such sanctions are clearly contemplated in the contract that his parents agreed to beforehand.
Now, this lad may feel aggrieved. He may suggest that in essence he is being bound by rules and agreements to which he was never a party. In short, this idyllic spirit of volunteerism which created Enclavetown has also created - in a manner of speaking - a new person, and his rights as a free man are being trampled upon.
At this point, again, I would ask for your reactions and discussion.
Rick
You’re right that I don’t buy the “social contract” thing, any more than I buy that inner-city protection rackets are “security services”.
Your second issue seems to center around the notion of age of consent. I’ll go with that assumption in answering you, and you can steer me back in if I veer.
(By the way, thanks for the thoughtful way you pose your questions — actually allowing me to answer first before you go further, and actually asking about a single, focused, common issue, rather than a bombardment of ridiculous hypotheticals about giant squids reclaiming their land and men who own all the water on earth.)
Libertarianly speaking, the definition of an adult is a person who is capable of giving meaningful consent. That means that children, people who are severely retarded, or people who are senile, etc., are not adults. But they are still rights bearing entities because God or nature gave them their original property: life.
The contract parents have with their child is unique in that they are the only consenting party; i.e., it is a unary contract. The child is therefore not bound to their contract, nor to the contract of their government, once he has achieved the ability to give meaningful consent.
Who decides when this has happened? His parents or guardians do, of course. (I’ll deal with incalcitrant parents shortly.) A consent age is meaningless. Some people are more mature at fifteen years of age than others are at fourty. Therefore, the parents will declare to their government that their child has become an adult whenever they see fit to do so.
At that moment, the man or woman is not a rights bearing entity whose voluntary consent is required before you may govern him. If you govern him without his consent, then your government has abandoned its libertarian context.
But what to do about parents who refuse ever to release their child from their custody? If the child believes that he has become able to give meaningful consent, and his parents refuse to declare his adulthood to your government, then he may challenge his parents in your arbitration system. Whatever system you employ, in order to be in a libertarian context, must provide a means to determine whether those it governs have freely consented. In your case, I believe you have chosen a contract system.
If your arbitration determines that the child is indeed an adult, then he is free, like any other human being, to join your collective or else secede from it. If your arbitration determines that he is not an adult, then he is returned to the custody of his parents. If he, on his own, disavows both your decision and theirs, then he may attempt to leave, taking with him no more property than he came into life with. (Yes, that means he must walk away naked if his parents will not let him have his clothes.) The reason you may not stop him from leaving is that he is not a “ward of the state”; he is the responsibility of his parents.
Note that it would do you no good to refuse to ever arbitrate on behalf of children who appeal to you because, since they cannot give consent, you cannot contract with them and therefore cannot derive any revenue from them.
Does this mean that, from time to time, there will be friction in families as parents and children (all parties behaving immaturely) battle over whether the child is a grown-up? Yes, probably. But this is a family matter, and not a matter for the government unless, as I said, the child believes that he is no longer a child and appeals to your arbitration to declare him an adult.
Knowing what little I do about you, I presume you are not going to contract with lunatic trash who abuse their children anyway, so squabbles like these should be rare. Most parents certainly love their children, and I presume you will enforce responsibility and accountability such that the framework of your society is a sober one, and not a Jerry Springer circus.
I imagine that you will have a slew of follow-up questions, but I only ask that you minimize them by thinking through some of them yourself first. Your good intellect will be able to answer most of them, I believe. Think, as you already have done, about how to apply the simple principle of noncoercion, and your answers will pop out at you like musical notes pop out to the trained eye.
Okay. Fire away.
Dear Lord.
Obviously, that should have read: At that moment, the man or woman IS a rights bearing entity whose voluntary consent is required before you may govern him.
Age of consent is only an ancillary issue. It was the easiest vehicle I could use to place into the discussion your proposed mechanism for dealing with persons not amenable to the contracts which others have bound them to.
Thanks for your answers.
Now, what happens if a giant sea urchin attacks the … oh, wait. Sorry. That was next week’s movie.
Here’s my next question: if we draw an analogy between Enclavetown and Virginia, I would contend it’s a defensible one.
Although I own property in Virginia, it came with certain covenants, which I agreed to follow when purchasing the property. Some were explicit, such as the easement the phone company has in order to get to the utility pilon in my back yard. Others were based on the extant criminal and civil laws of Virginia. That is, I cannot use manufacture and use crack cocaine or crystal meth, even though it’s entirely on my private property, because there is a covenant that restricts its use. I was aware of this covenant before I bought my property.
Another covenant that came with my property was the agreement that each year, I would pay back to the enclave owners, the Virginia government, a certain amount of money, based on the value my property might have if sold.
Now, you may argue that I’ve just palmed a card: that rights belong naturally only to people, and that a state government cannot enforce its rights in the same way a contractually-based collective can.
But this is why I asked about the child and how he removed himself from the system if need be. I contend that, at some point in history, every resident of Virginia agreed to be bound by these covenants. They agreed that they jointed owned the land; that they would select among themselves managers responsible for management of that land and the promulgation of rules in support of same, and that their future private property within the bounds of Virginia was subject to those covenants.
Now, all those people are dead and gone, of course. But that does not vitiate the covenants, or the system of enforcing them. You may claim that you are in similar position to the naked fifteen year old – that is, you are putatively bound by an agreement in which you had no hand forming.
Why, then, is your option not as the fifteen year old? To either leave Virginia, naked as a jaybird, or to submit to the binding arbitration system which was set up by our contractual predecessors in interest - that is, the laws, court system, and so forth.
Once again, I await your considered reply. Beware the sea urchins.
Rick, that was devastating. I don’t see how Libertarian can argue that we do not now have a libertarian form of government, that we do not now have a government that was formed by the consent of the governed.
When all else fails, ask Cecil.
Who governs interaction between each of these proposed contractual communities?
Rick
Absolutely.
If what you say of yourself is true generally; that is, if every resident of Virginia (not just the majority) has freely and willfully consented (personally, not by proxy) to be governed in the manner that Virginia governs, such that not even one dissents; and if Virginia is protecting all its citizens from coercion and fraud from every source, both internal and external to Virginia, including the government of the United States and the governments of the counties and municipalities as well as other citizens; and if all citizens of Virginia may withdraw their consent and secede whenever their contractual obligation to Virginia is fulfilled; then yes, Virginia is libertarian, and Edlyn and I would be interested in negotiating to buy land there.
(Edlyn is ready to pack!)
Government is not a rights bearing entity, even if people have consented to be governed. In the same way that we are exercising here, not our right to free speech, but Straight Dope’s right as owner to allow us to speak, so it is that government that governs ethically is not exercising any rights of its own, but rather, it is exercising the right of each of its citizens to freely give it their consent. Rights and property are the same; one is a context for the other.
The fifteen-year-old man is not leaving his parents’ government’s property. He is leaving his parents’ property. And just as their obligation does not pass to him, neither did the obligations two hundred and fifty years ago pass on to you. But you say you accept them freely, and so you are bound to them. I must admit that I am surprised and delighted that Virginia had no sort of “whiskey rebellion” incident, and that the consent of every landowner who survived the revolution has been documented.
You have much to be proud of about your homeland. Ordinarily, revolutions just lead to more tyranny. 
“Every revolution evaporates, and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.” - Franz Kafka
I have a question.
Moving back to the OP for a moment, was therapy suggested as an alternative to prison? Because if this is the case, I can assure you that therapy is tremendously cheaper than putting people up and paying for their food and utilities. Second, it is highly unlikely that the therapists would come from the private sector, so the cost would even be significantly less than the fees that private therapists command. That said, I oppose such a proposal in most cases (if, in fact, I am correct in assuming that therapy was suggested as an alternative to incarceration). I think that the plan works for first time drug offenders (excluding dealers), and only if available at the judge’s discretion (as opposed to making mandatory statutes). Therapy is a viable alternative for these people because they have a problem that is best solved by therapy. Criminals of other varieties should serve a sentence in jail commensurate with their offense, since it is not always true that they have a pyschological problem. All car thieves are not kleptomaniacs. In addition, they would probably spend their time in therapy talking about the concept of consequence, as opposed to experiencing it first-hand.
But I’m probably wrong about the original subject in the first place. I don’t know what “parallel thread” you’re referring to. Moving on.
Libertarian, we disagree about the nature of “rights.” You are of the mindset that all humans (and I’m assuming most if not all living creatures) are endowed with some abstract concept that follows them no matter what their situation. I think you have to consider the nature and genesis of “rights” in the first place.
Imagine if you will a boy who upon birth finds himself alone in the wilderness. He knows nothing of other people, and wanders for his entire life without meeting another human being. What does this man know of “rights,” and what use does he have for them? Let’s take it further and imagine that in his travels he meets up with a hungry grizzly bear. Should the bear be expected to respect this man’s rights, since they are of course inborn and he does of course possess them?
The neccessity for rights springs from the concept of a society. “Rights” essentially set boundaries for what the society or (members of the society) cannot do to you. It follows therefore that “rights” are defined by society, and in fact granted by it, if not by the government then by some concept of a social contract. It is incorrect to say “I am a man, and by virtue of that I have the right to free speech.” Man by himself, in the absence of a society, has no use for such a thing. It is more correct to say “I am a member of society, and by virtue of that I have the right to free speech.”
The question follows: “Aren’t members of societies that abridge their rights entitled to the same rights that we have?” Certainly they should have them, we would like to see them have those rights, but the fact is that they don’t have those rights. For the purposes of a hypothetical discussion about the nature of rights, let’s put aside for the moment situations in which certain members of a society are denied rights that are extended to other members of that society. This is the fault of society and has little to do with the actual abstract concept of “rights.” Let’s then discuss, for instance, Communist Russia. Did people in Communist Russia have a “right” to free speech? They certainly did not. They were members of a society, and afforded the protections and benefits of said society, and as such they were subject to the established system of government in that society. You think they had a “right” to free speech? I would have liked to see you try and excercise such a “right” in Communist Russia. Should they have had the “right” to free speech. I think so. Should all people in all societies have such a right? I think so. Do all people in all societies have such a right? I think not.
Let’s return for a moment to our man in the wilderness. Imagine that he overcomes the bear and takes its fur in preparation for the coming of cold weather. Later he meets another man, who also has never before met another human. Let’s also imagine that the second man is naked and has a big club in his hand. Will he give regard to the “rights” of the first man, since they are of course inborn and he does of course possess them?
The bottom line is that the “rights” that we cherish basically cover two things: rules of interaction between one member of society and another, and rules of interaction between a member of society and the governing body of that society. Either way, society is the genesis of what we refer to as “rights.”
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill