Indeed. What’s to stop him from signing up with a government that will recognize his consent and protect him from being coerced by his parents?
If it does, then this gets back to one of the great flaws in social contract theory. Specifically, I ought to be able to sign up with a government that allows me to torture my own children to death and eat them, as long as I guarantee to kill them before the age of six. And anyone who tried to stop me from doing so would be violating the one law of libertaria.
I may be misunderstanding something, of course. But this has been an objection to social contract theory for me since I was eighteen.
And while the example is exagerrated, the possibilities are not: for example, it’s easy to imagine a government that allows infanticide, or that allows minors to be murdered by their families if they have sex before the age of majority.
Daniel
Do the different Libertarian mini-govs have to recognize each others judgements? Say Bob and Tom decide to get married in Libertopia, which recognizes the rights of same-sex people to marry. They’ve signed the contract which says that they will divy everything 50/50, even though Bob has bought most of their material possessions. Now, let’s say that Bob decides to move out to Libertainia with most of the material possessions, and the government of Libertainia either doesn’t recognize gay marraige or is rife with judges that frown on the practice. What is Tom’s recourse?
And thus perfect for our Liberal, no?
Nothing. Nothing prevents corruption in any government other than the vigilance of its citizens. But it stands to reason that corruption is easier to get at when a government may not legislate, and thereby extend to itself such privileges as not being subject to law suits. The appeals process in my Libertaria means that an arbiter found to have ruled in bad faith is not only reversed, but is a criminal. (He renegged on his oath.)
I’ve often described what I would do in that sort of scenario. I would grab you about the shoulders and pound your head into a tree until it was a bloody pulp. I would then gladly suffer the consequences of my actions. (Of course, I would never have given any consent to your government in the first place, so whether it could touch me would depend on its power and resolve versus the power and resolve of my own.)
His own government. It is ethically bound to secure his rights no matter what the inconvenience or consequence. Of course, libertarian governments (speaking along strict theoretical lines here) do not conduct diplomacy and trade with other governments. That is not their concern. They have one and only one duty: to secure the rights of their citizens.
I recognize and respect that you would break the law to stop child abuse, and that’s a really good thing. However, I do not believe it’s a good thing for preventing child abuse to be illegal: a system which lets abusers run free but punishes those who prevent abuse (keep in mind that you would be punished by my government if you simply offered a safe haven to my beaten child) is deeply flawed, in my opinion. As is a system in which a child abuser’s punishment, and a child saver’s punishment, depend on the relative “military” strength of the contracting governments.
Keep in mind that according to the Libertarian principle, if your government tried to protect you from my government’s punishment, your government would likely be running afoul of the libertarian principle, wouldn’t it? After all, you initiated force against me: how is protecting you from the proper punishment for that initiated force in keeping with the libertarian law?
Daniel
Certainly any system is liable to such abuses. A majoritarian system can legalize gang rape by voting it in. Granted that isn’t likely, but it’s equally unlikely that a libertarian government will legalize beating children who, after all, are rights bearing entities and therefore protected by the same ethic of noncoercion. I could easily say that you have made your hypothetical government nonlibertarian by definition.
Regarding your question, it could be argued that I am defending the child, and using defensive force on her behalf since she is incapable of doing it. But notwithstanding any other consideration, my government’s contract is with me. It does not view itself as the world’s moral police.
Pre-emptively, I would like to request that we drop the doomsday hypothetical scenarios on all sides. I don’t care to hear yours, and I’m sure you don’t care to hear mine countering them. Let us all stipulate that nothing is perfect and that people can find a way to circumvent almost anything. The exercizes in these things prove nothing and take a lot of time. As well, they are taking us off the topic of marriage and divorce, which I suppose is still of interest to the OP.
Yes it is, and I apologize for not getting back to this thread as much as I would like.
ISTM that the core function of the government of Libertaria is to guarantee that its citizens are free from coercion. Child abuse certainly seems to fall under that heading; thus I don’t see an issue. You cannot contract away your children’s rights not to be abused, because they are not your rights, but your children’s.
The right to be free from coercion is one of the basic rights under the social contract between Libertaria and its citizens, even its minor citizens. Maybe children in Libertaria don’t have full rights of contract, as they don’t in the US and Europe. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the basic human right of freedom from abuse. Same in Libertaria.
We can quibble over what constitutes abuse, but that is a red herring (IMO). Assume that whatever would fit the definition of “abuse” is the standard in Libertaria. And I would expect that you cannot contract away anyone else’s right to be free from coercion, regardless of what organization you are dealing with.
Am I correct in saying that you would not classify Libertaria as a majoritarian system? Libertaria could not legalize gang rape, since that would violate the ethic of non-coercion.
I am envisioning Libertaria as having a constitution, laying out the basic principle of non-coercion, and (I guess) a list of the necessary rights that follow from it - freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, of contract, etc. And I imagine some kind of judiciary to interpret those rights. Would it be a hijack to discuss those?
If it is, never mind. Is there, however, some kind of social services agency that works to intervene in cases of child abuse? I would recommend (as a Founding Father of Libertaria - all hail my completely arbitrary authority to set it up) a non-voluntary tax on all citizens to fund such an agency.
How say you, fellows citizens of the only truly free country on earth? Do we tax our citizens to create a police agency?
Regards,
Shodan
But if we assume that there would be no problems in Libertaria there would be nothing to debate, right? You might see these hypotheticals as “doomsday” scenarios, but others obviously see them as very real problems with the (so far) very hypothetical Libertarian government.
Then in this matter Libertarian government is no different than the government we now have(or any other government for that matter.) If your government would be duty bound to defend your contract against other Libertarian goverments then wouldn’t the Marraige/Divorce situation of people divorcing and moving to separate areas create problems that would occupy large chunks of each governments time and budget?
Would there be but one central Libertarian government occupying this land then? I thought that there would be separate governments contracting and negotiating with each other-that is how Liberal has been describng the situation. If there are many separate Libertarian governments then people could(and most certainly would) organize governments that follow their own principles, no matter how low those principles are. The solution would be to have many Libertarian governments that were ruled over be a central Libertarian government that established a basic “bill of rights” and rules that the member “states” would have to agree to.
Yes, you are. As you say, the driving principle is noncoercion, not majority desire.
I don’t mean to play thread cop, and it’s your thread anyway, so you can discuss whatever you want. So can anyone else, I reckon. But the mean old neighbor scenarios are tiresome, and always amount merely to a different way to solve the same problem. My eyes glaze over at those. Besides, I have a mean old neighbor right now, and George Bush is doing nothing about it.
With respect to your vision, that is certainly one way to do it. My own preference, however, is to give the maximum possible leeway to arbitration to establish over time (and over changing times) exactly what does and does not constitute coercion. Therefore, I prefer a very minimal Constitution. A right that can be written down can be erased. As Libertarians, we operate from the assumption that people have all possible rights, and that government has none. Therefore, I advocate a single law, and one that focuses government on a single task. Something like this: “Every citizen shall be guaranteed freedom from coercion.”
We can begin by knowing basic things. Don’t assault people. Don’t steal people’s money. That sort of thing. The citizen learns to think of his rights in terms of boundaries. For me, it is important that arbitration be allowed to consider complaints on a case by case basis, so that things won’t happen like someone suing me for pollution because I exhaled.
You could do that, I guess, but in my opinion government should protect children from abuse anyway, and it shouldn’t be anything more special than protecting anyone else from abuse. Protection from abuse is the very essence of libertarian govnerment.
Well yes, but they’re problems for any system. Child abuse? Poverty? Toxic landfills? Google these and you will see that they are practically pandemic in the world we live in right now. If you insist on bringing up the mean old man in Libertaria who beats his kids, then I’m going to insist on bringing up the mean old social worker in Florida who ignores you beating your kids.
Quite possibly, which is a good reason for governments to be discerning with respect to whom they will contract with. You have a right to give your consent to be governed, but you don’t have the right to force someone to govern you.
The problem here is that, as Lib pointed out, some form of coercion is allowable, desirable, and necessary for children. We may guarantee that all citizens are free from coercion; but if we therefore don’t allow parents to snatch their children out of a busy street, we’ve created an unworkable society.
At the same time, if we allow parents to beat their children bloody for showing disrespect, we’ve also got a problem. This isn’t a doomsday scenario: even in our society where child abuse is illegal, it happens a lot, and in a society where it isn’t illegal, it’s silly to believe that it would happen less.
For a society to work, I maintain that there must be strict definitions of what level of coercion a parent may or may not use against his child. If no such definitions exist globally, then you’ll get multiple smaller governments fighting wars over the issue, as members of one try to protect the members of the other and run into a humongous irreconcilable difference.
And if such definitions do exist globally, then we’ve moved beyond Libertania having just one law.
Daniel
Correction: I’ve always conceded that that is one possible way that things could arise. It is likely that, over time, the more successful governments will succeed and the others fail. Eventually, I would suspect that only a few (or maybe even one) would emerge as viable. Same as now, you might say, except that, if the few are libertarian, then you will always have the option of forming your own with like minded people. Governments that sit on their laurels will find that they’re wearing them in the wrong place, and that their citizens do not re-up when their contracts expire.
Ack! :eek: No! No, no, never! I never said such a thing, and all the history for years shows that I have said the opposite. Children may NOT be coerced, neither by their parents nor by anyone else. Parents may use only defensive and retaliatory force against their children, and then only as much as necessary to secure their rights.
I misunderstood, then; I apologize. Looking back, I see you said:
And you’re right, that doesn’t imply that adults may ever use coercion against children.
However, I have a hard time believing that any human society would function that way. If my neighbor decides he really wants to play dodgecar, I suppose I can imagine a society where I cannot prevent him from doing so (or, let’s remove the cars from the situation and say that he wants to see how far out in the ocean he can swim). If my child wants to see how far out in the ocean she can swim, I can’t imagine any functional society in which it is illegal for me to prevent her from doing so. Preventing her from swimming out into the ocean, or punishing her for doing so (because, for example, I know that she has poor judgment of her own capabilities and could swim out further than she’d be able to swim out from) is neither defensive nor retaliatory.
Daniel
Whew! Thank you. 
Well, with respect to the car, I imagine the road owner wouldn’t look kindly on any sort of jackassery that might hurt his revenue and expose him to suits (for allowing it). But not only MAY you retrieve your child from the ocean, you MUST retrieve her. You are responsible to protect her life (she has a right to life) because she is incapable (as a nonconsentual entity) from protecting her own. Sexual abuse and that sort of thing is equally taboo in Libertaria on the same principle — the child’s inability, by definition, to give meaningful consent.