Is there a legal age of consent in Libertopia?

Thanks very much for your explanation Liberal - consider my ignorance fought :slight_smile:

Any chance of you reviving the Ask the Libertarian thread?

In retrospect, I can see how you might have gotten confused from what I wrote, Little Nemo. Sometimes, words that are in my head don’t all make it to the page. Let me be more clear to your specific question. It is always the government that has final determination of what is coercive and what is not. That is precisely what you, as a citizen, have given your consent for — arbitration over disputes. So yes, theoretically, anyone may take a matter to arbitration claiming an interest and seeking to suppress a coercion. But a person without a legitimate claim would be ill-advised in doing so since accusing a person of coercion without basis is an initiation of deception, something similar to the idea of a frivolous charge or lawsuit, and is therefore a coercion of its own. You run the risk that the party you’ve accused will be exonerated. It therefore behooves people who are strangers to learn about a situation before butting in. The grounds that justify an interested party charging coercion in your specific case is that government itself is committing a breach if it fails to live up to its contractual obligations. It has guaranteed to secure the rights of all citizens, and it therefore is in the interest of all citizens to be vigilant that it does so. Regarding the ages, again remember that age per se is not the issue. The arbiter upon his investigation will decide whether you are an adult 14-year-old or a child 21-year-old. Note also that parents are not allowed to make poor decisions with respect to their children. They are contractually bound to make only good decisions. Giving birth was itself a coercive act since the child did not consent to be born, and your care of him until adulthood is the means by which you mitigate your coercion. And government is the final arbiter over whether your decisions have been good or poor, and its criterion is the noncoercion principle. I realize this sounds like rambling, but it’s a lot of stuff to cover, and sometimes answers lead to more questions and whatnot. And again, I don’t think it’s a perfect system. It’s just one that I prefer. And please consider that it does not bind you to my own preference. You are entitled to be governed, if you wish, by whatever government you believe might best ensure your safety and happiness. A libertarian government, by definition, governs only volunteers.

I would, Margalita, except that there has never been a time that they have not become impossible to handle behemoths with twelve different people positing fifty different hypotheticals that, upon each response, become revised anew in manifold directions. It then becomes impossible for me to keep up with it all. Everyone (including me) becomes quite testy. People scream that I missed a point they made two pages back after I’ve already spent hours responding to others as new posts come in. And so it is best for my own mental health that I don’t. There is a wealth of information about classical liberalism on the Internet, and there are more books written about it than any other political philosophy. So those who want to learn more can do so easily. I don’t mind participating occasionally in a thread like this, particularly since your question was, as you pointed out, not dealt with as much as some others. All the best to you in your search for answers. Lib out. :slight_smile: