Well, I think you can answer that. May I come into your home and witness to you and your family about the blessings and prosperity of Jesus Christ as much and as often as I want? If not, why not? If so, what’s your address?
And since it’s extremely unlikely that a nation of 270,000,000 people would have 100% agreement on anything, a social contract would never come into existence.
As for majority rule, no democracy could exist without it. Therefore, you must be against democracy.
As for “witnessing,” no, you can’t come into my home without my permission because it’s my house. How does that take away your right to speak freely in a public place?
I’m afraid you’ve gotten it all mixed up. That is exactly the circumstance in which a social contract exists and is forced upon whoever happens to fall within the arbitrary borders claimed by governors.
There was, of course, no “nation of 270,000,000” when Lock (and others) conceived of the social contract.
I’m surprised that a person of your intelligence can’t grasp this: people may consent to be governed by majorities, thus establishing democracies. Tyranny occurs when people are forced to yield their consent against their will.
Attempting to obfuscate the matter with so-called “public property” merely displaces the problem by one more step. You have no “right to speak” at such a place, save whatever your governors will allow.
I cannot walk into a courtroom and begin witnessing because the owners will not allow it. Whoever calls the shots with respect to a thing is its owner — whether de facto or de jure. Some ownership is legitimate; some is not. A thief is not the rightful owner of property that he has stolen, even if that thief is a governor. Or a gang calling itself “the majority”.
If you are a victim of tyranny in this country, please explain how (if not for me, then for anyone else reading this thread who doesn’t know you).
Lib, that’s the way it is with ALL rights; they are ALL limited in some way. Your right to speak ends when you engage in slander or libel. Your right to be violent is permitted only when self defense is necessary. You did not have the right to vote till you became 18 years old.
I’m surprised that a person of your intelligence can’t grasp the concept of public property. A nation’s citizens own the property; the governors administrate it at our direction with money collected in the form of taxes. (And I hope you don’t start your “taxation is theft” shit again.)
**And who are the owners? Not the judge in the courtroom. It’s not the bailiff. It ain’t the mayor of the city or the city council or the governor of the state nor is it the state legislators nor is the federal government.
It’s the taxpayers. And if a majority of the taxpayers say you cannot witness for Jesus in a courtroom, well, tough noogies for you. No one said the system is perfect, but only a complete and utter fool believes that perfect systems are even possible.
(BTW: I’ll be back tomorrow, but after that, I’ll be gone from the board for a few weeks so I can see some of my relatives in another state, so reply while you can.)
I admit I’ve always been a little torn over the flag burning issue.
As a libertarian, I abhor any form of governmental regulation that attempts to limit an individual’s right to express one’s view.
As a (somewhat) patriotic American, I’ve always been a little squeamish of the affect flag burning has on the veterans of this country who fought and died defending our liberties.
That’s why I like the solution a group of southern legislators had…
They overwhelming passed a state law after the Flag Amendment died in Congress which lowered the penalty for assaulting a flag burner caught in the act to something like a Class D Misdemeanor with the maximum penalty of $5 and no time served.
Call me a barbarian, but I consider that creative legislating
Love that sig, JohnBckWld. That leads my favorite Ice-T album from high school days. That was done as a comedy act, right? You’re going to come back and tell me that it’s John Ashcroft in two months time.
But it’s not against one’s will in our country. The reason that the social contract works and the the thing that makes majority rule moral (in the case of most (all?) democracies) is one crucial point: the right to leave. Hate the high taxation? Sell your property, get it’s fair market value, go somewhere else more to your liking. The phrase used is “Vote with your feet”
The social contract and majority rule are only unacceptible to me if the person (excluding criminals) are NOT free to leave with their property (or it’s cash value).
Case in point: Denver has obscene, (though mostly unenforced) gun-grabbing/property confiscation laws. I hated living there, yet it’s what a majority of the voters wanted (forget the constitutional issue for the moment). I was able to leave and move to a county with laws more to my liking, so I’m happy. AND the people of Denver are happy since a weapon-owner has left.
It’s impossible to have a democracy (or, any kind of government) that requires 100% approval. (Besides, if you get 100% approval on anything, you don’t need a government to enforce it.) I’m comfortable with striving towards libertarian goals, but I’m also comfortable with the idea that Democracies that allow people to leave with their property (or fair-market equivilant) are acceptible.
Fenris
I respectfully disagree. I see having to bring in limitations of rights as being a pretty clear sign that something is wrong. In this example, that the rights being limited aren’t actually rights.
I believe that true rights can not limited and that if two rights come into conflict with each other than at least one isn’t a right.
Oh. and ‘taxation is theft’ coming up in a discussion of libertarianism? God forbid :rolleyes:
So your vision of democracy doesn’t include the notion that the rights of the minority must be respected? Whatever the majority wants goes?
Well, since you won’t deal with the subject we were discussing, let’s just deal with the subject you’ve raised.
Tyranny, libertarianly speaking, is defined as the usurpation of rights. Rights are defined as the authority accrued to property ownership.
Any man who is fined for building a toolshed in his backyard without the permission of his local governer, any man who is sent to prison because he smokes marijuana in his living room, any man who is brought to trial because he offered to give a blow job to another man — these are tyrannies.
Ethically, a man has the right to build on his own property, to smoke whatever he wants, to have sex with other men who consent. These are rights inherent to man (as I defined rights for you). These are rights that you no doubt consider petty and worthless to preserve.
It is from men believing that they know what’s best for all of us, men coveting and envying the property of other men, men proclaiming power and authority over others that tyranny is born.
The way rights are limited is the way I’ve explained it to you, what, four thousand times now over the course of three years? The owners — those who call the shots — with respect to property prescribe rights. Governors who have usurped ownership of the very land where your home is built, they say when you can speak. They say when you can be violent. They say when you can vote.
As always, you don’t listen and therefore assign to me arguments that I have never made and then attack them. Taxation is a mugging.
If you walk into a department store, select the items you want, pay for them and leave, then you have committed an act of consent. But if you walk into the store, and are met by armed thugs who take what they want from you and give you whatever (if anything) they please, then you have been mugged.
Though you’ve claimed many times that a nation’s citizens own the property, and though you’ve claimed many times that governors administrate at “our” direction, you’ve always avoided dealing with the obvious contradictions: no citizen may build a home in a national park; no citizen may sleep on a public bench; no citizen may pick an apple to eat from a tree “owned” by the citizens.
You’ve made ownership into a meaningless term. You fancy that we all are part of your little utopian world where whole nations of people were not relegated to rocky land where they couldn’t grow food, where people were never interned because of their ancestry, where prisons are not overflowing with men whose sole crime is that they peacefully and honestly pursue their own happiness in their own way while being poor and black.
Some people feel the need to run the lives of others, to draw the lines that suit them and apply them to everyone, to deprive hard working people of the fruits of their own labor. They are content to have their rights dispensed to them by magistrates, and they believe that the playing field should be leveled by making other people equally weak.
As Judge Stephen Cohen said in a Florida court when he declared that henceforth he would strike the notation “A.D.” from all court documents, “Jewish writings often refer to dates as C.E., for Common Era, and B.C.E., Before Common Era. The abbreviations allow Jews to refer to the modern calendar without acknowledging its Christian underpinnings.” His declaration was made without the consent of anyone else.
Gah. Before you change the subject — again — let’s deal with the leap from it’s “the taxpayers” to it’s “a majority of the taxpayers”. I would appreciate it greatly if you would stop equivocating on that matter. Please say majority when you mean majority, and please stop speaking of both a majority and a whole as interchangeable enitities.
Also, please remember that prisoners, including poor blacks arrested for drug possession, pay tax but do not vote. The fact is that people who do not or can not vote have no say. The fact is that people who voted for the loser have no say. And the fact is that the people who voted for the winner have had all they say they are allowed to have.
Lucky for you, I reckon, that you aren’t one of the more than one million dark skinned men in prison who cannot go to see their relatives in another state. But I suppose that you will reason that that is as it should be. After all, it does not inconvenience you. And the majority mob has spoken.
Ah, I see. So long as a man is willing to relinquish the property that his family has tilled and nurtured for generations, exchange it for whatever the highly regulated market will bear, abandon his neighbors, friends, and family to begin anew on yet another plot of land that is claimed by governers with guns, then all is fair. Got it.
What on earth were people complaining about? ;j
Pah. I knew that this thread would end up being hijacked into a discussion on libertarianism itself rather than how the tenets of libertariansim would be applied. Call me prescient, or something.
Why to libertarianism threads always seem to be started in the pit? Why can’t we start one in GD, just this once?
(Oh, OK, I’m indulging in whiney hyperbola that is demonstrably false. But the Big GD Libertarian Thread we were involved in just before the Great Purge got… well… purged. And I’m bitter).
pan
Hardly. There ARE protections for minorities, and should be. But a democracy cannot exist or function if it can be stopped completely by a minority of one person. There has to be some compromise, and as long as the people truley opposed to the situation can leave (with their property), it’s (IMO) the best real-world solution I can envision.
Fenris
Engage in massive deregulation of the market and buy land NOT from “governers with guns”(?) but from like-minded people in a community which shares your values.
Like I said in another post: I can’t think of a better real-world solution. If you (the generic “you”, not you specifically Lib) insist on 100 agreement before any law can be passed, you’ve just abolished ALL governments: democracy through totalitarianism and end up with anarchy. You’ve even removed the ablility of a libertarian form of government to govern.
Reductio ad absurem(sp) alert! 
Since, if it requires 100% consent of the governed, a libertarian government can’t act either. If I’m in a liberterian society and decide I’m a Commie and as such, all property is shared (so I have the right to go into stores and take whatever I want), and I don’t consent to be governed by Libertaria’s government, how dare they impose their will on me? I don’t consent to be governed by them, and as a Commie in a Libertarian society, I’m a minority of one! Will the Tyrannical Libertarian Overlords* impose their will on me, a minority?!
And I wouldn’t find “Well, with regards to property issues, you don’t NEED 100% consent of the governed.” a satisfying answer.
Fenris (not a Commie! Honest! Although I’d like to be a Tyrannical Libertarian Overlord*)
*I’ve never seen those three words together before. I got quite a chuckle after typing them. 
Before you start slinging insults around, you might want to actually read the thread, starting with the OP:
Bolding mine.
I was going to explain why I regard extreme libertarianism as a science-fiction fantasy that willfully ignores basic elements of human nature, but I can see that Libertarian is already (inadvertently) doing it for me.
What is so extreme about the inoffensive notion of peaceful honest people being free to pursue their own happiness in their own way? We understand that the “nature” of some humans is to recoil in horror at the thought of others being happy when they are not — and that is exactly why we advocate a government whose sole purpose is to keep us secure from them.
Fen!!! You found Libertaria!!!?? :eek:
I think your solution of sell all that you own and move is a bit eerie, frankly. The whole pack-em-up-and-move-em-out thing has spawned an awful lot of misery throughout history. I’m surprised you would Godwin so quickly.
Because one person’s pursuit of happiness may cause untold pain and suffering for others. Ask anyone whose loved one died of a drug overdose.
And those who have more property have more rights?
You’re right about the last two, but I agree with the first. Some people don’t know how to build structures safely and the state does have an interest in making sure that structures are built safely. Fewer people needing to go to the ER that way. Or do you honestly believe that everyone knows what he’s doing, that there are no fools in this world?
Wrong. You don’t know me as well as you think.
**Yeah, well, some people ARE idiots who don’t know what’s best for them. Have you never seen a man smoking while pumping gas into his car? Or crossing three lanes of traffic to get to the freeway exit? Check out other Pit threads to see how stupid some people are. We have a choice: we either let these fools kill themselves or we stop them before they kill themselves plus any innocent bystanders.
That’s gonna happen no matter what political system is in place. It’s part of human nature and libertarianism isn’t going to magically make it go away.
**And as long as those restrictions are reasonable, why should you have a problem? Or do you believe that there is no such thing as a reasonable restriction?
If a mugging isn’t a theft, what the fuck is it??
If you don’t like the way a certain store treats its customers, go to another store, though I doubt you’ll find one to your liking. You’re too difficult to please.
**Which I will continue to do.
**Nor should he. National parks were established to preserve the land. Building on the land does not preserve it. I suppose if you had it your way, there would be condominiums and houses on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and only the owners of those condos and homes would be permitted to even LOOK at the canyon.
Don’t you think your grandkids and great-grandkids and great-great-grandkids are entitled to view the canyon in its natural state?
Nor should he. And I was once homeless and would have killed for a park bench to sleep on. (Well, not really, but you know what I mean.) You wanna know why? What’s to prevent some other, more desperate, less ethical person from robbing or even killing the person in his sleep? What ethical society would make it easier for people to be crime victims?
I’ll be damned if I know where there are any publicly-owned apple trees. And if there are, I doubt that the fruit goes uneaten.
All right, you little shit, you are REALLY asking for it when you accuse me of being historically ignorant. I am part Cherokee, descended from survivors of The Trail of Tears, so don’t you even THINK I don’t know how the original inhabitants of this continent have been treated by The Powers That Be.
I know damned well what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War 2. (Did you know that George (Mr. Sulu) Takei’s family was among those interned? I bet you didn’t.)
I know damned well that some people are in prison because of racism. But I know (and I think you do too) that a lot of people in prison belong there. Why? BECAUSE THEY BROKE THE FUCKING LAW!!! If a person breaks the law, he should be in prison. Period.
And what’s wrong with this? If you don’t live in Florida, why the hell should you care? What a ridiculously trivial thing to object to!
Why should prisoners be permitted to vote? Sounds like a reasonable punishment to me. And how the hell do prisoners pay taxes?
Every citizen of age who is not in prison may vote. What is wrong with that?
Better luck next in the next election.
What more do they need?
Well, technically, I suppose it’d be robbery.
:d&r: