Lighthouses and Giant Squids: A Debate about Libertarianism

Great Debates
221

To me, this begs the question. To go back to my fact pattern, X’s government has a contractual duty to protect him from coercion. Disregarding ethics only comes into play if X’s government believes X initiated the force or fraud. But, as I’ve argued, I think there’ll be a strong tendency for governments to adopt rules of arbitration that favor their own contractees over those of other governments (by being victim-friendly, for one). Otherwise, what incentive would customers–err, citizens–have for contracting with them? So Y’s arbiter says that X initiated the force or fraud. X’s arbiter, when X brings his own claim in that court, says that Y initiated the force and that X killed Y in self-defense. Now both governments are legitimately and contractually justified in responding with force against the citizen of the other government.

They need not be unethical, because–and this is a crucial point–it will not usually be clear who initiated the coercion. Different arbiters, under different rules, will arrive at different outcomes. And it’s likely that the outcome under X’s government’s rules of arbitration–insofar as X is claiming coercion against a different government–will favor X. In doing this, the arbiters need not be corrupt; they need not be rooting for X themselves–it’s very easy to design rules of procedure which systematically favor one side over the other. And as long as the action is brought in the court contracted by the victim, I think the courts will have victim-friendly rules. Or else they’d lose that business.

Anyway. I also disagree that Mr. Smith’s army must be capable of defeating mine; I think all that’s necessary is that the contracting government believes itself capable of engaging mine. But that argument’s of lesser interest to me.

222

I understand your points, Gaderene. I just don’t agree that the situation must be as you describe.

On a sidenote, it’s interesting to me that this thread seems to have shown me to have a better view of humanity than I thought I had. I am going to think about that for a while.

Enjoy the holdiays.

223

You too. :slight_smile:

224

This is going to sound somewhat abstract, but Lib, what does “free will” mean to you? And where do you draw the line between coercive and non-coercive influence?

-Ulterior

225

Sorry, didn’t see Libertarian’s good-bye post. In that case, I’ll open it up to everyone in this thread.

Cheers to everyone for a spirited discussion.

-Ulterior

226

I am a strong believer of libertarianism. Just about everything that they advocate, I advocate and want for myself and my country.

Our government is too big, and America has too many laws governing every miniscule detail of your life. Especially after 9/11. 9/11 just gives the huge American government an excuse to weild even more power over the populace, to take away civil liberties in the name of “security”. Friends, there is no security.

The strongest government should be your local government, your city, county or municipal government, then the state government, and finally the national government. Our local governments are closer to the people that they serve and are more accountable by the citizenry.

Most everything that the federal government has its hands on should be privatized. Do away with the post office, if you want something mailed, go to FedEX, UPS or DHL. Parents should be required to pay to send their child to school. If you have six children on a fixed income, you will be known as irresponsible. Things like roads and bridges can be paid by user fees paid for by people driving the cars. Additional monies for that fund would come from bus services that of course, private industry would provide.

The local governents will be given stronger powers, and its citizenry will have the right to vote to allow certain activities in their communities. Items like drug (at least medicinal marijuana) legalization, gambling, alcohol laws will be controlled by the local government, not an overseer from Washington DC.

Taxes should come from one source, sales taxes. Unlike the IRS, everyone pays into the system and you do not have people hiding money because you can’t and there would be no need. Since government now operates under limited authority and scope, these taxes will be very reasonable and all could pay without trouble.

The states provide for the payment of the state militias, police, transportation workers, and prisons only. Prisons under a libertarian society will mean that a prisoner works for his three hots and a cot. If the inmate wants medical care, they will have to pay or have insurance like everyone else in the system.

The Federal Government should provide for a national defense only. Repeal most cabinet offices, the Department of Education has never educated anyone and the Department of Agriculture has never made the corn grow. Of course, REPEAL SOCIAL SECURITY!!! What gives this government the right to take money away from me just to give it back when I am old and gray? It makes no sense, never has. I can take this money and put it in a IRA or other savings account, save up for a home, or piss it away drinking beer at the local Hooters. The only people that deserve money from the government are those who were hurt or who have died defending the US against enemies, whether they are soldiers, or police.

Lastly, the United States gets out of foreign entanglements and situations, especially the Middle East. Suspend all military aid worldwide. My dollars I earn should stay with me instead of propping up Israel, getting irresponsible countries like Kuwait out of jams, and guarding a nation like South Korea, a country that hates Americans and foreigners in general (I lived five monthes in Korea, so I know).

Writer,P.J. O’Roarke, Rep. Ron Paul, Gov. Gary Johnson (NM), and William Weld (Mass) are libertarians, but these people will not join the movement because the federal government and its election laws are forever rigged in favor of the elephant and the jackass. Gary Johnson would make a wonderful President, but it will not happen.

Look up www.lp.com for other platform issues. They are a hell of a lot better than the Republicans and Democrats, which are two organizations supported by your tax dollar.

Liberty is good.
SENOR

227

Ah, yes. Liberty is good. I don’t know how I didn’t see that before.

Well, if liberty is good, then hell–libertarianism must be for me. When do I get to meet the giant squids I’m always hearing about?

228

Good? Yes. Optimal? No.

Reasonable isn’t really a standard I’m comfortable applying to an ethic in the abstract. It seems to me that the application of the ethic is the proper context for evaluation of “reasonableness”.

My view of teh ethic you describe is quite similar to my view of ethical pacifism. It is a good ethic, but not an optmial one for human beings as I understand them. There are specific contexts in which each ethic can be quite reasonably applied, but I do not think it would be reasonable to apply them generally and unliaterally throughout a single nation/territory/society.

229

(By unilaterally I meant in only one nation/territory/society with the rest of the world continuing in their varied governing structures as they do today. I certainly wasn’t imagining that anyone was arguing that Lib was proposing that his ethic be forced upon anyone in a “unary contract” (except children and teh mentally infirm, of course, but that is not an exception which I find unreasonable)

230

These are three steps which will bypass irrationality through physical manifestation and implimentation. These three steps do not actually violate anybody’s consent.

1.) Widely distributed free public painless suicide machines designed by human beings to assure efficiency and painlessness.

2.) Publicly owned legalized prostitution. You can incorperate the pipeline, just not the business of selling sex itself. (allow sex to be a section of e-bay, where you can literally put yourself up with no minimum required bid for sale).

3.) Voting system which gives reciepts, and with which non-transprency is coded out completely; publicly owned and funded with a one week national holiday during the election week.

Those three acts will organize any human government into an ideal. In a system where capital is being abstracted, these are the only measures (absent rare individuals who can simulate these systems without having them present) that will clean up the corruption of irrationality. This system is designed to make rationality the selective value for success, rather than the ability to hide irrationality from sight.

-Justhink

231

As far as the US is concerned; or any society which uses written law because they have abstracted written communication; those three codes will self-organize and decrypt all irrationality and corruption with regards to consent vs. consent violation. The first two will have an immediate impact in the unequal distribution of resource using slavery. The last one will change the constitution to have it’s law catch up with the self-organizing cure that this code impliments. Once can save the degree of withdrawl that irrational people will suffer when they are shown to be social hypocrites down to the core in a means which they can observe by coding the law above and beyond these three implimentations.

We really don’t require much written law outside of these three… simply that the first two are considered irreversable and not subject to voter change. People need to understand that they cannot declare their superiority when they are simply violating consent by enslaving others through irrationality. If the logic refuses to simulate this system internally, then the pressure needs to be abstracted externally so that people have the pressure to solve for consent without simulation; and thus be rationally sentient. That is your solution. I guarantee that it does work and will work, and only violates the consent of individuals who breed so that they can have human-slave-machines; there is no other reason to object to this use of consent appropriation within a society.

-Justhink

232

Interesting–and you guarantee this with what, exactly?

And how, exactly, do you imagine that step (2) is going to change the breeding habits of all members within a society? I’ve lived in a few places that had legalized prostitution, and I do not recall witnessing any such revolution in social behavior.

233

Tests can be conducted to show the effects in groups of tens of thousands to observe the effects before instituted on the larger population. Before one even institutes the testing phase, one can institute the statistics phase for allowing the testing phase to occur with reason.

The first phase can be run with regards to how much pressure humans endure before selecting painful suicide. How much pressure humans endure before selecting painless suicide.

I believe that one key experimental calculation for all of these tests is something called ‘contradiction frequency’; which is the precise number of contradictions being run through a specific time interval. With a single word, a contradiction frequency can be as high as 15 contradictions depending upon the moment that word is uttered. A little more research than my own can etablish a cap which cannot be crossed as a threshold.

People are given equal shares and contrdiction frequency is calculated for each being in observation, as is response to contradiction frequency for each being in observation. I am quite certain that beings who exhibit the highest contradiction frequency with regards to a conflict of confessed belief and behavior will show an astonishing leap in statistical success with regards to desire fulfillment. The humans selected will have no bearing on this result - although older individuals will in very small percentages select based on a ever so slightly reduced contradiction frequency level. The point of this experiment is to show that we live in a counter-intelligent society which does not actually select intelligent or consistent (behavior/belief)/time.

Once this is established, controls will be run to show which factors place the pressure upon groups to select the lowest contraiction frequencies. Again, I am quite certain that the three items that I submitted will come up as the most self-organizing fixes to this dilema of irrational selection process.

The first one eliminates the encryption of murder/fraud/suicide beyond death exploit. A persons suicidal tension can be calculated to produce work without the feeling of rational entitlement and without the desire to kill themselves as a result of being a slave labor. The energy which can be leeched from these calculations will show a dramatic reduction when the being is granted a painless suicide machine contructed by human beings for that purpose, not owned by the government or beaurocracy, but simply sitting there like a public park, usable by anyone at anytime. It would be illegal to attempt to stop someone from using such a machine through the use of physical contact. It will not take long for the cascade effect of abuse regarding the slavery of individuals with this line to perculate throughout all of society. Society will begin to self-organize to produce national law which coincides with natural law, so as to not watch the ruin of their society when slaves are given a true option with which a slave-master and others in the community can actually veiw the evidence of slavery statistically. The first to go will be those with the lowest contradiction frequencies; the highest national assets… from there the system will self-organize.

The second fix deals with the issue of counter-intelligent sexual selection; and the use of this existential pressure to control labor practices. In our current system, females have the highest sexual power; and dictate counter-intelligent policy by using this power to select the most counter-intelligent individuals (those with this highest contradiction frequency). To ease the pressure which perculates wealth into pockets possessed by the most irrational beings in society, this attacks the witholding of using ones body as a product; which currently is consuming more existential energy than capital - and is reducing the rationality of the population as a whole. I personally know of no society on earth that doesn’t control prostitution through corperate hands - in this instance; the silent hands. Even in legalized systems, the product is ‘liscenced’ to whatever degree, so as to prevent any human being from actually earning independance from the act of selling their bodies for a year or what-have-you. As a social fix, providing females with capital will place less pressure on their need to select counter-intelligently for any selection; especially sexual selection - this will invariably distribute the existential reward to more logical centers of society; to re-enforce the use of logic and ethics in living and gives them more power to deselect those who abuse logical contradictions to violate consent with short term results in mind. Such an de-corperatized movement in America will shift the wealth around in vast quantites. Assuming 40 million females sold at contracts of $1000.00 per day; you’re looking at 4 trillion in flow over one years course. To protect their offspring from the suicide machines above, they will be required to detect and select rationality and non-contradiction over counter-intelligence; they will also have the power to effectively make these decisions without feeling trapped by the current system.

The third one is obvious.
The first two systems place extreme pressure on irrationality to become rational by opening pipelines which are the evidence that society is more interested in consent rather than slavery. People will not and cannot help to use these pipelines in an intelligent means before they become enslaved or degenerated towards using them for wholly counter-intelligent means. The greatest evidence of counter-intelligence is the use of murder before suicide; the act of which is necessarily a form of brainwashed slavery. This type of slavery will be extremely difficult to hold in a society that has these pipelines openned up. The machines will select the individuals or visa-versa before the individuals become living representations of the machines inversions. More than anything, it’s a put up or shut up decryption to rhetoric - which gives rhetoric zero selective value. Statistics yeilded from the usage of these machines will detect corruptions which have not even been spoken or are directives hiding behind the office of the highest officials. The subconscious will detect these and select the machines before the drawn out effects of torturous slavery are observed in investigations 50 years later.

-Justhink

234

Ah, so your “guarantee” is a mixture of faith and gibberish.

Your first point hinges upon the assumption that it is fear of the process which prevents many people from killing themselves, not any factor of the result.

Your second point hinges upon the belief that the only reason more women do not prostitute themselves openly is that the house/pimp/agent takes too large a cut of their potential profit.

Your third point is “obvious”.

Mix in a hypothetical statistical analysis, data from experiemnts never actually performed and voila, paradise.

Personally I think the Buddha wrapped it in a more attractive package, but I’ve never been very good at judging between messiahs.

235

Geez, step away from the boards for a week and five pages fly by…

I think Gadarene raises a whole bunch of good points, to which I’d add: does Libertopia have jury trials or witnessess?

Seating a jury depends in part on the coercive power of the state to require individuals to sit, and to require that their employees not fire them for taking jury duty time. Does Libertopia have professional jurors, paid a full wage for their time?

And in the real world, if a crucial witness refuses to testify, the court can subpoena them. I take it that in Libertopia requiring that a person testify at an arbitration would be an initiation of force, particularly if the witness is a noncontracting party to whatever government is holding the arbitration. Can Libertopia compel witnesses?

I’m concerned for the state of due process in Libertopia.

I also think Lib hasn’t really answered Gad’s bear trap hypothetical. The real world correctly recognizes that parents cannot keep their children tied to a leash like a dog, and that children wander, and that property owners who own property where children will foreseeably wander owe a duty to those trespassing children. Evidently this is not the case in Libertopia; apparently, Libertopia requires that children be kept tied to the front porch at all hours, lest they run across the next-door neighbor’s lawn.

This example makes me wonder about the limits of trespass in Libertopia. What if trespass is bourne of necessity? I am in a boat and am caught in a sudden storm. Fearing for my safety, I tie my boat to Lib’s pier. Assuming I do not damage the pier, can Lib maintain an action for trespass against me? Indeed, can he push me off the pier back into my boat, cut the ropes tethering me to pilings, and let me drift back into harm’s way?

236

In places where it is illegal to prostitute, the reasons are obvious… they will be arrested.

In places where it is legal, the equivilent of mafia rings organize to create slave labor. If you’re not in the ring, but an indenpendant, your advertising will not be as fruitful and if you actually begin to succeed, you will be killed. If we create a publicly owned system where individuals can post their prostitution of themselves (for free or whatever price they deem), then the market for this patriarchical system will vanish. More than anything on earth right now at this time, it is the illegality of prostitution which creates and maintains the patriarchical system from an equal opportunity system which judges human value with selection as opposed to finincial value upon birth or through abusing consent in ones lifetime.

Death and Sex are the two resources being witheld to create the vast majority of easily remedied human complaints about life and about others. Withloding these systems of consent allows the pockets of consent abuse to exist… it’s that simple. If these consents are abstracted outwards, the pockets vanish and choice becomes rational and consentual rather than servitude upon birth to whoever was born the biggest idiot.

-Justhink

237

Result was the primary reason I talked about.
Leaving a bloody carcass for some unsuspecting person to find is one of the reasons people do not commit suicide.
Becoming a vegetable because of failure or becoming a life-long state of pharmacuetical industry tests is another result which prevents this from occurring.

These are pressures which compell people to not commit suicide which are dissolved when the process is abstracted outwards into a machine designed by human beings for the purpose of working and being in an environment where the bodies are designated as being where they are supposed to go. there are no unsuspecting corpse suprizes by some 5 year old walking down the street that this person considers.

Obviously, someone committing suicide is not interested in their family or friends because those people are using them as slave labor. Clearly, the family and friends will grieve at the loss of their slave machine which did work for them. The family does not however own this human being.

By abstracting this process outwards, the undesirable results are coded out of the act. This is a phenomenon people devote incredible resource towards when it allows them to enslave other individuals with technology; to shield them from from the pain which they are causing in the process. It is a complimentary system to the cowardice which procures from those who are being padded by technology to hold the delusion that they worked for it. It places the poressure on these individuals which they are hiding and creates an equillibrium of technology developed with the ideal of choice and consent and the lack of need to abuse other human beings.

The only functional reason to judge a person for committing suicide is to see their value as slave labor. You can hide it behind religious delusion, but that’s the only functional reason for such a sequence of behavior.

Abstracting suicide into the public domain holds the evidence of writing law or committing an act to the statistical accountability of the ethic of that act. If you don’t pay people a certain wage and they all kill themselves, you know that you need to modify your wage pay; assuming you can get your business back if you lost a team of world expert specialists.

It also allows people a clear vision that they have a choice, they don’t have to tolorate injustice, they don’t have to work for a retard… the process really starts cleaning up logical corruption from the inside out and the outside in - it’s like injecting penicillin into a bacteria culture; it just kills the corruption and hypocrisy surrounding consent abuse whether it’s coded into law or personality.

-Justhink

238

Why am I not suprised? Another big Libertarian thread, but not even an answer to the most basic of questions about how your proposed governance would function. I mean, you can post reams of text going on about how evil current governments are with that irritating self-righteous tone, but you can’t even answer an incredibly basic question about how your ideal form of government would work. The reason your answers on the topic keep contradicting each other is, as far as I can see, that you don’t really have an answer; either your ideal form of government produces results you don’t like (the crazy neighbor blowing away kids for trespassing) or it does something you consider evil (governs someone who has not initiated force and who does not consent to be governed by it).

I guess I’ll just post a link back to this thread whenever you start going on about how Libertaria is so wonderful and all other governmental systems are evil - certainly, if you’ve got time to post more of your usual ramblings about Libertaria, you’ve got time to answer the basic questions about how it works.

239

Ahh, but are they Libertarians - that is, do they buy into the whole LP platform, not just the idea of smaller government? And do they believe in the sort of thing that Libertarian advocates here (multiple arbitration companies, etc.), or even just the stuff that you posted above?

Speaking of the stuff that you posted above, can you support any of it with some kind of arguments or evidence? Just telling us that user fees and local governance will solve all of our troubles because the LP says so is not what I’d call a good argument. This is a 5-page thread, the people here are not exactly afraid of debating something.

It has a lot more to do with the fact that the LP is primarily a platform for fruitcakes to rant than a serious political party. For all of the complaining about how demopublicans have the election laws rigged in their favor, I’ve seen little evidence that they manage to prevent the LP from doing anything. North Carolina has fairly strict requirements to get onto the ballot, yet the LP in NC managed to have more ballot slots than real candidates (“real candidates” being “people who run an actual campaign, not fruitcakes who avoid the press or provide answers like ‘I am not the best candidate for this position’”). Is it that the press doesn’t give LP candidates equal time? Well, I noticed a suprising number of refusals to take advantage of free TV time from LP candidates around here, so that doesn’t seem to be it. Plus, it would be absurdly hypocritical of the LP to claim that the private press owed them anything…

If you believe this alleged electoral bias is really keeping the LP from winning elections, provide some evidence. It looks to me like the ballot restrictions merely serve to hinder people who aren’t really running a campaign from getting on the ballot. We had a thread on this very topic shortly after the last US elections, you may want to ressurect it.

The Republicans and Democrats can at least appeal to more than 5% of the voters, which is what is needed to actually do anything in our form of government. Libertarians should think about possibly doing something to appeal to existing voters (or to get non-voters voting) rather than alienating potential voters by just posting and speaking whatever strikes their fancy in the indignant, self-righteous, condescending tone they always seem to use.

240

I think I will keep this one simple, since this thread is nominally about Libertarians utopian vision not justhink’s utopian vision:

Cite?

Cite?

Cite?

[response unavailable in this forum]

Cite and/or formal demonstration?

Translation?

I find your grasp of human nature is nearly as impressive as your clarity of expression. I truly cannot fathom the utopian path which would result in mass worker suicides in the face of inadequate wages.