How about maintaining infrastructure? Roads, bridges, dams? Food inspection, drug testing(Rx)?
Fire and police? Is all that immoral?
Welcome to the thread WillFarnaby. I mentioned you upthread, along with your response to an example supporting the bizarre idea that taxes might ever serve a moral purpose:
You consider the eradication of smallpox to be “irrelevant.”
I herewith give you the opportunity to revise and extend that thought.
ETA: Regarding my post with early examples of taxation, do you agree that it was “immoral” for Oog the Baboon’s grandfather to make him share banana with his cousin?
Hell, I’m still waiting and hating on Glenn Beck for not having gotten his “planned” Libertopia commune/autonomous gated community/eco-social disaster area off the ground yet. I was promised quality schadenfreudetainment and goddamit the unwritten contract was breached, man.
I don’t want to misquote WillFarnaby. Here are his words:
Beyond implying that eradicating smallpox was irrelevant, he seems to imply it’s along a slippery slope to mandatory abortions. 
I think we should ask Farnaby to reduce his “philosophy” to a more basic and understandable level. I repeat:
WillFarnaby, Do you agree with OP that it was “immoral” for Oog the Baboon’s grandfather to make him share banana with his cousin?
Your quote of me was in direct response to a post of your own in which you claim that supporting mandatory vaccinations was some sort of “test”. I did not imply anything about slippery slopes. What I did was point out that just because smallpox vaccinations were beneficial to society, it doesn’t mean that they are somehow different from any other policy that would benefit society. So what I did was offer two parallel policies. Both policies would likely benefit society at first glance (which is the only glance that matters to statists). Both policies involve a gross violation of a person’s self. The only difference is one has more popular support.
In summary your “test” of my position on this supposed “market failure” doesn’t even measure what you intended it to. All it did was test whether or not I was in the current political mainstream.
On another note, you seem to be ignorant of biological history as well as libertarian political theory. You imply that humans evolved from baboons. I don’t believe that was the case. In any event, I’m unaware of a branch of libertarian political theory that advocates for the recognition of property rights among non-human animals, though I will not say it doesn’t exist.
This might be a valid argument if you have a government where one person is the king or the dictator. But in a democratic system, the government is the community. “A person” isn’t going to increase taxes; it has to be a consensus decision. So why would the community object to a decision they agreed upon?
More idiocy. I didn’t make that claim at all; hyenas could have been used for the example rather than baboons.
Yet, you still have refused to answer the question:
Was the coercion of Oog the baboon a case of immoral taxation? If not where do you draw the line?
Upthread I gave careful examples demonstrating that property rights are created by government. No response to that? Your misconception is so huge, I really do think it best to start with Oog the Baboon and focus in on your confusion that way.
The government isn’t the community. That’s where we differ. A democratic government differs from an autocratic or monarchic only in the way it gains legitimacy. All governments of all forms exist at the will of the people. This does not change the fact that government policies always benefit a small group at the expense of the rest, not the entire community. This is true of dictatorships as well as democracies.
Liberty? I want to walk all around the place as it is my natural right to do so. But I’m stopped all the fucking time by people who say that I’m “trespassing” on their “property”.
When I check their claims I notice that they got this piece of land from someone who got it from someone who “stole” it from someone who got it from someone who stole it from someone who was passing by and arbitrarily stated “this is my property and from now on I will forbid anyone to enter it”.
That’s completely fucked up and ludicrous and I can’t understand there are people supporting this silly “property” concept and accepting to be deprived of our natural right to roam the land!!!
That’s rather like saying “the only difference between consensual sex and rape is consent”. It’s true, but so what? It’s an important difference.
Problem is, our system of government wasn’t set up to just be “the people rule”. Our system of government was set up to guarantee individual rights, even if the people don’t like it.
Libertarianism is based on morality, it’s just a simple morality: people have the right to be free of coercion, except in cases where it’s absolutely necessary. “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” is not a sufficient justification to force people to do things against their will.
Well, you’re right: the government isn’t the community. I should have said the government is a tool of the community. But other than that, I stand by what I said. The government is answerable to the people who have power over it. And in a democratic system, that’s the community. This is the primary reason why democratic governments work better than other systems - the community can put a check on government when it begins to act against the perceived interests of the community.
Who do you feel the “small group” is who are using the government “at the expense of the rest” in a democratic system?
And like many other things which are based on a nebulous ideal, it’s just as unworkable. Socialism sounds great on paper, but it falls apart in the real world because people are self-centered assholes. For much the same reason, there’s never been a libertarian country in the history of the world.
That’s pretty much the definition of libertarianism, though, isn’t it?
However, while the democratic system is the best form of government we know, it does not work well enough for it to simply be “the things we do together” as I believe Liz Warren put it.
Political scientists for decades have been adding to our knowledge of how politics actually works. The public doesn’t react to check the government unless the government acts in a way directly threatening the public’s interests, and even then the government has an advantage in that it can use its bully pulpit and ability to rally supporters of the majority party to muddy the waters enough. A good example is Syria. If we were talking about President McCain, Democrats would be in apocalypse mode right now and there’s no chance that Congress would vote to authorize strikes. But since we have President Obama, even though the vast majority of the nation is against the strikes, Democrats don’t want to undermine their President so will probably vote in large majorities to pass a resolution if it comes to that.
We saw how this works when Jim Moran and Charlie Rangel were being interviewed together on one of the 24 hour news networks. Rangel is against attacking Syria. Moran scolded Rangel for undermining the President. Obviously if McCain was the President this wouldn’t be a concern for either of them.
But libertarians do that all the time. Look at the example clairobscur gave. He wants to exercise his liberty to move around by taking a walk in the woods. He’s not planning on building a house or cutting down any trees or hunting for deer; he just wants to take a walk. But in Libertaria (and most other places) the owner of that forest can tell clairobscur he can’t enter the woods - and he can use force against him if he does.
Now how do you define that as “absolutely necessary”? Sure property rights are good but are they so vital that they give the property owner the right to take away clairobscur’s liberties - his liberty to travel and even his life? That’s not a defense of liberty - it’s a defense of property rights. The only people who could justify this position as a defense of liberty are those I referred to earlier - the people who think liberty and property rights are synonymous and don’t understand any other meaning of liberty.
You’re comparing the perfect to the good. I said before that restrictions on liberty are justified, but the burden of justification lies with those who would restrict. I’d say that mostly the United States lives by this ideal, making the US the closest thing to a libertarian country.
No, it’s the definition of morality pushers from the left and right who want to force people to live the way they want, even though there isn’t even close to a societal consensus around their views, and therefore it would require the use of copious amounts of coercion to get people to toe the line.
Situations where the 51% try to coerce the 49% are immoral, and any sane person, IMO, would consider such laws immoral even if they would very much like those laws to exist.
Democracy, not being an imaginary political system, isn’t perfect. It takes time to work and sometimes it moves in the wrong direction for a while. But generally, it eventually gets to the right place.
Libetarianism, in theory, might work better than democracy. But I strongly doubt libertarianism, in reality, would outperform democracy.
I see your point, but your first step then should be to make it so that the federal government can’t prevent people from freely walking around, camping on, hunting on, etc. government-owned lands. I can see why you wouldn’t want people building permanent houses or cutting down trees or drilling for oil on public lands, but the restrictions on people living off the land are ridiculous. Any person should be free to just go out and live in the wild if they want.
An individual who owns a vast forest shouldn’t be able to keep off simple travelers, I agree, in the same way that owning a home doesn’t stop the government from building a sidewalk which separates you from a portion of your front yard so that people can walk safely around the neighborhood.
Things like fencing should only be legal to prevent people from getting close enough to potentially violate your privacy or safety, or to protect things on your land which are likely to be stolen(like crops and livestock). I know that if I owned 100 acres of forest, it wouldn’t bother me in the least for someone to walk through it or even camp on it, just so long as they didn’t approach my home uninvited.
I agree. This the central flaw of democracy - a majority can abuse a minority.
But it’s still am improvement. In every other system of government, people can be abused by a minority (and if you don’t think that’s true about libertarianism, talk to clairobscur who has that gun pointing at him). At least in a democracy, you have to convince a majority to go along with the abuse.