You are morally bound only by the dictates of your conscience. The government has practical authority because it’s bigger than you. With any luck, the two won’t be diametrically opposed too often.
In Scandinavia, they have a right called “Freedom to roam”, which I’ve always found to be an interesting concept. In essence, it allows you to camp almost anywhere. Nevertheless, I think I’d be bummed if some dirtbag camped out in my front yard.
For example, in Sweden:
Are you against this? Because it sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I said I’m a Lockean not a libertarian. Somalia is an example of what happens when you don’t have enough government. North Korea’s an example of what happens when you have too much. I want to live in the middle ground.
Is there a time element involved? Let’s say I own a large parcel of woodland. Some people hike though my woods - I’m not going to object. They stop and have a picnic - okay, as long as they clean up after themselves. They pitch a tent and spend the night - now I’m getting a little annoyed but I might let it slide. Two weeks later, they’re still camped out on my land - I’m calling the sheriff.
According to the wiki, it’s “a night or 2”.
Thing is, there’s 7 billion other human beings on this planet.
You want the right to wander wherever you want, dig wherever you want, live wherever you want, hunt and fish wherever you want, build wherever you want, and so on.
Except there are too many people on planet earth for that to happen, because if everyone did it, no one could do it. And so people form gangs, and decide that certain things are possible here but not there, and make long lists of rules about what will happen if you don’t do what they say.
If you have the right to do whatever you like, and they have the right to do whatever they like, and their idea of doing whatever they like is to put you in a cage or shoot you in the face, and there are 300 million of them and one of you, what’s going to happen?
You say that 300 million people don’t have the RIGHT to shoot you in the face just because you don’t wanna follow the rules. Except what are you going to do about it?
The reason the 300 million of us mostly follow the rules and threaten to shoot you in the face if you don’t follow the rules is that we see the fruits of following the rules–a decent place to live, mostly, for a lot of people most of the time–and the fruits of not following the rules–a shithole, mostly, for a lot of people most of the time. And since we’d rather not live in a shithole, we decide to shoot you in the face if you don’t follow the rules.
And your only recourse is to attempt to persuade us to change our minds about this. Complaining that our current system of laws only exists because everyone agrees to pretend it exists misses the point. Of course laws only exist because we agree to act as if they exist, and if we stop acting as if they exist then they stop existing. Same thing for your human rights, and your civil rights, and your rights as a natural person, and your property rights, and every other right you can think of. They only exist because we all agree that we’d be better of acting as if they existed, and they stop existing when we stop acting as if they exist.
So it’s no good complaining that there’s no where you can go that’s free of The Government. The Government doesn’t exist, man. It’s not Government that’s the problem, it’s other people. We’ve had other forms of social organization in the past besides governments. People lived in family groups, or tribes, or clans, and still do in many places.
Except when there’s no government, what are you going to do when a neighboring clan grazes their fucking sheep on your pastures? You’re going to get your friends, and you’re going to threaten them with violence if they don’t stop. And they’re going to get their friends, and threaten you with violence if you try to stop them. And whoever has the toughest set of friends will win that dispute. And when we get tired of this, we get groups of families who come together to hash things out, and you now have a clan or tribe, and a group of clans comes together and now you have a kingdom.
If you have no rules to stop a family or a clan or a kingdom from forming, what are you going to do when your neighbors form a country and start oppressing you?
We can choose whatever sorts of social organizations we wish, we just have to live with the consequences of those choices. Choose a set of rules that doesn’t allow for people to own private property and we get one set of results. Choose a set of rules that doesn’t allow for police and courts, and we get family vendettas. And on and on. Take a look at the countries and societies that have existed over the world and over the millennia, and take a look at what happened when they practiced various types of rules. And then advocate for the sorts of rules that result in the kind of society you’d rather live in.
This is why I advocate for the modern system of liberal government, democracy, and capitalism. Not because this results in a utopia, but because not having those things tends to result in a shithole, and I don’t want to live in a shithole. And so do lots of other people. Countries like, say, China, take a look at their totalitarian communist dictatorship and realize that China is a shithole, and hey, countries that choose other paths are much better places to live, and so China tries to emulate those countries and becomes much less shitty. Wow, it works!
The problem for America and Europe and Japan and so on is that since we’re pretty much the least shitty places to live in the world, there aren’t a lot of other places that we can point to and say, “Hey, if only we were more like those guys we’d suck a lot less”. I mean, sure Canada can look at Japan, and Australia can look at Germany, and Denmark can look at France, and see room for improvement.
So, bottom line, if you want a better place to live you have to convince the rest of us that we’d all be better off if we did things your way. And since most of us don’t want you digging up our yard, or camping in our garage, or punching us in the face, we probably aren’t going to be convinced. We kind of like how things are now, because hey, things could be worse, am I right? And they have been worse in lots of times and lots of places, much much worse.
Total agreement with the entirety of your post. I just quoted the part, here, because it made me grin.
What a lot of people overlook is that we’ve tried all those other ideas. We had a long period of very limited environmental regulation, for instance. And the skies turned brown. (And the very rivers caught on fire!) So, now we have strong and highly intrusive environmental regulations – and air we can breathe.
It’s not just a trade-off we can live with: it’s a trade-off we cannot live without.
This.
All the anti-regulation quasi-libertarian people seem to forget this so easily, and yearn for the good ol’ days when you could dump used motor oil in the ditch outside your house, and mining companies could dump their toxic tailings in the public land, and factories could churn out lethal toxins in mega-doses, and banks were run like casinos, and everbody was fine with that.
But it was great for everybody.
Except the poor. Or women. Or anyone not of European ancestry. Or anyone of not the right European ancestry. Or anyone of the wrong religion.
You’re not a tree, if you don’t like where you are, or how you live, - change it!
There are many places in the world where you can live as you wish, apart from others. Try the far north of Canada or Alaska. Spirit yourself away into the bush, and take up your free lifestyle. There isn’t a whole lot stopping you. You’d likely have to do so quietly and with discretion, but pretty much, if you don’t draw attention, no one will care.
And I say this as someone who hitchhiked cross country, in their youth, and continued to roam freely around the world from SE Asia to S. America. It’s a much freer world than you imagine!
But you have to get up and go after what you want, it’s not going to be delivered to you!
(Please ignore this advise if it’s really all about the political blathering about oppression of freedom by evil, authoritarian, first world democracies!)
Which countries allow anyone to immigrate? Are there any? “If you don’t like it, leave” would only be an appropriate answer if migration weren’t severely limited on this planet.
Besides which, there’s a legitimate philosophical question here. We talk about the “social contract” and having “political representation”, but 99.99% of the laws that apply to me, I had no say in. I never signed a social contract. By what mechanism did this authority obtain legitimacy?
It seems to me that it’s just the powerful subjugating the weak. There’s more power (including wealth and natural resources) in America than in Somalia, that’s the only reason why we aren’t killing each other over food and territory everyday like they are.
The powerful in Somalia only have access to guns and easily manipulated young men. The powerful in the US have access to legislatures, courts and police forces. The outcomes might be better over here, but I’m not sure our system is any more just, or any more legitimate.
And save me the “voting” talk. You only get to vote on the choices you’re given, like when mom asks you if you’d prefer lima beans or spinach tonight. You don’t get to choose ice cream. It’s a powerful method of placating the masses is all.
Which I must admit, our upper class is good at doing. Warlords elsewhere could learn a thing or two about treating people just well enough to get them to do what you want. But just because we’re well fed and comparatively safe doesn’t mean we’re not still in a cage.
Does anybody think this is what “society” necessitates? That there’s no better way for a group of people to live and organize? That “freedom” is just the size of the box you’re kept in?
Just as a note, nothing about libertarianism means being opposed to pollution laws. Pollution is an externality, and thus a legitimate area for government intervention. Poisoning me against my will with toxic discharge isn’t much different from injuring me against my will with a knife.
I’m sure some libertarians are opposed to such laws, because some libertarians are cranks, but many more are not.
That is, indeed, it, and the foundation of all human society. Thus, no society is perfectly moral.
However, a society in which power stems from the decisions of the majority, rather than powerful individuals (ie an aristocracy or warlords), is more moral than its predecessors.
Most will allow you to leave; finding one to take you in, especially if your reason for leaving was that you didn’t like the social arrangements of the last one, might be a bit trickier.
A couple of hundred thousand years of evolution did. People figured out it’s nicer to live with rules that apply to everyone than no rules applying to anyone. @Failed states’ are the ones where this rule no longer holds true and aren’t such nice places to live (i.e. Somalia)
A bit simplistic, considering the ‘powerful’ here aren’t taking everything from everyone and most of the time, and you’ve got the government largely on your side preventing random powerful people trying to take your shit at-will, but perhaps your experience is different from mine
Part of the problem is nearly everyone has access to guns, not just the powerful, and they formed into semi-tribal cliques after the higher state broke down in the wake of the end of the Cold War - Somalia used to be a strategic pivot between East and West; when the East was no more, the West lost interest and they collapsed as they didn’t really have any economy
Yeah, at the Federal level; try at the local or state level and work your way up there if you want to change things.
A pretty big one, then, with nice views between the bars that seem an awful long ways apart, too. Perhaps a cage that’s nearly impossible to change from freedom, it’s so large.
Depends on the size of the box, really. When the box is pretty much as big as a whole continent and / or planet, and I can pretty much do what I want in that box, then I’m OK, thanks.
Hence the ‘pseudo-libertarian’. True libertarians are pretty few and far between.
This.
Lots of things have been tried: tribalism, anarchism, communism, and so on. The tide of the world is moving toward representative democracy and capitalism, though.
I dunno, I’d say anti-pollution-law folks are fewer and further between. Anti-regulation generally refers to regulations that the speaker views as useless or harmful, and keeping dioxin out of drinking water is neither.
I’ll take the tyranny of prevailing opinion over the tyranny of death squads and serfdom anytime. There’s no perfect society, nor can there be, just bad ones and better ones. We in the First World enjoy the latter.
I doubt that. Many of the industrialist claim to be Libertarian (the Koch brothers are probably the most notorious example) and that’s just what they want - cheaper energy through relaxation of environmental and workplace safety regulations. Lots of so-called Libertarians believe that any sort of financial services regulation is anathema.
‘Relaxation’ is a weasel word, it can mean anything from pumping mercury into the river, to cap-and-trade reform, to inspecting stack scrubbers every 45 days instead of every 30.
That’s a very different issue, in that you can choose your bank, but not your air.
In terms of natural “god-given” rights, you have the right to think what you want and do whatever you are physically capable of doing. No one can stop you doing this. However, depending on your actions, others may decide to use their own natural rights to limit the actions that you are physically capable of. All other perceived rights are developed by man and tend to actually be more restrictions of what others can do to you. So when you say “I have the right say what I want” what you really mean is others don’t have the right to incarcerate me for what I said. Even these aren’t so much laws as they are behaviors that the general consensus of society have generated and that each individual has decided is or is not in his best interest to follow.
So while saying “I never consented to these laws” is true, it is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that those around you have decided to use the society consensus to motivate their choices to limit your actions should you take action against the society consensus. You are free to do what you want but you do so at your peril.
I’d like to see one too. Or you could just tell us where you live.