But the crucial question you haven’t addressed (though you’ve been asked several times) is what you think will happen when two different individuals have agreed to submit to arbitration with two different courts?
So you better do what your kinship group says or else. Sounds quite free to me.
You were asked above–why should we be happy to emulate Ireland from 700 to 1700 AD? My impression is that this was not a particularly happy time or place to be. Do you have concrete information that says otherwise?
The United States is under threat of invasion from whom, exactly?
It’s voluntary, right? My question is what about the creation of a central state in Ireland would have created more happiness?
Their respective insurance companies would likely have some kind of agreement on which court to submit to.
Let me be clear: I am not advocating a return to the society of medieval Ireland. Just like you’re not advocating a return to Hitler’s Germany because you favor democratic government.
Would the creation of a central government in Ireland have brought happiness through the end or exacerbated conflicts between factions?
You are forgetting that I, and my fellow citizens, have contracted a protection service that would easily destroy your minor force and likely kill you.
You’re saying government improves societal morality by stealing, kidnapping, invading, enslaving, and extorting. Somehow i don’t believe that.
Except businesses without insurance will have lower prices because they don’t have to pay premiums. Some folks might be willing to pay extra to deal with a business that’s been certified as trustworthy, but a lot more will pick the cheaper option, particularly for small transactions where they can afford to personally assume the risk.
One of the things that I find amusing about libertarian arguments is how disconnected they are from how business actually works.
Then it’s not a voluntary society, is it? I never agreed to let you kill me for stealing or attacking you.
Not really, I’m saying that the morality of the governors is proportional to their accountability to the governed. With a functioning democracy, it’s quite high. When the de facto government is the strongest clan or warlord, it’s quite low. History bears me out on the point, the abuses of the aristocracy are quite well documented.
You’re just as likely to fall victim to MS or Alzheimer’s as I am. It’s not about “looking both ways”, it’s about caring for your fellow citizens who’ve drawn the short straw. Like any decent human being would do.
You pricks who don’t accept that you’re just as likely as anyone else to fall victim to the vagaries of misfortune truly astound me.
This is out of line for Great Debates. You can’t insult other posters here. The “arseholes” comment was also inappropriate. You can make negative comments about ideas, but once you turn it into ‘you libertarian arseholes’ or ‘you pricks,’ it’s an insult that belongs only in the Pit. Don’t do this again.
Don’t pay taxes, you go to jail.
Don’t pay simony, you go to Hell.
Did you know subjects of a warlord are often impressed into military service? Forcing someone to pay taxes is extortion; forcing someone to risk life and limb is benevolence? Or is your thinking that in a fractured feudal state without “central” government taxes or impressment can be avoided by fleeing to the province of a different warlord?
In any event, I do give you credit for finally identifying an example Farnabytopia for us to ponder. I felt cheated when your disciple, Idaho-something, could only come up with, as his example, U.S.A. before civil rights and aviation regulation. :dubious:
Ostracism was indeed the main form of punishment primitive tribes used to punish repeat wrongdoers. Jared Diamond talks about this in his recent book. It is a fearsome threat, as in this form of society being cut off from your clan is very likely a death sentence.
I’m not sure why anyone would prefer to live in a stone age world (Or 7th century Ireland) than the modern world. I don’t think a primitive existence would even work with a world of 7 billion people. But you could move to the rainforest and give it a shot, I guess.
Err…just so I’m clear, are you suggesting that Ireland in, say, the 800s was a society in which property rights (i.e., one’s ability to keep and use one’s property without outside interference unless one engaged in a trade free from force or fraud) were stronger than they are in a modern state?
We are not talking about who thinks he is getting his money’s worth, and who is not. If it costs $1000 to build a road, and there are three taxpayers, if any of the three pay less than $333.33 1/3, then the others have to pay more, no matter how much they value being able to use the road. In order to allocate cost by how much they use the road, you would charge a usage fee. That’s different from a progressive tax system.
I think we’re talking past each other. I agree that people may have to pay more than an equal share under a progressive system, but then I also think that people are able to keep more than an equal share under a private property system, so that doesn’t concern me. So if the question is, are all costs apportioned equally, I agree that they’re not.
But if it’s a question of value, not cost, you’re dealing with what I and Buck are discussing.
And a third question is efficiency: it’s not always efficient to apportion costs equally. Nor is it necessarily fair.
Nonsense. Money is itself a government invention. It’s how the government engages in the convenient fiction of private property rights–as I said, an ingenious and highly useful fiction, but not an end to itself. If you want to play the game of private property, you have to follow the rules.
Of course. My chance of death by government under a modern state are infinitesimal compared to my chances of death by neighbor under a stateless society.
Precisely true. Property is a fiction invented by government. Without it, your property belongs to the person who shoots best.
I couldn’t have said it better myself: how quaint. Find me a stateless society with no strong government to appeal to (to exclude some hippie commune somewhere) in which there aren’t bands of warlords and gangs who terrorize the populace. The vast majority of people in history cared very little for human life; its sanctity, and the dignity of the individual, are fairly recent concepts that have gone hand in hand with the rise of the modern state. In stateless societies the people who spend all their time practicing to kill have one good way to earn a living: killing people who spend their time figuring out how to do something useful. This is an historical truth, not conjecture.
A strong claim and a dubious one. On what basis do you draw the conclusion that they will “likely” have some kind of agreement? Why do you think it’s likely rather than unlikely?
And even if it’s likely, will there not be exceptions? And even if it’s likely, the unlikely case may come about. What do you propose will happen in such a case?
Let you be clear? By all means, please be clear! If you’re not advocating a return to the society of medieval Ireland, why are you pointing to that society and describing it for us?
The other thing about kinship groups is that “sharing” isn’t really optional. This has advantages, obviously, but if you’ve got excess resources then you’ll be expected to spread them around, whether or not it’s deserved. There are richer and poorer members of the clan, but there’s only so much intra-clan inequality that human social groups are willing to tolerate. I’d imagine that compulsory gift-giving in these sort of societies is probably a greater burden than modern taxation, plus you also have the burden of conforming to whatever social norms your clan has and be personally responsible for attendance in clan fights.
Usage fees–tolls–are a method of funding roads. But people can benefit from roads even if they never drive on them. Their food may be delivered on that road, as might other goods. Their customers might use that road to get to their businesses, etc. So you can’t really evaluate how valuable a road is to someone by seeing how often they drive it.
Evaluating exactly how much benefit someone is getting out of a road (hospital school etc) is an impossible task. A tax system–imperfect as it is–is probably the least bad way to allocate funds for public goods.
The rantings of the militias sound sane compared to this. No one in Washington - Republican or Democrat - respects the rule of law?
Ever been on a jury? If you have, you’d understand that a jail term is not enslavement. Even the Japanese were not enslaved - interned improperly, yes, but that wrong was justified by an actual national emergency.
The pledge is acknowledgement of your citizenship and your participation in society. We who were born here are born into citizenship, but we don’t have to stay citizens if we don’t want to. Do you refuse to say the pledge? With your attitude, you should.
No local taxes or their equivalents to local nobility? Sure Ireland as a whole might not have been a state, but neither was classical Greece. Doesn’t help your case one bit.
I don’t know much about Irish history, but this section from Wikipedia doesn’t seem to support your contention