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Pollution, we can agree upon, I think: it destroys, damages, or diminishes enjoyment value of other properties (or in the case of air, damages others health or otherwise reasonable quality of life).
As for buying up the porn shop's property, I see two parts: protecting property values and unreasonable burdens. Both are interrelated, so for the sake of clarity, I'll take one at a time.
Unreasonable burden: Meaning allowing or placing a burden that does not have to exist. Making the homeowners responsible for coming up with the money to buy the contentious property is an unreasonable burden on property owners - implicitly a hidden ownership fee. This is particularly true if the neighborhood's owners make other owners put up their fair share for the purchase of the property. That makes individual ownership of the property much more difficult, all other things equal. So in this case, government regulations against certain value-destroying property uses protects and sustains the rights of the property owners.
Property values: If you have to pay extra fees, then all other things equal, that'll cut the value of the property, both in actual monetary terms and what the owner pays for a given quality of life (however subjective, subjectivity still matters in real estate/property ownership). This, by definition, is a loss of enjoyment of that property (the enjoyment being not having a questionable business very close by).
In both cases, government regulations protect property owners, even if at the expense of the interests of the controversial property's other owner (read: hypothetical "me"). The neighborhood homeowners may be infringing on "my" own right to use that property as I see fit as long as it doesn't damage others (in the purely physical sense). But the homeowners can argue that "I" am infringing on their right to live and (perhaps especially) raise their kids in areas well away from adult entertainment, on property enjoyment grounds, if nothing else. Also, what if I refuse to sell anyway on purely principle grounds (i.e. I like having an adult entertainment shop here, and if they don't like it <raspberry!!!>)?
You have the right to choose a place to raise kids in areas well away from adult entertainment, but you don't have a right to stop someone from opening a shop you don't like on their property...in the same way that the shop owner can't kick you out of your house or tell you how to decorate it, etc. because he doesn't want a family home near his shop.
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So who is right? "Me" or the nearby homeowners? Back to strictly economics. With a government in place, they can pass zoning ordinances restricting my right to set up such a business, thereby protecting the right of property owners to have a reasonably predictable value of a property (i.e. with a minimum of disruptive influences). True, I won't get a right to profit off my property, but I don't see profit-making from a property as absolute - especially if it comes at the expense of others' well-being (even if only monetary in this case). With governments in place, both me and the owners can appeal to a higher authority, who will decide the issue as seen fit.
That is why I can't buy into "small government" as Libertarians usually use the term - it allows other people to disregard the essential rights of those too financially weak to defend themselves (weak in absolute or relative terms).
That's the thing...the only rights that exist are negative rights (philosophically speaking, not talking about legal rights, which are just whatever politicians decide upon). The right to not be attacked, stolen from, etc... you can't have a right to anything that places a requirement on someone else. That's why you don't have a right to reasonably predictable value of property, or to decide who moves in next to you, or how they decorate their home, or whether they sell things out of it, etc.
Those things are desirable, but not rights. Potential solutions that don't infringe on their rights could be living within homeowners associations, or having some type of agreement built into the contract when you buy the house, or having a planned community along the lines of a hotel or Disney World, where it's a private place but with public areas, etc. so that could function similar to a government with zoning, but explicitly agree to that arrangement when they move there.
But those are just ideas off the top of my head. I'm not an expert, and solutions come from millions of people with their own expertise working out solutions over time. Who knows what people would come up with...if I could predict it, I should be put in charge right now.
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Originally Posted by Loveshiscountry
You made this up. There may be a few but I haven't met a Libertarian who wants to violate the rights of the individual. No such thing as essential rights either. That's a made up term.
I said allows. Big difference between allowing violations and actively committing them.
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Originally Posted by T0103E
You have the right to choose a place to raise kids in areas well away from adult entertainment, but you don't have a right to stop someone from opening a shop you don't like on their property...in the same way that the shop owner can't kick you out of your house or tell you how to decorate it, etc. because he doesn't want a family home near his shop.
That's the thing...the only rights that exist are negative rights (philosophically speaking, not talking about legal rights, which are just whatever politicians decide upon). The right to not be attacked, stolen from, etc... you can't have a right to anything that places a requirement on someone else. That's why you don't have a right to reasonably predictable value of property, or to decide who moves in next to you, or how they decorate their home, or whether they sell things out of it, etc.
There's no requirement to refrain from or to prevent acts that damage, destroy, or cause loss of enjoyment to something (a positive right)? Buying a house isn't like buying into a stock market fund. People have to reside .. be… in them. It is not an out-of-sight, out-of-mind matter the way stock markets are. This is especially true when this is both the person's largest single purchase and if acts immediately outside their property are likely to have a major impact on the value of their home - like a high late-night traffic volume (even ordinary commercial establishments, totally aside from strip clubs across the street from residential areas).
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Originally Posted by T0103E
Those things are desirable, but not rights. Potential solutions that don't infringe on their rights could be living within homeowners associations, or having some type of agreement built into the contract when you buy the house, or having a planned community along the lines of a hotel or Disney World, where it's a private place but with public areas, etc. so that could function similar to a government with zoning, but explicitly agree to that arrangement when they move there.
But those are just ideas off the top of my head. I'm not an expert, and solutions come from millions of people with their own expertise working out solutions over time. Who knows what people would come up with...if I could predict it, I should be put in charge right now.
HOA's have rules too - a restriction on your own rights. As for contracts, many clauses are on a 'take it or leave it' basis, with little to no room for negotiation. That means the seller or HOA has the power while the buyer (potential or actual) has to take their lumps. In effect, the HOA is still a rule-making body, and in fact HOAs often have the same basic essential rules precisely to protect the property values - and actual governments usually support them unless some clauses are socially discriminatory. Seems to me like a HOA is a de facto government, even if they don't have their own polices and such. Speaking of which, HOAs themselves can have unjust rules too. Governments offer courts to redress this.
Now you'll likely say at this point "who watches the watchers"? Simple answer: it's a circle of accountability: The ruled watch the watchers, the watchers watch the government, the government watches the ruled, who in turn watch the watchers. Like I said "Circle of Accountability". Governments are the largest scale protectors -especially over large geographic areas. Its more stable to have governments rule over large areas than small ones (Imagine if every property owner or at least neighborhood was its own independent country. That practically assures societal instability, for more competing factions increases the odds of war).
There's a lot more to say, but that's my take on why I think governments are necessary - and I mean larger than "small government".
You've been respectful to me, so it would be foolish not to reciprocate.
I just leave it alone. You'll note that for the rest of this thread, the usual "pilers on" won't be getting replies from me, but you will.
Minus maybe 1 or 2 people in the LP itself (seriously, not even the LP does libertarian correctly), politicians claiming to be or credited for being libertarians are nothing of the sort. Which is why proper libertarians have gone for the anarcho-capitalist mantra, as not one politician out there is willing to grab that moniker or allow it to stick to them. My screen name is a reference to this, although I didn't get "an-cap" in there anywhere. A proper "NAP, no initiation of force, private property and voluntaryism in all things" libertarian and an an-cap are functionally the same, minus really nit-picky points of minutia you can see in some of the really minor quibbles between me, rebeldor and No_Recess. We are like 98% kismet, but not 100% and we get much fun out of that remaining 2%.
The Non Aggression Principle already accounts for the bad actor even in a stateless society. Nobody is authorized initiations of force, but everyone is authorized defense against those initiations, since the person(s) initiating force is surrendering exactly all of their own natural rights by committing the initiation of force against another. When you violate the NAP, you voluntarily forfeit your own rights, and the society can, even without the state, call in that tab.
On the individual scale, it works like this - I have no natural right whatsoever to come up and punch you. We all agree on that, whether the state agrees or not. You do have the natural right to defend yourself if I do try to punch. Again, we all agree there, even without the state chiming in. Where people think the state is necessary is determining my punishment for my attempt to punch you, or YOUR punishment should your expression of your right to self-defense offend some outside observer's sensibilities.
Here's where a NAP libertarian/an-cap lands - if I roll up on you and forfeit my natural rights in my attempt to initiate force upon you, then YOU decide what my punishment should be, and there is no limit, because I voluntarily forfeited my rights via my voluntary actions against you. So if I try to punch you, and you reply by beating me into a year long coma....that's perfectly justified and proper according to the NAP. The state is not required for you to defend yourself. They are required, however, to punish you for doing so, even though every theory of natural rights says you acted properly.
It does make sense, because people have been taught that only the state can decide how punishment works and what defines violations. The NAP is much simpler than that. If you harm someone by initiating force against them, you forfeit your rights. Period. If I punch you, I am wrong. If I breach a contract to harm you, I am wrong. If I steal from you, I am wrong. And most of our felony laws address this concept, minus letting the victim choose the punishment for their assailant.
Critics of libertarianism always bring up environmental law, like dumping waste into rivers isn't a violation of the NAP. When companies do this, they are violating the NAP big time. When they get away with it, it's because the state itself shielded them from reprisal for their actions. The person(s) victimized by their actions should have the right to both decide the punishment and mete it out. In a stateless society where that was the case, the offending chemical waste dumper would likely find their company burned to the freaking ground, and the society would agree that is proper, because by violating the NAP, that corporation of grouped individuals chose to forfeit their rights.
Then comes the "but the individual is weak and the corporation is mighty" rebuttal, but that assumes that in stateless society, the state is somehow still there to offer state protections that lend corporations the might that none of their individual employees possess. Corporations are lent that power by the state. Take away the state, and the corporation is nothing more than a big merchant who is just another one of your neighbors. In a stateless society, if your neighbor dumps trash on your front lawn, your neighbor surrenders their natural rights to you, and does so of their own volition. You then get to decide their fate from that point forward.
Virtually all corporate evils are only possible via the power of the state. Take that away, you take away he power of the corporation.
A common misconception is that libertarianism/an-cap'ism is somehow "everyone does what they want, no rules, woo hoo!!" anarchy. It isn't. There are rules, just not as many as a state and its faceless bueaucracy:
Non Aggression Principle
private property rights
natural rights
voluntaryism
Those rules are simple, and have remedies for those who would choose to ignore them.
People simply cannot understand these rules being upheld without a tyrant who possesses a monopoly on force and violence. It's inconceivable that people can adopt the same policies they use for 99% of their lives and apply them locally, regionally and nationally.
So your questions are fine, well stated and most clearly understood.
I'll get back to you in more detail later on, but my initial reaction is that letting the victim decide the punishment is where the wheels start to come off. If I carry that line of thinking to its extreme, I could shoot someone dead for coming into my yard and picking an apple from one of my trees, and it would be perfectly justified. That seems disproportionate to me, not to mention the fact that the picker's family might decide to retaliate. Then what? It kind of irks me to come down on the side of outside authority, but one of my fears is that without it, we could end up with all kinds of endless blood feuds.
I do agree with you about corporations - they depend on the state for their existence. One thing I don't think many people realize is that it was once very difficult to form a corporation in this country; the founders were not fond of them. I wish I could remember where I read that. Perhaps you know. That they have become as powerful as they have is most unfortunate.
I mean, we could get into the entire philosophy of property, but what's your goal? I'm aware that it can get complicated (wouldn't necessarily say those examples are that overly complicated) and you can run into gray areas, but that doesn't invalidate the general concept of property that I laid out.
The rule with homesteading is that the first person to make use of it has the highest claim to it. The people who wrongfully displaced the natives were at fault.
They got away with it because their use of offensive force overpowered the natives' defensive force, but that doesn't invalidate the concept of homesteading...same way that a guy can mug you in an alley, but that doesn't make the idea of "theft is wrong" invalid.
If it doesn't work, then it doesn't negate the theory but it does negate it in real life........as you have shown. You can't say. "trust me it works" when you just showed it didn't.
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It reminds me of how we'll make the argument that people shouldn't be supporting the initiation of force, even if the state does it, and the response is "but people will initiate force, so that's unrealistic"...
I've argued for years for us to quit supporting the states use of force and where has it got me? To do that, we ourselves may have to resort to violence.
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It's like if you lived in the past when slavery was viewed as acceptable, you tell people to stop supporting it, and they say "that's utopian and would never work" and go back to supporting it. If enough people stop supporting it, slavery won't exist on any large scale, and you can deal with the few people that try to enslave others. Same with what we're arguing.
And obviously I'm not directing that at you, just most discussions we end up in.
It took violence to end slavery. Saying that everyone is going to come together is sadly never going to happen.
The rule with homesteading is that the first person to make use of it has the highest claim to it. The people who wrongfully displaced the natives were at fault.
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You have justified the dissolution of the natives by your own standard. They did not homestead. They were semi nomadic.
I would like the smartest libertarian in the room, you will need them, to tell me how much land is due each person. Secondly, I would also like to know if fertile coast land is just as good as the Nevada desert. If so then I would like to stake my claim in several choice areas.
You have justified the dissolution of the natives by your own standard. They did not homestead. They were semi nomadic.
I would like the smartest libertarian in the room, you will need them, to tell me how much land is due each person. Secondly, I would also like to know if fertile coast land is just as good as the Nevada desert. If so then I would like to stake my claim in several choice areas.
Depends on what you are using it for. You want to farm or be a casino operator?
I have some chores I need to do that I've been putting off. If I can force myself to do them, it may be a while before I check out your link, but I will check it out.
As for why I focus on how such a society would function on a practical level, the only thing I can say is, because it matters. It's easy for me to envision a scenario a bit like feudalism, where the most powerful and well-connected person effectively BECOMES the state. That might not be any worse than what we have now, but I don't see it as much better, either.
I do thank you for your detailed reply, as opposed to simply joking around and dismissing my questions as foolish.
Now without any other state how would he even claim to own it? Who would he buy it from? At one time the Bureau of Reclamation limited it to 160 acres per lot for small farms.
Now we seem to have several water monopolies and millionaires with the genius not to create anything new, but to engage in the renterism of old. Their product is not merely the remuneration of their capital and labor. It is the remuneration of the profits of good politics.
So the libertarianism that does not define "property" may as well be praying in tongues that only his god could understand.
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If enough people stop supporting it, slavery won't exist on any large scale, and you can deal with the few people that try to enslave others. Same with what we're arguing.
