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Coercive Purchasing?
Possibly a partial reconciliation between libertarianism and socialism

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Coercive Purchasing?

Thoughtless
Professor

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Posted 05/02/08 - 11:19 AM:	#51
keda wrote: That is enough to conclude there is no such thing as an equal right to space. Ever heard of the saying, two wrongs don't make a right? If there's not an equal right to space, then there's not an equal right to existence ("I can exist here, here and here, but you can only exist here and here"). As for two wrongs not making a right, the "equilibrium point" idea is simply a practical way of dealing with the fact that we all inevitably infringe on one another's equal right to access space, simply by moving around. keda wrote: You didn't answer the question though. Why would you plant the crops in the first place, if you can just use the taxes to buy it, than having to hire 20% of the land just to do it, in which case you would be the one who have to pay the taxes instead. Why would you plant the crops in the first place? Why, to eat them, of course. There's no guarantee that the other person on the island is going to use more than 50% of the space on the island to grow crops (which would require them to compensate you for using more than 50% of the space). Again, if you only use 20% of the space to grow your crops and I use 80% of the space to do whatever, not only do you not have to give me any of your crops, I owe you, because I'm using more than 50% of the space. The only way you could get away with living off of someone else's crops is if they wanted to use more than "their" 50% of the island to grow them. Otherwise, you'd have no claim to their crops. keda wrote: So who is going to do the work? Who is going to rent the land and grow the crops? Someone, or we'll all starve! This is where the two-person scenario starts to break down. What you're not realizing is that if I use a bunch of land to grow crops and therefore have to pay rent to everyone else, I can still sell my crops at a profit. After all, I'm only compensating them for my use of excess land, and surely the land with my crops growing on them is worth more than the land without my crops growing on them. In fact, businesses profit despite having to pay rent all the time; it's just that the rent is going to some arbitrary landlord. keda wrote: My point all along has been that there is middleground between those two extremes you keep jumping back and forth between. Your "middle ground" is allowing people to violate others' right to access space, so long as they leave them with some tiny amount of space. By that reasoning, I'm not violating someone's right to life by enslaving them unless I actually kill them, because even though I place restrictions on their right to exist, I let them live. Edited by Thoughtless on 05/02/08 - 11:26 AM
_____________________ You down with OPP(Original Poster's Prerogative)?

Mike H
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Posted 05/05/08 - 12:57 AM:	#52
keda wrote: All partakers of a particular contract unanimously agree on it. While it may not be beneficial now, or even in a thousand years, sooner or later warfare will become obsolete and people will sign a contract of perpetual peace, unless they exterminate themselves before that happens. How is what people will do in a thousand years relevant to a just society now? keda wrote: Strong people can cooperate with weak and each benefit more than when they did not, since the weak may be able to contribute much more under the protection of the strong, and they could negotate as to share the benefits equally. I'm not saying that it is always beneficial for the strong to cooperate with the weak, and I'm certainly not saying that the strong should cooperate with the weak against their will. But if even some of the strong, some of the time, refuse to cooperate with the weak and instead find it beneficial to exploit them and violate their rights, how could you say that would be wrong according to a contractarian theory of justice? You can't say such strong people violated a social contract, because they didn't find it beneficial to enter into such a contract in the first place. You have to show that ALL strong people ALL the time would agree to cooperate with the weak for this social contract theory to work. keda wrote: You must realize that there is no one else to set up a democracy with if everyone else is in a fascist dictatorship. If you could persuade someone else to join you, then of course, you can set up your democracy. I'm not denying that there can be several states, but one state to another are still in the state of nature and may wage war against each other and there is no notion of just war unless an international court has been set up with international laws. My point is that simply living in an area does not mean you consent to its laws, whatever laws those happen to be. I just picked the example of fascist laws as an extreme case. Are you claiming that by living in the USA one consents to all of its 45,000 laws, including, for example, all of the laws that violate libertarian principles? keda wrote: I'm not a historician and I do not tailor my theory of justice after history. That would be incorporating injustice into injustice which is absurd. If you see it that justice is an impossibility then I don't see what the point is debating with you anymore, but if you see it as a possibility then why not strive for it? Depends on how big the possibility is. Its a possibility that I could win the lottery, but that doesn't justify spending my whole income on it (or any of my income, for that matter). The probability that the strong will be convinced to act against their interests and sign into a social contract for the benefit of the weak is so small as to be essentially zero, in any stretch of time relevant to me. If this is what justice requires - well, perhaps justice isn't worth striving for. keda wrote: I have read it and I do agree with Dawkins in so far that there is a tendency for altruism to develope under certain conditions. I don't think however he said the latter, but it has been a long time since I read the book, and I can't be sure, but in any case if he did it would be self defeating and a inconvenient blemish in an otherwise mathematically precise truth. Then again Dawkins has made a lot of other surprisingly and obviously incorrect statements so it may not be surprising that he could have made such an error. Well I'm not a biologist, but it seems pretty outlandish to me to claim we have an evolutionary incentive to help out any other member of the human race. Thats a very strong claim - dawkins made a more modest one. Are there any biologists who argue for that stronger claim?

Mike H
Student

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Posted 05/05/08 - 02:45 AM:	#53
thoughtless wrote: mike H wrote: I don't think entitlement to the product of one's labor follows from the principle of self-ownership. Do you have your own argument for that? I'm familiar with the one equating confiscation of the product of one's labor with servitude. I'll assume that's the argument you're going to use, since its the only plausible one I know of - and I want to argue against it If someone takes the product of my labor, I am essentially the involuntary servant of the thief, according to that argument. But I think that argument only works if you don't know ahead of time that the thief is going to take the product, or if you have no choice but to work. If you live in a town of desperately poor people, and you erect a giant jewel-studded statue made of pure gold on your lawn, knowing for certain it will be gone by the next morning, can you legitimately claim that the robbers placed you in servitude? Rubbish. If a woman dresses up like a whore and goes to a bar full of known rapists, can you legitimately claim that the rapists violate her rights when they proceed to rape her? Please. Perhaps you should reconsider your intuitions in that case as well. What if, instead, a woman clothes herself in raw meat and walks into a den full of lions? Can she say her rights have been violated? What is the essential difference between known rapists and lions? Free will, you say. But I say, they're the same, "free will" or no. Free will, supposing it exists, is only freedom to act according to our desires, after all. If you try to act against one your desires, that only proves that you acted in accordance with a stronger desire to act against that desire. A known rapist has a desire to rape, and we can furthermore suppose that he either has a strong desire to have that desire, or he is too weak-willed to overcome the desire to rape. How is he free, then, to not rape? Aren't moral injunctions against him just as futile as they would be against the lion? We can only treat hardened rapists as we would lions - lock them up and keep them away from us. Morally condemning with them is as futile as morally condemning a stone for falling on one's head. So, I would say a woman who walks into a room of known rapists - which she knows are known rapists - dressed provocatively is either quite stupid, or as some might put it, she was asking for it. It is the equivalent of jumping off a bridge. If you're too stupid to know that jumping off a bridge leads to death - well, you probably aren't intelligent enough to qualify as a moral being with rights. And if you wanted to jump off the bridge, you're definitely not the victim of the sharp rocks below. thoughtless wrote: If bears were intelligent and had free will, their theft of my fish wouldn't be inevitable, so your attempt to make theft by starving people seem inevitable doesn't hold water. Okay, suppose the bears have free will and a moral sense. But what if they were famished to the point of near death? Would their theft of fish really not be inevitable? Isn't it a bit fanciful to suppose that even beings endowed with a moral sense and free will to act upon it will ever - all of them - put morality above all other concerns, including life itself? So isn't thumbing one's nose at nature and supposing that oneself has been wronged when nature kicks one's ass, rather childish? Hungry bears or starving peasants - both are forces of nature, really. thoughtless wrote: Mike H wrote: So the point of this is that if you know that x percent of the product of your labor is going to be taxed away, it seems a bit facile to claim that you are subjugated by the government - that your self-ownership is violated. So if I warn you ahead of time that I'm going to come and steal all of your furniture, and I have a big mob of people who agree with me that it should be taken, you won't complain? Or, to more accurately reflect what you're saying, if I warn you ahead of time that I'm going to siphon one dollar out of every five that you earn from your checking account, and I have a big mob of people who agree with me that I should do so, then you won't mind if I start taking a portion of your earnings, because you'll know it's coming? Good to know. I'll circulate a petition and get back to you. But the thing is, even if you let me know in advance that my furniture will be taken, I've already worked for that furntiture. I worked for it in expectation that I will be able to use it for myself. If, unexpectedly, you come along and tell me you're going to take my furniture in a week, much of that work turns out to be for you instead of for me. So I could legitimately claim that that act of theft was a case of involuntary servitude. You have to know before you even start working that x percent will be taken, for that x percent to not count as involuntary servitude. You know that in the case of taxes. So what if you tell me that from now on, whenever I buy new furniture you will take it? Well, if you're a determined furniture stealer, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop you, then you'd be just like the hungry bear - there's no moral reasoning with you, and it would be quite useless to for me to claim I am being morally wronged. I might as well act as you were a gang of angry woodpeckers that always destroy my furniture whenever I buy it. If you're not a determined furniture stealer, perhaps it is still not right to say I involuntarily serve you. For after all, if I continue to work and buy furniture, knowing for sure that you're just going to keep stealing it, when I know I could buy other things instead that won't be stolen - aren't I, in effect, saying that I want to keep providing you with free furniture? I might still claim that I am morally wronged. But it wouldn't be a claim based on self-ownership. thoughtless wrote: Mike H wrote: Its only by luck that you were able to earn that much from your labor anyway - in all likelihood there are millions of people who work twice as hard as you do for a tenth as much. How do you know for a fact that it's only by luck that I was able to earn whatever it is I have earned? Well partly because you are typing on a computer right now - which means you are richer than probably 2/3rds of the world. But also you earn what you earn because of skills, and circumstance, both of which are matters of pure luck. Skills are the result of natural ability and dedicated work. But what is dedicated work the result of, ulimately? A character predisposed to such work. And what is such a character the result of? A character predisposed to developing such a character. Its an infinite regress that can only end in the ultimate determinants of skills: genes and environment - nature. The same argument goes for circumstance. thoughtless wrote: Mike H wrote: Well I'm no socialist, but I have to agree with them somewhat here. It is true that trades are mutually beneficial - people gain wealth by providing society with services it desires. But you're forgetting the institutional context in which that occurs - the trades resulting in people gaining wealth don't happen in a vacuum. Property rights have to be protected - you have to have a whole system of politicians to make laws, military and police to enforce and defend them, and bureacrats and officials to carry them out day to day. Those people don't have to do that, or do it well. They could just let the law of the jungle rule - in which case the physically strong and ruthless would get rich, not the people who serve society well. So isn't only reasonable to think people who gain wealth only because these people worked hard owe a debt to them? Should those people not be compensated for providing a good institutional context for the gaining of wealth? And if they are to be compensated, where is the compensation to come from, if not from the people who gained wealth as the result of their efforts? This doesn't fly, because not only is a lot of our infrastructure private, a lot of it that's currently public could be private, and it would end up costing less. So if I was only able to make my fortune because I had access to roads, and these roads ended up costing 50% more than they would have if they were private, then, really, the public owes me money. If they were private, I would have spent 50% less, and that money would have gone directly to the entity which provided the roads. But regardless of how this infrastructure could have been built (whether better or at lower cost), the fact is that these people did build it, and only because of that, have you earned your money. If our parents weren't perfect in raising us, does that mean that they owe us? Or rather, do we owe them - perhaps in the form of providing care when they're old - because they in fact raised us, however imperfectly? And besides, there is such a thing as the free rider problem. Roads are one thing - they are public, but rival goods. In other words, a business could exclude people from using them if they did not pay up (hey wait a minute - shouldn't you be in favor of public roads, which allow movement on land?) But many public goods are nonrival - like national defense. Such goods would be underprovided in a free market, because you can't get many people to pay for them, since they just want to free ride on whoever does pay. thoughtless wrote: The point is that you can't owe a debt to society for using private services (because you pay for them each time you use them), and there's no reason why you should owe a debt for public services which are thrust upon you in lieu of the equivalent private services. Again, it's like the homeless man who washes your windshield and then demands payment. Even if a clean windshield is an essential asset to you, you could have chosen to have it cleaned by someone who, firstly, wouldn't have forced the transaction, and secondly, would have charged less. But the homeless person isn't a basic requirement of earning your income, like infrastructure is. Would your thinking change if you were disabled, and the only way you could get to the only place you can work is by getting up a long flight of stairs, and every day this homeless person helped you up those stairs? Would you owe something to him then? thoughtless wrote: Mike H wrote: I just personify society as shorthand. I don't think I run the risk of causing people to believe society is actually a person. By society, I mean "every individual, equally." Oil or metal doesn't belong to everyone equally, because they require effort to extract - they are a product of labor. But I think that if they were just sitting around, freely available, they would belong to everyone, equally. Even if they are not essential to anyone's life, why should anyone have more claim than another to such freely available resources? Because the appropriation of said resources doesn't infringe on any other person's right to exist. If I do the work of going around collecting all of the seashells in the world, why should you be able to come take them from me? I'm not infringing on your right to life by hoarding seashells. Not so with space (land). Seashells are not considered very valuable by society, so then the work involved in collecting them ceases to be negligible. If you go through the work of collecting them, fine, they're yours. But if instead of sea shells, iron, copper, etc are just lying around for anyone to pick up, you don't have the right to just get a team of people and horde all of it to benefit yourself at the expense of society. You don't have a right to it just because you took the effort to go pick it up, which was miniscule in comparison to its worth to society. thoughtless wrote: Sure, but the perpetrator is not any individual, it's your allergy. If I'm allergic to light (and some people actually are), do I have the right to make restaurant owners everywhere dim their lights for me? No, because they are not violating my rights; if anything, my allergy to light is "violating my rights". I'm not talking about rights here, I'm talking about externalities. Restaurants might not be violating the rights of the person allergic to smoke, but its still a negative externality. That person suffers because of the choices of others - they trade freely, for their mutual benefit - but that mutual benefit excludes the allergy sufferer. thoughtless wrote: Mike H wrote: I'd say that its a general rule that whenever you belong in a sufficiently small minority in a certain market, where no profits are to be made from servicing you (either from high costs or low revenue), you suffer from a negative externality in a system of perfectly enforced property rights. If no one wants to sell you something because it wouldn't be profitable for them to do so, maybe you ought to offer them a higher price. Why should they be forced to serve you if they don't want to? That sounds like slavery. Why should the person with smoke allergies be forced to stay inside all the time? That sounds like discrimination. My point is that there are always tradeoffs. Libertarians try to determine the right course of action by reducing everything to ownership. But there's more to what is good and worth protecting than just self-ownership and private property (whether or not one follows from the other).

keda
dumbo

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Posted 05/05/08 - 04:26 AM:	#54
Mike H wrote: How is what people will do in a thousand years relevant to a just society now? A just society can exist now, given the eventual possibility of perpetual peace. But if even some of the strong, some of the time, refuse to cooperate with the weak and instead find it beneficial to exploit them and violate their rights, how could you say that would be wrong according to a contractarian theory of justice? You can't say such strong people violated a social contract, because they didn't find it beneficial to enter into such a contract in the first place. You have to show that ALL strong people ALL the time would agree to cooperate with the weak for this social contract theory to work. Not really. If one signs a contract one is bound to it until it is broken by another part and breaking it is wrong. Thus, one must in doing so consider the benefits in a long term perspective, and if it would not be beneficial under particular circumstances, they can be outweighted in the sum. All strong people do not have to agree to cooperate. A group of cooperating people will however soon outcompete any individual who doesn't. My point is that simply living in an area does not mean you consent to its laws, whatever laws those happen to be. I agree with you. Depends on how big the possibility is. Its a possibility that I could win the lottery, but that doesn't justify spending my whole income on it (or any of my income, for that matter). But we are not talking about a lottery in which case you are not participating in injustice for not trying to win. The probability that the strong will be convinced to act against their interests and sign into a social contract for the benefit of the weak is so small as to be essentially zero, in any stretch of time relevant to me. If this is what justice requires - well, perhaps justice isn't worth striving for. Did you forget to take into account the probability it will be against ther interest? Well I'm not a biologist, but it seems pretty outlandish to me to claim we have an evolutionary incentive to help out any other member of the human race. Thats a very strong claim - dawkins made a more modest one. Are there any biologists who argue for that stronger claim? Of course, Dawkins made a very general claim, and I am just looking at the most extreme entailments of this claim. As a species, nearly all of our genes exist in symbiosis, consistent to his theory that it is in the interest of them all to do, were they do have such. It is very unlikely a gene that would go up against them to survive in the long run.
_____________________ Free Europe Now The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. -Benjamin Franklin If my sons did not want wars, there would be none - Gutle Rothschild It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes - Josef Stalin Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace - Bob Dylan A prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation. - Immanuel Kant

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