rights

Let's examine a genuine market anarchy:  The Black Market.  Yes, there's some small businessmen in it, but there's also some big ones.  And when you get to the big ones, you notice that a certain amount of ruthlessness appears to be needed to stay big.   Meanwhile, the small people in those organizations are still earning about the same as they do at their second job at...Taco Bell.  Meanwhile, the goods stay fairly low quality, because that's what sells the most.  And this is even with goods that demand quality, like drugs.  Just ask anyone that had a bit too much rat poison cut into their ecstasy. 

Ehhh.... That's not exactly a Market Anarchy. There are no peaceful means of conflict resolution in the black market, so violence is the accepted process. In a market anarchy, mediation and arbitration are the way to go, and so violence is not acceptable. There are also market opportunities for quality control companies (like Underwriters Laboratories) to clear up that quality problem. The catch is, being the black market, it's all illegal, so there's a lot of risk in setting up either of those ventures.

I admit, it's a lot of fun, until you run into one of those really bad eggs that wrecks the engine of your ride home, and you're either dealing with normal government again or trying to convince yourself that just warning people not to trust him will be enough.

So, what do you do when you run into one of those "really bad eggs"
in government?

The same thing as anywhere else:  you try to convince enough people with power that this is a bad egg.  Decentralized power certainly helps though, in requiring more than one bad egg to help him stay in power. 

Let's examine a genuine market anarchy:  The Black Market.  Yes, there's some small businessmen in it, but there's also some big ones.  And when you get to the big ones, you notice that a certain amount of ruthlessness appears to be needed to stay big.   Meanwhile, the small people in those organizations are still earning about the same as they do at their second job at...Taco Bell.  Meanwhile, the goods stay fairly low quality, because that's what sells the most.  And this is even with goods that demand quality, like drugs.  Just ask anyone that had a bit too much rat poison cut into their ecstasy. 

Ehhh.... That's not exactly a Market Anarchy. There are no peaceful means of conflict resolution in the black market, so violence is the accepted process. In a market anarchy, mediation and arbitration are the way to go, and so violence is not acceptable. There are also market opportunities for quality control companies (like Underwriters Laboratories) to clear up that quality problem. The catch is, being the black market, it's all illegal, so there's a lot of risk in setting up either of those ventures.

  I do accept that the example is not perfect, partly because the people attracted to such a high-risk venture will make other choices for high-risk activities, like fighting.  Still, if they were interested in peaceful cooperation, it would happen.  Instead, what happens is corporations/gangs expanding, and then threatened and forced to either fight back or dissolve.  Sounds a lot like the standard Cyberpunk dystopia.    As far as the quality problem, I agree that legalization would be likely to reduce these problems, but I'm sure we've all heard of enough cases where quality control was a problem, but the company refused to admit it until a government stepped in. 

I suppose the question becomes one of moral accountability.  You say that requiring corporations to be accountable to the people buying the goods and services is enough, and that a gov't is inherently not accountable to anything.  I think it is more effective to try to build that accountability into gov't from what is already there.

I noted that government success in delivering on constitutional promises varies. The statistics are publicly available.

If one lie, all lies.  

The statistics come from the same source (WHO and the UN) as showed Cuban health care and Ethiopian literacy was wonderful.  I visited Cuba. Cuban health care for ordinary cubans is a bed to die on, except that in practice you don't get the bed unless you have the right connections.

When Ethiopia was ruled by a Marxist totalitarian terror regime, engaged in bloody civil war against the peasants, using artificial famine as its major weapon, official WHO statistics showed it successfully achieved wonderful literacy.  When the Marxist totalitarian terror regime fell, peace and order was restored, and famine largely ended, its official literacy rate suddenly and mysteriously dropped back to normal African levels.  Did everyone suddenly forget how to read?

That the British National Health murder elderly people with breathing problems, and that murders by the state correspond to nearly ten percent of Netherlands deaths somehow fails to show up on these statistics of the wonderful success of health systems.

for anyone who is interested in researching the matter further, rather than repeating populist agitprop* that has little basis in reality. If you want me to provide an opinion on the ethics of refusing to spend vast sums of limited public resources treating terminally ill geriatrics,

I am in favor of government refusing to spend  vast sums of limited public resources treating terminally ill geriatrics.  I specifically praised the Australian government for openly refusing to do so, for openly and officially sending sick people home, for refusing to pretend that health care is a right.  I am opposed to governments pretending that they provide health care as a right, as the British and Netherland governments pretend to do and then quietly murdering people who attempt to exercise that supposed right as necessary to keep the hospitals from overflowing.

Whosoever says that health care is a right, that any "positive right" is a right, will commit murder, and frequently does so.

Let me preface my responses with the caveat that I am but one man, and this but one man's opinion. How it would actually go down may be completely different.

What keeps violence from breaking out? Say if someone doesn't like how the arbitration goes, and he and his gorilloid brothers and nephews and cousins decide to take matters into their own hands.

Well, first, this is not a culture of victim disarmament. Taking matters into their own hands would also be taking their life into their own hands...or rather, their opponents' hands. Secondly, they would have signed a contract to abide by the arbitration decision, so doing so would breach that contract. There's lots of examples on this very site of possible solutions.

What keeps Snake Oil Shoppe from bribing Underwriters Laboratories to declare their drugs safe? If no one dies and only a few get sick and can't trace it back?

The other QA labs, for one thing. Competition keeps 'em honest. Secondly, you know that little tag you sometimes find in your clothes, "inspected by #16", and such? Well, imagine if #16 were personally liable if your pants somehow harmed you? The inspector who took the bribe and signed off on Snake Oil Shoppe's application would be personally liable for the damages thus incurred. No hiding behind corporate personhood, without the government creation of the corporation.

I suppose the question becomes one of moral accountability.  You say that requiring corporations to be accountable to the people buying the goods and services is enough, and that a gov't is inherently not accountable to anything.  I think it is more effective to try to build that accountability into gov't from what is already there.

Which brings me to my next point. Not corporate accountability, personal accountability, and competition. You buy bad dope, you, or your heirs (my condolences) take the dealer to task on it. Other people hear about that, and buy from someone else. This is almost how it works in the black (Konkin prefered the term red market to refer to illegal markets where violence is acceptable, and I agree.) market, except there's no clear way to determine exactly who cut your X with rat poison.

What keeps violence from breaking out? Say if someone doesn't like how the arbitration goes, and he and his gorilloid brothers and nephews and cousins decide to take matters into their own hands.

Looking at societies that approximated anarcho capitalism (saga age iceland and the old west), sometimes violence did break out.  But violence is costly, dangerous, and hard to stop once started.  Worse, it gives you a bad name, and having a bad name makes it relatively safe for someone to kill you.

What tended to happen when violence broke out is that everyone went looking for allies.  The allies tended to have cooler heads, and eventually dragged everyone into court after a fairly moderate number of deaths.  In the Icelandic sagas we fairly frequently read the allies cautioning hotheads to think of the court case that will follow the killings.  You could do quite a lot of violence and killing legally in Iceland, but sooner or later you would wind up in court explaining why it was legal.

I recollect one story where a bunch of icelanders arguably has just cause to kill another bunch of icelanders, and have stolen some treasure from them.  At which point one of the cooler heads points out that killing their opponents and stealing their treasure afterwards is arguably legal, but just plain stealing their treasure is highly illegal.  So they give the treasure back, and then kill them, taking some serious casualties in the process, then resteal the treasure.

Let's examine a genuine market anarchy:  The Black Market.  Yes, there's some small businessmen in it, but there's also some big ones.  And when you get to the big ones, you notice that a certain amount of ruthlessness appears to be needed to stay big.   Meanwhile, the small people in those organizations are still earning about the same as they do at their second job at...Taco Bell.  Meanwhile, the goods stay fairly low quality, because that's what sells the most.  And this is even with goods that demand quality, like drugs.  Just ask anyone that had a bit too much rat poison cut into their ecstasy. 

Ehhh.... That's not exactly a Market Anarchy. There are no peaceful means of conflict resolution in the black market, so violence is the accepted process

Because you cannot do justice in the sunlight.  Justice can be done, but no one can see whether it is being done or not.

Sooooo, the populace would have to be armed, with that implied threat, to prevent violence? What if the gorilloids had more/bigger guns?

The weakest man can kill the strongest. 

As Colt's advertising slogan used to say:  "God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal,"

Well, first, this is not a culture of victim disarmament. Taking matters into their own hands would also be taking their life into their own hands...or rather, their opponents' hands. Secondly, they would have signed a contract to abide by the arbitration decision, so doing so would breach that contract. There's lots of examples on this very site of possible solutions.

Sooooo, the populace would have to be armed, with that implied threat, to prevent violence? What if the gorilloids had more/bigger guns? Or what if half the population believes they should have won and sides with them? (Whether or not they would agree with the gorilloids that violence was the answer.)

Ignoring the guns for a moment, if they won't accept the arbitration result, how would breach of contract be enforced?

Sam makes a good point about violence: It's costly, and ruins your rep. This would cause most sane people to avoid it, and well... shall we say... weeds out the less sane?

But again, ignoring the guns, if someone refuses to abide by (or even show up at) an arbitration, all the injured party need do is make that fact public. Smart, sane people would then avoid dealings with them, for the simple reason that if the guy screwed one person over, they're likely to do it again. So, someone who repeatedly refused or failed to make good on arbitration would rapidly find themselves out in the cold, with no friends, and no business contacts.

What keeps Snake Oil Shoppe from bribing Underwriters Laboratories to declare their drugs safe? If no one dies and only a few get sick and can't trace it back?

The other QA labs, for one thing. Competition keeps 'em honest. Secondly, you know that little tag you sometimes find in your clothes, "inspected by #16", and such? Well, imagine if #16 were personally liable if your pants somehow harmed you? The inspector who took the bribe and signed off on Snake Oil Shoppe's application would be personally liable for the damages thus incurred. No hiding behind corporate personhood, without the government creation of the corporation.

What if there is no competition? What if the only other lab is run by someone who isn't trained in chemical analysis (it was just a hobby) and he confirms Underwriters' (bribed) assessment? What if Underwriters and their competition have an agreement to confirm each other's results (they essentially form a trust)?

Going back to our original question, what if the sick cases cannot be traced back to Snake Oil Shoppe and thereby to Inspector 16?

Not trying to be difficult, but if there is a corollary to Murphy's Law, it'd probably be if the worst possible scenario can happen, it will.

No, no... this is the kind of discussion a libertarian dreams of... polite, rational, and interested.

But back to the question at hand.

• If the cases can't be tracked back, the insurance companies involved eat the costs. Incentive enough to track it down, I think.
• If there's an agreement to confirm the results, then that's not competition, and that fact will eventually (probably, unfortunately, with a case like this) come out, and those involved will be neck deep in some smelly stuff.
• Similarly, with a goof on the part of the hobbyist chemist, he'd be liable too... Incentive to know your stuff.
• And finally, no competition is not an easy state to maintain. Even UL, today, doesn't operate in a vacuum.

No, no... this is the kind of discussion a libertarian dreams of... polite, rational, and interested.

Coulda fooled me. The chicks called you and Mellryn and Macsnafu "irrational" and "cynical" and said your arguments made "unsupported illogical leaps" and when you explained the logic they didn't either refute it or apologize, just pretended that never happened. And then complained of other people being insulting, but I sure didn't read anything worse than what they said. Me, I'm still waiting to hear them refute you about the people who would rob you blind taking over government. Til then, better you than me, dude.

No, no... this is the kind of discussion a libertarian dreams of... polite, rational, and interested.

Coulda fooled me. The chicks called you and Mellryn and Macsnafu "irrational" and "cynical" and said your arguments made "unsupported illogical leaps" and when you explained the logic they didn't either refute it or apologize, just pretended that never happened. And then complained of other people being insulting, but I sure didn't read anything worse than what they said. Me, I'm still waiting to hear them refute you about the people who would rob you blind taking over government. Til then, better you than me, dude.

The previous conversation was not particularly polite or rational. But, I am a very forgiving person, and this conversation, no epithets have been tossed, so I'm willing to let the last one slide. (Would still like a rebuttal on that wall of text I spent so much time writing, though)

We'll leave you the last word and concede the discussion to you.

Works for me.

So how would it prevent a BPSP from trying to take over, or how it would deal nonviolently with one actively working to take over?

The "Christmas War" arc shows a pretty good way, though I'm having a hard time finding it. (Little help here, guys? I know it starts at 601, but I don't know where it picks up again)

Also, this arc shows a great "murder trial". That Auto-doc, man... some day, it's not going to be there.

As to assuming violence won't happen, No, we're not utopians, we know people are still going to do stupid things, Read that murder trial. With the exception of the victim still being alive, that is a very good example of the solutions in place to solve violence. Another arc is this one, a tale of piracy on the belt.

It might be best understood that the unalienable negative rights - life, liberty, and property - slide frictionlessly past each other, and are not only easily accommodated but utterly necessary for society to happen.

Society is not properly a concrete entity, but rather the process by which omnivorous naked killer apes - who will expediently slaughter and eat each other if circumstances facilitate such activities - manage to live in each others' company without behaving like the proverbial Kilkenny cats. 

The philosophers of the Enlightenment spoke of "the state of nature" as a condition of constant warfare between man and man, and members of our species were said to have "come in out of the state of nature" when by virtue of agreement to respect our respective rights we condition our peaceful (if not necessarily amicable) coexistence with the deadliest animals on the planet: our fellow H. sapiens sapiens.

This then facilitates a division of labor society and we begin speaking not only about psychology and sociology but economics, thus getting ourselves to von Mises' praxeology, the concerted study of all conscious human action. 

There can't be "conflicting rights" when it comes to these negative human rights.  Another person's right to go about his own life unmolested doesn't infringe upon another individual's precisely equal right to the same respect, and neither does the ineluctable corollary "unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission."

(Thank you, Mr. Smith, and why the hell aren't you serving the people resident in your congressional district as their voice in the U.S. House of Representatives?)

Positive rights, on the other hand, derive from the essential negative rights and pertain to voluntary dealings with fellow sovereign sapients in the disposition by exchange of the participating entities' tangible and intangible alienable property.

Even then, of course, there's no such thing as "conflicting rights" because everything grinds down to the question of which party has the right in each particular case, whereupon that right must be respected or things will be "getting pretty sporty down here."

I hate to be pedantic here, but the word is "inalienable". The "un" came from Fox News when it felt the need to be different.
Please use the correct word in the future, unless you really are an uneducated twit.
Thank you.

Eile: Just some observations of points made in this debate:

Sunny: The text of the Second Amendment reads, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Eile: Nothing is said about "self-defense". As such, the wording suggests that the natural right being protected is the security of a free state; that is, the Federal Government cannot do anything that compromises the security of the US. Yeah, we know about Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller, but Stevens's dissent makes this distinction clear. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Hi TeamGirl! In this forum, the Second Amendment does include self-defense of a person and their property, not just "the security of a free state".  Here, they believe the most evil thing a person can be is one that believes in the concept of "the state," therefore, the 2nd Amend. must mean defense of the person, because there can be no state.

Sunny: The Golden Rule states, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." In other words, it doesn't just advocate passive restraint from harming someone else, but also commands the active pursuit to aid someone else.

You would have to be Christian in order to believe the Golden Rule applies to you.  ZAP has no provision for religious-based compassion.

Eile: So the right ta life is not just the right not ta be murdered but also the right ta be protected. The right ta liberty is not just the right not ta be locked up (or ta be denied the protection of the law) but also the right ta be granted freedom (or granted the protection of the law). And the right ta property is not just the right not ta have yer stuff stolen, but also the right ta be given stuff you need. In other words, if natural rights mesh with the Golden Rule, they not only prevent the government from doing harmful things, they also obligate the government ta do beneficial things. Like protect people from gun violence, pollution, hazardous work places, shoddy merchandise, and bad food and drugs; grant people the ability to live and work where they want without discrimination; and give people the basic necessities of life.

ZAP and Anarcho-capitalism as espoused here means exactly that.  The right to Life is the right to live, but not be protected (AnCap is social darwinism at its worst: kill or be killed; there is no government to do the protecting of the weak or minority), etc.
And, being  in the majority, AnCappers likke it that way.

Sunny: But even if natural rights do not mesh with the Golden Rule, it still obligates Christians to actively help other people, not just refrain from hurting them.

You would have to be Christian for this to apply.

Eile: In "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, the Republic of Gilead justifies its repression of women by claiming that instead of given them "freedoms to" (positive rights), it's protecting them with "freedoms from" (negative rights).

Sunny: In other words, it claims that rather than allowing women the privilege to have careers, earn money, or even read, which subjects them to the crime and degradation of the outside world, it protects them with the right not be assaulted, subjected to abortions, or lusted after. The point is, while negative rights can grant liberty, they can also be used for oppression.

Eile: Finally, not all privileges come from robbery or denying rights ta others. Being able ta drive a car is a privilege, not a right, but when the government licenses you as being properly trained it doesn't deny someone else a basic right in the process, and when you purchase a car ta drive, yer not stealing it from someone else.

but in the ZAP and AnCap model, being certified as a trained driver does deprive an untrained driver the privilege of driving. And purchasing a car does deprive someone else.

Sunny: Healthcare may also be a privilege, but government provided healthcare is robbery only if you believe paying the taxes that support it is a form of theft, and it denies basic rights only if you believe mandating everyone to carry insurance violates some right not to carry insurance. If you agree to live in the US, you also agree to abide by its laws, including tax laws, so technically you consent to the "theft", and people who refuse to carry insurance for whatever reason infringe on the rights of others not to have to pay for their medical expenses with higher premiums and healthcare costs.

Dont try to use logic here; this forum is as impervious to logic as Superman is to bullets.
These fine people do see taxes as theft and people who make use of tax-funded health care as "worthless parasites."

Absolute freedom means one is free to do what ever they desire at any time no matter what.  Obviously if you think about that a moment you see the problems it presents.

• "Bob has a bad night and decides your house blocks his view of the sunrise, with a little explosive he removes it with you still inside.  In a world of absolute freedom he has done nothing wrong.. "

Well, here's the catch:


Everyone has absolute freedom. That's the definition of free will. However, my freedom to swing my fist without consequence ends at your face, and the other way 'round. That's what rights are, the boundaries that mark where the consequences start.

I think you misread something, as in my given example of "Absolute Freedom" no one was there to punch back hence the discussion had ended.  Your reply helps point out a savage side effect of "Absolute Freedom" and why it has been seen so often in Frontiers and labeled as "Lawlessness"   

So long as one can stand back up and retaliate, There is no limit to the action that may be taken in response.  To end any worry of direct consequence severe, brutal, inhuman, uncivilized action is often the only options. 

So for example, that Cheater at the Card Table will be shot dead or lynched after having all the money beaten out of them.  Where in a more civil local they would have been roughed up, money removed and been thrown from the casino banned from ever returning. 

I am not saying Free Will is a bad thing, All I am stating is a society based on Absolute Freedom is unworkable, where one based on AnCap will function.