Hugo

I think it's lamentable that elections in the US have chiefly become about popularity contests for candidates rather than about policy and ideology. The last election was a showcase of this. In Canada the situation is not quite so bad as people still generally think more in terms of Liberals vs. Conservatives and their party ideologies than of Martin vs. Harper and their individual attributes, although the latter is far from unknown. I think this is why policy has become increasingly unimportant to American parties, replaced instead to see who can recruit a popular figure to run for them, like Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, etc.

My points have gone unanswered. Only Blackdog even seemed to notice that I'd spoken. How disappointing. The Democrats were originally conceived as a bastion of small-government, Jeffersonian ideals which its founders felt were increasingly threatened. Their great flaw was their endorsement of slavery, necessitated by their power base in the South. Ultimately, it would become a big part of their undoing in the War Between the States, when Lincoln, the first Republican president and a man with a seeming penchant for statism and destructive war, all but destroyed them. The final blow for the Democratic tradition came with FDR, who decided that the best way to oust the Republican Hoover was to copy his policies completely and blow them up to an unimaginable size. Since that time both parties have been indistinguishable. So since the Depression, we have had two parties identical in general ideology, differing only on matters of policy. As of right now, we can see the two parties as basically a referendum on the Iraq war. One is for, one is against, but as to all the other measures they are the same. Both parties believe that America needs a big, powerful government that will interefere in social and economic aspects of its citizens lives on a daily basis. They occasionally differ on how that power should be used. I'm curious as to how Republicans on this forum can so heartily endorse one party and so vehemently denounce the other when they are so nearly identical in policy and ideology. Of course, the most bitter political fights are between parties of common ideological heritage who view their opposition as heretics - Nazis and Communists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Papists and Protestants, and so forth. Maybe this explains it.

This is your problem: all of the terms you have given me are vague, arguable and ill-defined. I'm arguing that a person has rights on the basis of being a member of the species homo sapiens. That is objectively definable. One can scientifically arrive at a definition of homo sapiens, and no debate rages in the scientific community about whether or not something is human any more than they argue about if something is made of lead or copper - it's easy to establish. On the other hand, you're claiming that my definitions are subjective - which they aren't - and attempting to shoot them down by asking if I'd include or exclude groups that are extremely subjective in their definition, as we've established by your attempts to define them. The words you've used in these definitions are extremely difficult to apply and very easy to argue over. If I'd asked you to define copper, for instance, you could simply tell me that it was a transition metal with a density of 8920 kg/m3, an atomic weight of 63.546 amu, an electron configuration of 3d104s1, melting at 1357.6 K, boiling at 2840 K, with a molar volume of 7.11 ×10-6 m3/mol, a specific heat capacity of 380 J/(kg·K), and even more statistics with can all be objectively verified. But I've asked you to define "mentally deficient" and the definition you've come up with is no less vague than the original term! This is why there is no argument amongst academics about what "copper" is, although there's plenty of debate about what "retarded" is or what "mentally deficient" is. How many animals and plants do you think you will eat in your lifetime, and how many do you think your death will feed? I don't see anything approaching equality here. Furthermore, cabbages and other food sources are culled before the end of their natural life-span to feed you. You, however, will wait until you cannot possibly live any more before giving your body to them. That doesn't seem particularly egalitarian either, since animals and plants are killed in the prime of life to feed and clothe you. Isn't that an argument against medicine? Isn't it even an argument against the use of fire, spears, or huts with roofs? No, it was Latimer's right to abandon his daughter whatever his motivation. She had no right to live at his expense without his consent. However, it would be wrong for him to actively cause her death. It's quite possible that he could have abandoned her and someone else would have taken her in, without her needing to die.

This just raises further questions. What is meant by "idiocy", "imbecility", "moronism", "subnormal", "handicapped" and "ordinary life"? Again: slowed down or backward relative to what and by how much?

Are you sure? Right now, the US government of all branches accounts for about 35% of the US economy. "Communist" China has a government that only runs 20% of the economy. Government spending and authority has increased under Bush. The supposedly tax-and-spend Clinton actually oversaw a much smaller increase in government spending than George W, and the latter's Patriot Act is completely reprehensible to classical liberalism and the original Constitution. Bush's measures to "privatize" social security are about as free-market as the worst of FDR's crackpot schemes. The actual results of this scheme are - surprise, surprise - increased government spending and intervention in the free market! The awarding of government contracts and so forth under Bush is profoundly anticapitalist, and smacks of statist mercantilism and nepotism. It's pretty easy to make the claim that George W. is a socialist, but a biiiiiig stretch to say that he pays anything more than lip-service to capitalism and libertarianism.

Of course. However, I am saying that the respect or disrespect of rights does not affect their existence. For instance, returning to the Holocaust, I would say that the violation by the Nazis of the Jewish right not to be harmed did not change or abrogate that right. No, actually, things like rights will always be in the mind. They never become realised any more than they will in the mind of one man. Based upon what? Define "mentally retarded." To say that it was unlawful is to say that a person has a claim on another to support them against their will. If Mr. Latimer was not able to do that, that would have meant that he would have been his daughter's slave. No, that's you. I'm discussing human beings as distinct from other lifeforms, and human beings are objectively distinguishable and separate from other lifeforms. On the other hand, you are bandying about extremely subjective terms like "mentally retarded" and "severely handicapped". How are you deciding who falls into these groups? Let me guess - a line drawn arbitrarily? Fall below a certain IQ and you are "mentally retarded"? Lose more than a given percentage of the average faculties and you are "severely handicapped"? But you don't. A great many things are consumed and destroyed to keep you alive and happy. You are not sharing and equal with a great many things. Have you died and been mulched so that you could feed a cabbage lately? For the umpteenth time, I am saying that the enforcement of rights (which often hinges upon force) is separate from the existence of rights (which does not).

So, you're telling me that your theory of property hinges on club ownership? No evidence, eh? Didn't think so. I already made my argument, and since you won't provide a counter-argument despite my repeated requests, we'll assume that you are a Holocaust apologist and leave it at that, since you obviously lack either the will or the ability to defend yourself. Here's the original argument again: Hugo: I am drawing a distinction between initiation of force and force used in response to the initiation of force. You, apparently, are not. From what I can gather, you are telling me that the Warsaw ghetto uprising was ethically equivalent to the Holocaust, whereas I would say that the uprising was not wrong, because it did not initiate force, whereas the Holocaust was wrong, because it did. Sweal: And again I tell you your distinction, as it applies to the creation of rights, relies on a faulty assumption: That your opponent in a confrontation will accept your view of initiation, and will care. Hugo: If this affects the creation of rights, then what you are telling me is that there are no ethics, and no morals, and human action is solely limited to what is possible - there is no right or wrong, and the Holocaust, the Purges and the Cultural Revolution are all acceptable to you, because there exist no rights independent of the willingness of others to respect them or the ability of the right-holders to defend them. I.e. Nazis don't respect the right of Jews to live, and Jews lack the ability or will to defend that right, therefore, Jews have no right to live. That's what you have just told me. You're comfortable with that? You haven't refuted any of this. The word 'liar' is not some kind of debating trump card, you know. You sling it out so often when you're losing an argument and without any evidence that I think you believe it is, that I will scurry away when you childishly scream "no fair!" I'm afraid it's not so. I believe you will be wasting your time. Either Sweal does not understand what classical liberalism is, or he is not one. His repeated defence of economic interventionism e.g. minimum wage laws is completely and utterly at odds with classical liberal thought. I think you were right on the money in your first post when you stated that he would be happy with the NDP, because his arguments reveal that he is, in fact, a 'third way' democratic socialist who believes in big government and distrusts free markets, and as such is a sworn enemy of classical liberals.

That doesn't matter. We are discussing rights theory here, which deals with questions starting in 'ought' or 'should', not 'can' and 'does'. As I've said, if you argue that rights must perfectly coincide with practical possibility, then you're justifying all sorts of horrible crimes simply because you believe that if people have no ability to defend themselves they have no right either. No, I'm not going to stop saying that until you give me a good reason to, e.g. a logical refutation. I'm not particularly scared by your bleating 'liar' every so often. No, the above paragraph actually demonstrates that the state is a party of identifiable individuals. It is not something like 'society', which is just a concept without identifiable individuals. 'Microsoft' is a party, since you can identify all the individuals who work for Microsoft and distinguish them from those who don't, and they act with a unity of purpose. 'The state' is also a party for the same reasons. It has employees and beneficiaries, and acts as a unified organ. If you'd reply, and I think you might, that everyone is a member of the state because democracy theoretically admits anyone to government (a highly debatable argument, but we'll let it stand for now), then that also means that everyone is also an employee of Microsoft because anyone (theoretically) could go and work for Microsoft. No, they haven't. We are not talking about a universal agreement here, never have been and never will be. You are talking as though we were. So long as government remains a creation of less than all, it is an imposition. If what you are saying is true, perhaps you can bring out the historical evidence and documentation whereby the 'individuals in society' arrived at a consensus and formed a government? No, that was never my point. I originally asked you what you thought would happen if you refused to pay your taxes. You said that you'd be exiled. The letter of the law proves you were wrong since the penalty for tax evasion is up to five years and up to double the amount evaded, not exile at all. If you were to voluntarily leave Canada while owing taxes, you can be sure that the Canadian government would attempt to have you extradited and punished as above. The truth is that the Canadian government wants what it decides you need to pay, and will make sure it gets it one way or another. The only way you could leave Canada and feel secure would be to pay the government everything it claimed you owed it before you left.

A man alone in the wilderness can have both rights and language. He just has no particular need for either. Alright. I don't think you're paying attention. You cannot assign equal rights to both, because to assert that one has a right to live is to assert that the other should die for it. A can only exist off of B. If A's right to live is to be defended, B must die. If B's right to live is to be defended, A must die. So it cannot be the case that they have equal rights. It's like trying to be half-way between dead and alive. There is no half-way. You're either alive or dead. Either the lion may live, or the gazelle. Not both. Didn't you just finish telling me that intervening to oppose Hitler was morally acceptable? How does this fit in with that? That's right, they are lesser beings. As I said before, I haven't noted any lions building pyramids or gazelles developing rights theories. Man is demonstrably unique and demonstrably superior. We have a far superior intellect to anything else on the planet and that puts us at the top of the food chain. Now, as I've said before, to assign equal rights to animals is to assign lesser rights to man, because man needs to exploit animals in order to exist. I know that you are very keen to keep dodging this question, but I'd appreciate an answer: what makes animals superior to us that they need superior rights, and how do you justify your own existence? Example? I'll give you three that prove you wrong. Holy Experiment Pennsylvania was ended by the invasion of British Redcoats keen on restoring the colony to Crown control. Anarchist Iceland was ended by the military invasion of Haakon IV of Norway. The Anglo-Saxons (neo-anarchist, with an ostensible government that in practice didn't do much of anything) were invaded and conquered by William of Normandy. Now, I'd like to see your examples, because I believe you don't have any, because you are completely ignorant in these matters. But go ahead and prove me wrong. Who said the absence of government means the absence of police? Perhaps you've heard of security guards? Private detectives? Mercenaries? The trouble is that people of that inclination, if sufficiently opposed, stand to lose more than they can gain. It's in their better interests just to co-operate and trade, they can get more. All you need is the threat that you can make a lot of trouble for your enemies, and they'll be inclined to become your friends. Free workers are more productive than slaves. Slaves just take every opportunity to slack off and run away. This is why slavery died out in North America, in the northern states, because of growing capital, slavery just wasn't economically viable any more.

His argument would be inconsistent and logically indefensible. The problem is that government is unable to do this, because it lacks the price mechanism, which is the method of feedback between consumer and provider. Because it does not have this mechanism, it cannot judge the value of things correctly, and thus could improve welfare only by blind luck. I would say that even that never happens, because government intervention itself is inherently net welfare-reducing because it consistently misjudges value (it has no means of correctly judging value, therefore, any judgement it makes is almost automatically wrong, much like any attempt to describe a print by a blind man) and thus misallocates resources, which is wasteful, and can be viewed as a transaction cost. It is possible that government may, by blind luck, correctly assess value, however, remember that the economy is not a snapshot but a process, and all values are moving targets, so any success in this won't be anything more than fleeting. I already did. Please pay attention. Once again for the cheap seats (and you): in societies where government has not been involved in currency, markets will arrive at one anyway. Usually it is gold, however, objects as diverse as seashells have been used as currency. This is because currency is not something created by government but an extension of the barter system that develops quite early in human societies. If people barter amongst themselves, they will use money amongst themselves once their society evolves past anything beyond the most primitive mode of human existence. For examples, you can take any society that had no governmental involvement in money and see that they did, in fact, generate currency. There's the vikings (hacksilver), the Anglo-Saxons (gold), and us. If you look at the history of our currencies in the Western world, like dollars, pounds, or francs, they come not from government, but from free-market currency (mostly gold). Even their names are terms for weights of gold or silver (the pound sterling is so named because it was originally the value of one pound of sterling-grade silver). Most governments just appropriated them for their own purposes at various times (the US government during the Civil War, the British government around the start of WWI, etc). Yes. How many financial analysts and economists are employed to try and predict inflation and money markets? Every day, in the Wall Street Journal you can read predictions for the interest rate and inflation. The people producing that analysis and reporting it are doing that purely because the government is in the business of counterfeiting money - sorry, inflating currency. If the government was not involved in this, those people would be working in some other line of work, possibly working to better human existence rather than just trying to compensate for the harm that government policy does to it. The resources allocated to that prediction and reporting are transaction costs. They are inefficiencies, misallocated resources. So in summary, my hard evidence is the job of every financial analyst who is on the payroll of some company or institution who predicts or analyses the interest rate and its effects. That is unsubstantiated libel, in a public moderated forum, and all copies of your posts are archived, even after you edit them. It is Greg's policy to maintain all such posts should subpoenas be issued for them. Watch your step. If you're going to make accusations like that you had better have some kind of evidence.

The latter. Austrian thought holds that there are a priori truths to be found in the universe. It generally explains events as coming from these truths, for instance, the theory of money, credit and the business cycle is held as a priori truth as it is a fact that, given various situations, humans as a whole will react in a certain way. Once that is known, it is easy to predict the results of e.g. inflation, and sure enough, every historical example of an inflatory economy is easily explained with the Austrian cycle theory. This is because the theory is based on a relatively simple a priori truth. Regarding the theory of rights, there are a priori rights that are inherent to humanity: the right to property (of which self-ownership is a party) is ultimately the only one that matters. All other rights can, if they are just, be traced back to this one. Events in history can be described in terms of this a priori knowledge. I hope that this isn't new knowledge to you. You'd bragged of having some kind of post-graduate economics degree, or at least study - one hopes that you didn't go to such a bad university that they could teach such a course and never mention even the basic principles of the Austrian school (today, demonstrably the most influential school amongst economists as a whole, although not in other disciplines). You are telling me that you are a man without principle? I find that hard to believe. Even the most rigid utilitarianism must have at least some idea of what 'welfare' is so that it can strive to improve it. You find that grossly offensive? I suggest you need to revise your ideas, then, because these are your ideas that you are finding so repugnant. Don't bother with your usual "liar liar pants on fire" crud, I've already explained the point and you haven't enlightened me as to how it is untrue. Therefore, we'll assume it is true until you can prove otherwise. Perhaps according to your useless definition. I'm familiar with that little gem. However, I'm not willing to accept that priests, teachers and www.consumerguide.com are governments.

What are you on about? No, the Austrian school accepts transaction costs, but has the following additions to more traditional theories: 1) Transaction costs are unavoidable and no system can be devised where they do not exist (e.g. nobody can know everything, therefore, there will always be information assymetry) 2) Transaction costs are not universally welfare-decreasing but must be assessed on a case-by-case basis 3) No evidence suggests that government intervention reduces transaction costs. Unless you were the one pocketing the transaction cost, in which case, its reduction decreases welfare. It's perfectly possible for a transaction with a high cost to be Pareto optimal. In fact, it would be impossible to make a transaction more Pareto optimal by reducing transaction costs, since the transaction costs go to an individual or individuals whose welfare will be decreased by that reduction, and the definition of a Pareto improvement is one where somebody's welfare can be increased without reducing anybody else's welfare. Therefore, even unimaginably massive transaction costs are, in fact, Pareto optimal. This is one of the beefs that the Austrian school has with Pareto optimality - it's not useful for the real world. Two problems with this example. Firstly, if common currency reduced transaction costs, the free market would arrive at that anyway. There are many examples of market action reducing transaction costs without any state intervention, for example, why credit and debit cards are all the same size and are intercompatible, or why credit bureaus share information. In history, when currency has been privately issued, the market quickly arrives at a common currency anyway, most usually gold. So we don't need government for that. Secondly, when considering inflation and fiat money, the fact is that state provision of currency has increased transaction costs. Computing for and predicting inflation creates inefficiencies that would not be there were it not for fiat, inflatable money. As Hayek and von Mises have explained, it is pretty much inevitable that a state will inflate centralised money, and this is certainly borne out by empirical evidence since the Roman Empire was involved in currency debasement and inflation. Yes, I'm a former Marxist and am familiar with Marxism and socialism. I'm also familiar with Chicago school capitalism or monetarism, Keynesianism and even Galbraith (though it would be a stretch to call his ideas a school). Unless you believe that interpretation can actually alter the universe and history rather than just our view of it, that does not affect my argument one bit. The Austrian school does not dismiss it, it rebuts it. If you'd actually read any Austrian economists you would know this. There are pages and pages of text from Menger, von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and more on this subject. Again, going to www.mises.org and searching for "pareto optimal", you'll see a lot of works on the subject, in addition to their e-book selection - hardly dismissive at all! Good for you. However, I wasn't attempting to do any of the above. You made a point, I rebutted it. I don't particularly care how you feel that impacts on things I was never trying to address.

I believe in natural-rights theory. That should answer your question. I'm not answering this again. You already know my position, stop wasting time. Your statement effectively says that lions and gazelles should have equal rights. They can't. Without eating the gazelles, the lions die. If the lions are to live, the gazelles must die. You cannot assign equal rights to both, because in so doing you condemn one species to die, and that would mean you had assigned greater rights to the other. If it can't be applied, what is its use? The idea that there are only two entities in the universe is, frankly, stupid, because it ignores the undeniable reality that entities other than yourself are separate and independent. You say this in the full knowledge that governments have wiped out about 120 million people in the 20th Century alone, not including battlefield dead? Are you joking with me? I find it very hard to believe that anarchists would even be capable of breaking all moral or legal guidelines as much as governments have and do. Your argument ignores all the empirical evidence, which clearly shows that the agents of the state are, even by our own laws, the biggest criminals in existence and history. You mean the slavery that was protected by government and law? Yes, they do only have meaning among persons. Language only has meaning among persons. Does that mean that an individual has no capacity for language? That doesn't sound right. I don't remember you agreeing that rights existed independently of force, but often had to be defended by force. Is that what you're saying now?

If the thief spoke of this as 'force', the only thing that demonstrates is the truth behind the idea that lack of education is a factor in crime, because the thief doesn't know what the word 'force' means. I've already told you. You can read published authors of this school: David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Henry Thoreau, Lysander Spooner, etc. Example? No, it reinterprets it, to say that when we observe what appears to be aggregate action, what we are really observing is the aggregate effect of many, many individual actions, and everything about economics is reducible to the actions of individual humans. For instance, we talk about an increase in consumer spending, but 'the consumers' have not been spending more - this aggregate increase is the overall effect of thousands or millions of instances of one guy going down to the store and buying something he didn't buy last month or last year. Now, do you have a refutation? From what you've said it becomes plain you have no understanding of the Austrian school, so I'd be surprised if you did. If this affects the creation of rights, then what you are telling me is that there are no ethics, and no morals, and human action is solely limited to what is possible - there is no right or wrong, and the Holocaust, the Purges and the Cultural Revolution are all acceptable to you, because there exist no rights independent of the willingness of others to respect them or the ability of the right-holders to defend them. I.e. Nazis don't respect the right of Jews to live, and Jews lack the ability or will to defend that right, therefore, Jews have no right to live. That's what you have just told me. You're comfortable with that? Exactly. I'm curious to know how you reconcile this with your ideas of social contract and state measures to improve welfare. By your ethical standard neither should exist. We've already had this discussion. Your only response thus far has been to posit that the universe does not exist outside of human perception, which is such radical solipsism that I don't feel we have any common ground to continue on - after all, if you don't accept that the universe exists, you don't accept that anyone other than yourself exists, so what's the point of debating government or economy? According to you we might as well debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This doesn't make sense. In this case there would be no need for government, because as I have said in another thread, you don't need to form a coercive government to force people to do what they want to do anyway. If a group wanted to create a government because they wanted that government to do things like provide welfare, why would they not just provide welfare themselves without the government?

Yes. Go to www.mises.org and do a search for "Pareto optimal" and "information assymetry" or "imperfect information." Historically the state has appeared through violence and conquest. States come into being with violence and continue their existence with violence. Now, rather than mindlessly saying "no it isn't" as you and Sweal so often do, perhaps you could construct an argument, with an example? And let's never mind any ideas that people would just gather together and say, "Hey, we need a government." It never happened. Find me an example in history of a society that did that. People are like water, they take the path of least resistance. Faced with the existence of the state, they don't tackle the public-goods problem of trying to destroy it, they try to exploit it as it is to benefit themselves. This is why the state is such a bad idea. Again, in a physical universe that exists independently of humankind, this isn't true. It will be the case that in any dispute like this, one person will actually have had it first, and the other is lying. Rather than just walk away in defeat, one should try to find the truth. It's a perennial favourite of yours to blather on about transaction costs. It's ironic that you accuse Sweal of waving jargon around like a child with new toys at Christmas, but this is exactly what you do! "Oh, transaction costs, transaction costs!" Not once have you ever demonstrated to me that the state is able to reduce theses costs in any kind of welfare-improving way! You've never even demonstrated that transaction costs are a bad thing! Oh? Well, then perhaps you can explain to me why all states grow in size and power, August? Perhaps you'll name me a government in the world that's interested in reducing its power and influence? Am I fundamentally misinterpreting the progession of the US government from a minarchist state that levied no income tax and raised no standing army to the modern Leviathan that accounts for over a third of national GDP? When? How? It's easy to talk of what's possible. Many crazy and outlandish things are possible, but never actually happened and probably never will happen.

Then you are apologising for the Holocaust, since the state granted the right to murder Jews to the SS, and the Jews failed to defend themselves. Either that, or you think the Holocaust was wrong, in which case you agree that there are rights which exist irregardless of the state. You're also saying that it would be just fine if I took a rifle, went on to my rooftop and shot cops. But what you basically seem to be saying is that people can do whatever they want and their 'rights' are defined by the force they are willing and able to apply for others, in which case, there's really no justification for the state, is there? In this situation, the state has no right to exist, it's just one more gang trying to impose its will on others by force. You think that's an answer? I said this to you: And your response is "no it isn't"? Why even bother? You just look stupid. If all the individuals in society could impose that then we would not have a government at all, since government is a means for making people do what they won't do of their free will - yet you have just told me that government is formed and acts according to the will of all the people! In this case, it really makes no sense for people to be forming an institution that forces them to do what they want to do anyway, does it? The alternative is that the 'social contract' and government are actually imposed by less than all the people, so I'll ask you then, by what right do they do this to their fellow men? You wish! Section 239 subsection 1 of the Income Tax Act states that upon conviction for tax evasion, you will be fined between 50% and 200% of the amount sought to be evaded and imprisoned for up to two years. Under Section 239 subsection 2, you can be prosecuted by indictment, which carries a penalty of 100%-200% of the amount you sought to evade and up to five years in prison. You seem to think that tax evasion is punishable by exile. It's been a long, long time since anybody in Western civilization was punished by exile. The Tsars used to do it, but that was a long time ago, in a faraway land. Completely irrelevant to my point.

Your terms are wrong. I don't agree that any man can establish rights. They are part of being human and you can no more create or destroy them than you can create or destroy a person's humanity. Similarly, nobody else can deprive us of our rights, they either respect them, or they do not, but they can never destroy them or deprive us of them any more than they can destroy or deprive us of our humanity. In this case, the two options to defend us against the consequences of a transgression of our rights are either persuasion or the use of responsive force (or the threat to use responsive force).

Your immature name-calling against a well-established and accepted school of thought does your argument no favours. I'm not making such slurs against your principles. This school of thought is often known as anarcho-capitalism, pure capitalism, right-anarchism or (radical) libertarianism. There's no need for petty insults. A lot of traditional economic definitions are not accepted in Austrian economics. For instance, the Austrian school rejects the notions of Pareto optimality and information assymetry. Austrian economists don't accept 'welfare' as being a macroeconomic function. It's pointless to pursue notions of social desirability because 'society' doesn't 'desire' anything. Individuals desire things, thus, welfare increases/decreases can only be assessed by individuals. No, you don't have to be an anarcho-capitalist to be an Austrian economist, although many of them are anyway. It is not just a matter of definitions. I am drawing a distinction between initiation of force and force used in response to the initiation of force. You, apparently, are not. From what I can gather, you are telling me that the Warsaw ghetto uprising was ethically equivalent to the Holocaust, whereas I would say that the uprising was not wrong, because it did not initiate force, whereas the Holocaust was wrong, because it did. In the same way, I say that restraining a thief is not wrong, because it does not initiate force, but to steal is wrong, because it does. To simplify this, I use terms like "coercion" and "aggression" to distinguish initiated violence from responsive violence, and to include the threat of the initiation of violence, or the initiation of fraud. Anyway, if you wish to get back on-topic, go ahead. Before it got off-topic I was waiting from a response to my points regarding the incompatibility of classical liberalism and economic interventionism, because such interventionism violates the liberal ideas of contracts and liberty. I merely took it further to show that without a compromise, classical liberal ideas must inevitably reject the state in toto.

Of the points in my previous post. You didn't address any of them.

It requires no other people or level of society to maintain this freedom. Therefore, violence against it is a transgression against the norm rather than the norm. Rubbish. Right here, there's you, me, and Sweal. That's three. And there's our computers. That's six. And our chairs. That's nine - and so on. The universe contains probably an infinite number of entities, and the earth contains around six billion people. To say that there are only two is insane. Your idea that there is only "you and the one who is not you" is similarly deranged, because if "that which is not you" was a coherent entity as you claim, there could be no difference, but I will treat you differently to Sweal, and either one of us could die without it affecting the other, so how could Sweal and I be the same entity? What Rothbard means is that, unlike the lower animals, man has no instincts that tell him what he should do with his life. His instincts merely help him preserve it. Anarchy: Absence of any form of political authority. (American Heritage Dictionary) It doesn't mean the absence of law. It means the absence of monopoly on law held by violence. The problem, as I've said, with your Peter-Singer-esque animal rights ideas is that you cannot assign equal rights to animals and people. Humans need to exploit animals in order to live. Either you put animals ahead of people, or vice versa. If you put animals ahead of humans I would want to know why, and furthermore, how you justify your own existence! The difference between Hitler and Rothbard in this case is that Hitler ignores the possibility that different 'races' could co-operate in favour of creating conflict. Rothbard has to accept that between humans and animals there is no possibility of co-operation, at least, not on a large scale. Animals compete for the same resources, like other humans, but unlike other humans, animals cannot co-operate or strike deals. Try offering to share your dinner with a bear. Make a right-of-passage agreement with a nest of vipers. Complete and total rubbish! What you have described is not anarchy, it's government! Under anarchy, there is nothing explicitly preventing a person exercising or gathering equal or greater force to those who would aggress against him. Under the state, the individual may not use the weapons the state has, may not hire armed individuals to help him as the state may, and sure enough, the state uses this power to commit massive rights violations every day. It seems what you fear most about anarchy is a state, which is the opposite of anarchy. I'd like to ask you why you embrace what it is you fear, hoping that it will defend you from itself? Why would you attack anarchy in favour of what we already have, when your greatest worry about anarchy is that it would return to what we already have?

Sure. Strictly speaking, in my opinion the earth is round and orbits the sun, gravity causes things to be pulled back to the ground, 2 and 2 make 4, and you are being evasive.

Therefore I can draw up a contract which states that Theloniusfleabag is allowed to come into your house any time he likes and help himself out of your fridge. I accept it, he accepts it. It's legitimate. According to you, it doesn't matter that neither of us has any rightful claim on your house, your fridge or its contents. Yes, it is. You can identify the individuals who make up the government. There are almost three million of them in Canada. You can also include those who are net recipients of state largesse as well. Those people are acting agents. They are also capable of taking collective action, much like a private company. What agents? Who is this who imposes government by way of the social contract? Go ahead and try. You'll be arrested, tried and imprisoned for tax evasion. There isn't a country in the world where this is not the case.

And that is its self-contradiction. To be consistent as a classical-liberal is to reject the state. To accept the state requires a concession on at least one liberal principle, and as a libertarian once said, then it stops being a principle and becomes a guideline, then a goal, then finally, a lie. Compromise once and it becomes far easier to compromise again. We are, after all, dealing with human beings here. All value is purely subjective, and once again, we're back at the problem of deciding who will evaluate what "welfare" means in the utilitarian-liberal society. "Coercion" is the initiation of force or fraud, or to put it another way, aggression. A thief is the coercor, even if I am violent towards a thief, because in doing so I am not aggressing against him.

The only position on government consistent with classical liberalism is not to have one, because governments only act with coercion, and classical liberalism is completely averse to coercion. Basically, government action in favour of equality or general welfare will consist of overriding freely-made contracts in favour of dictates imposed by the threat of violence. This is not classical liberalism. Even in areas where government intervention appears to be anti-coercive, such as in policing, one must consider that government exerts a monopoly over these services, protected again by the threat of violence. Look at anything government does and somewhere, there will be violence or the threat of it involved and vital to the process. The only government compatible with classical liberalism is one that does not force consumers to buy what it offers (law, policing, etc) and allows competition from other providers, but then, that's a description of a private company, not a government at all. The problem with a utilitarian approach to classical liberalism is that, through countless compromises, it ends up destroying the entire philosophy because it is governed not by consistent principle but merely by expediency, and such expediency is not in the aid of liberty as an end unto itself (as apart from natural-rights libertarians such as myself), but as a means to a vague "general welfare" which, as I've said, is subjective and thus impossible to arrive at. The only welfare pursuable is individual welfare in the judgement of the individuals which will enjoy it, and the only way to pursue it is to leave those individuals as free to pursue their own idea of welfare as possible. Perhaps "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" should read "life, liberty and the pursuit of your own happiness." Regardless, the utilitarian approach to liberalism ends in tyranny because it will accept coercion, and because the goals it will pursue will be those of an ever-shrinking number of people at the expense of the rest.

Sadly, no. Neither is acceptable from a classical liberal perspective. The problem is that you are approaching the problem from the wrong side. Instead of thinking that government can address inequality of opportunity where possible, think instead that in doing so the government must necessarily issue dictates to an employer that he may not exercise his own free will in employing whomsoever he chooses. For instance, to require that women be paid the same as men for the same work dictates that an employer shall not exercise any personal views he may have on the relative productivity of female employees, which is incompatible with classical liberalism since it holds that a man may make or refuse contracts that pertain to his own body and property without restraint from third parties, even if such contracts may seem unfair or unjust to outsiders. This idea is actually put forward in the New Testament, of all places. On the second notion, the problem is firstly that "general welfare" is far too vague a term for the majority to ever agree on any kind of useful definition, and thus no democracy could ever determine what "general welfare" meant or how it could be improved, and what would happen instead is that the democratic government would "increase welfare" according to the views of various minority groups - which, in effect, is exactly what we have in modern Western democracy, where lobbyists and special interest groups can pull government every which way except in favour of the general populace, whose interests are invariably served by a lack of government action. Witness our hordes of economists and professors, each of whom has some kind of Plan Guaranteed to Increase the General Welfare If Only the Government Would Follow It, and which are invariably at odds with the plans of other intellectuals.