Hugo

It remains a circular argument. In order for the social contract to be acceptable, the contract has to be legitimate. For the state to be a party to a legitimate contract, the state must be legitimate. But you say that the legitimacy of the state rests upon the social contract. So once again, the argument assumes its conclusion as its most vital premise and is therefore completely invalid. Because you cannot make a contract that attaches terms and conditions to the use or possession of goods or people you have no legitimate claim over. I cannot, for instance, draw up a contract with Theloniusfleabag stating that when he is in your house he is entitled to help himself to whatever is in your fridge. I have no claim over your house or your fridge. That cannot be. A contract is not an acting agent and cannot impose anything. If the government does not impose the social contract, somebody else does. Who is that? What of the citizens who reject the prevailing custom/law/norms?

Since I evidently cannot explain it to you in a way easy to understand, I shall turn to Murray Rothbard for an explanation: This must be a joke, it's such a ridiculous point that I have trouble believing you'd even seriously propose it. The Hitlers of the world did what they did using a massive state. They are arguments for anarchy, not against it! The fact is that no tyrant in history created his evil state from anarchy, but from an existing state, the totalitarianism of which they merely perfected but never started. Hitler was concluding a growing Prussian trend to a collectivist state that had begun early in the 19th Century, Stalin brought the centuries-old Tsarist autocracy to its logical conclusion, and Mao became the latest in a series of emperors that had run for thousands of years, his rise to power being no different in length or bloodiness than that which had marked the change of any Chinese dynasty. In fact, as regards the relative number of deaths, Mao's rise to power was not even the worst in Chinese history.

This is very, very true. There is a twofold attack by the state upon economic activity: firstly, the outlawing of perfectly acceptable business e.g. prostitution, drugs, liquor (in Ontario, anyway, the state monopolises it), gambling, medical services (except the state's own monopolists), etc. Then there are the attacks via licensing laws and regulations upon businesses regarded as legitimate, for instance, the difficulty in operating a taxi or bus line, or any kind of business in which you employ other people. There's a saying that nobody ever got rich working for someone else, which is mostly true unless you're someone like Steve Ballmer, but the state has made it very difficult to go into business for yourself and condemned the vast majority of people to be employees for life. One would hope. It depends upon whether the jury is inclined to listen to their morals or obey the letter of the law, because technically, if a woman shoots a would-be rapist on the streets of New York or Toronto she has violated strict laws that forbid carrying a concealed (or unconcealed) firearm, and the evidence is the bleeding rapist lying in front of her, so the only way she can escape conviction is if the jury decides to ignore the law in favour of their personal ethics - which doesn't go over too well with judges and the judicial system as a whole. These laws only punish the law-abiding. Criminals don't respect gun restriction laws, so all these laws do is disarm potential victims. If forced schooling does cause more juvenile crime, then that speaks for itself. If it does not directly cause it, the fact that more schooling cannot prevent coincidental increases in the juvenile crime rate shows that it is not an effective countermeasure. Connecting unemployment to crime certainly requires more than I have provided here. However, the connection between minimum wage laws and workers paid at the lower end of the market clearing range is borne out in theory and in empirical evidence, and it's a fact that groups such as blacks and teenagers are overrepresented in the ranks of these workers. Correlating unemployment and crime is the argument that "the Devil makes work for idle hands", that unemployed people (especially young, single males) may be bored or desperate enough to turn to crime. Without getting too much into the causes of and correlations between unemployment and crime, I think we can agree that it's better to be law-abiding than not (assuming the laws are just, anyway) and better to be gainfully employed than not. Minimum wage laws stand in the way of at least the latter.

Alright, Thelonius, since you can't provide a consistent position for me to debate with this discussion can go no further. This passage is self-contradictory. Replace "eat you" with "gas Jews" and "alligator" with "Nazi". You argue that rights can only be bestowed, but that you believe in a priori rights. Your position is incompatible with what you claim is your rights theory. If you did not believe in a priori rights as you claim, you'd have no problem with Nazi massacres, and you'd also believe that you should be able to do whatever you can get away with, in which case, why aren't you plotting ways to rob and murder people without getting caught right now?

Sorry about that. In response to this I would say that physical containment only seems to work as long as the subject is physically contained, and unless we're going to start locking people up for the rest of their natural lives as a response to every crime all we are doing is delaying the recidivism. As to an incentive to avoid more severe punishment, you may have something there. However, I'd ask you to consider that having your wages garnished is quite a strong incentive not to reoffend, after all, restitution for a further offence would probably push the criminal below the poverty line. A criminal's resort to bankruptcy notwithstanding I would think this would be a good deterrent, especially if the criminal were being monitored by parole officers and thus very likely to be caught should he reoffend. Of course. I don't think any law-abiding citizen wants to be placed in the situation where they have to draw a weapon in defence of their life or property. However, I think you'd agree that you would want that ability and right as a last resort. I know that if I were a woman facing a rapist or a frail senior citizen facing a burglar I would much rather have a gun in my hand than not. I would also rather not be afraid to use my gun for fear that I would be harshly punished for defending my rights against aggression. Well, there's a lot of factors here. It's not going to surprise you that I blame government for most of these. Ignorance may be a factor, but it's statistically proven that every time the length of mandatory school attendance goes up, juvenile crime also goes up. Forcibly educating the ignorant causes crime to increase. A lot of pressure is put on the poor by taxes, which since the 1930s have hit the poor harder than the rich, and by collusion between government and big business which has slowed or prevented development of poor neighbourhoods and denied opportunities for work and entrepreneurship to poor people. For instance, minimum wage laws create a disproportionate amount of unemployment amongst blacks and teenagers. The poverty and hopeless that this inflicts upon them may well be a factor in causing increased crime, with legal avenues to material well-being closed off, they are more inclined to try illegal avenues. The path to lucrative jobs is through entry-level jobs, and minimum wage laws destroy entry-level jobs and deny people a chance to get work experience that will make them worth considering to a better-paying employer. Similarly, big businesses have succeeded in having government put licensing requirements and anti-peddling laws into effect which deny the entry of poor people into the entrepreneurial class. It does not matter that most small businesses will fail, the fact that a person has at least the hope of becoming rich without crime is an incentive not to commit crime. I suspect, however, that the denizens of American and European ghettoes have long given up hope that education and legal work will ever bring them to material comfort. The more that government does to try and help these people, the worse it gets. Sure, but whatever the difficulty and the other factors, the current justice system is not tackling them adequately. I think we can objectively establish that by "rehabilitation" we mean, at the very least, no recidivism and an entry into legitimate, productive life, and we can objectively say that not only does our current system not achieve this in any great measure, it is not even making any progress towards greater achievement.

I agree, and this is a problem. We should not be satisfied with a system that deters the victims of crime from filing suit against criminals for losses incurred. For one thing, imprisonment makes it impossible for a criminal to make any financial restitution to an individual. Perhaps we might consider a parole/house arrest scenario where a convicted criminal will be closely monitored by the police, but allowed to live and work without going to prison, and his wages garnished for the victim. Of course, it would be a nonsense to allow criminals in this situation access to welfare. We should also consider the idea of transfers of this debt, whereby a victim could "sell" the debt to an enforcement company, who will give the victim the lump sum of their restitution (minus a fee for themselves, or adding an extra fee to be paid by the criminal) and make it their business to bind the criminal to repayment of this debt. I think that if the system were reworked so that criminals had the ability to repay victims, or an increased ability, solutions for victims to be able to pursue criminals would be better. The increased likelihood that restitutions might be paid would probably lead to more "no win, no fee" legal services, particularly as an existing criminal conviction should provide a certain win in a tort suit over the same offence. OK. As regards general deterrence, I don't think it's consistent with classical liberalism to make a criminal into an example for other potential criminals. This, in effect, punishes the criminal for potential crimes committed by others. I believe that a man should be held responsible for his own crime, and if other people commit crimes, let them be punished when it happens. As to specific deterrence, this interferes with the classical liberal idea of free will, speaking instead of determinism: that there is something that we can do (or fail to do) which will induce a criminal to reoffend. It is probably the case that a lot of violent offenders are just violent people, disturbed and with a desire to impose their will on others by force. Even somebody who is not generally violent but commits an out-of-character act (finds his wife in bed with someone else and shoots them both) obviously is capable of breaking down the mental barriers to antisocial behaviour. There may not be much in the way of deterrents for these people, since we are speaking either of people who are violent by their very nature, or people who commit violence without thinking of the consequences. If we emptied our prisons of "criminals" who had convicted victimless crimes we would drastically cut their populations. In the US, more than half of inmates are being held for nonviolent "crimes". Just to eliminate the notion of victimless crime would solve a great many of the problems facing our justice system. What do you mean? Personally, I think that it is a real problem that we have removed the right of citizens to defend themselves. As one professor noted in the 1970s, for instance, those who advocate gun control laws are safe in well-policed suburbs and secure apartments, and don't think of people who have to live in parts of town that the police have abandoned to the gangs. It's noteworthy that crime in neighbourhoods with high gun ownership is less, to a burglar, it's generally not worth getting shot over. Career criminals are opportunists and will simply move on to a less risky proposition. This is why car alarms work, not because they can prevent theft (given enough time, a good career thief can steal any car), but because they make the car less appealing than unprotected vehicles. Yes, we can say that. If the objective of rehabilitation is lack of reoffence, and the objective (or one objective) of the justice system is rehabilitation, the fact that almost three-quarters of convicted criminals will offend again does not speak well of the success of this system. It also seems that the justice system has not made headway against this problem. If recidivism were around 90% fifty years ago, we could say that while the situation was bad, we were at least making progress. However, no progress seems to be evident. If it is the case that punishment and rehabilitation are at odds and one cannot achieve both, then it is pointless trying to pursue both. I would like to speak to the fact that prisons generally become training camps for criminals, where felons in their late teens can go and learn the tricks of the trade to become master criminals upon their release. My father is a social worker dealing with youth crime and tells me that if you want to learn how to be a successful criminal, the best place to go is prison. This, again, would be a problem best solved with keeping criminals out of prison, letting them live on parole and making restitution, in my opinion.

The problem with any allegations of harm against "the public good" is that "the public" is a mythical thing that does not exist. It's just individuals, and the victims of crime are individuals. When you boil it down, "the public" effectively means "everybody except you". I personally take the stance that if there's no identifiable victim, there's no crime. This necessarily means that acts like selling or taking drugs, prostitution and gambling aren't crimes. Definitely. You could say that a good measure would be if we regarded every criminal conviction as a tort for which a civil suit should be filed. I don't know if punishment really works as a deterrent given the stupendous rates of recidivism. If we're trying to deter, maybe we ought to consider something other than prison. As regards prevention, once we're sentencing, prevention has failed. Prevention of crime isn't found in courts, it's found in police patrols, security guards, alarm systems, guard dogs, armed citizens, and so forth. As to your last point, rehabilitation, once again the high rate of recidivism speaks for the failure of our justice system as a rehabilitative system.

In Europe of the Dark and early Middle Ages, crimes were punished by restitution made to the victim. Steal a man's sheep, and you are sentenced to return that sheep and a sack of grain for his inconvenience. Then it became customary for the king to exact a small fee for the dispensation of justice, so the criminal might return the sheep and pay the sack of grain to the king. After that, it became customary for all the restitution to be made to the state, and none to the victim. Now, we have gone even farther down that road. Not only will the restitution not be payable to the victim in any measure, we actually make the victim pay for the imprisonment of the criminal through his taxes. Rather than slapping band-aids on our (un)justice system, would it not make more sense to try and reform it in such a way that victims of crime receive some restitution for what has been done to them? I admit that it is difficult to place a value that can be repaid on what is lost to a rape or murder victim, however, the current system essentially claims that what these victims lose is worthless because they receive nothing. Punishing repeat offenders more harshly makes no sense. If a victim was caught and punished once that should be enough for his crime - we start again with a clean slate. To say that we should punish more harshly for the second crime is to say that he was not sufficiently punished for his first crime and that we are carrying some punishment over to the second. We are also saying that, although we considered his debt to society repaid the first time he was punished, we now recant that and say that he does not start again tabula rasa at all! Consider also that our justice system also violates its own principles. To compel a man to appear at his own trial and to imprison him before that trial violates the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Until his conviction a man should be regarded as innocent, but imprisoning him and coercing him to appear at his trial violate his rights as an innocent man. A judge may also hold a man in contempt of court, but that violates the rule that a man shall not judge his own case. In contempt of court, the judge is claiming that a man is not respecting his court. To uphold this principle, the case should be brought before a neutral judge for consideration. The way we do things now makes the judge victim, prosecution, judge, jury and executioner all in one. Should a classical liberal not seek to address these problems first?

Nobody ever said that a right would protect you. I think that you don't actually know your own position. When speaking in an abstract fashion you will happily tell me that rights have no meaning and even no existence beyond their enforceability or the respect that others hold for them, and when I tell you that this basically justifies the Holocaust, you will quickly backpedal and say that no, you didn't mean that at all. If that's genuinely your belief, then have the courage of your convictions and come out swinging on behalf of Hitler and Stalin. The fact that you are morally repulsed by this idea shows me that even you don't believe what you are saying. You believe you know the answer? After 6 pages of debate I think I've managed to determine that you don't even know the question. Again, you're tripping over your own feet. You tell me that animals should have rights like humans, but then imply that rights for animals could be violated by anybody with the power to do so (i.e. humans), and that the ethics that would proscribe such an act are as illusory as the rights themselves, which is basically a statement that animals don't have rights at all and are merely property, which was the position you actually attacked just a few days ago! As I said before, half in jest, it seems that I'm arguing with two different people posting under one name.

Your position is increasingly unclear. I would like you to tell me if you think rights exist regardless of state interpretation or if they exist only by state fiat. Note that rights can still exist even if violated. It seems to me that you favour the former position of rights existing irregardless of governmental recognition, and if that is the case, this means that the same rights must apply regardless of whether it was government agents or private individuals who violated them, which means taxation is in fact theft, for instance. That argument leads nowhere, because who are you to say how much is too much to take?

Consider this: if imperfect information were indeed inevitably welfare-reducing, this would not be an argument against a free market unless it could be proven that governments are less prone to imperfect information. However, theories of government and actual empirical results show that governments are even more vulnerable to imperfect information than markets. For instance, in a market people have to put their money behind their theories. It's not enough to claim your idea is better, you have to put your own capital behind it to make it work, so you'd better be sure you're right. However, governments are not investing their own money and so have less incentive to make sure that their ideas are right before putting them into practice. In the market, a bad idea will not be backed by consumers or investors and will be liquidated of its own accord (think of Betamax, or OS/2). In government, since consumers and investors are divorced from the product, bad ideas are not automatically liquidated at all (e.g. the gun registry or the NEP). Food for thought. There are flaws in Austrian theory. For instance, von Mises monopoly theory is not as good as that developed by Rothbard. It's also possible to point out that when it comes to law and justice, even von Mises is not Misesian because he fails to follow his own logic. Von Mises also does not make the case for private money, which his theories should lead him to do. This is why I generally describe myself as Rothbardian rather than Misesian. There are other flaws in capitalist theory too, such as the Chicagoite ideas on perfect competition (used to favour trust-busting and oppose advertising), or the flawed Smithian value-addition theory of value.

Then on what ethical grounds do you justify forcing one man to labour for another when he will not do so willingly? This is slavery. If you review other threads I have posted in I have already refuted social contract theory. It doesn't work. Review Lysander Spooner's writings for an in-depth refutation. Yes, and no wars, and no trade barriers, and no concentration camps, and no political police - what a horrible world. No, actually von Mises acknowledges that information assymetry is inevitable and may actually be beneficial. One of the things Austrians attack Chicagoites on is Chicagoite insistence on perfect imformation, which Austrians state is impossible and therefore to focus on it is to claim the market is imperfect by comparison with an impossible model.

The only things that will ever be free are those that are so abundant as to be virtually infinite in supply, like air. This is going to hurt, Thelonius. Sorry. No, they are not. This is what $200 buys you today. This is what $200 bought you in 1950. But by CPI, $200 then is worth over $1500 today. So we should really compare that 1950 RCA model to this. You are seriously telling me that TVs have not dropped in price and increased in quality? You seem to have noticed anyway, so what's the problem? If people no longer feel that Hostess Chips are worth their money, they won't buy them. If they continue to buy them, obviously they do! It can be the case that forces outside of human control may make prices go up, for instance. I was working in IT in the late 90s and a fire at a major RAM manufacturer caused prices to rise. However, within 6 months they were still lower than they were before the fire. Similarly, a company may decide to gouge its customers, They will be quickly eliminated by competitors who do not. These minor interruptions do not greatly disturb the general trend of increasing quality and decreasing price.

Voltaire. So am I correct in interpreting your statements as saying that only the state may grant rights, and therefore the Holocaust was not murder? You are being quite vague. I suspect this is because you are caught between seeming morally reprehensible and between recanting your argument. If that is the case I would urge you to be intellectually honest, it takes a great man to admit he was wrong. Don't get caught defending Nazism because you can't admit you were wrong. If that was the case then to extend rights to 'inferior' beings like animals, plants, minerals etc. would mean denying rights to your fellow humans, because without violating the 'rights' of animals and plants we could not exist. Basically, either humans are superior to animals and plants, or animals and plants are superior to humans. You can't have them be equal. I take the former position. Do you take the latter? In which case, how do you morally justify your continued existence? You agree but you disagree? Which one of your personalities am I talking to right now, and could the other one just keep quiet for a while so we can have a rational discussion?

Llandysul, in Ceredigion. A minimum wage does not necessarily create unemployment if you deviate from the economic definition of a minimum wage. However, what we understand by minimum wage is setting a wage floor above the lowest market clearing wage. This does create unemployment. My point is to show you that in the free market, every product in history has steadily dropped in price while increasing in quality. This means that over time more and more people will be able to afford these products, all the while returning good profits (this is the incentive to try and make the products better and cheaper). Cars and televisions were once possessed only by the rich. Now they are within the grasp of all. So it would be with free-market healthcare, although it may be the case that initially some might not be able to afford healthcare (given that the government has been fixing wages and prices for such a long time that it has completely distorted the market mechanisms that were actually making healthcare cheaper and better up until the 1930s, in the US at least), over time healthcare would become both better and cheaper, affordable to all. In the meantime charity would probably make up the shortfall, at least until the great wealth that free markets deliver came into effect. If we introduced a completely free market I believe that everybody at every income level would have healthcare within years, not generations. Compare this to government healthcare, which does not increase in quality or decrease in price. Canadian healthcare gets ever more expensive and the quality does not increase. Just this year, in Ontario many services have been cut and healthcare premiums have been reintroduced. Could you imagine car manufacturers announcing next year that there would be no more ABS brakes and airbags, and the price of a car would increase by $2000? I don't think so. This argument is nonsense. The fact is that people put their health at a less than prime priority every day - smokers, substance abusers, extreme-sport enthusiasts, even drivers, airline passengers, etc. It amounts to the same thing. If healthcare is provided by the market but controlled by government, then the state will pick which companies get to provide not by efficiency or customer satisfaction but by kickbacks and party contributions, by meeting silly criteria (look at how government regulation has destroyed the daycare industry), and so forth. US healthcare is government controlled and not government-delivered. Then you don't understand von Mises very well. He never argued for state control of anything except law and justice. His student Murray Rothbard would not even argue for that, as he believed that the very existence of the state was immoral and unethical and there was nothing the state provided which the free market could not provide for us at less cost and greater quality. Are you asserting that people have a right to healthcare? Are you aware that that is a positive right and thus completely at odds with Austrian doctrine, which holds that no right can oblige a man to give to another by threat or force, and no right can require certain social or technological developments to be fulfilled? Then you will make compromises and end up quite anticapitalist. I'll refer you to William Lloyd Garrison: "Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, alas! it will be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend." There is nothing wrong with recognising that we will not get a free market overnight, but you should never stop advocating a free market anyway. As the old-guard libertarians discovered, once you compromise your position, you've lost.

If you are claiming that only the state can assign rights, then you are telling me that the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges were perfectly acceptable. No murders took place because those "murdered" had no right to live. To exterminate the Jews is the same as taking antibiotics to kill a bacterial infection: neither the Jews nor the bacteria have a right to live. If you instead believe that the Holocaust was still murder, then that means the state does not assign rights but merely violates or respects them, in which case the Nazis did not strip any rights from the Jews but merely chose to violate the rights they possessed irrespective of Nazi ideas.

I really have not. Look, here is your original contention, made on May 12th: Sweal: IF. And IF you accept that humans are able and willing to come a correct impression of it. Lots of IFs. And my interpretation of that was: If you were not saying we must consider the possibility that the world does not exist independently of human perception, then why would you have been so argumentative when I posited such an idea? Of course they do. You see, being scientific, you make judgements based upon the best evidence and the most likely theory that the evidence supports. It is always possible that the evidence is dead wrong and therefore, the theory is dead wrong, but in science one goes with the preponderance of evidence. You are tying yourself up in knots here. In arguments about the existence of God, you have taken a very scientific approach: the evidence suggests that God does not exist, therefore, he does not exist, and you won't consider that he might. In this, however, you are taking the exact opposite approach: the evidence suggests that the world exists, however, you insist that we consider the possibility that it does not. This is a very poor example. Thelonius and I have been quite right in asserting that ownership and government exist in the minds of men, there is no physical thing that you could ever point to and say "that is ownership" or "that is government." However, there are plenty of physical things you could identify as wheels and automobiles. Wheels and automobiles can exist independently of the minds of men. If the entire human race was to be wiped out tomorrow by some terrible blast of solar radiation or an unimaginably potent plague, there would be no more government, and no more ownership, but the wheels and automobiles we had created would still clutter the surface of the planet. Again? I say it's defence because in a universe that exists independently of human minds there would have to be one party that initiated force, therefore, the one that didn't has used force as defence. I say they are rights because to say otherwise is self-contradictory, because that would still assign rights, but rather than assigning them to human beings as a rule (which are objectively impossible to differentiate between in any way that would suggest different rights be applied to any), not to would effectively assign rights only to those able to defend them, and that theory makes a nonsense of itself. You are ignoring my argument completely. I am saying that it is possible to objectively differentiate humans from animals, but not humans from humans. Therefore the same theory used to assign humans greater rights than animals cannot be used to assign humans greater rights than other humans. We can all agree that a human is a superior being to a cat by dint of his thoughts and actions. As a general rule, humans will behave in a superior way to cats (we think further ahead in the future, use tools, philosophise etc). We cannot all agree that an Aryan is a superior being to a Jew. Aryans do not behave in any objectively superior fashion to Jews, even as a general rule. In fact, one of the problems the Nazi "philosophers" ran into was that it's very hard to even determine who is Aryan and who is Jewish, which certainly is not a problem facing anybody who would distinguish humans from animals!

That was actually Terrible Sweal's idea. My view is that if we're going to be scientific about this, the evidence before us overwhelmingly confirms that the physical world exists as we perceive it. To believe otherwise would be to accept the least logical idea, supported by the least evidence, which isn't scientific or rational at all. Not hypocritical, just self-contradictory. Revisit my examples of statist doublespeak. You can make a case that humans are innately superior to animals and thus, their rights would exceed those of animals. Aristotle had some very good ideas on why humans were superior beings, for instance, that mankind is the only creature who will philosophise and question the nature of his own existence. And also, I don't seem to have noticed cats building any pyramids, or elephants splitting the atom. Clearly humans are able to use their brains to far greater capacity than any other creature. Even animals with larger brains than ours, like elephants or whales, don't seem to be anything like on the same plane of intellect as humans. Elephants don't use tools in anything like the same capacity we do, although they have the physical capacity. Whales may have far larger brains, but their society is incredibly primitive compared to ours. And you think I'm leaping to the extreme? You are being quite laughable. First off, in this situation there does not need to be a contract because it is an act of charity and not an exchange. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with voluntary socialism. If a whole bunch of people in an anarchist society want to band together and form a collective of some kind, there is no reason to and no force that would stop them. It's imposed socialism I am opposed to. So is government. My belief does not decide it either way. Even if you take it, it's still my plasma TV. Once again, to apply another example to this argument, if the Nazis take over in Germany and the Jews are not organized against them, is it the Nazi belief in racial purity or the Jewish belief in their right to live that decides whether they will go to the gas chambers? And what are the implications of that? Coercion is the initiation of force. You are confusing coercion with violence. To use violence strictly in the defence of one's rights is not coercive. Again, using the Holocaust example, I believe you would say the Warsaw ghetto uprising was coercive. I would say it was not, that the Warsaw Jews were merely defending their rights with violence against people who had already initiated violence (or coerced) them. I believe the Warsaw Jews had every moral and ethical right to take up arms against the Nazis, but you cast those rights into serious doubt. You should read Alexander Solzhenitzyn. One of his key points is that every time a group comes along and attempts to "reset" morality, announcing that they will redefine ethics and morals starting from zero - "morality begins with us" - such a move inevitably ends up in gas chambers and gulags. You can't just abandon received morality and make up your own, and as I have shown you, your attempts at this can be used as justification for the most horrible crimes in history. My rights theory does not prevent such crimes, but it does say, a priori, that they were wrong. Yours does not. My rights theory also has its foundations in thousands of years of human development, starting with Aristotle and taking a great deal from Anglo-Saxon ethics and law. I don't know where you are taking yours from, but it seems to be a collection of post-modern nonsense to me.

A minimum wage of 1 cent per day would not actually be any kind of minimum wage, because it would set a "minimum" below the lowest market clearing price for labour. The term "minimum wage" means, economically, a wage set by fiat above the market clearing price. For what - antitrust? Statist nonsense. Insider trading? Statist nonsense. Some may have genuinely committed crimes, but Bill Gates is innocent, and Martha Stewart is innocent. The US has state-run healthcare. They just run it a different way. Canada has a directly state-run industry, the US government has outsourced healthcare to a cartel that they protect (the AMA). Same thing in effect. Actually, US doctors are prevented from knowing the financial status of their patients. Only hospital administrators have that information. You can have both. Ask which is more important, owning TVs or profit? TV manufacturers have made good profits, and TV ownership is now above 99%. Do you know that the government awards monopolies to companies in these fields? Of course they won't do anything but bleed their customers dry: the government has removed the most important incentive not to do so, the threat of competition! Food is more important than any of those. Are you proposing that we nationalise the food industry? What about the telephone industry? That's quite important. Should the state provide all housing? Shelter is a primary human need. Which are granted the power to create money by the government, and the government then proceeds to borrow most of the money thus created - deficit spending. I don't know how much you know about Austrian capitalism, but I find it strange that you laud it and then make so many statements that completely contradict Austrian doctrine.

If nothing belongs to anyone in any measure, they we should all just die, as a species, because we do not have any right to continue our own existences. Now you are back to your self-contradiction: you are arguing that there is no such thing as morality, only practicality, which runs completely against a lot of other things you have said on this forum, so I know this is not your sincere belief. You see how desperate the arguments are that statists have to resort to? So far, I have heard, in the last few days: 1) We cannot assume that the physical world exists, and rights theory must somehow take into account the possibility that everything we sense is an illusion. 2) Nobody has any rights whatsoever and the only ethical code is that the strongest person may take what and do as he pleases. 3) Rights theory must also take into account the equal rights of non-human creatures and even inanimate objects, and we must respect the rights of soil, rocks and minerals. 4) Nobody can own anything or even a part of anything, so ethically, even breathing is wrong. Is this collection of tragic crap seriously the best you can come up with? Frankly, I would be surprised if you could turn any of it into an argument for the existence of a state anyway! I think you're just making this nonsense up as you go along, because if you think about it, all of the above four arguments are mutually exclusive anyway - if you adopted any one theory it would automatically invalidate the other three, so it's my interpretation that you have no theory of rights or property and are just being argumentative and petty, so I suggest you go away and think about the position you want to take before you match wits with a person who has a well-developed theory of rights and property.

That is a circular argument, because acceptance of the social contract has to depend upon the legitimacy of the state (or it would have no right to make such a contract), and the said legitimacy rests upon acceptance of the social contract! Why so evasive? I stated that the terms of the social contract are not defined. You argued that they are. I can't prove a negative, so the onus is on you to prove the opposite. It can, but that depends upon having a legitimate claim over the goods which inferred agreement is supposed to affect. For instance, if you eat at a restaurant, it is inferred that you will pay the bill, because the restauranteur owns the establishment and the food you consume. He has legitimate authority to do that. The case does not apply to the government, because as I have said, the legitimacy of the government to impose an inferred contract depends upon the validity of social contract theory, and that theory depends upon an inferred contract, which only a legitimate government could impose - you see? The argument assumes its conclusion as an essential premise and is therefore invalid.

Invalid because the definition is too inclusive. "Citizens and residents of Canada" includes many people who reject the social contract, and you can't include people who reject something in a group who supposedly accept something, so your definition needs to be tighter and more exclusive. Because I want you to tell me. Because a contract is an agreement between two or more parties. Agreement is express consent. Without a need for express consent, "contract" is basically defined as "agreement without agreement", which is an oxymoron. Nor is it the case that agreement is implied, because the legitimacy of the government must be a prerequisite for that, and that legitimacy depends on the validity of the social contract, which depends on the legitimacy of the government, ad infinitum - an invalid, circular argument, because it assumes the conclusion as a premise.

Who are they? What are they? How does that not completely destroy the very idea of contract law?

You should read "Friedman on Galbraith" in which Milton Friedman explodes all of Galbraith's silly theories and further reveals that Galbraith has absolutely no following amongst economists, which is not true of Marx, or von Mises, or Friedman himself. Galbraith's ideas are full of gaping holes which he usually makes no attempt to plug, just ignoring them. This is why he appeals to laypersons, but is ridiculed by other economists. Do you even understand what you are talking about? Banks should be allowed to create whatever money they want. Anybody should. The problem is that unless you create money that's backed by an actual commodity, gold being the best example, nobody is going to use it. The trouble is that government has appropriated a monopoly on money and, worse, abandoned commodity money in favour of fiat, paper money. Not really. I'm interested to hear more, though. The Canadian government creates both. Inflation is created by fiat money. When Britain was on the gold standard, the pound sterling did not lose any value in about two centuries. Since it left the gold standard, the pound has lost 90% of its value. Chronic unemployment is created chiefly by minimum wage laws and to a lesser extent by other government regulation. Minimum wage laws don't create any jobs, they just outlaw some that already exist, which is also true of other labour laws. Therefore, what labour interventionism teaches us is that you can buy as much unemployment as you want. I can go one better. Macro economics doesn't even exist. What we perceive as macroeconomics is actually the aggregate effect of microeconomics. If you can understand microeconomics (i.e. the trades and activities of humans at an individual level), you've understood macroeconomics. Of course, it's helpful to speak of macroeconomic effects, and even Austrians do it, but one should always be mindful that it is individual action that creates such effects, and not aggregate actions. "Society", "the economy", "the banks", "big business" etc. are not acting agents, have no unity of purpose and no goals.

Hooray, a man possessed of sense and intelligence. I do agree with your post but there are a few points I shall embellish upon. I think that if you were to abolish the heavy and massive government controls and regulations on the media, regulations that greatly favour large companies, you would find that such a breakup would happen on its own. The internet is a medium that is almost completely unregulated and free-market, and there is not even a semblance of oligopoly there. Or Benito Mussolini, surely a man who understood Fascism. The state has granted them this power. With privately issued currency we would not have such a problem at all. As to fractional reserve banking, this remains a source of debate amongst us Austrians. My take is that with commodity-based currency, fractional reserve banking is basically fraud, and would be treated as such. Shareholders and customers won't tolerate fraudulent banks. Introduce private, commodity-based money and fractional reserve banking will disappear. The collapse was the result of the Keynesian policies. Inflation produces an expansion which contracts again soon after, unless counteracted with even more inflation, which delays the contraction but makes it more severe when it happens. As Weimar Germany showed, it can't be delayed indefinitely. I certainly can - anarcho-capitalism, after Rothbard, Spooner, Thoreau, David Friedman, Hoppe and an obscure guy called Jesus of Nazareth. I've defended that view on several threads in this forum. Get stuck in if you want. I can also refer you to Hoppe's theory of time-preference, which posits that a monarchy will be more responsible than a democracy because the time-preference is longer (i.e. monarchs are forced to think decades into the future, but democrats only need to think up to the end of their term in office).