Hugo

Well, it's my opinion that if one believes in self-government, one must respect the right of people to secede from a government, as the Chechens, the Kurds, and the American Confederacy had the right, which was denied to them by violence of the central government. Central government generally doesn't like secession. It is a challenge both to their power and to the "rightness" of their government, after all, if they were governing in a perceptibly just and fair manner who could want to secede? I think this pattern will probably be repeated. The Kurds will want to secede again and other groups, like the Marsh Arabs, might follow suit. Unless the new Iraqi Constitution includes right of secession (and it is by no means certain that it will, or even that it will be federal in the first place) it will be interesting to see how the new Iraqi government deals with this. Either they will allow secession and Iraq will balkanize into a few small, ethnically contiguous states or they will not, in which case we can look forward to at least a few years of Iraqi civil war and probably a longer period of terrorism, as Russia is undergoing now.

Michael, I have replied to you in my "defence of anarchism" thread as it is more relevant there. Both the outlawing of drugs and the use of tax money to assist addicts are cases of using state funds and resources to interfere in the strictly private affairs of individuals. This is quite an extreme punishment for somebody who simply wants to use his own body and his own money in a way he desires to. I'm sure you're about to tell me that drug addicts steal, so that's not their own money, however, theft is not all about drug use, and drug use is not all about theft, and theft would be a crime whether it was to fund drug use or not. I also posit that, were drugs legal, they would be far cheaper and safer than they are now. People generally don't commit theft in order to afford cigarettes, so it would also be with legal marijuana, heroin or cocaine. The period of prohibition in the US accompained a marked increase in the crime rate (even excluding the "crime" of drinking or possessing alcohol) and a marked increase in the incidence of alcohol abuse. If drugs are legalised we will have far fewer problems with crime, violence and substance abuse than we do now, not to mention billions of dollars back into our pockets that were being used to fund this ineffectual and wrongheaded "War on Drugs". That's because state-generated "solutions" don't actually solve anything. The most a government can hope for is to clean up a mess it originally made, but usually they end up creating a new one as they do so.

(Reply to Michael Hardner's post) Probably because the Chinese aren't aware of their own slavery, just as you are not aware of your own slavery, and also because the Chinese state has a monopoly on power and violence. This was not true of Spartacus's uprising. The historical analysis, e.g. by Bruce Catton, was precisely that industrialisation made slavery economically unviable. It seems to me that your original contention is that, in an anarcho-capitalist society, slavery might happen. But the same allegation can be made against any society with a state, so this objection to anarchy is not valid. It's also worth noting that a society which desired anarchism would be necessarily devoted to nonaggression and Lockean natural rights, and so would display a profound moral aversion to slavery. Anarchists view the state as a slaveholder and this is almost always the source of their disgust for the state. It's hard to imagine this situation changing.

No, you have not. You have said that despotism becomes totalitarianism when the level of state interference in the lives of the citizenry reaches some critical mass. I want to know where that point is, how you precisely distinguish between "despotism" and "totalitarianism". Even where such changes are gradual and hard to gauge, for example in the change from childhood to adulthood, we set some arbitrary point at which we judge the change has occurred. A fetus is judged to be human at birth. A child is judged to be an adult at 18 (usually). I want to know where you set your arbitrary point, or if you don't have one, how you distinguish one from the other. "Demos" is Greek for "people." If the majority of people have no say in government, how can you claim that that government is the rule of the "demos"? If you defined the rule of a few of the people, you'd use the Greek word for "few", which would make the word - surprise surprise - "oligarchy". To call such a government "democratic" is as bald-faced a lie as the title, "People's Republic of China", in that it is a republic of the people in name alone. Ah, so your argument rests upon the contention that once a democracy does something to brutalize the minority, it is no longer a democracy. In that case, we have no democracies and never have had any democracies, because all "democratic" governments have done such things, for instance, interring Japanese-Canadian citizens, or drafting unwilling young men to fight and die in foreign wars, or denying marriage to homosexuals. If this is your contention, then your democracy is unattainable and self-contradictory, because as soon as a government of the majority is created it inherently discriminates against the minority by excluding them from the powers of government, which would mean that democracy would disappear the very instant it was created. To summarise, your democracy would destroy itself by the very action of coming into being. My original point was that the 19th Century was a period in time - in the West - when individualism briefly outgrew totalitarianism. Those were the exact words I used. Eureka originally came up with this despotism vs. totalitarianism argument all on his own, in an attempt to throw up a smokescreen which he hoped would hide the fact that his contention about the 19th Century being a period of falling living standards was refuted. Even according to your definition, totalitarianism was the rule before the 19th Century. I can accept your definitions of the two terms without negating any aspect of my argument. My original point stands.

I'm aware of that, but Guevara's face tends to appear on more tee-shirts than Castro's. And the fact remains that Guevara, too, was a cold-blooded murderer and a good friend and fellow revolutionary of Castro.

You have failed to answer my question. At what point does a despotism cross over into totalitarianism? "Oligarchy" means government of the few, "democracy" means government by majority, therefore, Athenian government was an oligarchy since the majority of people had absolutely no say in government. I warned you against trying to re-define words. No, civic life is not necessary for an ordered society. Where you see references to civic life, it's generally an excuse for government interference in private life. This is not borne out by history. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of the ostensible democracies that enslaved people and denied votes to women, for instance. You also ought to consider that the "rule of law" in a democratic society is decided by the majority, so there is no guarantee that it will not brutalize the minority - as it so often has. But government creates the Rule of Law. What you are basically arguing is that government, or the majority, will and can be expected to police itself. I think that investing arbitrary power in any group and then just expecting that they will behave and refrain from abusing it is foolhardy in the extreme.

I'm sorry, but the economists Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and the Nobel-award-winning Friedrich Hayek all disagree with you. There's nothing special about gold or silver coins, they're just commodities. Other cultures have used things as diverse as seashells for money. As regarding your statement that coins are "standard" rather than arbitrary in value, this cannot be true. Nothing has value until somebody has placed a value on it. Consider how worthless Confederate dollars were in the closing years of the Civil War. Most Americans did not value that currency at all. Perhaps you'd like to share with us which Nobel-prize-winning economists your theories derive from? You are stating that since the Chinese state exerts absolute and brutal power over its citizens, amounting to slavery, this is a failure of anarcho-capitalist theory? I think it's a failure of statism. Perhaps, but history proves that at some point, that won't happen. Look at the abolitionist movement in the (relatively) modern USA and Britain, or the slave uprisings in ancient Rome and Greece, such as that led by Spartacus. Then study the history of the Northern American states prior to 1860. It's now accepted historical fact that slavery in the North died out because it just wasn't economically viable. It took longer in the South because those states were economically backward compared to the North. It's the key difference.

Castro a benevolent dictator? You are a complete idiot. He has murdered around 140,000 of his own people to date, and I've told you this repeatedly in these forums, so not only are you grossly ignorant, but woefully closed-minded to boot. Communist sympathisers make me sick. It would be no more morally disgusting to wear a swastika than a Che Guevara tee-shirt. I know you hate Bush, but you do your cause no credit when you become an apologist for the greatest criminals in history.

I seem to remember that Iraq is actually quite similar, even under Saddam's rule. Were there not Kurdish areas that refused to submit to Baghdad authority in the North?

To those who were debating the feasability of anarchy with me, I've started a thread here. I'll begin by replying to Eureka. Of course not, but that was never what I was arguing. Minority/majority relationships can shift, but you should not base a political philosophy on the hopes that they will shift, and that the new majority will refrain from exacting a revenge upon the new minority. Princeton University's WordNet as cited by Dictionary.com says that totalitarianism and despotism are synonyms. Regardless, let's assume you are right anyway. You have said This cannot be true because it suffers from the bald man paradox. If the difference between despotism and totalitarianism is the degree to which government "invades every aspect of civic life" then there must be a defining point at which a government has crossed from one to the other. Where is that? I already dealt with Rome. I said: Then list them. I'll make it easier for you: list just ten pre-19th Century democracies. That's the point you are disputing. Then define "democracy" for me and we will proceed from there. I'm sure you're about to say something silly, like defining Athenian oligarchy as democracy in order to prop up your previous point, but the definition of democracy you give will be subjected to great scrutiny, so be careful and don't get caught in the trap of relying on very nonstandard definitions of English nouns in order to justify your argument.

You can give it a shot. I'm fully confident you won't be able to, though. I have started another thread and indulged Eureka in a reply there.

I should direct this question back at you, and ask what is to prevent slavery in a state-policed system? Evidently nothing, since practically all nation-states, even the democratic ones, have practiced state-sanctioned slavery at some point. A police force that backed slavery would not get much business. It would certainly run into trouble when it conflicted with the police forces employed by those who didn't advocate slavery, and would have to compromise with them or risk economically destructive violent conflict. Since the anti-slavery forces would be far larger and stronger (slaves and freemen outnumbered slaveholders in all slaver societies), the almost certain outcome is that the slaver police forces would have to agree not to enslave or allow the enslavement of anybody who was not a client of theirs. Therefore, anybody contracting with a pro-slave police force would be advocating their own slavery, and the pro-slave police force would disappear pretty quickly. You ought to also consider that, when slavery is not backed by arbitrary state power, runaway slaves and abolitionists would be able to form their own police force to prevent their recapture and also to liberate other slaves. Slavery would quickly collapse on economic grounds alone since the rising costs of slaveholding (increased security necessitated by the liberating efforts of abolitionist police, the desire of slaves to flee and join the others in freedom, etc.) would make it less profitable than hiring freemen to do the same jobs. The private police force is open to the market forces of competition and pricing which ensure that the public demands for justice, law and value for money will be better met than with a monopolistic state police force. Any commodity which is used for exchange and not consumed by the recipient but held for further exchange is "money". The word "pecuniary" derives from the Latin word for "cattle", pecus. If the medieval blacksmith pays the baker in horseshoes, but the baker has no horse and trades the horseshoes to the miller for flour, horseshoes are money. Therefore, it is safe to say that the concept of money predates even ancient Sumerian shekels.

So, you believe the warlords and militias in the Middle East are paid for by voluntary contracts with the Middle Eastern people? I submit to you that these miltias and warlords are just state governments writ small, and that their money and power are extracted by extortion rather than free exchange. I'm not interested in what you think would "probably" happen. I'm interested in what you can prove, and you can't prove this. I can, however, tell you that the murder rate in 19th Century England, under public law enforcement, was not much different from that a century before under private law enforcement. A further example of a society without any government law enforcement whatsoever, but with rights and rights protection at least as good, and usually better, than any contemporary society, is Iceland. But you don't think government can screw things up or cause them to go wrong? Or you don't think that the arbitrary power invested in government makes their screwups more dangerous? Voluntarily. That word destroys your own argument. Government is people with guns and arbitrary power. But these are not the people making the direct decisions in the company, are they? The shareholders elect directors who appoint executives. Wrong. If the damage to the individual who ordered the company to pollute was less than the benefit to the individual, they would be wise to pollute. Limited liability corporations make that condition a near-certainty. Contract: 1a. An agreement between two or more parties, especially one that is written and enforceable by law. How can I agree to something before I have the capacity to agree to anything? Maybe my parents were blind alcoholics. I shouldn't be bound to be raised by them if I don't want to be, nor should I be bound to the arbitrary power of a state if I don't want to be. The analogy with one's body is false. You don't own your body or have any contract with your body, you are your body. No complaints from me. Here's the problem. If you argue that by remaining in the country, I agree to the state's power, then it must be your contention that the Canadian government owns Canada and every single piece of property in it, because nobody can place conditions on the use of property they don't own, nor can they claim some jurisdiction over or the right to dispose of what they don't own. Marriage and corporations are not market failures, they are just markets with high transaction costs. Marriage particularly so. This is because they are not based on exchange of money. You believe that state-organized health insurance has overcome all problems that a market might have and has been more successful at providing goods and services than a free market could have been? Explain how. Free markets don't fail, August, and even if they did in some parallel universe, that's no excuse for coersion and violence. Also, define how the state offers a way to transact beneficially.

I think the most likely outcome is a central and ineffective government, that resides in Baghdad and controls Baghdad alone. Outside of the capital, tribalism will probably prevent any kind of unification, at least on a national scale. Any Iraqi nation-building will have to respect tribal boundaries, so it's unlikely that there would be a unified Iraq again without ruthless central control, as was offered by Saddam. This is, once again, a hangover from colonialism. Just as in Africa, the division of territory along lines arranged by Western colonial powers rather than along local tribal and political divisions has caused many groups with deep enmity to be thrust together. I think what the US (and to a lesser extent the UN) is doing is simply a repetition of this colonial fallacy. Rather than confront the problems inherent in Iraq and Afghanistan that would prevent effective nation-building, they choose to ignore them in the hopes that they can somehow forge an effective nation-state within colonial borders with no consideration to ethnic divisions. I also worry that Iraq's neighbours (many of whom have suffered at Iraq's hands in the past) will look upon the disorder and the withdrawal of US troops as an opportunity to expand their borders. Iran and Syria would almost certainly love to add a slice of Iraqi territory to their own, and a weakened Iraqi state left without an effective military or even effective control over its own territory would be a golden opportunity. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait probably fear US repercussions too much to try a similar annexation, though they would doubtless like to.

Done. Get back under your bridge. Still not a cited fact or single piece of evidence, I see. Turn off your TV and go read a book. And you are citing the failure of Middle Eastern state police to stop this as a reason why we need state police? What you should be asking is why and how the state could do it any better. The failures of the state justice system are many. The police are undermanned and underfunded, the courts hand down seemingly random, inconsistent and nonsensical judgements, the victims of crime are never even listened to, let alone compensated, and so it goes on. Like all state-run institutions, the Canadian justice system is like a bad hangover from the USSR. It looks jarringly out of place in our modern, high-tech, free-market world, like the dilapidated roads, run-down power stations, chronically underachieving schools, and everything else the government puts its dead hand upon. Well, this runs completely counter to everything else you've ever argued in this forum. You have always said that the free market provides more and better for less, but suddenly when it comes to security (which is a commodity like any other), you do a complete about-face and argue that only the state can provide more and better for less. Can you explain the self-contradiction? Why are your economic policies capitalist in some areas, Marxist in others? Yes, as I already said, because they can get a cheaper-than-market way to do business by interacting with the government. If there was only a free market, how could anybody get a cheaper way to conduct transactions than going through a market? Consider that free enterprise has a motive to reduce transaction costs and the state does not. As far as government is concerned, its income is practically unlimited. This is as true for commodities like security as it is for commodities like foodstuffs. This still doesn't explain your self-contradiction. I blame the state for amplifying the bad aspects of human nature and I blame the state for the large majority of human misery and suffering in history. Limited liability corporations are an ideal way to negate risk, August. You see, the corporation has legal personhood and can be held accountable, but the corporation does not exist. You can't point to anything and say, "That's the corporation." What limited liability does is take responsibility away from individuals and give it to an abstract concept. Therefore, it's hardly surprising when individuals act in an unethical fashion. Take an example. The Niagara Textile Corporation dumps a load of toxic chemicals in the Niagara River. Under limited liability, the corporation can be fined, so they just pay their fines and do it again, because presumably the cost of the fine multiplied by the probability of being caught is cheaper than the cost of disposing of the chemicals properly, or they wouldn't have done it. If, however, the individuals in the corporation remain liable for their actions, then law agencies can identify the men who did the dumping and the executive who signed the order to do it and charge them personally. This makes it much less likely that the corporation will do it again. Executives don't mind a $2m fine amortized over the entire company, because they can share that cost with employees, customers and so forth, but they mind a $2m fine extracted from their personal bank account. Obviously you didn't read the link I gave you. Let's make an analogy. Say I sign a contract with some people, before your birth, that you are going to be my slave forever. Is that binding? Is it fair and just? The social contract idea hinges upon the idea that people of no relation to you, generations ago, can make a contract that you can be held to. The only just contract is one that you yourself consent to. Because the ticket is optional. Nobody forces you to buy it. However, there are men with guns and prisons forcing you to pay your taxes. And I presume you'd argue that segregation laws were perfectly alright, because blacks were free to move to California or New England? Actually, you do, you just can't let go of your preconceptions enough to admit it. Your self-contradictory arguments speak for themselves. You are like an old Polish housewife, asking who will produce bread if there is no state to do it. And who else would you have said that to? Thomas Jefferson? Martin Luther King? Mahatma Gandhi?

I've highlighted the crucial flaw in your argument. For this to happen as you've said would mean I was moving my property - my bullet - onto somebody else's property (what is not my property must be somebody else's, because under anarchism everything is private property or unclaimed wilderness). Once that happens, I've committed the crime of trespass. He whose land my bullet flew onto has had his property and his rights violated according to anarchist law and I can and should be punished, even if my bullet never hit anybody. You're dodging my point. Imposing law to "protect people from their own idiocy" - your words - not only implies that you consider yourself some kind of Nietzchean ubermensch in that you are far wiser than any of your fellow men, but also that you have the right to impose your will upon them in the name of their own good. Correct? Because if you do not acknowledge that you are wiser and better than all of your fellow men, then you have to leave them alone and refrain from trying to impose your values and your ideas upon them by force. No, it is the essence of theft. Taxation is stealing, and if you deny that, define taxation in such a way that it doesn't also describe high-minded theft. Court cases over taxation are not about retaining your rights to your property, they are about specifying the amount of money the government may steal from you. Show me a court case where a citizen has won complete freedom from taxation. Would you have said that to Iraqis pre-2003? That by remaining in Iraq, they are voluntarily accepting their rape, torture and murder in their thousands? Then you are very ignorant of anarchism. The key tenet of anarchy is not "every man for himself", but the Non-Aggression Principle which goes, according to L. Neil Smith, like this:

No, you assume that I rely on the collective. The simple fact is that you haven't thought about the matter enough. There are viable alternatives to the state in every conceivable field. There are already private security guards and private detectives. There's no good reason why the state should monopolise police forces. Private police forces predate state police forces by millenia. Consider London's pre-Peel thief takers for one example. Actually, money also predates central banking by millenia. During the 19th Century, many American communities had privately minted and issued money. They found that their currency and, as a result, their economy, was much more stable before the federal government shut down the private mints and forced everybody to use greenbacks. You can read on this concept further in Murray Rothbard's essay, What has government done to our money?

That was the excuse of Hitler and Stalin too - people don't understand why National Socialism/Communism is good for them, we have to impose it by force for their own good. This argument can be summarised as, "I know what's good for other people more than they do, and I should have the right to use force against them to ensure what I know is the best outcome for them." Go ahead and try it. I guarantee they won't just say, "well, alright then." They will issue fines. If you don't pay up, they will imprison you. If you resist arrest, they will use force against you. If you resist force with force, they will kill you. John Singer was shot dead by a deputy sherriff in 1979 because he refused to submit to a court order that he cease homeschooling his children and resisted repeated attempts by local police to arrest and incarcerate him. Note that John Singer never committed any aggression against the police or anyone else, and after the first court hearing he retreated to his farm and did not leave it until he had been killed. This is a strawman argument, August, and you should know better. Why would any sane stadium owner permit any kind of weapon inside his premises? They don't allow weapons now, or even outside food - why do you think this would change suddenly? It's no big deal to install metal detectors and hire security guards to enforce this, many stadiums already have these. Furthermore, if any stadium did allow assault weapons inside, who would be crazy enough to go there? Anyone who valued their life would stay away, and anyone who'd like to carry an assault weapon into a stadium and use it must bear in mind that he'd be surrounded by people who also had assault weapons and the will to use them. Such a stadium would go out of business rapidly - problem solved. The anarchist view of law and crime is generally preventative rather than retributive, which is why it's difficult for a lot of people to comprehend. Our justice system focuses not on preventing crime but punishing it after it happens. Because of government. The reason why the stock corporation is the dominant, nay, exclusive form of large business organisation is because of a 19th-century American law which allows such a corporation certain benefits, such as legal personhood and limited liability. The stock corporation doesn't exist because it's naturally superior, it exists because the state has made it artificially superior. The huge size of corporations is also due to government. People take the path of least resistance. If you have to give up A to get X, or A and B to get X, you'll only give up A. Right now, the best way to get ahead in the business world is to get the government to help you, with subsidies, protective tarriffs, exclusive contracts and so forth. This means that companies who are large enough to afford effective lobbying will get ahead. Without government, companies are forced to compete on fair terms and the large bureacracy and inefficiency of big firms would work against them. Consider that in corporate headquarters such as the Sears Tower or the Chrysler building, there are thousands of people who draw very substantial salaries but have nothing to do with either production or retail of the company's products. That is inefficiency, dead weight. Small businesses don't have that problem. In a truly free economy we would see many kinds of business organisations - workers collectives, small-business federations, and many more (I don't believe for a second that what I cannot imagine cannot be imagined by anybody else either). All would get a fair shot at business. As it is, that won't happen because the government plays favourites. Because there is no alternative. They cannot set up collectives, sole-trader federations or anything else because the state has rendered such organisations uncompetitive. On the contrary, I don't think you consider the cost of organising society with a government. I know that you think the free market provides better goods and services at lower prices than state-run industry does. Why do you suddenly lose faith in your own beliefs when it comes to services such as law enforcement? Such ideas are the mainstay of anarchist law. However, the fact is that you never voluntarily accepted any of the government's decrees. You were coerced into them. Read No Treason by Lysander Spooner. The social contract is a swindle. The only contract that is valid is one that you enter into voluntarily. To say that a contract can be entered into involuntarily or before your birth is to say that slavery is permissible. There's no interaction. Try and strike a deal with the taxman if you don't believe me. Families and business will compromise with you, try and take your needs into account. Government has no interest in you as an individual and will do whatever will win the next election, no matter how much that hurts you. I do actually agree with you, August, I was just playing devil's advocate. In my opinion, we are at present coasting off the impetus built up in the 18th and 19th centuries. Once that inertia is spent, economic and social collapse is assured as long as government continues on this socialist model, just as socialism collapsed before.

The tyrant's excuse. If you have to violate basic human rights to do something, what you are doing is misguided and almost certainly evil. But it isn't subsidizing the right to choose, because the individual does not have that right. I just showed you how many people who disagree with certain institutions are forbidden by threat of violence and death from withdrawing from those institutions. I think that because you use terminology like "it could be argued that..." you don't agree with what you're saying on a fundamental level, that the taxation/coersion system is profoundly and intrinsically unjust. Very true. Or America, or replace "General" with "KGB Director" and you've got Russia.

I strongly disagree. Women and slaves couldn't vote. They also wrangled the electoral system using the institition of patronage so that the plebs couldn't actually elect any of their own, but rather decided which wealthy former general's boots they'd get to lick in a given year. It does not matter. There are always going to be minorities, by definition wherever there is a majority in populace, thought or deed, there will be a minority. The minority, in democracy, has rights that are only preserved by the goodwill of the majority, rights that are frequently trampled, even today. The problem is that many see "minorities" as racial or religious groups, but in truth a minority is also a group that doesn't agree with the consensus, like the drug-legalisation lobby. Right now, the Canadian government violates the right of its citizens to private property, and renders many people modern sonderkommando by forcing them to support institutions they are strongly opposed to under threat of violence. Pro-lifers are forced to pay for abortions, homeschooling parents are forced to pay for public schools, and drug-legalisation activists are forced to fund the War on Drugs, for instance.

Really? Before the 19th Century there were no democracies. What else, besides totalitarianism, was there? Wrong. Except those who don't want socialised medicine and pay for it anyway, those who are pro-life and are forced to pay for others' abortions anyway, those who want to smoke marijuana and are banned by majority consensus, and so it goes on. And it might not. You are basing your political opinions upon what you would like to be true, rather than what is true. Blacks were a minority in the USA two hundred years ago. They are minority today. They will still be a minority in a century. Now, after having several debates with you and witnessing your debates with others I see the usual pattern emerging. You have no facts, no evidence, no citations, completely incorrect and ignorant theories and a dearth of logical argument. You have lost every debate you engaged in with me, so let's not waste any more time and say you lost this one too. Anybody who knows how to debate properly is welcome to take this up. Unless Eureka gets his act together, I plan on ignoring any further posts from him since they are mere trolling.

Probably. But that's the public goods problem at work. You see, the roads are public, which means they are supposed to be owned by all of us. However, the fact is that a percentage of us - state officials - get to tell us what we can and cannot do with this property. Therefore, it follows that roads cannot be public property, but instead private property which is completely monopolised by the state (and which the state is forcing everyone to pay for), because only the owner of something can decide how that thing should be disposed of and utilised. If the roads were truly public, the government would have no right to tell me I couldn't drink and drive, because it's my road too. However, I can't tell everyone else that they can drink and drive, because it's their road too. Hence, the public goods paradox. However, if roads were private, the owners could set whatever conditions they wished for their use. If you live on a street with your kids, you and your neighbours who also have young kids could pool your resources, buy your road and stipulate that anybody driving on it must not drive at more than 25km/h and cannot have any alcohol in their bloodstream. Anybody who breaks these rules is guilty of a breach of contract or trespass and can be charged and punished accordingly. If they don't like the rules, they can find another route. Well, you've made a poor analogy. I said that with no victim, there's no crime, but in your example there is a victim: your 1-year-old child, whom you have confined against his will in a situation that endangers his health. Once again, this is a very poor analogy. This would be a case of the mechanic failing to perform the tasks you paid him to perform to your required standards, thus, the mechanic is guilty of breach of contract even if nothing had happened to you. Once again, there is a victim - you - and the crime is fraud. The mechanic promised a given service and didn't perform it. The right not to be aggressed against, to be left alone.

I'm just going to pick up some points from various sources here. I'll tell you what it isn't: a homogenous nation-state. The problem is that the government - the mob - sets these very rights. What men give, they can take away, and there are countless instances where a democracy has violated the rights of its minority subjects - sorry, citizens - in horrible ways. It depends what that control is going to be. If you pick some kind of government, be aware that government created all the problems with globalisation and corporate power in the first place, by artifically making the stock-corporation the best method of collectivisation, by meddling with and monopolising the money supply, by making itself vulnerable to lobbying and so forth. What most leftists propose is that government fix what government broke by trying to fix something else, which it broke by trying to fix something else again, and so forth. I'd say it's bad in practice and bad in principle. In practice, we have 77% of the Canadian electorate chafing under a government they never voted for. In principle, democracy says that the majority should get to boss the minority around and tell them what to do. There has been nuclear power, the laser, the transistor, and so forth. It's an interesting premise but I think that the 19th Century was a period where individualism briefly outstripped totalitarianism, resulting in a huge increase in wealth, living standards, scientific advances, and so forth. Then, in the 20th Century, totalitarianism started to catch up again. So, we're back to statism and war again. And if it ever did, you can be assured it would be referred to the courts, a recount or a second vote before that lone vote was ever allowed to decide anything. Explain how.

Of course. Every decision we make and every action we take affects the lives of others every day. Should we spend our time working through the myriad threads of thirty million lives to determine who did what and punish them for consequences they could never have known would result from their actions? How would you do this, given that no sociologist, psychologist, economist or supercomputer has anything close to a working model of human social interaction? Or should we restrict criminal punishment to those actions that directly infringe upon the rights of another? No, you misunderstand. If there's no victim, it's not a crime.

No more or less so than Gandhi was when he illegally made salt. For the purposes of our argument, Gandhi was a man committing a so-called crime of illegal industry and trade. Drug dealers, too, are committing a so-called crime of illegal industry and trade. The fact is that drug dealing is purely consensual, and the only element of coersion comes, ironically, from state involvement. You don't see a black market for codeine that's tied up in prostitution, gun-running, extortion and so forth. Obviously, but that does not affect anything I have said at all. The same could be said about the rendering of Nazi Germany Judenrein, the denial of voting rights to blacks and women, and so forth. Would we be any further ahead if the activists in those fields had said, well, the law is the law, we have to go along with it? We have our social advances precisely because some individuals railed against and fought unjust laws. Drug laws are unjust. As a lover of freedom and justice it is my duty to oppose them. Yes, until your actions infringe upon somebody else's rights. If you get into your car blind drunk and drive all the way home without incident, no actual crime has been committed because you did not impinge upon the rights of any of your fellow citizens. If you run someone over, of course, then there may be a crime, with a victim and a perpetrator. A court would have to prove that your negligence caused the accident, and that you had full knowledge that your earlier actions (getting drunk) would cause such negligence. But drunk driving laws don't so much hold to "innocent until proven guilty" as "guilty before having committed a crime." No, because that would impinge upon somebody else's natural rights, which would mean that, if you were allowed to get away with it, they would be your slave. To advocate freedom to use drugs is not to advocate their use. I think you should be free to use drugs. I don't think you ought to use them, though. I also don't think you should buy a domestic car, because imports are much better. I'm not going to interfere if you want to buy a domestic, though. That's the difference. You mean, after prohibition ended they declined in power and influence, and both crime rates and alcoholism both dropped sharply? Of course, we wouldn't want to reduce crime or the incidence of drug abuse. Better keep drugs illegal so that that doesn't happen. Oh, and so the state can have a nice, righteous crusade to waste your tax money on and draw your attention away from their creeping encroachment upon your freedoms and rights.