Hugo

How is it not? If a man is innocent until proven guilty, then if you arrest and detain a man before his conviction then you have forcibly abducted and detained an innocent person, which is kidnapping. The same as in civil cases. Basically, you receive notice that a suit or charge has been brought against you and an invitation to attend along with your legal counsel, if you have one. Of course, if you don't show up, then you get tried in absentia, and if convicted then you are no longer an innocent man and your arrest and detainment would no longer be kidnapping. As to what I'd to when someone just runs away when the notice comes, well, I'll answer that when you can tell me how they've solved the problem of people skipping bail. If this is true, then the State has no right to govern us (or only enjoys the right until someone blows up Parliament). Therefore, the State is merely a band of thugs exerting their will over us by force and relying upon force to perpetuate this state of affairs. Therefore, I see no reason to respect the State or acknowledge its alleged right to rule anymore than I see a need to acknowledge the Mafia as right and legitimate. After all, by your logic, the State is basically a more successful Mafia.

But they are not. A police officer can kidnap a person and it will not be considered a crime. A taxman can take money without consent and it will not be considered theft. The mint can print currency and then spend it, which if committed privately would be considered counterfeiting and a serious offence. These are all crimes which the State has decided will carry no punishment or stigma when carried out in certain predefined circumstances and by its agents. Human nature being what it is, Government is the impractical solution because it accrues all power in the hands of a monopolistic, coercive group and then somehow supposes that a few printed words will stop them abusing it. Any society or group will reflect the general attitude of its members. If the people are too selfish, greedy and violent to be without a State as you claim, you assume that a State formed of these people will not be selfish, greedy and violent, when that is completely illogical. In these circumstances a State is likely to be a whole lot worse than anarchy. If the people are generally peaceable and altruistic, then a State they formed would probably be as well, but it would also be unnecessary since it wouldn't do anything people would not be inclined to do anyway. Not to mention Hayek's conundrum of the State: it represents coercive power over other people, and those attracted to positions within it will usually be those with a taste for power, which almost invariably accompanies highly unpleasant attributes, therefore, a State is likely to be made up of the most selfish and greedy people in the whole of society.

Police officers never shoot anybody for victimless crimes? The Canadian Government didn't bomb any innocent civilians in Yugoslavia? I beg to differ. If a man is innocent until proven guilty, then to arrest and detain him before his conviction is therefore kidnapping. Whether or not the populace consents to it is irrelevant, unless you are still clinging to the idea that rights are what other people say they are. And if that's the case, then if I bomb Parliament, none of the MPs can have had a right to govern or even to live. But they don't. We're not living in some cloud-cuckoo land where the unachievable is discussed. Well, sure, and just because everyone in the USSR was poor and oppressed didn't mean that the goal of the Soviet Constitution was to impoverish and oppress all the people. However, that's the way it turned out, and when you examine it, it dawns on you that this was not only possible but, in fact, inevitable. So it is with Government. The purpose is not for officials to serve themselves, but when you create a system that attracts people with a lust for power and grants them the "right" and the power to lord it over others, and then remove all the checks and balances against them, what else could possibly happen? It's just a matter of time before the State becomes self-serving. That is impossible. To govern others means that you need to be able to do to them what they cannot do to you (e.g. you must be able to imprison them if they don't do as you say, but you must be invulnerable to imprisonment for not doing what they say), therefore, to have Government, you need to have a double standard in law.

You confuse anarchy with disorder or chaos. They aren't synonymous. All States are created through war and conquest, so a Government is not order and peace but the end result of violence and chaos.

Libertarian used to mean anarchist. Now it usually means a minarchist, like a Randian. Anarcho-capitalists can be regarded as radical libertarians, or those who take libertarianism to its logical conclusion. Such anarchists accept the need for law and order, they just reject giving any group a monopoly on prescribing, providing and enforcing it. Basically, if the free market provides better at less cost, why not apply that to law, courts, etc? Indeed, in the USA there are more private security guards than cops, and more cases are settled in private courts than State ones each year. Private police forces have better track records than State ones both in the prevention of crime and in the misuse and abuse of force. Anyway, there are other threads where I discuss this in more detail (still open) - let's not let this thread wander too much.

Yes, right where suffragettes, abolitionists, democrats, heliocentrists and evolutionists used to be. This is what's called an ad populum fallacy, Argus - the notion that if an idea is not widely accepted it is therefore wrong, and conversely, if an idea is widely accepted, it must be right.

You're thinking of emotivist-anarchism. I'm an anarcho-capitalist. There are many more schools besides, such as anarcho-socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-primitivism, individualist (or egoist) anarchism, and probably more. But those are the major ones.

Why? I oppose State-monopolized courts, therefore, I must support the concentration of State power and the abolition of such checks and balances as exist? That doesn't make sense.

But that is a strawman, because I never, ever claimed that the actions of the Canadian State meet my wishes either. Pretty much every State will claim that, even the ones engaged in bloodthirsty massacres. The State depends upon at least the grudging consent of the populace and so has to wage an unceasing propaganda battle. What a State claims is really irrelevant, you are dealing with virtually pathological liars here. But I'm an anarchist who does not acknowledge the need or desirability of any Government or State, including the Canadian one. Very recently, in fact, I have labelled the Canadian State as a gang of thugs, murderers, thieves, kidnappers, counterfeiters, extortionists, etc. I know that there are many people who believe Canada to be the model of pacifistic, benevolent foreign policy even as they attack US foreign policy, however, I'm not one of them. I do not see how freedom and democracy are actually helped by abrogating freedom of speech, imprisoning without trial, searching (breaking and entering) without judicial oversight, torturing the enemies of the State, and so forth. And here we have it. Freedom definitely comes at the expense of the American State, so they will basically pay as much lip-service to it as the electorate demands and move to abolish it wherever they can justify it or where it will not be noticed. This has been the pattern of American government since the Revolution. Each new war and new crisis brings new taxes, new State powers (and the concentration of State power in Washington), and less freedom.

That is true, his argument is a false dichotomy. However, I feel that it can also be described as a strawman since he is ignoring my main argument in favour of attacking a much weaker one that I never made.

Firstly, as I had said, it is not so much that the USA conducts itself differently from any historical State in its quest for power and, if possible, hegemony, but the hypocritical terms in which it couches it - the name of freedom and liberty. Of course, all empires need their causes. The Romans built their empire for civilization, the British in the name of the white man's burden, the Nazis in the name of racial purity and manifest destiny, and now the Americans are doing it for freedom. Of course, all of those things turned out to be fallacious: Roman society was barbaric and more violent and degenerate than the "barbarians" it conquered, the British arguably detracted from the lives of their colonial subjects as much as they added to them, Nazi racial theories were based on some of the worst "science" of the 20th Century, and the USA is steadily abrogating all of the freedoms it purports to be spreading around the globe. Secondly, simply because a quality or idea is rare or even unknown is no reason not to advocate it. At one point, the same could be said of women's rights, abolitionism, democracy, and so forth. Nevertheless, those are all fact now, almost wholly because some people did not listen to the arguments that these must be impossible merely because they had never been done before. Kind of like the man who argued that we don't need a patent office because everything that could be invented was already invented.

What small groups are these - private criminals? We still have those under the State, and the empirical evidence demonstrates that the State is less effective in battling their privations than private citizens and private guards. If you refer to private protection agencies and courts, of course people have a stake - everyone who buys their products has a stake that can be withdrawn, i.e. by going to the competition. I would say that this stake is at least as powerful as a vote. Perhaps you can tell me if you agree with my summary of monopoly. Let's say we gave Exxon a monopoly over the supply of oil and also the power to force people to buy oil - they could access everybody's bank account, draw out what they liked and in exchange, give you access to whatever amount of oil they like. You have the power to change this, of course - you can buy shares in Exxon. One share, however, has a negligible effect, just as one vote has a negligible effect. Owning a large bloc of shares has a bigger effect but the means to do this are limited to a few people, just as entry into political office, which has a similar effect on the State, is limited to a few people - one must be well-connected, wealthy or backed by wealth (corporate, special-interest, labour union etc.), educated, Francophone, etc. In this situation, what's to stop Exxon from delivering as poor of a product as it likes and to charge as much for it as people could possibly pay? Then, replace "Exxon" with "State", and "oil" with "law and justice" and the sundry other goods and services the State controls, and tell me what's changed so that the State would not conduct itself the way a corporation would. And yet, it is. The State violates every one of its own laws. If justice is blind then the State is a big gang of thugs. Murder, kidnapping, extortion, theft, counterfeiting, you name it, the State does it, every day.

This is a strawman fallacy. You imply that since I denounce the foreign policy of the USA, I must therefore embrace that of Canada, when I said nothing of the sort.

And the most important difference of all: under a State, one group practically monopolizes these rules and punishments, and violently attacks anybody who attempts to compete - as I've said, like the Mafia. Consider this: in every society we need food. This is true of Statist societies and anarchist ones. Therefore, what's the difference between an anarchist society and one like Cuba where the State monopolizes the production and distribution of food? The answer is the monopoly. This is not true. Every anarchist society that I have mentioned did not collapse but was invaded by foreigners - a fate that States are definitely not immune to! Iceland thrived for several centuries and was conquered by Norway. Ireland thrived for almost a millenium and was conquered by England. Hole Experiment Pennsylvania thrived for a shorter time and was conquered by England. In all of these cases it is also interesting that the conquest proved much more difficult than the conquest of a State, since the people were used to rejecting government and there were no existing organs of government for the conquerors to take over. The English in Ireland, for instance, were shocked to find that every time they concluded a peace treaty with some tribe, others would still attack them in the same geographical region - they found it hard to comprehend that there could be multiple 'governments' in the same area. Why? Explain. I would also like to hear what right, in your opinion, trumps property rights, and why. You have far more power over the rich being a consumer than you have over the government being a citizen. You don't have to buy what they offer and you don't have to accept any job they have. They cannot prevent you starting out on your own in either case. Your control over them is your ability to choose their competitors. Under capitalism, if anybody is enslaved to anybody, it is the entrepreneurs who are enslaved to the consumers. Politicians have no such restraint. All they need is the support of maybe 1/5 of the electorate, and they are your masters without possibility of appeal or any alternative. But you handily gloss over the fact that it is States who are the biggest expropriators, the biggest murderers, kidnappers, counterfeiters, confidence tricksters and so on. So you conveniently leave out the fact that the woman, as part of the bargain for this protection, must suffer the crimes she seeks protection from. You have admitted as much already: we have a State, you claim, because of all the bands of thugs we could possibly be exploited by, we prefer them. Assuming that people always know the truth. They don't, and to return to my earlier parallel, if what you said were true the Earth should be flat. Most people didn't realize it was round, most people didn't realize that bad smells didn't cause sickness, most people didn't realize that drought and famine were the products of adverse weather conditions and not angry gods, and most people don't realize that the State is unnecessary and dangerous. Perhaps I can explain this another way. I assume that you believe a monopoly is bad for people. You will probably agree that a corporation with a monopoly will extort, gouge and rip people off. It will use its monopoly status for its own gain at the expense of everybody else. What we have done with the State is to grant one gang of thugs monopoly power. If what I have said above is true, this means it is inevitable that the State, with this monopoly, would quickly become not only the biggest but also the worst and most tyrannical group of thugs. After all, there is now nothing to restrain that.

No, they did not. They turned up several years late when they felt it was in their interests. I don't see how this draws any ties between defence and military adventuring. It seems to me that you are arguing - for an analogy - that unless I am permitted to leave my house with a gun and go shooting people, there is no hope that I could defend my house from an intruder. Given all the heady talk of democracy-seeding I think it the height of hypocrisy for the USA to be coming to the aid of disgusting little regimes like Saudi Arabia.

Sure. On July 24, 1941, the US government took the step of freezing all Japanese assets in America and imposed an oil and material goods embargo. Roosevelt described this as "economic war". Japan persisted in trying to defuse the situation, but Roosevelt wanted in on WWII, so this wouldn't do. On November 26, the USA delivered a 10-point ultimatum known as the Hull Note to Japan demanding that it basically quit all territories gained since 1933. The US Ambassador in Tokyo called this "the document that pushed the button that started the war." The USA imposed the embargo and freezing of assets as an objection to the Sino-Japanese war. They did not do this out of conviction that the war was wrong, but because Japanese actions in China conflicted with Theodore Roosevelt's Open Door Imperialism policy, which held that China should be open for American business. The Japanese presented two proposals to the USA in mid-November, the first being that they settle the Sino-Japanese war immediately and conduct a partial withdrawal of Japanese troops. The second proposed a cessation of military action in China in exchange for 1m gallons of aviation fuel. Roosevelt was initially prepared to make a counter-offer but later decided against it, instructing Cordell Hull to send the Hull Note which basically demanded that Japan abandon all gains in its costly Sino-Japanese war, or else. The Japanese fleet that was to attack Pearl Harbour set sail the same day.

That doesn't make sense. It's like saying a woman wants to be raped by somebody so that she won't be raped by somebody else. Good, and that's basically my point: the State is essentially a criminal organization of thugs who exert power over people for their own benefit. I don't see how a rational defence of the State can arise from that. Your argument that one group of thugs may be better than another is pointless since it basically says that the worst that can come of anarchy is what we have already, therefore, we need to preserve what we have already.

Alright, so basically you are saying that the State exists not because it should or because it is right, just or utilitarian, but because it can. There's no difference between the Government and the Mafia. Correct?

What of those "members" (since you mistakenly seem to insist that the State is synonymous with its subjects) who reject it? What justifies the imposition of the State upon them against their will?

I would say it had more to do with the fact that they had no hope for peace. At that point, the choices for Germany were to win or to be defeated. Had there been a third alternative, other than a desperate and bloody gambit of last resort or the destruction of the Hohenzollern State, I'm sure they would have pursued it. Wilhelm II may have been none too bright, however, there's nothing suggesting that he was insane enough to continue fighting with no soldiers, no guns, no bullets and no food if there was an alternative. Even Hitler, in 1945, sought a peace settlement - and he was crazy! And perhaps Austro-Hungary should have thought of it before delivering an impossible ultimatum to Serbia. For that matter, the USA should have thought of it before delivering a highly insulting and impossible ultimatum to Japan, which led them to believe that war was inevitable and that they should strike first to have any hope of winning. That's a much-glossed-over fact of history. Sure, but the historical consensus is that WWI was not the fault of any one country. It was due to increasingly hostile and belligerent blocs of power. The attitudes of all European countries in the early 20th Century made war inevitable - it was always a question of when, until 1914. It cannot have, because the circumstances I am speculating about never arose. Ghostbusters! Well, since I've been coerced into paying for them and as they're supposedly there for my benefit, why not? Would you have run into a Berlin street in 1943 and said, "Screw Hitler! Long live Stalin!"? What would I gain from such a stance beyond my own misery? One has to know how to pick one's battles. Because their modes of operation are distinctly unjust and illegal. No private security firm could get away with a tenth of what the police do. Blackdog's responses to this point have been excellent and he obviously knows what he is talking about. I won't sully his arguments by my relative ignorance. You may have as many sites as you like. The fact remains that WWII historians all agree that the Waffen-SS was a frontline combat unit that was fanatically devoted to Hitler and the Reich. They wholeheartedly flung themselves into battle and had a legendary disregard for their own casualties (which was criticized by other generals). As Blackdog has pointed out, your point is self-contradictory. You state that soldiers do what they do because they believe in their cause, and then when presented with a case where soldiers devoted to a cause committed atrocities and backed a wholly unjust and evil State, you claim that that couldn't possibly be right, against all the evidence, and that they must have been coerced. The question here is what differentiates your motivation from that of a Waffen-SS soldier?

If that were true, the Earth would be flat. Belief does not make fact.

No, I don't expect that they would. They'd have to be stupid. What would happen is that American firms simply wouldn't do business in chaotic and unstable parts of the world - which is pretty much what happens now, of course. As to charity, transfers of wealth between governments generally do next to nothing for people. Private charities (which work in some pretty awful parts of the world, bless 'em) are much better. In any case, I can't see what you are arguing for here. Are you proposing that the USA must send vast armies overseas so that soldiers and foreigners can die for business interests? Why would the abolition of military adventuring make mutual defence obsolete? For sure, America is a better place to live than most other countries in the world. The problem is that with every war America fights, the government accumulates more power and abrogates more freedoms. None of these ever return once abrogated: temporary taxes and restrictions become permanent. What poses the greatest danger to the American way of life is the so-called defence of the American way of life. War is the health of the State.

There are many avenues of attack on the State. Murray Rothbard pursues the theory that it runs counter to natural rights, David Friedman does not particularly care about rights but argues that the State is both unnecessary and dangerous in a utilitarian way because nothing it does cannot be done better in a free market. If Thelonius is correct and there are no concrete and objective rights, then the State is just another gang of thugs and can't be justified. I object to that, because the way you have posed the question means that it is inevitably couched in the terms of your morality and sense of right and wrong. The use of the word 'fair' denotes that much, because it is a moral concept. What you seem to be asking me to do is take a moral idea and judge it without morality. But if you believe there are no fixed rights than that also means there is no such thing as property or ownership, because these concepts denote the right to control, and nobody can have such a right. Therefore, under your theory, anybody who does adhere to the State's definition of laws and rights is delusional.

Why does the system need to survive? Why is equality of opportunity fulfillment of rights and not a violation of rights? What are rights anyway? An anarchist system has never collapsed. Everyone has an incentive to support the system because creating a State requires the effort of many who will not end up benefitting from it. The State exists parasitically and as such must remain a minority so that its extortions will not just bleed the extorted dry. Therefore, the majority will not benefit from the existence of a State and so will generally oppose its creation. I believe that government sponsored wealth redistribution is massive violence (against property, in outright confiscation, and against the persons of those who resist) and class warfare (taking from haves to give to have-nots), and I fail to see how something can prevent itself. Those States that have redistributed wealth most drastically are also those that have created the greatest amount of violence and class warfare. Actually, I'm very open to Stirneresque nihilism. However, if you take a nihilist view of rights then that still does not justify the State - without objective rights, the State becomes a gang of thugs doing what they want by force without any moral or ethical justification whatsoever. The only definition of 'rights' that justifies a State is one which basically claims the State gets to define rights, and that is logically indefensible because there is nothing about the people comprising the State which would indicate that they have any better idea of what rights are than anyone else. Your question cannot be answered as posed. Even if true, how does this justify the existence of a State?

Then why are you insisting that this War on Terror is in fact some kind of Good vs. Evil struggle, when what you have just said should lead you to view it as just a turf war between different (but very powerful) gangs of thugs? Nor was putting nuclear missiles into Turkey. Anyway, I don't believe a case can be made that the USSR was more belligerent than the USA during the Cold War. US troops went overseas far more often than Soviet ones. How many wars did the USSR fight by proxy, anyway? They pulled out of Korea. They backed Chiang Kaishek in China. They didn't do anything about Vietnam until it became clear that the USA was going to intervene. The oil crisis produced great adaptation in the West. People abandoned gas-guzzling cars for smaller ones, found new ways to conserve energy, etc. Had the oil crisis continued, this development would have intensified. I appreciate that you believe I am indifferent to the suffering this caused, however, I think this suffering pales beside the suffering that the instabilities and struggles in the Middle East have produced. Put it together with the disastrous administrations of Nixon and Johnson and you have your explanation, though. These administrations pursued very similar policies economically and socially. The gap between rich and poor was considerably smaller then than it was during either the 1990s or so far this decade. Trickle-down economics were more successful at improving the lot of the poor than either Clinton's measures or Compassionate Conservatism. My point is that grandiose war aims do not a just and wise policy make. Woodrow Wilson called WWI a war to "make the world safe for democracy." What WWI actually and foreseeably did was to make WWII inevitable, which snatched the whole of continental Europe out of democracy, and the aftermath of which left most of Europe and many other parts of the world in tyranny. Foreign interventionism.