Hugo

Yes, it is a measure of market success to kill less people than the competition. This is the impetus behind car safety: airbags, crumple zones, ABS/EBD brakes, traction control, drive-by-wire, etc. The difference between a soldier killing someone and a car manufacturer making a defective car that kills someone is that the victim in the former case had no choice - death was visited on him. In the latter, nobody forced him to buy and drive a car, he could have walked. You make your own decisions about risks rather than having the State risk your life without your consent. I don't disagree, and this type of case used to be grounds for a lawsuit before the government decreed back in the 19th Century that industrial pollution was no longer a violation of property rights. Just because you have consensus doesn't mean the conclusions reached are correct. Need I remind you of the countless incorrect and idiotic things that, at one point, the majority believed - the earth was flat, bleeding improved the health, bad smells caused disease, the devil lived in unleavened bread, etc? No, they are not. A lie is something that you say which you believe is not true. It's not arbitrary. Look it up in the dictionary. But only government has or can grant a monopoly. Wrong. These systems are basically heirs of the Anglo-Saxon borh system, which existed without government. Or to have the plant inspected by an independent and trusted food processing inspection board, whose stamp of approval the meat packer can use as an advertising tool. Coercion: the use of express or implied threats of violence or reprisal (as discharge from employment) or other intimidating behavior that puts a person in immediate fear of the consequences in order to compel that person to act against his or her will; also : the defense that one acted under coercion (from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law). I don't see how the scenario you outlined fits into that definition. Can you explain in greater detail? Where, exactly, is immigration creating huge slums? Wasn't this the story of 18th and 19th Century America - vast immigration from all over the world? Give me your huddled masses and all that? Was it not also the case that this period was the time of greatest improvement in the American standard of living and wealth? Assuming that they didn't work. But if they got jobs, paid taxes, bought products, etc. why would this pose any kind of problem?

Ah. Then what you are saying is that WWII didn't need to be fought, because the conquest of Europe by Nazis and the murder of European minorities was not immoral or wrong. After all, it was up to the Nazis to grant them any rights they might have had, and they didn't do that, ergo, they had no rights which could have been violated.

It doesn't need to be decided. When you initiate force or fraud against another person or his property, that's an encroachment of rights. This definition is not arbitrary and is logically defensible. Quite a few people here have tried to shoot it down but nobody has come up with a decent argument against it. Even assuming you're right, that does not justify or necessitate the existence of government since there is absolutely no reason why a governmental decree of what constitutes 'encroachment' is any more or less accurate than any alternative. This is untrue. A deliberate lie is fraud. Anything else is caveat emptor. I would say that the most essential thing about government is its coercive, monopolistic, mandatory nature. It is what differentiates government from everything else. So to say that government and these other things differentiate only in this matter is really meaningless. Why is that the case? What examples of market failure can you think of and why would government do any better in these instances? Why would it do that? Make an argument. Don't just make stuff up and expect me to believe it without proof or logic.

As always, I define freedom as having natural limits where it encroaches on other people's freedom. So it goes without saying that, when I say to move around as one sees fit, that means without encroaching on anybody else's rights, because that would abrogate their freedom to move. So you either move into unclaimed wilderness or you go someplace where the current owner is willing to either sell, give or lease to you.

No. I see a series of actions all of which are in some degree inferior to solutions that would be reached in an anarcho-capitalist society.

Why must they? The 'freedom' to defraud is not a freedom because it encroaches on the freedom of others, it is a rights-violation. I would also like you to demonstrate to me how these organizations are "quasi-governmental". If you start telling me that they are like governments, then like Sweal and August, you are going to get caught defining everything and everyone as a government: an impossibly broad and useless definition. Yeah, because nobody ever died where there were government regulations. Like I said to August, don't assume that government fixes all problems. It's demonstrable that government is very bad at fixing problems and most of the problems it addresses aren't actually problems at all, or are problems made by earlier government 'fixing'. So, you admit that abuse of governmental power is the problem. Good.

Government structures are the opposite of individual liberty and choice. This is like saying that living must be tempered with some murders. Is this a government, then? How about this? What about this? This? Your claim is nonsense. The examples above, and other examples of market-based fair-trading practices and internet dispute resolution prove this point wrong as well. It isn't caused by lack of trust. Tribal bonds are still very powerful there and Africans generally have a greater sense of kinship and loyalty than Westerners do. This is why democracy fails there: people vote along tribal lines and the biggest tribe forms the government, every time. The problem is, as I have said, that governments there wield massive power and accumulate great wealth for their heads of state, and this power and opulence is too much to resist for many, who spend their time attempting to wrest this power from the existing government. For example, in Nigeria the problem was not lack of trust - members of the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Rwanda were generally united amongst themselves, but also tragically united against each other, which led to the mass slaughter of minority Tutsis by Hutu. Government did not prevent this, it perpetrated it. The power of government exacerbates problems such as you describe.

Ah, so if I steal your car stereo, you should just accept it, because some people are actually carjacked? So it's not that you reject theft, you only reject theft if it's not done to support something you agree with. How about murder? Rape? Torture? Will you support these crimes if you agree with the cause? Well, here's the thing. Anarchist societies without armies were all eventually conquered by foreign armies (although they usually made it very difficult), although most of them existed for centuries - longer than the paltry 85 years of the USA. However, history very clearly shows that a nation-state with an army is also perfectly conquerable. In fact, it's often easier to conquer because the existing apparatus of government can be used by the enemy, and the populace is trained to subservience. So what do we gain from an army? Invulnerability to invasion? Tell that to the Persians, the Romans, the Turks, the Holy Roman Empire, the Chinese, the Russians, the French, the Germans... you get the point. Having an army in no way guarantees your security in any measure. It just adds more tyrants who already hold power over you without having to invade first.

Perhaps, but still, you must appreciate that picking the lesser of two evils is an inferior (though perhaps pragmatic) option to picking neither. As to WWII, as Friedrich Hayek noted, it's almost funny that we fought that war to oppose 'evil' Nazism and, before, during and after that war, adopted many Nazi principles and ideas. They weren't original to the Nazis, to be sure, but the collectivist Nazi ideology is and was firmly entrenched in mainstream European and North American political ideas. Right, you keep saying this. However, this nullifies your idea that the Allies fought the war to end the Holocaust and that the battle is between good and evil. According to you, there was no moral weight between either the Allies or the Axis powers and it was simply a struggle between rival power blocs - a viewpoint you have rejected elsewhere. This is a further example of what Blackdog has described as your pretzel-like corkscrewing without actually landing on an argument. So how is that different? Conscription means a nation-state will win a war? Ah, so we must do like they do? The antidote to Nazism is building a state along Nazi principles to oppose it? Or is it better to try and oppose this evil wherever it is seen? Actually, it is pretty silly to call an analogy 'silly' without any argument to prove it. You might as well say the analogy was 'purple' or 'happy' or 'populous'. Yeah, and quite a lot of Germans didn't find Hitler's arguments as feeble as I do. What does that mean? I reject that claim. I use the perfectly valid rhetorical exercise of reducto ad absurdum and construction of valid analogy to illustrate the invalidity of certain ideas. I do not twist anything, I just show how other arguments are self-contradictory and nonsensical. Once again, ask any Waffen SS soldier in WWII what they were defending and they'd never reply "one of the greatest evils in human history." What does that prove? You guess not. But as Iraq, and Somalia, and Afghanistan (Soviet-era), and WWII Yugoslavia and Denmark, and so forth prove, you don't necessarily need an army to defend yourself against an invader. This is all speculation on your part. The argument is essentially the same as that used by Mafia protection racketeers. It's also the same as used by tyrannical regimes the world over: "You need us to protect you, even though our existence violates your basic rights, because the evil fill-in-the-blank will come and kill you in your sleep if we're not here!" This is like the whole Cold War argument too. American anti-Communists warned that the Soviets were going to take over the world, resting on faulty theories like the "missile gap" fearmongering, but history proves without a doubt that the USSR was not interested in conquest, would not risk her security for foreign conquest, would not send her armies outside her borders (except for Afghanistan - far less than American belligerence in the same period), and was always willing to trade territory for guarantees of peace. Stalin gave up his stake in Austria for a guarantee of Austrian neutrality, and was also willing to give up East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states etc. in exchange for similar guarantees of neutrality. American unwillingness to live at peace with the USSR condemned millions of Central and Eastern Europeans to 45 years of tyrannical rule.

Well, this is a half-truth. The structured cultures may have "taken their place" but the suffering endured by the Russian or Chinese people was far more massive and terrible than that endured by Africans. It's also the case that, in the course of abandoning colonialism, the colonial powers visited all their worst faults upon the decentralized cultures, and left them with borders, governments and so forth. The struggles in Africa have generally been about seizing the reigns of government created by colonial nations. This is an argument for Communism. The USSR, North Korea and Cuba prove that Communism is not a good way to look after the needs of most people at all.

The means for Hitler to take power were already present long before he even entered politics. The powerful, centralized State and a culture of statism makes the wielding of such power all too easy. You will find that most dictators and tyrants take the reigns of a nation that has a history of such powerful, centralized government: Lenin and Stalin, Mao, Hirohito and the Japanese military, etc. In regions where government was weak or absent, conquest and tyranny were far more difficult. It took the British centuries to bring anarchist Ireland under their heel, and really, one can make the case that they still haven't to this day. The problem is that the kind of discrepancies and violations that turned up in Hitler's case have been alleged and have actually occurred in pretty much every democratic nation - vote fixing, vote buying, intimidation and threats (even murders), spying, sabotage, packing the judiciary and other houses, and so forth. There's nothing really remarkable about anything Hitler did, the main difference between Nazi Germany and Western democracies being one of degree and not of principle. If, as Eureka claims, Nazi Germany was no democracy or was not formed democratically, then there are no democracies and never were.

I might point out that if it were not for soldiers and other armed thugs in the service of the State there would have been no gassing of Jews to stop. Does that clarify things? My other point is that there is no real difference between Country A and Country B, and unless you can demonstrate to me that two wrongs make a right, that's what I'll continue to believe. If something is worth fighting for, people will fight for it.

Which are they? As Roy Childs said, you have to establish things: first, that there is a problem, secondly, that government solves that problem. Statists far too often assume that government will solve market problems when empirical evidence suggests that it does not. They also assume that there are problems that need solving when logic suggests that what they perceive as a problem isn't a problem at all. These safeguards don't work. All checks and balances are within the control of the State. What we do is to hand all the power and guns to one group of people and expect them to police themselves. It never works. This is why government always expands and the extent of its human rights abuses always grow. You're right, this was asked, and I already answered it. And that's why we have arbitrators. The State doesn't even pretend that it can solve this problem and that is why the State has courts. Why do you pretend it can? What did I just say? If you accept it it is not coercion. Please tell me whether or not you actually understand this. Look: someone cuts me with a knife. That's coercion. Someone cuts me with a knife because he's a surgeon and I paid him to. That's not coercion. Same act, but because of my consent, one is not coercive. This is too stupid for words. I'm not justifying it with a response. Yes. No States mean no borders, no borders means no concept of "immigration", just people freely moving about as they see fit.

The same can be said of almost all democratically formed governments. Even those with an electoral majority usually don't have the support of over 50% of the population as a whole. For instance, George W. Bush got 51% of the popular vote, which is 62 million people out of a population of 295 million, or 21%. In 1936, FDR got 60.6% of the vote, which was 27.4 million out of 128 million, or 21%. Even discounting the under-18s, this still means that both were opposed by most of the population. The point was not that Hitler had majority support in Germany, because he didn't, and it's incredibly rare for any democratic party to get that. In fact, I think it may never have happened. The point was that his government was the product of a democracy, and democratic procedure was not violated to get him into government. Hitler was always careful to keep his government legitimate according to Weimar law, hence his rubber-stamp democratic procedures and holding of sham elections. For a democratically elected government to subsequently abuse and expand their power is really nothing new - Lincoln, FDR, Bush Jr, etc. As I said, if you write off Hitler's government as undemocratic because of this, you write off most historical Western governments with it. Right, but we all know what "the Holocaust" usually refers to, don't we? I think that, without further clarification, when a person mentions "the Holocaust" we assume he means the Nazi oppression of Jews and other minorities between 1933 and 1945. Isn't that all democratically elected governments? Find me an historical democratic government that has kept every single one of its campaign promises and never done anything to disillusion anybody. Again, if you write off the Nazis because of this, you write off virtually all Western democratic governments with them. Something tells me Sweal won't be back here for a while.

Perhaps I did not make myself clear before. I will say it again. You cannot escape or deny the fact that all Allied countries conscripted men to fight. Nor can you escape or deny the fact that a very great many of them came back dead or very physically and mentally scarred. Are you going to answer my question or not? I have been very accomodating of you, and you are just being rude. Good for them! Replace "Canadian soldiers" with "Waffen SS" or "Gestapo" and the sentence is still exactly true. So, you still need to prove your point, unless you're saying that Canadian soldiers are no better than Nazi stooges. No, I don't know exactly what you mean, because you repeatedly refuse to explain it to me. I find it laughable that you tell me how elementary so many of your points are and then are either incapable or unwilling to articulate them. In what circumstances would you need to? Perhaps because they perceived you as a threat, you were in their territory and heavily armed, etc? Yes. I would like to think that those who debate with me understand the terms they are bandying about. I think that's better than responding with no answers at all and tireless repetition of empty dogma. Ah, so you defend the government. The government is not the people. The government is a violator of the rights of the people. It steals, it murders, it kidnaps, it enslaves, it defrauds, it counterfeits, millions of times, every single day - and yet you defend it against the people whose rights it violates, and then have the absolute nerve to tell me you are fighting for those people? Wake up, man!

But this is not attempting nothing. This is attempting to attain nothing, because the Buddhists see nothingness not as something we already have but as something that one has to achieve. For instance, I have two oranges. If I want to have no oranges, I actually have to do something to get there. I can give them away, throw them in the sea, leave them on the ground and run away, but I need to do something, and abandoning the oranges is my goal. Right - once you achieve the goal you have no more goals. Once you cross the finish line, no need to keep running.

Review your William L. Shirer. His popular mandate made his the most powerful party in the Reichstag, based upon the Weimar proportional-representation electoral system. Hitler then performed some wrangling with von Papen and Hindenburg to form a government, but everything he did to attain power was perfectly legal according to the Weimar Constitution. Certainly it was a lot more legal than Paul Martin's jiggery-pokery over the last month or so. Actually, no, I'm using that as an example to dispel Sweal's notion that everything a democratic government does to its citizens is voluntary on their part. I can tell you who the government is not: all of us. Otherwise, as I demonstrated, the Holocaust was 11m suicides. The government, then, is those who exercise or are agents of those who exercise coercive power which is nevertheless protected by law. This is all covered quite well by Franz Oppenheimer, if you fancy a read. Here's an extract as paraphrased by Rothbard: When I say 'owned' I mean exercising the right to control, since that is all that ownership means. The government of Canada has pretensions to control all property and people in Canada, particularly as the Charter contains no guarantee of property rights, therefore, it owns everything. Firstly, this is just reiteration and not development of your argument. You have not responded at all to the property-rights question. Secondly, if you willingly submit, it isn't coercion, is it? Again, failure to develop the argument. I need make no response yet. Why? Then you need to re-examine your ideas, because the definition of "government" you have offered me - in which you refer to a condo governor board as a government - means that these mechanisms also would have to be government. Has Greg appointed you moderator? No? Then it is not your place to make any such remarks. If you feel that inappropriate things have been said then take it up with Greg. It's his jurisdiction, not yours, despite your previous illusions that this website, to which you contribute nothing, is somehow at least partly your property anyway.

Let everyone who alleges that Greg is a "dictator" and other such nonsense take careful note of this.

Yeah? Why don't you complain to Greg again? I bet he does exactly what he did last time you complained about this: absolutely nothing, because you don't have a leg to stand on and are just throwing a little tantrum because your ideas don't pan out the way you'd like.

But an attempt needs a goal. You cannot attempt nothing, to attempt to get nothing is not to attempt. You assume the nature of the goal but that is the very thing you must prove. Insufficient explanation. Why does not being have no achievement or reward? Buddhists say it does. What do you mean by 'nothing'? Empty space?

But it isn't universal. You just told me it's not universal. Look: -- Theloniusfleabag, Jun 13 2005, 07:36 AMBesides, you assume the motives behind these attempts are 'to be further', when that is precisely what you are trying to prove with this example. You're still assuming your conclusion. You still fail to address the point that evolutionary 'dead ends' could actually be the true successes, and the individual creatures wiped out through evolutionary 'failure' may actually have achieved what 'successful' creatures have not but were supposed to. If the will can override what you claim are natural inclinations, and humans naturally have this free will, what makes you think that the purpose of human existence is not to successfully override natural inclinations (like eating too much sugar) and cease to be?

This is essentially Sweal's Patented Useless Definition of Government revisited. If a condo association is government, then priests are government because they set the terms, conditions and dues for membership in the Church, and teachers are government because they set the requirements for education in their school, and corporate management is government because they set the requirements and compensation for their employees, and so forth. Basically, everyone is government. However, the actual fact is that these examples are just private individuals and organizations exercising their property rights, to control their own things. If you are saying this is analogous to the Canadian Government, then you assume that this Government owns the entire nation. Why not? Corporations and shareholding, associations, boards, committees, PTAs - there are many voluntary methods of making collective decisions without resorting to the violence of government. Again, it's about property rights. Buy a house and agree to abide by the decisions of the street committee. Don't like it, don't buy it. But to call this analogous to coercive, nation-state government is to say that government owns the entire country. After all, a street committee would not just turn up and decide it controls the street (unless it was a conquering invader, in which case it would simply be forming a State in the same way that all States have been formed) - it would have to be placed there by the people who actually first owned and built the street and as such is just an exercise of their rights and is not coercive at all. Right, because these are public goods problems created by government interventionism and a lack of property rights. You watch, Sweal, I'm going to make you apologize for the Holocaust, again. This'll get you goose-stepping mad: If taxation is not theft then you are saying that what a democratically elected government does to its citizens is voluntary. Therefore, drug pushers send themselves to jail, people who double-park fine themselves, and all the Jews and minorities killed in the Holocaust actually committed suicide because it was done by a democratically and constitutionally elected government, and whatsoever a democratically elected government does to its citizens is voluntary. Who is 'the public?'

I thought perhaps you had some new arguments, but I was wrong. This is just repetition of your earlier viewpoints without development. The assumption that perfection is either static or objective isn't one I'll just accept without an explanation. You are still assuming your conclusion. You say that evolutionary success proves that the goal is to be, and evolutionary failures are just attempts at success gone awry. But whether or not they are successes and failures depends upon the purpose of life being 'to be'! You still have not established that what you call success and failure aren't actually reversed. Your argument presupposes what you are trying to prove as an essential premise and is therefore invalid.

This is not true. If he was defending my right to property ownership he would defend it against the worst violator of that right, i.e. the Canadian government. However, the reverse is actually true: he will defend the Canadian government, the rights violator, against me! This being the case, it's impossible that he is defending my rights any more than Mafia protection-racketeers are defending the rights of the people they extort from. As Blackdog said quite a while ago now, the soldier does not serve the citizens, he serves the State and usually against the interests of the citizens.

If you do a search for 'slavery' in my posts you will find three pages of results, in all of which the assumption is made that slavery is wrong, and where I argue against the state for enslaving people and that anarchy will not lead to slavery. Your original lie (or error, whatever) was that I contended that slavery was not morally wrong but only economically unfeasible. The simple search I detailed above proves this wrong quite easily. You've lost me. What are you talking about? There have always been hostile people in the world, but the crimes of private citizens such as Charles Manson or Ted Bundy are intinitesimal compared to the crimes committed by nations such as Stalinist Russia or Maoist China (although we identify Stalin and Mao as the criminals here, it is important to note that they needed a massive State to be complicit in the crimes). Even the democratic Canadian State has killed more people than Ted Bundy did. As to hostile nations, yes, and nation-states are by far the greatest criminal organizations in history. This is why I oppose the idea of the nation-state. Once again, quoting Judge Judy, if it doesn't make sense it probably isn't true. The idea of creating or supporting belligerent nation-states because there are belligerent nation-states does not make sense to me. Perhaps you can explain it, prove to me that two wrongs actually do make a right, that there can be such a thing as a War To End War etc. Then why do you think it makes sense to vest huge amounts of arbitrary power and the capacity for massive (even nuclear) violence in the hands of these fallible, selfish and evil people? This is what I don't understand about statists: anarchy won't work because people are evil. Instead, we must give these people the huge power of a coercive State and a military. Analogy: corporations are evil, enslave people and rape the planet. What we need to do is to abolish governments and give all the power to corporations, and give them private armies too. That'll solve the problem. I did not belittle him because he is a member of the military. As I said before, I have had the same arguments with military men and armchair warhawks. I attacked his arguments (or lack thereof), excepting where I sarcastically referred to him as an intellectual giant, which was my attempt to curb his insufferably arrogant attitude made all the worse by his complete inability to explain or justify his views. But this is wrong. He is, in fact, willing to put his life on the line for the Canadian State, which daily commits millions of crimes and rights-violations against Canadian citizens such as you and me. He provides a service I don't want and supports a State that steals money from me in order to provide it. I think I have every right to denegrate that! Imagine if I decided that you needed your roof painted with purple polka-dots, stole a few thousand dollars from you to pay for it, and then accused you of ingratitude when you complained about it. That's my situation.