[Rothbardian]

[quote="J Oswald"

Please provide some evidence for this claim. Thank you.

Also, it would help your argument if whatever source you use is an actual scholarly source rather than some libertarian talking points website.[/quote]

I suggest using google, the official statistics speak for themselves. I found this for you if you really don't want to find your own:

http://www.independent.org/publications ... sp?id=1861

Libertarians should definitely look up the "Xeer" system Somalis have been using.

I am surprised it even gets commented on. The stupidity of looking at the current situation in a country as if that proves whether or not it's system works by comparing it to another country is absurd. There are many factors that play into how well a country is currently doing relative to its neighbors, nevermind countries on the other side of the world. What has to be analyzed is how systems put in place have changed that one society. Socialism obviously ruined Somalia, and anarchy had moderately improved it despite the terrible conditions for implementing it.

[J Oswald]

Libertarians should definitely look up the "Xeer" system Somalis have been using.

See my previous post about Xeer (you can't miss it - it's quite long) and why any libertarian who claims to support it needs to actually learn about it. The author whom I quote at length in that post is one of the best sources of information in that regard.

Socialism obviously ruined Somalia

No, nepotism and the influence of a small clique of well-connected city-dwellers attached to the colonial government ruined Somalia when that same clique pushed for independence from the UK and the institution of a Western model of government. Somalia was doomed to fail from the start - the parties formed by the urbanites lacked any real differentiation in policies between one another and used the traditional kinship structure as a means of soliciting votes. The number of active political parties in Somali was somewhere in the 60s by 1969 - a clear sign of fragmentation along kinship lines.

I'll go through your source in detail when I'm not tired and preparing for Thanksgiving travel. A brief skim through it tells me that the bulk of its statistics concern Northern Somalila - specifically Somaliland and Puntland. Somaliland has been an independent state since 1991, with a functioning central government and a single dominant clan, the Ishaak. Puntland's situation is less clear, but it has a functioning government.

[Rothbardian]

See my previous post about Xeer (you can't miss it - it's quite long) and why any libertarian who claims to support it needs to actually learn about it. The author whom I quote at length in that post is one of the best sources of information in that regard.


No, nepotism and the influence of a small clique of well-connected city-dwellers attached to the colonial government ruined Somalia when that same clique pushed for independence from the UK and the institution of a Western model of government. Somalia was doomed to fail from the start - the parties formed by the urbanites lacked any real differentiation in policies between one another and used the traditional kinship structure as a means of soliciting votes. The number of active political parties in Somali was somewhere in the 60s by 1969 - a clear sign of fragmentation along kinship lines.

I'll go through your source in detail when I'm not tired and preparing for Thanksgiving travel. A brief skim through it tells me that the bulk of its statistics concern Northern Somalila - specifically Somaliland and Puntland. Somaliland has been an independent state since 1991, with a functioning central government and a single dominant clan, the Ishaak. Puntland's situation is less clear, but it has a functioning government.

I don't necessarily advocate Xeer, I just think it's something libertarians should be aware of. There was a Canadian man that wrote a book about Somalia since the 91's and he cites official sources, I am trying to remember the name of it but it's been a while.

Without getting into specifics, unless I'm mistaken Somalia had a powerful centralized government. You can place the blame on the specifics of it's collapse, but I would argue that these are the symptoms that ail centralization to one degree or another as a matter of course, so the specifics aren't that important.

[Nunt]

Somalia is definatly not a place anyone would want to live in. But then again, this counts for almost all African countries.

[Phred]

Six pages disputing the obvious: that Somalia is not a libertarian country. Of course it isn't, duh! It is an anarchy.

Libertarian countries (as Libertarian is defined in the forum description) have functioning governments. These governments involve themselves in far fewer functions than those in non- libertarian countries: to whit they restrict themselves to handling the cops, the courts, the military, and diplomacy with other nations. But they nonetheless do possess governments. Anarchies, by contrast, have no government at all. Clearly that makes Somalia an anarchy, not a libertarian country.


Phred

[Someone5]

Six pages disputing the obvious: that Somalia is not a libertarian country. Of course it isn't, duh! It is an anarchy.

Libertarian countries (as Libertarian is defined in the forum description) have functioning governments. These governments involve themselves in far fewer functions than those in non- libertarian countries: to whit they restrict themselves to handling the cops, the courts, the military, and diplomacy with other nations. But they nonetheless do possess governments. Anarchies, by contrast, have no government at all. Clearly that makes Somalia an anarchy, not a libertarian country.


Phred

Somalia is an example of a failed state, not an anarchy. This is arguably a libertarian objective--the creation of a nonfunctional government that only serves the interests of the people in power.

[Joe Liberty]

Somalia is an example of a failed state, not an anarchy. This is arguably a libertarian objective--the creation of a nonfunctional government that only serves the interests of the people in power.

That's not arguable at all. Libertarians do not desire a 'system' that serves the interests of any one group, let alone the "people in power". In a constitutional republic the People are the power anyway, not those who happen to hold office. We also don't desire a "nonfunctional" government. Except for our anarchist bretheren, we desire a functional government, but one with very limited functionality: it needs to function enough to do its proper duty of preserving property rights, for one thing.

And you seem very intent on telling me what I'm supposed to believe so that you can knock the Strawman down.

Not a week has gone by over the past 25 years that I haven't seen this same thing (and every time I hear these arguments, the poster believes he or she is the first one to stumble onto our Achille's Heel. It would be funny if it weren't so trying.)

[Someone5]

That's not arguable at all. Libertarians do not desire a 'system' that serves the interests of any one group, let alone the "people in power".

Certainly they do desire such a system; freedom, but support for the people with property against the people who don't. That is precisely the government libertarians argue for. A government that does nothing for those without property, but protects every whim of the propertied.

Protecting property rights is protection of the powerful from the weak.

[Joe Liberty]

Certainly they do desire such a system; freedom, but support for the people with property against the people who don't. That is precisely the government libertarians argue for. A government that does nothing for those without property, but protects every whim of the propertied.

Protecting property rights is protection of the powerful from the weak.

That's quite a spin, but full of faulty assumptions.

One: I own property, and I'm certainly not among "the powerful". Even the "poor" own property. The law, if it is to mean anything at all, applies to all individuals equally. "Property" also means an individual's person and everything he owns; in the words of people much wiser than I, "persons, houses, papers, and effects". Anything you obtain using your labor or the results of that labor (e.g., currency) is your property. Since you obtained it via your labor (or what you've traded that labor for), it's as much a part of you as your body is. That applies to everyone equally; the fact that some people are able to accumulate more property than others doesn't change that.

Two: a libertarian/minarchist government doesn't "do nothing" for the poor, it does the same for them it does for the rich: protects their property rights. The assumption that the poor have no interest in property rights strikes me as rather bigoted. It also seems to assume that a poor person will always, inevitably remain poor, while a rich person will always, inevitably remain rich; such is not the case.

Three: property rights and human rights are indivisible (Here is a link to an essay by Murray Rothbard that makes the case better than I can.) It can be shown that the countries with the greatest respect for property rights have higher standards of living for all citizens, not just the rich. If you believe that preserving property rights is "protection of the powerful from the weak" then you and I aren't talking about the same thing. In fact it sounds like you're trying to rationalize stealing, for there's no other reason to think that property rights work against "the weak" unless you think they should try to take property from others.

In short, libertarians do not desire anything close to what you're portraying. You can continue to express what you believe to be the results of libertarianism, but I'd appreciate it if you stopped telling us that what we desire isn't really what we desire.

[Someone5]

One: I own property, and I'm certainly not among "the powerful". Even the "poor" own property. The law, if it is to mean anything at all, applies to all individuals equally.

"Every person named Joe has to pay a 30% special income tax." If this were applied to all individuals equally, people named Joe would still get screwed. There is such a thing as inherently unjust laws; a law that benefits one person more than it does another, even when they are applied equally to everyone. Property protection laws are in this category, because they provide a disproportionate benefit for the people with the very most and almost no protection for people with the very least.

Let's go to the obvious example of the property owner who doesn't want to sell his house to someone wanting to build a road. Well, that road builder under a strict property regime would have no choice but to build his road around the property in question. And that road builder would be well within his right to completely encompass the property owner's property with his road, and further to deny the property owner the right of crossing that road. And there is nothing that the property owner could do about it under a strict property regime, except to die stuck on his little plot of land, unable to cross that private road.

You may think this a contrived example--and it is, to demonstrate a point--but it applies more broadly to a society with strong property laws but no individual protection laws. The people who own, you know, 60% of the property can pretty effectively fuck over the people owning 40% of the property if they have half a mind to do it. That's coercive force they can apply to others to compel them to act in accordance with the will of the property-majority. And that's compulsion being established by the government equally enforcing property laws without anything to counterbalance it.

So you might say that you could pass a set of "owner rights" or something along those lines to protect against the most egregious exploitation of property... but do you really believe that a codified set of laws can account for the sum total of human ingenuity? Because if you do I have to ask what you're doing arguing for libertarianism in the first place. If you establish a system that encourages people to exploit others--as capitalism does, by way of the profit motive--people will simply find innovative new ways of doing it.

Two: a libertarian/minarchist government doesn't "do nothing" for the poor, it does the same for them it does for the rich: protects their property rights. The assumption that the poor have no interest in property rights strikes me as rather bigoted. It also seems to assume that a poor person will always, inevitably remain poor, while a rich person will always, inevitably remain rich; such is not the case.

Sure the poor have an interest in property rights, they simply lack the means to make very good use of those protections; they will still be prey to the powerful.

Three: property rights and human rights are indivisible (Here is a link to an essay by Murray Rothbard that makes the case better than I can.) It can be shown that the countries with the greatest respect for property rights have higher standards of living for all citizens, not just the rich.

Because he is engaged in a rather woolly ex-post-facto rationalization of motives that weren't actually in play. To use his fire example, Holmes wasn't even contemplating property rights when he was establishing that principle. Rothbard is only able to make these claims because he has expanded property rights to a meaningless term meaning "good". "You are protecting property rights if you protect a person's life," etc. Thereby he can try to claim that anyone doing things for traditional public safety motives are actually doing it to protect property rights, even if property rights didn't enter the picture when the person was protecting the public.

At best the property protection was incidental. Back here in reality the states that protect property rights oppress everyone underneath them. For example, a dictator who claims everything in the state as his property, then "protects" property generally against seizure, is in fact protecting property rights and oppressing his people at the same time. You can use property rights to "protect" just about any sort of action you want. You can use property rights to protect life, you can use property rights to enshrine death. Which do you suppose would be the more common use of them?

If you believe that preserving property rights is "protection of the powerful from the weak" then you and I aren't talking about the same thing.

You're talking about a fantasy world where property rights are only used for good things, and I'm talking about how property rights actually get used.

In fact it sounds like you're trying to rationalize stealing, for there's no other reason to think that property rights work against "the weak" unless you think they should try to take property from others.

There's no theft if there's no property. Saying I'm trying to rationalize stealing is rather silly. I am not trying to rationalize stealing; I am making a moral argument that theft should be eliminated.

In short, libertarians do not desire anything close to what you're portraying.

Maybe you're right. Maybe you don't actually want a world like that, but it's the sort of world you all continually advocate. Maybe you don't desire it, but it is the predictable consequence of the policies you favor. You believe people like Rothbard who think that only good things can follow from property rights, when in fact they can be a tool of incomparable tyranny just as easily.

[Phred]

There's no theft if there's no property.

There is no life if there is no property.

Saying I'm trying to rationalize stealing is rather silly.

No, saying you are trying to rationalize stealing is accurate. That is exactly what you are trying to do, by in essence defining theft out of existence.

I am not trying to rationalize stealing; I am making a moral argument that theft should be eliminated.

No, you are playing silly buggers with semantics rather than having an intellectually honest discussion. You are not demonstrating how theft should be eliminated, you are arguing that what every rational human has recognized as theft since the dawn of recorded history should be declared a null concept.


Phred

[Rich]

In a constitutional republic the People are the power anyway, not those who happen to hold office.

So hold on there was the the United States in its early days a Constitutional Republic by your definition? It certainly didn't protect the property rights of Blacks or native Americans. Do you accept that the Obama's administration is way, way better at defending property rights than the founders America?

[Someone5]

There is no life if there is no property.

Nonsense. Life existed before property, it will go on quite nicely after property is gone.

No, saying you are trying to rationalize stealing is accurate. That is exactly what you are trying to do, by in essence defining theft out of existence.

You are trying to rationalize theft, by claiming that you have a right to property. See? Anyone can make weird illogical assertions that their opponent is rationalizing something they're not.

No, you are playing silly buggers with semantics rather than having an intellectually honest discussion.

It's hard to have an intellectually honest discussion with someone who believe that it's fair to everyone to evenly enforce a law that has disproportionate benefits for a few.

You are not demonstrating how theft should be eliminated,

Theft should be eliminated by eliminating property; without an ownership claim, you cannot steal anything. It's fairly basic logic.

you are arguing that what every rational human has recognized as theft since the dawn of recorded history should be declared a null concept.

Sure, though I would disagree with your assessment of the property-hoarders as "rational."

[Joe Liberty]

Someone5, Phred responded as well as I could have, I'll let his response stand. I will respond to your closing sentence:

You believe people like Rothbard who think that only good things can follow from property rights, when in fact they can be a tool of incomparable tyranny just as easily.

Again, you misrepresent. I've never said that "only" good things can follow from property rights.

In a constitutional republic the People are the power anyway, not those who happen to hold office.

So hold on there was the the United States in its early days a Constitutional Republic by your definition?

By objective definition.

It certainly didn't protect the property rights of Blacks or native Americans.

I never claimed it did. The infrastructure was there, but it was selectively applied. I fail to see why inadequate application should necessarily damn the principle. I also never said that there were no problems in 1789 America, so your point smells suspiciously of straw.

Do you accept that the Obama's administration is way, way better at defending property rights than the founders America?

I accept that in modern America, property rights are more universally applied than they were back then. But that didn't require a fundamental change to the constitutional structure of the country, just a closer adherence to it. And none of that has anything to do with Obama, whom from all appearances has even more contempt for the Constitution than Bush did.

[Phred]

Nonsense. Life existed before property, it will go on quite nicely after property is gone.

Nonsense. Life - even unicellular life - cannot exist without property. In fact, life itself can accurately be summarized as a continuous quest by living entities to acquire and keep that property which is essential for a living entity to continue its existence as a living entity. Are humans living entities or are they not?

You are trying to rationalize theft, by claiming that you have a right to property.

Do you have the right to attempt to continue your existence as a living human? If so, then you have a right to acquire and to keep property.

It's hard to have an intellectually honest discussion with someone who believe that it's fair to everyone to evenly enforce a law that has disproportionate benefits for a few.

Which law might that be?

Theft should be eliminated by eliminating property; without an ownership claim, you cannot steal anything.

So, as I said, you can't eliminate theft, all you can do is rename it. That isn't logic, it's childish neener neener game-playing. It's on the level of covering your eyes and then proclaiming that since you can't see me, I don't exist.

Sure, though I would disagree with your assessment of the property-hoarders as "rational."

Those who didn't "hoard" property died pretty quickly. That to me is the epitome of irrationality.


Phred

[Kman]

You may think this a contrived example--and it is, to demonstrate a point--but it applies more broadly to a society with strong property laws but no individual protection laws. The people who own, you know, 60% of the property can pretty effectively fuck over the people owning 40% of the property if they have half a mind to do it. That's coercive force they can apply to others to compel them to act in accordance with the will of the property-majority. And that's compulsion being established by the government equally enforcing property laws without anything to counterbalance it.

How exactly?

You can use property rights to "protect" just about any sort of action you want. You can use property rights to protect life, you can use property rights to enshrine death.

How can you use libertarian property rules to enshrine death?

[Someone5]

Nonsense. Life - even unicellular life - cannot exist without property. In fact, life itself can accurately be summarized as a continuous quest by living entities to acquire and keep that property which is essential for a living entity to continue its existence as a living entity. Are humans living entities or are they not?

Property exists only as a legal concept; a product of government. It is nothing but a durable claim of ownership that is protected by a society. Nothing else. It does not exist at all outside of that context.

Do you have the right to attempt to continue your existence as a living human? If so, then you have a right to acquire and to keep property.

That is a complete fiction that you have created.

Which law might that be?

Any law which protects property generally.

So, as I said, you can't eliminate theft, all you can do is rename it. That isn't logic, it's childish neener neener game-playing. It's on the level of covering your eyes and then proclaiming that since you can't see me, I don't exist.

That is an elimination of theft. If you eliminate the ownership claims which underlay the crime of theft, you have eliminated the crime. If there are no property rights, there is no punishment for violating them. Property does not exist without a government administering the ownership claims. It is not a natural phenomena.

Simple possession is natural, property is not. By the natural rules, you own nothing, you only possess that which you can personally defend from others.

Those who didn't "hoard" property died pretty quickly. That to me is the epitome of irrationality.

People lived for tens of thousands of years before property existed, and will live many thousands of years after property is gone--assuming the irrational property-hoarders don't kill us all in their short time on Earth.

[Kman]

Property exists only as a legal concept; a product of government. It is nothing but a durable claim of ownership that is protected by a society. Nothing else. It does not exist at all outside of that context.

If we for the sake of argument treat countries as a form of very large families, then we have the american family/house, we have the canadian family/house, the danish family/house etc..etc.. There are not laws stopping the american family from attacking and seizing the property of the canadian family, it is total legal anarchy and yet Canada still exists and Denmark still exists and both ''families'' retain their properties due to a variety of reasons, the main one being that americans simply consider it immoral to attack and deprive these other families of their property. This is how it works in an anarchistic society also, each family has property, not because of a government, but because of the morality of their local community as well as the simple impracticality of starting a war between families.

[SolarCross]

Agreed with Kman - property is not bestowed by government or protected by government generally, in fact it usually steals property more often than it protects it. Property is simply a right to use claimed by the owner and recognised by his neighbour, it is a matter of social custom. Somalia is an example of this, it may not be libertarian and it may be a funny kind of anarchy, but there is no government and people DO have property and it is better protected than any property owned by us people who are under the grasping claws of government.

[lucky]

The normal definition of government involves the notion of a "monopoly on the legitimate use of force".

Not really. Every country's law allows private use of force when situation demands it.

The answer, btw, is that societal sensibilities would demand it.

The implementation of prevailing "societal sensibilities" in an actionable way is what a representative government is.

However, there is no point entering into a semantic debate. This is the society I am advocating. If that makes me something other than an anarchist by your standards, who cares?

You do, obviously. Once you stop arguing for "eliminating government", and instead start discussing what your desired governing policy is, it will become much more reasonable to have a political discussion with you. It might be semantics, but you get bogged down by it for pages in every thread you participate in.