[slybaldguy]

Do realise you wouldn't be the monarch under the system you advocate? You'd be an uneducated peasant.

[SolarCross]

Do realise you wouldn't be the monarch under the system you advocate? You'd be an uneducated peasant.

An uneducated peasant like Royalist Sir Isaac Newton member of the Royal Society, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Justice of the Peace and Master of the Royal Mint? Oh dear what a pity. Come on Sly real life now not fairy tales, please.

[Truth To Power]

Do realise you wouldn't be the monarch under the system you advocate? You'd be an uneducated peasant.

An uneducated peasant like Royalist Sir Isaac Newton member of the Royal Society, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Justice of the Peace and Master of the Royal Mint? Oh dear what a pity. Come on Sly real life now not fairy tales, please.

Speaking of real life, Newton was a genius. You're not.

[Truth To Power]

A landowner is effectively king of the area of land he owns. See Saudi Arabia.

I don't think Saudi Arabia is a good example. Did the king become the owner of the land through homesteading and voluntary trade?

He became the land's owner through forcible appropriation, the same way all landowners did.

There is no way to remove other people's rights to liberty through voluntary trade, and "homesteading" is just a term made up to rationalize forcible dispossession, appropriation, and removal of people's liberty rights.

Anyway, a landowner is not king of the area of land he owns.

Actually, in the absence of government policy to the contrary, he pretty much is, and that is how the actual kingdoms of feudal Europe began. Current landowners are constrained only by government and the very minute division of land.

A king my have arbitrary powers about the lives of his subjects. For example, a king may punish infidelity by hanging. In contrast, the only real punishment a land owner would be able to dish out would be that of banishment. Not murder, not torture, not imprisonment.

Not at all. The kings of feudal Europe used their ownership of land to impose arbitrary powers on their tenants without any need to assume arbitrary powers (this was complicated by the church's role of granting them divine authority, of course), because banishment -- i.e., eviction -- was often effectively a sentence of enslavement or death, with torture as an option. This was reconfirmed by the Enclosures.

[SolarCross]

Speaking of real life, Newton was a genius. You're not.

Of course. I was not implying that I am a genius. I was showing that a monarchy does not mean a binary class system of one king and everyone else is a uneducated peasant. If I would be an uneducated peasant in a monarchy I would be so too in a democracy, bureaucracy or anarchy, more so even.

[The Immortal Goon]

An uneducated peasant like Royalist Sir Isaac Newton member of the Royal Society, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Justice of the Peace and Master of the Royal Mint? Oh dear what a pity. Come on Sly real life now not fairy tales, please.

I'm assuming you went to Cambridge then?

I actually find your reactionary doctrine far more coherent and measured than libertarian ramblings. I violently disagree with you, but at least there is some broader sense of history than poorly defined words used to string together incoherent nonsense and magic.

[SolarCross]

I actually find your reactionary doctrine far more coherent and measured than libertarian ramblings. I violently disagree with you, but at least there is some broader sense of history than poorly defined words used to string together incoherent nonsense and magic.

Thank you. In what way or ways do you "violently" disagree? I'd be interested in your perspective.

[The Immortal Goon]

Fundamentally, I disagree with your circular view of history. It doesn't allow for building upon itself enough, in my view, but presents things as an endless loop. My general sense of magic would dictate that history moves more like a spiral. While I think you would agree with that in some ways, I think things are too locked into a right spiral that doesn't allow for various changes and development upon those changes.

For instance, Venice at its height must be more or less glossed over in favour of chaos leading to absolute monarchy. Or Stalin has to become a monarch, I guess. As a broad stroke that may be fine, but it seems like there would be too many exceptions.

I also tend to agree with a lot in this thread that see a firm monarchy as undesirable for various reasons. A selfish sense identity in the first hand. A disbelief that a single individual could (or should) govern an increasingly complex society, a distrust in a system reliant upon genetics and birth order; and a certain negligence in general specialization.

The latter point was somewhat controlled in absolute monarchies through use of the church that acted as administrators and specialists. Would there be a similar counterbalance in your system?

[SolarCross]

Fundamentally, I disagree with your circular view of history. It doesn't allow for building upon itself enough, in my view, but presents things as an endless loop. My general sense of magic would dictate that history moves more like a spiral. While I think you would agree with that in some ways, I think things are too locked into a right spiral that doesn't allow for various changes and development upon those changes.

To clarify it is a circular model of politics. Order to Chaos to Order. Alongside that we could have another model of knowledge / technology which is not circular but is an exponential. Put the technology exponential together with the political circle and you get a spiral. Technology builds on itself because it is harder to destroy knowledge than it is to create it because it is replicates itself from mind to mind very readily, so it tends to accumulate. Well perhaps the grand structure of technology is a sigmoid curve rather than an exponential.
Politics is different: social order is easier to destroy than create, and the extents of order and disorder are bounded one cannot get more ordered than an absolute monarchy and there is nothing more disordered than an anarchy.

For instance, Venice at its height must be more or less glossed over in favour of chaos leading to absolute monarchy. Or Stalin has to become a monarch, I guess. As a broad stroke that may be fine, but it seems like there would be too many exceptions.

It is a broad stroke but if one can look beyond the surface of things to its structure then there are no exceptions one will see the tendency to disorder closely accompanying the dispersion of political authority and that sustained renewals of order occur only under an undivided leadership who is the source of his own authority or who gets it from a higher authority (God for example) rather than a lower one. Renewals of order under this singular leadership are most successful when it meets no effective organised opposition which is most likely to occur only after the prexisting political order has decayed to the point of anarchy.

I also tend to agree with a lot in this thread that see a firm monarchy as undesirable for various reasons. A selfish sense identity in the first hand. A disbelief that a single individual could (or should) govern an increasingly complex society, a distrust in a system reliant upon genetics and birth order; and a certain negligence in general specialization.

There are arguments for and against anything, the arguments people select as best and most correct depend on where they are in the decay of political order and in which direction is favoured more disorder or more order. How about elections? If you are marxist you think elections are stupid and chaotic and competitive examinations are better, its more orderly and coherent. If you are an anarchist elections are stupidly authoritarian, no one should get to have power just because of some formal process. If you are a democrat then elections are obvious and not at all nonsensical.

The latter point was somewhat controlled in absolute monarchies through use of the church that acted as administrators and specialists. Would there be a similar counterbalance in your system?

Monarchs will of course employ advisors and agents to help them govern. The role of ministers is not really counterbalance but more augmentation. To get an idea what a monarchy can be it is best to look beyond just medieval europe and look also at Cyrus II the Great, Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Augustus Ceasar, Sultan Suleiman I, Emperor Meiji and others for concrete examples.

[Nunt]

He became the land's owner through forcible appropriation, the same way all landowners did.

There is no way to remove other people's rights to liberty through voluntary trade, and "homesteading" is just a term made up to rationalize forcible dispossession, appropriation, and removal of people's liberty rights.

Well thats really what libertarianism is all about. An attempt at a rational way to distribute property rights. So yeah, homesteading is made up and rationalized. But that doesn't mean that it is meaningless. Property is either acquired through homesteading and through voluntary trade or it is not. You may not find that principle a good one but that does not mean it doesn't exist or that we cannot make a distinction between forcible appropriation and forcible appropriation (to use your terms and value) through homesteading and trade.

Actually, in the absence of government policy to the contrary, he pretty much is, and that is how the actual kingdoms of feudal Europe began. Current landowners are constrained only by government and the very minute division of land.

I disagree that without government landowners would not be bound by any rules. I believe that norms and values are very important in a society. And even if you are rich and own a lot of land, you will still have to follow some rules. Societal outrage and the power that comes from that will keep the rich in check.

Compare it with the US President. The commander of the most powerful army, yet he cannot simply declare himself dictator. The democratic tradition and norms within the country would not allow it. In contrast, in many third world countries without such a tradition, the president does manage to become a dictator. So its not a question of 'government' vs 'no government'. Its more complicated than that. There are very powerful forces within a society that can keep a president in check. I believe that in a succesful libertarian world, those forces will also keep the very rich in check. There is no guarantee that this will be the case, as there is also no guarantee that a president will not become a dictator. But I believe its possible.

[Technology]

Well thats really what libertarianism is all about. An attempt at a rational way to distribute property rights. So yeah, homesteading is made up and rationalized. But that doesn't mean that it is meaningless. Property is either acquired through homesteading and through voluntary trade or it is not. You may not find that principle a good one but that does not mean it doesn't exist or that we cannot make a distinction between forcible appropriation and forcible appropriation (to use your terms and value) through homesteading and trade.

The right to acquire property through your own labor is complicated by the idea of having others labor upon your property and yet this labor never has the same trans-formative effect to overrule the initial labor put in. The right of contract, somehow overrules the ownership of product. I beg to differ. If the property of ones labor is sacrosanct, then a contract which binds someones labor product as property cannot be legitimate.

If I make the contract for workers to work in "my" factory, on my terms, then what I am asking them to do is to voluntarily give up the ownership of their product as property, and their ongoing peaceful projects as property. This is simply a higher level idea of the concept where someone would voluntarily contract themselves as a slave. Can you use self-ownership to give up self-ownership? No. This is a normative contradiction. A contract which asks you to be a slave forever cannot be binding; it should be breakable at any time. Similarly, on the higher level, a contract which asks you to surrender the ownership of your projects should not be legitimately bound by force. Your products and projects are yours to claim at any time. And if they are collective projects, they must be co-operatively owned and managed.

From this stems a morally legitimate right for workers to homestead their factory through their use and labor. If the product of labor is property, then the products of their labor belong to them. If their worked projects are their property, then the factory is that.

If they engage in a sit-down strike to gain concessions from the boss, this is not aggression. The aggression here would be calling the (private?) police to forcibly evict them.

So, I would say we can draw different conclusions from the homesteading principle depending on how we treat the right to contract. Contract messes things up creating a grey area from which can arise competing interpretations of NAP theory and homesteading.

Another complication is that the history of property is steeped in violence. Murray Rothbard argued that corporations which get at least 50% of their income from government subsidies via taxation are illegitimate forms of property that were not acquired voluntarily and can be homesteaded by their workers. In making 50% an arbitrary cut-off point, he implicitly admits the non-universality of the NAP, which means it cannot be used as a consistent framework for society in place of the state. We could go further still than Rothbard. We might eventually consider that all current property is based on violent acquisition at some point, and thereby there must be a "Great Reset" by homesteading. And voila! I have produced a revolutionary form of anarcho-capitalism in conflict with the conservative form!

[SolarCross]

Technology's post should be enough to convince any an-cap the impossibility of their vision, not because it is "true" but because if the an-cap ever gets his desired anarchy (and he certainly will get the anarchy) there will be no peace for him and his projects. He'll be lucky if day in day out he has to argue the toss over his ownership claims on every little thing, from his house down to the shirt on his back, with lefty pseudo-intellectuals (leading mobs of half starved ex-students) in all probability he will be unlucky enough to have to argue the toss by the use of force of arms, with absolutely feral hominids, day in day out, until he is finally eaten raw.

[Truth To Power]

He became the land's owner through forcible appropriation, the same way all landowners did.

There is no way to remove other people's rights to liberty through voluntary trade, and "homesteading" is just a term made up to rationalize forcible dispossession, appropriation, and removal of people's liberty rights.

Well thats really what libertarianism is all about. An attempt at a rational way to distribute property rights.

No, it is an attempt to rationalize the current (or an even more unjust) distribution of property rights.

So yeah, homesteading is made up and rationalized. But that doesn't mean that it is meaningless.

I never said it was meaningless.

Property is either acquired through homesteading and through voluntary trade or it is not.

There is no resemblance between homesteading and voluntary trade. Homesteading removes others' rights to liberty without their consent.

And what happened to acquiring property the rightful way, through production?

You may not find that principle a good one but that does not mean it doesn't exist or that we cannot make a distinction between forcible appropriation and forcible appropriation (to use your terms and value) through homesteading and trade.

Trade is not forcible appropriation. Production is not forcible appropriation. Homesteading is forcible appropriation.

I disagree that without government landowners would not be bound by any rules. I believe that norms and values are very important in a society. And even if you are rich and own a lot of land, you will still have to follow some rules. Societal outrage and the power that comes from that will keep the rich in check.

History does not leave room for much optimism on that score.

[Nunt]

History does not leave room for much optimism on that score.

I am not the optimist here. The optimists are the ones who are saying that we just need to install a government and then rich people will magically have to behave. I am saying that we need to establish something far more difficult than a governemnt (to establish a government is just to give a group weapons and some legitimaticy in using arbitrary force). Instead we need to establish societal norms and values that keeps very powerful people from misbehaving. That is something far more difficult and a prerequisite for any peaceful society.

[SolarCross]

I am not the optimist here. The optimists are the ones who are saying that we just need to install a government and then rich people will magically have to behave. I am saying that we need to establish something far more difficult than a governemnt (to establish a government is just to give a group weapons and some legitimaticy in using arbitrary force). Instead we need to establish societal norms and values that keeps very powerful people from misbehaving. That is something far more difficult and a prerequisite for any peaceful society.

So you need to establish (or re-establish) a religion then and somehow tilt the table so that the majority of people take it up instead of following their own kooky cults.

That still does not solve the military problem though. At least the majority of armed agents within a territorial arena need to have mutual allegiance or they will fight each other. This majority of arms also need to be organised into a chain of command with one supreme executive at the top or they will not function well in a coordinated manner when faced with the task of expanding their dominion or defending it.

[Nunt]

So you need to establish (or re-establish) a religion then and somehow tilt the table so that the majority of people take it up instead of following their own kooky cults.

If you want to call it a religion... I wouldnt call it that. Its just a number of shared values such as those values popular today like freedom of speech or democracy. If you want to call those like: the religion of free speech, well I guess some people will think you have a point. But imo, it hardly has anything to do with religion.

That still does not solve the military problem though. At least the majority of armed agents within a territorial arena need to have mutual allegiance or they will fight each other. This majority of arms also need to be organised into a chain of command with one supreme executive at the top or they will not function well in a coordinated manner when faced with the task of expanding their dominion or defending it.

Why would they need a supreme commander? It can be a group of allies fighting together. The ancient greeks did pretty good fighting the god king.

Even accepting that a unified army could fight better than a group of allies, this does not mean that a group of allies would be impossible. They'll have other advantages than a bureaucratic behemoth.

[SolarCross]

If you want to call it a religion... I wouldnt call it that. Its just a number of shared values such as those values popular today like freedom of speech or democracy. If you want to call those like: the religion of free speech, well I guess some people will think you have a point. But imo, it hardly has anything to do with religion.

Well it is religion. Freedom of speech and democracy are totems of faith, sub-doctrines of the larger progressive faith. Progressivism has no god (except maybe an idealised abstraction of a human being) but does have plenty of superstition, persecuted heresies and objects of veneration. It is also a mess of schisms. The origins of progressivism are even from a "real" religion with a "real" albiet depreciated god, this parent religion is protestantism. Even if you don't like to call your new faith a religion you will need to do all the things a religion does in order to convert people to it: proselytising, indoctrination especially of the young, formulation of doctrine, persecution of heresy, myth creation, historical revisionism, establishment of ideological propagation centres, establish a hierarchy of doctrinal specialists and propagators and provide a living for them, seek relationships with political leaders and convert them if possible, and so on. If you do not then no one will get the message, no one will adhere to it for long, and your new religion will just be another minor kooky cult amongst thousands.

Why would they need a supreme commander? It can be a group of allies fighting together. The ancient greeks did pretty good fighting the god king.

If all you know of history was found by watching "300" in High Definition then for sure the greeks did a great job against the persians. However the real 300 were accompanied by 7000 allies who abandoned them, the real 300 were defeated albeit heroically and Athens was razed to the ground. King of Kings Xerxes mission against the Greeks was a only punitive expedition as a reprisal for some greeks (without the knowledge of the others) funding a rebellion in one of the persian satrapies. Having razed Athens Xerxes went home with his army satisfied in his victory.
The only time the Greeks did properly kick Persian arse was after King Philip of Macedon (technically not a greek) succeeded in subduing through warfare most of greece under his rule then his son King Alexander III aka Alexander the Great used the now united Macedonian and Greek forces he inherited to invade and take over Persia by conquest.

What's you're idea about King Alexander III known as Alexander the Great to Greeks and Alexander the Looter to the Persians? Hero or Zero?

Even accepting that a unified army could fight better than a group of allies, this does not mean that a group of allies would be impossible. They'll have other advantages than a bureaucratic behemoth.

Sure groups of allies can be expedient, if you are a small power amongst many other small powers faced with one big power that wants to get bigger then your best chance is an alliance with all the other small powers.

But we are wandering away from the point. If we are talking anarchy then we are talking about fracturing military spheres of dominion down to the individual level so that even the small Greek States of ancient times look big and impressive in comparison. So in your anarchy your nice suburban neighbourhood will have its own militia with its own elected general or maybe a committee of part-time elected generals. They organise barricades and checkpoints on the roads in and out of the community to keep out all the howling cannibal biker gangs and other feral hominids, so far so good. Then a new King Alexander arises with a force of soldiers so numerous and professional that none can withstand and he proceeds to swallow up your neighbourhood and all of the surrounding neighbourhoods and everything else without breaking a sweat. You call him King, pay him tribute and there is peace. What's not to like?

[Truth To Power]

I am not the optimist here. The optimists are the ones who are saying that we just need to install a government and then rich people will magically have to behave.

No one here has said that AFAIK.

I am saying that we need to establish something far more difficult than a governemnt (to establish a government is just to give a group weapons and some legitimaticy in using arbitrary force).

Sure. Government is just a means to secure and reconcile the equal rights of all to life, liberty, and property in the fruits of their labor. Almost by definition, the goal is more difficult to establish than the means of achieving it.

Instead we need to establish societal norms and values that keeps very powerful people from misbehaving. That is something far more difficult and a prerequisite for any peaceful society.

Right. But the main thing that enables the powerful -- and especially the rich -- to misbehave is privilege: legal entitlements to benefit by the uncompensated abrogation of others' rights. The societal norms and values that will support a peaceful society must therefore include intolerance of privilege. But people are very attached to their privileges, and will defend to the death privileges that seriously harm their interests, as long as they are part of a package of privileges of which one or two give them some modest advantage. Consider how passionately misguided, ill-informed and/or thoughtless people on this forum have defended landowner privilege, even though they are almost certainly net losers by it.

[Nunt]

But we are wandering away from the point. If we are talking anarchy then we are talking about fracturing military spheres of dominion down to the individual level so that even the small Greek States of ancient times look big and impressive in comparison.

Just because the individuals are their own soverein does not mean everyone will be an army of one. People can cooperate. They can form corporations and mutual organizations that can become very big.

[SolarCross]

Just because the individuals are their own soverein does not mean everyone will be an army of one. People can cooperate. They can form corporations and mutual organizations that can become very big.

Organisations are ineffective if they are not hierarchical, especially military organisations. Military organisations cannot peacefully co-exist within the same territorial arena without well-defined allegiance to each other and they cannot function well as a team versus existential threats without unified chains of command. Larger military organisations tend to beat smaller ones. Peaceful production and trade activities can only occur and blossom in areas which are not militarily disputed.

Put that altogether and anarchy is not viable for civilisation.

If anarchy persists the economy will decline. If someone, anyone, gets a military force together superior enough to wipe out the competition then a state will be formed by them out of the areas they gain control over. The areas they control will be internally peaceful allowing economic development which in turn will enable the government to increase its military capabilities which in turn will allow them to expand into still anarchic areas and add them to their state further empowering them to take over more areas until they finally start bumping up against other states. Having unity of command means states can make credible agreements over where the borders lie between them, allowing them to interoperate peacefully which allows trade between them which in turn strengthens both states economies.