Why I am an Anarchist - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The 'no government' movement.
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User avatar
By Eran
#14128182
The question of justice (and morality) boil down to ownership and property (justly-acquired) and, ultimately, to the initiation of force.

The relation between employee and employer is ultimately a contractual and voluntary one. The employee and employer each accept certain responsibilities. The employee provides his labour, while the employer pays him for his effort. The employment contract may include many additional stipulations, including conditions and terms of termination, work conditions, etc.

Assuming, however, that the employment agreement stipulates "at-will employment", i.e. the unconditional right of each side to terminate employment for any or no reason, such termination doesn't represent an act of aggression, an initiation of force or, under most circumstances, a moral wrong.

The relationship between the state and its citizens is totally different. The state has no legitimate claim to make the rules within its territory. It only asserts that claim successfully through its superior force. Without the legitimate right to set the rules, the state also lacks the right to condition continued presence within the territory on compliance to those rules. Forcing a person to accept those rules ("laws") on pain of physical assault (to person or property) is an act of aggression, initiation of force, and an immoral action.


There is no doubt that employees are often harmed by a termination of their employment. But "harm" is far too loose a criterion on which to base moral disapprobation, let alone justification for resistance by force. Restricting ourselves to the context of employment, there is no doubt that employers are also often harmed by employees choosing to quit their job. Yet nobody seems to advocate forcing employees (or even fining them) for exercising their right to leave. A woman may cause untold emotional harm to a lover in which she isn't interested, yet her right not to be interested is similarly unquestioned.

TruePolitics wrote:Can you guys please stop spelling organization with an s? It's really getting annoying.

Sorry for the annoyance. But the 's' spelling is the one common in Britain, and is perfectly legitimate and correct. This is an international web-site, not an American one.
User avatar
By Red Barn
#14128193
Eran wrote:The question of justice (and morality) boil down to ownership and property . . .

Yep. I know that.

:)

And if you'd just come out and say this in a frank and open fashion once in a while I wouldn't detest you nearly so much.
User avatar
By ingliz
#14128203
property (justly-acquired)

Seeing as there is no such thing as "property (justly-acquired)", all land having been violently taken at some point in its history, the moral argument for property is self-serving bullcrap.


:)
#14128513
TruePolitics wrote:Isn't that essentially what government is? A civil organization?


No. A voluntary organization is one people enter into voluntarily, the way you'd join a club, or a fraternity, or a homeowners association, or sign up for a credit card.

A government is imposed upon a population. The fact that some percentage of that population may approve of the government is irrelevant, even if it's a majority.

ingliz wrote: land having been violently taken at some point in its history
:)


Is that a bad thing? Was it wrong for those who used violence to take? Should that land have been left in the care of the people who were developing it without taking it away from someone else?
User avatar
By Eran
#14128716
Seeing as there is no such thing as "property (justly-acquired)", all land having been violently taken at some point in its history, the moral argument for property is self-serving bullcrap.

This is a nihilist argument that confuses the ideal with the practical.

It is practically impossible to perfectly remedy the results of all historic injustices.

But to go from there to saying that justice is therefore meaningless is unjustified.

The quantity of land available for human habitation is fairly constant.

However the value of all property available to humanity has increased very rapidly over the past 200 years. That means that, measured by value, the vast majority of property today is newly-created. Further, there is no reason to expect that trend won't continue, such that the vast majority of property (by value) available, say, 70 years from now will have been newly-created.

The relative weight of unjustly-acquired property will similarly diminish over time. The problem of past injustices, in a growing economy, is self-correcting.



Moreover, the obsession of the left with "land" and "capital" shows them as stuck in the 19th century (if not in earlier times).

The industrial revolution greatly diminished the importance of land in the economy.
The knowledge revolution greatly diminished the importance of capital in the economy.

More and more we are moving into an economy in which by far the most important resource isn't land or capital, but human skill and creativity. Fortunately, this is also the one resource that is naturally egalitarianly-distributed.

All of us who care about society's poorest (and that care isn't restricted to the left) should recognise and celebrate this development.
User avatar
By ingliz
#14128783
nihilist

I am not disputing that there is an argument for the ordered allocation of property. I am merely pointing out that your argument for such "rights" is fatally flawed.


:)
User avatar
By Eran
#14128872
I know of no better one.

For one thing, who will do the allocation and by what right is the entity doing the allocation more justified to control the property in question than are its current owners?
#14129568
ingliz wrote:I am not disputing that there is an argument for the ordered allocation of property. I am merely pointing out that your argument for such "rights" is fatally flawed.


:)


How does pointing out that in the past people had their rights violated prove him fatally flawed? Slavery was a global constant for nearly 6,000 years, there for argument against slavery is flawed. Am I doing it right?
User avatar
By ingliz
#14129647
fatally flawed

It is flawed because, once you unwrap the fancy packaging, nothing has changed. It is exactly the same, no more just or unjust, the same few lording over the many by violence and the threat of violence.

It's a con.
Last edited by ingliz on 14 Dec 2012 16:58, edited 1 time in total.
#14129834
It isn't practical to entirely remove violence or threat thereof from the equation of human interaction, a better approach has to be to include it but seek ways to mitigate its risks. What happens to a society that all agrees to down the tools of war and just peacefully negotiate disputes? We can see this from historical natural experiments one of which was the Chatham Islanders in the Pacific. They were a polynesian people who settled on a small very isolated island in the pacific, when europeans discovered them they found them to be remarkably peaceful, they had no weapons and solved their disputes through discussion, the europeans saw they had nothing worth stealing and went on their way leaving them alone, so far so good. The europeans next stop was New Zealand just 500 miles away, they casually mentioned the Chatham Islanders to the local Maori population who hitherto had no idea of these people's existance. The warlike Maori immediately loaded up on swords and guns and sailed over to the place killing everyone there just because they could.

Any disarmed person or group can only be peaceful until discovered by a warlike group at which point they can only hope for slavery instead of death.

Once you acknowledge the necessity of including violence in the equation of a society you can have either of one of two arrangements. Decentralised force or centralised force.
We are all familiar with centralised force, a disarmed majority practically enslaved to a armed minority.
Decentralised force such as the an-cap's multitude of security firms with individuals also having the right of self-defence creates a MAD scenario that did so well at keeping the peace between the US and the USSR. What would the US have done to the USSR if the US had been the only one with the power of the nuke?

When your opponent can do as much harm to you as you can do to him then war becomes unaffordable.
When one player has all the force he has no discouragement from using that force as much as he likes.
#14130459
ingliz wrote:It is flawed because, once you unwrap the fancy packaging, nothing has changed. It is exactly the same, no more just or unjust, the same few lording over the many by violence and the threat of violence.

It's a con.


That's quite an assertion. Would you care to explain? How is it that acknowledging property rights is using violence or the threat of violence? If I invest my labor into a piece of land and through that labor claim ownership, that doesn't seem the same as using guns to boot a farmer off of his land because I want it, or think I know how to use it better than he does.
#14152528
taxizen wrote:OP

How do you deal with crime, I understand there needs to be law to be a crime but what I mean is e.g. someone was routinely polluting a reservoir, how should that be dealt with?
User avatar
By Eran
#14153235
In a libertarian anarchy, all crime is some form of property rights (or use rights) violation.

Pollution can easily be either (or both), depending on circumstances, in which case the criminal-justice process can be applied against polluters by those harmed by their invasive activities.
#14153330
Eran wrote:In a libertarian anarchy, all crime is some form of property rights (or use rights) violation.

Pollution can easily be either (or both), depending on circumstances, in which case the criminal-justice process can be applied against polluters by those harmed by their invasive activities.

So there are rules and enforcement, bodies which deal with this sort of thing?
User avatar
By Eran
#14153382
Absolutely. To libertarians, "anarchy" doesn't mean social chaos or lack of order. It has the much narrower meaning of "no government" in the traditional sense of "an organisation with a geographical monopoly over the legitimised use of force".

There are different suggestions on how such institutions could function. The key is that the authority to use force always originates with the property-rights holder whose rights have been violated. The use of force is of either a defensive or restorative nature, and thus doesn't count as initiation of force which is generally prohibited.
#14153513
Eran wrote:Absolutely. To libertarians, "anarchy" doesn't mean social chaos or lack of order. It has the much narrower meaning of "no government" in the traditional sense of "an organisation with a geographical monopoly over the legitimised use of force".

There are different suggestions on how such institutions could function. The key is that the authority to use force always originates with the property-rights holder whose rights have been violated. The use of force is of either a defensive or restorative nature, and thus doesn't count as initiation of force which is generally prohibited.

Hmm the more I hear about anarchism the more it interests me, its a very misunderstood concept.
By Someone5
#14153608
republicuk wrote:Hmm the more I hear about anarchism the more it interests me, its a very misunderstood concept.


Well, Eran isn't actually describing Anarchism. He's describing Unicorn Capitalism, where the state-that-doesn't-exist will enforce all the things you want them to enforce but none of the things you don't want enforced.
#14153648
Here's a scenario for anarchists.

Someone's playing music very loud night after night, you and the people living nearby are unable to sleep, it becomes so bad that your health noticeably declines due to sleep deprivation.

The music player protests his freedom to play his music as loud as he likes, whenever he likes and that any use of force to stop him is an act of oppression, you and the nearby people try to reason and compromise with him but have no success. What do you do now?
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