libertarian answers

No point yet. I may have to watch it several more times before I understand it. The fact that he doesn't clarify HIS position on ethics makes it difficult to agree or disagree with him. He says he's written a book that spells it all out. http://www.lulu.com/content/1270751 Haven't read it.

Also, find a way to place your ads on your "Lo-Fi Version" of the site. You get impressions there that you want to capitalize on. Since few people actually use it, think about putting several ads there.

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I see that at one time this site displayed Google ads, but I can't seem to find them anymore. If Google Adsense isn't an option, I'd recommend Adbrite. Adbrite pays for both impressions and clicks. A small banner in the header would generate some income to help defray costs. I've had decent success with them on my websites. http://www.adbrite.com Just my $0.02.

And I must say that I have been treated well by the Objectivists here except for the warning I got for being a dumb noob. For clarity of thought, you guys are like a breath of fresh air. I hope my contributions paid for in value the time you spent talking with me.

Maybe some clarification is in order here. I've read the OPAR and have a fairly good but admittedly much shallower grasp on her ideas than most here. For me, reading Rand was well worth it. But I also came away with more questions than answers. Maybe the answers were there and I missed them. Maybe that is why I'm here.

My solution would be a to let the free market decide which solution to this issue wins out. The natural result might be a geographically based government that provides such services. It may turn out that geography may not be what the market favors. Maybe your government provider would be based in another region and hires locals to enforce your rights similar to car insurance companies. I think it is hard to predict where the market will go. So would it then be logical to force everyone to support that institution that defends individual rights? My head hurts.

Is there a line of reasoning that logically explains why taxation for one thing is not as bad as taxation for another thing? Or do you view both as illegitimate based on a central principle? I know that sounds like trolling, but it honestly is not. I am completely open to hearing your thoughts. Learned a lot today.

Good stuff. I can't find anything wrong with that reasoning. I will add that assigning labels to groups of people and characterizing them accordingly might be fun, but it is also unproductive. Probably means the end of this thread and a conscious effort on my part to stick to ideas from now on. Agree. As a libertarian, I will admit the Libertarian Party is an embarrassment. My apologies for generalizing ALL liberals as unthinking. That was collectivist and I will try to do better in the future. Wow. You've changed a misconception I had about Objectivism. I can only say that I agree with you in that taxation should be voluntary and is the only consistent position one can take based on a rational morality.This is turning out to be a great day!

Before my reputation sours here, let me be clear in stating that I would fully support a state that ONLY served to protect the individual rights and never violated them. My problem is that I don't see how that would work in reality. I assume that the service this state renders (protecting individual rights) must be paid for. If that service is paid for voluntarily, then there is absolutely no problem morally. But what happens if a few moochers refuse to pay?

In my mind, it is important to distinguish between the term "government" and "state". Today, they're often used interchangeably to mean the people who run the Post Office, State Parks, and the local police department. But in a logical debate, I think it is important to distinguish them as separate. A home owners association would be a government. By government, I mean a voluntary body composed of people who have been delegated responsibilities by the members of the group. A state would be the body that claims a monopoly on initiation of force. Now I'm not talking about how the state SHOULD act, but addressing the reality behind how they DO act. An example of this is the initiation of force against those who would refuse to pay taxes. If you refuse to pay the taxes the Federal Government dictates that you owe, they will eventually come and try to put you in jail. If you attempt to defend yourself from them, they will most likely kill you. I agree. In an ideal world, this would be true. The state would only protect your rights. But to protect your property from being stolen from you by other individuals, the state steals from you via taxation. In essence, the state todays says that to protect your rights, it must first violate them. As a practical matter, this may be necessary. But it seems logically inconsistent to me.

I did indeed acknowledge that some libertarians are unprincipled and take positions based on the last argument they heard. But not all libertarians. To say that all members of a group share common beliefs is collectivist. It would be like saying that all Objectivists run railroads. OK. The lightbulb just went off for me and now I get it...and agree. There is no central doctrine based on reason that libertarians can rally around that defines them. The reality is that libertarians hold a grab bag full of ideas that are often contradictory. Arriving at a core set of principles (or even a principle) would be impossible. Ongoing debates in libertarian circles over many issues certainly prove your point. That is where I would probably disagree with you. Reasoning with the crackpots and showing the error in their beliefs can be effective. It would certainly be easier to reason with a libertarian versus a liberal who is immune from actually thinking and prefers to use feeling as their guide. In the free-market of ideas, reason and logic will win only if they are on the field and actively engaged in battle.

So Rand said "But of course, anarchists are collectivists." The anarchists we see today protesting at the Starbucks in Seattle and hugging trees are indeed collectivists and I won't argue with that. If you listen to them, they would replace the state with rulers that they like. That being the case, they would indeed be collectivists. But how can one be an anarchist and also advocate rulers who enforce their randomly chosen brand of collectivism? That sounds like a state to me. In my mind, an anarchist would reject any form of the state. The state being defined as the group of individuals who enforce a monopoly on the initiation of force in a given geographic location. If the initiation of force is immoral, then would one be forced to reject any group of individuals calling themselves the state and staking such claims to the legitimate initiation of force.

I read some reviews of the book and the point seems to be that libertarians don't have a core philosophy and arrive at their conclusions as though they randomly selected them from a buffet of ideas. While I agree that many libertarians do indeed arrive at their positions based on what they feel at the time, this isn't necessarily true for all libertarians. Self-described libertarians range from the Neal Boortz types who lap at the fringes of libertarianism from the neoconservative right to full blown anarcho-capitalists who would reject the state as inherently evil on the principle that the individual should be valued higher than the collective.

Certainly the two topics are different. It is the underlying principle of secession that I wanted to debate. My contention is that the individual must be honored above any collective group. If I understand minarchism, at some point it must place the collective above the individual. I assume there are many minarchists who frequent this forum and wanted to hear their reasoning for how a minarchist state can fully respect the individual.