Swerve of Shore

That is a list, not an explanation. It's an okay list, but it doesn't describe how the rights are derived or how to apply them, which are really the fundamentally important issues. For instance, he says he has a "right to life". Does this mean that you have the right to have your life be supported by the assistance of others if you fail to support it yourself? Many liberals believe this. Does this right to liberty mean that you are free to walk in to your neighbor's house and take food out of his fridge? Many anarchists believe this. Does the right to property mean that you can take anything you want as long as you can defend it? Many warlords believe this.

Important to understanding the Objectivist viewpoint is that the entire framework of rights only functions if they are applied universally, to everyone. This means that the rights are basically negative in their application. The right to life means that other people have no right to kill you. It does not mean you have a right to live at their expense. The right to liberty means that other people have no right to enslave you, not that you can do whatever you feel like doing. The right to property means that other people have no right to take what you have produced, not that you have the right to keep whatever you can steal and then defend.

Multiple governments operating in the same territory cannot protect rights in this fashion because they would lack any kind of authority over law-breakers. If the citizens can simply cancel the government's authority over them on a whim the way they can cancel their relationship with Time Warner, then there is no government authority or power and no justice. The result is gang warfare, as Dormin and I have both stated.

I will do my best to explain Rothbard's mistakes from the Objectivist position.



Essentially Rothbard inverts the basic moral/political rights of man.

According to Objectivism:
1. The first political right of man is the right to life. That is the right to exist as a man qua man. Without this right, I would be dead.

2. From this right extends the correlary right to liberty, or freedom from coercion. To live as a man, I must be free from physical attack, theft, and fraud from my fellow man. Only then can I use my rational mind to continue my life and attain happiness. Without this right I would be killed or enslaved.

3. Finally, we arrive at the secondary correlary, the right to private property. In order to exist I must be able to lay claim upon and defend objects in existence, so that I may use and dispose of said objects as I please. Without this right, I would at best live in a constant state of fear that all of my production would be lost, and at worst, perish after losing my produce.

4. Objectivism maintains that these rights must be secured in the order listed. The only way to do so is to create an objective arbiter of disputes which will defend a man's right to life and liberty, SO THAT he may engage in economic transactions with private property. This arbiter is the state, an organization which holds a legitimate monopoly on force within a geographic area and uses said monopoly to defend individual rights.



According to Rothbard:
1. The first political right of man is the right to private property, AKA self-ownership. Man has the right to engage in economic transactions with his own property, which originates from his own body and the labor it puts into his environment.

2. Man can then use this right to purchase his rights to life and liberty from other individuals on the market. Overall, the market will produce optimal conditions of for liberty which individuals will voluntarily opt into.



The Problem:

Man cannot engage in economic transactions fairly, or live his life with any meanigful liberty, if his basic rights aren't protected in the first place. Rothbard's vision boils down to "might makes right" because there is no objective standard by which force should be used in a stateless society. Rand stated that rights must be protected from the outset by a single body with the power to coercively stop all those who wish to violate rights. Rothbard claimed the protection of rights should be tossed up to the market so that hopefully the good people will grab the most guns and kill off/intimidate enough of the bad people so that objective law reigns over (part of) the land.

The most common rebuttal claimed by anarchists is that governments are inherently contradictory because they are coercive entities by default. The idea is that even if a state doesn't tax its citizens (as Rand supported), it still coercively prevents other private companies from setting up "competing governments" which might provide more efficient or different services.

This challenege is predicated upon the use of an invalid concept knowns as the "market for force." Force is not a commodity or a tradeable good. Force is the imposition of will upon another being. There is no "trade" or "exchange" of coercion, only one party dominating another until the physically weaker party is destroyed or it capitulates. To suggest that there can be "competing wielders of force" is an invitation for gang warfare as "competitors" try to destroy each other on the "open market."

While we all should have the right to create products and services, and then offer them to others in voluntary exchnages, none of us have the right to pick up a bunch of guns and arbitrarily declare ourselves to be enforcers of justice unless we are permitted to by society in some manner (ie. appointed/hired by officials elected by the general population). Imagine what that would mean in concrete form: if someone steals my ipod, I would be able to find that person a few days later and execute him on the spot with a bullet to the back of the head. I could then declare that I am not a law breaker, but actually the judge, jury, and executioner in my own judicial system which I voluntarily formed for myself. And by the standards of my own legal system, the theif deserved his punishment. The only way I could be stopped (assuming that competing governments were permitted), is if another "private government" attempted to strike back at me... at which point I would rally together my own gang and we would enjoy a nice shoot out in the streets.


Anyway, I actually really like Rothbard aside from the anarchism and 100% reserve stuff. Feel free to ask more questions.

Partially or poorly implimented capitalism doesn't lead to results contrary to those intended. Its just leads to a less free society. If everything were unregulated except the meat packing indusry, it woldn't cause the market to go haywire, the meat packing industry would just be less productive. Poorly implimented capitalism is better than no capitalism. Ayn Rand agrees with this. For instance she calls fort the defense of Israel against the various Arab nations opposing it. This was on the grounds that while Israel had poorly implimented capitalism (well the poorly implimented socialism also), they were still better than the medievalists surrounding them.

Vaguely free societies can get along, However collectivists tend to kill one another over their differenes in ideology. They are so bent on controlling everything people who don't conform their opinion are a threat to them. This leads them to dissavow one another all the time.

The soviet union wasn't socialist (or failed) because -

- There was a state, and that is still a class. (Anarchism).
- My traditions and culture were disrespected (Tribalism).
- No one wants to bow down to Moscow (naitonalism).
- Only people of similar hertiage and race can really care for on another, attempting to encourage altruism between racis is a Christian myth (Nazism).
- The Soviet Union wasn't socialist, it was state capitalism. The state owned the means of production , not the people, who were never given proper representation, and were forced to compete for the favor of the state. (Democratic Socialists)
- It threw away institutions that could have strengthended the state and thus the nation. It destroyed the church, scared away industrialists, and left the working class as an unorganized mess. All of these pieces could have been brought under the state. (Fascism)

Under all of this though is the fact that collectivists can only say that a certain itteration of collectivism didn't work because it wasn't their specific form of collectivism. Individualists on the other hand can see the merits of societies with mediocre levels of freedom and can point out how to improve them.

Well it is the same, insofar as they are both claiming "this has never been implemented in real life." Rand's conception of capitalism is not a description of the current system or of historical reality, but rather a projection of an ideal. According to Sciabarra, "an ‘ideal-type’ [is created by] abstracting liberal referents from historical states, while disregarding nonliberal factors that have been internal to every state in history. For Rand, such concepts as ‘government’ and ‘capitalism’ are socially transformative; their ‘ideal’ character is latent in currently distorted social forms.” (Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, p. 283.) It is in this way she means "unknown ideal." In saying that you call into the conflationist trap, I am saying those features of the current system you point to are products of the nonliberal factors, not the liberal ones.
How are the two claims different then? Obviously they differ in regards what they think is desirable (socialism and capitalism), but if you think that attempting to implement one thing leads to different results, then they also differ in terms of what outcomes each side thinks socialism or the free market will produce. In that case, the difference in our positions is simply over the latter. Since I agree the attempt to implement socialism leads to something different than what the socialists themselves describe, I have nothing to add there. But I also think interventionism leads to something different than what you think it will, and that only the free market will reliably lead to results that I, and to a large extent you and most people, desire.

I think on the Randian grounds, the current economic landscape is a corporate state produced not of free competition but of government intervention, including not only direct subsidies, grants of monopoly privilege, and barriers to entry, but also a regulatory framework that enables firms to socialize the various costs and externalities, while pocketing the benefits, and leaving employees and consumers with a straitened range of options. In the absence of government intervention, we maintain, the market would not resemble anything like the current system dominated by a group of large corporations with their current form, and might perhaps even involve greater worker empowerment and solidarity (!).


But if, crucially, the free market refers to the sphere of voluntary human interaction, then such markets cannot be created by government force. I think cap and trade represents another government-corporate partnership designed to rip the rest of us off. In our view, polluters who damage others' property are simply forced to stop and to pay restitution. They are not granted arbitrarily the "right" to pollute a certain amount, and thus they cannot trade this right in return for various privileges.

http://heritage.org/index/country/norway

The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom ranks Norway the 40th freest economy in the world. The index is by no means perfect, but its lists a lot ways in which Norway is no socialistic including its efficient judicial system, low inflation, relatively light business regulations, and lack of trade barriers.

Hi. I'm following this topic and intend to reply to it at some point.