MichaelM

Welcome mOzart, you came to the right place. I am hard pressed to find anything you have said to be untrue, but I think the post as a whole is imprecise enough on the topic to be somewhat misleading. I don't think you can correctly say what I know you want to say without doing so with both pertinent meanings of the word "right" on the table. The first meaning I refer to is the most obvious, which is the political right to life that is here and commonly regarded as inalienable. But that is true only in a narrow context. Far less common is consideration of the fact that it is possible for men to live outside of a society, and when they do, they have no political rights at all. Such situations would include individuals or families or small scattered groups of men living on a remote island, in a remote jungle, in an area isolated by some cataclysmic event (man caused or natural), and someday, small random groups that wander off to this planet or that or wherever man is able to survive on his own. In that context, force is not managed by a system of reciprocal agreements (political rights) among men, because there are not enough men to make up a third party sufficient to enforce them. Force is managed rather individually by each individual's system of moral rights (and wrongs). When governments are formed, it is these moral rights (moral code) that are institutionalized in the form of a government. Consequently, it is ultimately only those moral truths that are inalienable (when and if they are accurately defined), and not the manifestation of those truths in the form of political rights. You can be alienated from your political rights in two ways: 1) you can move out of a society, or 2) you can violate the rights of another. Every Objectivist devotee knows that the use of force in self defense is morally sustainable, because one cannot violate a human right without implicitly denying the concept altogether. Meaning, one may not violate the right to life of another and then claim a right to his own life. I have encountered in a recent thread, some Objectivist wannabe's who deny this explanation of self defense on the grounds that rights are inalienable and cannot therefore be forfeited. That is the danger of being imprecise in the way the preceding post is. They failed to distinguish between the moral truth that is not inalienable, and the contingent promise based on it (political right to life) which is alienable. I still use the expression "our rights are absolute and inalienable", but always aware of the contexts in which that can be said, and able to explain it when necessary. PS: Voluntary slavery is impossible, because it flies in the face of the law of identity. You cannot act according to your will (voluntarily) and contrary to your will (involuntarily qua slave) simultaneously.

[correction for the record: government performs three functions: police, military, and the courts.] In the 60's when Objectivism first blossomed, the quoted question was usually overshadowed by an almost identical but different and more immediate one. That question was, "how would a government that could not impose obligations on its citizens ever defend itself without a draft?" Rand's answer went something like this: "You don't think men who have experienced complete and unadulterated freedom would ever allow their own nation to be overrun, do you?" I considered that answer sufficient, and refrained from writing to ask just how much she thought the soldiers would have to be paid to volunteer. Similarly, I will now say: "You don't think Wal-Mart, Microsoft, GE, EXXON, and so on would tolerate anything less than a top-of-the-world-class defense capacity for the protection of their existence, do you?" And as gravy, the population would throw in the small change just to be a part of it all. We should not second guess them about the methods they would devise to achieve uncoerced financing. They will be better at that then than we ever could be now. And this obsession with discovering the exact method treads dangerously close to the fallacy of being concrete bound. You are failing again to break the mold you live in. You are drastically underestimating the differences between productivity and wealth as we know it and as it would be in a free nation. Any scheme you could think of now would be pitiful in the shadow of that capacity. Men set free will naturally invest their productivity and wealth to the hilt in order to make a profit. And to live without coercion is the ultimate profit.

Exactly. In fact, the possibility of unanimity among all about everything is as close to zero as you can get. As I have said before, "consent of the governed" means no more than agreement among the dominant group that forms the government and writes the constitution. BUT: Those who do not agree to the constitution, but own property in its jurisdiction are nonetheless humans due equal rights. That is the failpoint for any application of your other scheme to a non-unanimous society. You cannot force the dissenters to pay for anything (whether they benefit from it or not) without violating their rights. Furthermore, if a relative, friend, acquaintance, or whatever lands on any location (in this prototypical nation) to which those dissenters have rights of access that include their guests, that alien may visit them, and the government must allow it, because such an event would occur without any use of force to take a value owned by another. The alien may stay as long as he wants and travel wherever owners allow him to. He may work for anyone who will hire him, buy property from anyone who will sell to him, and live happily ever after here. If he demonstrates a knowledge and understanding of government, rights, and the non-initiation of force principle, he may also vote. The rationality of the visitor or immigrant is no more the concern of the government than is the rationality of its own citizens. In fact, the goal of rights is to guarantee the freedom to be completely and utterly irrational [in the eyes of others] so long as the irrationality is not imposed on others by initiated force.

The contractual arrangement you describe is not a government in the Objectivist sense. It would have to be classified as a deed restriction or a condominium agreement (and would be valid as such). The difference is that a government may not mandate positive actions, such as the payment of those fees. It may only prohibit the initiation of force. Also, the context is specious. You have chosen to couch this claim in the least plausible of all possible contexts in which establishment of a government would be a valid human pursuit. What good is it to actual, non-unanimous societies?

Trey, Go to each of your question marks, hit the spacebar, and type a "No." You are trying to understand what a government of a free society should be and do from the wrong end of the task. Go back to the primary principles and apply them -- relentlessly! If the government is to hold a monopoly on force in order to remove all force from the value exchanges among men ( all men ) within the borders it can sustain, then there will be neither citizenship fees nor immigration laws. While it is entertaining to muse over just how free men would finance their government, it is not an important question. It is unlikely that any specific systems we could devise now would coincide with those that would actually be used in 3058 anyway. If a prescient speaker had predicted the internet to a conference of computer superbrains and business leaders in 1960, how many could even have fantasized how little it would cost the average user? And what difference would it have made to the validity of the content of the speech?

I'm going to have to stick with a no on this one, unless someone can do a better job of justifying it. Anyone except the government may propose standards is how that should read. And CF, I understood GC's position exactly as you described it. My problem with yours, his, and Trey's comments is that they are all dragging around the status quo. You have not tried to start from no government at all and to then trace the steps through the formation process until you arrive at a point where your positions become required for the defense of rights. The point being that it is dangerous enough to let the government perform its primary mandate without adding superfluous benefits to its can-do list. The proper entity to provide contract templates to the populace is the legal products aisle at Wal-Mart (among others). When the government suggests other formats for ideal contracts, it interferes in the competition between Wal-Mart and any other company marketing legal products. Furthermore, because their "proposals" come from the same entity that will be settling disputes over contracts, they will unavoidably cast a shadow over any different templates offered in the free market. OPAR p.366: "Government is inherently negative. The power of force is the power of destruction, not creation, and it must be used accordingly, i.e., only to destroy destruction. For a society to inject this power into any creative realm, spiritual or material, is a lethal contradiction: it is the attempt to use death as a means of sustaining life." This means that the government may not do anything it wants to that its donors will condone. It means that if templates are as great an idea as Trey thinks they are, he should start a business producing them for sale, but that urging the government to produce them can constitute a conspiracy to violate rights. And, while I agree with GC that the corporation is a parallel to marriage, I see a better one in the prenuptual agreements that are currently in vogue (and sans any template at all). But in the end, it is the word "marriage" itself that is overladen with past baggage. Instead of trying to squeeze laws into it, just forget it, and let a whole new vocabulary emerge to denote all the various versions of shared-life agreements free individuals will create.

In only one single legal context of all possible legal contexts, it is -- it simplifies the task of managing the use of force by or against us. And, per Peikoff (OPAR p.366-7) on the state and its laws: "It has no standards to uphold and no benefits to confer..." Rand only establishes two standards laws must meet: 1) they must be objective, and 2) they must serve to protect rights (from force). She qualifies rights (and by extension, laws) as being necessarily, and exclusively, negative mandates. This would exclude all laws that prescribe what one may or should do, such as your templates. Instead, laws could only address prohibited uses of force.

Instead of answering the questions I posed, you have merely repeated the original assertion. I still don't know how you got from a government with the sole task of force management to "it is proper for the government to aid them..." It is not the government's job to aid us or to simplify our life, is it?

Gabriel, I think you are trying to use the word "relevance" in two different ways at the same time. The relevance of your knowledge of the philosophies you mention lies in the understanding it provides you of the nature of the evils you face and their manifestations in the actions of those who would make your life miserable. The relevance of the Objectivist ethics lies in the guidelines it provides for choosing your actions under those circumstances. Those guidelines are equally efficacious and more necessary in precisely the irrational world you dwell in than they are in our slightly less irrational world. [Read Rand's "How to Live a Rational Life in an Irrational World".] Objectivist ethics are derived from definitions of the nature of man. They therefore always were, are now, and always will be relevant in all human contexts. To conceive of a context in which they are irrelevant would require at least one contradiction. Also, I suspect that you are harboring an overestimation of American corporate politics compared to the Romanian. Yes the style here is more refined, but the content is, more often than not, the same. When I was just barely through my training period at a major American manufacturer and still in Rand-Phase I, I wrote a 40 page memo carefully outlining the self-prostitution we were engaged in in the designing of our products. They shunted me off to the German subsidiary, gave me an apartment on the Rhine, a company car, and Berlitz lessons during work every day for a year. It was their way of getting rid of me without seeming to diminish the fake importance they placed on "good communications". The moral questions, of course, remained untouched. German fluency gave me the opportunity to flee to a high position at an equally major German manufacturer. With a design department long overdue for an overhaul and a past reputation of honesty to a fault, it seemed like a much better venue to pursue a productive career. But sooner than I could have imagined, I found myself standing in passive amazement (and amusement) in the middle of a huge room full of staff while the chief engineer over our division literally yelled in my face repeatedly, "Now, you must say yes!, you must say yes! you must...." In the long run, the politics in these two companies were indistinguishable except that the Germans were less sophisticated in their execution. It is to be expected that the Romanians would be even more primitive in this respect, but I seriously doubt that the moral issues you face are much different from those you would face in this country. Your integrity and the life of your career are at stake in both. In that decade over which this sequence of events transpired, I grew to suffer less and less from the experience of enduring their irrationalities, because I read more of, thought more about, and learned more from Objectivism. The most powerful weapon against irrationality is the ability to fully comprehend it. If you would provide us with some specific moral dilemma of corporate politics you face, or have faced, and tell us how you judged the ethics of those other philosophies to be more relevant than the ethics of Objectivism, I am sure we can show you how exactly the reverse is true.

That standard marriage contract devised to spare the cost of lawyers looks more like one of those special benefits the government should not provide than a function it should provide. What act of initiated force would this service shield us from? Of the infinite possible combinations of vows and agreements between two or among more than two humans pertaining to their mutual responsibilities in a shared life, what standard would the government use to favor one combination over all others? And since it most certainly may not forbid all of the others, why bother to anoint one to be standard or official?

Quoting myself [Nov 9 post to "Can Objectivists Pay Taxes?] on Rand's position, as I learned it long, long ago: The only ones who have a right to benefit from taxation are those who oppose it in principle. Anyone who advocates taxation and acts (votes) to enforce it is an accessory to a violation of human rights. Implicit in any such violation of human rights is that rights have no validity. The thief that acts as if the victim's rights are invalid cannot claim those same rights for himself. That is why no thief (or accessory to theft) has any right to the booty. And thus, no taxer has any moral claim on the benefits. Those who oppose taxation, on the other hand, are the victims. All the benefits they can grab when the government offers them would never repay them for what was and will be stolen from them in their lifetime (and don't forget to include pain and suffering, punitive damages, and your fees!).

A Capitalist government does not provide solutions to problems. Under Capitalism, free men solve problems by producing and exchanging goods and services per contracts. The government only guarantees that in all parts of the process, participation shall be voluntary. Since a tax is, by definition coercive, taxation of any size for any purpose may not be practiced by a Capitalist government. Consequently, taxes, as a solution to a problem, are not an appropriate component of any discussion about Capitalism. There is no reason why air should not be owned in the same way that minerals in the ground or water in the sea would be. It is not even a new idea. In the 60's, Pan American Airways built its skyscraper offices in leased airspace over Grand Central Station. Regulation of the introduction of pollutants into the air could easily be achieved by deed control agreements among air rights owners. Those owners would in turn be subject to the normal conrtol (under Capitalism) of the public who would produce and own all the things those owners would need to sustain their own lives.

1) Capitalism is not practiced today. There are no corporations operating today in an economic environment that equals or even simulates one in which there is: no taxation, no regulation, no public property, and in which "market controls" are exerted not only by those who do or do not buy products, but also by those who boycott or ostracize those who buy products of which they disapprove. That is a market that demands the responsibility of thinking from every customer. Therefore, it is premature for you to assert that there is some distinction between the theory of capitalism and its practice. It is also a fallacy to assert that. The trail to access proof of this statement starts 3 posts above yours. Follow the train of thought in AshRyan's request [there is a thread on the subject running now], and if you can persevere to the end, you will never make that assertion again for the rest of your life. 2) Quality according to whom? It is not the function of capitalism to regulate choices other than to guarantee that they are voluntary. To the degree that buyers are free to choose, the quality of the products they buy will mirror the quality of their thinking. But so will the quality of their government. Consequently, if you could graph the overall quality of products on the market with one line and the overall liberty of the market participants with another, the two lines would lie on top of each other.

ernie, you should try reading a few of the posts before you ask all these questions. 4 minutes before you asked here if it is OK to accept government grants, you added a reply to the taxes thread directly adjacent to point 2. of my post in which I related Ayn Rand's answer to this very question.

You can morally judge any act. But when you morally judge the act of making payments demanded by the government at the point of a gun, be sure you have your contexts in order. My understanding of this thread is that it deals with paying taxes by citizens of this country (or some other mixed economy government). In that context it is immoral to *not* pay taxes, because that would be self-sacrificial. It would preserve X dollars while placing your grip on life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness in grave danger. There is no value to X that is greater than the latter. The immorality of collecting taxes, by the way, has nothing to do with the morality of paying taxes. If I remember Ragnar's adventures correctly, he was an outlaw. He pirated government ships on the open sea to get the money to reimburse the immoral taxes taken. This is an entirely different context. He made the judgement that the losses exceeded the gains from living under the laws of that government. So, he abandoned all claims to his political rights and reverted to self-rule by his own moral principles. In other words, he became a full-fledged revolutionary. In that context, there would be no point to even considering payment of taxes. Therefore, are you sure Ragnar said *paying* taxes is immoral? Could it be that he said *collecting* taxes is immoral, and therefore he felt justified in taking the proceeds back from the government?