Aziz 2 Al-Jabir 2

Firstly, in this day and age it is doubtful that the majority of people would support slavery and such agencies would thus lose business from the vast majority of people. If a large portion of people supported slavery however, the government could easily become corrupted by their influence and enact slavery across entire regions un-checked if it existed in such a scenario. also if the trend to support slavery existed government officials would not be immune from this trend. They are only human. The reason slavery existed to the degree the that it did was because of the government's enforcement of slavery laws. In a system of private protection agencies however, corporations have a profit incentive to avoid conflict. Unlike with the government private companies must absorb the cost of fighting with other companies which would be hefty. This would result in higher prices and lower efficiency resulting in the loss of clients. Many clients would also boycott pro-slavery companies causing them to lose more money. The private enforcers, who would be fighting for profit would have to be paid outrageously high salaries for them to want to risk their lives fighting for a cause such as slavery which would be unsustainable for the company. Furthermore their would be many other protective agencies that slaves or slavery opponents could flock toward for protection. Poor slaves would either pay receiving charitable aid or contributions or selling a claim on restitution for a violation of rights as was common practice in ancient Iceland. Gun ownership would not be restricted allowing for people to take up arms against oppressive companies in addition to this and as a last resort. Upholding a system such as slavery would cause too many conflict for private agencies and would be injurious if not detrimental to them economically speaking and thus have an incentive not to uphold such a system. I'm not saying that it's not possible for something to go wrong. I'm merely saying that the free-market handles such situations better than a coercive monopoly. The state has been notoriously bad on the issue of slavery historically speaking

I do believe that the state, which I define as an entity that either holds a coercive monopoly on the justice system, the police, the military, the law etc. or collects money forcibly should be abolished and condemned as evil. This however does not mean that I am opposed to having rules. I believe we need to have rules preventing the initiation of force and persuasion through force which can be best enforced by privately owned civil, restitution-based civil courts. There will not be one entity that will be allowed to initiate force to prevent competition.

I advocate anarcho-capitalism. The free market can provide legitimate protection and justice better than the state the same way it provides any other service better than the state. The demand for security that would be present in absence of a state would bring about private protection agencies and private arbitration agencies. The competition they would face would cause them to have to provide the best and most just services or be put out of business. The fact that they would have to use their own resources and be responsible for the costs of conflict would cause them to resolve disputes between agencies in the most peaceable ways. This is opposed to the state which is the very type of organize crime syndicate you oppose. The amount of violence and suffering the state has created has been unprecedented in human history due to the fact that it serves as an unchecked coercive monopoly on the use of force within a given territory. As to my profile flag, it is a mixture of the Gadsden flag and the voluntaryist/anarcho-capitalist flag as indicated by the diagonal split of yellow and black. It should also be noted that the reason organized crime syndicates have the type of power they do is because they bribe officials in government who aid and abet them.

To abolish the state. And CONDEMN the concept, if that sounds better.

That is always a possibility. But this is also a possibility for governments. There will never be a perfect system. Humans are fallible. If governments have the final say in the use of force they could always become corrupted. Governments that start out small seem to inevitably grow bigger such as was the case with the United States government. This is because once prosperity increases due to capitalism the government will want to steal some of that prosperity. Private arbitration agencies, and by this I mean agencies that are charged with trying and punishing criminals, on the other hand would be subjected to market competition and would lose business and possibly their jobs if they were to enact punishment un-righteously. I would argue that these agencies are less likely to become corrupted for this reason as well as because of the fact that there would be many competing agencies that people could turn to in the case that one of the agencies becomes tyrannical. This would be harder to accomplish if the government were to become tyrannical.

The way to end democracy is to eliminate the concept of the state as a social institution. The state feeds democracy and allows it to exist.

Yes, private arbitration agencies rather. A system of competing courts which would be subjected to competition in the free-market just as any other service, resulting in the ones that provide defense against aggression most efficiently to survive due to the competition they will face. If the government is going to violently force private protection agencies that are not aggressing against anyone and are merely punishing criminals righteously, this seems to me to be a violation of liberty. It is as though a special group of people is arbitrarily selected to enact righteous punishment and is given the right to use force against others who do the same thing.

I'm mainly asking about why a person should have the right to pursue happiness and how this is derived from the right to life but a little more background info on the right to life would be helpful in understanding this concept.

Hey guys, I'm a libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist who has lately been interested in the objectivist philosophy. I am beginning to learn about the objectivist defense of the right to life but would like more specifics on how the right to pursue happiness is derived from this right to life. My understanding is that objectivists view life as necessary to uphold any value or to be interested in philosophy in the first place but on a more fundamental level, how does this translate into the right to pursue happiness? After all it is not necessary to be happy in order to live. One could argue that it is necessary to truly fulfill life but what justifies the ability to fulfill life from the right to life and how does this relate to liberty for each individual? As a disclaimer I already uphold the principles of liberty and the non-initiation of force being a libertarian but was curious to learn about the objectivist justifications for the above and how it leads to liberty according to the philosophy. As an anarchist I am also curious as to why objectivists favor the state despite the fact that it violates liberty, namely, in that it imposes a specific protection agency on all human beings within a given geographical territory and does not allow it to choose any other organization regardless of whether or not it upholds the principle of the non-initiation of force.

Yeah, thanks. Makes a lot of sense. I recognize that Ayn Rand did use different terms but I agree that the same principle, that it is morally wrong to aggress against others and that each person is a sovereign entity unto himself, entitled to live freely, still exists in her philosophy. And I do like the way she uses some Aristotle's philosophy to justify the libertarian/objectivist principle of individual liberty. I do intend to learn more about Rand's philosophy as I think it is very important to justify any moral principle on rational grounds which she seems to do very well.

Hello, I'm new to these forums. I am a libertarian from Texas and operator of the newly founded political blog, vforvoluntary.wordpress. I have grown increasingly interested in Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy and its theory of ethics and am interested in learning more about it.

Hey everyone, I'm a libertarian who's been interested in objectivist philosophy lately. I understand that one of Ayn Rand's criticisms of libertarianism is that many of those in the libertarian movement treat the non-aggression principle as an axiom and do not necessarily attempt to justify it rationally making them "hippies of the right" so to speak. I do agree with her that it is important to have a moral justification for liberty at the end of the day, so how does an objectivist go about justifying concepts like non-aggression, individual liberty, self-ownership, property rights/homesteading, etc in a rational manner. I understand that life is the primary value in objectivism, but would like elaboration on how objectivists get from this point to justifying liberty and individualism as I think it would be helpful in combating statist views which deny non-aggression and liberty