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Dr. Dave

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  1. 1. We use the word "own" in different contexts, and I think are misled by the fact that the same word is used in each context to think that ownership is the same thing in each context. I own my pen I own my house I own my dog. (Actually my wife does.) I can smash up my pen or do whatever with it. My town has an ordinance prohibiting me to put up a sign larger than a certain size. I like the term "husbandry" to refer to my relationship to the animals on our land: 1 dog and 7 chickens. I can't just smash them up if I feel like it. 2. I was a great admirer of Ayn Rand. I have a signed copy of "Into. to Objectivist Epistemolgy" which I hope to sell for big bucks some day, thereby refuting the labor theory of value! I met her a couple of times. I remember a time when someone asked her about an incident in one of the novels where someone was killed basically for being an irrational person. I don't recall the details of the novel incident, but I recall that Ayn Rand gave her answer, then the person persisted a bit, asking "Yes, but don't even irrational people have a right to life?" Ayn Rand threw her shawl or something over her shoulder in a huff and said -- I can hear her accent now -- "If you still don't understand, after I have explained it to you, then I feel dirty even talking to you." My blood ran cold at this way of treating a sincere, thoughtful human being. I had forgotten this incident for many decades, until I started posting my thoughts in these forums. I hate to say it, but I get that same feeling reading many of these postings. A flashback. This was my 1st interaction with other self-described objectivists in many decades, and it has not been pleasant. I would like to explore issues I am concerned about, but not at this price. Nominally, these forums are about philosophy. Philosophy means love of wisdom. Get a clue.
  2. What is your definition of political philosophy?
  3. I've been thinking about various ways a ownership violation can disappear, and I think difFerently about this now. Certainly, the fact that a master thief is very good at destroying evidence etc. does not make the thief a legitimate owner of what is stolen. A prosecutor has a different set of problems than a political philosopher. But what if the thief sells stolen goods and uses the proceeds to send his/her child to college? Is a piece of the college degree stolen? This makes no sense. Or what if you have a $20 bill in your wallet that actually traces back to an unsolved robbery. The robber bought a pack of cigarettes with the $20, the store owner deposited it in a bank, the bank loaded it into the ATM machine, ... Your wallet is stolen, but the police recover it and you get your $20 back. It's not just that it is treated as if it's your legitimate property. It really is your legitimate property. The rights violation has disappeared. Thanks for helping me see this. With land, the thing that bugs me is you can see with the plain evidence of your senses that there are societies composed of 2 ethnic groups: The ancestors of group 1 owed the land for millenia. The ancestors of the group 2 invaded and conquered. Now, years later, the members of group 1 own almost all of the decent land, and the members of group 2 own little or no land and live in abject poverty. It's completely obvious what happened. But no individual case of theft can be proven in a court of law. So we just let it go?
  4. Not sure if this is sufficiently on-topic but I wanted to mention that what we call "corporations" are products (at least since around the 1860's) of state interference in the economy, not the natural workings of LFC. There is no such thing as a natural right to limited liability. If any one of us damages or injures another, we have a responsibility to pay restitution or some other penalty as needed to "make them whole." We don't get a "pass" on liability for our voluntary actions when we act in groups. Corporations, however, have been granted charters of limited liability by governments. This amounts to a promise by the state not to attempt to redress grievances beyond the assets of the corporation. But remember that only individual people exist, and individual people are liable for their actions. Corporate charters are a promise by the state not to exercise the retaliatory use of force in situations where force of fraud have been initiated. When they picture capitalism, some people imagine the corporations they are familiar with as constituting the market. But capitalism is "the unknown ideal." In a just society, there might not be entities very similar to what we think of as corporations. I say "might" because you can't reliably subtract the undue influence of limited liability and predict what would be left -- there is no "control group".
  5. It strikes me that Sally is in a situation not all that different from the one Ayn Rand and her family was in in 1917. As far as what to do if Big Stick Enforcers takes over, here is an idea that has worked in the past: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right - it is their duty- to throw off such government, and provide new guards for their future security." The argument that a teensy-weensy violation of liberty (i.e. forbidding competition in the use of retaliatory force) is OK because it helps reduce the chance of a bigger violation is a utilitarian argument, incompatible with objectivism.
  6. If I attempt to delegate my right of retaliation, do I thereby initiate the use of force? If I do not thereby initiate the use of force, why isn't it the person who prevents me the one who initiates force?
  7. "Common law" was created by the Normans. The foundation of common law (judicial decisions, court reports, the practice of royal officials announcing "the common law" and having a single system of law) were not part of Anglo-Saxon tribal law." Yes you are sort of right. A recent chapter on Anglo-Saxon Law says that "... many customs of Anglo-Saxon law evolved into a form that survives in English and American common law" (p. 251). So there is a distinction between the 2, but not one that affects my point. Here is the url for the chapter: http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/...o-saxon-law.pdf I remember hearing once that the reason why many legal terms seem almost duplicate -- e.g. "assault and battery", "will and testament" -- is because one word has an English origin and the other is it's French origin counterpart. So common law grew out of some sort of mixture of traditions of the conquerer and traditions of the conquered.
  8. "You describe security guards and arbitrators. Government provides retaliatory use of force, not preventive." Protection is a broad term that covers everything involved in obtaining redress for injury or damage: policing services -- including detective work to catch aggressors, etc., the judicial services required to examine evidence, etc., and "corrections" services to keep people safe from dangerous people. The issue is whether there is a rational justification for these services being concentrated in one monopoly provider organization in a given geographical area.
  9. "You have an invalid presupposition: "force" is not a market service, so people in a town will not purchase "force services" from anyone. The use of force is not something that can be contracted." This is a very interesting point. I had not heard the argument put this way before. It goes a step beyond the "archy defense" in The Nature of Government. I am not yet convinced however -- Suppose I have the right to do X. On what rational basis am I prohibited from contracting with some other person to do X on my behalf? Substitute for X "retaliate against aggression." Since you can't initiate aggression, you can't purchase it. But you can purchase retaliatory force. Any right that a person has, they can delegate to another agent if they so choose. To try to prevent them from doing this is to initiate force against them.
  10. "The fact that a person doesn't use all of the land he owns is a red herring. The only question is..." These discussions are great. There is no question that an adult human being has the right to own land. Sorry if I seemed to say otherwise. I asked "Does this person really own the land he/she claims to own?" in order to explore more deeply the nature of land ownership. I am not sure I understand it fully and would like to get others' ideas. But certainly once ownership is established, an owner is free to use as much or as little as he/she pleases. Re. the "moot point," after how long does property theft turn into legitimate property ownership? I can't see an objective basis for any time limit. Or is that just not a worthwhile question?
  11. I see two different issues. One relates to the situation where a person enters some previously unclaimed, unowned territory and puts up "DO NO ENTER - PRIVATE PROPERTY" signs every few yards over a territory of several hundred acres in area, thereby claiming ownership. He or she then builds a cabin and clears a small portion of it, and maybe occasionally goes hunting on most of the rest, or forages for mushrooms and firewood. Does this person really own this whole place? Can he or she sell it, rent it, or charge a user fee for walking on it? The second issue is that there are hardly any patches of ground left that are previously unowned and unclaimed. What people call "'my property" is not a patch of land they personally wrestled from the wilderness. They bought it from somebody. But the purchase was only valid if the seller properly owned it. That seller probably bought it from somebody else, and so on. What some people either explicitly affirm or implicitly sense is that as you go back in time, you very often find that some violation of rights was involved in the supposed ownership of much land. This is certainly true in Europe, where the land was once improperly thought to be "owned" by barons and nobles who were basically thugs and terrorists. When Proudhon wrote that "property is theft" he was probably referring to the fact that current property ownership (in his day) was based largely on force and fraud. In the US, the issue relates more to the treatment of Native Americans, and is more complex.
  12. The definition of "monopoly." Suppose the people in a town are purchasing protection and arbitration services from United Protection Services. But Sally, a peaceful, non-invasive individual, simply doesn't like the way they do business. She wishes instead to purchase protection and arbitration services from the Acme Protection Group. People shop around for services from different companies all the time in a free market. Now there are going to be 2 protection providers in the same geographical area. Either (A) there are now "competing governments" (although that term is not the right one, but it's the one Ayn Rand used for this situation), or ( we prevent this by prohibiting Sally from entering into this contract. Is there an option ©? Of (A) and (, which one necessarily violates the rights of a non-invasive individual? United Protection Services and the Acme Protection Group can operate in the same or overlapping geographical areas based on a set of mutual understandings between themselves; possibly written -- like treaties between governments -- but also possibly unwritten customs and traditions. It is in the self-interest of both parties to reach and adhere to such understandings. What is called "common law" is not "laws" passed by government legislatures, but the accumulated wisdom of decisions on disputes, originally made by Anglo Saxon tribal elders and councils, over many hundreds of years, that provide objective standard operating procedures for resolving new disputes.
  13. Re: "If you wish to live in a society where each person can "CLAIM" self defense and use force at their whim, then what you are wishing for is anarchy. What Rand is describing is not delegating the actual right of your own self-defense so much as you are allowing for an OBJECTIVE measure to be established for when there is a conflict." What's missing in the Rand/Binswanger discussion of "competing governments" is an understanding of the role of custom, or convention, in regulating the behavior of people who interact. We all know how to construct grammatically correct English sentences, and can spot an incorrect sentence, for example. The rules of grammar are OBJECTIVE, not a matter of whim. But nobody forces us to obey them. There is no regulating power. In a free society, people will need to protect themselves against force and fraud. Thus, there would need to be some unified, common understanding of what you do when you feel you're a victim, how the issue is to be decided, what will happen to people who refuse to obey reasonable requests to testify so issues can be resolved, or to pay restitution, and so on, in accordance with the conventions of a given society. That does not mean there needs to be a government, in the sense of an organization that has the right to prevent other people from entering into peaceful and voluntary contracts. A government, in the sense of an organization with an enforceable monopoly on the defense of rights in a given geographic area, does by definition have the authority to prevent other people from entering into peaceful and voluntary contracts, and so it is unjust. An organization that had a natural, or de facto, monopoly would not be unjust however, and one can call that a government if one wants, but it stretches the meaning pretty far.
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