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tadmjones I'm trying to understand what you mean, but I'm unable to come up with anything. I thought I already explained before that we are all for a government of laws, we would like to see more law, and in fact we would like to see the law applying to the government, and that this would cause it to lose its monopolystatus; and furthermore, on those premises, states or monopolists of law are actually lawless. Nobody external to their group writes and enforces the laws among them. The government itself interprets whether or not it itself has broken laws which it itself has legislated. This is supposedly impermissible under a normative conception of the law, which is what Objectivists take under the concept of "objective law."

The Mises selection you post is about economic calculation being impossible in the absence of price mechanisms, then this is a reason not to have a government for efficiency and incentival reasons, because the production of law and order is not magically exempt from the laws of economics.

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The government itself interprets whether or not it itself has broken laws which it itself has legislated. This is supposedly impermissible under a normative conception of the law, which is what Objectivists take under the concept of "objective law."

Citation?

Since you have already (incorrectly) asserted that objective law has been given no definition by Rand, how could you possibly claim with confidence whether anything at all is taken under the concept of objective law?

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I thought I already explained before that we are all for a government of laws, we would like to see more law, and in fact we would like to see the law applying to the government, and that this would cause it to lose its monopolystatus; and furthermore, on those premises, states or monopolists of law are actually lawless. Nobody external to their group writes and enforces the laws among them. The government itself interprets whether or not it itself has broken laws which it itself has legislated. This is supposedly impermissible under a normative conception of the law, which is what Objectivists take under the concept of "objective law."

If you are arugeing from the perspective that the current administration(and other administrations say since Garfield to pick a starting point) have operated outside of constitutional parameters , i would agree. That does not mean that the idea of a federal government vested with the objective of the protection of indidiual rights is wrong in principle.

Nor do I think in principle, would the idea of incorporating other nation states into a federal system be unwarrnted. Take the example of Canada, culturally and geographically it would not be outrageous to posit that in principle the nation state of Canada could adopt the ideals in the US constitution and endeavor to work within that framework, setting aside the idea of local governance. Local governance would obviously have to conform to and operate within the context that the sole function of any govermental body is the recognition and protection of individual rights.

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To me it seems that any justification for anarchism,in any form, is based on the idea that implementations of principles are shown to be faulty, therefore principles are faulty. The fix then seems to be better implementation as opposed to pointing to the incidents of deviating from principle. Which suggests that principled action is impossible given a certain scale, which I would submit contradicts or negates the idea of principle in the first place.

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Citation?

Since you have already (incorrectly) asserted that objective law has been given no definition by Rand, how could you possibly claim with confidence whether anything at all is taken under the concept of objective law?

I'm just going off of what you guys are sitting here telling me objective law is all about. Literally, you guys' words. I'm not referring to Rand specifically here, she never explained what objective law is, or mentioned a lot of these principles. Other Objectivists and later expounders try to fill the gap by giving various descriptive traits of what objective law is, usually the two most popular ones are "objective law is clearly definable and generally known beforehand." We also hear that objective law is singular and unified. Objective law is reliable and stable. Objective law is not derived from whim. Objective law is objectively derived. It's rational! It's based on reality! etc.

Some people like Robert Bidinotto, drawing on Locke, have tried to fill the gaps by explaining various parts of objective law, like the "you must have a final arbiter" principle, and the "you must submit your disputes to a third party." Look, here's our very own Hairnet arguing the third party principle of objective law in another thread on these very forums:

The function of the state is to retain the use of retaliatory force in the hands of an objective third party institution.

The institution is objective because it defines its rules and procedures and explains them to the public, and it is third party because when two people have a violent encounter, it steps in to arbitrate the dispute.

If you are robbed for instance, and you fail to stop them in the act, what should you afterwards? Should you attempt to regain your stolen goods by force? How should you go about doing this? What about punishment for those who stole your goods? The state takes this task away from you and makes it so that no single person should ever have to bear the burden of being judge, jury, and executioner alone without any guidance.

With a state there are procedures that everyone knows about ahead of time, before any crimes take place. It is fair and impartial (even if the system may not be completely perfect). This prevents anger. misinformation, and mob rule from causing tragedies.

So, all I'm saying is, if what you're telling me is that all of these things are normative conceptions of law, and if we can determine (as I argue) that the state fails to live up to these conceptions of objective law, then it follows that states are lawless to that degree. And then I argue that the free market can produce those aspects of objective law.

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If you are arugeing from the perspective that the current administration(and other administrations say since Garfield to pick a starting point) have operated outside of constitutional parameters , i would agree. That does not mean that the idea of a federal government vested with the objective of the protection of indidiual rights is wrong in principle.

Nor do I think in principle, would the idea of incorporating other nation states into a federal system be unwarrnted. Take the example of Canada, culturally and geographically it would not be outrageous to posit that in principle the nation state of Canada could adopt the ideals in the US constitution and endeavor to work within that framework, setting aside the idea of local governance. Local governance would obviously have to conform to and operate within the context that the sole function of any govermental body is the recognition and protection of individual rights.

Okay sure, if I was arguing that, your conclusion would follow. But nowhere in what you quoted was that argued.

Edit: I'll try to give you a better response than that. I agree with you above, I'm not saying that the failure of any particular state to live up to any given principle of objective law constitutes an argument against all states. That would be fallacious as you point out. Likewise, earlier in the thread, JMeganSnow trotted out the old "Somalia argument" and, as you can see, I was somewhat unimpressed.

What I'm saying is something more like this: If we assume that X is a principle of objective law, and if it can be demonstrated that states are, by their nature, incapable of producing X, then states, by their nature, are incapable of producing objective law to that degree.

If S is a part of P,

and no Q has S,

then all Q's lack some P

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You are equivocating between those who wish to offer competing services and those who are weilding force in unjust ways, amalgomating both under the title of "unauthorized." As argued above, that won't do because we don't assert that people should be allowed to weild force in unjust ways, nor that people should be allowed to weild force outside of objective law.

The problem is that whether some use of force or not is "just" is not readily apparent. We need some objective process for determining what is just and what is not. However, if there indeed is some process, with an enforcement mechanism, to determine whether certain protection agencies are operating in just ways or not, then we're already back to a system with a final arbiter.

I'm afraid I don't get what you're saying in regards anything else. That a band of robbers and murderers makes themselves known to each other and claim to be my agent says nothing about whether or not such arrangements are justified. Also, fancy highlighting aside, that Rand quote is actually tells us nothing whatsoever about what objective law actually is. I take it to mean that objective law is unambiguous, and clearly definable, and known beforehand. Okay then, I'm not opposed to that, we can agree those are good things, so how are these traits only available to governments? We are not told.

Grames' point here was that under a system where any particular crime might conceivably be prosecuted under one of two different agencies, there is by definition no way to know beforehand what the particular punishment is, or even the substance of the law itself, because it could be the particular standards and strictures of the first agency, or the second. If in fact there is no difference between the two, then there isn't meaningful competition between them and we're not really talking about a polycentric legal system.

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The problem is that whether some use of force or not is "just" is not readily apparent. We need some objective process for determining what is just and what is not. However, if there indeed is some process, with an enforcement mechanism, to determine whether certain protection agencies are operating in just ways or not, then we're already back to a system with a final arbiter.

Of course whether or not some particular use of force is just is not readily apparent, and of course we need some objective process of determining what is just and what is not. The fact that there is some process, with an enforcement mechanism, doesn't yield you one monopoly agency. Who is to determine that process and comprise its enforcement mechanisms if not some "final arbiter" holding coercive monopoly power? But the assumption that determining those processes and their enforcement mechanisms is the function of some one agency, rather than of the entire system of interacting agencies, is precisely what we challenge. I would think you would be able to see such a non sequitur.

Grames' point here was that under a system where any particular crime might conceivably be prosecuted under one of two different agencies, there is by definition no way to know beforehand what the particular punishment is, or even the substance of the law itself, because it could be the particular standards and strictures of the first agency, or the second. If in fact there is no difference between the two, then there isn't meaningful competition between them and we're not really talking about a polycentric legal system.

But this has already been brought up and answered in the thread. If competing courts converge on a shared set of norms, that does not mean they become part of a single monopoly institution. Burger King and McDonald's products bear more than a passing resemblance to each other, but they are not regarded as the same firm.

I'm really shocked that you think "by definition" there is no way to know beforehand what particular standards and strictures will be applied in the case of there being two different agencies interacting, as if these two agencies would have never thought about such a contingency before and did not already have contracts and procedures in place as a prerequisite to even entering the industry. The use of interlocking arbitration agreements is already widespread within various industries. Such a lack of imagination makes it seem like a critic proposing this scenario has never read even basic introductory material on the issue.

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  • 2 months later...

>To say, "I support anarchy," is the same as saying, "I support the rights of individuals to engage in acts of non-objective justice,"

 

But isn't "objective justice" simply a floating abstraction? Is there any example of such justice anywhere in human history?

English Common Laws built up over centuries of prior judicial decisions.  The kind of decisions that held sway indicate or where reflective of an underlying ethical understanding of how people should interact in a community.  The decisions that subsequent judges agreed with held by stare decisis.  Other decisions were over ruled in subsequent cases.

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