Pseudo-libertarianism (was: Capitalism and those who decry it)
Steve Gustafson
Steve Gustafson sic ait:
SG>What this belief fails to take into account is that the boss owns
>nothing but what the government says he owns and allows him to own.
James F. Hranicky hoc responsum refert:
JFH>?? What does this mean. The proper government cannot take away
>property you have legally earned. The government does not "allow" you
>to keep your property, it prevents someone else from stealing it. Two
>totally different things, invalidating your next statement.
You may have missed the posts I had made a while before; at any rate,
"property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and there is no
law without government. Therefore, government invented the very notion
of "property," government defines it, and government sets its limits.
SG>It's the boss who wants something for nothing if he wants
>the benefits of government without being subject to the burdens that go
>with them.
JFH>To a certain extent this is true, but you have to demonstrate that bosses
>won't pay any taxes. This is a another subject entirely.
Another example of pseud-lib logic tying its knickers in a knot.
If you concede the validity of at least some taxes;
--- but, you also believe that laws like anti-discrimination laws
somehow "take" from the bosses that are subject to them, by
forcing them to keep workers they would rather fire for
discriminatory reasons,
then why can't those laws be sustained as "taxes," then? The burden of
such "taxes" seems to me to be far lighter than a tax the boss actually
has to cough up cash to pay. The boss still gets the work he pays for
from the worker he would otherwise fire. All he has lost is his alleged
"right" to discriminate. This strikes me as a small price to pay for
the privilege of living in a tolerant society.
[This assumes that the boss has not somehow offended the worker he wants
to fire for discriminatory reasons by his machinations. Knowing human
irrationality, it is conceivable that the worker might start to shirk
under those circumstances. This may be a hidden cost of
anti-discrimination laws --- but even so, it's just one more "tax" that
the boss must endure if he must act in such an asinine way.]
SG>Liberty is the absence of people having effective power over you to tell
>you what to think or do. From my perspective, it makes no difference
>whether your boss got his power from political or economic means.
JFH>The most a boss can do is fire you. He cannot arrest you, violate your
>property rights, or affect you in any way once you do not work for him
>anymore.
JFH>What you want is for everyone to have everything their way always. Can't
>happen.
Not "always." Only in certain areas --- like, for example, freedom of
speech and religion. Here, it seems to me that you have no freedom if
you are subject to penalties for choosing the wrong one --- however
those penalties are exacted.
Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has been a leading
light in the economic analysis of Constitutional freedoms. He has
arrived at almost the exact opposite conclusion that you have. His
notion is basically, a law is unconstitutional if it makes the exercise
of your Constitutional right more costly. Sunday closing laws are the
canonical example. If the law requires you to close your business on
Sundays, but your religion requires you not to work on Saturdays, the
law has penalized you for adhering to this religious belief by mandating
a Sunday Sabbath; and is therefore wrong.
Of course, not all Constitutional freedoms are even -now- enforceable
against employers. But the same principle applies generally. A law
preventing religious discrimination in employment creates more freedom
than it takes away.
---
. OLX 2.2 . steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com hanc litteras scripsit.
Jim Kalb
>You [Mr. Hranicky] may have missed the posts I had made a while before;
I certainly did; I've been away from t.p.t for a while and don't read
a.p.l. If what follows deals with issues that have grown old and cold,
ignore it.
>at any rate, "property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and
>there is no law without government. Therefore, government invented the
>very notion of "property," government defines it, and government sets
>its limits.
and that obligation is a notion invented and defined by government, or
is there something special about obligations regarding property?
>Judge Posner['s] notion is basically, a law is unconstitutional if it
>makes the exercise of your Constitutional right more costly. Sunday
>closing laws are the canonical example. If the law requires you to
>close your business on Sundays, but your religion requires you not to
>work on Saturdays, the law has penalized you for adhering to this
>religious belief by mandating a Sunday Sabbath; and is therefore wrong.
Suppose Sunday is the only day of the week most people are off work, so
people would do a lot of shopping on Sunday if they had a chance, and
that most shopkeepers have a religious obligation to close on Sunday,
but doing so is very costly to them if competing shops remain open.
Then mandating Sunday closing would make it far less expensive for most
shopkeepers to comply with their religious beliefs without laying a
comparable additional cost on anyone who also had to close on Saturday,
since (by hypothesis) for most customers Saturday would be just one
ordinary working day out of six. Also, what does Posner think should
happen if in a particular locality with two-day weekends 60% of all
shopkeepers are religiously required to close on Sunday but would have
rather serious problems if they did so while others did not, and 1% are
religiously required to close on Saturday and would have *very* serious
problems if they were also required to close on Sunday?
>Of course, not all Constitutional freedoms are even -now- enforceable
>against employers. But the same principle applies generally. A law
>preventing religious discrimination in employment creates more freedom
>than it takes away.
(as Posner says) Sunday closings burden people who can't work Saturdays
for religious reasons?
Also, I'm not sure why antidiscrimination laws increase freedom. As it
is now, the only kind of working situation most people can choose is one
in which the employer and work environment maintain a sort of
religiously neutrality. If there were no laws against religious
discrimination then many businesses would still organize themselves in
that manner, and such businesses would have an advantage competing with
other businesses for employess who liked that kind of environment. On
the other hand, if people wanted to set up Born Again Baptist Bakeries,
Inc., committed to integrating making a living with a certain sort of
Christian life, they could do that as well, and prospective employees
could decide whether that or a more neutral situation was what they
wanted.
--
Jim Kalb (j...@panix.com) "Who lives without folly is not so wise
as he thinks." (La Rochefoucauld)
James F. Hranicky
>JFH>?? What does this mean. The proper government cannot take away
> >property you have legally earned. The government does not "allow" you
> >to keep your property, it prevents someone else from stealing it. Two
> >totally different things, invalidating your next statement.
>
>You may have missed the posts I had made a while before; at any rate,
>"property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and there is no
>law without government.
Wrong again. Eventually, governments came about to enforce property
rights. They did not create them. In some limited cases, there may be
respect for rights without government, but I wouldn't try and run a
society without one.
Rights stem from your right to life and life-sustaining action. Private
property is necessary for both.
>Therefore, government invented the very notion
>of "property," government defines it, and government sets its limits.
The government's setting of limits does not make it right.
>JFH>To a certain extent this is true, but you have to demonstrate that bosses
> >won't pay any taxes. This is a another subject entirely.
>
>Another example of pseud-lib logic tying its knickers in a knot.
Thanks.
>If you concede the validity of at least some taxes;
>
>--- but, you also believe that laws like anti-discrimination laws
> somehow "take" from the bosses that are subject to them, by
> forcing them to keep workers they would rather fire for
> discriminatory reasons,
Eventually, I would like to see taxes voluntary. Like I said, that is
beside the point. The government's only proper role is still protecting
private property rights.
>then why can't those laws be sustained as "taxes," then? The burden of
>such "taxes" seems to me to be far lighter than a tax the boss actually
>has to cough up cash to pay. The boss still gets the work he pays for
>from the worker he would otherwise fire. All he has lost is his alleged
>"right" to discriminate. This strikes me as a small price to pay for
>the privilege of living in a tolerant society.
Advocationg the initiation of force is a self-destructive philosophy
eventually. The gun will be eventuallu aimed at your head when you
try to discriminate against a neo-nazi.
Regulations are not taxes, sorry.
Going the other way, the employee should not be able to quit unless
the boss says so. This is your logic. If not, you are being hypocritical.
Why are you not tolerant of the employer's views?
>JFH>What you want is for everyone to have everything their way always. Can't
> >happen.
>Not "always." Only in certain areas --- like, for example, freedom of
>speech and religion. Here, it seems to me that you have no freedom if
>you are subject to penalties for choosing the wrong one --- however
>those penalties are exacted.
Freedom of expression does not entail others' obligation to agree
or associate with you.
>Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has been a leading
>light in the economic analysis of Constitutional freedoms. He has
>arrived at almost the exact opposite conclusion that you have.
Who cares?
>His
>notion is basically, a law is unconstitutional if it makes the exercise
>of your Constitutional right more costly. Sunday closing laws are the
>canonical example. If the law requires you to close your business on
>Sundays, but your religion requires you not to work on Saturdays, the
>law has penalized you for adhering to this religious belief by mandating
>a Sunday Sabbath; and is therefore wrong.
The law is wrong because it prevents you from using your property
peacefully, and is a violation of your individual rights.
>Of course, not all Constitutional freedoms are even -now- enforceable
>against employers. But the same principle applies generally. A law
>preventing religious discrimination in employment creates more freedom
>than it takes away.
False.
I do not base my political views on "maximizing social happiness." To
advocate the initiation of force is wrong.
To say that property rights are not absolute, and should be regulated
by the whoever is in the government, is to advocate that your views
should be imposed on others, to "maximize utility or happiness."
What happens when you aren't in the majority voting people into office?
You set yourself up to being regulated by the like of the employer
you don't like, when his views are in the majority.
I've said it before. When the gun is pointed at your head, you stand
accused by your own philosophy, and remember: you asked for it.
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
Gordon Fitch
a relatively small group of people with a uniform culture and
a rather strong regard for tradition; the individuals them-
selves could enforce it. Serious problems arise when the
community grows rather large, because different people have
different ideas about property. The same is true when
different cultures collide. A well-known example is the
conflict between the American Indians and the European
colonists, who had very different ideas about real estate.
The Europeans themselves went through a similar set of
problems between the time the Roman empire fell and the
establishment of modern states; at one point, there were
four systems of law operating simultaneously over the
same territory in what is now France. The Europeans solved
the problem by transferring the definition of property
entirely into the legal system, and more or less unifying
it. I think we have to account ourselves heirs of that
solution; that is, our idea of property is bound up with
an idea of law (in the sense of precise, written texts,
not customs or gestures) and of government (that is, a
public agency with a monopoly on violence and a claim
of sovereignty over territory). Alternative systems of
property would be rather fuzzy, something many people
(especially those who own a lot of stuff) would probably
find disquieting.
--
)*( Gordon Fitch )*( g...@panix.com )*(
Gordon Fitch
| ...
| Also, I'm not sure why antidiscrimination laws increase freedom. As it
| is now, the only kind of working situation most people can choose is one
| in which the employer and work environment maintain a sort of
| religiously neutrality. If there were no laws against religious
| discrimination then many businesses would still organize themselves in
| that manner, and such businesses would have an advantage competing with
| other businesses for employess who liked that kind of environment. On
| the other hand, if people wanted to set up Born Again Baptist Bakeries,
| Inc., committed to integrating making a living with a certain sort of
| Christian life, they could do that as well, and prospective employees
| could decide whether that or a more neutral situation was what they
| wanted.
Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
counterweight to the more rational forces militating
against it. The most outstanding examples I can think of
are discrimination against Jews and discrimination against
persons of African descent, although there are others. The
problem is that a free market distributes utility, and the
utility experienced by a strongly bigoted minority is
distributed into the remainder of the community. Since
the community may regard discrimination as socially dele-
terious -- there is considerable reason for doing so --
they can construe the exercise of bigotry as an attack on
everyone, and its suppression as an act of common defense,
thus remaining good (classical) liberals.
J.J. Kuslich
>
>Steve Gustafson sic ait:
>
>SG>What this belief fails to take into account is that the boss owns
> >nothing but what the government says he owns and allows him to own.
>
>James F. Hranicky hoc responsum refert:
>
>JFH>?? What does this mean. The proper government cannot take away
> >property you have legally earned. The government does not "allow" you
> >to keep your property, it prevents someone else from stealing it. Two
> >totally different things, invalidating your next statement.
>
>You may have missed the posts I had made a while before; at any rate,
>"property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law;
I don't think so. Let's imagine an island with two people on it.
You are one and Bob is the other. You two mutually decide that coconut
tree A is yours and coconut tree B is Bobs. Good - you have property and
he has property. No government yet, but the concept of property is
perfectly clear and acceptable.
Now, let's say a month later, Bob has killed his tree - B - by
constantly urinating on it. So, he decides to chop down yours just because
he wants to. But you see him going to do it, and you try to stop him.
Neither of you is willing to give up your positions on the state of the
tree, those being:
You: The tree is yours and you don't want it chopped down.
Bob: The tree must be chopped down, even though it is your
property.
HERE is where a government would be *useful*. Here, a government
could protect your property rights against Bob's irrational axe. Such a
government has not made property meaningful, defined property, or anything
of the sort. It simply will protect your right and define HOW to protect
your rights.
>and there is no
>law without government.
Now, this is probably true. Laws are a governmental concept and
are used to determine what a government can and cannot do.
>Therefore, government invented the very notion
>of "property," government defines it, and government sets its limits.
No. See above.
>
>SG>It's the boss who wants something for nothing if he wants
> >the benefits of government without being subject to the burdens that go
> >with them.
>
>JFH>To a certain extent this is true, but you have to demonstrate that bosses
> >won't pay any taxes. This is a another subject entirely.
>
>Another example of pseud-lib logic tying its knickers in a knot.
Ad hominum nonsensium.
>
>If you concede the validity of at least some taxes;
>
>--- but, you also believe that laws like anti-discrimination laws
> somehow "take" from the bosses that are subject to them, by
> forcing them to keep workers they would rather fire for
> discriminatory reasons,
>
>then why can't those laws be sustained as "taxes," then? The burden of
>such "taxes" seems to me to be far lighter than a tax the boss actually
>has to cough up cash to pay. The boss still gets the work he pays for
>from the worker he would otherwise fire. All he has lost is his alleged
>"right" to discriminate. This strikes me as a small price to pay for
>the privilege of living in a tolerant society.
What are you talking about here? You talk about a tax, but claim
he (the boss) doesn't have to "cough up cash to pay" it. Huh? Is it a tax
or isn't it? Even if it is, that too is violating the boss's property
right. Why should the boss pay a tax? Clarify.
>
>[This assumes that the boss has not somehow offended the worker he wants
>to fire for discriminatory reasons by his machinations. Knowing human
>irrationality, it is conceivable that the worker might start to shirk
>under those circumstances. This may be a hidden cost of
>anti-discrimination laws --- but even so, it's just one more "tax" that
>the boss must endure if he must act in such an asinine way.]
Anti-discrimination laws are a clear violation of property rights.
Your talk about taxes is very vague and only indicates your lack of respect
for rights.
>
>SG>Liberty is the absence of people having effective power over you to tell
> >you what to think or do. From my perspective, it makes no difference
> >whether your boss got his power from political or economic means.
>
>JFH>The most a boss can do is fire you. He cannot arrest you, violate your
> >property rights, or affect you in any way once you do not work for him
> >anymore.
>
>JFH>What you want is for everyone to have everything their way always. Can't
> >happen.
>
>Not "always." Only in certain areas --- like, for example, freedom of
>speech and religion.
Freedom of speech and religion refer to what the GOVERNMENT can do
in those areas. Basically, the government cannot interfere in any way
*directly* with someone's expression of ideas (i.e. speech) or their
religion. So the government cannot make laws to dictate policy (e.g.
political correctness, Catholocism, etc.) in these areas. However, this
says NOTHING about how individuals will deal with speech and religion among
themselves. If a Catholic church doesn't want to let any Hindu's in (for
whatever reason) they don't have to! Freedom of religion here has no
application.
>Here, it seems to me that you have no freedom if
>you are subject to penalties for choosing the wrong one --- however
>those penalties are exacted.
Penalties applied by whom? If the government is applying penalties
because you're not a Christian, you are correct. If an employer decides
not to hire you because you are not a Christian, while that is irrational
on his part, it is HIS business and HIS property and he does not have to
respect your religious beliefs. You have no claim on him, meaning you have
no right to the job he is offering, so he can refuse to employ you at any
time and for any reason.
>
>Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has been a leading
>light in the economic analysis of Constitutional freedoms. He has
>arrived at almost the exact opposite conclusion that you have. His
>notion is basically, a law is unconstitutional if it makes the exercise
>of your Constitutional right more costly. Sunday closing laws are the
>canonical example. If the law requires you to close your business on
>Sundays, but your religion requires you not to work on Saturdays, the
>law has penalized you for adhering to this religious belief by mandating
>a Sunday Sabbath; and is therefore wrong.
Sunday closing laws are unconstitutinal because they violate the
property rights of a business owner who may run his business as he sees
fit. He has earned that right by working to earn that business (i.e.
paying for it). If the judge above really ruled that such laws were
unconstitutional because they violate "freedom of religion" god help this
great country! (so to speak) Such laws are only violations of property
rights. Other explainations (like the one above) seem rather contrived to
me.
>
>Of course, not all Constitutional freedoms are even -now- enforceable
>against employers.
They aren't enforceable against employers at all! What are you
talking about?!? The government does not exist to tell the people what to
do, people tell the government what it can and cannot do. *THAT* is what
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is talking about. Not what people
are allowed to do, but what the government is allowed to do. Get it right.
>But the same principle applies generally. A law
>preventing religious discrimination in employment creates more freedom
>than it takes away.
This is like saying "killing all AIDS infected patients may cause
alot of deaths, but in the long run it will save many lives of those who
may contract it in the future." I doubt you would agree with this policy,
yet you agree with the same principle when it comes to private property.
Your standard for deciding when to violate property rights is ambiguous and
sounds rather utilitarian - and I'm being nice by limiting myself to those
terms.
J>J>K>
==========================================================================
Right to the heart of the matter, right to the beautiful part.
Illusions are painfully shattered, right where discovery starts.
-- RUSH, "Emotion Detector"
==========================================================================
Jim Kalb
>You could have a property system maintained by custom among
>a relatively small group of people with a uniform culture and
>a rather strong regard for tradition; the individuals them-
>selves could enforce it. Serious problems arise when the
>community grows rather large, because different people have
>different ideas about property. The same is true when
>different cultures collide. A well-known example is the
>conflict between the American Indians and the European
>colonists, who had very different ideas about real estate.
property differed not only for reasons specific to the particular
cultures involved, but also because of differences in levels of
technology and other things that tend to be communicated from one
society to another when the societies are in constant contact. The
importance of the latter sort of factor appears from the current
tendency for notions of property to become more similar internationally
(consider the recent collapse of commmunism).
>The Europeans solved
>the problem by transferring the definition of property
>entirely into the legal system, and more or less unifying
>it. I think we have to account ourselves heirs of that
>solution; that is, our idea of property is bound up with
>an idea of law (in the sense of precise, written texts,
>not customs or gestures) and of government (that is, a
>public agency with a monopoly on violence and a claim
>of sovereignty over territory).
of property was determined mostly by the courts, who viewed themselves
as applying customary understandings to particular cases. A similar
process in antiquity had led to the development of the Roman code of
civil law, which the continental countries eventually adopted wholesale.
One final thing: international definitions of property are sufficiently
consistent and reliable, even in the absence of world government, to
permit international trade and investment on a very large scale.
(I should say that I too view Anarchocapitalism as unrealistic. I am
prejudiced in favor of views that treat social practices and
understandings as prior to government, though.)
Jim Kalb
>Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
>much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
>or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
>counterweight to the more rational forces militating
>against it.
account in employment decisions, then there are often rational forces
favoring it. For example:
1. Institutional purpose. My "Born-Again Baptist Bakery, Inc.",
dedicated to the integration of the born-again Baptist way of life with
making a living, could rationally discriminate against everyone who
isn't a born-again Baptist. "Old-Stock Rural Southern White Guy Auto
Body, Inc.", dedicated to fixing cars in a working environment rednecks
find congenial, could rationally discriminate against everyone who
didn't fit the profile.
Liberalism appears dedicated to the elimination from political life of
any notion of a common good or common way of life other than the
satisfaction of the desires each of us happens to have as an individual
and social arrangements rationally designed to bring about such
satisfaction. The point of my examples is that antidiscrimination law
goes the next step and attempts to eliminate from the institutions and
processes whereby we make a living any notion of a common good or way of
life other than making money. If Born-Again Baptist Bakery, Inc. should
be treated as an illegal enterprise, then why should Ben and Jerry's be
any different? Both select employees based in part on what the employee
thinks is most important in life rather than based strictly on
qualifications relating to economic function, and so both select
employees based on personal characteristics that prospective employees
can't be expected to change and that don't relate to the efficient
functioning of the business. (I am assuming that Ben and Jerry's
prefers to hire people who agree with their corporate philosophy and so
would take the fact that people are Objectivists, for example, into
account in deciding whether to hire them.)
2. Institutional Efficiency. The need to manage diversity is not
necessarily a blessing. You have mentioned that American Indians and
Europeans tend to have different notions regarding property. No doubt
they also tend to have different notions relating to a great many other
things relevant to economic cooperation (e.g., the degree to which
authority should be shared in a common enterprise; the situations and
degree to which functional or personal considerations should take
precedence when they conflict; the requirements of a comfortable working
environment; what actions are respectful or insulting). If that's the
case, it seems likely that it would be easier for a business to achieve
smooth and efficient cooperation if it preferentially hired either
American Indians or Europeans than if it hired a random mix in a
locality in which there were substantial numbers of both.
I would suggest that anyone interested in these issues read _Forbidden
Grounds_, by Richard Epstein.
Gordon Fitch
| >Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
| >much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
| >or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
| >counterweight to the more rational forces militating
| >against it.
j...@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
| If "bigotry" includes all instances of taking race, sex or religion into
| account in employment decisions, then there are often rational forces
| favoring it. ...
By "rational" I meant the usual forces given by (classical)
liberals (libertarians) as tending to eliminate bigotry
without government or other public intervention -- for example,
the higher wages one must pay or lower employee effectiveness
one must get, presumably, if one hires on racial grounds
rather than "merit." Of course, I regard their view as
simplistic, but it does need some answering. The distribution
of bigotry through the market is part of the answer, and the
material utility of bigotry, which you start to go into, is
another.
The persistence of bigotry, prejudice, racism, nationalism,
and so forth, strongly indicates that it serves some kind of
important purpose, possibly a biological one, and if we fear
its destructive effects, and want to eliminate or at least
control it, it would behoove us to understand it. But try
to tell a Net libertarian that, and you'll be told it doesn't
matter because the free market will make it go away; all
that is necessary is to eliminate or weaken the government.
Gordon Fitch
| consistent and reliable, even in the absence of world government, to
| permit international trade and investment on a very large scale.
I would argue that we do have a world government, but that
it is not overt. Its covertness has certain advantages; for
instance, an overt government claiming sovereignty and a
monopoly on violence would have to intervene in Bosnia and
Somalia, where there is nothing of interest to those who
matter; but as things stand, interventions can be carried out
only when the cost-benefit balance is favorable, e.g. Iraq.
Too, demagogs can fulminate about the flag and the homeland
before the folk, while their agents make good deals with
Great Satans elsewhere on the sly.
To some extent, though, I am arguing tautologically, because
I believe that the ability to trade and invest freely across
national boundaries is evidence of the world government, if
not the world government itself.
James F. Hranicky
>control it, it would behoove us to understand it. But try
>to tell a Net libertarian that, and you'll be told it doesn't
>matter because the free market will make it go away; all
>that is necessary is to eliminate or weaken the government.
Check out Thomas Sowell's works on race in America. I believe he is a
black conservative, but he basically says the same thing, and he is
generally very thorough in providing empirical evidence.
After all, how long can you continue to hate the person who sells the
best food (cars, furniture, etc..) because of his race?
There will always be stupid racists, but the market is a voluntary place.
If you want something from someone who could deny it from you for any
reason, you're going to have to at least treat them decently, if you
don't like them.
"The market" shouldn't be construed as a panacea. It never will be.
However, incentives to treat people well exist in the market much more
than any other system (look at ours...how's that racial issue?). If you
want something from someone, you first have to show that you are
trustworthy, or they will leave.
At worst, the market will dictate that those who can't stand each other
must leave each other alone.
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
Gordon Fitch
| >[ discrimination ] ... [To]
| >to tell a Net libertarian that, and you'll be told it doesn't
| >matter because the free market will make it go away; all
| >that is necessary is to eliminate or weaken the government.
j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
| Check out Thomas Sowell's works on race in America. I believe he is a
| black conservative, but he basically says the same thing, and he is
| generally very thorough in providing empirical evidence.
I read an article in which he cooked his evidence, and
since then I haven't trusted him. He's a polemicist first
and foremost. Not that this makes him worse than most
other columnists, but a grain or two of salt is required.
| After all, how long can you continue to hate the person who sells the
| best food (cars, furniture, etc..) because of his race? ...
Indefinitely, apparently. People seem to derive a
remarkable amount of utility out of bigotry and related
practices. That's why I think it ought to be looked
into analytically. One may, out of principle, believe
that government intervention is not the way to handle
the problem, but denying that the problem exists or will
just go away by itself is not the way to handle the
problem either. There have been more or less anarchistic
approaches to breaking down racial barriers, like the
Montgomery bus boycott started by Mrs. Rosa Lee Parks,
who chose to sit in the front of the bus, or the
Greensboro sit-ins. I welcome suggestions along these
lines by libertarians and anarchists, especially when
they come from the experience of putting one's body on
the line.
By the way, "hate" isn't the issue. I've met dozens
of racists who just loved the nigras. The good ones,
that is. We're talking about theories of superiority
or preference based on ancestry, religion, sex,
language, appearance, and the like, and the practices
which follow from such theories.
Jim Kalb
>By "rational" I meant the usual forces given by (classical)
>liberals (libertarians) as tending to eliminate bigotry
>without government or other public intervention -- for example,
>the higher wages one must pay or lower employee effectiveness
>one must get, presumably, if one hires on racial grounds
>rather than "merit."
the relation between free markets and racial or similar discrimination
read Richard Epstein's _Forbidden Grounds_. Epstein uses economic
analysis very skillfully to show why in many situations discrimination
promotes overall well-being. My comments on efficiency were based on
his discussion.
Jim Kalb
>I believe that the ability to trade and invest freely across
>national boundaries is evidence of the world government, if
>not the world government itself.
on a concrete state of affairs (e.g., Mediaeval Iceland) that you would
both approve? They might find the state of affairs politically correct
because it lacks what they call "government", while you might accept it
as workable because it would evolve certain devices to maintain order
that you would be inclined to call by that name.
James A. Donald
arbitrary fiat of the omnipotent state.
In <22s7m4$l...@panix.com>, g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) wrote:
> You could have a property system maintained by custom among
> a relatively small group of people with a uniform culture and
> a rather strong regard for tradition;
> The Europeans solved
> the problem by transferring the definition of property
> entirely into the legal system, and more or less unifying
> it.
> of government (that is, a
> public agency with a monopoly on violence and a claim
> of sovereignty over territory).
Your history is wrong.
Your description is clearly false in the middle ages, since
private property in land and goods was well established at
a time when the idea of a monopoly of force was generally
regarded as an outrageous atheistic totalitarian measure.
On the American frontier private property existed before
the state turned up. In the settlement of Australia
private property rights on land came into existence, (based
on either buying land from the natives or killing them)
despite the active opposition of the government, which
refused to recognize the squatters rights to the interior
for a considerable time.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| We have the right to defend ourselves and our
James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we
| are. True law derives from this right, not from
jame...@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
Gordon Fitch
| Gordon Fitch claims property rights derive from the
| arbitrary fiat of the omnipotent state.
On the contrary, I claim no such thing. In fact, the
quotation immediately below contradicts your assertion.
g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) wrote:
| > You could have a property system maintained by custom among
| > a relatively small group of people with a uniform culture and
| > a rather strong regard for tradition;
|
| > The Europeans solved
| > the problem by transferring the definition of property
| > entirely into the legal system, and more or less unifying
| > it.
|
| > of government (that is, a
| > public agency with a monopoly on violence and a claim
| > of sovereignty over territory).
jad:
| Your history is wrong.
|
| Your description is clearly false in the middle ages, since
| private property in land and goods was well established at
| a time when the idea of a monopoly of force was generally
| regarded as an outrageous atheistic totalitarian measure.
As I think I said: from the fall of the Roman Empire in
the west until the late middle ages, there was a great
deal of difficulty about property, including multiple
legal systems and, to be blunt, lots of plain thuggery.
I would not agree that private property in land and
goods was "well established", although some may have
subscribed to the theory.
jad:
| On the American frontier private property existed before
| the state turned up.
When was this? The Lousisana Purchase (1802?) extended
the territory of the United States to the Great Divide,
and the Mexican Cession (1845) to the Pacific Coast.
Prior to the Mexican Cession, the Mexican government
(and before it, the Spanish Crown) exerted state power
over those territories. Possibly you may refer to the
territories under control of the Indians?
The state may not have been staffed, but it was there
in theory, and the participants generally seem to have
recognized it.
jad:
| In the settlement of Australia
| private property rights on land came into existence, (based
| on either buying land from the natives or killing them)
| despite the active opposition of the government, which
| refused to recognize the squatters rights to the interior
| for a considerable time.
Yes, and one of the factors motivating the American
Revolution was the desire to get over the Alleghany
Mountains against the wishes of the British government,
which had made deals with Indians restricting further
colonization. But this was a quarrel within a state.
How long did the Australian settlers refuse to
recognize the utility of the government in
establishing their property rights?
Ken Arromdee
>There will always be stupid racists, but the market is a voluntary place.
>If you want something from someone who could deny it from you for any
>reason, you're going to have to at least treat them decently, if you
>don't like them.
Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
--
"On the first day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Leftover Turkey!
On the second day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Turkey Casserole
that she made from Leftover Turkey.
[days 3-4 deleted] ... Flaming Turkey Wings! ...
-- Pizza Hut commercial (and M*tlu/A*gic bait)
Ken Arromdee (arro...@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu)
david rolfe graeber
on this point you might want to consider the work of
Karl Polyani on the rise of a capitalist market system in
England ("The Great Transformation"). He makes it perfectly clear
that, there as in other places, what some call "the free market"
did not spring up spontaneously but was consciously created by
government policy, backed up by the massive use of brutal coercive
force. Private property in land was created by the state's policy
of backing up "enclosures" of what had been village common lands,
throwing millions of peasants off their lands into vagabondage -
vagabondage being then made an offense punishable by death. Thus
was a landless working class created who the enclosers could
hire...
Let's face it: the "free market" has always operated
within a space opened up by, and ultimately guaranteed by, the
violence of the state. It's no different internationally today.
BTW, on an earlier topic from this thread:
Jim Kalb (I think it was) was arguing that if colonists and
American Indians had different ideas about property, it was largely
because they were on different levels of technological development,
and cited "the recent collapse of communism" as evidence that as
we advance, our definitions tend to converge (on absolute individual
private property, presumably). In fact, there is absolutely no
historical/ethnological evidence to back up any evolutionary model
like this. It's just not true.
Among American Indians themselves there were wildly varying
types of property regime: the Yurok of California for example had a
very extreme system of individual private property - just about
everything was owned by someone, and could be bought or sold for
shell money. And they were hunter/gatherers, who on any scheme of
technological evolution would be considered totally primitive. (In
fact the part of the world with the oldest and most widespread
traditions of private property is probably New Guinea). Other American
Indian groups had very little in the way of individual property:
perhaps just a few personal possessions, and the rest was owned
collectively, or rights in it were doled out in various complicated
ways to different people.
If you really look at the historical evidence what comes out
is that there's a million different ways to work it - what "property"
even means, and what sort of things can be "property", varies hugely
from culture to culture. There are some societies where the most
important forms of property are songs or stories, or the right to
wear a certain mask at a certain festival. Very often there is no
distinction made between what we'd call "property" and "offices", so
that for instance anyone who could make off with the crown jewels
would by so doing become king. There are systems in which different
parts of a person's body can own property separate from each other:
as with the Kwakiutl (another non-agricultural Native American people)
where a man's arm might receive a chiefly title different from that
of the rest of him, and own property in its own right.
There's just no overall evolutionary pattern. The rise of
states usually means _less_ individual property, not more, since
almost always its said that everything ultimately belongs to the king
(a notion still enshrined in watered-down form in our eminent domain).
But even then, cultures vary: Islamic kingdoms tended to have widespread
state ownership of land; Imperial China on the other hand went for
private possession. Finally, as for your "recent collapse of
communism" - well, apart from the fact that the issue of property is
still being hotly contested in most of Eastern Europe and whatever
the result is, it probably won't look exactly like what we have here -
might I remind you that the _rise_ of Leninist regimes began only
seventy-odd years ago, that they were clearly tangled up in the shock
of technological change that was occurring at the time, and that they
involved massive changes in property regime that went in the exact
opposite direction as you were claiming modern societies tend to go.
In China collectivization was introduced in a society that had been
used to private property in land for thousands of years! It's been
partially effaced now, but this only underlines the point that things
go back and forth.
Sorry 'bout the little reality check, there. Now go on
with your arguments...
DG
Michael Feathers
>The persistence of bigotry, prejudice, racism, nationalism,
>and so forth, strongly indicates that it serves some kind of
>important purpose, possibly a biological one, and if we fear
>its destructive effects, and want to eliminate or at least
>control it, it would behoove us to understand it. But try
>to tell a Net libertarian that, and you'll be told it doesn't
>matter because the free market will make it go away; all
>that is necessary is to eliminate or weaken the government.
You (and some libertarians) are forgetting one of the cardinal maxims of
libertarianism: `There is no Utopia.'
I'm a libertarian and I'll concede that bigotry, racism, nationalism (and
all other in/out group classifications) have some sort of purpose and a
free market may not take care of it. But I feel that most remedies actually
contribute to the problem.
If you ever get a chance, read about Gestalt psychology. The pioneers of
that school hypothesized that everyone divides the world into the "things/
people that are like me" and the "things/people that are not like me."
Most everyone likes to align themselves with some group and will not see
similarity in themselves to another group which they dislike. It is a
natural human reaction. Even the groups which seek to embrace everyone
like most in the liberal movement, must see themselves as a group in
opposition to the people who disagree with their philosophy of embracement.
It seems kind of contradictory, but that should underscore how fundamental
this tendency is.
Naturally, such obvious differences as skin color and nationality may
easily trigger the us/them thinking in many people automatically. It is
for this reason that I think that though we may make advances on some
forms of prejudice, it will always be with us in one form or another.
If we eliminate racism, we'll have to deal with blondism and brunetteism.
Personally, I find organized labor's tendencies toward nationalism
disquieting. You see that little commmercial by some textile union in
which the girl asks her mother "Why did Daddy lose his job" and she replies
"because some people don't buy American, dear." That is appalling!
I'd say "because kids in other countries have to eat too, dear. And, if
they can make a shirt better and cheaper than we can then they -deserve-
the money for it."
One of these days, that sort of nationalism will be considered as filthy as
racism.
Jim Kalb
>Private property in land was created by the state's policy
>of backing up "enclosures" of what had been village common lands,
>throwing millions of peasants off their lands into vagabondage -
>vagabondage being then made an offense punishable by death. Thus
>was a landless working class created who the enclosers could
>hire...
land was not village common land, that the main problem in creating a
free market in land was making land held under one of the feudal tenures
freely alienable, and that that problem was dealt with by various
technical legal means such as collusive lawsuits. A reference to the
statute making vagabondage an offense punishable by death would also be
helpful. I had thought the basic scheme under the Elizabethan poor laws
was to make the parish of origin responsible for poor relief and so to
send vagrants back home rather than to execute them.
> Among American Indians themselves there were wildly varying
I don't doubt it. Do regimes vary as wildly today? If not why not?
>Finally, as for your "recent collapse of communism" - well, apart from
>the fact that the issue of property is still being hotly contested in
>most of Eastern Europe and whatever the result is, it probably won't
>look exactly like what we have here - might I remind you that the _rise_
>of Leninist regimes began only seventy-odd years ago, that they were
>clearly tangled up in the shock of technological change that was
>occurring at the time, and that they involved massive changes in
>property regime that went in the exact opposite direction as you were
>claiming modern societies tend to go. In China collectivization was
>introduced in a society that had been used to private property in land
>for thousands of years!
Leninist regimes as a history of an attempt to defy in the name of
Marxism the Marxist theory that property relationships are determined by
the needs of the productive process at a particular level of technology.
The attempt failed and is being abandoned, which tends to confirm
fundamental Marxist theory on this point (at least in the case of modern
societies, in which economic life has achieved a considerable degree of
autonomy) even as it refutes the practical proposals of Marxist
political parties.
Mr. Grinch
:You may have missed the posts I had made a while before; at any rate,
:"property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and there is no
:law without government. Therefore, government invented the very notion
:of "property," government defines it, and government sets its limits.
Nonsense. "property" in the sense of territory is not only antecedent
to governmnet, it is about a billion years antecedent to man.
Mr. Grinch
Mark O. Wilson
|Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
|much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
|or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
|counterweight to the more rational forces militating
|against it. The most outstanding examples I can think of
|are discrimination against Jews and discrimination against
|persons of African descent, although there are others. The
|problem is that a free market distributes utility, and the
|utility experienced by a strongly bigoted minority is
|distributed into the remainder of the community. Since
If this were true, how come laws had to be passed in order to
force people to discriminate.
--
Mob rule isn't any prettier merely because the mob calls itself a government
It ain't charity if you are using someone else's money.
Wilson's theory of relativity: If you go back far enough, we're all related.
Mark....@AtlantaGA.NCR.com
D. J. Pajerek
>In <22s8at$m...@panix.com> g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>
>|Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
>|much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
>|or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
>|counterweight to the more rational forces militating
>|against it.
>
>force people to discriminate.
>
The laws that were passed were intended to encourage and/or force
discrimination other than that which would otherwise occur. It's
been demonstrated fairly clearly that, in the absence of so-called
'equal opportunity' or 'affirmative action' laws, discrimination
would still take place, the difference being, who is the beneficiary
of the discrimination.
Don Pajerek
Standard disclaimers apply.
david rolfe graeber
In article <22vboo$k...@panix.com> j...@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>gr...@kimbark.uchicago.edu (david rolfe graeber) writes:
>
>>of backing up "enclosures" of what had been village common lands,
>>throwing millions of peasants off their lands into vagabondage -
>>vagabondage being then made an offense punishable by death. Thus
>>was a landless working class created who the enclosers could
>>hire...
>
>land was not village common land, that the main problem in creating a
>free market in land was making land held under one of the feudal tenures
>freely alienable, and that that problem was dealt with by various
>technical legal means such as collusive lawsuits.
There was a dual process. While you are right that most land
(particularly wheatfields etc) was not part of the commons per se, it was
subject to communal restrictions - ie, you couldn't fence or hedge it
in but had to allow members of the commons to graze their flocks on
the stubble, etc etc. "Property" after all is basically a bundle of
rights of access and exclusion which can be invested in different people
and corporate bodies. Enclosure tended to concentrate all of them in
the hands of a single owner: thus if one enclosed one's own land, one
was able to deny other members of the community any access to it; it also
usually allowed one to sell it to people outside the community, which
one often was not allowed to do before.
However, while most _land_ was not primarily communal, most
_people_ relied a great deal on communal rights in land, particularly
the poor. Hence the creation of sheep-walks for commercial wool
production on what used to be communal grazing lands often meant that
whole villages were uprooted and their inhabitants driven away -
something which could hardly have been accomplished without the use
of force.
The main point I was trying to make was that you can't separate
property rights and class relations; that the creation of a "free
market" was also the creation of a landless, impoverished, helpless
class of people who could be forced into working for the people who
got the property, and that "force" meant exactly that
A reference to the
>statute making vagabondage an offense punishable by death would also be
>helpful. I had thought the basic scheme under the Elizabethan poor laws
>was to make the parish of origin responsible for poor relief and so to
>send vagrants back home rather than to execute them.
so I don't have enough things to do already that I have to
go scurrying into the stacks of my local library looking up some
statute because you don't believe me? Sheesh.
"Vagabonds in London in 1524 were ordered to be "tayed at
a cart's tayle" and "be beaten by the Sheriff's officers with whippes"
and have "round colers of iron" affixed to their necks. The notorious
Statue of Edward VI decreed that anyone refusing to labour "should be
branded with a red hot iron on the breast" and "should be adjudged
the slaves for two years of any person who should inform against such
idler"... Elizabethan legislation provided that begging should be
punishable by burning through the gristle of the right ear AND A
SECOND OFFENCE BY DEATH; the former penalty being humanely modified
in 1597 to one of being stripped naked to the waist and whipped until
the body was bloody." (Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of
Capitalism, 1946, p234 - emphasis mine - Dobb cites E.M.Leonard's
"Early History of English Poor Relief" p25 and F.M.Eden, "State of
the Poor" for his sources.)
It might make you feel a bit better to know that the law was
only sporadically enforced, it being understandably difficult to find
a citizen willing to make a complaint against some panhandler if he
knew the fellow would be executed. Nonetheless
"Vagrancy was a felony for repeat offences in the Acts of 1536,
1547, 1572, 1576, 1597, and 1604. In practice it seems offenders were
mainly hanged under the first two Elizabethan statutes. Three males and
a female were executed in Middlesex sessions in 1575-6; another was
ordered to die in Warwick in 1582; and still others were hanged for
consorting with gypsies, which was felonious by a statue of 1562 (sources:
Statutes III.560, IV.i.6, 591, 610-11, ii.900, 1025; Middlesex Co. Recds
(1886) I.94, 101-3, 221, 266-7, etc...) It is impossible to say what
proportion of vagabonds were executed. The vast majority received
chastisement from the constable's whip..." (A.L.Beier: "Masterless Men:
The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, Methuen, 1985: p160). The
author goes on to say that while no more than 6% of vagrants in Stuart
Whiltshire were actually executed, "it would be wrong to conclude that
punishments were not harsh, simply because they were not fatal. Floggings
could turn into murderous affairs..." (op cit.)
Good enough for you? Or do you want the texts of the statutes too?
>
>> Among American Indians themselves there were wildly varying
>>types of property regime [ . . . ]
>
>I don't doubt it. Do regimes vary as wildly today? If not why not?
um, the point I was making was not that hard to grasp. You
said or strongly implied that property relations are determined by
the technological level of a society. Ne c'est pas? I said: no they
don't. You look at hunter-gatherers (always considered the lowest
level in such evolutionary schemes): some got very individualistic
systems, some very communal. You look at each level of evolution and
you see the same thing. Stateless ("tribal" if you like) agricultural
societies: some are big on private property, some aren't. Heavily
centralized state bureaucracies running vast irrigation systems (the
classic "oriental despotism"): some (Mesopotamia) had the state
owning the land, others (China) had individual ownership. Ergo: there
is no systematic relation between technological/evolutionary level
however conceived and forms of property...
Maybe I didn't understand your argument, however. Maybe you
weren't saying that technological level determines forms of property
at _every_ level of evolution, but only that it determines there
will be private property when you get up to the industrial level.
But if so, why should it be that most of the world outside of western
Europe switched _away_ from private property rather than towards it
when they started industrializing in a big way? I mean, even if you're
going to make an argument that the whole thing was some weird,
demented mistake you still have to come up with some explanation for
why, if industrial society causes private property, then in so many
places for most of the last century it didn't; in fact, that it caused
the abolition of private property.
(A hint: maybe the actual process of changing an agrarian
society into an industrial one, capitalist or state-capitalist (eg,
in which workers work in factories for wages, whoever might own the
factory) is a necessarily traumatic one which cannot be accomplished
except through the liberal use of coercive force on the part of the
state, and that's what Stalin was doing just as much as what the
English gov't was doing two or three centuries before...)
Finally, as to your specific question: why do regimes of
property among American Indians not vary now as much as they did
earlier...well, Jim, that would be because they were conquered by
force of arms, wouldn't it? This is of course true all over the
world. Property law in Kenya looks a lot like British law, in Suriname
it has this strange relation to Dutch law, in Senegal there's this
mysterious French influence, in Guatemala, there is an unmistakable
connection to Spanish legal traditions. Hmmm, how did that happen?
I guess they all just spontaneously evolved that way once they
started industrializing or...err, well, thinking how nice it would
be to industrialize even if they couldn't do it yet.It certainly
wouldn't have anything to do with conquering armies and colonial
regimes.
>
>>Finally, as for your "recent collapse of communism" - well, apart from
>>the fact that the issue of property is still being hotly contested in
>>most of Eastern Europe and whatever the result is, it probably won't
>>look exactly like what we have here - might I remind you that the _rise_
>>of Leninist regimes began only seventy-odd years ago, that they were
>>clearly tangled up in the shock of technological change that was
>>occurring at the time, and that they involved massive changes in
>>property regime that went in the exact opposite direction as you were
>>claiming modern societies tend to go. In China collectivization was
>>introduced in a society that had been used to private property in land
>>for thousands of years!
>
>I would view the history of the attempted redefinition of property under
>Leninist regimes as a history of an attempt to defy in the name of
>Marxism the Marxist theory that property relationships are determined by
>the needs of the productive process at a particular level of technology.
>The attempt failed and is being abandoned, which tends to confirm
>fundamental Marxist theory on this point (at least in the case of modern
>societies, in which economic life has achieved a considerable degree of
>autonomy) even as it refutes the practical proposals of Marxist
>political parties.
>--
>Jim Kalb (j...@panix.com) "Who lives without folly is not so wise
> as he thinks." (La Rochefoucauld)
yeah, sure, whatever
see above
DG
Gordon Fitch
| |Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
| |much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
| |or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
| |counterweight to the more rational forces militating
mwi...@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM (Mark O. Wilson) writes:
| If this were true, how come laws had to be passed in order to
| force people to discriminate.
I've seen plenty of discrimination in and around New York
City where there were certainly no laws forcing anyone to
discriminate. And elsewhere as well. I thought everyone
was aware of this. Want me to give some examples?
Steve Gustafson
GF>You could have a property system maintained by custom among
>a relatively small group of people with a uniform culture and
>selves could enforce it.
It strikes me that what you would have here is a nascent legal system.
It would not only have substantive rules arising from the tradition;
there would be procedural rules (how does one summon the forum at which
issues and enforcement are discussed, &c.)
The common law of both England and America is at least in theory only a
slight elaboration of just such a system. The only additions are a
professional judiciary with formal rules of practice, and the
writing-down of the precedents taken from the decision of prior courts,
to be consulted as needed. In systems like this, the problem is to keep
the decisionmakers honest. Writing the rules, and codifying them as
precedent, is one tested solution.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Steven A, Gustafson, Emperor of Laurasia and Gondwanaland
Steve Gustafson
Steve Gustafson sic ait:
>at any rate, "property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and
>there is no law without government. Therefore, government invented the
>very notion of "property," government defines it, and government sets
>its limits.
Jim Kalb hoc responsum refert:
JK>Would you say that "obligation" is a meaningless word without government
>and that obligation is a notion invented and defined by government, or
>is there something special about obligations regarding property?
To me there is a strong difference between obligations and property
rights. You might be obligated before God or somebody not to run the
family that's a day late on its rent out of their flat on Christmas Eve.
Your lease, on the other hand, may give you an unequivocal contract or
property right to do just that. The essence of a right is that it your
personal prerogative to exercise it as you wish, and in that exercise
you cannot be penalized or held to account in any way. You can have
legal rights to do moral wrong, regardless of what Auntie Ayn says.
JK>Also, I'm not sure why antidiscrimination laws increase freedom. As it
>is now, the only kind of working situation most people can choose is one
>in which the employer and work environment maintain a sort of
>religiously neutrality. If there were no laws against religious
>discrimination then many businesses would still organize themselves in
>that manner, and such businesses would have an advantage competing with
>other businesses for employess who liked that kind of environment. On
>the other hand, if people wanted to set up Born Again Baptist Bakeries,
>Inc., committed to integrating making a living with a certain sort of
>Christian life, they could do that as well, and prospective employees
>could decide whether that or a more neutral situation was what they
>wanted.
In an ideal world filled with people who were otherwise rational despite
their religious beliefs, this might work. We must live in a world that
falls substantially short of this ideal, though. I accept the judgment
of our founding fathers that people have a -right- to choose their
religious faiths and practice it --- that is, that they should be able
to choose it without being held to account or penalized in any ways for
their choice.
If Born Again Baptist Bakeries represented the views of a very small
sect, there would be no problem. In our irrational world full of
irrational people, this poses no problems. What actually happens out
there is that Born Again Flour Co. tells Born Again Bakeries, "I
understand you hired a cookie cutter who has a heretical interpretation
of Matt. 9:7. Sack him, or we won't sell you any more flour." Then,
Born Again Trucking Company says, "Get rid of the heretic, or we won't
transport your cookies."
To claim that these things have not occurred is to ignore history. It
is true that these acts are economically unwise for the bigots to
undertake. On the other hand, social pressures have been remarkably
successful in keeping these systems in place. If preserving real
freedom for real people requires taking away these "property rights,"
yes, at gunpoint ultimately, then so be it.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Easy to tell Good from Evil. Good makes no noise.
Carter Butts
In response to David Graeber's cross-cultural analysis of property, I
must say that I agree. Possession control protocols vary and have varied widely
from culture to culture. The critical issue in social analysis, then, is not
which protocols are "right" and which are "wrong", but which are "stable" and
which have positive side effects.
__
Carter Butts /__|
ea...@acpub.duke.edu ----------/ \----------
--------| |--------
"Know your enemy, and know yourself, ------| |------
and in one hundred battles you will \^^/
never be in peril." -Sun Tzu ///\\\
david rolfe graeber
>gr...@ellis.uchicago.edu (david rolfe graeber) writes:
>
>> so I don't have enough things to do already that I have to
>>go scurrying into the stacks of my local library looking up some
>>statute because you don't believe me? Sheesh.
>
>but that's what I remember" would have been enough to keep the
>discussion going if you had nothing right at hand.
now, now. You didn't say "tell me more about this practice"
you challenged me to provide a reference to the actual statutes I
was referring to, clearly implying they didn't exist. They did, but
if I hadn't spent the time to get you the references the implication
would have been that I was lying or ignorant. I don't think a
slightly bemused note of exasperation is entirely out of line here.
>
>>You said or strongly implied that property relations are determined by
>>the technological level of a society. Ne c'est pas?
>
>I said a couple of things. One was that if societies are in constant
>contact the property relations in each will be affected by things that
>are easily transmitted among societies, such as technology. Another (in
>a later posting) was that the Marxist claim that property relations are
>determined by the stage of development reached by the productive forces
>has been confirmed by the collapse of communism. (I assumed thatn
>"productive forces" means "technology", which I think ought to be OK.)
>
>On the first point: one thing transmitted among societies is ideas of
>how to do things, which is in itself an influence favoring uniformity.
>That's especially true if some ideas (private ownership of the means of
>production) can be seen by comparison to be on the whole more efficient
>than others (public ownership) under what seem to be the relevant
>circumstances, including the state of technology (microchips and so on).
>
well, once again you are drawing your examples from one
specific recent historical event (or closely related series of them),
rather begging the question of whether this is how things generally
have tended to work. Assuming for instance that the main criterium
for determining property relations is that of "efficiency" is
a statement of ideology, not of fact, since it implies that the
question "efficiency in doing what?" need not be asked at all. It
ignores questions of culture - for example, do people tend to value
leisure time more, or consumer goods, or certain types of status
symbol - and of course questions of power (which overlap with the
cultural ones). I was trying to emphasize the role of power - "coercion",
as libertarians like to say - in creating and maintaining forms of
property, because it is often so glaring left out.
>Another result of constant contact among societies with no single
>society clearly dominant is cultural diversity and therefore conflict of
>standards, methods of valuation, modes of cooperation and so on. The
>obvious way of resolving such conflicts (apart from conquest) is
>exchange. Exchange places certain limitations on the rules governing
>property (for example, both sides must view the property exchanged as
>alienable) and it promotes uniformity in certain other rules as well
>(for example, rules regarding fraud). Exchange also promotes the
>development and use of a universal standard of value based on supply and
>demand (that is, money).
well this sort of speculative logic is all very well but
you might find it interesting to examine the historical record of
what has tended to happen, historically, when different societies with
radically different systems of value actually do come into contact -
that is, when there is not an overwhelming superiority of force
on one side. What actually happens is that you develop a kind of
autonomous sphere of exchange in which people from the different
societies can deal with one another, but which is almost entirely
"encapsulated" (I think that's the common term) - it is cut off from
ordinary life and property relations and does not really effect it.
Most forms of trade currencies - beads, what-have-you - operated
this way. Since we were talking about Indian-Colonist relations, let
me take the example of wampum, which was produced in massive amounts
by colonists, for exchange with Indians (mainly for use in the
fur trade). Actually it was used as money among the colonists too -
wampum was legal tender in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania
for a couple hundred years but that's another story. The point was:
for them it was money, a medium for the exchange of private property.
Indians used it in this way when dealing with colonists. However, they
_never_ used it this way among themselves. Instead, it was stored for
use in various forms of ceremonial/diplomatic purposes, in accord
with a complex ideology of peace-making whereby wampum served as a
token of the desire of the giver to create concord and happiness by
lifting the grief and anger the receiver felt due to the death of
loved ones. (Well, I am talking Iroquois here, I don't know say
the Cherokee ideology, it was likely somewhat different, but none
of the Indian nations used wampum as currency in internal relations.)
I could provide endless examples if you really want.
My point is that your logic seems like common sense, but
only if you already accept the cultural logic of our own society
as valid for everyone. I know it's odd, but things just didn't
happen that way when people met each other as equals.
>
>So quite apart from interchange of technology and whatever tendency
>toward uniformity such interchange may bring about, constant contact
>among societies promotes free markets and property rules consistent with
>free markets. That process continues today as countries around the
>world modify rules relating to property to make foreign investment
>easier.
>
well I think my opinion on this is already clear - if one
looks at the matter in any historical depth, you find that (a) the
mere fact of contact and exchange does not tend to bring about the
rise of private property and commercial exchange _within_ societies
which are not inclined this way already, and (b) the way that superior
technology _does_ play into this is by providing things like rifles
and gunships and the like, which have allowed Westerners to take over
just about every country in the entire world and forcibly impose
regimes of private property and market exchange. Look, you know this
happened. Why deny it?
>>But if so, why should it be that most of the world outside of western
>>Europe switched _away_ from private property rather than towards it when
>>they started industrializing in a big way? [ . . . ] (A hint: maybe the
>>actual process of changing an agrarian society into an industrial one,
>>capitalist or state-capitalist (eg, in which workers work in factories
>>for wages, whoever might own the factory) is a necessarily traumatic one
>>which cannot be accomplished except through the liberal use of coercive
>>force on the part of the state, and that's what Stalin was doing just as
>>much as what the English gov't was doing two or three centuries
>>before...)
>
>The switch away from private property in communist countries was due to
>the successful use of force by a small minority with a clear ideology.
>Many other third-world countries also call themselves socialist but from
>your reference to "the liberal use of coercive force" it appears that those
>aren't the ones you mean.
>
>A comparison of China and noncommunist Chinese societies (Taiwan, Hong
>Kong) suggests that under modern conditions an agrarian society can be
>changed into an industrial one without using coercive state force
>remotely on the Stalinist scale, as long as there is no switch away from
>private property. The comparison, together with recent developments in
>China, suggests that industrialization will be more successful to the
>extent the Stalinist approach of state control and terror is rejected.
>North and South Korea are another example. I suppose in Europe one
>could compare Greece and the other countries in the Balkans, although
>there the similarities among the societies are not as strong. (Hong
>Kong is not agrarian, of course, but it is populated mostly by refugees
>from agrarian China).
>
>There are other examples of formerly agrarian societies that have become
>industrial without using coercive force on a scale remotely comparable
>to Stalin. Japan and the United States are two. I suppose one could
>argue that our Civil War was an instance of the use of coercive force to
>promote a change from an agricultural to an industrial society, but even
>if the South had been allowed to secede industrialization would have
>gone forward in the North.
>
yes, well, I don't want to go into all the historical particulars
here - I mean, it's an interesting issue why in some places it happens
less painfully than others. I don't have time to go case by case, but
I do want to emphasize that sheer force of arms and police/military
power plays much more of a role in most of these cases than we realize -
even if the number of people who are actually killed varies considerably.
(What might differ from case to case in other words might be the
ability of the dispossessed to try to resist.) People often forget that
all of the "economic miracles" of Asia - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (I
leave out city-states which had no major agrarian sector) - were
countries which were occupied by foreign armies, and that in each case
the leaders of said armies imposed massive land-reform, basically
expropriating all the big landlords without compensation, and that this
in turn was meant to be an economic underpinning to industrialization. It
was not _as_ different as we might naively imagine...
>> Finally, as to your specific question: why do regimes of
>>property among American Indians not vary now as much as they did
>>earlier...
>
>My question wasn't intended to be specific to American Indians. Rather,
>it was why today we see no tendency toward the mind-boggling diversity
>of property systems worldwide that you tell me characterized (say)
>hunter-gatherer societies of the past. There are 200 [?] independent
>societies in the world. Why don't their property institutions tend to
>diverge in accordance with local circumstances and cultural
>peculiarities? What do you think the constraints are?
My answer was not specific to American Indians either - my
answer in the original posting, which you diced out and then treated
as if it wasn't there. This seems a strangely dishonest way of
arguing: you asked originally "why has this diversity given away
to uniformity." I answered: as with the Indians, so with almost every
country on earth. They were all invaded by one or another western
power and colonial regimes imposed on them, so that their property law
is now in each cased based on the legal tradition of the country that
colonized them. In other words, the other forms of property were no
longer recognized by courts, which enforced their decision through
the power of the police and military. These other forms of property
were (at least in the overwhelming majority of cases) physically
suppressed through the systematic application of the coercive violence
of the state.
But I said this before. If you disagree, you can say so,
but why just make believe I didn't say it and ask the question again?
>--
>Jim Kalb (j...@panix.com) "Who lives without folly is not so wise
> as he thinks." (La Rochefoucauld)
DG
Jim Kalb
>Europe switched _away_ from private property rather than towards it when
>actual process of changing an agrarian society into an industrial one,
>capitalist or state-capitalist (eg, in which workers work in factories
>for wages, whoever might own the factory) is a necessarily traumatic one
>which cannot be accomplished except through the liberal use of coercive
>force on the part of the state, and that's what Stalin was doing just as
>much as what the English gov't was doing two or three centuries
>before...)
(feudal land tenures, large-scale ownership of land by the church,
common rights in land, serfdom and slavery, tribal ownership of land)
were suppressed in the course of the economic development of the West.
The suppression of such forms of property was sometimes violent or
associated with violence (e.g., the French Revolution, the American
Civil War, the Indian Wars), but sometimes it wasn't. Also, the
violence had no very close connection with industrialization -- 19th
century England was a lot less violent than England had been in earlier
times, and in particular English criminal law became far less bloody in
the early 19th century.
The change in forms of property in the West was a very long-term process
(enclosures, for example, went on for centuries) that involved a lot of
different actors in a lot of different places and shows no tendency to
reverse itself, so some overall explanation based on underlying factors
that go far beyond particular acts of particular people seems called for
(like "such forms of property weren't adapted to free markets so they
disappeared because free markets were more efficient").
The case of state socialism seems different. Some industrializing
societies adopted that system and some did not, and where it was adopted
its adoption appears to have been contingent on particular events that
could easily have been otherwise. Also, the system involved a quite
unusual amount of violence and displayed other signs of inefficiency and
instability culminating in a tendency to abandon it and revert to a
regime of private ownership. So the two cases don't seem similar to me.
Mark O. Wilson
Are you contending that all (for example) merchants are bigots, or just some
of them. If the first merchant you try is a bigot and won't sell to you,
than try somewhere else. The only cases that I am aware of where everybody
was a bigot, are where they were forced to be via the government.
Steven Burnap
: [deleted for space]
:
: all of the "economic miracles" of Asia - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (I
: leave out city-states which had no major agrarian sector) - were
: countries which were occupied by foreign armies, and that in each case
: the leaders of said armies imposed massive land-reform, basically
: expropriating all the big landlords without compensation, and that this
: in turn was meant to be an economic underpinning to industrialization. It
: was not _as_ different as we might naively imagine...
Sorry to butt in, but I have to point out an error. Japan was not
industrialized while occupied by a foreign army. Japan industrialized
in the early part of this century before any western troops touched
Japanese soil. The "Economic Miracle" of Japan after World War II
was not a change from an agrarian to an industrial society but a
rebuilding of an industrial infrastructure that had been destroyed in war.
Also, if I remember correctly, Thailand has the distinction of being
the only non-western country to never be conquered by a western one.
Steve
Jim Kalb
>go scurrying into the stacks of my local library looking up some
>statute because you don't believe me? Sheesh.
but that's what I remember" would have been enough to keep the
>You said or strongly implied that property relations are determined by
>the technological level of a society. Ne c'est pas?
contact the property relations in each will be affected by things that
are easily transmitted among societies, such as technology. Another (in
a later posting) was that the Marxist claim that property relations are
determined by the stage of development reached by the productive forces
has been confirmed by the collapse of communism. (I assumed that
On the first point: one thing transmitted among societies is ideas of
how to do things, which is in itself an influence favoring uniformity.
That's especially true if some ideas (private ownership of the means of
production) can be seen by comparison to be on the whole more efficient
than others (public ownership) under what seem to be the relevant
circumstances, including the state of technology (microchips and so on).
society clearly dominant is cultural diversity and therefore conflict of
standards, methods of valuation, modes of cooperation and so on. The
obvious way of resolving such conflicts (apart from conquest) is
exchange. Exchange places certain limitations on the rules governing
property (for example, both sides must view the property exchanged as
alienable) and it promotes uniformity in certain other rules as well
(for example, rules regarding fraud). Exchange also promotes the
development and use of a universal standard of value based on supply and
demand (that is, money).
toward uniformity such interchange may bring about, constant contact
among societies promotes free markets and property rules consistent with
free markets. That process continues today as countries around the
world modify rules relating to property to make foreign investment
easier.
>Europe switched _away_ from private property rather than towards it when
>actual process of changing an agrarian society into an industrial one,
>capitalist or state-capitalist (eg, in which workers work in factories
>for wages, whoever might own the factory) is a necessarily traumatic one
>which cannot be accomplished except through the liberal use of coercive
>force on the part of the state, and that's what Stalin was doing just as
>much as what the English gov't was doing two or three centuries
>before...)
the successful use of force by a small minority with a clear ideology.
Many other third-world countries also call themselves socialist but from
your reference to "the liberal use of coercive force" it appears that those
aren't the ones you mean.
A comparison of China and noncommunist Chinese societies (Taiwan, Hong
Kong) suggests that under modern conditions an agrarian society can be
changed into an industrial one without using coercive state force
remotely on the Stalinist scale, as long as there is no switch away from
private property. The comparison, together with recent developments in
China, suggests that industrialization will be more successful to the
extent the Stalinist approach of state control and terror is rejected.
North and South Korea are another example. I suppose in Europe one
could compare Greece and the other countries in the Balkans, although
there the similarities among the societies are not as strong. (Hong
Kong is not agrarian, of course, but it is populated mostly by refugees
from agrarian China).
There are other examples of formerly agrarian societies that have become
industrial without using coercive force on a scale remotely comparable
to Stalin. Japan and the United States are two. I suppose one could
argue that our Civil War was an instance of the use of coercive force to
promote a change from an agricultural to an industrial society, but even
if the South had been allowed to secede industrialization would have
gone forward in the North.
>property among American Indians not vary now as much as they did
My question wasn't intended to be specific to American Indians. Rather,
it was why today we see no tendency toward the mind-boggling diversity
of property systems worldwide that you tell me characterized (say)
hunter-gatherer societies of the past. There are 200 [?] independent
societies in the world. Why don't their property institutions tend to
diverge in accordance with local circumstances and cultural
peculiarities? What do you think the constraints are?
Jim Kalb
>>at any rate, "property" is a meaningless word in the absence of law; and
>>there is no law without government. Therefore, government invented the
>>very notion of "property," government defines it, and government sets
>>its limits.
>
>Jim Kalb hoc responsum refert:
>
>JK>Would you say that "obligation" is a meaningless word without government
> >and that obligation is a notion invented and defined by government, or
> >is there something special about obligations regarding property?
>
>To me there is a strong difference between obligations and property
>rights.
observe them. You seem to believe that those particular obligations
were invented by the government. My question was whether you would say
the same about all obligations, or whether there are some obligations
that are different in this respect from obligations regarding property.
>What actually happens out there is that Born Again Flour Co. tells Born
>Again Bakeries, "I understand you hired a cookie cutter who has a
>heretical interpretation of Matt. 9:7. Sack him, or we won't sell you
>any more flour." Then, Born Again Trucking Company says, "Get rid of
>the heretic, or we won't transport your cookies."
>
>To claim that these things have not occurred is to ignore history.
boycott. There could be rules dealing with such situations that don't
touch primary discrimination (analogies could be drawn to labor law or
to the U.S. response to the Arab boycott of Israel, in both of which a
distinction is drawn between direct refusals to deal and secondary
boycotts). Incidentally, I wasn't aware that secondary boycotts of the
sort you mention have been a significant problem in connection with
intergroup relations. Are there any specifics you could mention?
>If preserving real freedom for real people requires taking away these
>"property rights," yes, at gunpoint ultimately, then so be it.
include the freedom to form communities with a common way of life
directed toward some common good. One example of such a community is a
monastery. My Born Again Baptist Bakery, Inc. was intended as an
example of an institution that is part of another such community. To
suppress such an institution strikes me as an act of tyranny.
Jim Kalb
>was referring to, clearly implying they didn't exist.
challenge? If you had had one at hand it would have been the quickest
way to give me further info. It's true, of course, that asking for
references rather than further discussion indicates an inclination not
to put oneself in another's hands.
> well, once again you are drawing your examples from one
>specific recent historical event (or closely related series of them),
>rather begging the question of whether this is how things generally
>have tended to work.
Ideally, of course, one would show that the rules governing what's
happening now are a special case of universal rules.
>Assuming for instance that the main criterium for determining property
>relations is that of "efficiency" is a statement of ideology, not of
>fact, since it implies that the question "efficiency in doing what?"
>need not be asked at all. It ignores questions of culture - for example,
>do people tend to value leisure time more, or consumer goods, or certain
>types of status symbol -
circumstances is a descriptive rather than ideological statement. The
notion is that when a variety of societies are in constant contact so
that there is cultural interpenetration, standards of value within each
society become less coherent so that voluntary cooperation tends more
and more to be achieved by exchange. That process is encouraged by
technical advances that make varying standards more immediately present
to each person (people in Bangalore can see on TV what's doing in New
York) and that make it possible for more and more of the needs of life
to be met by exchange (if insurance, ready-to-eat food and VCRs are
available on the market you don't need family and friends as much).
Then, when people think about political and social issues, they tend to
emphasize the goods they continue to recognize collectively (in the
limiting case, the only such good would be exchange or monetary value)
and to view the overall goal of society as the maximization of those
goods (in the limiting case, growth of GNP). The nice thing about
taking efficiency in the generation of exchange value as the overall
goal of society, by the way, is that it allows people to avoid asking
"efficiency for what" -- exchange value can be exchanged indifferently
for consumer goods, for leisure, and for lots of other things, and in a
society in which it is accepted as the univerally-applicable measure of
value its possession confers status as well.
>and of course questions of power (which overlap with the cultural ones).
>I was trying to emphasize the role of power - "coercion", as
>libertarians like to say - in creating and maintaining forms of
>property, because it is often so glaring left out.
be whether the current general form of society is as it is because
particular people have had the power to make it that way, so that if
different people had power and made different choices it would be very
different (and possibly much better), or whether things are as they are
because of impersonal social and economic laws that we can't do much
about. I'm inclined more to the latter view; you seem inclined more to
the former.
>What actually happens is that you develop a kind of autonomous sphere of
>exchange in which people from the different societies can deal with one
>another, but which is almost entirely "encapsulated" (I think that's the
>common term) - it is cut off from ordinary life and property relations
>and does not really effect it.
circumstances such as effective propinquity (which would in turn vary
with things like the technology of transportation and communication) and
the advantages to be gained from extensive exchange (which would vary
with the state of productive technology). It seems to me that
encapsulation of foreign influences is not very effective today anywhere
due to reasons of the sort I just mentioned, and it's becoming less
effective all the time.
>if one looks at the matter in any historical depth, you find that (a)
>the mere fact of contact and exchange does not tend to bring about the
>rise of private property and commercial exchange _within_ societies
>which are not inclined this way already, and (b) the way that superior
>technology _does_ play into this is by providing things like rifles and
>gunships and the like, which have allowed Westerners to take over just
>about every country in the entire world and forcibly impose regimes of
>private property and market exchange.
we have today, contributes to the establishment of regimes of private
property and market exchange. I suppose the issue is whether if Western
colonization had never taken place there would nonetheless be a
long-term worldwide tendency toward such regimes. I would think so.
The West did not impose such regimes on the former communist countries
or on China, all of which are moving in that direction, nor on Turkey,
Thailand or Japan, all ancient civilizations that were never colonized
and all of which have such regimes. Iran, another ancient civilization
that never became a colony, is experimenting with Islamic socialism, but
my understanding is that the experiment has not been very successful.
Also, now that the colonial empires are gone, why not more tendency to
diverge?
>People often forget that all of the "economic miracles" of Asia - Japan,
>South Korea, Taiwan (I leave out city-states which had no major agrarian
>sector) - were countries which were occupied by foreign armies, and that
>in each case the leaders of said armies imposed massive land-reform,
>basically expropriating all the big landlords without compensation, and
>that this in turn was meant to be an economic underpinning to
>industrialization.
1905. Also, what was the foreign army that occupied Taiwan and imposed
land reform? Ditto for South Korea -- we occupied them for a while, but
it would have been odd for us to impose land reform on a country that
was not a former enemy. In any case, it's not clear to me why land
reform is needed for industrialization. If a city surrounded by
communist China or by the ocean can industrialize, why not a city
surrounded by feudal domains?
> My answer was not specific to American Indians either - my
>answer in the original posting, which you diced out and then treated
>as if it wasn't there.
become unreadable.
>This seems a strangely dishonest way of arguing: you asked originally
>"why has this diversity given away to uniformity." I answered: as with
>the Indians, so with almost every country on earth. They were all
>invaded by one or another western power and colonial regimes imposed on
You seemed to me to be talking about the Indians. If I was wrong I was
wrong, but suggestions of dishonesty make it hard to carry on a
discussion (there is no requirement that we carry one on, of course).
The point of my response (you can review it on your own system if you
want) was to ask why there is not now more of a tendency to diverge in
the 200 independent political societies that now exist. Given that
colonialization took place, each society is now free to define its own
rules of property based on its own culture and traditions (foreigners
might complain if the redefinition deprived them of rights they now
have, but citizens of powerful foreign countries don't have significant
stakes in all countries and not all such complaints could be made good).
The fact that there seems to be no tendency to return to anything like
the extreme diversity that once obtained suggests that constraints other
than brute external force are at work. Do you agree that such
constraints exist? If so, what do you think they are?
Steve Gustafson
Michael Feathers sic ait:
MF>You (and some libertarians) are forgetting one of the cardinal maxims of
>libertarianism: `There is no Utopia.'
Neither is there under state socialism or the banker's socialism that
goes by the name of "capitalism" today. This is itself not a reason not
to try to change things we -can- change.
MF>I'm a libertarian and I'll concede that bigotry, racism, nationalism (and
>all other in/out group classifications) have some sort of purpose and a
>free market may not take care of it. But I feel that most remedies actually
>contribute to the problem.
I would not dispute that every proposed solution for these problems
bears with it certain economic and moral costs. The costs involved
differ with each proposal. They should always be taken into account.
But doing nothing also bears certain economic and moral costs. Notions
of "property rights" that claim that doing nothing to penalize racism is
not only morally right, but in fact we have no other options, strike me
as yet another doctrinaire and utopian fantasy.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Ante ortum nihil est homo, nec post funera quidquam.
Steve Gustafson
Mr. Grinch sic ait:
MG>Nonsense. "property" in the sense of territory is not only antecedent
>to governmnet, it is about a billion years antecedent to man.
Property differs in many ways from animal territories. Animal
territories cannot be bought and sold; they depend entirely on the
strength and other merits of the animal possessor. An animal that
carves out a territory is not entitled to keep it indefinitely. He must
always face the challenge of other animals in order to retain
possession; and when he grows old or becomes ill, he loses it.
Property --- by definition --- cannot be defeated in this way. What
makes it different is the sanction of the law.
---
. OLX 2.2 . But the wombat was most subtle of all beasts in the field
Gordon Fitch
| || |Historically, it has turned out that some people derive so
| || |much utility from bigotry (because they enjoy its exercise
| || |or can sell it to others) that it forms a strong
| || |counterweight to the more rational forces militating
| || |against it. ...
mwi...@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM (Mark O. Wilson) writes:
| || If this were true, how come laws had to be passed in order to
| || force people to discriminate.
gcf:
| |I've seen plenty of discrimination in and around New York
| |City where there were certainly no laws forcing anyone to
| |discriminate. And elsewhere as well. I thought everyone
| |was aware of this. Want me to give some examples?
mwilson:
| Are you contending that all (for example) merchants are bigots, or just some
| of them. If the first merchant you try is a bigot and won't sell to you,
| than try somewhere else. The only cases that I am aware of where everybody
| was a bigot, are where they were forced to be via the government.
No; what happens is that is some markets, bigots prefer not
to trade with merchants who do not enact bigotry (whatever
their personal preferences may be). They will pay a signifi-
cant price for the absence of the objects of their bigotry.
Since merchants tend to follow the market rather than high
moral principle, they will sell the bigots what they want;
in fact, they will compete to do so. Thus, even though the
ardent bigots seem to form a minority, they have considerable
influence on those markets where they choose to exert it.
An outstanding example is real estate, although there are
many others. This is not theoretical reasoning leading to
a theoretical result; I am giving an explanation for
phenomena I have actually observed with my own eyes. I've
listened to developers explain why they _had_ to discrimi-
nate or go out of business. And I've passed it along.
J.J. Kuslich
>In article <22ud93...@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu> j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>>There will always be stupid racists, but the market is a voluntary place.
>>If you want something from someone who could deny it from you for any
>>reason, you're going to have to at least treat them decently, if you
>>don't like them.
>
>Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
>absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
>the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
This may be true. Racist restaurants may arise. So what? Don't
go there. HOWEVER, in places with large "minority" populations, racist
restaurants (i.e. excluding the minority) would be a BAD business move.
Note, also, that minority is definitely a contextual term. In Hawaii, for
example, Whites are not only the numerical minority, but also the minority
that is discriminated against the most. I lived in a Hawaii last summer,
and I really didn't care that there were places I wasn't welcome. There
were plenty of other places to go where people were rational and wanted to
make money - including my money. And you know what? Some of those people
might have even been "racist", but I bet they would have taken my money
regardless (in fact, they did - but then there are laws against
discrimination, so they were forced to take it. But I think they would
have either way).
J>J>K>
==========================================================================
Right to the heart of the matter, right to the beautiful part.
Illusions are painfully shattered, right where discovery starts.
-- RUSH, "Emotion Detector"
==========================================================================
J.J. Kuslich
>
> In response to David Graeber's cross-cultural analysis of property, I
>must say that I agree. Possession control protocols vary and have varied widely
>from culture to culture. The critical issue in social analysis, then, is not
>which protocols are "right" and which are "wrong", but which are "stable" and
Stable by what standard? How is stability determined?
>which have positive side effects.
Positive by what standard? Positive for whom? Why are these side
effects considered positive? How did you arrive at that decision?
J.J. Kuslich
>
>Michael Feathers sic ait:
>
>MF>You (and some libertarians) are forgetting one of the cardinal maxims of
> >libertarianism: `There is no Utopia.'
>
>Neither is there under state socialism or the banker's socialism that
>goes by the name of "capitalism" today. This is itself not a reason not
>to try to change things we -can- change.
>
>MF>I'm a libertarian and I'll concede that bigotry, racism, nationalism (and
> >all other in/out group classifications) have some sort of purpose and a
> >free market may not take care of it. But I feel that most remedies actually
> >contribute to the problem.
>
>I would not dispute that every proposed solution for these problems
>bears with it certain economic and moral costs. The costs involved
>differ with each proposal. They should always be taken into account.
>
>But doing nothing also bears certain economic and moral costs. Notions
>of "property rights" that claim that doing nothing to penalize racism is
Why should racist beliefs be outlawed by the government any more
than religious beliefs or socialist beliefs? All that the notion of
property rights implies in this situation is that the *government* may take
no action against property owners since doing so would violate not only
their property rights and rights to freedom of expression, but also a
violation of one's very right to life. If a person owns a restaurant and
lives by the product of his ownership and management of that restaurant,
than interference by the govt. that interferes with the operation of that
restaurant interferes with the very means of living that the owner has
chosen. This not only imples a violation of the right of life, but also
the fact that the very product of the owner's work used to purchase the
property is being violated is also a violation of the owner's property
rights.
This is not a defense of racism. Racism is disgusting and
completely irrational. This is a defense of individual rights.
>not only morally right, but in fact we have no other options, strike me
>as yet another doctrinaire and utopian fantasy.
The notion I described above says nothing of the kind. Property
rights neither demand nor imply that one can/must do nothing about racism.
You can fight it via education, voluntary boycotts, peaceful and lawful
demonstrations, etc. Is that nothing?
david rolfe graeber
>david rolfe graeber (gr...@kimbark.uchicago.edu) wrote:
>: [deleted for space]
>:
>: all of the "economic miracles" of Asia - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (I
>: leave out city-states which had no major agrarian sector) - were
>: countries which were occupied by foreign armies, and that in each case
>: the leaders of said armies imposed massive land-reform, basically
>: expropriating all the big landlords without compensation, and that this
>: in turn was meant to be an economic underpinning to industrialization. It
>: was not _as_ different as we might naively imagine...
>
>
>Sorry to butt in, but I have to point out an error. Japan was not
>industrialized while occupied by a foreign army. Japan industrialized
>in the early part of this century before any western troops touched
>Japanese soil. The "Economic Miracle" of Japan after World War II
>was not a change from an agrarian to an industrial society but a
>rebuilding of an industrial infrastructure that had been destroyed in war.
>
I was wondering whether to point out that in Japan the economic
transformation in question fell into two stages, only one of which
was carried out under an occupying army, the other by a fascist regime.
However, since the discussion was about whether or not it is necessary
to have massive government coercion in such cases, and fascist regimes
are plenty repressive, and since all this is common knowledge, I figured
why waste bandwidth by belaboring the obvious.
As for industrialization...this is interesting. Japan certainly
had industry in '45, and their military production was obviously nothing
to sneeze at, but it was hardly a world-class commercial/manufacturing
player. That came only over the course of the '60s, really. Also: in
1945 Japan's population was about 75% rural; now it is more than 75%
urban (these figures are from memory so they are not exact.) All the
people I've talked to from Japan (or for that matter Taiwan or S. Korea)
seem to think land reform was extremely important to the economic
changes that followed.
>Also, if I remember correctly, Thailand has the distinction of being
>the only non-western country to never be conquered by a western one.
>
>Steve
yeah, and maybe Tibet? Well...let's see what happens there.
DG
Steve Gustafson
Steve Gustafson sic ait:
SG>To me there is a strong difference between obligations and property
>rights.
Jim Kalb hoc responsum refert:
JK>Property rights exist to the extent other people have obligations to
>observe them. You seem to believe that those particular obligations
>were invented by the government. My question was whether you would say
>the same about all obligations, or whether there are some obligations
>that are different in this respect from obligations regarding property.
I am by no means certain that property rights exist only to the extent
other people have obligations to observe them. Not all property rights
are directly observable at all times, for that matter. What you seem to
be asking is, "are all property rights binding in conscience at all
times?" I couldn't agree with such a sweeping statement, at least not
unless you made it circular by saying that property rights only exist
when they are binding in conscience.
One problematic area in ethics for pseudo-libertarians, I think, is the
question of disaster profiteers: the fellow who charges vastly inflated
prices, say, for building materials in the aftermath of a hurricane, &c.
By doing so, it seems to me at least that he has put himself in a
situation where I would be compelled to say that no one is obligated any
more to respect his "property rights." Whatever economic justifications
might be made for such behaviour, it would seem to me that at least in
conscience no one would be bound to pay the price that such a profiteer
asked.
SG>What actually happens out there is that Born Again Flour Co. tells Born
>Again Bakeries, "I understand you hired a cookie cutter who has a
>heretical interpretation of Matt. 9:7. Sack him, or we won't sell you
>any more flour."
JK>The specific problem you seem concerned with here is the secondary
>boycott. There could be rules dealing with such situations that don't
>touch primary discrimination (analogies could be drawn to labor law or
>to the U.S. response to the Arab boycott of Israel, in both of which a
>distinction is drawn between direct refusals to deal and secondary
>boycotts).
Yes --- of -course- there could be rules that deal with those
situations! But, those rules, by definition, would exert an effect on
your "property rights" and your autonomy to deal with your property as
you wish. Which is the proposition I sought to defend all along: those
sorts of rules are occasionally worthwhile in order to protect religious
freedom --- i.e. to protect your right to choose and practice your
religion free of cost or penalty imposed by others.
SG> Incidentally, I wasn't aware that secondary boycotts of the
>sort you mention have been a significant problem in connection with
>intergroup relations. Are there any specifics you could mention?
It has been my impression that "shunning" --- i.e. the sort of boycotts
and secondary boycotts envisioned here --- has long been practiced by
authoritarian religious communities. It was also my understanding that
it was just this sort of sub-rosa boycotts or threats that resulted in
the de facto enforcement of segregation in places where it was not
legally allowed.
SG>If preserving real freedom for real people requires taking away these
>"property rights," yes, at gunpoint ultimately, then so be it.
JK>I suppose my point was that real freedom for real people ought to
>include the freedom to form communities with a common way of life
>directed toward some common good. One example of such a community is a
>monastery. My Born Again Baptist Bakery, Inc. was intended as an
>example of an institution that is part of another such community. To
>suppress such an institution strikes me as an act of tyranny.
Would a socialist United States of America also be such a community? It
seems to me that the preservation of liberty for those whose liberty
especially needs defended --- members of racial or religious minorities,
the holders of unpopular opinions --- does occasionally require some
restraints on "community" action.
When we move beyond the walls of a monastery or a commune into the
marketplace, I don't think so. It once again all boils down to the
interplay between the economy and the law. In order to preserve the
sort of economic freedom that many highly prize, it may at some point
become necessary for the law to protect the integrity and accessibility
of markets to all. Where the line should be drawn is a hard question,
so I am not prepared to defend any possible solution as being the single
valid one. Much would seem to defend on what kind of community you are
talking about. For the USA, that makes the question a bit easier.
The American republic has ensconced religious liberty and racial
equality among its core values. Given those values, it does not seem to
be unreasonable for us to have enacted laws that seek to protect the
integrity of the marketplace, by seeking to vouchsafe access to the job
and property markets to racial and religious minorities, despite the
forces of human unreason that may from time to time wish to exclude
them. Whether they actually succeed or are the best ways of
accomplishing these goals is another question: but I see the motives of
laws like Title VII as more truly libertarian than the economania of
those who claim they trespass against sacred property rights.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous.
Lefty
> yeah, and maybe Tibet? Well...let's see what happens there.
No. Tibet was occupied by the British for a time early in this century.
--
Lefty (le...@apple.com)
C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:.
James F. Hranicky
>Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
>absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
>the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
Perhaps it will make it worse?
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
James F. Hranicky
>g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| >[ discrimination ] ... [To]
>j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>| Check out Thomas Sowell's works on race in America. I believe he is a
>| black conservative, but he basically says the same thing, and he is
>| generally very thorough in providing empirical evidence.
>
>I read an article in which he cooked his evidence, and
>since then I haven't trusted him. He's a polemicist first
>and foremost. Not that this makes him worse than most
>other columnists, but a grain or two of salt is required.
Oh, come on, this is ridiculous. What evidence, how do you know he
'cooked' it? Have you read any of his books? He footnotes the living
*hell* out of them. This is totally sloppy.
You charge him with misrepresentation. If he is guilty, fine. But you should
have the decency to back it up, rather than making some throwaway
comment.
I generally take *everyone* with some salt.
>
>| After all, how long can you continue to hate the person who sells the
>| best food (cars, furniture, etc..) because of his race? ...
>
>Indefinitely, apparently. People seem to derive a
>remarkable amount of utility out of bigotry and related
>practices. That's why I think it ought to be looked
>into analytically. One may, out of principle, believe
>that government intervention is not the way to handle
>the problem, but denying that the problem exists or will
>just go away by itself is not the way to handle the
>problem either.
False dichotomy. Implying that the government shouldn't be holding
guns to people's heads to cure them of racism does not imply that
'nothing should be done.'
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
James F. Hranicky
>The laws that were passed were intended to encourage and/or force
>discrimination other than that which would otherwise occur. It's
>been demonstrated fairly clearly that, in the absence of so-called
>'equal opportunity' or 'affirmative action' laws, discrimination
>would still take place, the difference being, who is the beneficiary
>of the discrimination.
The Jews and the Chinese show that discrimination isn't such a large
factor after all.
I point again to the works of Thomas Sowell.
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
James F. Hranicky
>steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) hamintaur goft:
>>If preserving real freedom for real people requires taking away these
>>"property rights," yes, at gunpoint ultimately, then so be it.
May I be the first to warmly wish that you are the next victim of your
own pathetically destructive philosophy, you bastard.
And when they drag you off to jail at gunpoint because you have failed
to hire a neo-nazi, I want to be there to spit in your face.
'Real people,' indeed.
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
david rolfe graeber
In article <2348t6$l...@panix.com> j...@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
[massive amounts deleted..]
>
>I would think that the degree of encapsulation would tend to vary with
>circumstances such as effective propinquity (which would in turn vary
>with things like the technology of transportation and communication) and
>the advantages to be gained from extensive exchange (which would vary
>with the state of productive technology).
sure you would think that, since that would be the logical
thing if everyone thought like a "rationally maximizing economic
actor" as created by Western economists. As it happens, they don't.
So this is not what happens.
> It seems to me that
>encapsulation of foreign influences is not very effective today anywhere
>due to reasons of the sort I just mentioned, and it's becoming less
>effective all the time.
of course it's not effective _now_! Nobody's even trying,
or governments aren't, anyway. That's because Western techniques
of rule (which require a cash economy, a bureaucracy, a certain type
of educational system, etc etc) have clearly proved the most effective
means of maintaining oneself in power against other governments
who are also organized this way, and have correspondingly effective
modern armies, and of course against ones' own people who might object
> I suppose the issue is whether if Western
>colonization had never taken place there would nonetheless be a
>long-term worldwide tendency toward such regimes.
yes, well said.
to really judge this,the logical thing is to look at what
happened _before_ colonization, when there was plenty of world-wide
contact and trade, but less inequality of power.
so: was there an overall trend towards more private property
over the previous thousand or two thousand years? No. There was not.
One does not have to have a brain the size of Cleveland to
understand that if the course of history, or technological development,
do tend to spontaneously bring about _more_ private property, and not
the other way around, then as one goes back in time, or to
earlier stages of development, there should be _less_ private property.
This is simple common sense. Right? Ok, so: was there less private
property in earlier societies, or ones with simpler technology? No!
This is the point I _started_ with for Christ's sake! For thousands of
years, societies came into contact, technologies advanced, yet the
variety of regimes was not effected. Then, in one hitherto rather
obscure corner of the European continent, a regime based among other
things on private property developed - one which proved so effective
in military terms that these countries were able, over the course
of the next couple hundred years, to conquer almost every corner
of the earth and impose their laws and systems of government
on them, actively intervening to transform the economies of the
countries in question to make them dependent on western techniques and
economic ties to the west. That's what happened.
[To be honest, I'm even simplifying things: capitalism has
always been somewhat flexible in what sorts of property regime it finds
convenient for its purposes. For example, the gradual lifting of feudal
tenure in places like England was central to the creation of a wool
industry, but as a result England needed to import grain: the result
was the general _imposition_ of feudal tenures even where they had not
existed before all over Eastern Europe (East-central Europe in the
Middle Ages had been an area with much more land held in freehold
than in western Europe), so the local aristocrats could extract a
larger and larger surplus for profitable export to the west... In
other words, the creation of a unified capitalistic market system meant
a move towards private property on one side of Europe, and _away_ from
it in the other.]
So: for thousands of years, there's no observable trend to more
private property. Then, a few western countries conquer the world and
impose it. Your conclusion: "it would have happened anyway."
It is obvious that you are more comfortable living in a
hypothetical reality of your own making than in history or the real
world - hence your incessant "I would think that"s, offered in lieu
of concrete examples. But even if you want to be hypothetical, what
does this "it would have happened anyway" even mean? "If capitalism
had never developed in western Europe?" or, "if capitalism had developed
there, but it had been some friendly, pacifistic capitalism which
had no interest in violently subjugating anyone but merely wanted to
trade with them?" It seems this latter is what you really have in mind:
it's the image of history you were trying to push before I reminded
you of what really happened.
Well in fact, if we are talking about capitalism, as opposed
to simply property regimes (capitalism being defined as something
where some people have capital, and use it to generate profits, and
employ others who do not have capital as wage laborers...) then it
is pretty clear that capitalism and especially industrial capitalism
could _never_ have developed without its military wing. Take the
industrial revolution itself: in the 16th and 17th centuries, the
major exporter of manufactured cotton cloth in the world was India (not
a country dominated by western-style private property incidentally)
which was exporting all over Africa, the Middle East, Asia and even
Europe (calicoes). How did England win over these markets? Did they
produce a better or cheaper product and favorably compete? No, they
conquered India and closed down their export industry by force, then
imposed their own monopoly by the same means - and it was only then
that they could achieve operations on a large enough scale to make
industrializing production feasible. (After having conquered Bengal,
you may be interested to know, the East India Company tried to reform
their land tenure system and impose a regime of western-style private
property, which resulted in such total economic disruption that an
estimated third of the population died in the resulting famine. We
are talking about millions of people dead here. This was an extreme
case - but such things happened all over the world. Nowadays people
like you would prefer not to hear about it, to deny this happened if
at all possible, in the name of the ideology which caused it to
happen to begin with. This upsets me. It's one of the main reasons I
feel obliged to carry on these somewhat pointless conversations at
all. There should be someone to speak for the victims of this logic,
to at least point out that they existed.)
You are honest, at least, in admitting it's mainly the last
few years of history you are interested in. That's fine. We all live
in the present. But when you take a political or social trend that
has been going on for a little while, but which you strongly support,
and try to argue that it is the inevitable direction of all human
history, then what you simply an ideologist. That's mainly what
ideologies do. They take something that happens to be happening now,
or seems to be happening now, and make it seem like an age-old
part of nature, something against which one could not possibly argue.
The problem is there just isn't any evidence to back your position up.
>Japan was industrial before 1945 -- remember that they beat Russia in
>1905.
Obviously Japan had industry (right - like they must have stolen
all those battleships and aircraft carriers from some other country
when that country wasn't looking); however its population in 1945 was
still something like 75% rural.
As for the period before: well, excuse me for assuming my
audience had common sense. My point, if you remember, was that rapid
industrialization almost always takes place under a repressive regime,
and anyway involves massive force or the threat of force. In this
context I noted as an interesting aside the little-remarked role of
foreign armies in land reform in East Asia, naively assuming that
people would remember that, while this happened while the process of
industrialization was already under way in Japan, the previous regime
there was a fascist regime, and that this was if anything a confirmation
of my larger point.
Also, what was the foreign army that occupied Taiwan and imposed
>land reform? Ditto for South Korea -- we occupied them for a while, but
>it would have been odd for us to impose land reform on a country that
>was not a former enemy.
it's my fault you are ignorant of history? if you don't know
what happened, look it up.
>>This seems a strangely dishonest way of arguing: you asked originally
>>"why has this diversity given away to uniformity." I answered: as with
>>the Indians, so with almost every country on earth. They were all
>>invaded by one or another western power and colonial regimes imposed on
>>them [ . . . ]
>
>You seemed to me to be talking about the Indians. If I was wrong I was
>wrong, but suggestions of dishonesty make it hard to carry on a
>discussion (there is no requirement that we carry one on, of course).
I see. Then you must have assumed that Senegal and Kenya were
actually Indian tribes. Ok. From now on when I mention
countries I will specify what continent they are on ("Kenya, which is
in Africa...") so as not to confuse you.
>
>The point of my response (you can review it on your own system if you
>want) was to ask why there is not now more of a tendency to diverge in
>the 200 independent political societies that now exist. Given that
>colonialization took place, each society is now free to define its own
>rules of property based on its own culture and traditions (foreigners
>might complain if the redefinition deprived them of rights they now
>have, but citizens of powerful foreign countries don't have significant
>stakes in all countries and not all such complaints could be made good).
>The fact that there seems to be no tendency to return to anything like
>the extreme diversity that once obtained suggests that constraints other
>than brute external force are at work. Do you agree that such
>constraints exist? If so, what do you think they are?
>
well, I believe I explained previously that what is really
behind differences in property regime is not economic utility but
(a) culture and (b) power. What has happened in the modern world is
that one set of institutions, rooted in one cultural tradition,
have proved they are by far the most effective means to maintain
rulers in power.
You will notice that all nations on earth, even that
handful that were never colonized, have also adopted the outward
forms of western parlaimentary or presidential regimes:
they have presidents or prime ministers, they have a 3-part division
of legislature and judiciary and executive, etc etc etc. Even though
these are hardly the only ways governments can or have been run;
and in fact, they may well be little relevent to the actual power
relations even in the societies that claim to have them.
You may argue that this is the most efficient way to run
a government - but as I say, they don't always really run it that way
at all. No, they have adopted western institutions of power because
those are the ones that buy respect among the big boys - they know
who is running the world and they want to be in the same club. Also:
they are part of the whole apparatus of rule which allows them to
maintain modern armies and security forces - ie, have access to the
technological imports needed, educate people to be able to operate
them, and so on. To say that societies in the modern world are "free"
to go back to modes of property typical of, say, the 17-18th century
Kwakiutl or Luapulu of Zambia (which is in Africa) or Maori of New
Zealand (which is in the Pacific) is absurd. People are not free.
They are dominated by regimes based on brute force, which are mainly
interested in maintaining themselves in power, and know that the
application of Western techniques of rule is far and away the most
effective way for them to do so. In fact, the only effective way.
Western industrial society imposed its model on the rest of
the world not because it was most effective in providing goods
that would make people happy, but because it was most effective in
providing weopons that could kill them. It still is today.
It is easy to see that this is one area in which culture is
least relevent: people may well disagree about what they consider a
good life to consist of, of what they consider valuable...but
everyone has an absolute desire not to be dead. Something that can
kill you is a powerful argument - it matters little whether the
threat is weilded by foreign conquerers, their western-trained
successors, or even the governments of Thailand or Iran (which are
in Asia) or some other indigenous state which has recognized what the
powerful techniques of organizing coercion are and adopted them. The
striking thing about world history, if you bother to actually read
some, is how powerful culture can still be: how many people around
the world were willing to die, and did die, rather than have to live
on under a regime in which everything that had given meaning and value
to their lives had been destroyed, in which everything that had given
meaning and value to their lives was treated like so much shit by
people who think like you who were standing there holding a gun to
their heads as they explained that this was the simply the
inevitable working out of universal historical laws.
Theories of inevitable progress like yours are nothing but
ideology. When someone makes an argument that people are slaves to
some abstract law of history, you will almost always find, on closer
examination, that they are trying to cover up for, and ultimately
justify, the very real and non-metaphorical enslavement of some
population or populations to rulers who operated under the same
assumptions. First you tell people they have to change their ways or
you will kill them; then, you justify yourself by claiming that such
change is inevitable, you were just acting as the agent of history;
finally, once the bodies have been in the ground long enough, you
start making believe none of this ever happened at all, you leave
out all references to the violence and coercion (as you continually
tried to do until I insisted we talk about what really happened),
create these imaginary models of how it "could" of happened all on
its own, and try to make believe that _is_ what happened unless you
discover you're dealing with someone who knows better.
There's no difference between Communists and Capitalists in
this respect. They're just two sides of the same coercive coin. It
hardly surprises me, then, to learn you find Marxist notions of
historical inevitability so appealing.
DG
Ken Arromdee
>>Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
>>absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
>>the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
>Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
>Perhaps it will make it worse?
It doesn't _have_ to change anyone's mind. The benefit to the minorities of
barring single-race restaurants is not that it increases tolerance, but it
increases restaurant availability.
--
"On the first day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Leftover Turkey!
On the second day after Christmas my truelove served to me... Turkey Casserole
that she made from Leftover Turkey.
[days 3-4 deleted] ... Flaming Turkey Wings! ...
-- Pizza Hut commercial (and M*tlu/A*gic bait)
Ken Arromdee (arro...@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu)
James F. Hranicky
>In article <23h301...@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu> j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>>>Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
>>>absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
>>>the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
>>Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
>>Perhaps it will make it worse?
>
>It doesn't _have_ to change anyone's mind. The benefit to the minorities of
>barring single-race restaurants is not that it increases tolerance, but it
>increases restaurant availability.
The idea that minorities will never be able to find restaurants without
anti-discrimination laws is a bit riduculous, don't you think?
Don't you have a little more repsect for minorities?
-----
Jim Hranicky (j...@reef.cis.ufl.edu)
Gordon Fitch
| >| >[ discrimination ] ... [To]
| >j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
| >| Check out Thomas Sowell's works on race in America. I believe he is a
| >| black conservative, but he basically says the same thing, and he is
| >| generally very thorough in providing empirical evidence.
gcf:
| >I read an article in which he cooked his evidence, and
| >since then I haven't trusted him. He's a polemicist first
| >and foremost. Not that this makes him worse than most
| >other columnists, but a grain or two of salt is required.
jfh:
| Oh, come on, this is ridiculous. What evidence, how do you know he
| 'cooked' it? Have you read any of his books? He footnotes the living
| *hell* out of them. This is totally sloppy.
I don't see why I should have to keep mountains of
old clippings around to disprove Sowell. In any case,
unlike Mr. Sowell, I do not have the resources of major
media corporations and a lot of time on my hands to
use them for study; I would have to have different
opinions to get that kind of backing. However, next
time I catch Mr. Sowell off base, I'll be sure to let
you all know.
jfh:
| >| After all, how long can you continue to hate the person who sells the
| >| best food (cars, furniture, etc..) because of his race? ...
gcf:
| >Indefinitely, apparently. People seem to derive a
| >remarkable amount of utility out of bigotry and related
| >practices. That's why I think it ought to be looked
| >into analytically. One may, out of principle, believe
| >that government intervention is not the way to handle
| >the problem, but denying that the problem exists or will
| >just go away by itself is not the way to handle the
| >problem either.
jfh:
| False dichotomy. Implying that the government shouldn't be holding
| guns to people's heads to cure them of racism does not imply that
| 'nothing should be done.'
Then what should be done? When I read Usenet, I read
endless discussions about how and why to fight the
government when it fights discrimination, but zero about
how to fight the discrimination itself. Maybe I'm
reading the wrong newsgroups? Where do libertarians
discuss how to deal with these problems?
J.J. Kuslich
>In article <23h301...@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu> j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>>>Going to restaurants with no blacks _has_value_ to racists. Since the
>>>absence of blacks has value, and people are willing to pay to gain this value,
>>>the market will result in there being restaurants which sell this "commodity".
>>Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
>>Perhaps it will make it worse?
>
>It doesn't _have_ to change anyone's mind. The benefit to the minorities of
>barring single-race restaurants is not that it increases tolerance, but it
>increases restaurant availability.
Ok, now that you've admitted that such policies have nothing to do
with a solution to racism or discrimination, let's get on with the
argument.
So, by what right can the government violate property rights to
increase restaurant availability?
By what standard is "increasing restaurant availability" a goal and
function of a government?
What do government and restaurant availiability have to do with
each other?
How does a government remain consistent by advocating freedom and
protection of individual rights while simultaneously violating several
rights and freedoms of thousands, tens of thousands, and possibly millions
of its citizens?
It looks terribly inconsistent to me. Until I follow some wise
advice, "Check [my] premises." I have done so and the only conclusion that
is non-contradictory is that your motives are altrusitic and you have no
interest in freedom whatsoever.
J.J. Kuslich
>g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| >| >[ discrimination ] ... [To]
>
>| >j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>| >| Check out Thomas Sowell's works on race in America. I believe he is a
>| >| black conservative, but he basically says the same thing, and he is
>| >| generally very thorough in providing empirical evidence.
>
>gcf:
>| >I read an article in which he cooked his evidence, and
>| >since then I haven't trusted him. He's a polemicist first
>| >and foremost. Not that this makes him worse than most
>| >other columnists, but a grain or two of salt is required.
>
>jfh:
>| Oh, come on, this is ridiculous. What evidence, how do you know he
>| 'cooked' it? Have you read any of his books? He footnotes the living
>| *hell* out of them. This is totally sloppy.
>
>I don't see why I should have to keep mountains of
(bracketed comment mine)
Well, neither do I. Therefore, I officially negate your arguments
here in this thread. I don't have any evidence to back up my claim your
arguments are false, but you don't seem to think I need any, so I won't
bother with any. So there!
You know, that's the second time you've allowed me to do that (by
your own words, I should say). And it feels rather good. Now I see why
you seem to enjoy it so much. ;-)
I hope you don't mean to say you can't think of ANYTHING else
except running to the government crying, "discrimination!" Come on, think
a little - please.
The only REAL way to end discrimination ('end' meaning end
widespread discrimination, since SOME discrimination will ALWAYS exist just
as irrational thoughts will ALWAYS exist.) is via education, teaching
people to THINK, and a change in philosophy, perhaps. NONE of these things
requires the government. I'm sure there are many other ways (peaceful
demonstrations, advertising, etc). How about suggesting some of your own?
Unless you're not serious about ending discrimination, that is.
Jim Kalb
>>encapsulation of foreign influences is not very effective today anywhere
>>due to reasons of the sort I just mentioned, and it's becoming less
>>effective all the time.
>
> of course it's not effective _now_! Nobody's even trying,
>or governments aren't, anyway.
world and there would be a lot more efforts if people thought the
efforts could succeed. Think of the efforts in Islamic and socialist
countries to keep out Western cultural influences or cultural
anti-Americanism in Europe. Even in the United States people worry
about failures to encapsulate -- Jews worry about disappearing as a
separate people because of assimilation, traditionalist Catholics worry
that their church is absorbing the values of a democratic consumer
society, all sorts of people worry about the homogenizing effect of TV,
and so on. None of the efforts seem to work very well, at least not on
a nation-wide scale. (Maybe it would be worthwhile to look at groups
like the Amish to see what the circumstances are in which smaller-scale
efforts can be successful.)
It's hard to encapsulate when there are televisions, radios, cassette
recorders, jet aircraft, automobiles and a world market on which a huge
variety of goods and services are available at a small fraction of their
cost of production by traditional methods. If people are permitted by
their government to acquire such things a great many of them will, and
one foreign influence leads to another. That's especially true if the
first foreign influence is something that makes communications easier.
>if the course of history, or technological development, do tend to
>spontaneously bring about _more_ private property, and not the other way
>around, then as one goes back in time, or to earlier stages of
>development, there should be _less_ private property.
example, that markets and private ownership have always been
economically advantageous when technology is complex and changing, but
that the balance of advantage when things like military strength or
social stability are taken into account did not decisively favor private
property until prosperity became the key to both.
>For thousands of years, societies came into contact, technologies
>advanced, yet the variety of regimes was not effected.
Presumably that variety existed at one time everywhere in the world. Do
you claim that that same degree of variety existed in all parts of the
world down to the time of European colonization?
>Then, in one hitherto rather obscure corner of the European continent, a
>regime based among other things on private property developed - one
>which proved so effective in military terms that these countries were
>able, over the course of the next couple hundred years, to conquer
>almost every corner of the earth and impose their laws and systems of
>government on them, actively intervening to transform the economies of
>the countries in question to make them dependent on western techniques
>and economic ties to the west.
in military terms. So were the Mongols, but I don't believe the
survivors in the countries they conquered imitated Mongol institutions.
Do you think the European regime has been successful in other respects
as well? Or do you think that it has been successful only with regard
to things (which presumably would include health, material wealth, and
political freedom and equality) that are of interest to Europeans but
that people elsewhere wouldn't care much about if the Europeans hadn't
colonized and transformed them? And why did the Europeans suddenly
became so powerful militarily? It seems to me it was mostly because of
other advantages attributable to their mode of economic and political
organization that would have been attractive to non-European societies
in any event.
> It is obvious that you are more comfortable living in a
>hypothetical reality of your own making than in history or the real
>world - hence your incessant "I would think that"s, offered in lieu
>of concrete examples.
points. Also, I'm posting from talk.politics.theory, where people like
to talk about general theories. That doesn't mean it's our only
interest in life.
> Well in fact, if we are talking about capitalism, as opposed to
>simply property regimes (capitalism being defined as something where
>some people have capital, and use it to generate profits, and employ
>others who do not have capital as wage laborers...) then it is pretty
>clear that capitalism and especially industrial capitalism could _never_
>have developed without its military wing.
claim. In the absence of European military power would the traditional
Indian mode of producing cloth be outproducing European capitalist
methods today so that European capitalist arrangements would disappear
if they had somehow managed to appear? If elimination of competition by
military force is necessary for capitalism to develop, then how can a
country (Japan, for example) become one of the foremost capitalist
countries when it is militarily weak?
>But when you take a political or social trend that has been going on for
>a little while, but which you strongly support, and try to argue that it
>is the inevitable direction of all human history, then what you simply
>an ideologist.
history"? My interest is the direction of current history, why it has
that direction, and whether the things that make it have that direction
are fundamental things that aren't likely to go away. Of course, in
order to understand why things are happening as they are, and to assess
whether they are likely to keep on happening that way, it's helpful to
reflect on why things happen in general so that you can see whether your
theory of what's going on now is supported by more general theories.
As to "strongly support" -- apart from this one, the last two threads
I've been involved in on talk.politics.theory have been one thread in
which I claimed that the universal market society to which we are
tending is one in which the sole socially-recognized value will be
money, and another thread in which I in effect claimed (the terms of
discussion were different) that such a society will be unstable, because
if the only value is money then people will eventually decide to get
what they want by the quickest means possible, and that the ultimate
outcome will be chaos and tyranny. I don't at all like the new world
order we seem to be headed toward. It's important to understand as
clearly as possible why things are headed that way, though, and to be
realistic about the problems and the possibilities.
>That's mainly what ideologies do. They take something that happens to be
>happening now, or seems to be happening now, and make it seem like an
>age-old part of nature, something against which one could not possibly
>argue.
people who have claimed that what is happening now has a cause that can
be identified, isolated, and eliminated by the application of sufficient
force. One characteristic many such people have shared is a bigoted
inability to imagine that those who disagree with them may be reasonable
people who hold their views in good faith:
>One does not have to have a brain the size of Cleveland . . . for
>Christ's sake! . . . It is obvious that you are more comfortable living
>in a hypothetical reality of your own making than in history or the
>before I reminded you of what really happened . . . Nowadays people
>like you would prefer not to hear about it, to deny this happened if at
>like they must have stolen all those battleships and aircraft carriers
>excuse me for assuming my audience had common sense . . . it's my fault
>you are ignorant of history? if you don't know what happened, look it up
>Indian tribes. Ok. From now on when I mention countries I will specify
>what continent they are on ("Kenya, which is in Africa...") so as not to
>lives was treated like so much shit by people who think like you . . .
>you leave out all references to the violence and coercion (as you
>continually tried to do until I insisted we talk about what really
Ken Arromdee
>>>Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
>>>Perhaps it will make it worse?
>>It doesn't _have_ to change anyone's mind. The benefit to the minorities of
>>barring single-race restaurants is not that it increases tolerance, but it
>>increases restaurant availability.
> Ok, now that you've admitted that such policies have nothing to do
>with a solution to racism or discrimination, let's get on with the
>argument.
It's certainly a solution to the _effects_ of discrimination.
Gordon Fitch
| >| guns to people's heads to cure them of racism does not imply that
| >| 'nothing should be done.'
gcf:
| >Then what should be done? When I read Usenet, I read
| >endless discussions about how and why to fight the
| >government when it fights discrimination, but zero about
| >how to fight the discrimination itself. Maybe I'm
| >reading the wrong newsgroups? Where do libertarians
| >discuss how to deal with these problems?
jfh:
| I hope you don't mean to say you can't think of ANYTHING else
| except running to the government crying, "discrimination!" Come on, think
| a little - please.
|
| The only REAL way to end discrimination ('end' meaning end
| widespread discrimination, since SOME discrimination will ALWAYS exist just
| as irrational thoughts will ALWAYS exist.) is via education, teaching
| people to THINK, and a change in philosophy, perhaps. NONE of these things
| requires the government. I'm sure there are many other ways (peaceful
| demonstrations, advertising, etc). How about suggesting some of your own?
| Unless you're not serious about ending discrimination, that is.
I can think of things not requiring government inter-
vention; so have Civil Rights types. But they have
generally not been libertarian (classical liberal)
approaches. As an example: the Greensboro sit-ins
were an _anarchist_ approach to the problem of lunch-
counter segregation -- not that the participants were
anarchists, but their mode of operation in that case
was to simply to non-coercively manifest a different
social order, and let people relate to it as they saw
fit. Another, similar example was the Montgomery bus
boycott.
Now anarchists -- at least those of leftist flavor --
constantly discuss strategies like this to advance
their various agendas. But I don't hear of
libertarians doing this; and I would think they would,
because they would want to preclude government inter-
vention by dealing with social problems before the
political will to have the government intervene arose.
Gordon Fitch
| sure you would think that, since that would be the logical
| thing if everyone thought like a "rationally maximizing economic
| actor" as created by Western economists. As it happens, they don't.
| So this is not what happens.
Et cetera. Outside of the spite and scorn and superiority,
rather odd in an author who affects to despise coercion and,
I suppose, domination in general, I have trouble making out
the thesis of the article. "Culture and power" are referred
to as if they are elementals, impervious to observation and
analysis. One of the things we often discuss is how power
comes into being; I would call this "political theory",
basically. Is the contention here that it's mystical? It
has no components or attributes? Do we just say "power
happens?"
Mike Huben
(James F. Hranicky) loses it:
>
>>steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) hamintaur goft:
>
>>>If preserving real freedom for real people requires taking away these
>>>"property rights," yes, at gunpoint ultimately, then so be it.
>
>May I be the first to warmly wish that you are the next victim of your
>own pathetically destructive philosophy, you bastard.
>
>And when they drag you off to jail at gunpoint because you have failed
>to hire a neo-nazi, I want to be there to spit in your face.
Get a grip, man. This sort of naked hatred is inapropriate. You should be
ashamed of yourself, and apologize publicly. Perhaps you can come off making
libertarians look a little better than your comrade Thant, who has yet to
apologize for attributing my views to mental illness.
Mike Huben
"The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good
ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of
rational conviction." Bertrand Russell in "Skeptical Essays".
J.J. Kuslich
>In article <1AUG1993...@envmsa.eas.asu.edu> kus...@envmsa.eas.asu.edu (J.J. Kuslich) writes:
>>>>Do you think making them all sit together is going to change anyone's mind?
>>>>Perhaps it will make it worse?
>>>It doesn't _have_ to change anyone's mind. The benefit to the minorities of
>>>barring single-race restaurants is not that it increases tolerance, but it
>>>increases restaurant availability.
>> Ok, now that you've admitted that such policies have nothing to do
>>with a solution to racism or discrimination, let's get on with the
>>argument.
>
>It's certainly a solution to the _effects_ of discrimination.
Treating the effects of a problem does nothing to improve the
situation and can (and usually does) make things worse. Take strep throat,
for example. Taking throat lozenges may relieve your sore throat
temporarily, but as soon as you stop taking them, it comes back. Also,
ignoring the *Cause* of the illness (in this case, the bacterial infection)
can ultimately allow the illness to develop into more serious and dangerous
situations.
One does not address a problem by treating only the effects - one only
ignores it and proudly declares one's ignorance and lack of concern for the
cause, and thus lack of concern for the real problem itself.
It seems very common today to see people avoid a problem, but treat
the symptoms to make it look like they're trying to solve it. Such a
policy is either a fraud or incredibly naive and/or ignorant.
J.J. Kuslich
>j...@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>| >| ... Implying that the government shouldn't be holding
>| >| guns to people's heads to cure them of racism does not imply that
>| >| 'nothing should be done.'
>
>gcf:
>| >Then what should be done? When I read Usenet, I read
>| >endless discussions about how and why to fight the
>| >government when it fights discrimination, but zero about
>| >how to fight the discrimination itself. Maybe I'm
>| >reading the wrong newsgroups? Where do libertarians
>| >discuss how to deal with these problems?
>
*I*, J.J. Kuslich, wrote the following, not "jfh" (aka Jim
Hranicky). Sorry if I confused you when I jumped in, Mr. Fitch.
>| I hope you don't mean to say you can't think of ANYTHING else
>| except running to the government crying, "discrimination!" Come on, think
>| a little - please.
>|
>| The only REAL way to end discrimination ('end' meaning end
>| widespread discrimination, since SOME discrimination will ALWAYS exist just
>| as irrational thoughts will ALWAYS exist.) is via education, teaching
>| people to THINK, and a change in philosophy, perhaps. NONE of these things
>| requires the government. I'm sure there are many other ways (peaceful
>| demonstrations, advertising, etc). How about suggesting some of your own?
>| Unless you're not serious about ending discrimination, that is.
>
>I can think of things not requiring government inter-
>vention; so have Civil Rights types. But they have
>generally not been libertarian (classical liberal)
>approaches. As an example: the Greensboro sit-ins
>were an _anarchist_ approach to the problem of lunch-
>counter segregation -- not that the participants were
>anarchists, but their mode of operation in that case
>was to simply to non-coercively manifest a different
>social order, and let people relate to it as they saw
>fit.
First, you're right that sit-ins, or any other demonstration that
violates the rights of others (i.e. ends justify the means) are NOT part of
classical liberalism. However, I'm a bit confused, because you seem to be
calling such actions "non-coercive" above. You didn't mean to say this,
did you? Because a sit-in most certainly IS coercive if the participants
refuse to leave when asked and must be forceably removed by police.
>Another, similar example was the Montgomery bus
>boycott.
Voluntary boycotts are not contradictory to Capitalism or classical
liberalism.
>
>Now anarchists -- at least those of leftist flavor --
>constantly discuss strategies like this to advance
>their various agendas. But I don't hear of
>libertarians doing this; and I would think they would,
>because they would want to preclude government inter-
>vention by dealing with social problems before the
>political will to have the government intervene arose.
Well, part of the problem could be that many people aren't even
willing to go so far as to discuss the possiblity of doing without
government intervention (present company excluded, it would seem :-). So
discussions often get hung up. But I think you'll find that many
classical liberalists and Captalists *do* take part in voluntary actions
to express displeasure for some policies in the private sector they do not
approve of. Most, I would think, simply express themselves by not
supporting "industries" or businesses that support policies contradictory
to their own. (For instance, I do NOT buy books that are supportive of
environmental agencies/policies. That's just a small example, I realize,
but I'm just trying to give a general idea).
Others may make their demonstrations more visible by publically
denouncing some policy or what-have-you of some business. How about some
of the peace marches of Dr. Martin Luther King (jr?)? (BTW, I'm not
suggesting MLK was a Capitalist).
Anyway, I think you get the idea.
Gordon Fitch
| First, you're right that sit-ins, or any other demonstration that
| violates the rights of others (i.e. ends justify the means) are NOT part of
| classical liberalism. However, I'm a bit confused, because you seem to be
| calling such actions "non-coercive" above. You didn't mean to say this,
| did you? Because a sit-in most certainly IS coercive if the participants
| refuse to leave when asked and must be forceably removed by police.
They were non-coercive from the point of view of (left)
anarchists. Whether they were coercive or not depends on
your view of property, etc. etc. etc. Actually, the
situation was trickier than that; they weren't asked to
leave, they just weren't served, and when they just kept
sitting there, the lunch counter was closed, at which point
they left. And came back when it reopened. Woolworth's or
Kresge's or whoever it was -- it was a 5&10 with (this is
important) branches in the North -- wouldn't or couldn't ask
them to leave, but it could refuse to serve them. Of
course, a day or two later the chain was hit with a nation-
wide boycott, but that's another story. This is all off the
point, I just like telling stories.
| ... Well, part of the problem could be that many people aren't even
| willing to go so far as to discuss the possiblity of doing without
| government intervention (present company excluded, it would seem :-). So
| discussions often get hung up. But I think you'll find that many
| classical liberalists and Captalists *do* take part in voluntary actions
| to express displeasure for some policies in the private sector they do not
| approve of. ...
Actually, in the good old days, the Civil Rights and similar
movements had to come up with non-governmental strategies,
because the government was on the other side. They made
enough trouble so that Those in Charge decided they'd better
coopt the movements to the extent possible (as they had
previously coopted the socialists and the labor movement).
This served two purposes: it confused or defused the
radicals, and it helped swell bureaucracies. Now, I would
think libertarians might be interested in de-coopting these
movements. If you don't want the government, it's a good
idea to remove its _raisons_d'etre_, is it not?
J.J. Kuslich
>kus...@envmsa.eas.asu.edu (J.J. Kuslich) writes:
>| First, you're right that sit-ins, or any other demonstration that
>| violates the rights of others (i.e. ends justify the means) are NOT part of
>| classical liberalism. However, I'm a bit confused, because you seem to be
>| calling such actions "non-coercive" above. You didn't mean to say this,
>| did you? Because a sit-in most certainly IS coercive if the participants
>| refuse to leave when asked and must be forceably removed by police.
>
>They were non-coercive from the point of view of (left)
>anarchists. Whether they were coercive or not depends on
>your view of property, etc. etc. etc. Actually, the
>situation was trickier than that; they weren't asked to
>leave, they just weren't served, and when they just kept
>sitting there, the lunch counter was closed, at which point
>they left. And came back when it reopened. Woolworth's or
>Kresge's or whoever it was -- it was a 5&10 with (this is
>important) branches in the North -- wouldn't or couldn't ask
>them to leave, but it could refuse to serve them. Of
>course, a day or two later the chain was hit with a nation-
>wide boycott, but that's another story. This is all off the
>point, I just like telling stories.
Well, I liked your stories, to tell the truth. :) If activists
truly didn't violate the restauranteur's property rights as you describe
above (that is, they just sat and didn't refuse to leave when ask) then
that does not contradict classical liberalism either. In fact, it sounds
like a good idea to me as well as fairly peaceful. But if they're asked to
leave, that's the end of it.
>
>| ... Well, part of the problem could be that many people aren't even
>| willing to go so far as to discuss the possiblity of doing without
>| government intervention (present company excluded, it would seem :-). So
>| discussions often get hung up. But I think you'll find that many
>| classical liberalists and Captalists *do* take part in voluntary actions
>| to express displeasure for some policies in the private sector they do not
>| approve of. ...
>
>Actually, in the good old days, the Civil Rights and similar
>movements had to come up with non-governmental strategies,
>because the government was on the other side.
Yes, and THAT is where Civil Rights apply - equal treatment BY THE
GOVERNMENT, UNDER THE LAW. The government, because of it's monopoly on
force (except in self-defense, blah blah blah), it's potential power over
citizens, and out of strict fairness, justice, etc. must NOT discriminate
in legal matters. However, this says NOTHING about discrimination in the
private sector.
>They made
>enough trouble so that Those in Charge decided they'd better
>coopt the movements to the extent possible (as they had
>previously coopted the socialists and the labor movement).
>This served two purposes: it confused or defused the
>radicals, and it helped swell bureaucracies. Now, I would
>think libertarians might be interested in de-coopting these
>movements. If you don't want the government, it's a good
>idea to remove its _raisons_d'etre_, is it not?
I don't know what raisins have to do with this - I thought we were
discussing politics here. ;-)
[ Actually, my French was way back in High School and I don't remember much
of it. What does, "raisons d'etre" mean? ]
Well, you kind of lost me there with all your coopting,
de-coopting, re-coopting, optingopting. (My fault.) But I don't really
see why classical liberals would be very interested in any opting. Also,
c.l's don't necessarily want NO government at all (and no, that's not just my
bad grammar :), but a limited one. As for C.L., anarchists need not apply.
J>J>K>
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Tim Bomgardner
|> [someone else writes: I can open a restaurant, but serve who I want]
|>
|> And if not, how does it differ from a rule that says, "We shall enforce
|> no racially discriminatory contracts. If one comes before us, the
|> discriminatory portion will be struck from the bargain if possible, and
|> the remainder allowed to stand."
I think you missed his point. He is not disputing the unenforcability of
a racially discriminatory contract. He is asserting a right to refuse to
enter into a contract (on whatever grounds he chooses, including racial
discrimination), your arguements about implied contracts not withstanding.
TB
J.J. Kuslich
>
>J. J. Kuslich sic ait:
>
>JK>My opening a restaurant says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about WHO
> >I will CHOOSE to serve. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Why? Because no one has
> >any claim on another human's life. NO ONE.
>
>Ancient Teutonic law, as it was in force in mediaeval Iceland, and Saxon
>Britain, and which became the common law of our ancestors, imposed a
>duty on all innkeepers and proprietors of public houses, that they
>should serve all guests and pilgrims who travel on the King's highways
>to the best extent that they are able. They incurred that duty by
>choosing to open. This is in fact the origin of the phrase "public
>house." It was (and is) a necessity; otherwise travel and pilgrimage
>would be impossible.
So what?
>
>The judgment of a thousand years of our ancestors has been that those
>who open businesses to the public incur a duty to serve the public by
>the fact that they have opened.
They were wrong. So? Am I supposed to find some intrinsic value
in an old idea just because it's old? Altruism has been around alot
longer, but that doesn't give it any extra weight.
>If you want no one else to have a claim
>on your custom, keep your doors closed.
Why? And you just claimed to be "all for more freedom" (a curious
statement in itself because of the word 'more' ) in a response to Jim
Hranicky. Ha!
>This is the kind of "it's just
>tough" argument that pseudo-libertarians are fond of making in other
>circumstances. Perhaps it -does- infringe on your liberty; but no more
>than being charged extra for postage because you live in East Jesus,
>West Virginia would.
Huh? You seem to be very good at non-sequitors, but I think
the Redskins will still do well next season even without Joe Gibbs. :-)
>
>SG>This isn't a question even of values. This one is simple logic. You
> >want the government to "settle disputes in contract matters." Do you
> >actually think you can keep the government's role in doing -that-, while
> >not conceding the government's power to make rules to settle those
> >disputes, decide what is a valid contract, and what is not???
>
>JK>Yes, the government may set rules as to what the government will
> >consider to be a valid contract enforceable by the government. However,
> >this does not force people in any way to make such contracts. It becomes a
> >very good idea if you wish enforcement of the contract, but it isn't
> >necessary. You suggested that the government TELLS people what contracts
> >(i.e. what relationships) they may engage in, and that is nonsense. All
> >the government may do is define what is considered as a legally enforceable
> >contract.
>
>There is no clear place to draw a line here. A government might decree,
>"If you wish to make your contracts enforceable, they must be written on
>a decent grade of parchment, in handwriting, and stamped with a wax seal
>distinctive to each party." This appears to be a content-neutral rule;
>but it may serve a valuable policy --- a policy about which reasonable
>lawmakers can differ, though. Obviously, the government that makes and
>enforces this rule thinks that it is very important to let people know
>when they are binding themselves at law; so that they can back out any
>time before they press their personal seal into the sealing wax without
>charge. Is this rule one which lawmakers have no right to make?
>
>And if not, how does it differ from a rule that says, "We shall enforce
>no racially discriminatory contracts. If one comes before us, the
>discriminatory portion will be struck from the bargain if possible, and
>the remainder allowed to stand." You may consider this rule
>illegitimate; it is less content-neutral than the first rule; but -what-
>is the rule you are applying, if you label the first sort of rule as
>permissible to lawmakers, and the second illegitimate?
Because, as you seem to state yourself, the first policy interferes
with no rights, and the second does. Also, the second is NOT
"content-neutral" (though I'd like you to define that more clearly since it
is somewhat ambiguous.
>
>I think that letting government make rules --- of both types --- simply
>comes with the territory of leaning on government to enforce contracts.
Nope. Though, I am not surprised that YOU think it "comes with the
territory."
>Even if you assume an ideology that labels the first permissible, and
>not the second, you will not be able to let government make that
>distinction for itself.
That's what laws are for. To TELL government what to do. You make
it sound like the government is an entity independent of the citizens. Is
this how you think government should be?
>
>JK>Ah, yes. "Practical" This little buzzword has caused more decay
> >in the fibers of this country than any other word I can imagine. Once you
> >allow the government to start violating property rights, there is no way to
> >protect them any longer. They only remain protected to either prevent
> >revolution (if the cultural climate is such) or because politicians are
> >jsut so cowardly they fear such outright evil, or because money talks and
> >politicans may be bought to see property protected. But anyway, the
> >right is violated.
>
>Perhaps this is true. The question is, are self-proclaimed libertarians
>committed to an economanic dystopia, or are they content with rolling
[rest deleted as it's irrelevant]
I don't really know. I'm not a Libertarian.
>
>For, frankly, I -agree- with -most- of the Libertarian proposals on a
>point by point basis. I wouldn't be posting if I didn't. I agree with
>their perspective on individual liberties.
Yeah? Which ones?
>I agree with perhaps the
>majority of their economic agenda and their desire to be rid of most
>governmental regulation.
"economic agenda"? And what would that be, as you see it?
>Frankly, it seems to me that if we accept your views, there is only
>-one- conceivable set of laws, customs, and rules that could ever be
>justified.
Laws are context dependent. That is, situations change with time
and new laws may be needed, and old laws repealed. However, the PRINCIPLES
behind those laws and the governmental structure IS uncompromiseable.
Customs and govenrment have no business being associated. Customs
are "culturally" and societially determined and will only come through in
the government to the extent that politicians and govenrment workers are
citizens of a certain culture.
>Given the large variation observed in actual human
>societies, I have misgivings as to whether imposing such a system could
>ever be wise. It would violate as many people's rights to impose the
>libertarian vision on the world as it would anybody else's utopia.
I'm not talking about utopias.
Also, your assertion that Capitalism would violate as many rights
to implement as to not implement is unsupported and ridiculous.
Jay Cole
>For, frankly, I -agree- with -most- of the Libertarian proposals on a
>point by point basis. I wouldn't be posting if I didn't. I agree with
>their perspective on individual liberties. I agree with perhaps the
>majority of their economic agenda and their desire to be rid of most
>governmental regulation. But if this is intended as politics and not as
>dreamland, Libertarians must begin with the currently possible. The
>baleful influence of Ayn Rand has instead induced them to phrase their
>proposals in shrieking, moralistic certainties. This arouses my native
>skepticism. If libertarianism is going to go anywhere, it seems to me
>that it must become less doctrinaire.
Libertarians know and acknowledge that you can't place these principles in
all at once. It would create chaos. The propose a step-wise approach to
moving toward a full Libertarian society. For example, we look at the
educational voucher system as a step toward privatized school system. We
look at the reduction of the debt as a necessary step before we can become
a Libertarian state. The stepwise solution as in any political group is
driven by the members of the party at that time, common sense, and most
important, logic.
Jay Cole (dkff)
Steve Gustafson
Steve Gustafson sic ait:
SG>Ancient Teutonic law, as it was in force in mediaeval Iceland, and Saxon
>Britain, and which became the common law of our ancestors, imposed a
>duty on all innkeepers and proprietors of public houses, that they
>should serve all guests and pilgrims
J. J. Kuslich hoc responsum refert:
JK>So what?
It was not I who postulated mediaeval Iceland as a libertarian utopia.
Yet, even they maintained these allegedly oppressive customs.
JK>Because, as you seem to state yourself, the first policy interferes
>with no rights, and the second does. Also, the second is NOT
>"content-neutral" (though I'd like you to define that more clearly since it
>is somewhat ambiguous.
It seems to me that there is no right to have the government's aid in
enforcing contracts. The government is entitled to decide which ones it
wishes to help you enforce, and refuse to assist you on others.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Yes, my god exists! I carved him from wood myself!
J.J. Kuslich
>
>
>JK>Because, as you seem to state yourself, the first policy interferes
> >with no rights, and the second does. Also, the second is NOT
> >"content-neutral" (though I'd like you to define that more clearly since it
> >is somewhat ambiguous.
>
>It seems to me that there is no right to have the government's aid in
>enforcing contracts. The government is entitled to decide which ones it
>wishes to help you enforce, and refuse to assist you on others.
Well, if you wish an anarchist society with no govenrment, then you
won't have enforcement of contracts and won't have to worry about it.
However, if you have a Capitalist government, then the government may (and
can) enforce contracts under defined terms. So, yes the government WILL
enforce some and refuse to enforce others, based on the rules it uses to
define a valid contract (such as "the contract must be in triplicte with
one copy going to the first party..." and "the contracts must have an
element of time involved..." or what have you). Bureraucratic and
systematic rules, but NOT ideological rules (such as, "only contracts
formed between Democratic party members will be enforced since the
Democratic party is obviously the party of God." or other nonsense).
TERVI| MARKO J
>liability of shareholders is limited to the amount of their investment
>--- is a special right that must be created and conferred by government.
>Without this, at a very minimum, strangers to the association's
>contracts could hold all the shareholders liable for the corporation's
>liabilities.
>(steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson))
Limited liability works in two ways, and the other would to some extent
exist even without the government. Let's suppose there was no government-
created limited liability. Then people who would conduct business with a
company called Widgets LTD would know that the owners are not guaranteeing
what ever Widgets LTD is guaranteeing with their personal wealth. That's ok,
it's an implicit contract, and who doesn't like it can do business with some
other form of widgetbusiness.
Unfortunately governments have created a limited liability towards
third parties. For example if Widgets LTD causes a chemical spill which
damages other people and their property, then the owners of Widgets LTD are
not responsible with their personal wealth, although the third parties never
voluntarily decided to have anything to do with Widgets LTD. This flaw in
state-controlled capitalism should go. But, like in so many issues, people
tend to not question status quo, when it's pointed out that "this is the way
it's done in all western countries".
Marko Tervi|
Helsinki,Finland
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for you
And how your government can stop preventing you from doing that
Roger Collins
|> Under laissez-faire, in the absence of government intervention, the best
|> people can do is to form more or less elaborate partnerships or joint
|> ventures. What makes corporations unique --- the fact that the
|> liability of shareholders is limited to the amount of their investment
|> --- is a special right that must be created and conferred by government.
Imagine I give my brother $10,000 to start a business. In exchange, he
agrees to pay me 10% of the profit. I make it clear that I will not
be responsible for anything over my original investment. He gets into
serious debt and the business fails. The liability is all his.
How is my making such an agreement a "special right?"
If I borrowed $1,000,000 in a regular interest loan from a bank and
then I caused $10,000,000 damage to a neighboring factory. No judge
would ask the bank to cough up more than the original investment,
would they?
However, I admit something seems wrong with an entity in which *none*
of the owners are liable, or in a single owner limiting his/her
liability simply by incorporating.
I don't know how to resolve that one.
Roger Collins
Tim Smith
>Imagine I give my brother $10,000 to start a business. In exchange, he
>agrees to pay me 10% of the profit. I make it clear that I will not
>be responsible for anything over my original investment. He gets into
>serious debt and the business fails. The liability is all his.
>
>How is my making such an agreement a "special right?"
>
>If I borrowed $1,000,000 in a regular interest loan from a bank and
>then I caused $10,000,000 damage to a neighboring factory. No judge
>would ask the bank to cough up more than the original investment,
>would they?
One difference here is that in a corporation, the corporation is run for
the benefit of the shareholders. In your examples above, your brother
has no duty to run his business in a way to generate profits for your
benefit, and you have no obligation to run your business in a way that
will be good for the bank (e.g., you are free to do stupid things, go
bankrupt, and leave the bank out in the cold).
With a corporation, the shareholder has some say (for stock that can vote,
anyway), and the corporation will owe a fiduciary duty to them, so they can
take legal action if the corporation is being run in a bogus way.
A corporation is going to be a much more attractive investment. Without
limited shareholder liability, I don't think that much of a secondary market
will develop for shares in business enterprises, and without a secondary
market on which interests in an organization can be readily traded, there
will be much less interest in investing in the first place.
--Tim Smith
John R. Moore
>Under laissez-faire, in the absence of government intervention, the best
>people can do is to form more or less elaborate partnerships or joint
>ventures. What makes corporations unique --- the fact that the
>liability of shareholders is limited to the amount of their investment
>--- is a special right that must be created and conferred by government.
>contracts could hold all the shareholders liable for the corporation's
>liabilities.
>Government has also intervened by prescribing the rights conferred by
>stock ownership and making them standard. This allows markets to exist
>where one share can be easily valued in terms of other shares, without
>considering any special rights or liabilities you might gain or lose by
>selling corporation A and buying corporation B.
>None of these rights would exist without positive law behind them.
>Government is their source and creator.
This is circular. Without government, you wouldn't HAVE liability enforcement
in the first place. Thus corporations are just modifications to the
government's liability system.
--
DISCLAIMER: These views are mine alone, and do not reflect my employer's!
John Moore 7525 Clearwater Pkwy, Scottsdale, AZ 85253 USA (602-951-9326)
jo...@anasazi.com Amateur call:NJ7E Civil Air Patrol:Thunderbird 381
- - Support ALL ...erk glugh mmpph.... Memory fault (core dumped)
Bwaldrop
: Imagine I give my brother $10,000 to start a business. In exchange, he
: agrees to pay me 10% of the profit. I make it clear that I will not
: be responsible for anything over my original investment. He gets into
: serious debt and the business fails. The liability is all his.
: How is my making such an agreement a "special right?"
It depends what exactly your agreement is. If you are buying 10% of the
company, you are buying 10% of the liability. But if you are loaning the
business $10,000, and will be repaid with 10% of the profits in
perpetuity, that might be a different situation.
: However, I admit something seems wrong with an entity in which *none*
: of the owners are liable, or in a single owner limiting his/her
: liability simply by incorporating.
: I don't know how to resolve that one.
I think a truly free market would find a number of different ways to
connect capital with business. But I think that business in general would
be conducted in a much more responsible way if the government-created
liability laws weren't in place.
Bob Waldrop
Repent, Harlequin, Repent, said the Tick-tock Man
bwal...@xmission.com
Steve Gustafson
John R. Moore quoth:
SG>None of these rights would exist without positive law behind them.
>Government is their source and creator.
JRM>This is circular. Without government, you wouldn't HAVE liability enforcemen
>in the first place. Thus corporations are just modifications to the
>government's liability system.
Now you're thinking along the right track.
Without government, there would be no such things as "markets" or
"contracts" or "property rights" at all. The contents of those rights,
the shape of those institutions, and the actual measure of the rights
they confer, is a decision made by a lawmaker. When some property
rights are limited, or some contracts are decided to be unenforceable,
no one's inviolable freedoms have been trampled.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Vibrabimus noctu circa horologium.
T. Mark Gibson
>John R. Moore quoth:
>SG>None of these rights would exist without positive law behind them.
>>Government is their source and creator.
>JRM>This is circular. Without government, you wouldn't HAVE liability enforcemen
>>in the first place. Thus corporations are just modifications to the
>>government's liability system.
>Now you're thinking along the right track.
>Without government, there would be no such things as "markets" or
>"contracts" or "property rights" at all. The contents of those rights,
Guess again, Zippy!
You and I could be stranded on a island and develop a "market" a place
and/or system to barter goods. We could establish contracts..."you may fish
in my lagoon iff you give me one out of every three fish you catch--and I get
to pick the fish." We could have property rights...one half of the island is
mine and the rest is yours.
There is no need for third-party (read: government) lawmakers to establish
markets, contracts, or property rights.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Gibson | Free men keep and bear arms, slaves can't.
gib...@bmrl.med.uiuc.edu | Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian!
1:233/16 (Politzania) | First Hillary, then Gennifer, now us...
Ted Frank
>steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
>>Now you're thinking along the right track.
>
>>Without government, there would be no such things as "markets" or
>>"contracts" or "property rights" at all. The contents of those rights,
>
>Guess again, Zippy!
>You and I could be stranded on a island and develop a "market" a place
>and/or system to barter goods. We could establish contracts..."you may fish
>in my lagoon iff you give me one out of every three fish you catch--and I get
>to pick the fish." We could have property rights...one half of the island is
>mine and the rest is yours.
We can concede that libertarianism has the potential to work wonderfully on
a two-person model. Maybe you can even add a few people, assuming they're
friends to begin with. I fail to see the relevance: in kibbutzim, socialism
works wonderfully (they've produced an inordinate share of Israeli leaders),
but I don't think any of us would dispute that the socialism kibbutzim
practice wouldn't work on a national level.
>There is no need for third-party (read: government) lawmakers to establish
>markets, contracts, or property rights.
Until society becomes any reasonable size. I wouldn't want to use a
Greyhound bus to take two people from New York to Boston, but that
doesn't mean the bus isn't well-suited for taking forty people at a time.
--
ted frank | "Many things--beating with a rubber truncheon, water torture,
the u of c | electric shock, incessant noise, reruns of 'Space 1999'--may
law school | cause agony as they occur yet leave no enduring injury."
kibo#=0.5 | -- Judge Easterbrook, 841 F.2d 181.
John R. Moore
>John R. Moore quoth:
Nope. Markets would still exist and property rights would also. Rights
are not dependent on the existence of a government. However, rights
need a specific kind of government in order to be protected most
efficiently (NOT in order to exist). Without a government, I'd need to use
weapons to protect my property rights, but I would still have those rights.
Markets don't need a government at all. Contracts need an
enforcement mechanism, and government seems to be the best way to do that.
--
DISCLAIMER: These views are mine alone, and do not reflect my employer's!
John Moore 7525 Clearwater Pkwy, Scottsdale, AZ 85253 USA (602-951-9326)
jo...@anasazi.com Amateur call:NJ7E Civil Air Patrol:Thunderbird 381
"Government is the agent of those who are too refined to do their own mugging."
Joseph Sobran
gregory m. byshenk
gib...@bmrl.med.uiuc.edu (T. Mark Gibson) writes:
>You and I could be stranded on a island and develop a "market" a place
>and/or system to barter goods. We could establish contracts..."you may fish
>in my lagoon iff you give me one out of every three fish you catch--and I get
>to pick the fish." We could have property rights...one half of the island is
>mine and the rest is yours.
>There is no need for third-party (read: government) lawmakers to establish
>markets, contracts, or property rights.
There is one problem with this scenario. I'll skip the issue of markets
because what a "market" is is complicated; let's just look at contracts
and property rights.
Your island situation does not involve a "contract," but only a sort of
gentleman's agreement. What makes something a contract is that it is
enforceable. This is not the case on the island. Suppose your partner
fishes in your lagoon and refuses to give you the fish; what are you
going to do? All you can do is refuse to make further agreements; you
have no way of getting your fish.
Similarly with respect to property rights. We don't need to get into
the status of rights and whether they exist prior to government, but
only with the issue of enforcement. You can certainly have property
on your island: you each claim your own half of the island. But if
one of you refuses to respect the property rights of the other, what
do you do? Your "property" then becomes whatever you can manage to
hang on to. If the other resident has encroached on your property,
and violated your "rights" -- well, that and two coconuts will buy you
a fish.
The point is that without some means of enforcing your rights and
contracts (i.e. a government), such things are meaningless, at least
in practice.
greg
--
Gregory Byshenk | The University? Hah! Half the time
gbys...@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu | *I'm* not responsible for my opinions!
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Department of Philosophy
"Says Red Molly to James: 'That's a fine motorbike...'" R.T.
Steve Gustafson
T. Mark Gibson quoth:
TMG>You and I could be stranded on a island and develop a "market" a place
>and/or system to barter goods. We could establish contracts..."you may fish
>in my lagoon iff you give me one out of every three fish you catch--and I ge
>to pick the fish." We could have property rights...one half of the island i
>mine and the rest is yours.
TMG>There is no need for third-party (read: government) lawmakers to establish
>markets, contracts, or property rights.
What happens if one decides to no longer honour the bargain? If one
announces, "I am taking over the whole island. I will attack you if you
resist?" Or, the other fellow comes by night to fish in your lagoon
without paying, while you sleep? Or, one of you announces that "Our old
arrangement is cancelled. I now want two of every three fish you
catch."
Quite obviously, something is missing from this ad-hoc arrangement that
prevents it from being a real "contract." What is missing is the
potential for enforcement and interpretation under a code of rules that
existed prior to and independent of your actual agreement. In short,
yours is something less than a contract, because no government exists to
enforce it or interpret it.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Mors infanti felix, juvenis acerba, nimis sera est seni.
T. Mark Gibson
>T. Mark Gibson quoth:
It is a contract between two people. Either party can take whatever steps
he deems necessary to enforce the contract. But if it is a good contract,
both parties should find it beneficial enough to want to keep up their
respective sides of the bargain. For example, if we are both capable of
gathering enough food to feed ourselves, we may decide to specialize in
obtaining the foods we are best at gathering. Perhaps you are better at
fishing than I am while I am the more accomplished hunter, so we agree on
some sort of exchange rate between fish and wild boar. Since we can
each gather more than enough edible plantlife to suit ourselves, we don't
barter fruits and vegetables.
If one party actually harms the other, there is likely to be violent conflict
and the person most skilled in combat is most likely to survive, but both
parties may end up dead or they may simply stop fighting and avoid each other.
Societies can and have existed without governments as we know them. Modern
societies do require governments, but the problem is that they tend to end
up with much bigger, much more expensive, and much more oppressive governments
than is good for them. Governments are necessary evils in modern societies and
should be kept as small and powerless as possible while still maintaining
the capability of defending their citizens from external and internal threats.
gregory m. byshenk
=>TMG>You and I could be stranded on a island and develop a "market" a place
=>>and/or system to barter goods. We could establish contracts... [...]
=>TMG>There is no need for third-party (read: government) lawmakers to establish
=>>markets, contracts, or property rights.
=In article <2213.1...@tfd.coplex.com>
=steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
=>What happens if one decides to no longer honour the bargain? [...]
=>catch."
=>Quite obviously, something is missing from this ad-hoc arrangement that
=>prevents it from being a real "contract." What is missing is the
=>potential for enforcement and interpretation under a code of rules that
=>existed prior to and independent of your actual agreement. In short,
=>yours is something less than a contract, because no government exists to
=>enforce it or interpret it.
In article <2ei5ep$q...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>
gib...@bmrl.med.uiuc.edu (T. Mark Gibson) writes:
=It is a contract between two people. Either party can take whatever steps
=he deems necessary to enforce the contract. But if it is a good contract,
=both parties should find it beneficial enough to want to keep up their
=respective sides of the bargain. [...]
As I made the same point as Mr. Gustafson, I'll throw in a comment here.
You are missing the point. What you are describing is _not_ a "contract"
between two people, only a sort of "gentleman's agreement." What makes
something a "contract" is that it is _enforceable_ and not dependent
only upon the goodwill or whims of the parties.
A contract is _binding_ in a way that your agreement of two parties
on an island is not. This is precisely the point made above. There
is nothing inherently wrong with agreements, but they will hold only
so long as the parties agree. Of course, so long as both parties
continue to hold up their side of the bargain, there's no real
difference between a contract and any other agreement. The difference
arises when one party stops holding up his or her side of the bargain.
Suppose, in your island scenario, that your co-inhabitant agrees to
let you fish in his lagoon, provided that you give him one-third of
the fish you catch. Your catch is particularly good, and when you
finish fishing, he decides that he is going to take _all_ the fish.
A "contract" implies that at this point someone would step in and
say: "You agreed to take only one-third of the fish, and you are
bound by that agreement." In the island example, this is not
possible, all you can do is fight it out.
To make the point again: a "contract" is more than just an agreement;
it is a _binding_ or _enforceable_ agreement. Without some method
of enforcement or ensuring that parties remain bound, your agreement
is not a contract. Thus, a contract requires something like a
government.
[...]
=Societies can and have existed without governments as we know them. Modern
=societies do require governments, but the problem is that they tend to end
=up with much bigger, much more expensive, and much more oppressive governments
=than is good for them. Governments are necessary evils in modern societies and
=should be kept as small and powerless as possible while still maintaining
=the capability of defending their citizens from external and internal threats.
A minor point here: I'm not sure if you are intending to argue a
libertarian (or Libertarian) position here, but you'd best be careful
with positions like the above. The position you state would probably
be acceptable to almost _anyone_, including a lot of Marxists. Almost
everyone (excepting maybe some fascists and other authoritarians) believes
that governments should be only as large as necessary to defend citizens
from external or interal threats. The only disagreement would be over
what the 'threats' are and how much government you need to defend
against them. Some people think 'heresy' is an important internal
threat. John Stuart Mill, in _On Liberty_, thought that "offenses to
public decency" (I think that's a direct quote, although I don't have
a copy handy) were internal threats that ought to be defended against.
The way you phrase things, everyone agrees that we have to draw a line
somewhere, the only disagreement is over where to draw the line. Why
is your suggested location superior to that of others?