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Old 11-27-2007, 04:49 PM
foal foal is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 1,019
Default Re: A Critique of Rothbardian Natural Rights (sorta long)

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You're going to too much effort to try to make these exaggerated generalizations to make your point, as if everything is black and white. In describing our system you go from "dictatorship" to "mob rule" to "representative mob rule". You claim the terminology is not important, but I'd say those are all pretty significantly different. I'm not sure "representative mob rule" even makes sense. If it's representative then it's not mob rule. If you don't want me "playing semantics" then stop labeling things with attention-grabbing evil/negative sounding words.

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come up with your own label i dont care to keep trying. You keep explaining the difference between the terms but have yet to explain why that matters relative to the debate. Some people force other people into their way by WHATEVER THE MEANS. Stop playing games.

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Hah I'm not playing games. It'd be like if I said "anarchism is marxist communism" and then got upset at you for playing games when you corrected me.

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"You said that iraq was wrong because the system was forced."
No I didn't. I said
"invading countries and trying to force them to have the sort of government we want doesn't work well."
There's a big difference.

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I dont see the difference. Please elaborate.

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Statement one: "Iraq was wrong, because the system was forced.
Statement two: Invading countries and trying to force them to have the sort of government we want doesn't work well.
I don't see how the two statements are equal in any way. Do I really need to elaborate?

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I still dont see why you think that anyone outside of those who find the legitimacy should be forced into the system. Why shouldn't democracies be entirely voluntary? Please defend why the systme must have the coercive element.

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That's a huge topic and I'm not going to get into it right now. I just entered this thread to argue against your more absolutist, black/white statements.

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. It's good for settling political disputes without actual fighting and for preventing any one person or faction from becoming too powerful.

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Iraq is an empirical proof that democracy is very ineffective at this goal.

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Of course Democracy alone isn't going to work miracles. No system of government or lack of government will. To be a good form of government it merely needs to be good in comparison to the alternatives. So for this to be evidence of the lousiness of democracy, we'd have to compare it to something else. Maybe as an experiment we can invade another country with a sectarian rift and force them to have no government. Then we can compare it to Iraq and see which works better. I'm being facetious of course, my point is just that evidence does not work the way you're suggesting it does. We need both an experimental group and a control group to compare to. If you look at History I think you'll find that the "best" societies have been democracies. That's debatable and not certainly not conclusive that Democracy is the ideal system, but it is the sort of empirical evidence you brought up.

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Iraq was not in chaos. Democracy created the chaos.

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I thought invading the country, overthrowing the government, dismantling the army and occupying the country created the chaos.

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Right now there are not enough property rights in iraq. If property right were presen i dont think its wrong to theoretically assume the society would be rid of the current problems and on a much more prosperous path.

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I'm curious how you would bring about these property rights, since they can't be enforceable by your philosophy?
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