a quick thought

[ConstantineX]

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Someone who rejects the morality of natural rights might be swayed by the practical benefits of AC.

But they will never be swayed by most the AC posters on this board, because those posters will never admit that such a person can have a coherent sense of morality without accepting natural property rights.

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I don't disagree with you. But I don't think this belief is shared by the ACers.

Let's forget about "rights" and "morals." Those are the terms ACers insist on forming the discussion around. Let's talk about the guy that wants poor people to get money. That's his preference. I think ACers would argue (as I tend to agree with) that in the absence of government, charity would work more efficiently. Is that a fair claim, ACers?

So then, if you believe in the practical benefits of AC, why not dwell on them? Why dwell on a side of it that people don't necessarily agree with?

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The evangelists, those who best disseminate the Word, cannot admit they are susceptible to the same cognitive biases as their ideological opponents. Why, that would make them bad evangelists.

[pvn]

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Two questions, I guess:

A.) It is morally acceptable for you to force me off land that you claim to own if I don't believe in ownership?

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Sure. Because all I have to do is say I don't beleive in a right to not be assaulted. If you're not violating anything, then neither am I.[/i]

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I'm stipulating that the land owner is an ACist...in which case I assume he believes in a right to not be assaulted, right? Are you just saying that the ACist has a right to suspend his own morality in order to coerce/assault someone who doesn't agree with that morality?

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Why doesn't he? Are you saying that morality is subjective, but you can't change your mind about it?

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If the ACist changes his morality to something that disgrees with AC, you are changing the premise of the question rather than answering it.

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How so? The question doesn't specify anything about the property owner's morals, only the squatters.

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B.) If the answer to (A) is "yes", isn't the person you are forcing off the land being involuntarily coerced into accepting your view of morality?

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Nope. He doesn't have to accept anything. He's just removed from that piece of land. He can then accept whatever view of morality he wants.

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I guess "accept" is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say "obey". My point is that he is coerced by the ACist in the same was that the ACist is coerced by the state.

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No, the state acknowleges property (to an extent), and imposes its power anyway.

Since your hypothetical person doesn't recognize property, the "coercion" he experiences is effectively nothing different than the "coercion" you would experience if you tried to pitch a tent in a bear's den. The bear doesn't "own" the cave. What are you going to do when he violates your rights and assaults you?

Without property, we devolve to might makes right.

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The bear is not a moral actor. You are. You have the ability to make decisions as to what it moral and what is not. We could all decide that assault is immoral without recognizing property, and simply allow people to go where they wish and do what they want. They would be more "free" under this system than the AC one. In fact, they would be most "free" without any restrictions on assault either.

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I'll go along with this. However this sort of freedom isn't my concern.

Further, in such a case, more assaults are *going* to occur, regardless of what anyone thinks about the morallity of such assaults. This should be quite obvious from the fact that people must eat to survive, and without the concept of property to protect investments of time and labor, conflicts will arise over the low-hanging fruit (quite literally, in this case). The conflict between the property "owner" and the squatter are really near the bottom of concerns here.

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AC limits freedom and imposes coercion by forcing people to obey property rights and prohibiting assault, whether they agree with these principles or not.

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AC doesn't "do" anything.

People defend themselves and the products of their labor.

People realize that cooperation has a higher EV than conflict. Property rights are ultimately a manifestation of voluntary cooperative agreements.

Moral systems are subjective in my opinion. However, some are objectively superior to others. Ones that are consistent are superior to inconsistent ones. I don't believe it's possible to construct a moral system which is consistent AND allows for self-ownership BUT does NOT allow for property rights.

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(You could say that someone who assaults another person has voluntarily chosen to engage in their social system, but you can't necessarily say the same thing about someone who wanders onto another's property.)

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No to both. If you initiate a transaction without consent, you haven't chosen to engage in a social system, you've chosen to IMPOSE a social system. And you have no expectation of the other party returning the interaction in any particular way (unless we're talking about some weird, self-evidently inconsistent system where you have a right to aggress but nobody has a right to defend themselves against you).

Someone who wanders onto property also has not (necessarily) engaged in *anything*. But not all wanderings are equal. Wandering into the parking lot of an office building in the middle of a wednesday afternoon is not the same as wandering into someone's bedroom at midnight. Agree or disagree?

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Statism does the same thing, based on different and/or additional underlying principles. But the difference is one of degree and not category.

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It's quite more than a difference of degree. Property (legitimate property as described by AC theory) arises from voluntary interactions. States do not. Statism is a construct that is imposed *over* a structure of property. Property predates the state, it is a necessary condition for a state.

[ConstantineX]

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Moral systems are subjective in my opinion. However, some are objectively superior to others. Ones that are consistent are superior to inconsistent ones. I don't believe it's possible to construct a moral system which is consistent AND allows for self-ownership BUT does NOT allow for property rights.


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I'm quite sure NickMPK disproved this, and just by proof of counter-example. He showed a society in which aggression was banned, and supposed a "voluntary" interaction was one requiring the approval of an entire society, i.e., communism. I fail to see how that is self-contradictory. Your argument, again and again, is to show that it renders the meaning of the word "coercion" as to be nearly meaningless. That's not to say it isn't a fine argument; it is, and we have seen through the course of human history and through the study of economics that the innovation of property rights on a "voluntary" basis allows each individual to equitably prosper.

But why on an individual basis? Notice that the communist is not persuaded by this rhetorical argument. His concern is not with individual self-satisfaction or the achievement of individual preferences; his concern is for the overall utility of the group, which behavioral psychology HAS demonstrated is increased in showing people might choose to be more "egalitarian" in comparison to the group. An argument for AC comes from the Austrian School, which asserts that it is complex or impossible to ascertain the true preferences of a community, and that those preferences are best realized when individual members act independently. But surely government has become better at discerning true "community" preferences by political innovation? It really does depend on the individual preferences of the moral actor; I fail to see how his system is not self-consistent, just merely inefficient.

And is this coercion always "'nearly meaningless'"? Consider the story of LTCM in 1998. After pursuing an arbitrage strategy that did quite well for some time, something bad happened and regulators, biased or not, deemed it to be a "systemic" risk that posed potentially great risk to the global financial markets if a bailout weren't organized. Is that contradictory to you? Voluntary agreements and contracts between investors and the hedge fund may have threatened to wipe out the pension plans of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, who had nothing to do with those agreements. Are you willing to actually assert that there is moral justification to not potentially blunt that blow? "No man is an island unto himself."

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Further, in such a case, more assaults are *going* to occur, regardless of what anyone thinks about the morality of such assaults. This should be quite obvious from the fact that people must eat to survive, and without the concept of property to protect investments of time and labor, conflicts will arise over the low-hanging fruit (quite literally, in this case). The conflict between the property "owner" and the squatter are really near the bottom of concerns here.


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So this is where we put on our empirical hat. Again, as I've pointed out, most of your arguments stem from things like "externalities are not measurable", and that voluntary interactions are best pursued through bilateral agreements. There are great deal many empirical arguments for libertarianism and AC outside a moral framework. The first and most important realization for me was the evolutionary perspective, that individuals are most satisfied when pursuing selfish goals. Therefore, the best legal framework and moral system should necessarily "play to our strengths" by recognizing where incentives stem from. Moreover, demand curves slope downward, and supply curves stem upward, in most cases. We therefore can combine these empirical truths alongside our most basic moral intuition and arrive at something like libertarianism or ACism. In fact, this bolsters the argument that ACers are continuously defending about Somalia - that property rights aren't self-organizing and don't arise in a vacuum. If the moral authority or reasoning behind libertarianism was so clear cut and appealing, why hasn't it arisen around the globe in an organic fashion? No, we see that we combine our economic knowledge, moral intuition with a good dash of ingenuity to design property law, which differs greatly from outright ownership, to licensing, leasing, and now even "open-source" innovation like the GPL or Creative Common licenses to further our desired outcomes. It would be far better for ACists to play up this synthesis of knowledge and morality that to pretend that it singularly existed in THE BOOK OF LIBERTY to be discovered. Would ants choose our system?

[bkholdem]

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Two questions, I guess:

A.) It is morally acceptable for you to force me off land that you claim to own if I don't believe in ownership?

B.) If the answer to (A) is "yes", isn't the person you are forcing off the land being involuntarily coerced into accepting your view of morality?

The point it to demonstrate that AC involuntarily forces people who do not believe in property rights into accepting a particular view of morality, just like statism involuntarily forces people who do not believe in the legitimacy of the state to accept it.

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Even if I were to accept your view of AC 'forcing' you to accept a particular view of property rights (which technically I don't you can keep whatever view you want, there may be unplesant consequences but you are not forced to change your view and accept AC view) there is a huge difference in scope here I think.

In statism there is a whole laundry list of things you are 'forced to accept' that are not on the AC list of things you are 'forced to accept'. There is a massive list of rules and regulations and masters to bow to and people who have influence and control over you, including the potential forced servitute in the army where your masters instruct you to go murder others.

I want to see a list of things you are 'forced to accept' in AC and a list of things you are 'forced to accept' in statism so I can compare.

It's the difference between being 'forced' to hold a penny and being forced to dig a ditch 50 feet deep and climb in it and live in it 2 months out of the year.

Trying to equate the 'burden' of living under AC with the burden of living under statism is ridiculous. In one land I have tremendous freedom and in the other I suffer tremendous opression. Please give me the burden of this 'forced' beautiful freedom and keep your opression.

[pvn]

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Moral systems are subjective in my opinion. However, some are objectively superior to others. Ones that are consistent are superior to inconsistent ones. I don't believe it's possible to construct a moral system which is consistent AND allows for self-ownership BUT does NOT allow for property rights.


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I'm quite sure NickMPK disproved this, and just by proof of counter-example. He showed a society in which aggression was banned, and supposed a "voluntary" interaction was one requiring the approval of an entire society, i.e., communism. I fail to see how that is self-contradictory.

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It's not... as long as the components of that society (i.e. the people) are all in it voluntarily. If people are compelled to participate, there is inconsistency, since by definition, the compelled party does not approve of his participation, and therefore there is not approval of the entire society for that interaction.

Such an arrangement seems doomed to small-scale applications or paralysis. We can subjectively rate this system less desirable than other consistent systems (at least, I am, and I'm going to guess that the vast majority of people would also). Further, note that such an arrangement is easily "permitted" under a broader system of voluntary interactions, so for those small-scale applications where it makes sense, such a structure can be used.

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But why on an individual basis? Notice that the communist is not persuaded by this rhetorical argument. His concern is not with individual self-satisfaction or the achievement of individual preferences; his concern is for the overall utility of the group, which behavioral psychology HAS demonstrated is increased in showing people might choose to be more "egalitarian" in comparison to the group.

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And those people who share that preference should be free to pursue interactions that they think will satisfy them.

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An argument for AC comes from the Austrian School, which asserts that it is complex or impossible to ascertain the true preferences of a community, and that those preferences are best realized when individual members act independently. But surely government has become better at discerning true "community" preferences by political innovation?

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I'm not sure this is something I'm really interested in finding out. We might find out who the most robust individuals are by stabbing them all in the chest.

Further, the methodology is flawed. If you ask people if they'd rather have a comic book or a picasso, most will select the picasso. Now if you ask them if they'd rather buy a comic book for $2 or a picasso for $100MM, more will pick the comic book. Governmental methods for determining these preferences divorce the goal from the cost. Who doesn't want "free" healthcare, or "free" education, or "free" ponies? If I can just check a box on a piece of paper and people magically show up to mow my lawn, wow, this is like the best thing ever, right?

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It really does depend on the individual preferences of the moral actor; I fail to see how his system is not self-consistent, just merely inefficient.

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It's not inherently inconsistent, but it becomes so the moment those preferences are imposed upon anyone who didn't explicitly agree to abide by the outcome of that preference-measuring exercise. If a bunch of people decide to vote on where to hold their pizza party, there's no inconsistency. If they gang up and drag someone else along (and make him pay, of course), then it gets problematic.

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And is this coercion always "'nearly meaningless'"? Consider the story of LTCM in 1998. After pursuing an arbitrage strategy that did quite well for some time, something bad happened and regulators, biased or not, deemed it to be a "systemic" risk that posed potentially great risk to the global financial markets if a bailout weren't organized. Is that contradictory to you? Voluntary agreements and contracts between investors and the hedge fund may have threatened to wipe out the pension plans of Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, who had nothing to do with those agreements. Are you willing to actually assert that there is moral justification to not potentially blunt that blow? "No man is an island unto himself."

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This example is too specific and too vague at the same time. I don't know enough about the specifics of this case to really comment. Were the pensions set up with specifc objectives? Surely people can voluntarily draw up investment vehicles where the managers of the funds are entrusted with specific goals, acceptable risks, etc, and if those are violated, the managers would be liable (liability could also easily be coded into the charter for the investment).

Any particular example you're likely to bring up will be encumbered by layers and layers of government regulation anyway, to suggest that what happens under such a regulatory regime would neatly translate into an unregulated scenario is making quite a large leap.

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Further, in such a case, more assaults are *going* to occur, regardless of what anyone thinks about the morality of such assaults. This should be quite obvious from the fact that people must eat to survive, and without the concept of property to protect investments of time and labor, conflicts will arise over the low-hanging fruit (quite literally, in this case). The conflict between the property "owner" and the squatter are really near the bottom of concerns here.


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So this is where we put on our empirical hat. Again, as I've pointed out, most of your arguments stem from things like "externalities are not measurable", and that voluntary interactions are best pursued through bilateral agreements. There are great deal many empirical arguments for libertarianism and AC outside a moral framework. The first and most important realization for me was the evolutionary perspective, that individuals are most satisfied when pursuing selfish goals. Therefore, the best legal framework and moral system should necessarily "play to our strengths" by recognizing where incentives stem from. Moreover, demand curves slope downward, and supply curves stem upward, in most cases. We therefore can combine these empirical truths alongside our most basic moral intuition and arrive at something like libertarianism or ACism. In fact, this bolsters the argument that ACers are continuously defending about Somalia - that property rights aren't self-organizing and don't arise in a vacuum. If the moral authority or reasoning behind libertarianism was so clear cut and appealing, why hasn't it arisen around the globe in an organic fashion?

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Time preferences, of course. When you're starving, or trying to avoid the boot stamping on your face, your priorities are slightly re-organized.

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No, we see that we combine our economic knowledge, moral intuition with a good dash of ingenuity to design property law, which differs greatly from outright ownership, to licensing, leasing, and now even "open-source" innovation like the GPL or Creative Common licenses to further our desired outcomes. It would be far better for ACists to play up this synthesis of knowledge and morality that to pretend that it singularly existed in THE BOOK OF LIBERTY to be discovered. Would ants choose our system?

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There's a combination of time preferences and basic evolutionary emergent traits at work here. We can assume that the behavior that we call "instinctive" provides some amount of satisfaction to ants. They (some of them, at least) like to be part of a colony.

Some people find that sort of structure comforting as well. But others don't.

Perhaps some ants would choose "our system" and others would not. Why do you frame it as an all-or-nothing proposition?

[bkholdem]

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Bkholdem is the only "utilitarian" ACist on this board who might have an answer for you beyond "That violates my rights, so you can't do that". So you'd have to ask him.

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You're saying that someone who rejects the morality of natural rights might still not be able to be swayed by the practical benefits of AC? I don't think this is what many ACers believe.


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Someone who rejects the morality of natural rights might be swayed by the practical benefits of AC.

But they will never be swayed by most the AC posters on this board, because those posters will never admit that such a person can have a coherent sense of morality without accepting natural property rights.

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As a utilitarian ACist (a rule untilitarian) I will say that I neither 'reject' nor adopt the morality of natural rights, but I am certainly swayed by the practical benefits of AC (including the practical benefits the poor and destitute will experience that they are denied under statism) which happens to provide me with additional utility.

And it is irrelevant to me if the other AC posters (one, all, or any % in between) admit or deny that a person who rejects the morality of natural rights can have a coherent sense of morality without accepting natural property rights. I accept property rights but I don't think I accept the notion of 'natural' property rights.

I have also had a pleasant debate with another ACer in the politics forum about morality (it did not revolve around property rights though) if you care to search.

[bkholdem]

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Someone who rejects the morality of natural rights might be swayed by the practical benefits of AC.

But they will never be swayed by most the AC posters on this board, because those posters will never admit that such a person can have a coherent sense of morality without accepting natural property rights.

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I don't disagree with you. But I don't think this belief is shared by the ACers.

Let's forget about "rights" and "morals." Those are the terms ACers insist on forming the discussion around. Let's talk about the guy that wants poor people to get money. That's his preference. I think ACers would argue (as I tend to agree with) that in the absence of government, charity would work more efficiently. Is that a fair claim, ACers?

So then, if you believe in the practical benefits of AC, why not dwell on them? Why dwell on a side of it that people don't necessarily agree with?

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I don't know about the rest of them, but if you do a search of my posting history you are not going to find a lot of arguments for natural property rights or what have you.

And if you do a search I think you will come across some fine posts from Borodog and HMK who is able to articulate the benefits of AC over statism without focusing on morality.

[ALawPoker]

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I don't know about the rest of them, but if you do a search of my posting history you are not going to find a lot of arguments for natural property rights or what have you.

And if you do a search I think you will come across some fine posts from Borodog and HMK who is able to articulate the benefits of AC over statism without focusing on morality.

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OK, maybe it's just my perception that those guys focus more on the morality than the practical benefits. Maybe they don't. But even still I'm talking about practicality in a different sense.

I know Boro and others have written some good stuff. But even in explaining practical benefits their stuff still assumes AC's values as the right way to think (it's practical *to them*) and does not recognize conflicting values as worthwhile ends in their own right. The conflicting values, in their minds, are simply values that people shouldn't hold.

If I'm a biggot who doesn't like gay people, it's easy for me to think I'd prefer a state. The state seems to give me some control over their behavior. But hey, wait a minute, in the absence of a state I'm free to discriminate against whoever I want as I see fit. Tough as it is to accept with my primitive mind, but maybe things would be better without the magic wand of government making all the decisions. Even though I hold a value that leads most people to conclude they need a state, you can argue that my interests are best protected without a state.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the assumption that X is universally good, so everyone is free to conduct their business, oh look more X!

I'd like to hear how AC would be good for the people who happen to value intrusion into their neighbors' lives (I'm not concerned with why intrusion should be regarded as a bad thing). If your answer is that AC could not exist as long as people value intrusion and that you wish they'd realize that if they had different values things would be better, then fine, say it. But most any AC argument I've ever read on here will, either explicity or implicitly, say that a certain value is "right" and will never mean much to someone who unflinchingly holds a different one.

My impression is that ACers believe it is OK to hold any value whatsoever. Does that not extend to valuing nosiness and intrusion? So what happens when someone's value/moral/preference/whatever is to intrude in someone else's business? Is a state a good solution for those people? Or are there good arguments that show why people who want a hand in my life will still be better off without a state?

If the latter (which I suspect is your answer), why then do the vast, vast majority of self-proclaimed ACers seem to hold classically liberal values? If it should be so clear that everyone is better off with no state, then why do only the people who already agree intrusion is wrong seem to buy it?

If a gay bashing drug fearing god loving businessman told me he was an ACist, I guess I'd know he was *really* an ACist, and not just a pothead who's never thought much about the role of the state in our daily affairs. The fact that very few of these people seem to exist makes me wonder if the state is actually bad for the universal spectrum of our society's preferences, or if it's just bad for people who think a certain way to begin with.

[Nielsio]

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I'd like to hear how AC would be good for the people who happen to value intrusion into their neighbors' lives (I'm not concerned with why intrusion should be regarded as a bad thing). If your answer is that AC could not exist as long as people value intrusion and that you wish they'd realize that if they had different values things would be better, then fine, say it.

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Any group of people who value 'intrusion'/slavery, will clearly going to be enslaved.

Only if the larger part of the group believes in and understands freedom will it ever come about.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that the natural state of man is not to believe in slavery. Man naturally believes in universal morality.

[ALawPoker]

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Any group of people who value 'intrusion'/slavery, will clearly going to be enslaved.

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Sweet. Works for them!

Like I said I'm not really interested in why intrusion is bad. I, personally, regard other people's desires as worthwhile ends.


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Man naturally believes in universal morality.

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This is an interesting point. I'm not really sure what it's based on or what exactly you're implying though. Care to elaborate?