Topic: Intellectual Property - In All Fairness! - page 82. (Read 105893 times)

Couldn't I just hire a bigger and meaner private security firm to nullify the protective capabilities of your security firm?

What's so particularly special about having a central authority for enforcement? Could I not just hire a private security firm to protect me? If you can't understand the NAP, then we have worse things to worry about (I'm not referring to the detonate-by-water-droplet-nuke problem either)

Indoctrinated? Cultist? Yeah those words change everything now... What was I thinking? Poor crazy brainwashed illogical me... Horrific indeed! Sheesh.

I did agree with a person being quarantined, but that's because they were the weapon.

It's so funny. They both keep trotting out the NAP, as if they've been indoctrinated by some cultist book they both read. And they keep making this horrific assumption that everyone just follows the NAP - but how exactly does that work unless some central authority enforces the NAP?

I thought you agreed a person with smallpox could be quarantined.  My bad.

As humans we are able to organise they type of society we want to live in.  We have the capacity to intervene to regulate dangerous materials and quarantined dangerous people.  In the case of fertiliser, as we discussed earlier, the case of a person with smallpox, we know that lives will be saved if we do intervene.  Since we have the capacity to save these lives, failing to intervene is facilitating extra unnecessary killings.

Do you have a moral basis for stopping us?  

What's the matter?  You don't like the idea of rules that you only follow if you feel like it? 

Oh my goodness - are you being deliberately obtuse?  Is it not clear yet that I'm hypothesising a libertarian world?  There is already a solution in the current system.  The law states what is or is not permitted.  This is not stated under libertarianism and, as such, any individual could potentially interpret almost any action as hostile.  You yourself have said that a positive or negative interpretation of hostile intent could depend on whether the supposed assiland is SMILING or not.  Do you not realise how ridiculous that is?


Well if that happens, here's what you could try.  Carry your nuke around with you and see if any ghosts object.  It's *really* hard not to ridicule statements like this.  Political philosophy is a *social* issue.  If it's just you, there's no society, no political philosophy, no problem.

I agree that, if your actions concern only you and your property, you may do as you please.  But when your actions involve me, directly or indirectly, actively or passively, I declare that you may not do as you please.  And you STILL haven't resolved the problems - they are not 'edge cases' - they are simple situations which probably occur thousands of times a day around the world without resort to violence.   Go on, you asked me who owns the room and I answered.  Are you free to carry a gun in or not?  Answer it, and the other questions, in your next post here, or I declare the discussion over - libertarianism, as proposed by you and b2c, is fundamentally flawed and unworkable in the modern world.


EXACTLY. You are negligently endangering them.  Why don't you ask b2c or Fred if they will condemn an unqualified person who carries a nuke around with them.  Or - just read back a few pages.  They have already expressed themselves abundantly clearly.  Now - this litigation - where does it take place?  Which court?  Who enforces the verdict?

So... I'd have to move house every time somebody from Texas happens to move in on my street?

Who pays for it?  Is it obligatory to participate and to obey the rules of this BBB company?


Where does the litigation take place, given that your polluting factory is thousands of miles from your house, from your market, and, most importantly, from the security company defending you?  And now you are suggesting that, under libertarianism, you can expect to be extorted by the mafia at any moment?  That doesn't sound very satisfactory...  And, let's be clear, if the Mafia is more powerful than the security company you already employ, well, you can expect them to come knocking anyway.  Right?

In an unregulated world, money=guns.  Damn, even *with* regulation, it's already like that.  b2c and Fred propose libertarianism because they abhor the MightMakesRight status currently enjoyed by governments.  You have just acknowledged that libertarianism=MightMakesWinnerMakesRight.


There's also the law and a small matter of being put in prison, though I concede that in the current system wealthy people seem not to end up in prison.

NAP is absurd, because its membership is voluntary.

Round and round in circles we go.

The NAP doesn't speak to anything specific regarding nuclear weapons or smallpox. Additionally, if Atlas says it does, I would disagree with him. You can directly react to violence or threats thereto (overt gestures indicating such). If you wish to call that regulating, that's fine, but it should only affect the person specifically in conjunction with the use of the weapon, not independent of it.

Just possessing a "dangerous" object independent of the person who may act upon it doesn't qualify any object for regulation. To wit you don't regulate the materials themselves just because they have the potential to do harm.

You're never going to get an answer to that question, because the answer is nothing more than, "because I said so."

Obviously, the rest of us will dispute that, but he'll stand firm.  That means we'll have to fight it out and whoever is left standing will uphold their opinion.  Violence will always determine who gets their way, no matter what semantics/defintion/word games the libertards want to play.

That's avoiding the question.  We have the capacity to interfere and if we don't, people will die.  You feel that you have a right to ahead anyway.  What is the basis of this right? 

By the way, need to point out that current insurance companies work the way my proposed security companies do. What's stopping them from simply running away with the money is that practically all insurance companies are themselves reinsured through other bigger specialized companies. It's easier to just take out a claim from the reinsurer, fix your customers, and continue to make money off them, than run away with whatever you have collected so far.

So if there was nobody around me, or I was the last living human, I would become incapacitated, supposedly because I'm only enabled by those who permit me to have "personal liberty"?


I am at liberty to do everything insomuch as it only concerns me and my things (excepting mutual contract), but I am not at liberty to prohibit you from the equal supremacy to act upon you and yours. Liberty is justifiably constrained by the NAP. Nothing particuarly difficult to understand about that.

Give or take a few far-fetched edge cases where it takes a little more imagination, it works pretty well.

I would guess that tourists wishing to travel to those places would hear lots of stories about other tourists being shot for stupid reasons, and would make sure to study up on the culture of the place they are going. Likewise, the natives may be able to recognize the out-of-place tourists and act accordingly. Perhaps it will become common to just simply rent a gun when you arrive, too. It's not much different from current tourists traveling to Somalia or UAE.



No one. As mentioned below, just personal financial consequences. In extreme cases, perhaps even litigation from neighbors who believe you are negligently endagering them by having flamable property close to theirs without means of securing it if it starts to burn?


Properties contracts are awarded by residents who will hopefully have a choice of security companies, with security companies having incentive to fight for customers by providing better service. Admittedly, that may require the customers/land owners to be a bit more mobile....
If someone does not wish to adhere, see above/below.


They could. There could also be a secondary overseeing body, like a BBB for security companies, that oversees multiple territories, helps enforce secority company contracts, and which the security company would have to be a member of if it wants to have any hope of doing business. The security BBB is not tied to any specific company or territory, and is not directly responsible for security, and thus will have incentive to keep all of the other companies in check (unless all of them colude, if which case the company exposing that collusion will likely end up with all the contracts)

That's true. Though you're still exposing yourself to massive litigation risk, and as mentioned, people paying security companies to keep them safe will very likely expect that company to protect them from outside threats, not just from threats on their own property. If you own a nuke, and are not paying anyone for security, you should probably expect to have random companies to come by to try to extort you mafia-style, or have private contracts placed on obtaining either your nukes or your head, since, technically, neither one is well protected.



Yes. Unless the owner is paying someone else to stop you. As far as i understand it, the main source of all might in libertarian society would come from customers handing out money. Voting is essentially done by whoever can get paid the most.

P. S. This is not something that I know or studied. I actually know very little about libertarian beliefs, and aside from a few books and documents have read little about it. I am quite literally just thinking through these things and making them up on the spot. Thus, I fully expect to be wrong in either my reasoning, or my understanding of libertarian beliefs.

Funny how that quote (in bold) sounds awful Libertarian-like. As in, the right to defend oneself. I would carry a gun if necessary, so that at a moments notice, should someone threaten my life, I could defend myself. Taking the right to defend myself from me equates to unprovoked violence or threat thereto. Do you agree that you have a right to self-defense and ownership of a gun (among other things), or am I missing something? Seemingly you have no problem "engaging in mortal violence", so what's the problem?

Yes.  The key thing is that whatever system is used, it needs to provide the safety that society demands

I guess my point was that this capacity will very likely exist under both, democratic government, and private libertarian systems, and thus the argument of which system is better is somewhat moot for this specific example.

Might makes right is in it's purest form in a libertarian society. In a democratic society, we have the means to get all voices heard and a centralized power that prevents strong individuals or groups from exploiting people. In libertarian society the man with the biggest gun makes all the rules, which is why this non aggression bull shit is.... Well... bull shit.

ABSOLUTELY!  Where there is a cultural precedent AND everybody has similar ideas of what is and is not acceptable, then libertarianism would be great - like in a small isolated country village perhaps.  But people travelling from far and wide, with different ideas of what is acceptable, would almost certainly feel threatened by normal behaviour for the place, or would make the inhabitants feel threatened by simply doing what they feel is normal.  My questions are: how can we resolve this conflict?  Fred insists he has the right to carry a gun around unless otherwise prohibited.  I insist he does not, and would be willing to engage in mortal violence if necessary to defend myself.  I come from a country where guns are outlawed, but I've been in Texas - all I could do was take a big gulp, keep my head down, and try not to piss anyone off.


At your service...

Lucky you said "likely", otherwise I would have asked:  Who decrees that you should do so?  Who enforces you to do so if you choose not to?

Who 'awards' territories to a private security company?  What if there some people, e.g. nuclear bomb holders, there do not wish to adhere to the contract?

Or alternatively the security company could just shut up shop and run with the money.  Unless, of course, everyone in that territory, now dead or dying, happens to have been all along secretly paying another honourable security company to hunt down the first, just in case the first one should run away from its responsibilities.

So what if you don't pay for security and to hell with the consequences - not having to pay for security or insurance will also enable you to provide a cheaper product than your competitors.  [sarcasm] Ohhhhhh, of course, people will buy the more expensive product because they'll ALL know that you don't have insurance and they'll really disapprove of that even though your factory is thousands of miles from your market. [/sarcasm]

So MightMakesWinnerMakesRight?  I can freely invade and take control of defenceless property and no-one other than the miserable owners will try to stop me?