Topic: Objections to the non-aggression principle - page 3. (Read 5884 times)

Would you not agree though that the opposite of lawfulness and justice would be violence at least in the context of the aforementioned definitions? As in things that are unjust and unlawful are violent, and if they are not violent, then they may be a "crime" without a victim, and therefore not "criminal" to begin with? Or at least not a proportional punishment/force/response relative to the measure of the physical aggressive acts themselves.

I'm interested in proportionality of punishment, restitution and marginal deterrence, and thus any response in excess of the "crime" committed is "unfairly" disproportionate and unwarranted. It would appear we have many laws that meet this description. We make criminals out of relatively ordinary people.

It's very difficult to make a statement/definition maintain it's truthfullness and conciseness without some context.

It is my writing. I wouldn't call it my creation per se. I claim the word combinations but none of the individual concepts.

Fred, why not make a thread where your effort to create your own law can be discussed? 

I can see its been revised and improved it over the first draft I saw; is this something you created yourself?

Men, Women, Agent(s), Person(s), and Life collectively or individually have synonymous equivalent meaning herein. De facto entrusted crucially dependent Life admits safe guardianship or conveyance thereto.
1.   All men are equal in Rights.
  1.1.   All men are intrinsically free, whose expression when manifest, admits autonomy.
  1.2.   Rights exist because man exists (consequent to Life).
  1.3.   Rights are inalienable and inherent, hence discovered not created.
  1.4.   Man commits autonomous choices apart from all other men.
2.   Rights are defined as the Liberty to control, secure and defend one’s Property and Life.
3.   Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything not in violation of other’s Rights.
4.   Rights Violations are unprovoked physical aggressions (UPAs) initiated by man against another, or Breaches of Contract (BOCs), resulting in an incontrovertible diminishment in one’s Rights.
  4.1.   UPAs are non-consenting acts which cause an Object (Property or Life) to undergo a transferred or transformed change to the Object’s original energy state or condition.
  4.2.   Energy transfer to/from an Object or energy transformation of the Object occurs by means of three ways, namely: thermodynamic work, heat transfer, or mass transfer.
  4.3.   Contracts are compulsory promissory agreements involving Property or Life (and specific performances or forbearances therewith) between mutually consenting men.
  4.4.   Misrepresentation of Contract obligations or BOCs resulting in misappropriation of Property or Life, or expenditures related thereto, is subject to Rights Violations.
5.   Property can be anything comprised of physical material matter (PMM).
6.    Property is the exclusive non-simultaneous possession or dominion of discrete PMM.
  6.1.   Unconstrained/non-delimited/uncontrolled PMM (UPMM), UPMM effusions or energy transmissions, are not Property; they are ownerless nonexclusive UPMM or Emissions thereof, until physically made to become otherwise.
  6.2.   A Property’s inertial reference frame, dimensions, Emissions/Emitters, usage and genesis thereof, define and constitute its Property Scope Ambit (PSA).
  6.3.   PSAs that initiate tangible material perturbations which intersect or preclude another’s preexisting or antecedent PSAs may be subject to Rights Violations.
6.4.   Preexisting antecedent unconstrained Emitters cannot proscribe the receipt of similar, both in magnitude and direction, intersecting Emissions Flux.
  6.5.   Property cannot transform into something extracorporeal, extrinsic or compulsory due to the manipulation or interpretation of its PMM composition.
  6.6.   Absent Contract and Force, Property or Life of one man shall not control, compel or impede Property or Life of another.
  6.7.   Unintentional personal ingress vouchsafes unimpeded passage and egress.
7.   Force is the means –proportionate to the aggression– to obstruct, inhibit or extirpate the Rights of any man who interferes with or imminently threatens the Rights of other men.
  7.1.   Force can only be applied to resolve Rights Violations and is consequently just.
  7.2.   Man, or an Agent to man, must ascertain that a Rights Violation has occurred.
  7.3.   Man is severally liable and accountable for solely his Rights Violations a posteriori.
8.   Justice, viz., lawfulness effectuates disjunctive Rights between men.
9.    That which is neither just nor lawful is Violence and imperils the Rights of man.
10.   Violence causes inequality (unequal in Rights of man) and is forbidden.

A state with a monopoly on violence, with its ability to exercise force subject to democratic control, is preferable to being subject to the whims of gang law or mob rule where violence is meted out as and when a gangster feels like it.

We already know you oppose democracy - what you are failing to do is offer something better. 

"Gang law" is exactly what we live in today. The strongest armed group of a territory imposes its law through coercion. That's precisely what libertarians are against.

Nations, definitely not.
Governments, in some senses, related to sovereignty, perhaps. But you should never forget that individuals in a free society would not be able to force millions of others to pay for their expenses. It's much easier to do stupid things or violent wars when you're not paying the bill. The decision makers in governments barely need to bother in making bad decisions, while a free individual would internalize all of his costs.

And by the way, if even governments, which don't pay the true price for they actions, manage to solve most of their disagreements diplomatically, it makes no sense thinking sovereign individuals would live in constant war. Logic and history show otherwise. (medieval Ireland, for instance, had less and smaller wars than continental Europe in the same period).

Also, if you realize that governments are in anarchy in relation to each other, and if you support the (wrong) idea that a ultimate decision maker is imperative for society organization, than the only logical conclusion is that you support the abomination of a World Government... do you?

How is such a question relevant? First of all, I made no such claim. Secondly, I did in fact claim that you can't presuppose that a stateless society would value the NAP, thus the point of our discussion is for you to demonstrate that a stateless society would universally adopt the NAP. You're getting absolutely nowhere by trying to argue for the existence of a scenario by presupposing it.

You are contradicting yourself.

1. As you said, there is 1 final authority on law.  Thats one law.  Why call it anything else?
2. Monopolies are not always inefficient.  They work well for things like health and defence.  In fact, I don't know of any health or defence system worth having that isn't monopoly based.  
3. Disputes are resolved peacefully when the cost of violence is too high.  Events like the invasions of Poland and Iraq show you what happens when you don't have legal protection and the other party sees little cost to attacking you.

And this is my problem with the NAP.  It doesn't allow for people who are plain aggressive and outgun you.  And it doesn't allow you to create monopolies where needed or to raise taxes.  It doesn't allow for creation of property rights.  Even simple things, like for example, to build a road requires compulsory purchase.  NAP advocates say this means no new roads.  I don't see that as a good thing.

I believe you are incorrect. First, there is not "one law". The law is constantly changing and is subject to jurisdictional dispute. I will give you that with states, there is ultimately a final authority on law in a given region, but would you want a final authority on any other good or service in a region? That's called a monopoly, and most people recognize that they provide poor quality service. Second, the state is "tied up" in regulations of its own making. Those regulations could disappear in an instant if the state wanted badly enough to violate them. For example, take a look at the recent murder of a United States citizen by his own government. Citizens are forbidden from learning the legal justification under which any of them might be summarily killed, because it is a state secret.


How do you come to this conclusion? There is no "single law" for the entire world, and almost all disputes are resolved peacefully. Almost all of the most violently resolved disputes are between governments. Does that speak nothing to you?

Please understand, I do not advocate for a stateless society in which every individual acts like a state. I merely believe that most individuals will generally prefer to solve problems non-violently, and this tendency is suppressed when immersed in a culture which celebrates the use of violence. I believe the state, as a fundamentally violent institution, provides such a culture.

chrisrico - the reason the state is tied up in regulations as to how it uses violence is that within its borders, there is only 1 law.

Remove the state and you have no one single law.  So every dispute will require violence.  For example, a dispute over who gets the house in a divorce will have the husband's hired thugs enforcing his rules against the wife's hired thugs enforcing her's.
 
Same will apply in inheritance law.  If Grandad leaves the entire estate to his daughter, she will have to hire thugs to fight off her brother's thugs as her brother will say that the will was not valid.

There are great benefits to having only 1 law and 1 force authorised to use force. 

Why would or how could the same individuals who bind the state so securely not do the same to a competitive marketplace in the provision of law and justice? Just look at how each type of service is provided. It is considered legitimate (through social norms and state-run education) for the state to threaten violence against those who do not fund it, regardless of their satisfaction with services received. Private organizations, on the other hand, have no such guaranteed source of income, and must convince individuals to purchase their services without threat of violence.


Simple? Do you consider, for instance, the federal government of the United States, with its origin as an intentionally limited government, to be simple and efficient? I can't find an authoritative answer, but I've heard that the entire USC is over 200,000 pages long.


That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Conversely, you seem stuck on the fallacy that currently exists must be beneficial for the fact that it exists. If, for instance, statist solutions to poverty really worked, don't you think they would have by now, in a world where governments have the largest welfare budgets of all time?

I get that and we all share that objective. 

What I don't get is an efficient fair alternative to one party having a monopoly on violence and that party being tied up by all kinds of rules and regulations as to how it can use violence. 

By "works" I mean society functions in an efficient and just manner, even if undesirable behavior exists.

We agree on the demand for law.  Where we disagree is on the most efficient way to provide it.  A state with a monopoly on violence which is tied down by rules as to when it can use violence is a simple and efficient way of providing a safe social environment.  

If you know of a better one, let me know but it does have to be better - not just different for its own sake.  

I know it does - as we saw in London last year and see in umpteen stateless regions all over the world today, stateless societies are playgrounds for violent individuals. 

That's why I prefer the idea of a state.  If we need violence to protect ourselves, then one body with a monopoly on violence is preferable.

Hawker when I said you are incorrect, I meant that to be coming from my point of view, it is my opinion you are incorrect. I just want to repeat, a stateless society works with participants who are violent criminals, thieves, and rapists.

I dispute that law, or the idea of property "comes from" the state. I will however assume that it does so for the sake of argument.

That the idea of property, as a legal concept, comes from the state does not imply that it those same arrangements/services could not be provided at least as efficiently by a private market (not geographical monopolies).

What you don't seem to grasp is that there is a demand for law, it's merely that the state has a violent monopoly on the market. Take away the state, and you don't take away the demand, you just take away the monopoly. In the absence of a perceived legitimate monopoly, competition flourishes, just as it does in any market.

Your property is yours under state law.  Take away the state and what was your property is the property of whoever can take it by force.

Its not enough to assert that I am incorrect.  I can show that violence falls and quality of life rises are we get into modern organised states.  I know you want to improve on what we have and so do I.  But I don't believe you can wish away the huge percentage of the population that will resort to violence within 30 minutes of state protection being taken away from people and property.

First there was no state, then it came into existence. Your statement implies there were no property rights before the state. It seems to me that I have the right to retain ownership of my property. If I do not have the right to retain ownership of my property, logical inconsistencies arise.


The state provides protection via police in London. Claiming that removing that protection is somehow equivalent to a stateless society is misguided because in a stateless society protection is provided in a decentralized way. The stores were looted because there was nothing protecting them from being looted. Your example shows the weakness of centralized state power. The state failed to protect the people, they failed in their responsibility so the people had to suffer for it. In a stateless society the responsibility would be on the institution providing the protection and the clients who are looted would have recourse. If you believe that a society without government is dependent on all citizens acting what today would be considered "lawful" you are incorrect.