Topic: What's so special about the NAP? - page 17. (Read 20458 times)

Hmmm.  There is a real America.  Go out and try to get people to vote to change those things; it won't happen because Americans are violently anti-drug.  Heck you guys even have towns where alcohol isn't allowed.

I eat a banana. Is that aggression? Well, not if it's *my* banana. Yes if it's your banana.

So you can't decide what is or isn't aggression until you first have a system of property rights. NAP simply says to respect those property rights.

This should make it uncontroversial. I mean, who argues for theft, fraud, or violence? But it doesn't do what those who argue for it thinks it does.

For example, does a NAP argue against the war in Iraq? Well, no, since NAP permits retaliatory force. There are no shortage of violent acts Saddam Hussein committed that the United States could retaliate for, such as the Al-Anfal Campaign. You need complex principles and arguments about international engagement and entanglement to get there.

Does a NAP argue against taxation for any reason? Well, no. The government may take its own property by force if needed, and laws determine what belongs to whom. Once a law is passed that taxes you, the tax amount is no longer your property.  You need complex principles about the scope of laws and the just applicability of laws to get there.

So really NAP just says something we all agree with -- force is the last resort when someone doesn't do what they're supposed to do, and lying to get a thing of value is bad.

Good old U.S. of A. Land of drug prohibition that well over 50% of the populace disagrees with, a TSA that everyone hates, and numerous other unpopular laws. Proof positive that the "lesser of two evils" is still fckn' evil.

You must live in a pretty fucked up place if a policy you believe that the majority of people want can't get voted on.  Where are you from?

I assume you actually mean removing all taxes and allowing private firms to offer competing services to those the government provides? If it made it onto a ballot, I can see it passing pretty handily. Of course, it would never make it onto the ballot.

That's a problem with the NAP too I suppose. 

Is there anyone who thinks the NAP would ever be freely adopted in an election as a replacement for democracy?

I assume you mean The National System of Political Economy? I was unable to find "Principles of Political Economy."

I'm in the process of formatting that book into an ePub for easier reading. I expect to have that completed tonight, then I'll start reading.

As far as I can tell, the only people in this thread who have claimed that NAP should be the "sole" moral philosophy are those who oppose it and those who fail to understand it.  The rest of us recognize that non-aggression is merely the basis of any consistent, and just, moral code.


The "modern" derivatives market, which is completely unregulated, managed to create $600 trillion in liabilities with no governing authority whatsoever.  I submit that as evidence of the possibility for debt relationships to exist without government monopolies.


The NAP does not prevent individuals, and society by extension, from being proactive, or from following the wise who see change coming.  Though I can see how you may have gotten this impression by generalizing the views of some Libertarians.  I'm just going to defend non-aggression here, not market anarchy.


Frankly I assumed you would choose a more realistic threat than this.  Do you recognize the irony that, thanks to a minor application of the NAP known as mutually-assured destruction, neither the US nor Russia will even remotely approach thermonuclear confrontation?  Nuclear war is a complete canard.  Neither Putin nor Obama are irrational actors.  Not even Dick Cheney was insane enough to broach this.

The economic meltdown is a disaster, true, but it is a contrived disaster which is being deliberately exacerbated by the FED, just like the Great Depression.  And, yes, the solution to this problem lies with the masses, with projects like Bitcoin and others.  The solution to poor (or in this case malicious) leadership is not different leadership, it's less leadership.


Look, I have no responsibility to hand-hold every mouth-breathing moron into making the correct decisions in life.  The most I can do is point out the correct path, and to insulate myself from the consequences of their not taking it.  The choice is up to them.

You accuse adherents of non-aggression of protecting "oligarchs", and then promote this "heroic leader" garbage?  You should consider yourself lucky if aristocrats choose to lead by example rather than simply marching the poor lemmings off to an early demise as they have done repeatedly throughout history.  Is that the "responsibility" you think is being shirked?

And it's not "collective guilt" for individuals to be collectively responsible for their individual choices.  It's just reality.  If you want to change that reality, you won't do it through heroic republicanism and convoluted legalism.  Clearly all that does is make us all collectively responsible for an ever-increasing prison population.  You'll do it by promoting basic property rights, individual responsibility and non-aggression.


I'm glad you bring this up.  Because I think it's also important to point out that we live in a world in which individuals can obtain thermonuclear weapons, and the technology to destroy us all.

As a result, I would proffer that the rational choice for those who wish to guide civilization away from ruin, would be to tone down the grandiose collectivist navel-gazing, and consider adopting a more strictly moral philosophy that accounts for this fact.


I was alluding to Gödel.  


Yes, and the fact that you don't believe this is possible tells me that you don't fully understand the concept of non-aggression.

Furthermore, that you can only seem to define morality in terms of "justice", and justice in terms of "nebulous ethereal feelings", tells me that you don't really have any better alternative either.


This was to give you a "right wing" option.  Since I'm not up to snuff on neo-conservative political philosophy, unfortunately it was the best I could do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_verbosity



My response: The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman. Available for free,likewise as a pdf, at that link. A little digging will get you an html version, or a mobi pocket one, if you prefer.

It appears someone has read a history book.  Thanks for getting that one for me.  Let me add this.  That in our country the public will is enacted but the rights of the minority are protected.  These individual rights are universal rights which we believe should never be violated on the individual's account, regardless of the benefit to the public.

That's the real balance that should be being discussed, not NAP-land, foolish fantasies.  You NAP-sters should go buy James Madison's collected works and read them.

First, there aren't many people who could write that with a straight face. If you're one of them, I'm not sure whether to feel depressed or take pity on you. In practice, "separation of powers" means that the government is divided into warring political factions and everyone else is caught up in the cross-fire. Laws are made by people you probably didn't vote for to serve vocal (and typically lucrative) special interests. If you're accused of a "crime", you may get a fair trial or you may not. Either way, the verdict will be based on your compliance with the written law rather than anything resembling justice, and the punishment is often out of proportion to even the made-up crime you were accused of, to better ensure compliance.

Second, in "NAP-land" you have not only real but maximum separation of powers, since there is no monopoly on defense. Arbitration and defense services are distributed through the market. There are no written laws to adhere to, made up by people you didn't vote for, just the self-evident and universal principle that if you want others to leave you alone, you have to be willing to do the same.

Finally, if you should happen to be accused of violating the NAP and punished without a fair trial, those who put you through a kangaroo court and punished you unjustly are not shielded from the consequences of their actions by the monopoly provider of defense services. Government courts have written rules and procedures, but there is no punishment for government officials for violating them. If you're lucky you may get an early release, maybe even a formal apology. In "NAP-land" you can seek redress against the private arbiters and enforcers who harmed you; they have no special protection.

I may have been extending the definition of  Ad hominem a bit there, but I meant it as such, that you were saying my arguments were sophistry but didn't seek to explain how that wasn't met with a reasonable response.  It was an 'ad hominem' against my argument, I was anthropomorphizing my argument.  Sorry, sometimes my hyperbole gets carried away.

I'm glad to hear that you are willing to read something I'd suggest.  But I must inform you I've already read the massive turd that is Atlas Shrugged.  =]

What do you have for me?

By first book will be Principles of Political Economy by Friedrich List.  You can get it online for free as a PDF.

Why do I 'not like' the NAP, you ask?  Because the NAP is used to preach some type of Libertarian utopia that has never been seen on land or sea or in the fossil record and upon cursory and deeper analysis to the society governed by NAP one (who is literate in civics) realizes how deranged and ridiculous it is as a sole governing and moral philosophy.  That is why.

Let me explain.  Power relations exist.  And they exist without the proverbial "gun to your head" scenario that every Libertarian canard seems to invoke.  Power relations exist by virtue of almost every facet of difference in ability between individuals in an aggregation of individuals.  Where there is a difference in ability, wealth, intelligence, knowledge, age, sex, basically anything there is a difference in power.  (Are you with me so far?)

So let's take debt for example.  How does the creditor know that he's relatively secure in loaning the money?  How does the debtor know he's protected from dishonest lending and/or usurious methods of loaning?  How do bankruptcy proceedings exist for individuals?  If the creditor couldn’t be reasonably assured of repayment, then why would he loan to anyone?  If we returned to debtors prisons and/or he was guaranteed repayment then why would he not simply lend to anyone and everyone (the infirm, the deranged, children, deadbeats, etc.)?  And how do you have modern debt relationships without, yes, a monopoly of power that enforces the same rules and promotes a reasonably fair '3rd-party' that is relatively indifferent to the proceedings but is acting in the universally established methods and rules for governing said situation?  Rigorously define to me how that process works without a something that clearly is governmental in spirit, regardless of whatever pedantic titles you may want to assign to things. 

This is just one aspect to which the NAPtopia has no answers, and there are literally hundreds we could go through.  It is whenever the ‘rubber meets the road’ so to speak that all this beautiful rhetoric and literary masterwork of Libertarianism completely implodes, that’s why they can’t talk about specific policy or specific anything just arbitrary nonsense.

Let us define, albeit perhaps crudely, some basic terms.  “Society” is a lot of things, but let’s simply define it as the emergent behavior of the actions of people.  The “public good” is what helps the general population both in the present and in the future for people that have yet to be born. 

The world, actually the universe, exists in a constant state of flux.  Things change and will forever always change as far as we know.  Humanity can either react to the change (your seemingly preferred method), let’s call this the reactive approach.  Or humanity can be proactive and governed by wisdom, that is by the people that have the foresight to see these things coming and can steer the civilization away from said catastrophes and toward higher states of existence.  Those are I guess the options boiled down to their most basic levels, you can either be governed by ignorance, fear, and ideology (our backward past that you’d like to return to) or wisdom, justice, and foresight (republicanism, a ‘just king’ or other models).  This is the conversation that needs to actually happen; that is, how to determine the best means of a system for determining and establishing and enforcing justice, even the arch-reactionary Libertarian Fredric Bastiat admits this much .  The Libertarians say that this pursuit of State Justice can’t work or doesn’t work, wholly ignoring that their very lives and their very culture are testament to the fact that it did work and has worked.   Is it perfect?  Absolutely not!  But it gets closer to that, perhaps, unattainable perfection by the involvement and concern and action of those of intellect and goodwill, and the more they shy from this process the more it is corrupted by the unscrupulous and the further it moves from virtue the closer it moves towards ruin.

In terms of existential threats: presently we are seeing an economic meltdown that has the potential to be more disastrous than the Great Depression.  We see an incredible escalation of NATO aggression against Russia that is rapidly heating up in the thermonuclear armament sphere.  We have a worldwide decaying UK/US (‘special relationship’) empire that is frantically trying to maintain their oligarchical privilege (which all you are unknowingly defending with your crackpot ideology) and threatening a thermonuclear WWIII of mass extinction on the planet.  And these are just some of our problems. 

And let me just follow that up with a response to what is likely to be this ‘ideology in a can’s response.

“Yes!”, a Libertarian or otherwise someone of your Liberal Tradition would say, let’s let the degraded masses of people as a whole solve these problems!  Yes, just like the “Borg-Blob” model of the direct Democracy of “Occupy Wall St.” worked so well…?  All these attempts to say that “the people” should solve these problems, as you present them are not only a way to ‘pass the buck’ of any responsibility of action from yourself to the space between individuals but a way to collectively blame the emergent behavior that is society; to as it were, to blame a process that doesn’t have the human characteristics of ‘choice’ or can in turn by ‘blamed’ by such notions that are only applicable to individuals.  This strikes at the heart of the fallacy of Libertarianism, they invert and turn inside out Society.  You want to say that Society has all the properties it doesn’t have and has all the properties that it doesn’t.  By saying that these problems should be left to “the people”, as such, is saying the emergent behavior of the people is to take action and if the society (“the people”) do not take action then they (“the people”) are to blame for their problems; this is the doctrine of “Collective Guilt” – and I must admit, it’s a brilliant way to try and shirk your responsibility.  It is a modality of learned helplessness.  The fact of the matter is that society cannot be blamed in this manner and it cannot be the cause of anything in the manner that is being described.  I know that’s a rather abstract point, but it is permeated throughout the Libertarian doctrines, one simply has to be observant enough to see it.

Although Society as presented by the Libertarian (& their father the Liberal Tradition) doctrine cannot make Choices, as such, it is left quite obviously to individuals.  That is, the people of goodwill, intelligence and morals in the society have greater power over their fellow men, they have greater power over the future of men, they have historically governed the process by which we all owe our present lives.  In the past they have acted in accordance with virtue, not shying away from the grave responsibility that they possessed.  They used their influence and power to lead and guide the society away from crisis and toward progress.  Such is why we exist, and it is a great legacy to let down.  It is spit in the eye of every one of your ancestors who took up this responsibility and acted in their best possible accordance with what they knew was right.  If they choose not to take up this burden then others will, and they will not act within the accords of justice and will drive the civilization into the ground.  The problem, dear sirs, is that the stakes have never been higher.  We don’t live on a blank chalkboard by which you can devise, from scratch, every rudimentary axiom by which you want your utopia to be defined by.  We must work with that which we presently have and be aware and knowledgeable of its past, its present and its future trajectory; if we are to be able to change that future then we must learn all these things.  We live in a world with thermonuclear weapons, with the technology to destroy us all, return to a new Dark Age or to usher in a new Renaissance all within our lifetimes.  The choice is all yours; the defeat has the potential to be absolute, but so does the victory.


No sir, the problem is I fully understand it and I don't believe it.  You are seeing someone outside your ideological Libertarian bubble peaking in at you and informing you are an ideological captive and a slave.  That's why it must seem so alien to you.  The words of the NAP remain the same everywhere, this is true, but the NAP is anything but consistent in its meaning and it's not made to be, it was made to confuse ignorant well-meaning people that don't read hundreds of history books and would rather feel like some type of wizened sage by virtue not of wisdom but of a single line of rhetoric.  It looks like it's working quite well.  The problem is that no society, beyond the most primitive of tribal societies cannot even come close to living by the NAP.  The first paragraph I wrote above has what I find wrong with the NAP.

 

I 'have a poor understanding of information theory'... because I don't agree with the NAP or SO?  I work in the IT field as well (as most here do) yet I realize that human interaction is not governed by the type of rigorous determinism that your Java script is operating on.  In fact, I've noticed that programmers think very well in this logical flow type of format but for that very reason are nearly retarded in contemplating open systems. They cannot see the simultaneity of cause and the simultaneity of effect and the interplay in which cause becomes effect and effect because cause, they want simple A causes B causes C logical flows.  We need less Rain Man, more Socrates.

Because I say that modern society is complex (which it is) you claim that I claim that it has to be governed by "complex" philosophy.  I’m not necessarily disagreeing or agreeing with that, but I never actually said that, what I'm trying to illustrate is that the system of law must be necessarily complex in dealing with various facets of human interaction.  That's quite different than just wishing or saying that law should be intentionally complex for the sake of being complex or for the sole purpose of being complex because society is so.  In addition, your allusion to Occam is misguided, simply because something is complex doesn’t imply inconsistency.  What I've explained and continue to explain is that everything cannot be boiled down to NAP or SO and that different scenarios must be defined with regard to those circumstances if we are to be concerned with justice, which I am.  I gave an example above of debt relationships, yet for any possible facet we can think of there will be different actions and structures and guidelines (presumed laws) by which justice in that situation would be the greatest fostered and supported.

The axiom I seek to act in accordance with is justice itself, the thing about justice and all the virtues is that they are not of this physical world, the pure form of it resides in the realm of thought and cannot be rigorously defined by deterministic procedural ideology.  Justice isn't some type of fixed procedure by which you can apply the same medicine (NAP or SO) to every scenario, justice requires action, it requires involvement, it requires you to quit being an 'arm chair' observer and take part in your own future and create your own destiny and be a part of history rather than simply being a passenger in someone else's.  And yes, it requires force of action.

While justice is not a fixed procedure or a process it is the principle involved in whatever action or decision is morally being made.  To be a moral human being you must look at every situation and determine what justice is and then seek to carry it out.  This is the grave responsibility of being a human being, knowing the difference between good and evil and acting in accordance with it.  This is something that every human has the obligation and responsibility to do for themselves and their brethren and why people shy away from it so much.  It is why many have the wish to be servants, that the desire to be a slave is alive and well and apparently most alive with those that claim the 'greatest freedom and liberty'.  In becoming an ideological slave to this doctrine, you pretend to absolve yourself of these moral, innate obligations.  Those that take up these doctrines do not want that responsibility, what if they choose incorrectly and hurt people?  These are the types of fears inherent in the NAPtopians, that by somehow atomizing the society, which is the logical result of the NAP, then they will arrive at a place where moral decisions are no longer relevant and no longer required simply by virtue of their existence.  The great burden of being human will be lifted from their shoulders.  This is another allure of the NAP.


The Golden Rule is better since it promotes positive action which anything beyond the society of the most basest of animals requires - that is group collaborative action for the survival, improvement, safety and upward progress of that group.  This does not come from morality being strictly negatively defined.

Direct Democracy is perhaps the stupidest idea ever invented.  You need to open your eyes and see that the difference between the doctrines of NAPtopia, Anarchism and Pure Democracy are, in fact, only very slightly different from each other.  They share a numerous amount of the same inherent fallacies.  This is something I can clarify if you desire.

Was the mention of Hammurabi's Code some type of attempt at intellectual name dropping?  Do you mean that in anything other than 'an eye for an eye' should be the law of the land?  Why are your "solutions" to the problems of morality and law nearly pre-historic barbaric relics?  "Eye for an Eye" is probably more barbaric and backward as a ruling, prevailing ideological tenant than the NAP.  So your answer for your backward, reactionary morality is to be even more backward and even more reactionary?  Why not even go more barbaric and just enact the Law of the Jungle?

Like I said above.  Justice and the law should be as nearly identical as we can possibly make them.  We haven't even begun that discussion because it's always a policy discussion.  That is, one must assess the situation and do gargantuan amounts of research to fairly conclude anything regarding actual concrete, real, physical world problems - and Libertarians don't have time for that.  They are too busy in their ivory towers, stroking and polishing their otherworldly rhetoric.

I have to reject this statement there have been and there will again be individuals born in to highly unorganized and stateless civilizations. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't or haven't existed.

http://www.smashinglists.com/10-feral-human-children-raised-by-animals/

It's interesting to me how much controversy a simple axiom like "Do no harm." can cause. It makes me wonder what people are protecting on both sides of this argument.  

This is getting cross-posted in the other threads. If you doubt the fairness of NAP and market anarchy, This will be a good use of 23 of your minutes.

1. You ignored completely this:


2. How, exactly, is one monopoly organization, whose paychecks are all signed by the same guy, a "separation of powers"?

3. If laws were made only by people I voted for, all laws would be made by Ron Paul. I've voted for no-one else in over a decade.

The alternative to the NAP is a state where you have separation of powers, laws are made by people you voted for and you get a fair trial before being punished.  In NAP-land, you don't have these basic protections so you suffer the abuse that they were designed to prevent.

Forget everything else; these are the questions anyone who opposes the NAP needs to answer.

The alternative to the NAP is the principle that some (or all) people should be able to initiate or escalate the use of force against non-aggressors while simultaneously being able to claim that a reprisal in kind by the victim would be unjustified.

If you oppose the NAP, please explain the rational basis by which you distinguish between those permitted to act aggressively and those prohibited from doing so.

I think we need to clear something up first: Ad hominem is, essentially, "you're ugly, so therefor your arguments are false," not, as you seem to indicate "Your arguments are specious, therefore they are false." The former is an ad hominem fallacy, (you can certainly be ugly and right at the same time), whereas the latter is simply defeating your arguments. Repeating the NAP and the concept of Self Ownership is demonstrating how simple and not tricky my arguments are.

And feel free to offer up any reading material you like. I have one restriction: We trade. I read one book or article, you read one book or article. I'll try to keep my reading suggestions short, or, at least, on-par with yours. In any event, I won't force you to read Atlas Shrugged. I barely slogged through that thing. I wouldn't put it on any recommended list, unless you were up for some self-inflicted torture.

You are correct in that that above-most line is a type, it was supposed to say "SO" rather than "NAP".  Thanks for catching that.

But quoting the Dictionary is basically an ad-hominem against my arguments, you didn't actually address any aspect of them.  Then simply repeating the NAP/SO is just doing more 'hail marys' by repeating this stuff to yourself over and over again.  Could I make a reading suggestion list for you that would be outside your Libertarian bubble?  Would you read any thing outside of what you already avidly agree with?  I'm seriously curious.