Good one. What is the non-governmental, forceless alternative? We all hold hands and sing kumbaya while we ask Wells Fargo very nicely to stop doing mean things?
Tiax, what's it going to take for you to realize that it's only when the government stops interfering with business that monopolies will stop forming? Does a little thing called the Industrial Revolution ring a bell? I guess you didn't pay attention in US History, so let me edumacate you. The government didn't interfere, no anti-trust laws, and we basically had unchecked capitalism, and there were ZERO monopolies! Why? Because the invisible hand took care of it! You didn't need anti-monopoly laws against things like oil or railroads, the invisible hand took care of it! You didn't need laws, for example, regulating the meat industry for health safety, the invisible hand took care of it! Because guess what? Free market and lack of government interference would remove these kinds of problems, and government interference does nothing to remedy them!
... Wait. Wait. No. That's the opposite of true, isn't it? Oh man, I'm embarrassed.
My bad. I forgot the first law of libertarianism: the free market is indistinguishable from magic.
Monopolies- Give me 1 example of a natural monopoly(a monopoly that occured without government intervention) that has occured in the history of the industrialized world.
Hate the Poor- welfare is bad for the poor, it incentivizes laziness, minimum wage is bad for the poor as it creates unemployment and increase prices on goods, trade restrictions are bad for the poor as they increase prices on goods, child labor laws and maximum working hours per week regulations are bad for the poor as they decrease the amount of money that can be made by the poor, There are many more examples but that's enough for now
Taxation- it is theft, if I steal from you to give to the poor I am a thieve, the government does the same so shouldn't they be theives as well, taxation funds the government which is inefficient with the money,
Anarchy- yes it probably works, no you probably dont need the government to have a functioning legal system, you probably think Im crazy but I can probably answer all of your questions
Industrial Era- brought great wealth and prosperity to poor, middle class, everyone...
Discrimination- forcing me to serve someone who I dont want to serve sounds a lot like slavery if you ask me...
Monopolies- Give me 1 example of a natural monopoly(a monopoly that occured without government intervention) that has occured in the history of the industrialized world.
Water supply, electricity, gas, railways...
There's a reason why most countries either nationalize or heavily regulate such industries. These industries require significant infrastructure in order to supply the customer, and these costs both deter entry into and exit from the industry. Attempting to increase competition in these fields also decreases efficiency, since a potential competitor would have to duplicate the existing infrastructure.
Hate the Poor- welfare is bad for the poor, it incentivizes laziness, minimum wage is bad for the poor as it creates unemployment and increase prices on goods, trade restrictions are bad for the poor as they increase prices on goods, child labor laws and maximum working hours per week regulations are bad for the poor as they decrease the amount of money that can be made by the poor, There are many more examples but that's enough for now
According tot he Luxembourg Income Study, welfare programs in 14 countries dropped the absolute poverty rate by half or more (except the US, which went from 21.0 to 11.7). The country with the highest absolute poverty rate (France at 36.1) dropped the most (to 9.8).
Taxation- it is theft, if I steal from you to give to the poor I am a thieve, the government does the same so shouldn't they be theives as well, taxation funds the government which is inefficient with the money,
Taxation is not theft, but I think that's already been discussed in this thread.
Anarchy- yes it probably works, no you probably dont need the government to have a functioning legal system, you probably think Im crazy but I can probably answer all of your questions
Please answer how you think anarchy is not making false assumptions (eg, that people will keep what is theirs and give away their property in exchange for others' property).
Please explain how your concept of anarchy does not rely on a mythical definition of "government".
Industrial Era- brought great wealth and prosperity to poor, middle class, everyone...
I'm not sure "great" is the correct qualifier there, but during the industrial revolution wages did increase and the prices for most goods did decrease. The evils generally associated with it (eg, child labor) were not a product of the industrial revolution, as they had been present prior. I'm not sure how this relates to the rest of the thread, though.
Discrimination- forcing me to serve someone who I dont want to serve sounds a lot like slavery if you ask me...
You're not being forced to do it, you're being paid to do it. If the pay is insufficient to overcome your own discriminatory biases, you're welcome to quit.
Monopolies- Give me 1 example of a natural monopoly(a monopoly that occured without government intervention) that has occured in the history of the industrialized world.
De Beers. Even Milton Friedman fesses to this one.
Hate the Poor- welfare is bad for the poor, it incentivizes laziness, minimum wage is bad for the poor as it creates unemployment and increase prices on goods, trade restrictions are bad for the poor as they increase prices on goods, child labor laws and maximum working hours per week regulations are bad for the poor as they decrease the amount of money that can be made by the poor, There are many more examples but that's enough for now
You have yet to give one example of any of this happening. You've just said it does.
Taxation- it is theft, if I steal from you to give to the poor I am a thieve, the government does the same so shouldn't they be theives as well, taxation funds the government which is inefficient with the money,
Taxation is rent -- not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system.
Anarchy- yes it probably works, no you probably dont need the government to have a functioning legal system, you probably think Im crazy but I can probably answer all of your questions
You will forgive us if we aren't suddenly convinced of correctness of your position by "yes it probably works".
Discrimination- forcing me to serve someone who I dont want to serve sounds a lot like slavery if you ask me...
By all means, elaborate on how you think a guy walking into your store, exchanging money for goods, and walking out again is equivalent to being chained to an oar to pull until you die of exhaustion.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Asking for "a monopoly that occured without government intervention" is absurd on any nation-wide scale. It's not realistic. But saying that monopolies are because of government intervention is a conflation of correlation and causation.
Forcing people to do business with others is immoral.
Well, actually... If someone really doesn't want to do business with someone else, they can close shop whenever that person would attempt to do business with them. Does that mean that they could be closed indefinitely? That's their choice. They could make that same choice with or without government interference. Now, will that impact their business? Yes. But so will refusing to do business with the person in the first place.
Rent implies that the government owns your property which it doesnt. Also what if I dont want to live under that legal system?
Well, it's (theoretically) government by the people, which implies that you own some percentage of what government owns, which it is not unreasonable to say is your property. Therefore you own your property... Also, if you don't want to live under that legal system, you don't have to do so. You can always go somewhere else.
De Beers is an international cartel. South African law, however favorable, cannot be responsible for its successful monopolistic practices beyond South Africa's borders. That'd be like saying Coca-Cola is only a beverage behemoth because of favoritism from the city council in Atlanta, Georgia.
Rent implies that the government owns your property which it doesnt.
*sigh* I literally just said it wasn't rent for your property. You can be taxed by the United States even if you own no property in the United States. That said, the state does have sovereignty over property you own within its borders. That's a sort of substratum on which your own ownership is based: it means the state will fight for your land if the dastardly Canadians invade and try to take it. The concept of "private property" is meaningless without such a guarantee of safety. Think of it in terms of land value. Imagine you're an investor looking at two plots of land: one which could be overrun by the Canadian hordes at any moment, and one whose security is backed by the U.S. government. Which one are you going to be willing to pay good money for?
Also what if I dont want to live under that legal system?
Then move to a different jurisdiction. The same as if you don't want to live in a particular rental property. You say it's immoral to force people to do business with others? By living in U.S. jurisdiction you're demanding that they do business with you, in the form of providing to you the aforementioned territorial protection, roads and infrastructure, police services, and so on -- and unlike a black guy walking into a store to buy a loaf of bread, you're refusing to pay for any of it. Yeah, yeah, you didn't ask them to give you those things. If you're born into an apartment, you didn't ask for what your landlord provides, either, but if you want to keep living in the apartment as an adult you still have to accept the lease agreement, and if you don't you have to move.
De Beers is an international cartel. South African law, however favorable, cannot be responsible for its successful monopolistic practices beyond South Africa's borders. That'd be like saying Coca-Cola is only a beverage behemoth because of favoritism from the city council in Atlanta, Georgia.
"South Africa, the major center of world diamond production"
"The government long ago nationalized all diamond mines, and anyone who finds a diamond mine on his property discovers that the mine immediately becomes government property. The South African government then licenses mine operators who lease the mines from the government and, it so happened, that Io and behold!, the only licensees turned out to be either DeBeers itself or other firms who were willing to play ball with the DeBeers cartel."
Rent implies that the government owns your property which it doesnt.
*sigh* I literally just said it wasn't rent for your property. You can be taxed by the United States even if you own no property in the United States. That said, the state does have sovereignty over property you own within its borders. That's a sort of substratum on which your own ownership is based: it means the state will fight for your land if the dastardly Canadians invade and try to take it. The concept of "private property" is meaningless without such a guarantee of safety. Think of it in terms of land value. Imagine you're an investor looking at two plots of land: one which could be overrun by the Canadian hordes at any moment, and one whose security is backed by the U.S. government. Which one are you going to be willing to pay good money for?
Also what if I dont want to live under that legal system?
Then move to a different jurisdiction. The same as if you don't want to live in a particular rental property. You say it's immoral to force people to do business with others? By living in U.S. jurisdiction you're demanding that they do business with you, in the form of providing to you the aforementioned territorial protection, roads and infrastructure, police services, and so on -- and unlike a black guy walking into a store to buy a loaf of bread, you're refusing to pay for any of it. Yeah, yeah, you didn't ask them to give you those things. If you're born into an apartment, you didn't ask for what your landlord provides, either, but if you want to keep living in the apartment as an adult you still have to accept the lease agreement, and if you don't you have to move.
That's because the landlord owns the apartment, the government doesn't own the land. The government either stole the land or bought the land by stealing taxpayer money. "You have to move" is not an argument against the proposed immorality and hypocrisy of taxation.
"South Africa, the major center of world diamond production"
"The government long ago nationalized all diamond mines, and anyone who finds a diamond mine on his property discovers that the mine immediately becomes government property. The South African government then licenses mine operators who lease the mines from the government and, it so happened, that Io and behold!, the only licensees turned out to be either DeBeers itself or other firms who were willing to play ball with the DeBeers cartel."
This fundamentally fails to understand or address my point. Which is disappointing, because I thought I was pretty clear: South African law only applies in South Africa. De Beers operates worldwide. South African law cannot be blamed for De Beers dominating the diamond trade in other countries.
This is still not an argument. Property rights are not absolute. They end where the human rights of others begin. I have the property right to own a car but not the property right to run over another person with my car.
That's because the landlord owns the apartment, the government doesn't own the land. The government either stole the land or bought the land by stealing taxpayer money. "You have to move" is not an argument against the proposed immorality and hypocrisy of taxation.
*sigh* Again, I thought I was clear when I wrote that taxation is "not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system". The landlord owns the property, the government owns the legal system. The landlord pays for water and electricity, the government pays for roads and bridges. The landlord provides repair services, the government provides police services. (One difference is that the government is democratic and representative, meaning it's actually owned by you jointly with everybody else in the country. So maybe not so much a landlord as a residential co-op.)
And in any case, you've got a circular argument going with "taxpayer money is stolen because it's used to pay rent on land that's held illegitimately because it was bought with taxpayer money because taxpayer money is stolen". "Taxation is theft" can be a premise or a conclusion, not both.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
1. South Africa acted as a boost to DeBeers Diamond Company
2. The reason you dont have the right to drive over someone is because you would ve taking away their right to own their body. By refusing to do business with someone I am not violating their rights because they are not entitled to my goods or services.
3. All governments have a beginning in which they claim a plot of land. Claiming a plot of land is not owning that land. If you own some land, it wont become my land if I claim it.
1. South Africa acted as a boost to DeBeers Diamond Company
The "boost" being that they got to own a lot of diamond mines. Per libertarianism, there is nothing wrong with a company owning a lot of diamond mines. According to the theories of von Mises and Rothbard, a company that owned a lot of diamond mines should still be vulnerable to competition from other companies with their own diamond mines. This is not what happened.
2. The reason you dont have the right to drive over someone is because you would ve taking away their right to own their body. By refusing to do business with someone I am not violating their rights because they are not entitled to my goods or services.
You are offering your goods and services publicly for sale. Everyone in the public has equal right to take you up on that offer. So not following through on your offer when black people walk into your store is at the very least false advertising: fraud. What's more, your denial in concert with the denial of other racists in the community has the net result of stripping black people of equal economic opportunity. You are, in effect, in a conspiracy to run them over socioeconomically. You are creating a market that is not free, but to which some people are systematically refused access.
3. All governments have a beginning in which they claim a plot of land. Claiming a plot of land is not owning that land. If you own some land, it wont become my land if I claim it.
False in its own right, in direct contradiction with even libertarian theories of ownership or government (read your Locke), but most importantly, once again failing to address the point. We are not talking about government-owned land. What part of "not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system" do you find difficult to parse?
Monopolies- Give me 1 example of a natural monopoly(a monopoly that occured without government intervention) that has occured in the history of the industrialized world.
How about one that was stopped by modern government instead. Just as enlightening. British Telecom at the end of the 1980s early 1990.
After about 10 years of being the nationalised controller and sole provider of telecommunications services the then Conservative government decided it wanted to privatise the company and allow other companies to take part in the market but initially failed to put any constraints on BT other than we, Declaration of Interest: I work for BT, had to cover the entire country including the really unprofitable ones like the Highlands and the Islands. The newcommers to the market could just pick and choose the most profitable areas to place there networks with the intention of just piggy backing off the BT owned national grid to connect up their disparate networks.
We allowed this but charged them retail access to our network a cost that the smaller telecomunications customers could either pass onto their customers, and negate the major reason for using them, or eat the costs until they were forced to go out of business leaving BT once again the only telecommunications provider in the country. Note under your libertarian utopia these and build your own network and hope I don't said boys with axes round to remove your poles are your only options.
Thankfully for the smaller telecoms companies there was a 4th way go to the Government and tell them that we were in breach of assorted competition laws. The UK government then investigated and found that we were acting in breach of those laws and forced us to set up a mostly independant division of the company that dealt solely with the physical network and granted equal access to it for all the assorted telecommunications companies that we had failed to put out of business.
Note if that little bit of legislation did not exist there was sod all stopping us from continuing to charge everyone retail price of access to our market and putting everyone else out of business.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
1. They got an artificial boost that would not have happened under the free market that led to an increase in market share up to 80% which isnt even a problem because that means there is still competition in the market.
2. That would only be fraud if I had a sign on my shop that said: will sell to anyone,or something along those lines.
3. But I never made a contract with tge government that I pay taxes in exchange for their services. My ancestors may have made that decision but I should be able to opt out anytime. The government doesn't allow one to opt out of the contract.
1. They got an artificial boost that would not have happened under the free market...
De Beers formed by the merger of diamond mines under the free market. South African protection of the cartel occurred after the fact. And if the South African state did not exist, De Beers would have been able to protect its ownership of diamond mines through the libertarian-favored means of hiring private security contractors. In fact, they could have been much more aggressive in their monopolistic practices in the region, since there would be no law to prevent these private security contractors from engaging in open violence to acquire the remaining mines. And before you can say "non-aggression principle", why on earth should a diamond cartel with wads of money and a private army give a damn about the non-aggression principle?
2. That would only be fraud if I had a sign on my shop that said: will sell to anyone,or something along those lines.
That is implicit in offering something for public sale. If I'm selling apples, I don't have to expressly advertise "not poisoned" for it to be fraud if they're poisoned. A reasonable member of the public should be able to expect that food items for sale are not poisoned. A reasonable member of the public should be able to expect that a shop advertising a public sale will sell to them.
And remember, this is only half the problem -- and the lesser half. Even if you post a sign stating explicitly that you won't sell to black people, which would be despicable but which would at least be truth in advertising, you're still engaged in a conspiracy to deny people access to the market, and thus belying the "free" part of "free market".
3. But I never made a contract with tge government that I pay taxes in exchange for their services. My ancestors may have made that decision but I should be able to opt out anytime. The government doesn't allow one to opt out of the contract.
It absolutely does. You can emigrate and relinquish your citizenship. Some states in history have tried to forbid emigration, and yes, that would be unjust, but neither the United States nor any other modern democratic nation does this.
1. Would you buy from a business that steals and kills people?
2. Bad analogy, killing people with poisoned apples is different from not doing business with someone. Also this conspiracy is doomed to fail because most rational businesses want to maximize profits.
3. Again why should I have to immigrate to avoid taxes, what if I told you I would steal from you on a regular basis unless you move? Not fair.
1. Would you buy from a business that steals and kills people?
2. Bad analogy, killing people with poisoned apples is different from not doing business with someone. Also this conspiracy is doomed to fail because most rational businesses want to maximize profits.
3. Again why should I have to immigrate to avoid taxes, what if I told you I would steal from you on a regular basis unless you move? Not fair.
1. People don't always know/have a choice.
2. Companies are not required to be rational actors.
3. Because you have benefited from the society that have been built by taxes. It's not stealing because by virtue of your birth you are forced to interact with the world.
1. Would you buy from a business that steals and kills people?
If your concern is that a company is doing things like stealing and killing, why would you buy anything from De Beers today (which, considering their monopoly on the market, practically means "why would you buy diamonds")?
De Beers has only asserted that their diamonds are conflict-free (ie: not blood diamonds) since March 2000, and that move was only in response to international government interference.
De Beers is also implicated in the long-running exploitation and forceful relocation of the native tribes of Botswana, to the extent that Survival International has called is a genocide.
2. Bad analogy, killing people with poisoned apples is different from not doing business with someone. Also this conspiracy is doomed to fail because most rational businesses want to maximize profits.
It can be very rational to deny business to a small segment of the population if it increases market share among the larger segment.
Imagine I'm doing business in a town of 100 people. 10 of those are in tribe A and 90 are tribe B and currently 20% of the town comes to do business with me (so, I have 2 tribe A customers and 18 tribe B customers). Thru market research, I learn that if I don't do business with tribe A, I can double the number of my tribe B customers, the rational, profit-maximizing thing to do would be put up a "No Tribe B Allowed" sign. And if I can get together with a few other businessmen and all of us deny business to tribe A to drive them out of town, it would be a very rational thing to do if I think that the lack of tribe A people would attract more tribe B people to the town.
1. Would you buy from a business that steals and kills people?
History shows that people frequently do exactly that. Businesses are sometimes able to cover up the fact that they steal and kill people, because, y'know, tons of money and no police. But sometimes it seems like they don't even have to bother. As Lithl has pointed out, De Beers' business practices haven't exactly been secret. The buying public just didn't care.
2. Bad analogy, killing people with poisoned apples is different from not doing business with someone.
Special pleading. How is it different, and how does the difference break the analogy? The relevant similarity is that in both cases, the public has a reasonable understanding of what is being offered, and you are acting contrary to that understanding.
Also this conspiracy is doomed to fail because most rational businesses want to maximize profits.
Again, history shows that this is not the case. In the Jim Crow South, enough businesses refused to serve black people for the conspiracy to persist for decades and deal vast economic damage to the black community (which was not exactly rolling in the dough to begin with). Maybe, as FourDogs suggested, this is because they weren't profit-maximizing rational actors. Real-life human beings after all have a lot of motives other than money, and bigotry can certainly be among them. But even if they were profit-maximizing rational actors, in those communities white people were more populous, more wealthy, and more racist, so doing business with black people could easily have resulted in a greater loss of business from white people. (Under such circumstances, an antidiscrimination law would be to the business' benefit: racists can't blame the business owners for serving black people if they are legally required to do so. It is an odd consequence of game theory that sometimes restricting choices can improve profitability.)
3. Again why should I have to immigrate to avoid taxes, what if I told you I would steal from you on a regular basis unless you move?
You should have to emigrate to avoid taxes because otherwise you are collecting on the services the government provides to the community without paying for them. Like how you have to move to avoid rent because otherwise you are collecting on the services your landlord provides to you without paying for them. With a thief? Not so much.
1. First of all, the DeBeers market share reached an all time high of 80% and then startes decreasing to its current market share of 50%. Anyways, even if a company monopolizes through the use of violence, governments or private defense agencies could help out and besides they're diamonds, they're rare and not very important, so it isnt a big deal.
2. If push comes to shove and the discriminated against group can't find anyone that lets the group buy the things the group wants to buy from them,(this being obviously unlikely), the group can make their own businesses.
3. If I steal from you to buy you a car,I have still stolen from you. Besides I'd like to object to your statement that the state benefits me as I would think that the some of the things the state does, the free market could do better,and some of the things the state does is useless or harmful to the economy and the people. But I can't not use,for example,roads,so if the government lets me opt out of its "rent services" system, it would effectively have imprisoned me into a certain small amount of land.
My bad. I forgot the first law of libertarianism: the free market is indistinguishable from magic.
Hate the Poor- welfare is bad for the poor, it incentivizes laziness, minimum wage is bad for the poor as it creates unemployment and increase prices on goods, trade restrictions are bad for the poor as they increase prices on goods, child labor laws and maximum working hours per week regulations are bad for the poor as they decrease the amount of money that can be made by the poor, There are many more examples but that's enough for now
Taxation- it is theft, if I steal from you to give to the poor I am a thieve, the government does the same so shouldn't they be theives as well, taxation funds the government which is inefficient with the money,
Anarchy- yes it probably works, no you probably dont need the government to have a functioning legal system, you probably think Im crazy but I can probably answer all of your questions
Industrial Era- brought great wealth and prosperity to poor, middle class, everyone...
Discrimination- forcing me to serve someone who I dont want to serve sounds a lot like slavery if you ask me...
Thats all for now
As far as taxation being theft goes, do you use roads?
Art is life itself.
There's a reason why most countries either nationalize or heavily regulate such industries. These industries require significant infrastructure in order to supply the customer, and these costs both deter entry into and exit from the industry. Attempting to increase competition in these fields also decreases efficiency, since a potential competitor would have to duplicate the existing infrastructure.
According tot he Luxembourg Income Study, welfare programs in 14 countries dropped the absolute poverty rate by half or more (except the US, which went from 21.0 to 11.7). The country with the highest absolute poverty rate (France at 36.1) dropped the most (to 9.8).
Taxation is not theft, but I think that's already been discussed in this thread.
Please answer how you think anarchy is not making false assumptions (eg, that people will keep what is theirs and give away their property in exchange for others' property).
Please explain how your concept of anarchy does not rely on a mythical definition of "government".
I'm not sure "great" is the correct qualifier there, but during the industrial revolution wages did increase and the prices for most goods did decrease. The evils generally associated with it (eg, child labor) were not a product of the industrial revolution, as they had been present prior. I'm not sure how this relates to the rest of the thread, though.
You're not being forced to do it, you're being paid to do it. If the pay is insufficient to overcome your own discriminatory biases, you're welcome to quit.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
You have yet to give one example of any of this happening. You've just said it does.
Taxation is rent -- not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system.
You will forgive us if we aren't suddenly convinced of correctness of your position by "yes it probably works".
By all means, elaborate on how you think a guy walking into your store, exchanging money for goods, and walking out again is equivalent to being chained to an oar to pull until you die of exhaustion.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Forcing people to do business with others is immoral.
Rent implies that the government owns your property which it doesnt. Also what if I dont want to live under that legal system?
In an anarchist social order, we would have private arbitrators and defense agencies.
Asking for "a monopoly that occured without government intervention" is absurd on any nation-wide scale. It's not realistic. But saying that monopolies are because of government intervention is a conflation of correlation and causation.
Well, actually... If someone really doesn't want to do business with someone else, they can close shop whenever that person would attempt to do business with them. Does that mean that they could be closed indefinitely? That's their choice. They could make that same choice with or without government interference. Now, will that impact their business? Yes. But so will refusing to do business with the person in the first place.
Well, it's (theoretically) government by the people, which implies that you own some percentage of what government owns, which it is not unreasonable to say is your property. Therefore you own your property... Also, if you don't want to live under that legal system, you don't have to do so. You can always go somewhere else.
Which would be paid for by people who don't feel they have to pay for goods and services? Uhh...
Or does their use of the pstn mean this is government's fault too. For even having an internet?
Not An Argument
Well, you're one to complain about "Not An Argument".
*sigh* I literally just said it wasn't rent for your property. You can be taxed by the United States even if you own no property in the United States. That said, the state does have sovereignty over property you own within its borders. That's a sort of substratum on which your own ownership is based: it means the state will fight for your land if the dastardly Canadians invade and try to take it. The concept of "private property" is meaningless without such a guarantee of safety. Think of it in terms of land value. Imagine you're an investor looking at two plots of land: one which could be overrun by the Canadian hordes at any moment, and one whose security is backed by the U.S. government. Which one are you going to be willing to pay good money for?
Then move to a different jurisdiction. The same as if you don't want to live in a particular rental property. You say it's immoral to force people to do business with others? By living in U.S. jurisdiction you're demanding that they do business with you, in the form of providing to you the aforementioned territorial protection, roads and infrastructure, police services, and so on -- and unlike a black guy walking into a store to buy a loaf of bread, you're refusing to pay for any of it. Yeah, yeah, you didn't ask them to give you those things. If you're born into an apartment, you didn't ask for what your landlord provides, either, but if you want to keep living in the apartment as an adult you still have to accept the lease agreement, and if you don't you have to move.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This is still not an argument. Property rights are not absolute. They end where the human rights of others begin. I have the property right to own a car but not the property right to run over another person with my car.
*sigh* Again, I thought I was clear when I wrote that taxation is "not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system". The landlord owns the property, the government owns the legal system. The landlord pays for water and electricity, the government pays for roads and bridges. The landlord provides repair services, the government provides police services. (One difference is that the government is democratic and representative, meaning it's actually owned by you jointly with everybody else in the country. So maybe not so much a landlord as a residential co-op.)
And in any case, you've got a circular argument going with "taxpayer money is stolen because it's used to pay rent on land that's held illegitimately because it was bought with taxpayer money because taxpayer money is stolen". "Taxation is theft" can be a premise or a conclusion, not both.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
2. The reason you dont have the right to drive over someone is because you would ve taking away their right to own their body. By refusing to do business with someone I am not violating their rights because they are not entitled to my goods or services.
3. All governments have a beginning in which they claim a plot of land. Claiming a plot of land is not owning that land. If you own some land, it wont become my land if I claim it.
You are offering your goods and services publicly for sale. Everyone in the public has equal right to take you up on that offer. So not following through on your offer when black people walk into your store is at the very least false advertising: fraud. What's more, your denial in concert with the denial of other racists in the community has the net result of stripping black people of equal economic opportunity. You are, in effect, in a conspiracy to run them over socioeconomically. You are creating a market that is not free, but to which some people are systematically refused access.
False in its own right, in direct contradiction with even libertarian theories of ownership or government (read your Locke), but most importantly, once again failing to address the point. We are not talking about government-owned land. What part of "not the rent for living on a physical property, but the rent for living under a legal system" do you find difficult to parse?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
How about one that was stopped by modern government instead. Just as enlightening. British Telecom at the end of the 1980s early 1990.
After about 10 years of being the nationalised controller and sole provider of telecommunications services the then Conservative government decided it wanted to privatise the company and allow other companies to take part in the market but initially failed to put any constraints on BT other than we, Declaration of Interest: I work for BT, had to cover the entire country including the really unprofitable ones like the Highlands and the Islands. The newcommers to the market could just pick and choose the most profitable areas to place there networks with the intention of just piggy backing off the BT owned national grid to connect up their disparate networks.
We allowed this but charged them retail access to our network a cost that the smaller telecomunications customers could either pass onto their customers, and negate the major reason for using them, or eat the costs until they were forced to go out of business leaving BT once again the only telecommunications provider in the country. Note under your libertarian utopia these and build your own network and hope I don't said boys with axes round to remove your poles are your only options.
Thankfully for the smaller telecoms companies there was a 4th way go to the Government and tell them that we were in breach of assorted competition laws. The UK government then investigated and found that we were acting in breach of those laws and forced us to set up a mostly independant division of the company that dealt solely with the physical network and granted equal access to it for all the assorted telecommunications companies that we had failed to put out of business.
Note if that little bit of legislation did not exist there was sod all stopping us from continuing to charge everyone retail price of access to our market and putting everyone else out of business.
- H.L Mencken
I Became insane with long Intervals of horrible Sanity
All Religion, my friend is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Crafters' Rules Guru
It's not an argument that your premise of what a government even is isn't accurate?
2. That would only be fraud if I had a sign on my shop that said: will sell to anyone,or something along those lines.
3. But I never made a contract with tge government that I pay taxes in exchange for their services. My ancestors may have made that decision but I should be able to opt out anytime. The government doesn't allow one to opt out of the contract.
It was enough market share for De Beers to flagrantly manipulate the market. Market forces did not set prices; De Beers set prices.
That is implicit in offering something for public sale. If I'm selling apples, I don't have to expressly advertise "not poisoned" for it to be fraud if they're poisoned. A reasonable member of the public should be able to expect that food items for sale are not poisoned. A reasonable member of the public should be able to expect that a shop advertising a public sale will sell to them.
And remember, this is only half the problem -- and the lesser half. Even if you post a sign stating explicitly that you won't sell to black people, which would be despicable but which would at least be truth in advertising, you're still engaged in a conspiracy to deny people access to the market, and thus belying the "free" part of "free market".
It absolutely does. You can emigrate and relinquish your citizenship. Some states in history have tried to forbid emigration, and yes, that would be unjust, but neither the United States nor any other modern democratic nation does this.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
2. Bad analogy, killing people with poisoned apples is different from not doing business with someone. Also this conspiracy is doomed to fail because most rational businesses want to maximize profits.
3. Again why should I have to immigrate to avoid taxes, what if I told you I would steal from you on a regular basis unless you move? Not fair.
1. People don't always know/have a choice.
2. Companies are not required to be rational actors.
3. Because you have benefited from the society that have been built by taxes. It's not stealing because by virtue of your birth you are forced to interact with the world.
De Beers has only asserted that their diamonds are conflict-free (ie: not blood diamonds) since March 2000, and that move was only in response to international government interference.
De Beers is also implicated in the long-running exploitation and forceful relocation of the native tribes of Botswana, to the extent that Survival International has called is a genocide.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
It can be very rational to deny business to a small segment of the population if it increases market share among the larger segment.
Imagine I'm doing business in a town of 100 people. 10 of those are in tribe A and 90 are tribe B and currently 20% of the town comes to do business with me (so, I have 2 tribe A customers and 18 tribe B customers). Thru market research, I learn that if I don't do business with tribe A, I can double the number of my tribe B customers, the rational, profit-maximizing thing to do would be put up a "No Tribe B Allowed" sign. And if I can get together with a few other businessmen and all of us deny business to tribe A to drive them out of town, it would be a very rational thing to do if I think that the lack of tribe A people would attract more tribe B people to the town.
Special pleading. How is it different, and how does the difference break the analogy? The relevant similarity is that in both cases, the public has a reasonable understanding of what is being offered, and you are acting contrary to that understanding.
Again, history shows that this is not the case. In the Jim Crow South, enough businesses refused to serve black people for the conspiracy to persist for decades and deal vast economic damage to the black community (which was not exactly rolling in the dough to begin with). Maybe, as FourDogs suggested, this is because they weren't profit-maximizing rational actors. Real-life human beings after all have a lot of motives other than money, and bigotry can certainly be among them. But even if they were profit-maximizing rational actors, in those communities white people were more populous, more wealthy, and more racist, so doing business with black people could easily have resulted in a greater loss of business from white people. (Under such circumstances, an antidiscrimination law would be to the business' benefit: racists can't blame the business owners for serving black people if they are legally required to do so. It is an odd consequence of game theory that sometimes restricting choices can improve profitability.)
You should have to emigrate to avoid taxes because otherwise you are collecting on the services the government provides to the community without paying for them. Like how you have to move to avoid rent because otherwise you are collecting on the services your landlord provides to you without paying for them. With a thief? Not so much.
This isn't grade school.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
2. If push comes to shove and the discriminated against group can't find anyone that lets the group buy the things the group wants to buy from them,(this being obviously unlikely), the group can make their own businesses.
3. If I steal from you to buy you a car,I have still stolen from you. Besides I'd like to object to your statement that the state benefits me as I would think that the some of the things the state does, the free market could do better,and some of the things the state does is useless or harmful to the economy and the people. But I can't not use,for example,roads,so if the government lets me opt out of its "rent services" system, it would effectively have imprisoned me into a certain small amount of land.