What is the Difference between Anarchists and Libertarians?

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Declension
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13 Mar 2012, 5:38 am

scubasteve wrote:

If you earned it through honest work, it is rightfully yours

No, it doesn't work like that. If person B steals an object from person A, and the person B gives it to person C in exchange for work, then a crime has taken place. It doesn't matter that person C didn't know about it.

enrico_dandolo wrote:

Ultimately, something might have been stolen to "nature", which can be understood as stealing from every other human and every other living thing

Makes sense to me!

enrico_dandolo wrote:

the computer is also what was done to it, the actual human work and transformation

Here's a riddle for you: think of all the people who gathered the resources for my computer. Think of all the labourers who constructed my computer. Did any of those people own my computer, at any point?

enrico_dandolo wrote:

However, the justification of property is entirely unimportant and pointless.

Not true. Libertarianism lives or dies based on whether it can give a coherent account of how people came to own things. If you claim to be a libertarian, and you don't have an answer to this central question, then your politics are silly.

enrico_dandolo wrote:

The real question is: is property useful, or is it not? Also, thence: Would we be better without it? What would happen without it? How would the change be possible?

You're confusing two different issues:
(1.) is the concept of property desirable?
(2.) can the specific people who claim to currently own specific things make a good moral case for their ownership?

scubasteve
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13 Mar 2012, 6:16 am

Declension wrote:

scubasteve wrote:

If you earned it through honest work, it is rightfully yours

What object? Both of our previous quotes were talking about money.

If Bob robs Peter to pay Paul, would Paul be compelled to repay Peter? I think not. Bob is the criminal. Paul did nothing wrong.

donnie_darko
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13 Mar 2012, 7:43 am

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

scubasteve
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13 Mar 2012, 7:57 am

donnie_darko wrote:

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

That would probably fall under some form of Anarchism.

donnie_darko
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13 Mar 2012, 8:07 am

scubasteve wrote:

donnie_darko wrote:

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

That would probably fall under some form of Anarchism.

Yes I thought so.

ruveyn
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13 Mar 2012, 8:09 am

scubasteve wrote:

donnie_darko wrote:

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

That would probably fall under some form of Anarchism.

How can that be? Anarchists oppose the State in any form or degree.

ruveyn

scubasteve
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13 Mar 2012, 8:34 am

ruveyn wrote:

scubasteve wrote:

donnie_darko wrote:

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

That would probably fall under some form of Anarchism.

How can that be? Anarchists oppose the State in any form or degree.

ruveyn

No, you're right. A "federal system", even a very weak one, probably excludes anarchism.

I'm not sure what you'd call this... donnie_darkoism?

donnie_darko
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13 Mar 2012, 8:39 am

I guess I'd be a minarchist like ruveyn, though I think we'd probably have quite different ideas of what responsibilities this minimal state would have.

marshall
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13 Mar 2012, 11:25 am

Dox47 wrote:

Uggh, I'm feeling like I'm going to need to make another "this is NOT libertarianism" thread with all the strawman threads about the ethos lately.

Here's how I think of libertarianism in it's simplest form; those proposing a new restriction bear the burden of proving it's necessity. It's really that simple, a bias against an ever encroaching state and towards the least amount of government that will get the necessary done, that's it.

That's the operative word that people are bound to disagree on.

marshall
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13 Mar 2012, 11:54 am

aspi-rant wrote:

hm. bump... wondering why nobody reacts on my last post in this thread…

maybe i should quote less and more specific and emphasize some of the interesting part...

Quote:

8< - - -

Some of the more intriguing results reported in this study involve the Empathizer-Systemizer scale. The scale measures the tendency to empathize, defined as "the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion," and to systemize, or "the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system." Libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing—and they scored a lot higher. The authors go on to suggest that systemizing is “characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.” They then add, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’” They speculate that the “feminizing” of the Democratic Party in the 1970s may thus explain why libertarians moved into the Republican Party in the 1980s

8< - - -

maybe this helped.

But it seems like a lot of libertarians fail in systematizing when it comes to looking at things as a whole. They derive everything from a set of moral axioms regarding a single individual and his/her property. No attention is paid to the fact that some of that dreaded and unfair "redistribution of wealth" is needed to fund certain things that our overall economy depends on.

ruveyn
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13 Mar 2012, 1:21 pm

marshall wrote:

Like perpetual war?

ruveyn

slave
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13 Mar 2012, 4:38 pm

scubasteve wrote:

slave wrote:

Both groups are slaves.
Both groups will fail in their desire to change the existing power structure.
Both groups will serve the Masters until death.
The Masters will punish anyone who defies them.

You're wrong. More and more young Americans are joining both of these groups. When enough young people believe in an idea, they can change the world.

Let us take the last 300 years as a test of your statement.

How many times have young people, who embrace ideas of freedom, joined together to overthrow their Masters? Answer: hundreds

How many times did they succeed? Answer: 0, nada, zilch, goose egg.

Tell me why will this time be different?

Declension
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13 Mar 2012, 5:28 pm

scubasteve wrote:

If Bob robs Peter to pay Paul, would Paul be compelled to repay Peter? I think not. Bob is the criminal. Paul did nothing wrong.

I agree that Paul has done nothing wrong. But I'm not trying to say that Paul has done anything wrong. I'm trying to say that Paul cannot make a strong moral case for his ownership of the money. Is Paul morally obligated to help Peter once he realises what has happened? Not necessarily. But I think that Paul is morally obligated to acknowledge that his ownership of the money is not some sort of moral axiom. In other words, Paul is morally obligated to not be a libertarian.

Here is a real-world example: I currently live on land that used to belong to a Maori tribe. The land was unfairly confiscated from them by the New Zealand government. Does that mean that I have to give the land back to the Maori tribe? No. But it means that I'm a horrible person if I base my politics on the idea that my property is sacrosanct and axiomatic.

enrico_dandolo
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13 Mar 2012, 6:30 pm

Declension wrote:

enrico_dandolo wrote:

the computer is also what was done to it, the actual human work and transformation

Of course not. They exchanged the result of their work for the result of other people's work, and ultimately down the line, someone ended up with a computer.

Declension wrote:

Libertarianism lives or dies based on whether it can give a coherent account of how people came to own things. If you claim to be a libertarian, and you don't have an answer to this central question, then your politics are silly.

Libertarianism makes no sense for many different reasons, so it is still a secondary issue.

Declension wrote:

enrico_dandolo wrote:

The real question is: is property useful, or is it not? Also, thence: Would we be better without it? What would happen without it? How would the change be possible?

Actually, I was saying that talking about the latter was pointless. I'm not confusing them.

Also, the idea of "good moral case" in the context of the latter issue depends on an anser to the former, at least from a purely consequentialist point of view. Besides, I discussed it in the other paragraph. Making an eventual "moral case" of direct line line property would be utterly bizarre and impossible, except for intellectual property, and it is, in any case, a complete waste of time and energy if it is decided that property is undesirable, and probably still is even if it is desirable. Moreover, someone's property in the present depends in large part on that of their forebears, so it would be hardly a justification for the present.

donnie_darko wrote:

What do you call the belief that government should be mostly done locally, with only a very weak emergent federal system?

I call it reproducing the late Holy Roman Empire.

scubasteve
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14 Mar 2012, 1:16 am

Declension wrote:

I think that Paul is morally obligated to acknowledge that his ownership of the money is not some sort of moral axiom. In other words, Paul is morally obligated to not be a libertarian.

Then we are no longer debating logic. We are debating differences of personal belief. That seems pointless.

Last edited by scubasteve on 14 Mar 2012, 2:30 am, edited 2 times in total.

scubasteve
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14 Mar 2012, 1:18 am

slave wrote:

Let us take the last 10 years as a test of yours.

[img][800:656]http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/712/52399392636ea70ca98b.jpg[/img]
They overthrew a war criminal.

They ended a financial crisis.

They changed the Arab world.

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