For Liberty(and pwnage) Ron Paul 2012 Part II

[Abegweit]

I don't understand how you jump from one to the other. Why does the fact that violent actions occur beyond the state imply that the state is exclusively capable of facilitating non-violent interactions?

Precisely. Especially because the state is nothing more than violent reactions writ large.

 

[GamezRule]

You're a socialist now?

 

[Cutlass]

Throughout all of history the primary purpose of the state has been to enable the rich and powerful to steal from the ordinary and powerless. That is its objective. That is its sole goal. It has succeeded. The poor are sent to prison in vast numbers to benefit the police and the prison guards. The poor are denied the ability to right to get jobs by regulation and bureaucrats.

The thieving scum who use the state to deny a decent living to the poor are nothing less than criminal. Stop defending the thieves. Stop defending the institution which enables them. Do you have no decency?

More than you, obviously. You would be a slave to that thieving scum if it wasn't for the government placing some checks on them. You have absolutely no chance of having even the slightest shred of liberty unless people can band together as a government for self protection.

 

[Camikaze]

Moderator Action: Cool it.

 

[Traitorfish]

There are plenty of non-violent interactions without the state. But there are also plenty of violent interactions both with and without the state. The real stretch beyond the realm of the believable is to assume that there will not be violent interactions without the state. After all, non state violence is something that occurs every minute of every day of every year.

But the daily violence that most people face is clearly reduced by the actions of government, when government chooses to do so. Often government looks the other way. And when that happens there are some people claiming that that violence is the fault of the state. This is a question of the difference between an act of commission and an act of omission. If I know you are going to commit violence, and I do nothing to stop you, do I bear some of the responsibility? Sure. But I'm not the one that committed the violence. As near as I can parse out what some people are saying, the person who got out of the way of the violence gets all the blame and the person who commits the violence gets a pass. This is what Ron Paul does when he says that the government caused the financial crisis.

What people do when they blame private violence on the state is to build a false justification for all the private violence to go on unchecked.

The police aren't any good at stopping all crime, so let's abolish the police, and crime will surely cease.

Seriously, where is the logic in that?

And we are not talking about all the people. Maybe 5%, maybe 10%. But that 5 or 10% is not going to cease to exist because of the state getting out of their way. They will do more and more violence. The fundamental irrationality is to assume that anything can make that minority of predators go away. All that can be done is control and punish them and have the threat to them serious enough to discourage them from trying it.

And that doesn't even take into account the reckless violence as opposed to the deliberate.

How do we define "private violence"? Personally, I understand private property, wage labour, and the whole apparatus of capitalist society as a constant violence*, which makes the state, to the extent that it is the guarantor of this social order, a crucial component in this private violence.

(*Predicating my access to the barest capacity for practical activity, i.e. the real content of freedom, on acceptance of the control of others, i.e. private property? Sounds like violence to me.)

More than you, obviously. You would be a slave to that thieving scum if it wasn't for the government placing some checks on them. You have absolutely no chance of having even the slightest shred of liberty unless people can band together as a government for self protection.

And vive la commune, for as long as it lasts. But we're not talking about people banding together for self-protection, we're talking about the state. People consciously banding together typically don't murder each other for failing to adhere to an arbitrary distribution of material goods, which isn't exactly the most marginal function of the state.

 

[Cutlass]

How do we define "private violence"? Personally, I understand private property, wage labour, and the whole apparatus of capitalist society as a constant violence*, which makes the state, to the extent that it is the guarantor of this social order, a crucial component in this private violence.

(*Predicating my access to the barest capacity for practical activity, i.e. the real content of freedom, on acceptance of the control of others, i.e. private property? Sounds like violence to me.)

How do you want to define it? Everything from street level thugery to designing cars that burst into flame in moderate accidents. Adulterated food and medicine, unsafe products, dangerous working conditions, reckless financial arrangements, fraud, false advertising.

What you, and others, miss is that all that "capitalist" violence that you think relies on the state really doesn't. Effective and prosperous capitalism does require the state. But the private control (as opposed to legal ownership) of property in a market economy doesn't really require the state. It just becomes Somalia like without it. So you have private armies battling in the streets settling disputes rather than armies of lawyers. How is that better?

And vive la commune, for as long as it lasts. But we're not talking about people banding together for self-protection, we're talking about the state. People consciously banding together typically don't murder each other for failing to adhere to an arbitrary distribution of material goods, which isn't exactly the most marginal function of the state.

I'm not seeing your point....

 

[Traitorfish]

How do you want to define it? Everything from street level thugery to designing cars that burst into flame in moderate accidents. Adulterated food and medicine, unsafe products, dangerous working conditions, reckless financial arrangements, fraud, false advertising.

Oh, don't worry, I'm not an unthinking zealot. It's clear that the state provides some benevolent functions in our society, you'd have to have taken quite a knock on the head to think otherwise. I would simply contest that none of its benevolent functions demands its existence to be fulfilled, and that its fulfilment of them is ultimately in defence of a more fundamental violence. It's like how, yes, the kind did stop the barons from oppressing the peasants to heavily (to pick a stereotypical example), but the peasants did not fundamentally need a king to be free of baronial harassment, and the occupation of this moderating role by the king was not taken up with the well-being of the peasantry in mind.

What you, and others, miss is that all that "capitalist" violence that you think relies on the state really doesn't. Effective and prosperous capitalism does require the state. But the private control (as opposed to legal ownership) of property in a market economy doesn't really require the state. It just becomes Somalia like without it. So you have private armies battling in the streets settling disputes rather than armies of lawyers. How is that better?

Well, this is where we get into the discussion of what we mean by private property, and I believe some handsome young chap recently posted a thread to that effect...
But, at any rate, I don't buy into the notion that property and the state are in essence coincidental. That's not how history works, that's not how societies develop. These things are totalities, not mere atomic clusters; each aspect is predicated on every other aspect, meaningful only in terms of the whole, rather than constituting an assortment of positive units that happen to interact now and then. (Even Somalia is a failed state, not a stateless society; its social order to a significant extent presumes the existence of a state, it just so happens that there is no political entity with an effective claim to sovereignty at this point. The only real departure form this form are the nomadic pastoralists, and that's because they represent a pre-state model of society, which is another issue entirely.)

I'm not seeing your point....

No state on Earth represents the voluntary banding together of free agents for their own collective good, as expressed by the function of the state as a weapon against the masses in defence of the social order. Is my point.

 

[Cutlass]

Well, this is where we get into the discussion of what we mean by private property, and I believe some handsome young chap recently posted a thread to that effect...
But, at any rate, I don't buy into the notion that property and the state are in essence coincidental. That's not how history works, that's not how societies develop. These things are totalities, not mere atomic clusters; each aspect is predicated on every other aspect, meaningful only in terms of the whole, rather than constituting an assortment of positive units that happen to interact now and then. (Even Somalia is a failed state, not a stateless society; it very social order presumes the existence of a state, it just so happens that there is no political entity with an effective claim to sovereignty at this point.)

That's semantics. And to me, sophomoric semantics. A true "stateless" society is just going to be whoever has the most guns imposing a state. Or something, if not called a state, which fills largely the same nitch. Some may think that a stateless voluntary society is a possibility. But someone with guns will always show up to teach them better.

So you can get rid of the "state", but something even more violent will fill the vacuum. Everyone ended up with a state of some sort because it is inevitable. Some people may desire to live without a state, but they really haven't got a say in the matter.

So given that there will be a state, it is incumbent on those who want liberty to make the government as responsive to the people as possible. Not to cripple the government so that it cannot protect liberty.

No state on Earth represents the voluntary banding together of free agents for their own collective good, as expressed by the function of the state as a weapon against the masses in defence of the social order. Is my point.

You want perfect, or you want as good as humans are capable of?

 

[Traitorfish]

That's semantics. And to me, sophomoric semantics. A true "stateless" society is just going to be whoever has the most guns imposing a state. Or something, if not called a state, which fills largely the same nitch. Some may think that a stateless voluntary society is a possibility. But someone with guns will always show up to teach them better.

So you can get rid of the "state", but something even more violent will fill the vacuum. Everyone ended up with a state of some sort because it is inevitable. Some people may desire to live without a state, but they really haven't got a say in the matter.

So given that there will be a state, it is incumbent on those who want liberty to make the government as responsive to the people as possible. Not to cripple the government so that it cannot protect liberty.

I think we had this before, didn't we, the disagreement about how you define "the state". So perhaps we should try to address it a bit more thoroughly, see if we can't each some point of mutual understanding.

For me, the state is admittedly difficult to offer an exact definition for, because I regard it as necessarily being something historically specific; it is not possible to talk of the Idea of the state, and then to discuss concrete examples in terms of their distance or proximity to it. But as far as it is possible, I would describe the generic capitalist state as the supreme mediator. It is the set of institutions which, through their exercise of violence, attempts to regulate all human interaction, either directly or indirectly, i..e through property. A stateless society would be in which no such mediating institutions exists, and in which the administration of society takes place fundamentally at an immediate level (noting the possibility of delegative assembly and other forms of secondary coordination). This is true of hunter-gatherer bands as well as some pastoralist or primitive agrarian or peoples, for example, while it has been seen to exist in a repressed form through the continuation of communal property among peasant communities until the Early Modern period. Only with the emergence of capitalism does the state begin to adopt the totalitising form we see today.

You want perfect, or you want as good as humans are capable of?

I believe that humans are capable of better than predicating their society on the exist of bands of armed men who will kill you for disagreeing them, if that's what you're asking.

 

[amadeus]

5chars

The Department of Agriculture in 1906 criticized Sinclair's book as including, in part, "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact." Even before the book inspections were taking place and people actually toured Chicago's meatpacking plants. If conditions were so horrendous, why would it take Sinclair's book, if true, to expose that when people were coming in and seeing it for themselves already?

 

[Ajidica]

Not quite.
The Department of Agriculture only used the words "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact" when referring to the most extreme of Sinclair's assertions, such as the story about the person falling into the vat of lard and being left in there die and become the lard the company sold.

The President was leery of aligning himself with Sinclair's politics and conclusions in The Jungle, so he sent Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds, men whose honesty and reliability he trusted, to Chicago to make surprise visits to meat packing facilities. Despite betrayal of the secret to the meat packers, who worked three shifts a day for three weeks to clean the factories prior to the inspection, Neill and Reynolds were still revolted by the conditions at the factories and at the lack of concern by plant managers. Their oral report to Roosevelt tentatively supported Sinclair, failing only to substantiate the claim of workers falling into rendering vats and being left to be sold as lard

 

[Cutlass]

I think we had this before, didn't we, the disagreement about how you define "the state". So perhaps we should try to address it a bit more thoroughly, see if we can't each some point of mutual understanding.

For me, the state is admittedly difficult to offer an exact definition for, because I regard it as necessarily being something historically specific; it is not possible to talk of the Idea of the state, and then to discuss concrete examples in terms of their distance or proximity to it. But as far as it is possible, I would describe the generic capitalist state as the supreme mediator. It is the set of institutions which, through their exercise of violence, attempts to regulate all human interaction, either directly or indirectly, i..e through property. A stateless society would be in which no such mediating institutions exists, and in which the administration of society takes place fundamentally at an immediate level (noting the possibility of delegative assembly and other forms of secondary coordination). This is true of hunter-gatherer bands as well as some pastoralist or primitive agrarian or peoples, for example, while it has been seen to exist in a repressed form through the continuation of communal property among peasant communities until the Early Modern period. Only with the emergence of capitalism does the state begin to adopt the totalitising form we see today.

I don't see how viewing the modern institution of the state, or government, through the lens of a critique of capitalism is at all useful or accurate. Coincidence does not imply causation. They may have facilitated the rise of each other, but that does not mean that the rise of each is inherently dependent on the rise of the other. Any number of ancient empires had a pretty authoritarian and totalizing presence long before the rise of modern capitalism.

The issue is that you cannot turn back the clock. You cannot recreate these self dependent small communities that can self mediate all their disputes. It's just not a model that can be scaled up to millions of people. You have to have a long term connection to all the people involved. And that can't happen in a modern society.

I believe that humans are capable of better than predicating their society on the exist of bands of armed men who will kill you for disagreeing them, if that's what you're asking.

I don't. And nothing I've ever seen about the world gives me the slightest shred of hope that it could happen. I don't believe in utopias.

 

[amadeus]

Not quite.
The Department of Agriculture only used the words "willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact" when referring to the most extreme of Sinclair's assertions, such as the story about the person falling into the vat of lard and being left in there die and become the lard the company sold.

So the thing that everybody in 1906 was outraged by was something that Sinclair made up? Well, that doesn't match what I had written at all. As for the Neill-Reynolds report, who better to determine health safety standards than an economist and a civil service lawyer, especially when they had an entire two and a half weeks expertise.

 

[Ajidica]

So the thing that everybody in 1906 was outraged by was something that Sinclair made up?

Please, do tell me how one event that may or may not be true means that all the other abominable food practices listed in the book are made up?

Well, that doesn't match what I had written at all. As for the Neill-Reynolds report, who better to determine health safety standards than an economist and a civil service lawyer, especially when they had an entire two and a half weeks expertise.

They are better at determining conditions at the plant then you because, you know, they actualy were there.

 

[Archbob]

Maybe that would be the unexpected benefit of a Paul presidency- making the President such a tremendous existential threat to the United States itself that the legislature are forced to massively diminish the power attributed to the office, and so return a little sanity to the American political system. One can only hope.

Its not like congress lets Obama do anything now.

 

[amadeus]

Please, do tell me how one event that may or may not be true means that all the other abominable food practices listed in the book are made up?

Credibility issues. The Dept. of Agriculture didn't just criticize the employee sausage-ificiation, though.

They are better at determining conditions at the plant then you because, you know, they actualy were there.

Better than me, yes, but probably not better than people who had already been inspecting at the time and never lodged any complaints.

 

[NYHunter]

Is there any evidence that the human population was suffering from health problems directly linked to the meatpacking industry's practices?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Credibility issues. The Dept. of Agriculture didn't just criticize the employee sausage-ificiation, though.


Better than me, yes, but probably not better than people who had already been inspecting at the time and never lodged any complaints.

So your main objection is that a government department said it was wrong? Well bum me in the gob and call me the King of England.

 

[Cutlass]

Is there any evidence that the human population was suffering from health problems directly linked to the meatpacking industry's practices?

A lot of individual people were harmed. The human population as a whole goes on.

 

[squadbroken]

Is there any evidence that the human population was suffering from health problems directly linked to the meatpacking industry's practices?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_beef_scandal