Hoard the Wealth!

[Verbose]

You're saying that the government ruled that blacks were property, so the solution is to entrust the government to protect blacks? I don't understand how this is an argument against anything I've suggested.

Well, what TENDS to happen is some form of revolution or war being fought over things like that, eventually.

Oh, right, it did...


Power tends to get distributed in patterns of dominance and subjection. The point of the modern state is to reduce individual abuse by maintaining a system based on universal (supposedly) principles. Which does require a centralisation of power to the state. What's important is how this state then derives its legitimacy from its citizens. (Are they citizens of or are they subjects to state for starters?)

But democracy itself isn't necessarily something that ensures a well-functioning modern state. Take a gander at Greece of today for instance. It's a surprisingly weak modern state, so weak it's a society still mostly relying on mechanisms of patron-client relations. These are always personal and where the benefits for patrons and clients are always concrete and tangible - i.e. the system does not serve to maintain universal principles of things like even-handed administration or meritocracy. It also tends to make things like "private property" a matter of negotation, or direct power struggles. When you can't actually work out who owns what in sufficient detail, the one who commands most personal power tends to walk away with it. (Land ownership is very sketchy in places.) And access and concrete control tends to trump some kind of abstract principle of ownership.

Those are the kinds of challenges a weak state regularily gets confronted with. It might WANT universal principles to be maintained, like respect for abstract private ownership. It's just too damn weak to be able to. It's citizens might want universal principles like that to apply as well, except the subversion of them tends to be rather rapid, as there are tipping points when it just becomes daft for individuals to act as if anyone respected abstract ownership over immediate control.

We still have to work out how to make Russians and Chinese pay income taxes. That's the situation of early modern states. They make their money by raw material exports and taxing drugs consumed, usually by making alcohol/tobacco/pot/opium/herion a state monopoly. Imperial Russia of the 19th c. would have gone bust, had it not maintained a monopoly on vodka. (An unfortunate drawback being that the state actively wanted its subjcts to spend as much as possible on it, as it was a major mechanism of raising revenue for the state.)

Anyhoo, history aside, the impression is one of you desiring something of an improbability in the form of a weak-modern-state-which-yet-operates-fully-as-a-strong-modern-state.

 

[Perfection]

Why not?

Well, one answer is why should I? I don't think we should declare something a natural right without reason, and I simply haven't seen a compelling reason.

For me, property rights are only useful as far as they promote good things in life like safety, autonomy, knowledge, and friendship.

 

[GoodGame]

Amadeus, can you post a link to the quoted material, so we can have a broader context ?

 

[Cutlass]

(1.) I'm not sure I understand this question. As far as I know, there is no central (governmental) organization that regulates the distribution of charitable donations, and if there is, there shouldn't be. Like other things, I trust the private market to be self-regulating. This doesn't mean I trust individual organizations to always tell the truth, but that there would be independent oversight organizations that would issue recommendations on which charities are efficient and those that aren't.

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And that is where I fundamentally cannot get where you are coming from. There is 0 real world evidence of the private market being self-regulating as you seem to think. Given that it has never happened, for what reason do you believe that it would? Why would people reject their own self interest to self-regulate when it no one is forcing them to?

(2.) I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps a charity could choose to save its money during times of lesser need and then spend the money when the demand is high. Perhaps a charity could invest the money and withdraw the proceeds during those peak demand periods. I also think if we had a freer society, we would have fewer and shorter recessions because there wouldn't be the stimuli for the kinds of speculative bubbles that lead to these recessions.

They don't have enough revenue to meet the needs in good times. How can they put away money for bad times?

(3.) I don't want you to think I'm trying to offer cop-out answers, but I think even the poorest would be better off in a free market and that such amounts of charity wouldn't be necessary. If there were less government support in hard times, perhaps there would be a greater incentive for those most likely to be adversely affected in bad times to save and spend their money more prudently during the good times.

Less government support only means more people homeless or dependent on lifes of crime. There will not be more jobs or less unemployment. It's not like welfare is a choice.

You're saying that the government ruled that blacks were property, so the solution is to entrust the government to protect blacks? I don't understand how this is an argument against anything I've suggested.

This represents an utter failure to understand slavery in America. Slavery is what the private sector did. The government had no role in creating slavery. The government did, after slavery was too entrenched to get rid of without a fight, legitimize the fait accompli. But saying that is fundamentally different from saying that the government was in any way responsible for causing the situation in the first place. There would never have been any freedom for the slaves unless the government caused it.

 

[amadeus]

Anyhoo, history aside, the impression is one of you desiring something of an improbability in the form of a weak-modern-state-which-yet-operates-fully-as-a-strong-modern-state.

It isn't as though I'm arguing for chaos; I just find a moral problem with using force outside of cases of self-defense.

Amadeus, can you post a link to the quoted material, so we can have a broader context ?

Sure! Here's Hoppe's Idea of a Private Law Society. If I made any other references to Hoppe, it may have been from some things he's said in lectures he's given that I've watched on YouTube. They're fairly long (at least 20 minutes) so unless you're really interested in the subject, I'm not going to be providing links for them.