General News Crooked $Clinton may be replaced... I might cry...

Hmm, doesn't sound very credible. However I would sure love to see her get the boot followed by Bernie being brought back into the race. That would make my year, surely.

Either way the U.S. election system really could use a refurbish. Anyone who claim that the U.S. is a great model of how a democracy should be run is laugh-worthy.

 

"Property rights are necessary, but it's not necessary to grant enforcement of property rights to people who happen to own land now, because someone took it by force at some point in the past and it trickled down to them. You could achieve the same thing under a feudal system, where an absolute monarch grants property rights to specific feudal lords, who then determine who's allowed to use it, with control passed down according to some hereditary system (e.g. primogeniture)." The current system grants more freedom than a feudal system does, and history doesn't matter so much as how it functions now does. I think you might be right about land in particular, but ownership and enforcement are both necessary.

"What if they labour to acquire the land from you, e.g. by hiring a private army to take it by force? Why should that grant them any right to it? Why should the fact that someone did that in the past grant you a right to it? Property rights come with obligations to the society that pays to enforce them. Unless society pays to enforce property rights, they're meaningless, just like a right to health or education is meaningless unless society pays to enforce them." You’ve made me question my land ownership stance a bit more, so now I’d say if the land was unoccupied it could be taken over by laboring in the current world, but that’s not what happened and today it progresses liberty so that’s significantly less important than how it functions today.

"Why should it be charity? In a democracy, people choose to sacrifice some of their autonomy in exchange for protection of their rights (to property, health, education, etc.) by the state." In a country with 300 million people, people cannot consent through Democracy. Individualism is better than collectivism, which I believe should be enforced with a very strict and literal constitution that's focused on protecting freedom.

"The way liberal democracy works is that people come together and agree on what fundamental rights are, write a constitution to protect those rights, then democratically establish laws consistent with them. There is no difference in principle between your belief that land ownership is a right (which I share) and my belief that healthcare is a right (which you don't share). There is no logical basis for the libertarian view that property ownership is a special right, different from other rights like health or education. Both require the power of the state to be meaningful, and the state requires resources to function. What constitutes fundamental rights is subjective. Reasonable people can disagree on what they are, so they have to be solved through democratic processes. Going with the majority view on what fundamental rights are isn't going to please everyone, but what is the alternative? If most people aren't libertarians, why should a libertarian minority be given the power to define fundamental rights?" The system just doesn't work as well as it should. Most people are unhappy with government, neither I (nor anyone else) truly consented to the constitution, and it would be better if people could organize themselves into smaller societies with their ideal wealth distribution and laws. The libertarian definition of rights is better because it allows conservatives, liberals, and everyone else to live in something much closer to their ideal society than the current political landscape will.

"Other than through democracy, how do you define what fundamental rights are?" Everyone must own themselves, because if they don't someone else does. That is arbitrary hierarchy, and will hurt most people. Because people own themselves, they have a right to liberty. Liberty is taken away by murder, so it's a right not to be murdered. Private possession is an acquired right. When natural resources are open to everyone, one's labor makes something their rightful possession because if someone steals everything they create, it makes freedom for that individual impossible to achieve. Things like rape and assault violate self-ownership. Every right is an extension of liberty. Following the principle of liberty, if people want to live in a society where they can be murdered or stolen from, that's fine because they are giving up their rights voluntarily, so freedom still applies even if they pretend it doesn't.

"Evidence from social experiments says the opposite. Most people are at first willing to pay, but in a large enough group, there is always a small minority of selfish people who refuse to pay. Most people care about fairness, so when they see that some people are taking benefits without paying, they get angry. Some will protest against (or 'punish') the ones who don't pay by refusing to pay themselves. Those protests increase the proportion who aren't paying, and the process continues, leading to a rapid collapse of the system. This issue has been extensively studied by sociologists, economists and others, and systems that rely on purely voluntary contributions inevitably collapse. That's arguably why all advanced societies in existence use mandatory rather than voluntary mechanisms." That's a problem with how people are raised. If people understood responsibility and altruism (which is not promoted by a large government) they would pay taxes. And people definitely are good, everyone has good intentions, it's misanthropy that makes people believe that they shouldn’t help out. If you have faith in people, they'll be good once they see how selfishness doesn’t serve them.

"I don't know, but it's pretty clear that most people don't want to live in that kind of society. The issue is probably clearer in Europe than in, say, the US. Europe still has a lot of relatively small countries, and the EU has been moving towards open internal borders since the mid-20th century. Now the trouble is that, if you have people who pay a lot of tax to create public goods in their countries, but then people from other countries (e.g. with lower taxes and fewer public goods) are allowed to freely migrate in, you end up with a lot of people free-riding on the ones who pay the most tax. You really can't have totally free movement within a country/bloc, including free access to public goods within a country (infrastructure, health, education, etc.), unless you harmonise everything (taxes, which public goods are provided, etc.). I support restoring limits on access to public goods, and some limits even on movement between countries, rather than trying to harmonise things across 500 million people." In existing states, I agree about borders, though it’s not ideal.

"So, you could allow autonomy within the US, but then you'd have to build walls around each of the autonomous areas and control movement in and out of them. Even then, ones who didn't pay tax would still be free-riding on the military costs of the others, which protect them from invasion. Once you start organising collective defence and arranging how to pay for it, you end up creating a state again, with the same requirements as always. If voluntary funding were sustainable, it could be tried, but all the evidence suggests that this new state would either move to mandatory financing or collapse, because the minority of free-riders not paying would anger the ones paying, so the ones paying would either leave or stop paying." I'm not at all concerned with the mechanics, people within them could figure that stuff out, I just don't want any laws against a voluntary "crime" on a certain premises. If a group of people want to have a club (or something) where they essentially live in anarchy, it shouldn't be banned by a larger government as long as all of the rules are contractually defined and they don't interfere with anyone who has not agreed to be in the community. Their club shouldn't be taxpayer supported apart from normal stuff taxpayers choose to pay for, but they can work that out however they want.

 

I wish Crooked Hillary would be replaced by Crazy Bernie.