5 ms·
So what happens when someone employs force or fraud against someone else (in a hypothetical libertarian paradise)?
by CodeCube 9y ago
So what happens when someone employs force or fraud against someone else (in a hypothetical libertarian paradise)?
- drew55555 9y agoThey would be charged with a crime.
- eropple 9y agoBy the state? How does the state enforce it? Who pays?
- kelnos 9y agoLibertarians don't want no government at all, they just want the minimal amount of government necessary to enforce their platform. The people people pay for it, likely in similar ways to how they pay now.
- todd8 9y agoYes, or in some versions of libertopia you simply pay for what you use. Need a contract? Pay a contract tax stamp that pays for the courts to adjudicate the contract as necessary. Need to drive on a road? Pay a toll to drive on the possibly privately run roads (in any of the various ways that driving tolls can be collected). This approach obviously has some problems to be overcome, but the idea that people are currently made to pay for things they don't need or don't use just because a majority of their neighbors want them to has problems too, like fairness.
- kelnos 9y agoSure, I get that. (For the record, I'm not a libertarian.) Just saying that other versions aren't quite as extreme as the one you suggest.
- KGIII 9y agoWait, what? Mostly only anarcho-capitalists think along those lines. Libertarianism is a huge spectrum and is the polar opposite of authoritarianism. Taxes are necessary for a functioning, modern, society. Libertarian socialists exist, for example.
- WalterBright 9y agoThe purpose of government is to protect peoples' rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
- vacri 9y agoWhile that's the official libertarian rhetoric, from experience talking to people who identify as libertarian, they're less about life and the pursuit of happiness, and more about liberty and the protection of property rights.
- WalterBright 9y agoIt's pretty hard to pursue happiness when you have no liberty and no property rights.
- vacri 9y agoThere are plenty of ways to pursue happiness with little emphasis on liberty and property rights. Check out buddhism, for example, which is big on finding happiness with what you've got. Private property is not a prerequisite for happiness (and certainly not to the degree that libertarians talk about it). For example, Americans are happy that the government prevents strangers from walking across their lands. Northern Europeans are happy that they have Right to Roam, allowing them to cross private lands as long as they don't damage them.
- WalterBright 9y agoYou're free to become a buddhist if you want. Telling others their prescribed avenues of pursuing happiness is not freedom.
- vacri 9y agoYou were prescribing me an avenue of pursuing happiness when you said property rights were required. This kind of hypocrisy is rife throughout libertarianism. If anything, by showing you additional ways to be happy, I was increasing the options available to you.