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> no set policy one way other the other Isn't that the idea of liberty though? No central authority deciding what is a "good thing" - just keeping the peace.

joshuamorton 5y ago
That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty. You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled. If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally control, you'd be absolutely right.
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant. It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions. I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.
        thegrimmest 5y ago
        The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.
        wbsss4412 5y ago
        It seems like the government issuing their own currency still isn’t really the issue in this thought experiment…
        thegrimmest 5y ago
        It is though, since they can debase that self same currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the playing field when negotiating your taxes with the government. The only reason USD has any value at all is because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US government in, and what US bonds are paid in.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    > enforcing nonviolent interaction By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right? > Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them. [1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not? > By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        > A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not? Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point. > Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free. Right, so when I said > You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?
        thegrimmest 5y ago
        > a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. > Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it and relegated it to a tort.
wbsss4412 5y ago
The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there shouldn’t be any state at all. Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit? The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the minority in modern day America though.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people. > Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit? They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence. > The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    I define liberty differently than you do. I don’t accept the popular, modern definition of negative rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It leads to nonsensical conclusions. There is no such thing under my definition as a “free dictatorship”. A system where rulers aren’t bound by legitimate laws is by definition un-free. I don’t think my definition is super far off from yours though: liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's powers are very limited, but he is not democratically elected. > liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another. Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.
Spooky23 5y ago
That reductionist approach to liberty is a mirage for teenage boys and hermits. If I can do whatever I want, you can’t. The United States would have been pushed into a deep depression, but for JP Morgan’s vacation plans being a little different. Early 20th century America was not a radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was created underlies how fubar the system was.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > was not a radical place By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are. > how fubar the system was All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued narrow interpretation would be catastrophic.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are." That would be false. "The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there." That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      I guess we're just disagreeing about definitions then. What word would you use to describe the freedom I'm referring to?
      - mcguire 5y ago
        Absolutely! I do not know any single word or short phrase that describes "the freedom [you are] referring to", since as far as I can tell, the concept you use is known only among certain libertarians where it is called "freedom". Perhaps it would be "the absence of a hypothetical[0] threat of legally sanctioned violence from 'the government' in response to actions outside of a certain limited range". (Personally, if we're discussing the threat of violence, I am much more concerned by non-legally sanctioned violence from 'the government'[1][2], where by "much more" I mean "not very much at all" since violence and the threat thereof is actually fairly low on the useful methods of coercion scale. Now, if you are interested, my personal definition of "freedom" is along the lines of (OED, 1978 ed., "Freedom (4)") "the state of being allowed to act without hindrance or restraint" with the additional proviso of something like "...not infringing excessively on the freedom of others..." and made all lovely and transitively closed by the Kantian version of the golden rule. [0] Before you get all wrapped up around "hypothetical", consider: let's say your state health officials declare a mask mandate and you, like all rational people, do not wish to obey; you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free. Many freedom-loving libertarians seem to believe that the next event would be a member of the 101st Airborne popping out of a convenient closet with an M1A1 Abrams under each arm and reduce you to a fine mist for your temerity. What would much more likely happen would be a store employee or manager asking you to leave. Unfortunately, that presents a problem for our libertarian friend---at that point, you are technically trespassing and even the fiercest libertarian would say the use of force against you is legitimate, no? [1] What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution, and why do you regard it as more dangerously coercive than, say, your family? [2] Y'all do realize Rand Paul doesn't want people who vote Democratic to have their votes counted? The methods for that are technically legal, I suppose, but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em" (which would be illegal) in the grand spectrum of historical human behavior.

joshuamorton 5y ago

That's one definition of liberty, but not the only one. I'd propose the alternative: Liberty is the freedom to take actions in society as it exists. Therefore a society that had greater prosperity has greater Liberty. You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not?

thegrimmest 5y ago
Keeping the peace means enforcing nonviolent interaction and providing due process for conflict resolution. Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. They are different words for a reason. You can be very poor and very free, or very comfortably enslaved. Liberty is fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  Your definition of liberty here is getting really tangled. If liberty is “fundamentally your relationship with those who can use legitimate force against you” then how is having a set monetary policy incompatible with liberty as long as it comes from a “legitimate” source of power?
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    Because compliance with that monetary policy is enforced with.. force? You must pay taxes in USD, and if you don't you go to jail. The government also conveniently controls the USD supply, which allows the to debase it as they see fit, forcing you to obtain a set amount of USD per year to pay taxes. If the government accepted tax revenue in gold or bitcoin or anything else they don't totally control, you'd be absolutely right.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      But we all agree that the government is legitimate, and so it's use of force is legitimate. Additionally, if the government forced you to pay it $1000 a year, even if you could deposit that in gold, you would still be forced to pay. The currency seems irrelevant. It seems like what your saying is you believe taxation is legitimate, but requiring taxes to be pain in USD is illegitimate. Which, like, is just your opinion man (and makes the whole argument circular) I don't see any generic argument that makes taxation compatible with your definition of liberty but taxation in USD incompatible". I don't see really any generic definition of liberty that would distinguish between those two actions. I'm rate limited, but to your example below of a currency no one could obtain, the government could equivalently apply a greater than 100% wealth tax. Or the government could define all speech as force or any number of other things. A capricious government can do bad things yes, but requiring taxes to be paid in a particular currency doesn't give them any more powerful ways to be capricious.
      - thegrimmest 5y ago
        The currency seems irrelevant, but it's not. Imagine my government in Tyrannia only accepted taxes in a currency which was impossible to obtain except by stealing it (also illegal). The government would then hold every citizen in a catch-22, allowing it to arbitrarily decide whom to imprison for not paying taxes and who to imprison for stealing the currency required to pay them.
        wbsss4412 5y ago
        It seems like the government issuing their own currency still isn’t really the issue in this thought experiment…
        thegrimmest 5y ago
        It is though, since they can debase that self same currency as they see fit. This fundamentally changes the playing field when negotiating your taxes with the government. The only reason USD has any value at all is because it's what everyone has to pay taxes to the US government in, and what US bonds are paid in.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  > enforcing nonviolent interaction By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways, right? > Liberty isn't the same thing as prosperity/economic power. I didn't say they were synonyms. I said prosperity was a prerequisite to liberty[1]. A poor person isn't free to inhabit a house, and if they try to do so the state will use force to prevent or remove them. [1]: actually I said all else equal, more prosperity means more liberty. To use your example (which I don't really buy, a rich slave is sort of not a thing), a "rich" slave is able to purchase better food for themselves than a poor slave whereas a poor slave would need to resort to theft, and risk force as a consequence.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not? > By ultimately using force or the threat thereof to prevent people from using force in disallowed ways Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > A homeless person can be more free than a person confined in a mansion, can they not? Sure. But a rich homeless person is no longer homeless, and a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home. You haven't addressed my point. > Yes, since using force to compel action is basically the definition of slavery and decidedly un-free. Right, so when I said > You sort of admit as much, what is keeping the piece but ultimately deciding which things are good things or not I was correct. The government decides which things are good or not (using force in disallowed ways) and prevents those. Generally governments high in libetry also do things like punish fraud, because fraud is bad and misleading people and stealing their money...reduces liberty? Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty, and should the government even do it?
      - thegrimmest 5y ago
        > a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. > Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense has been derived from "theft by false pretense". But I'm pretty sure we'd be fine if we decriminalized it and relegated it to a tort.

wbsss4412 5y ago

The absolute end to that line of reasoning is that there shouldn’t be any state at all. Why does the state need to “keep the peace”? It does so through a monopoly on force. Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit? The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making, ie the rule of law, consent of the governed. I realize I am in the minority in modern day America though.

thegrimmest 5y ago
No, the absolute end is that the state should enforce negative rights, not positive ones. Liberty is the freedom from interference by or obligation to other people. > Why can’t private individuals simply work things out on their own however they see fit? They can, so long as they do peacefully. What the state provides is simply due process for the resolution of disputes, and the expectation that this process will be used instead of violence. > The idea of liberty, to me, is the idea that citizens have power over collective decision making This is democracy, which is somewhat tangential here. You can have a decidedly un-free democracy or (more hypothetically) a very free dictatorship.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  I define liberty differently than you do. I don’t accept the popular, modern definition of negative rights vs positive rights as the bedrock or liberty. It leads to nonsensical conclusions. There is no such thing under my definition as a “free dictatorship”. A system where rulers aren’t bound by legitimate laws is by definition un-free. I don’t think my definition is super far off from yours though: liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    A free dictatorship would be one where the dictator's powers are very limited, but he is not democratically elected. > liberty as non domination, one isn’t subject to the arbitrary will of another. Yes exactly. I just see things like "interfering in private negotiations/transactions between free, equal people" as fundamentally authoritarian/dominating.

Spooky23 5y ago

That reductionist approach to liberty is a mirage for teenage boys and hermits. If I can do whatever I want, you can’t. The United States would have been pushed into a deep depression, but for JP Morgan’s vacation plans being a little different. Early 20th century America was not a radical place, the fact that the Federal Reserve was created underlies how fubar the system was.

thegrimmest 5y ago
> was not a radical place By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are. > how fubar the system was All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one starting in 1936 with United States v. Butler. The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. I don't see why a continued narrow interpretation would be catastrophic.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are." That would be false. "The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there." That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    I guess we're just disagreeing about definitions then. What word would you use to describe the freedom I'm referring to?
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Absolutely! I do not know any single word or short phrase that describes "the freedom [you are] referring to", since as far as I can tell, the concept you use is known only among certain libertarians where it is called "freedom". Perhaps it would be "the absence of a hypothetical[0] threat of legally sanctioned violence from 'the government' in response to actions outside of a certain limited range". (Personally, if we're discussing the threat of violence, I am much more concerned by non-legally sanctioned violence from 'the government'[1][2], where by "much more" I mean "not very much at all" since violence and the threat thereof is actually fairly low on the useful methods of coercion scale. Now, if you are interested, my personal definition of "freedom" is along the lines of (OED, 1978 ed., "Freedom (4)") "the state of being allowed to act without hindrance or restraint" with the additional proviso of something like "...not infringing excessively on the freedom of others..." and made all lovely and transitively closed by the Kantian version of the golden rule. [0] Before you get all wrapped up around "hypothetical", consider: let's say your state health officials declare a mask mandate and you, like all rational people, do not wish to obey; you go into a convenient Half-Price Books mask-free. Many freedom-loving libertarians seem to believe that the next event would be a member of the 101st Airborne popping out of a convenient closet with an M1A1 Abrams under each arm and reduce you to a fine mist for your temerity. What would much more likely happen would be a store employee or manager asking you to leave. Unfortunately, that presents a problem for our libertarian friend---at that point, you are technically trespassing and even the fiercest libertarian would say the use of force against you is legitimate, no? [1] What is the dividing line between 'the government' and any other human institution, and why do you regard it as more dangerously coercive than, say, your family? [2] Y'all do realize Rand Paul doesn't want people who vote Democratic to have their votes counted? The methods for that are technically legal, I suppose, but it's not really very far from "round'em up and shoot'em" (which would be illegal) in the grand spectrum of historical human behavior.