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Sorry, if it's you in the forest with a shotgun defending your property in a libertarian utopia, you're the government.
by foobarbazqux 13y ago
Sorry, if it's you in the forest with a shotgun defending your property in a libertarian utopia, you're the government.
- homosaur 13y agoI get what you're aiming at but if you're holding the shotgun, that's not government. Government is when I cede the right to protect my forest with a shotgun in order that a government entity will do it for me. We give government a monopoly on force under the agreement that I generally should not be shooting people to protect my rights.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoIt's a totalitarian government where the dictator and the sole citizen of the state are the same person, and the citizen works for the dictator (well, there's no choice). Government is simply the application of force to create rights. No more, no less. But also, if you come onto my property, you don't have to cede authority to me, I'm still the government and I will make decisions about what happens to you, so you are bound to my laws whether you like it or not.
- sliverstorm 13y agoGovernment is when I cede the right to protect my forest We give government a monopoly on force No, that's just one incarnation of government.
- orclev 13y agoThat's not entirely true, at least in the United States. That's part of the purpose of the 2nd amendment. We cede some of our rights to use force to the government, but things like Castle Doctrine and the 2nd amendment mean we also retain those rights in specific circumstances. Another aspect of the 2nd amendment people often overlook (particularly gun control advocates) was that it was originally intended as a check to the power of the army. The idea being that should the government ever try to use the military to suppress the public, that an armed public would be able to fight back and presumably being bigger than the military, win. That theory has been greatly eroded in the last 70 years or so by the increasingly large gap between the weapons the military has access to and what the public has access to. Back when the constitution was drafted a rifle was a rifle was a rifle, and 200 soldiers versus 1000 citizens all armed with rifles, the citizens would likely win. These days with the military having tanks and jets and nightvision and all manner of other advanced weapons (including the much debated fully automatic rifles) means that your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict.
- homosaur 13y agoIn general, the point of something like castle doctrine is to maintain defense of life, not property. If I went down to the edge of my property and someone came onto my property and was not threatening me you can't then shoot them. The argument for castle doctrine is you can consider the act of home invasion itself to represent deadly force and can respond freely. Castle doctrine is a states-only policy and the feds have no position on it. The second amendment states only that people's right to bear arms shall not be infringed, it doesn't state anything about the application of force. I don't want to get into this debate on HN but there's not that much evidence that the 2nd Amendment was meant to be a check on the army. It's related to the long-standing English principle of the right to self-defense and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. The English always thought you had the right to defend yourself with deadly force and a long standing tradition of a natural right to bear arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms
- Karunamon 13y ago>your average group of citizens wouldn't stand a chance against the military in serious armed conflict I disagree with this - traditionally the US military hasn't fared very well in guerrilla warfare scenarios. Look at the number of deaths out in the middle east - fighting in city streets, that kind of thing. I'd also wager that if the military was used against the populace, a great deal of the military would defect out of principle. So not only do you have an armed public in unfavorable conditions, our hypothetical evil government also has an unknown number of traitors in the ranks. That leaves more indiscriminate options (bombs of various flavors) - and if things ever got that bad, we'd probably have other countries getting involved and even more defection. In short, it's not near as simple as "government has tanks, therefore government wins".
- jlgreco 13y agoLike most normal well adjusted people, I don't steal and I expect and find that those around me do the same. The reason my coworkers haven't stolen the keyboard off my desk when I go to get coffee isn't the government, it is just because they have some base-level respect for me. Clearly the concept of property, at least as it exists in my office, is not an artifact of some governing body. It exists despite that; it exists without any threat of force. Or is that most basic mutual respect now "the government" in an office environment? If that is the case then we are basically removing any useful meaning from the word.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThat's a good point. The last time I was reading about this I found out that some anarchists (pacifists, maybe) refer to this idea as "possession", to distinguish it from property. It's not "your" keyboard (in this case it probably belongs to the company), but you're using it right now, so it would be indecent to take it away from you.
- jlgreco 13y agoHmm, sounds about right. I haven't read much anarchist literature at all, but that meshes pretty nicely with what I know of anarcho-syndicalists. Either way, I think it stems from the same basic human desire, probably hardwired, to not have things taken and to have some basic loyalty or respect to members of your 'tribe'. (After all, governments are made of people and those people must have thought the concept of 'property' was a good idea for some reason.)
- foobarbazqux 13y agoSo the reason I brought up physical property is because if that's not a complete fiction then it's bizarre for intellectual property to be a complete fiction. Governments don't create things out of whole cloth, the laws always correspond to something, even if they do it badly.
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- humanrebar 13y agoThe inability to enforce rights in nature is independent of the existence of those rights. You might need a shotgun to defend your life in a "libertarian utopia", but that doesn't mean you don't have a right to it. In fact, your hypothetical correctly assumes that people need to protect their stuff. This need is evidence of self interest. The fact that there are universal norms that allow the use of force to protect things is evidence of a right to property. In other words, a victim of theft is rightfully angry. This lets us conclude that he has a right to be free of theft. This indicates a right to property.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThere's a difference between legal rights and natural / human rights. The latter are ideals, the former are what are brought into existence by the application of force. Intellectual property corresponds (somewhat poorly) to the natural right of being allowed to profit from your ideas.
- humanrebar 13y agoI disagree with your definitions. Rights, though abstract, are real. This is why atrocities outside the reach of law (murder in international water, war crimes, genocide) are clearly wrong. Laws are nothing but codified decisions from government. Sometimes they define the specifics of how natural rights are balanced against each other. However, laws sometimes violate rights, such as the now-repealed Jim Crow laws in the American South. Furthermore, the term "legal rights" can also be a misnomer for government-guaranteed privileges such as the "right" to government-provided benefits or (in my opinion) intellectual property "rights".
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThe difference legal and natural rights corresponds to the difference between laws and morals. That's all I mean. Natural rights are real things in as much as morals are real things.
- 13y ago
- baddox 13y agoYou're free to define "government" in such a way, but that's not a very useful definition in a discussion about what role the "government" should play.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoI think we went through this before. What was your definition of government again? A man and a woman alone together in a forest and the man has the shotgun?
- baddox 13y agoNo, that was never my definition of government.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoNo really, what is it? Does it have something to do with a certain number of people and an inequality among them?
- betterunix 13y agoYou need a society for a government to make any sense. One person defending their property is neither a society nor a government. Until you have the minimum viable population for our species (i.e. the smallest group of humans that can avoid extinction) you cannot really have a society.
- foobarbazqux 13y agoSo Adam and Eve then?
- betterunix 13y agoActually it takes more than one man and one woman for humanity to avoid extinction with a reasonable degree of success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population Of course, that number depends on things like the environment (a favorable environment will mean a smaller number) and the genetics of the "first" generation. I seriously doubt that the number could be as small as two for any species even under the most ideal circumstances.
- baddox 13y agoSo there was never only a single human in existence?