The Glade 4.0

So if Rynar starts a thread with quoting himself, does that make him a Farsky on coolness scale of 0 to Farsky?

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The Dude abides.

Honest question, don't go for the strawman =P

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't the argument in this thread that a Libertarian does not need to follow societal/collective laws? While at the same time they are free to enforce whatever laws they choose to follow themselves (or are laid out by a higher power for them)?

For example if a Libertarian walked into a restricted military zone they would consider that fine since society has no right to keep them out; however, if I walked into their cave they have every right to shoot me because it is their right to do so?

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Libertarian ideology is all based on individual rights. Your rights only extend so far as to where someone else's begin. As governments have no rights, a few take the extreme view that there can't be a restricted military zone, since government "property" should (and does) belong to the people, of which you are one of them, it is your right to go where you wish.

Private property is another matter entirely. Private property ownership is an individual right, and it is the owner's right to determine what other people can do with that property. If they want to keep you out, they can do so. If they want to allow you, they can do so.

I think they can be taken to illogical extremes, but the Libertarian focus on the individual as the sovereign is really paramount to the concept of freedom. Any law or government action that focuses on rights of a collective instead of the individual is really starting on a path to tyranny.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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So when there is a conflict between two individual rights whose take precedent?

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That's why Libertarians are not anarchists. Sometimes the courts would still be needed to figure out who really had the "right of way," so to speak.

If legal rights are correctly designed, there should be no conflict. This is why you'll hear some people here talk about the differences in positive and negative rights.

For instance, to the libertarian, you have a right to purchase healthcare, but you do not have a right to healthcare you cannot afford. A public healthcare system violates your property rights to give healthcare to others, therefore, it would be an anathema to the pure Libertarian. You cannot both have a right to the same thing in such a way that the two conflict.

This is really Elmarnieh's stated method of determining what your "rights" really are. If a right could infringe upon someone else's rights, it cannot be a right. Rights to him are an absolute thing, there's no possible way for them to conflict.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

There is a gaping flaw in your question. To contend that one individual's rights should take priority is ultimately against the entire libertarian philosophy as it makes the implicit assumption that one individual's rights are lesser than the others. The purpose of the courts is to serve as a mediator in the dispute, so that an equitable resolution can be made.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

These instances are exceedingly rare. The only one I can see is the rights of the fetus versus mother in a pregnancy after rape.

In those instances the law may say nothing - as any action is government acting opposed to its only reason for existing (the protection of the rights of its citizens).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Okay, nevermind. ONE possible way for them to conflict.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

They are not exceedingly rare. Individual rights come into conflict quite regularly, but most conflicts are able to be peacefully resolved to the satisfaction of both parties without any outside intervention.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

What if the two rights are complete opposites? Simplistic example, I have the right to walk peacefully wherever I want and you feel you have the right to restrict me from entering your property. In the end one of our rights must take precedence. There are no compromises, either I am allowed to walk on your property or I am not.

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That's easy.

You do NOT have the right to walk peacefully wherever I want to. Nobody does, because you do not have the right to walk on someone else's property.

I'm not a Libertarian, although I share many libertarian values. I disagree with Elmarnieh frequently. But I don't accuse him of being inconsistent, because he's really got himself a neat little self-contained and for the most part consistent ideology, which are often irrefutable so long as you accept a few of his initial premises (which I don't.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I believe you mean that people believe them to be in conflict quite often and so seek a remedy to this perception. Or it is the case that two claim they are in conflict (one or more parties doing so for their own gain by using a legal system to violate the rights of the other).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

So your property right supercedes my right?

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Some municipalities allow me to shoot you without warning. Others charge me with murder if I shoot you for breaking into my house and assaulting me.

Far many more municipalities will fine you for trespassing as a general rule, however I have no legal recourse to file any sort of complaint against you if you walk down my driveway and knock on my front door.

There are certainly compromises. Moreover, throughout the entire country, most communities can not agree with one another on what the appropriate compromises should be. That's why we have different states, each with their own laws.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No. Property rights are an actual right. Walking whever you want to is not.

There is no such thing as a right to walk peacefully wherever someone wants to. Therefore, their property rights supercede your wish to walk wherever you want to. You never had a right to do so, just as nobody else has that right either. The Libertarian also has no right to walk wherever they want.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You don't have the right you claim to have. Tell me what ownership means. You want to walk on the property owned by another individual. You are attempting to say you have more control over how that property is used than the owner? That would make you the owner Hopwin and that would be theft.

It seems you are entering the discussion with either social baggage or a bit of misinformation. I think both can be corrected with a real understanding of what ownership is.

Do you own yourself?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Those are societal laws, we are talking about a hypothetical Libertarian state where you are not bound by "eminent domain" on your freedoms.

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This is coming from a genuine desire to understand. So Libertarians believe in property rights apparently. Who grants them those rights? Don't they flow from society? Who enforces those rights? Why is property a right, while say walking along peacefully is not?

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Now we get to some of the flaws in an inherent rights based ideology. If you keep questioning along these lines, you'll eventually start to unravel things a bit when one realizes the entire concept of physical property ownership is subjective and arbitrary, rather than absolute.

In answer to them, Elmarnieh (and others) believe that rights are inherent, and natural. They don't flow from anything, they simply are. Kinda like God.



These, on the other hand, aren't so useful. The first is obvious: Government exists to protect rights. The second was already answered: Walking on someone else's property is not a right because it violates property rights.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Rights are inherent in our species. We have come to instinctively understand some of them (and in fact so have a few other species). We instinctively understand that killing an innocent is wrong - its been a social rule in every human society on earth. We instinctively understand that theft is wrong the evidence is the same. However we only have such instincts for the most plain obvious and oft repeated acts such as a direct observed theft or a cold blooded murder. We must rely on our ability to think and see logically to defend other rights which are more obfuscated from our innate understanding.

If rights flowed from society society would be able to not only take away but infringe on those rights and it would be moral. The subjugation of North Korea is not moral, however it is what flows from that society. Mao's revolution was not moral yet it was that society that fought and killed to enact it. Rights cannot flow from society if the society destroys rights itself.

Enforcement of rights is the only just action of government. The earliest governments were enacted to protect our most instinctively understood right - that to life and quickly were adopted to protect against theft as well.

Why is property a right? In the beginning it was easy to understand property as a right for it was directly connected to life. You put your energy into manipulating the natural world into creating your house, your bow, your arrow. (Your work put into an object or land to change it to suit your purposes so long as no work was done likewise previously creates property. Property once created can be exchanged by agreement.) Without any of those you would die and so property was obviously tied to the right to life in the early eyes of our species. That fundamental tie is now much more abstract. However property one own's is simply a physical representation of the time one has spent (labored) to obtain it. Thus it is a concrete manifestation of the owner's life's past.

But again I would like to know your view of what ownership is.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

and if I believe I have the inherent right to walk anywhere?


What if you flip it, their property rights are infringing on my right to walk wherever I want to.

I suppose my actual question is who determines what is/isn't an inherent right? Since Libertarians seem to ardently believe in some set of inalienable rights I'd like to know who made the list?

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Yeah, you can do that. Then it's not libertarian anymore, but you could make a consistent set of rights that don't include property rights.



God? Mother nature? I don't know, I don't believe in them. I might as well ask you (since you're a Catholic), "Why is God right, and Satan wrong? Who made that determination?" Make no mistake about it, Elmarnieh's ideology is a religion in itself.

Edit: I should add, that the american founding fathers had a similar ideological view. "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." They believed that our "inalienable human rights" were really evident in themselves, that everyone could see them.

That is, of course, poppycock.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The list is derived logically from the concept of ownership. That is why it is so important to understand what it is.

And you have no right to walk where you want for as we've shown it necessarily requires the infringement on another right - so itself cannot be a right.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Your insistence that individual rights are diametrically opposed, and your dogged perseverance in straw-manning exactly such a scenario says more about you than it does about the libertarian philosophy.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

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Holy shitsnacks!