"Freedom" thread or something

Gerinski wrote: Ambient Hurricanes wrote: ^I like how we all posted the same response at the same time  I too, Gerard, understood what you meant originally. Thank god I did not create some big misunderstandings!  Maybe I should refer to as 'Republican' for what I mean as 'European liberal'? or simply 'capitalist'?

Please not republican

"Libertarian" will do just fine; or maybe "fiscal conservative" or "capitalist" like you mentioned if you want to include a broader group of people.

Gerinski wrote: Laws are simply an attempt to minimizing conflicts (preventing them from happening in the first place) and, in the event that they still happen, make their resolution possible or at least easier and following some common logic. Without laws conflicts arise, and judges have to deal with them (unless you allow settling conflicts by brutal force). Repeated conflicts of similar nature create judisprudence. At some point the gvmt concludes that it's best to turn judisprudence into law, so that citizens know in advance what the rules of the game are and what will a judge sentence in case they incur in a conflict of that sort. What's wrong with that? You propose to cut the current laws down. You will have still conflicts (why wouldn't you?), your judges will get very busy and gradually they will generate judisprudence and that will eventually become new law. Why wanting to re-run history?

Because the laws we have now are unjust and go beyond the proper boundaries of law.

Law should deal merely with two general principles: 1. Do all you have agreed to do and 2. Do not encroach upon other persons and their property (I got those from Richard Maybury by the way, who has written some works on economics and law that are so clear and lucid that a seventh-grader can understand them and so insightful that many economists could learn from them).  Of course, every legal system has case law, which applies these principles to specific instances.  I have no problem with that.  The issue I have is when laws, as they do now, break outside the boundaries of these principles and then become multiplied ad infinitum until the government is in control of the most minute parts of our lives.  That's what's happening now and I want to stop it now.

Ambient Hurricanes wrote:   Law should deal merely with two general principles: 1. Do all you have agreed to do and 2. Do not encroach upon other persons and their property (I got those from Richard Maybury by the way, who has written some works on economics and law that are so clear and lucid that a seventh-grader can understand them and so insightful that many economists could learn from them).  Of course, every legal system has case law, which applies these principles to specific instances.  I have no problem with that.  The issue I have is when laws, as they do now, break outside the boundaries of these principles and then become multiplied ad infinitum until the government is in control of the most minute parts of our lives.  That's what's happening now and I want to stop it now.

Equality 7-2521 wrote: Government crushing competition to protect its privileged massive firms.

Edited by Gerinski - June 19 2013 at 13:51

Epignosis wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: Epignosis wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: thellama73 wrote: I don't think other security firms would like your army establishing itself as above the law. The law? What law? How come there is a law when there is no government? Did everybody agree on that law? Libertarianism =/= no law. There have been civilizations throughout history with laws but no government (and that doesn't make them Libertarian civilizations either). If a law is neither universally agreed upon nor universally enforced (neither of which happens in a libertarian society), what good is it? You could break it without any negative consequences. Where do you get this?

Get what exactly? That it's not universally agreed upon and enforced, or that you could break it without any negative consequences?

thellama73 wrote: o the best of my knowledge, laws are not universally agreed upon nor universally enforced now.

Within the scope of a single state, they are. You need to make two caveats here though: "Agreeing" in this context doesn't mean that you agree the law should exist, only that it does and that it is indeed law. You can't pretend it doesn't apply to you, because you know it does. As for universal enforcement, there are certainly situations where laws aren't properly enforced because law enforcement is never perfect, but that's a technical flaw, not a systemic one. If the law enforcement is of any quality, we can assume that it's nearly universal.

Now if you go outside the scope of that state and look at the interaction of different states, obviously the law is no longer universally agreed upon or universally enforced, but that should be obvious: It no longer applies on that level anyway. If we had a global "superstate", including an international law that all states agreed upon and international law enforcement, my statement would hold true for that state as well. Is it only because the world is basically an anarchy on the supranational level that law and law enforcement are not entirely universal.

thellama73 wrote: What happens when two countries with different laws have a dispute over a point of law? Typically there is a mediation process and a compromise is reached. This could easily happen between private security firms, and once the firms had been established and some precedent had been set, it would not be time consuming or inefficient.

Look at the fragility of international relations in the world today. Count the number of international wars that are being conducted right now. Compare that with the amount of civil conflict in any state of decent stability. If there were no states, the number of global political players would skyrocket from 200+ to seven billion, and all of these would interact without any commonly agreed upon law. If they behave anything like states do now (which I believe they would, even though the individual stakes for each person would be much lower), the potential for conflict would increase immensely. Even in the best-case scenario, where people form large groups of roughly the same size as today's states, the situation would certainly not improve - it'd be exactly the same.


Edited by HarbouringTheSoul - June 19 2013 at 14:01

Equality 7-2521 wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: Within the scope of a single state, they are. This is demonstrably false. Come to my neighborhood and see if any law against drinking in public exists despite it being on the books.

You can't expect any law enforcement agency, whether public or private, to enforce a law if it isn't informed that the law is being broken. If somebody steals from you and you don't report it to the police (or, alternatively, your private law enforcement agency), you wouldn't expect them to prosecute the thief, would you? Same with the police. If nobody files charges, you can't expect the law to be enforced. If charges are indeed filed and ignored despite being valid, then the law enforcement agency isn't working like it should. In any system or lack thereof.


Edited by HarbouringTheSoul - June 19 2013 at 14:11

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: You can't expect any law enforcement agency, whether public or private, to enforce a law if it isn't informed that the law is being broken. If somebody steals from you and you don't report it to the police (or, alternatively, your private law enforcement agency), you wouldn't expect them to prosecute the thief, would you? Same with the police. If nobody files charges, you can't expect the law to be enforced. If charges are indeed filed and ignored despite being valid, then the law enforcement agency isn't working like it should. In any system or lack thereof.

That's not my point. My point is that you can do it right in front of police. Your definition of law is just not representing what you want it to represent.

thellama73 wrote: Gerinski wrote: thellama73 wrote: Companies only become hyper-powerful because they have the government behind them.  I would have sworn that it was the other way around, that companies could not influence the government unless they had become already highly powerful. I guess that the government's favours do not come for free? I've been thinking about this. It seems like you are arguing that the government needs to exist to prevent companies from making money so that they cannot then use that money to lobby for government favors. That seems circular to me, in addition to the fact that you are now in the position of actively suppressing prosperity.

Edited by JJLehto - June 19 2013 at 14:47

Equality 7-2521 wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: You can't expect any law enforcement agency, whether public or private, to enforce a law if it isn't informed that the law is being broken. If somebody steals from you and you don't report it to the police (or, alternatively, your private law enforcement agency), you wouldn't expect them to prosecute the thief, would you? Same with the police. If nobody files charges, you can't expect the law to be enforced. If charges are indeed filed and ignored despite being valid, then the law enforcement agency isn't working like it should. In any system or lack thereof. That's not my point. My point is that you can do it right in front of police. Your definition of law is just not representing what you want it to represent.

I don't know how it is where you live, but here the police don't just arrest people for petty offenses if they just happen to witness them. They're usually on their way to deal with something more serious. What I mean by universal law enforcement is that if somebody wants to see the law enforced (and expresses that interest), it's enforced. That doesn't necessarily mean the law is always enforced even when nobody cares. That is impractical.