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How would it not? More supply lowers prices

@@dustinseth1 Not when the intrinsic cost to build skyscrapers are high, it has less to do with the land itself and just high cost to construct hence building loads of high cost buildings doesn't lower cost overall for housing.

@@4evahodlingdoge226 If they’re so egregiously expensive that they wouldn’t be profitable, then they wouldn’t be built. In either case there’s nothing wrong with repealing regulations.

@@dustinseth1 Not sure if you haven't noticed but every single high rise is marketed as luxury because affordable housing high rises aren't profitable and is almost always done by government at a loss.

@@4evahodlingdoge226I wonder why they aren’t profitable? Maybe you should watch the very talk under which you’re commenting.

Agreed

Singapore doesn’t have a bunch of autonomous robo taxis and it does just fine so you haven’t debunked anything. Congestion pricing is the number one way to ensure no traffic when implemented correctly.

Why would autonomous vehicles care more about congestion pricing than people? I mean just look at London; congestion pricing is a miracle cure and Manhattan should’ve done it 20 years ago

Also we have autonomous trains

@@evanfreund5651 because, once all vehicles are autonomous, there will be no congestion

The thing that although homeless people are disproportionately characterised by mental illness and addiction(there's reverse causation there especially for drug problems where people get addicted after becoming homeless, 100% of them can't afford housing(especially for the less-visible homeless who might not be on the street or causing trouble etc.). So a freer housing market would make it easier for them to buy and (especially with additional rent control and other regulations) rent a home. It would also make it easier for charitable organisations to support them by giving them a place to stay and other forms of support when housing is cheaper.

This was discussed recently in the New Bedford, MA, Standard-Times and the Fairhaven, MA, Fairhaven Neighborhood News. In the Laurel Canyon area of LA, hippie homeowners raised holy hell when big modern houses were built there.

No! Start w/reducing govt spending and govt econ regs, eg, Antitrust, EPA. If not, govt will create hidden taxes to pay for votes, eg, the Feds counterfeit money and credit which fund the welfare state and allows statists to claim that the resulting higher prices are caused by "greedy" businessmen.

Nice name

Or if govt can steal it for non-payment of property taxes, probably supported by Right and Left.

Thinking of southern California, there is an excessive amount of zoning for retail only with lots of underutilized land, vacant storefronts giant empty parking lots. In my area, I can go to city council meetings when they discuss plans for the next new big box store to occupy a former KMart lot and speak against the NIMBYs. I also write my city council person on occasion voicing these concerns.

Caplan addressed zoning in the speech. He compared Houston (almost no zoning) to the rest of the country and found that there was little to differentiate Houston land usage from the rest of the country. As such, Caplan's opinion on zoning was there was no need for it. People and business will zone themselves naturally, so zoning just prevents development without upside.

The book is sold out on amazon because of CGP Grey

canteluna "A rule of law society with accountable government" Accountable government? LOL Let’s stress the crucial importance upon proper definitions: what is the essential, fundamental characteristic that separates "government" from any other social institution? What attribute or distinguishing characteristic unites all governments under a common definition? Of course, there are many types of government. The term "government" subsumes theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, democratic socialism and any number of sundry dictatorships. It is said that the purpose of “government” is to protect “individual rights” - but that’s hardly a definition of “government.” Fascism and socialist regimes are also "governments” - but they hardly can be said to be institutions that "protect individual rights". A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area. To hold “exclusive power,” the state must initiate force against people, thus violating individual rights and the non-aggression principle. Government is force. If the initiation of force is not part of the equitation - it is not a government. This is not a controversial statement. Ayn Rand - the arch advocate of a constitutional republic - will inform you that government is force. Barack Obama will tell you that government is force. George Washington will tell you that government is force: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master".

Victor Pross That government is an institution of force is stipulated. The point is not that a government uses force, because the use of force is inevitable in a private property based society -- the very concept of private property demands it -- so the question is where any actor using force derives its authority. So, all these childish sentiments and platitudes about government as being abhorrent because it uses force is simply silly because it isn't really force libertarians abhor its any social organization that isn't 100% voluntary. Of course to define such a society in the way libertarians do, requires mental gymnastics that range from naive to disingenuous. "Hayek provides a very minimalist definition of freedom as freedom from coercion, and particularly coercion by a central government. But as the economist Amartya Sen has argued, the ability to actually take advantage of freedom depends on other things like resources, health and education that many people in a typical society do not possess. Moreover, freedom even in this minimal sense can be threatened by a variety of social actors, from wealthy elites to corrupt local governments to large corporations that hold a whip hand over their workers. A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers. In American history, freedom for African-Americans did not evolve spontaneously. It required first a bloody civil war to end slavery and then intervention by the federal government a century later to bring about the end of legal segregation." From Francis Fukuyama's “The Origins of Political ­Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.” I suggest libertarians read this book (there is an hour lecture here on youtube highlighting the main theses) before presuming to talk about things you don't understand.

"That government is an institution of force is stipulated. The point is not that a government uses force, because the use of force is inevitable in a private property based society -- the very concept of private property demands it -- so the question is where any actor using force derives its authority." In the book "City of God," St. Augustine relates the story of a notorious pirate. The pirate plundered small boats and raided villages along the coastline. He was eventually captured and brought to the mighty Emperor, Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the cheeky pirate replied with unabashed insolence, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." What is the real difference between a pirate and an emperor - apart from the scale of action? Both the pirate and the Emperor use force and violence to accomplish their goals. Both men expropriated the property of other people. What is the real difference between a pirate and an emperor? We can ask this very same question in modern times, in contrasting the political elite to private criminals. The moral of the story remains timeless. >"so the question is where any actor using force derives its authority." Ok, I'm game. Where does the state derive its authority?

Victor Pross I doubt you've actually read St Augustine. You probably just found his quote among others on some site proselytizing for libertarianism. I suggest you actually read him or other moral philosophers (religious or secular). The fundamental value in such teaching is about care for others and not using them as a means to an end. Capitalism is all about using others as a means to an end and so the lip service laissez faire libertarians pay to the non-aggression principle is a mere platitude as well as a contradiction in terms. Personally, I am not totally against capitalism, only against homo economicus and laissez faire. I don't delude myself, as libertarians do, that human beings are going to live without aggression (i.e., using others as a means to an ends) merely by adopting the NAP and observing negative rights. Therefore, I prefer a social organization that values human dignity and therefore limits the abuses in social relations incentivized in a market system, such as capitalism. If that means using force against the initiator of the aggression (i.e., those willing to use their leverage over others to treat them as a means to an end), then so be it. I'm not the one deluding myself that aggression is not required in some circumstances to ensure the kind of society worth living in.

"I doubt you've actually read St Augustine. You probably - " bla, bla, bla, Drop the bullshit. You know nothing about me or my background.

I didn't read your whole comment, but it looks like you're jumping to conclusions

I didn't bother to read or listen, but you're both obviously racist, sexist homophobes and the lecture is about fluffy unicorns. Slightly more serious answer to Slothy Llama, no, that is not his argument.

Product of public education strawmanning lecture that must 'obviously' be bad because person in question fails to utilize the working memory part of the coognitive system while taking in spoken information.

Condorcet's jury

Josie Cash Thanks for the name. I’m skeptical about Huemer’s conclusion that there is a dilemma if the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) is false, i.e., that either probability theory is false or people are worse than random guessers. The assumption of CJT that people are more than 50% reliable is really made of two parts: people are competent AND vote independently. Franz Dietrich (in “The premises of Condorcet's jury theorem are not simultaneously justified”) argues that whether an assumption is justified depends on the notion of probability considered and none of the notions renders both assumptions simultaneously justified. So, if he is correct, then it seems that probability theory can remain true, though the premises of one of its theorems cannot be jointly justified, and people are not worse than random guessers.

He does not say that that is an axiomatic truth. For his basic perspective, see 54:00 and 58:00

At 54:00 he basically states that it is a double standard to apply one standard of morality to acts between private individuals and another standard for how government operates. I already addressed that issue but will add this: I don't have a "right" to give someone a ticket for speeding, does that mean that the state is applying a moral double standard when it gives speeding tickets? Does that mean we should not have stop signs or traffic lights? Or that their use should be voluntary and as long as there is no harm there is no foul? Does someone need to be injured or killed in order for liability to exist? No, we take preventative measures because it saves lives and results in less injury. Taking such measures is a preferred social goal. There are big cities in the world that have very little traffic regulation, parts of the Philippines I've seen first hand. As a libertarian you might appreciate the lack of traffic regulation but I doubt you'd enjoy driving there. But the lack of traffic lights isn't a result of libertarian "planning" it is a result of the lack of taxes collected to create such an infrastructure. You might argue that private ownership of the roads would result in an orderly traffic system. But that would require people to pay to use it and the people are so poor there that even a privately owned road would not be able to pay for road maintenance by charging only those with money to afford it. The Philippines is also an example of a country with very few positive rights and as a result is one of the poorest countries and has an infamous record on human rights violations, as well as a huge wealth disparity, and relatively few enforced regulations on business. Have these policies led to a booming middle class or even a booming economy? Hardly. But I digress. The problem with Huemer's thesis at 54:00 is that he is begging the question of what a right is. What he really means is some "natural" right. But rights are not found in nature, and we don't live in a state of nature. If you define rights as only negative rights, then yes, the government is left mostly to protect one person from encroaching on another. (The libertarian claim that negative rights are consistent with property rights is a non sequitur and one of Rothbard's major failures in logic.) Huemer can talk about moral theory all he likes. I'm interested in how morality plays out in reality, not just on the blackboard. This is not to say that principles are not important, only that we can expect people to be conditioned by their environment as much or more than by moral principles. Studies show that people are not particularly moral when in positions where they know they can get away with what they'd otherwise consider immoral behavior. So, left to our own self interest and given the right incentives, we will violate our adopted moral code, because while we may have an innate empathy we also have the ability to rationalize. Huemer thinks that we are rationalizing when we allow government to act as we wouldn't act individually. I disagree and have already made my argument why. Take the issue of environmental protection. I find the libertarian position on this issue morally wanting. Libertarians, who are mostly anarcho capitalists, never argue for a morally pure ethic regarding pollution. Virtually everyone understands that, in the abstract, it is wrong to pollute, but we do it based on a notion of relative harm and cost-benefit analysis, not on a hard and fast principle. The same is true with principles in other aspects of social life. Even peace, a goal we all claim to desire and create systems of ethics to help us achieve, we know is not really possible unless we have a "pill society" because we know that morality is subjective to environment. Those of you who believe in voluntarism think you have found the principle (the NAP) on which to create the "good society." Most of us are skeptical. We know that in a free market environment, the non aggression principle will be ignored or compromised because of the incentives to do so. We know it because we've already seen it. We already have ethics, we have a basic "golden rule" ethic that has been around for thousands of years. Is it enough? Obviously not. Regulatory law is simply a response to someone harming someone else. That these laws may sometimes be unfair I don't deny, but to say that regulation causes more harm than good, I also deny. Morality comes from empathy, emotion, not logic. (Not that there is a hard and fast distinction between the way our brains work emotionally and logically. These parts of the brain interact in our decision making process.) So, when a society creates rights, it is doing so not from principles alone, but also considering human nature in a particular environment. The ideas that inform the rights come not from nature, though they may be based on what we understand as human "nature" but such understanding is ambiguous and so we arrive at rights and truths through a dialectic process by what resonates with logic, experience and our goals. Huemer, by making his case, is a part of that dialectic. Most people disagree with his libertarian positions. That doesn't make him wrong, but who's to say that he's right? Our best thinkers make their arguments and people decide what resonates with them. Huemer too. He is arguing that others don't have a right to encroach on his freedom. Others argue that libertarians don't have a right to likewise encroach on those of us who want the positive rights we create through democratic institutions. People clearly want a society that balances individual rights with social goals, goals which can only be achieved through positive rights and an enforcement mechanism such as authority delegated to trustees, i.e. government. There has never been any society that does not organize this way. Government, and its inherent authority, is a manifestation of human nature.

canteluna Wrong again. His thesis does not beg the question of what right is. I suggest you read his book.

I am not missing his point so I don't need to read his book. I've read Rothbardand others, he is saying nothing new. If this is the best response you can muster then maybe it's you who need to read more -- and wider.

"positive rights contradict at least some negative rights and (possibly, to my knowledge unproven) always some other positive rights." Yes, but that isn't necessarily a problem unless your position is dogmatic. People's interests come into conflict all the time. Consider the issue of eminent domain. The libertarian position, as far as I've heard, is dogmatic about the negative right of the private land owner not to be encroached upon. But property rights, and rights in general, are a social construct. Individual negative rights do not automatically, axiomatically trump the positive right of the society's to appropriate property for a "social good," Negative and positive rights derive from norms and norms change as the society changes. Since a society is made up of individuals, there is an inherent motivation to protect negative rights. But individuals also have social goals and, through a political process, can decide when negative or positive rights are most appropriate. Perhaps, we take negative rights too often for granted, as axiomatic, but a study of our hunter-gatherer ancestors shows this was not always the case. "Negative rights are the rights which can be proven to coexist." Obviously -- if coexistence is your only value or goal.

“It should also be pointed out that Huemer is a professor at the University of Colorado, which is a state university, subsidized by tax payers. Huemer is compelled to pay taxes, but he is not compelled to take a salary paid for, in part, by tax subsidies. Anyone else see the blatant hypocrisy in "do as I teach not as I act" philosophy?” This is an interesting point to raise. But in a philosophical setting, where truth is the primary goal, it looks more like an ad hominem fallacy of the tu quoque variety, that the source making the argument has spoken or acted in a way inconsistent with her argument; therefore, her argument is unsound. But arguing tu quoque is fallacious.

My motive was to raise the point as something to consider as a potential problem, not to argue the point as I would when trying to prove a point. I am only saying I am uncomfortable with this relationship between public education and billionaire political activists.

canteluna I appreciate your clarification and your feedback.

“In the hypothetical Huemer gives, the decision of paying for the drinks is determined after the fact, so the hypothetical is a "straw man." In a democracy it is not the case. The "rights" or laws are already understood prior to your decision -- especially by someone of Huemer's education.” Notice that that the "rights" or laws are already understood prior to your decision is different from that the democratic lawgiver is consented to by you. Huemer would say that a large portion of the population have not consented to such a government. “[I]f Huemer doesn't agree to the decision-making terms of the society he chooses to otherwise participate in, he can try to change it though voice while abiding by the laws of the land in protest, or he can exit. You can't have your cake and eat it too, Michael.” This dilemma needs to be substantiated, that an individual must either consent to a government or emigrate rather than a government must consent to the individual or emigrate from bothering her. “What is implied and glossed over in this hypothetical is not a small matter. He mentions that he has a right to his property, i.e his money. But money is a social construct for the social good, and as such is subject to the terms of its use.” This is a fair point. But his hypothetical can be rephrased to “the fruit of his labor” in place of “money”. “If you decide among your friends before hand that you will equally pay for the bar tab and then try to renege after the fact because you only had one drink and everyone else had several, you are not legally bound to such an agreement but if you have violated the trust of the group you can probably expect not to be invited to go drinking again.” This is something Huemer would/should agree with. The antecedent of the conditional, though, is required. “Trust is a significant issue here. Democratic institutions depend on trust and must earn that trust. The fact that our institutions are increasingly not trusted is not because they are democratic, but I would argue because they are perceived as being autocratic, opaque and unresponsive. This is not because a majority wishes them to be so, it is because they have been co-opted by powerful interests who wish it, i.e. the corporations (or powerful syndicated interests) that Huemer would apparently like to see in control of all facets of society.” Corporations are creations of the government, not creations of a free market. Provide examples of “powerful syndicated interests.” Huemer’s point is that the opinions or decisions of a larger group of people do not normally suffice to impose obligations on a smaller group or an individual who does not agree with the larger group, nor do they typically justify coercive behavior on the part of the larger group. Majority will alone does not generate an entitlement to coerce the minority, nor does it generate an obligation of compliance on the part of the minority. More precisely, majority will alone does not provide sufficient backing for a proposal to override an individual’s private property rights (your right to your money in this example) or right not to be subjected to harmful coercion. This sort of example places a dialectical burden on defenders of democratic authority, a burden of identifying some special circumstances that apply to the government that account for why, in the case of government, majority support provides adequate justification for coercion, even though it does not suffice for other agents.

"Huemer would say that a large portion of the population have not consented to such a government." Why make a distinction between a large portion of the population and one person? What is the difference in principle? How can sovereignty exist at the individual level in a society? It can't. The best we can do is create rights that protect the individual from the will of the many but it takes a society to define these rights. Expanding or modifying rights result from an ongoing dialectic by those who consent to be members of the society through the political process they consent to. Those who don't consent to the process have eliminated themselves from the process. How could it be otherwise? As Albert O Hirschmann explained, the options for members of any society are voice or exit. Ancaps have no problem understanding this concept when it comes to employer-employee relationships. How would any individual, sovereign or not, exist in a society without common pool resources/ property? The individual is always subject to the arbitrary law or rules of property owners in a propertarian/libertarian society. Where is the "voice" for the non property owner in such a system? Where is the exit? A libertarian world is a privately owned world. Freedom is limited in such a society far more than in the Left anarchist/voluntarist or democratic socialist hypotheticals I'm referring to. "your right to your money..." This statement begs a couple important questions. Money is created by govt and is a social construct and is not property in the way the self may be described (not that I agree with the "self ownership" principle as libertarians refer to it) and so its use is a matter of public policy, not a sovereign possession as the statement implies (there are legal limits as to what you can do with money. Essentially it is for paying public debt and taxes.). Also, ownership of money is highly questionable due to its original acquisition. Therefore, the relationships that result from the acquisition of property in a non consensual society are in question. Only a truly voluntarist/anarchist society without (or that does its best to limit) hierarchy and inequality can remove the question of the legitimacy of property and consent. Such a society is not the libertarian/voluntarist model which perpetuates inequality and the lack of meaningful consent, but the one I've described based on institutionalizing democracy wherever possible. "Corporations are creations of the government, not creations of a free market. Provide examples of 'powerful syndicated interests.'" That there are no free market societies, there are only nation states that provide the environment/rules for economies, the corporation is the organizational means for those interested in consolidated power/market share. The state regulates them and allows limited liability, sure, but it doesn't create the desire or even the means to grow as powerful as they do. The original corporate charter is nothing like the actual corporation of today which is because the distinction between state and corporation is a very porous one. Black markets are the real free markets and we should look to them for an indication of how corporations (or whatever they'd be called in a free market) would operate. The naive "mom and pop" style markets that most libertarians use to exemplify how businesses in an ancap society would operate is a joke. The Black market businesses are the real model of free market capitalism and where they merge with big banks and global corporations, although by means of stealth, is most telling. For example, there is nothing preventing drug cartels from conducting their businesses peacefully and respectful of their competitors. In fact, Black market businesses should be the role model for free market enterprise. Are they? Far from it. That they take on extra expense due to operating outside the law is no excuse for their cut throat behavior. That they deal in contraband goods has nothing to do with their choice to employ the violent methods they do with their competitors. What prevents free markets from acting like Black markets are oversight from an entity authorized by citizens to act on their behalf, not the lack of oversight, or what libertarians call freedom.

canteluna "Huemer would say that a large portion of the population have not consented to such a government." “Why make a distinction between a large portion of the population and one person? What is the difference in principle?” Some statists make the claim that not everyone would have to agree to the basic principles on which the government functions in order to have authority, since all it takes is a large portion of the population to produce such authority. You said, “Ideally, yes, everyone would have to agree to the basic principles on which the government functions in order to have authority.” But that’s consistent with saying, “Practically, yes, not everyone would have to agree to the basic principles on which the government functions in order to have authority.” The difference in principle is that sovereignty does not arise at the level of the individual, but arises at the level of a large portion of a population within a society. An anarchist can concede this, pro tempore, for the sake of discussion. “How can sovereignty exist at the individual level in a society? It can’t. The best we can do is create rights that protect the individual from the will of the many but it takes a society to define these rights” An anarchist need not be committed to disagreeing with this, although most libertarians would probably not agree. A theory of natural rights need not be explicated. Huemer, unlike Rothbard, does not take the natural rights approach in his book; rather, he employs a common sense approach. He argues that the belief in political authority is incompatible with common sense moral beliefs. There are three reasons for preferring to adhere to common sense morality rather than common sense political philosophy: first common sense political philosophy is more controversial than common sense morality. Second, even those who accept orthodox political views are usually more strongly convinced of common sense morality than they are of common sense political philosophy. Third, even those who intuitively accept authority may at the same time have the sense that this authority is puzzling - that some explanation is required for why some people should have this special moral status - in a way that it is not puzzling, for example, that it should be wrong to attack others without provocation. The failure to find any satisfactory account of political authority may therefore lead one to give up the belief in authority rather than to give up common sense moral beliefs. “Expanding or modifying rights result from an ongoing dialectic by those who consent to be members of the society through the political process they consent to.” Can a person be a member of a society and not participate in the political process that most of the members consent to? If not, why not? “Those who don't consent to the process have eliminated themselves from the process. How could it be otherwise?” Some libertarians would disagree or agree. I would agree. Anarchists shouldn’t be part of a political process if it requires that they consent to a coercive monopoly. “How would any individual, sovereign or not, exist in a society without common pool resources/ property?” By either adding value to society or not adding value to society. If one adds value to society, then one acquires resources from their services. If one does not add value to society, then one acquires resources from their family, friends or community who do add value to society. “The individual is always subject to the arbitrary law or rules of property owners in a propertarian/libertarian society.” The same can be said of non-free societies. The individual is always subject to the arbitrary law or rules of human owners in a non-free society. Without the profit-and-loss test, by which society ratifies allocation decisions, a government agency has no idea what to produce, in what quantities, in what location, using what methods. Their every decision is arbitrary, in a way directly analogous to the problem facing the socialist planning board. Some libertarians argue that taxation (whether it is direct like the income tax or indirect like inflation or national debts) is a form of slavery. They submit that forcible taxation on your personal income makes you a partial slave. For if you are legally bound to hand a certain percentage of your income (the fruits of your labors) over to federal, state and local governments, then from the legal standpoint you only have "some % ownership" of your person and labor. The pivotal point is whether or not ownership is ceded through voluntary contract. Have you any recollection of any deals you signed with the IRS promising them payment of part of your income? If not, then if 30% of your income is paid in income taxes, then you have only 70% ownership of Labor. You are a slave from January through April - a very conservative estimate at best, today! For some known examples of taxation from the future there are the following. Deficit financing; inflationary monetary expansion; government bonds, which future generations must pay out; spending the money taken in through social security, which future generations must pay for; offensive “defense” spending, which future citizens will pay for through increased risk of domestic attacks; massive educational failures, which have immensely deleterious effects on future productivity and happiness; the granting of special powers, rights and benefits to lobbyists such as unions, public sector employees and large corporations, which results in higher prices and deficits (the cost to the US economy for union laws alone is calculated at $50 trillion dollars over the past 50 years); the failure to adequately maintain public infrastructure such as roads, schools, bridges, the water supply and so on, which passes enormous liabilities onto the next generation; massive spending on the war on drugs, which increases crime in the future; and the pollution of public lands and other fixed assets, which saves money in the short run while ruining value in the long run. “Where is the "voice" for the non property owner in such a system? Where is the exit?” One option for a non-property owner’s voice is to boycott. The important thing about the boycott is that it is purely voluntary, an act of attempted persuasion, and therefore that it is a perfectly legal and licit instrument of action. As in the case of libel, a boycott may well diminish a firm’s customers and therefore cut into its property values; but such an act is still a perfectly legitimate exercise of free speech and property rights. Whether we wish any particular boycott well or ill depends on our moral values and on our attitudes toward the concrete goal or activity. But a boycott is legitimate per se. If we feel a given boycott to be morally reprehensible, then it is within the rights of those who feel this way to organize a counter-boycott to persuade the consumers otherwise, or to boycott the boycotters. All this is part of the process of dissemination of information and opinion within the framework of the rights of private property. Also, “secondary” boycotts are also legitimate. In a secondary boycott, labor unions try to persuade consumers not to buy from firms who deal with non-union (primary boycotted) firms. Again, in a free society, it should be their right to try such persuasion, just as it is the right of their opponents to counter with an opposing boycott. In the same way it is the right of the League of Decency to try to organize a boycott of pornographic motion pictures, just as it would be the right of opposing forces to organize a boycott of those who give in to the League’s boycott. “A libertarian world is a privately owned world. Freedom is limited in such a society far more than in the Left anarchist/voluntarist or democratic socialist hypotheticals I'm referring to.” Why do you think this is the case? "your right to your money..." “This statement begs a couple important questions. Money is created by govt and is a social construct and is not property in the way the self may be described (not that I agree with the "self ownership" principle as libertarians refer to it) and so its use is a matter of public policy, not a sovereign possession as the statement implies (there are legal limits as to what you can do with money. Essentially it is for paying public debt and taxes.).” Money is a social construct, for sure. But it need not be created by the government. There are alternatives to the government’s increasingly worthless federal reserve notes, e.g., Bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies. Alternatives currencies can be competing currencies. In fact, the government’s money monopoly is, as some libertarians argue, is the worst part of a government, since it facilitates all the other horrors of government. Again, “the fruit of one’s labor” can be substituted for “money” in Huemer’s example. “Also, ownership of money is highly questionable due to its original acquisition.” Expound on this. “Therefore, the relationships that result from the acquisition of property in a non consensual society are in question.” Explain the inference from your premise to this conclusion. “Only a truly voluntarist/anarchist society without (or that does its best to limit) hierarchy and inequality can remove the question of the legitimacy of property and consent. Such a society is not the libertarian/voluntarist model which perpetuates inequality and the lack of meaningful consent, but the one I've described based on institutionalizing democracy wherever possible.” I like Jeremy Weiland’s response to inequality. It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards enrichment. If this is true, then that means that normal, productive, and non-privileged people will tend to have similar estate values. This wide distribution of wealth will tend to reinforce bottom-up society and a balance of power unrivaled in history (except maybe in frontier experiences). In a stateless society, institutions for business and personal organization must derive their permanence from their usefulness not just to an elite few, but from the respect of the entire community - customers, suppliers, neighbors, etc. An entity that can operate efficiently and deliver a steady stream of income, whether an estate or a corporate business, becomes less viable the larger it grows because internal transaction and maintenance costs start to skyrocket. This is a function not of wealth itself, but rather of the inherent difficulty in convincing those with less to honor and defend the property of those with more. The more people benefit from a body of wealth, the more people will support it. A truly free market without subsidized security, regulation, and arbitration imposes costs on large scale aggregations of assets that quickly deplete them. I do not think they would be able to survive for very long without the State, even if “natural elites” exist or some form of social darwinism is proven correct, because natural hierarchies such as those would not need State intervention to maintain their cohesion. One can chalk this up to the fickle and often dark side of human nature, but it’s a phenomenon that we cannot just wish away - indeed, we should see a place for these dynamics in the legitimate, bottom-up society. "Corporations are creations of the government, not creations of a free market. Provide examples of 'powerful syndicated interests.'" “That there are no free market societies, there are only nation states that provide the environment/rules for economies, the corporation is the organizational means for those interested in consolidated power/market share. The state regulates them and allows limited liability, sure, but it doesn't create the desire or even the means to grow as powerful as they do. The original corporate charter is nothing like the actual corporation of today which is because the distinction between state and corporation is a very porous one.” The modern corporation is a legal entity chartered by the State. Corporations benefit from an arsenal of privileges, such as fiat entity status, personhood and limited liability, which serve to set the rules of the market on terms favorable to corporate investors and managers. The trend has always been to correct any perceived problems with big business by large, top-down regulation, rather than to reexamine the legal constructs that give these institutions such outsized power in our society. For instance, it is conceivable that a firm could argue effectively in front of a judge for certain of the rights of being a human citizen on a case by case basis, but current established law mandates a clumsy legal equivalence between living human beings and abstract organizations of people and assets (which is historically dubious). The benefit to big business, of course, is to regularize and simplify business legal proceedings, setting aside the legal advantages this gives corporations over individual humans. In the United States, for instance, the ability to exercise first and fourth amendment rights as if the firm were a human being results in corporate campaign contributions and protection from random inspections. It is interesting to see the framers’ document limiting government prerogative used to defend not merely the rights of human beings but those of the government’s own abstract inventions. Yet while human rights are invoked, privileges granted by the State to corporations that no human can claim, such as limited liability, represent a fiat subsidy. Imagine the cost of privately insuring the value of the total market capitalization of the world’s corporations! But the utility of the subsidy goes even further, because it allows investors to hire managers who have a legal mandate to pursue profits while maintaining a distance from the way the profits are pursued. Highly capitalized firms, who by their sheer size wield far more potential for harm than any single individual, essentially obfuscate the way decisions are made so that if third parties to the stock- holder-manager relationship are harmed, stockholders cannot lose more than their investment. The imbalance of responsibility this enables cannot be underestimated, for it goes to the very heart of corporate economic behavior. What would be different about business, socioeconomics, and politics if stockholders knew that their managers’ activities would leave them fully liable for the actions of the corporation and could lose their savings, their car, their house? Limited liability and corporate personhood make possible a way of doing business in a far riskier way than normal people would. How do we know this? Because few people, anarchist or not, would limit the liability of regular human beings, knowing that it is the consequences of undesirable behavior such as violence or theft that helps prevent it. In a free market, corporations would not be able to rely on the State for their very existence. Any ability to do business as an entity would come from the consent and cooperation of the market - customers, suppliers, contractors, service providers, banks, but most importantly management. Without a Securities and Exchange Commission and intrusive reporting requirements, oversight, and regulatory enforcement, it would be very hard to protect the shareholders at firms of any appreciable size and organizational complexity from outright fraud in a variety of ways. The well- understood legal relationships that govern so much capital finance and business activity would become much more ad hoc and peculiar. Shares in corporations would become even less uniform constructs from business to business, since their terms could vary wildly and they couldn’t simply be traded as almost fungible commodities. Unpredictability and risk would skyrocket, which is a much more favorable environment for the small-time entrepreneur than the big, clumsy, bureaucratic corporation. “Black markets are the real free markets and we should look to them for an indication of how corporations (or whatever they'd be called in a free market) would operate. The Black market businesses are the real model of free market capitalism and where they merge with big banks and global corporations, although by means of stealth, is most telling. For example, there is nothing preventing drug cartels from conducting their businesses peacefully and respectful of their competitors. In fact, Black market businesses should be the role model for free market enterprise. Are they? Far from it. That they take on extra expense due to operating outside the law is no excuse for their cut throat behavior. That they deal in contraband goods has nothing to do with their choice to employ the violent methods they do with their competitors. What prevents free markets from acting like Black markets are oversight from an entity authorized by citizens to act on their behalf, not the lack of oversight, or what libertarians call freedom.” Like corporations, black markets would also not exist without the state. Charles Johnson says that there are trades that the state has made entirely illegal: selling drugs outside of a state-authorized pharmacy, prostitution outside of the occasional state-authorized brothel “ranch,” or running small-time gambling operations outside of a state-authorized corporate casino. These trades are often practiced by women and men facing desperate poverty; the state’s efforts add the danger of fines, forfeitures, and lost years in prison. Beyond the government-created black market, there are also countless jobs that could be done above ground, but from which the poor are systematically shut out by arbitrary regulation and licensure requirements. In principle, many women in black communities could make money braiding hair, with only their own craft, word of mouth, and the living room of an apartment. But in many states, anyone found braiding hair without having put down hundreds of dollars and days of her life to apply for a government-fabricated cosmetology or hair-care license will be fined hundreds or thousands of dollars. In principle, anyone who knows how to cook can make money by laying out the cash for ingredients and some insulated containers, and taking the food from his own kitchen to a stand set up on the sidewalk or, with the landlord’s permission, in a parking lot. But then there are business licenses to pay for (often hundreds of dollars) and the costs of complying with health-department regulations and inspections. The latter make it practically impossible to run a food-oriented business without buying or leasing property dedicated to preparing the food, at which point you may as well forget about it unless you already have a lot of start-up capital sitting around. Huemer deals with the idea of cartelization in a free society in chapter 10. Here are the three main points for which he argues. Individual members of a cartel have an incentive to defect against the cartel. It is unlikely that a protection industry cartel would be enforced through violence between protection agencies. Nor could an industry cartel be enforced through a threat to refuse to protect customers of noncartel agencies. In an anarchist society, it is highly probable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution would all be legal. The essential difference between these ‘crimes’ and more paradigmatic crimes such as murder, robbery, and rape is that the latter crimes have victims, whereas gambling, drug use, and prostitution have no victims - or at any rate, no victims who are likely to complain. In the anarcho-capitalist society, rights are enforced by the victim of a rights violation bringing a complaint against the rights violator through his protection agency and relying upon a private arbitrator to judge the validity of the complaint. There is no effective mechanism for prohibiting victimless crimes, because there is no legislature to write the statutes and no public prosecutor to enforce them. What if a large number of people were so strongly opposed to prostitution that they were willing to pay their protection agencies to ‘protect’ them from living in a society in which other people buy and sell sexual services? And what if arbitrators in this society agreed that anyone complaining about someone else’s trade in sexual services had in fact been wronged (perhaps through being offended) and was entitled to compensation by either the prostitute or the prostitute’s client? In theory, a society of this kind could end up with antilibertarian prohibitions on prostitution; however, this is an improbable scenario, since few people in fact think that a contract to purchase sexual services victimizes any person who merely finds out about it and doesn’t like it, and few are in fact willing to pay as much to prevent other people from engaging in prostitution as prostitutes and their clients are willing to pay to be left alone. Similar observations apply to other victimless crimes, such as gambling and recreational drug use.

canteluna I’m also waiting on your response to my request that you explicate your theory of consent (you've merely eluded to consent by sharing or consuming benefits by the state so far, which is a gratitude consent theory), which is what I’m primarily interested in, since after taking an upper division philosophy of law class on John Simmons’ book Moral Principles and Political Obligations, I don’t know of any plausible accounts of political consent. Simmons himself is a philosophical anarchist, which entails that he is open to the ideal that there can be legitimate governments and so political obligations, but his claim is de facto, i.e., there are no actual governments with sufficient consent by individuals.