norpan

Oh, are we discussing the situation where there is a state? Well, that's obviously a completely different matter. I though we were discussing a flaw in anarchocapitalist thought. I agree that the state makes it possible to get rich on the behalf of others.

Well yes, but to make investments that makes the land profitable you must own it, or in some way be able to control the future use of the land. This is not possible when you only rent it, so the owner can not get as much rent as he could by selling the land outright. This is also why people take better care of things they own than of things they rent: they can get value from them in the future because they own them.

Owning a lot of land is not cheap in a free society. There is no such thing as legal ownership, where you just can call the police and have them remove squatters. You actually have to do it yourself, or pay somebody to do it for you. Where will you get the resources to pay them?Since the land itself is of no value unless it is used, the person who can make the land the most profitable is also able to bid the highest for the land. That person will also then have the most resources to pay for the protection of the land.Another thing to keep in mind is that, while there is objective ethics, there is no enforcer of it. Each person is responsible for their own ethics, and a land owner such as the one you describe will not be popular in society.There will also be competition. The fact that you have to provide security yourself effectively limits the amount of land you can own without making it productive. Since their land is worthless without anybody working it, they will compete for your labour and the one that bids the highest will get it.If there is much more people than land to work by hand, then there is a real problem, this is the problem of scarcity. But the free market has already solved that problem, by making farming so efficient that it can sustain a thousandfold more people than when the land was worked by hand. This caused the freeing up of a lot of labour, and is known as "the industrial revolution".I think you are chasing a ghost here. You are not free of the statist thinking that there is a "legal" owner of land and he has the right to protection of it from society. No such right exists. I make no claim that I know how a free society will solve these problems, I am certain that the combined talents of billions of people far exceed my own. But I don't see any way in which a person can own a lot of land without making productive use of it. It will simply not be accepted.

Let's look at it from the property rights angle; the basic principle of morality. We have universally and objectively established a system of property rights, where an agent can claim property rights as a universal. In the basic sense, the claiming of property rights is a moral action, you are saying that it is wrong for anybody else to violate your property, and so you are a moral agent. Now, featuses, small children, or coma victims do not claim property rights, because they don't know the have them, but there is the chance that they will know this in the future, and can claim them retroactively. I understand that killing small children prevents them from developing into moral agents, but we can say that the action was wrong because if we hadn't done it, at a later date the victim could have claimed it to be wrong, and so we have to wait until that moment and get their permission. We can also say that if we had waited, the victim would probably not have given their permission, so there is no "I didn't know" defense. I know this is a counterfactual claim, but I have no better at the moment. It's more like the "better safe than sorry" principle With regards to psycopaths, they are clearly capable of claiming their property rights, which makes them full moral agents.

Yes, this includes making the victim whole. The concept of property just says that a specific scarce good is property. It does not say anything about the quality of the object. If you throw my gold in the river, it is still my gold in the river. It does not transfer ownership of your gold to me. If "making a victim whole" is an objective concept, how do you objectively specify what property now belongs to the victim? I know that "intuitively " it seems I have a claim to your gold, just as it "intuitively" many people think that they have a claim to kill a murderer. But intuition is not a valid argument. Though I am open for arguments as to why aggressive retribution is an objective moral concept. Until I get such arguments that I accept, I won't use aggression for retribution because until then I have to consider it immoral. Indeed, "people" is not right to use here. A moral peer is something that has the capability to understand morality or (to be on the safe side) that potentially could could have that in the future (such as children or psychopaths or people in a coma). If you are reasonable sure that that something doesn't have the capability or can have it in the future, then it's not a moral peer.

Yes, this is also something which I have thought about a great deal, namely in the context of punishment. Most libertarians and anarchists state that some form of aggressive punishment is moral, even though the action itself would normally be immoral. This is a parallel to the concept that defense is moral. But defense is moral because the right to defend your property is the same as the right to property. Property rights are defined as the right to use force to defend property. Just as the property rights definition defines aggression as immoral, it defines defense as moral. With retributive aggressive force, this is not the case. In fact, the criminal has property rights over his own body. Kinsella and others has tried to overcome this problem by invoking a concept called estoppel. This means that the criminal, by virtue of his actions, has violated morality, and so cannot reasonably claim moral behaviour from others. But I don't think this holds water. What the criminal can reasonably claim does not in any way affect the morality of somebody elses actions. The only thing that determines if a violent action is aggressive is whether it is approved of by the victim or not. In the case of defense there is a direct link between the violent action and the property being defended, and the "victim" of the violent defensive action has only to stop violating the property rights for the defensive action to immediately become immoral again. Not so with aggressive retribution. Here there is some kind of "delayed property violation" not intrinsically connected with the property itself, but with the criminal. This concept is very interesting to analyze objectively, but so far I haven't been able to find any attempt to objectively bind the criminal to the property once the property violation has stopped. At least not in a way that makes violent action against the criminal moral. The main problem is how to objectively determine which aggressive action is allowed, and which is not. There is of course the concept of proportionality, but that is an entirely subjective concept, as there is no way to objectively determine if one piece of property is proportionate in value to another, as value is a purely subjective concept. So this goes back to the fact that all people are moral peers. Regardless of their previous actions. To have it any other way would be to lose objectivity.

I'll give it a go. Ownership arises because some object ("good") is scarce, that is to say that only one person can use it at the same time. To avoid conflict over the use of objects, we assign ownership, which is the exclusive right to use it. The alternative is to not have ownership at all, which means that anybody may use anything with equal rights. These are the only two alternatives which are universal and objective. Do the other person accept your use of his body to your liking? If not, then he must accept self-ownership as a valid concept. I'll group these. I don't see why labor has anything to do with ownership. The "resuls of one's labor" is a confused concept. It's much easier to determine who owns a scarce good by the following: either a good is unowned, or somebody owns it. The only objective and universal rule is that the person that uses the good first is the owner. By using it he proves that it is a scarce good that can be used. Ownership is only relevant when there is a conflict, and any subsequent conflict over the use of the good can then be resolved temporally. If something is already owned, then your labor with it does not transfer ownership to you. So labor is irrelevant. You do not own children, they own themselves, since they are themselves their first users, and also because they are intrinsically the only ones who can use themselves fully. Land does not have to be improved for ownership. Once you own something, you own it until you transfer ownership or abandon it. If you homestead a whole island by fencing it, you own it. Unless somebody has homesteaded part of it before of course. But keep in mind that just because you own something, that does not mean that nobody can take it from you. It only means that they are morally wrong to do so and that you are morally right in defending it. The only person you can force to behave morally is yourself.

Well, I'm not trying to blow anything out of proportion of course. There are a few trials going to establish this more clearly. I'm just saying it's something to try for yourself if you want. Low carb/fasting seems to help the body heal itself in many other instances (diabetes and obesity), so why not here? I read about this recently and here is a review of studies so far. And low carb is perfectly feasible, even on a vegetarian diet.

Of course, it's almost always not possible to identify a specific cause in a single case. A vegetarian diet per se should not be a problem However, it is well established[citation needed] that most cancer cells use glucose as fuel, and that seems to be why low-carb diets or plain fasting can cause cancers to dissapear. It's a bit harder to go low-carb on vegetarian food, although not impossible of course. You have soy, nuts, dairy and eggs (depending on what kind of vegetarian regime you follow). Fasting and/or a low carb diet is an easy thing to try and will not do you any harm. And it might actually make you better!

So very well deserved, Stefan! Those of you who haven't already donated to our worthy cause are well advised to do so after reading all those letters of praise.