BrentMcCulloch

I'm inclined to agree with this entirely. The more I debate with my most rational (perhaps an oxymoron in the case of statists, but in relative terms...) of my colleages, the more I understand that the social contract and "you can leave," bits are not meant as arguments. They are meant as a show-stopper to the debate, period. Once you hear "well, you can always leave," then you know that you've crossed the last line of their comfort threshold(s) and have entered territory that their mind has yet to chart. You've made them so uncomfortable in their asessment of reality and their relationship to the state (as indicated: stand-in for their parents) that they would MUCH rather you dissapear from the picture than attempt to re-draw the universe as they know it to account for all the logical steps you've taken them through. I think this is very much true. His argument of 'you can always leave' seems to have been meant as a show stopper, an excuse not to think critically about his own moral contradictions and end the conversation. It continued never the less, and he indeed performed batshit crazy somersaults around logic. As these debates seem to wildly move from one topic to another, in a subsequent email he came to the conclusion that the thing he didn't like about the moral philosophy of non-aggression was that you could choose to pass by a starving man on the street and let them die of hunger. His feeling is that we ought to be "morally obligated" to help them, and further that using aggression to make sure someone feeds him is good and moral. This is a little easier to turn around. I do the same thing when people bring up discrimination, and find it a very easy argument to win. This was actually a critical turning point to get my wife to understand liberty, and eventually embrace voluntarism. We have a mutual friend, Alex, who owns a few restaurants and coffee shops here in Toronto. During a debate about descrimination I simply asked my wife if Alex should be allowed to discriminate against members of the KKK, should they wish to dine at his establishment, or apply for a job. To her credit it made her completely pause and re-analyse her position rather than do what most people do, just argue their point without any critical thought of it. With regards to the starving person on the street, after establishing that 'obligate' in this context really means the use or threat of violence, i simply asked my friend: if this starving person on the street had previously raped and killed my entire family, is it still moral and good to threaten violence against me in order to force me to feed him? Followed up with: if this wasn't a starving person, but a cause that the majority of people think is good and moral, such as saving a failing auto-manufacturer through the use of a bail-out, if i am an ardent environmentalist (i could have said austrian economist) who refuses to pay for the bail out, is it moral and good to use or threaten violence against me to force me to pay for it? Finally followed up by: do you think it's moral to use or threaten violence to force your opinion on someone? Three days of radio-silence since then. I imagine he is simply frustrated and not thinking about it, but my hope, futile though it might be, is that he is starting to admit to himself that his views on morality are logically inconsistant. He is an engineer, so i know he has some value for logical consistancy. Anyways, I always try to learn something from these conversations, and what I learned from this one was that it's important to establish a few truths before even starting to talk to someone about government. I smartly had my friend agree that the term freedom was meaningless unless it was actionable. If I am a slave-master and i say to my slave "you are free to leave whenever you want, but if you do, i'm going to shoot you" - the slave is clearly not 'free' to leave. There are a few more truths or agreements that in retrospect i wish i had established. This made me think of Kal Molinet's approach of always starting converstations by asking: "do you think it's moral to use or threaten violence to force your opinion on someone?" I think if you combine this with the question: "do you think theft or the use of violence is a legitimate way to become the rightful owner of something?" Then you've got a voluntarist two-pronged pincer-move to start the conversation, which puts them on the defensive immediately. Not only are the actions of the state immoral, but it's ownership of the territory is as well. You can start on the offense - challanging their view of the state which they will find difficult to defend since it is inconsistant with their own morality (provided you're not talking to a sociopath) as they've already established - assuming their answers to those two questions is 'no.' Just a thought I wanted to share. Maybe i'm being an idealist and underestimating the batshit crazy somersaults, but what the hell, you've got to try someting :-)

It's funny, I find my friend in all other aspects of life to be quite smart and open minded, now it feels like he's just arguing for the sake of it. Here's his response to my example (above re: Luigi and the Mafia): "in the case of Luigi, the mafia is the legitimate owner of the territory and Luigi either grew up knowing he was on mafia territory or asked permission to move onto mafia territory. The mafia legitimately owns the territory through many years of precedence as established by people trading land contracts within this territory which specify that the mafia owns it."

Thanks for the help all! I haven't looked through your long list masonkiller, but i will do so now. In the mean-time, i wrote my friend a potential response, with the intention of a lead-up to a question of legitimacy of ownership (though, not sure how dicey that one will be). Anyways, here's what i've got, would love some feedback if anyone is up for it, am i going to get myself in more hot water by begging the question at the end? --------- Okay, bear with a me a moment and we'll get to the 'you can always leave' argument shortly. Let's go back to an example of a restaurant owner in the Bronx in the 1920's. Let's imagine, for the sake of example, that he acquired the ownership of his restaurant legitimately - he worked hard during his youth, saved up enough capital, and bought a restaurant from a previous legitimate owner in order to fulfill his dream of serving world-class lasagna. Now, imagine on his first day in businesses a group of armed thugs, aka: the Mafia, enter the restaurant and propose to him a deal. They say "Hey Luigi, I've got a deal for you. Either you start paying us $50 per month, or me and my boys here gonna beat the snot out of you. And we'll come back every day and beat the snot out of you until you start paying us $50 a month. But, if you DO pay us $50 a month, we'll provide you with a service: we'll keep you safe from other thugs who, if it weren't us hanging around, would threaten to beat the snot out of you." This is extortion, a classic protection racket, and I hope that we can at least agree that it is immoral. Assuming that we do, I would argue that we feel this way for a few reasons: - First, we recognize that the Mafia has no legitimate claim of ownership over the property of the restaurant or over Luigi himself. They might have a geographical territory in the Bronx within which they run this same protection racket, and they might say "we own these streets" or whatever Mafia thugs in the 20's said, but their simple say-so is not enough to provide any legitimacy to their use of violence. Their claim to the property is in fact only premised on the fact that they're willing to defend it with violence should any other group of thugs try to come into the territory and either disrupt or compete-with their protection racket, but the claim itself does not prove or demonstrate ownership. - Second, although Luigi has the option of closing up his shop and leaving if he doesn't like the deal, that does not morally justify the Mafia's extortion of Luigi, even if Luigi knew that his restaurant was within this Mafia's claimed territory when he bought it. - Third, we can see that just because the Mafia is offering a service, in this case the service of protection from other Mafias, in return for the $50 per month, the extortion is still not morally justified. In other words, it does not matter that Luigi might see some degree of benefit from being extorted - that does not change the morality of extortion. - Fourth, Luigi's ability to plead with or petition the Mafia for a lower price or better protection or more services, does not in itself morally justify the the actions of the Mafia. - Fifth, the fact that some of the restaurant owners in the neighbourhood might not mind being extorted in return for the protection services, does not morally justify extorting those who DO mind. Perhaps i am assuming too much. Do you think any of the above five points above make extortion moral? So, when comparing between the case of the Mafia as presented above, and similar actions when performed by Government, the real question simply becomes: is the ownership of the territory legitimate? If the government has a legitimate ownership over the territory, then they can certainly say 'my house, my rules' with regards to government action. If the government does not have legitimate ownership over the territory, then they are morally on-par with the Mafia. Do you agree? B.

Thanks Robin. I was just coming to the same conclusion myself - it's all about the legitimacy of the land's ownership. I was just looking for Stefan's stuff because he's always so eloquent. It may be difficult to communicate to my friend that the government does not have any rightful claim on the land (here in canada), in that context, without getting into 8000 other topics.

Hi All, I was just wondering if anyone knows where i can find Stefan's response to the common "you can always leave" statist argument? I imagine he's gone over it a few times, but i'm having trouble finding it. Having a discussion with a friend about it, and i'd like to review Stefan's perspective. Thanks kindly!

I found this piece in the new york times to be one of the most emotionally-charged articles on economics i've ever read, it might be a good one for Stefan to disect. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/opinion/how-austerity-kills.html