I don’t think people are fundamentally moral, only that they have the capacity for it. I believe the moral conscience is latent in everyone, just not fully developed in everyone.

I posit that the communal resources can be managed sustainably because it is in their self-interest to do so. I believe it because I’ve seen it first hand in a local anarchist community. No rules, no management, no authority, no mechanism, just a community of people engaging in common enterprise on the land they loved. Their economy consisted of fishing and foraging, tourism, trading trinkets with other communities, and believe it or not, professional surfing. All of this occurred out of the prying eyes of state interference…or so they thought. As soon as the state caught wind of their dealings they were forced to leave and their dwellings were burned to the ground.

I don’t believe this goodwill extends to government because it is a fundamentally immoral and anti-social institution. Anyone who occupies a position in it, moral or not, will nonetheless be perpetuating immoral and anti-social behavior. They couldn’t do otherwise.

But what you wrote is a good argument, and I agree with it. It works both ways, though. If one rejects freedom on account of the capacity for evil and greed of man, one should repudiate government power for the same reason.

I think both are possible. Whether good or evil, I only wish that I could deal with them all on my own terms, and associate with whomever I choose. I neither need nor want any collective management to determine which actions I or others take in any given situation, and I don’t think others need it as well, no matter how dependant upon they may have become in the meantime.

I get a similar feeling about statists. Since there are ways to care for others that do not involve state authority, I lean to the belief that those who are dependant on the state to care for others don’t really care for others. It’s just that they’d much rather have someone else do it for them. This isn't a liberal or objectivist critique of statist charity, as far as I know, but a Marxist one. As I mentioned earlier, the absence of a state would lay bare your compassion for what it really amounts to, and so far it’s not looking pretty.

Even with that hypothesis (which I don't ascribe to), you haven't justified your preference for economic liberties over civil liberties. In fact, for most states it describes how the already rich and powerful conquered the masses and keep them down. The system is already working in their favour.

I don’t prefer economic over civil liberties. In fact I think the proper role of government is to protect human rights and civil liberties. I just don’t think the proper role for government is to meddle in the economy, and for the reasons I stated.

The state isn’t the only agent acting in any economy. There are black markets that actively work to avoid state interference and involvement, for instance. The delusion lies in believing the state and the economy are somehow the same or inseparable, as if all trade, production, consumption, and enterprise would stop should a bunch of bureaucrats suddenly stop going to work.

The argument made no sense. There is no economy without government therefor laissez-faire is nonsense. Not a strand of bubble gum can connect the premise to the conclusion.

It does, and it does so poorly and unjustly. So maybe it shouldn't.

I was using the phrase “separation of economy and state” to describe the fundamental principle, much like the separation of powers and the separation of church and state. Some have implied that such a separation is not possible, or that the fact of state intervention invalidates the philosophy of state non-intervention, though one has to struggle to find reason in these objections.

My theory of the state and state formation is the so-called conquest theory of state formation, as written by Franz Oppenheimer. In his formulation the state is the organization of the appropriation of the labor of others. It forms to maintain the power of the victors over the vanquished. The ISIS caliphate is one recent example which supports my image, but empire is another.

The state has no power or wealth of its own. It confiscates power and wealth. Exploitation is its means of subsistence, violence the means of maintaining it. One can try to keep what he has earned from his labors to feel the force of this. And voting is merely a concession because the transient power of our representatives is always negated by the absolute power of the institution itself.

I would think so.

I’m pretty sure you can enforce your own behavior, as can most adults. If you need an official caste of moral busybodies to govern how you treat and cooperate with others then you are no different than the warlord or gang member.

I don’t care for your points or your hypotheticals. Your system is fundamentally immoral, little different than the warlord or a gangs you describe, except you promote one form of despotism because it is preferable to the other. I’d rather take my chances and have none of it.

Nonetheless, despite our disagreement, your examples of why you fear of laissez-faire is all I really wanted to know. So thank you.

My reasons for preferring it are moral. I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. Anything else is tyranny, injustice, oppression, exploitation, slavery. If you or I or any group of people acted as a state official or agent does, they’d be rightfully dragged through the street.

The same applies to matters of trade and enterprise. If anyone rigged the game in their favor as much as states have done—skimming, stealing, exploiting, extorting, racketeering, money laundering—he’d be thrown in jail.

Because of this, and because the state increases its own power in proportion to the decrease in the power of the people it rules, it is an anti-social institution worth opposing.

As for roads and government services, no government is required to flatten earth and lay asphalt. No government is required to tell me which products I should buy, or with which group of people I should engage in common enterprise with.

No laissez faire regime has failed because no such regime has existed.

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy.

Sure, “the economy” isn’t a useful term or idea, and we can quibble about it forever. But the usefulness of the term doesn’t automatically justify regulatory behavior, nor does it negate minding your own business. Anyone can mind his own business, refuse to regulate another’s economic activity, refuse to be an interloper, so I don’t think the principle is as nonsensical as you make it out it to be.

It’s true that many people espouse principles that they refuse to abide by, and it is probably true that they do so in order to dupe others, to achieve power, to benefit themselves and their friends, and so on—this is the history of America—but again, none of these objections justify regulatory behavior, nor do they negate the idea that the state should mind its own business.

Protectionism, mercantilism, subsidies, corruption—this is state intervention in a nutshell. I could be wrong but it appears that you are more concerned about who benefits from state intervention rather then the behavior of state intervention as such. Speaking of nonsense, how many years and how many votes have you spent waiting for a return on your investment?

Well, no, protecting human rights is not “regulated capitalism”. Preserving human liberty is not a 1-to-1 ratio with regulating the economy, and it is neither rationally nor emotionally satisfying for me to accept such non-sequiturs. There will be instances where protecting human liberty will cross into the economy, such as in the business of slavery, but abolition is concerned with the freedom and dignity of human beings and not with the regulation of the slave trade.

I do believe people can be evil and that people can be good, and that the latter should learn to defend themselves from the former, with violence if necessary. One can and should do that without a state because, if history is any indication, the state is often incompetent in that regard and violates those same rights. According to author RJ Rummel, the body count for which the state is to blame in the 20th century is 262,000,000, and this is only acts of genocide.

I think it is morally wrong to tax people just as it is wrong to steal the fruits of someone’s labor. I think you are morally justified in refusing to pay taxes. That system is little more than a protection racket. The problem is the state disagrees with you, and because they have the monopoly on violence and you are but a serf to their power, you probably won’t get away with it.

Yes, and probably courts.

I just don’t think you have a right to interfere in the movement of others. And no, I don’t think a company has any right to pour poison in a river.

The hands of a man who has never worked a day in his life with the fingernails of Karl Marx.

Fake communists like Streetlight would melt if they lived under communist rule.

No. One is not at liberty to interfere with another’s liberty.

I don’t want to abolish democracy, nor do I want to completely abolish the government. I just don’t think the task of government is to meddle in our livelihoods.

The abolition of slavery was fantasy. Perhaps given enough time, the abolition of state control over economic activity would come to fruition.

In my mind the proper role for government is to defend liberty, or to go extinct. The moral and just way to fund any institution is voluntarily, whether through subscription, donation, etc.

Simply that the state ought to mind it’s own business, stop regulating the economy, and let people earn their livelihoods as they see fit.

For every man who would exploit his neighbor is another who would not. This is why I have faith in the absence of state fetters. What prohibits a man from exploiting his neighbor is not the state, but a conscience and a reasonable set of moral principles.

Would you seek to dominate others should there be no state?

Humans are far too embedded in their social institutions for even the most ardent individualist (@NOS4A2? @Harry Hindu?) to opt out.

It has become increasingly more difficult.

I don’t think such a regime has existed.

My own view is that the state is formed through conquest and confiscation. I don’t believe in any social contract theory. As such, suffrage is merely a concession to state power, all of it premised on the off-chance that each of us might benefit from the spoils should we get to vote for the exploiters.

StreetlightX is right. The failure of laissez-faire doctrine is that it was never laissez-faire. In practice, the only difference between its proponents and it’s opponents is the incidence of those interventions shifted from one class of beneficiaries to another. The merchants never followed a policy of laissez-faire, and never wished the state to “let it do”, but sought to wield that power for its own benefit.

At any rate, a state that engages in intervention is engaging in exploitation, and does so with the monopoly on violence, whether influenced by “the people”, special interests, or a tinpot dictator.

I’ll try to clarify. If there are no positions of power for the plutocrats to occupy, it doesn’t follow that the absence of these positions of power leads to plutocracy. We can point to existing state structures and say “that is plutocracy” until the cows come home, but we are no less pointing to the state. Plutocrats can achieve control through democratic means.

What you haven’t done is shown how laissez-faire leads to plutocracy, is all I’m saying.

I look around and see competing interests competing for state power. All of them intervene in the economy through the very means you defend, yet we’re supposed to act aghast when they seize and use them. But it doesn’t follow that the absence of those means leads to them seizing them.

How does separating the state and economy lead to a plutocracy?

But the state is a monopoly of the kind you describe, destroying the playing field for everyone else, and willing to maintain it with compulsion and violence, with free reign to wage war, dominate each other, and ensure no one has any way of beating them again. Unfettered statism seems to me the greater threat than some entity from a game.

Fair enough. I’m not sure the far right would employ multiculturalism or socialism as state doctrine, for example.

We’re all over the place here. I thought we were talking about the left today, and not the right yesterday. Both are statist, both are authoritarian, both like identity politics, both are collectivist, yes. I appreciate the examples but I just don’t know what purpose they serve.

It’s true. The left used to be about freedom and individualism. Now it’s statist, reactionary, and collectivist. That’s why the old divisions hardly work anymore.

I’m not sure that’s true. To identify the left wing all you have to do is ask them.

This thread is about the left wing, though.

Whatever it is, it always reads to me as big government, nanny-statism with an emphasis on identity politics, activism, and anti-capitalism. It’s no so much extreme as it is routine. It’s fashionable.

I was just talking about Math.

Math wasn’t racist until people such as the Ethnic Studies Math teacher entered the scene. They are creating systemic racism.

Biden’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” commissar.

I mostly agree with your definitions. I would add, though, that an agnostic believes in the possibility that a god exists. The possibility of god is an equally untenable belief, in my mind.

I’m aware of Mill’s ideas. I don’t think the harm principle should apply to speech.

However you don't have the inalienable right to use Twitter or be employed by me, therefore it isn't wrong for me to fire you or for Twitter to suspend your account for expressing your opinion.

It’s true. Your business is yours and no one has a right to be employed by you, and you have every right to fire anyone. But the fact of having the right to fire someone for their opinions doesn’t mean that it is right to fire someone for their opinions. Though it’s up to you and no one else how you should operate your business, you should not fire someone because you don’t like his opinions.



It’s not a gift or a bargain or a contract. I was merely using the idiom “uphold my end of the bargain” to say that I will fulfill my obligation. Perhaps that idiom is too American. My apologies.

I will not seek sanction or punishment for your speech. I will also defend you from those who would seek your sanction or punishment. No casuistry will convince me to do otherwise.