@chilaxe to point #1, I would agree, I would like a society where rationalists would have a larger influence on society, but I'm not sold on the idea that we have an effective way to discern the rational, moral and wise from everyone else. Even if we did, I'm not comfortable with the idea of giving such hypothetical supermen some sort of inviolable authority over mere mortals like myself -- the kind of power that would flow from a strict libertarian view of property rights and contract enforcement.

To point #2, I agree that humans should not only merely have "at least some responsibility for their actions," but a tremendous amount of responsibility for their actions. I think the point Rawls is making is that whether you become rich or poor depends on so many arbitrary factors that you can't really make a claim that you morally deserve your precise economic status, because very little about how much you make for a living has to do with choices you actually make yourself.

I'd also add that it's not like failure in a market economy is some sort of moral failing that justifies the punishment of poverty. Yes, it's important to have feedback in the system for failure, but I think once you start stripping away basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, medical care -- things it would be considered unconscionable to deprive prisoners of -- you're crossing into a territory where you've lost sight of people's fundamental human rights.

I don't think land property rights extend to businesses caring for the land they possess. Look at Union Carbide or the chemical spill offs of the early 90s.

At the end it was social action of the populace that started holding businesses accountable.

>> ^MaxWilder:

Property rights make sense on land, because a disaster on your own property has a smaller chance of spreading to the entire region. Yeah, there is still some risk, but it's much lower. In the ocean, anything that goes wrong will have very far reaching repercussions.

Yeah, I don't see how letting the oil companies buy the ocean would protect it. They would have no incentive, it's their own property! With the government regulating the wells (in theory), they can be held accountable for disasters that ruin other industries and destroy beaches, as well as the ecology in general.

Property rights make sense on land, because a disaster on your own property has a smaller chance of spreading to the entire region. Yeah, there is still some risk, but it's much lower. In the ocean, anything that goes wrong will have very far reaching repercussions.

@dystopianfuturetoday, I want him to answer your question too.

@blankfist, maybe rephrasing the question would help. DFT and I think that coercion by economic extortion is only slightly different from coercion done with threats of violence. We also think there's a huge difference between the implicit threat of "violence" leveled on those who would break the laws that are passed through a lawfully elected government in which they have representation, and the kind of system you describe, where the only legitimate use of force is to enforce the whims of unelected private citizens when it comes to their property.

In our eyes, the problem with monarchy was that you had an unelected sovereign who makes law by capricious dictate, who can use violence to back it up. The problem with the libertarian ideal of a state that only enforces property rights is that it's effectively the same as monarchy -- you make property owners an unelected sovereign who makes law by capricious dictate, and can use violence to back it up.

Now sure, you will say "but in a free market, no one has to do anything they don't choose to", but that's exactly the same logic as my "all taxes and laws are voluntary, because you can always choose to leave the country and rescind your citizenship" argument. There's no guarantee you'll be given your non-property-related rights that we in modern society generally believe to be universal.

Essentially, the question is "how would your system prevent the erosion of equal rights, when the right to property reigns supreme?"

@blankfist, it was a an afterthought of an afterthought, and I thought I labeled it as such. Apparently your only response to what I actually considered my main comment was to downvote it.

Dude, they're called owners for a reason. They like absolute property rights for a reason.

I don't see a highway...can we focus on things we see because I can see a lot of oil on my beachfront property right now.

>> ^blankfist:

I disagree that not cutting your grass or opening a porn shop infringes on other people's property rights. The argument that someone's property value drops is valid, but I don't personally believe the perceived value of someone's property in relation to what someone else does with their property is something that should be regulated or legislated unless the property owner voluntarily signed an agreement agreeing to do so.

Hi, I've just been hired by BP's legal team, and we'd like to talk with you about trying to get you elected to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

See, we were doing something with our own property that, well, just so happens to have accidentally had a detrimental effect on the value of the surrounding people's property.

We don't really think it's fair that anyone ask us to stop, or compensate them for what we did, because after all, we were just exercising our right to do what we want on our own property. We're clearly not threatening any person's life, so what's the harm?

@jonny. Spider-man, you're drunk.

I only agreed about commercial vs. residential zoning because I was afraid it would derail NR and my conversation earlier. But now? I will say I disagree with zoning because it limits a property owner's right to choose what he wants to do with his property.

If McDonalds opened a corporate office next door to my home, I'd not like it, but I don't think there's much I should be able to do about it. It gets weird because to me McDonalds is a corporation, thus a private entity given validation by government, so in a way it's kind of public. I don't know, it's hard to artfully explain how I feel about that. Still, if a private business opened next door to me, that would be fine as long as they didn't reasonably do things to encroach on my well being or destroy my property. If they installed lights that shined in my window at night, I could reasonably argue in court that it keeps me awake at night and I could seek damages. That is if you could actually sue a fucking corporation.

I disagree that not cutting your grass or opening a porn shop infringes on other people's property rights. The argument that someone's property value drops is valid, but I don't personally believe the perceived value of someone's property in relation to what someone else does with their property is something that should be regulated or legislated unless the property owner voluntarily signed an agreement agreeing to do so.

However, if there's a realistic and reasonable threat to your life caused by careless activities of a property owner, such as building a nuclear bomb in his basement, then I think it's more than reasonable for the community to take action against him. But barring some unrealistic event such as building a nuclear bomb in his basement, I do believe a man (or woman) should be left to freely do with their property what they see fit.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday: I'm never going to convince blanco...


I'll give it a shot.

blankfist, you mentioned that zoning laws are what prevent McDonalds from setting up their corporate headquarters in a residential neighborhood. And you mentioned that as an absurdly extreme example of people doing whatever they want with their (land) property. I'm glad that you recognize it as absurd, because that implies that you also acknowledge that there are in fact sound legal limits to what a property owner may or may not do with their property, like storing nuclear waste in one's basement, or failing to cut one's grass and generally keep one's home from looking abandoned (blight). What is the legal basis for such laws if property rights are supposed to be absolute? The short answer is that they are not absolute - there are all sorts of restrictions on property rights, especially in the case of land.

But even if, for the sake of argument, I allow that property rights were absolute in the sense I think you're intending, one of the main legal bases for zoning restritctions is because it would infringe on the property rights of others, by lowering the value of their property. That same argument can be (and often is) applied to businesses. That's why strip clubs and porn shops can't be located wherever their owners would like. There are more mundane examples as well, such as the restriction on putting a big box store in the middle of a light commerical/residential mixed area. The exact same legal reasoning can be applied to the practice of discrimination of customers. By allowing a grocery store owner to hang a "whites only" sign in his window, it damages any neighboring businesses, and reduces neighboring property values in general.

That legal argument may ignore the morally repugnant aspects of discrimination, and would probably never be used in practice - it was just for the sake of argument given the premise of nearly absolute property rights. The more appropriate answer is what I mentioned above - property rights aren't even close to absolute, and the property rights of business owner's are routinely more restricted than those of private residences. The reason for that is because despite an ever growing number of Supreme Court decisions giving more and more individual rights to businesses, we're still not quite to the point of corporate citizenship.

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Our suffering masses, FORCED to DRINK BP's OIL, don't want to hear how socialism is the envy of property and property rights, and they sure as hell don't want to be told they have to WORK for anything.

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Will you socialists in your wonderful EURO-utopias do us here in the poor USA a favor? ADVERTISE!!!

Advertise via intertubes, radio, TV, smoke signals and skywriting around the clock informing all the wannabe progressive Statists and obama stash-check hopefuls SUFFERING here in the evil terrible USA how AWESOME it is, living in countries where everything is FREE!!!

Our suffering masses, FORCED to DRINK BP's OIL, don't want to hear how socialism is the envy of property and property rights, and they sure as hell don't want to be told they have to WORK for anything.

The USA rebuilt Europe (and Japan), so don't you think it's the least you can do??? ADVERTISE!!! Send boats! Offer free plane tickets! Get these oppressed suffering ENTITLED obamadrones to your golden shores and we'll throw Obama himself in for free!

@blankfist, you're not responding to the points I made.

In the first quoted section, I'm not making the "it's the law, so it's right" argument, I'm saying "we already have a formal, legal definition of the difference that makes sense to me and most people, what's the reason for changing it?" I further went on to provide examples where the same behavior get treated very differently today, and you decline to answer whether you think the law should be somehow normalized in that example.

In the second quoted section, again you don't actually make an argument for me being wrong in any way, nor respond to my example, you just declare that I am suffering from a "Democratic fallacy" (I don't think that word means what you think it means), and then go on to both make a straw man ("[You] want to meddle in all aspects of human life"), and a fallacious argument against it (i.e. your viewpoint is simpler, so it should be right).

In the third, I'm not making an argument about the historical facts surrounding Rosa Parks, I'm making the argument that if this is a moral argument, and that morality dictates that private discrimination is okay, while public discrimination is not, then Libertarian Rosa Parks needed to check and see who owns the bus (the City, or a private company) before she refuses to go to the back of the bus, because otherwise she's making a fuss about something she has no moral right to refuse to comply to, just the right to find another bus if she doesn't like it.

In fact, you are saying that to defend freedom, we should be willing to give our lives to defend the right of the bus owner to make black people get to the back of the bus, even if we think it's wrong (but that we shouldn't think it's wrong, because morally, property rights are all that matter).

@NetRunner. Propetarians. I like that.

Actually I think most Democrat arguments against Libertarianism come at property rights, therefore it takes up most of the conversation. When I speak with Republicans, it tends to be centered around life (death penalty) and individual liberty (war on drugs) and immigration.

Anyhow, I'm not sure what you mean by privately owned public spaces. That sounds like a lot of doublespeak. Sure, you have to pay property taxes so there's the argument that you never truly own your land, but if you purchase land to build a company on it, it's not technically public. It's private. Like your home.

If some racist asshole wants to buy land and open a racist grocery store, then so be it. I doubt you'd find many people visiting that shop, because this isn't 1950s Alabama.

It's his property, he can do with it as he pleases pretty much. If he wants to open a "blacks only" grocery store, it wouldn't be fair for the white guy next door to stop him. You're wrong if you think you have a right to dictate what goes on in private spaces when no one is being aggressed against.

Let me ask you this. If the religious right was the majority and they voted in representatives that said all homes and businesses must have a copy of the Holy Bible on their coffee table in the living room, would you approve?

@blankfist, read more than the first two sentences, please.

My point with that paragraph was that privately-owned public spaces should be considered partially a public space, and bound by the same sorts of equal access requirements we expect from government services.

Otherwise we're back to requiring the police to enforce racist policies like this. If you're saying a grocery store can be "whites only", what happens when a black guy comes in and refuses to leave? Presumably the same thing that happens when someone enters your home without permission -- call the police, or shoot him.

But yeah, I was actually asking rhetorically. I knew what your answer would be, my point is that your answer is oversimplified, and wrong.

PS: You're basically confirming the underlying premise of the cartoon -- libertarians don't really support freedom, they just defend property rights. You're propertarians, not libertarians.

I would say you're right, but for 50 years of successful prosecution of civil rights law. I don't think you realize how fucked up it was before both public and private agitation against private sector racism.

No, our society isn't perfect, and racism certainly hasn't been wiped out, but most of us feel its much better than when some slice of property rights were put over racial equality.

By your logic, because some people run stop lights, we should remove the stop light.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

^But that is just the point, even with laws, people can still get away with institutional racism. If I don't want to hire someone because he is black, then I could just fabricate any number or disqualifications for him. The same goes for drugs, anyone that wants drugs can get them. Anyone that wants to engender racist store policies can usually get away with it, for awhile at least. So you turn him into a criminal as the solution, just as the drug user becomes a criminal. You don't fight racism with laws, if anything that emboldens it. You fight it by heros like the people you mentioned standing up and saying they aren't going to take it anymore. I don't question the goal, I question the means.
(and I apologies about my tone earlier, it was meant to add some levity but it could be taken as sarcasm)