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Note that the thread, why I don't believe in the non-aggression principle , accumulated a number of long-winded posts about many conflicting ethical claims and related circumstances. It demonstrates how easy it can be for the intellectual to weasel his way out of libertarian ethics, and how hard it can be to convince the ordinary person that such
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Many people vote in self-defense to prevent other people taking their wealth. They are essentially acting in self-defense against the state, which is not consent.
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The result is a crime infested, smog ridden riot in which the town gets together and reasons that they create a small government to prevent said result from occuring regularly. If the town gets together and reasons that they should create a small government, then the town doesn't need a small government to get together and reason. If everyone in
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As Friedman points out, in a statist society good law is a public good and bad "special interest" law is a private good. So the result is that good law is undersupplied and bad law is oversupplied. http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/faq.html#part17 For every law that helps the environment, there are probably a dozen laws that give companies
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I think a better analogy for Roderick Long to use would have been this: Suppose human beings magically come into existence onboard planes in mid-flight, where their survival depends on the pilot taking them safely to the ground. By flying a plane, the pilot takes the risk that someone may come into being during his flight. Pro-abortionists would be
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Find a single political party that wants to abolish all rules and rule-making... if there has been one in the history of democracy. In every election without fail, 99% of eligible voters don't vote in favor of substituting the government for permanent chaos. In other words, democracy is 99% obsolete. No one is forced to vote, therefore 99% of people
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>> What’s an implicit contract? If someone is drowning at the beach, and you declare to everyone on the beach that you will go and rescue him, but all you do once you reach him is tread water, you're breaking an implicit contract. This is because you declared to everyone else that you would save him through your superior skill, which
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>>In the case of child neglect, would libertarians agree that it is immoral to leave one's 1-day old baby alone at home (without anyone watching/taking care of him) while going on vacation, effectively killing the baby? (I assume that most libertarians would not think that it is a violation of anyone's rights.) I think generally speaking
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>>My two cents: regardless of whether or not it ought to be illegal, it will always be de facto illegal. If the official law doesn't punish parents who leave their children home to die, mobs will. Likewise, regardless of whether black male-white female relationships ought to be illegal, it will always be de facto illegal. If official law doesn't
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[quote user="Autolykos"]I think that morality ultimately has an instinctual basis. That is, nearly everyone is born with certain moral instincts.[/quote] A side note: instincts do not always lead to the best outcomes, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in Blink . I don't understand Stefan Molyneux's concepts of morality particularly well, but