The freedom to drink coffee | Hacker News Reader

The freedom to drink coffee

raganwald.posterous.com

282 pointsllambda190 comments

I really like that coffee analogy! I also like the idea that nobody's a loser. And the customer's happier.

I'll go a bit further saying that, while nobody's a loser, I also understand the hippie's cry for a change: Everyone around him is buying espresso machines with pre-formated coffee capsules. The hippie gives away his capsules as whole grains; theoretically, it's the best way of distributing it. However nobody knows what to do with whole grains anymore. People chose the convenience of the capsule, and nobody cares to even try to appreciate this hand-made, fine grained, home grown coffee the Hippie wants to give away for free.

The coffee analogy breaks down though because there are plenty of options for refillable pods for the "senseo" style pod machines. And Kurig (and others) sell a refillable K-cup for those style machines. Where there is a demand for something, someone will fill it.

Additionally, the hippie could start fabricating his own pods that replicate the originals sufficiently to work in the manufacturer's machines. The equivalent in software is fast becoming untrue, as platforms increasingly take on tight control by the platform maker, enforced with cryptographic protections.

Well, that still as an analogue: jailbreaking.

Argument which apparently led to the post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082965

I love how oslic describes a dev who maintains their right to say how their work is used as a "protestor". Surely putting in the hard work, and being entitled to do with it as you please, is a cornerstone of free enterprise?

In a funny way, the Open Source and related movements are rocket fuel for idealised capitalism.

The first money I made on the web after college was made using Notepad++ to build sites on a LAMP stack. I'd guess most of us have similar stories. I'm happy to give away my knowledge for free, because it's not 1% of what I've received. And it doesn't mean I do everything for free either.

I don't think anyone can seriously claim that people making free software haven't changed EVERYTHING in software, especially on the web.

Let's take the coffee analogy a little further. Not only is some hippie giving away coffee with a "do no evil" license, but just down the road there is a large market, where many people have come together to give away their own special variants of coffee.

Over time, the many and diverse people in the market (which some might call a hippie commune, but the MBAs in the crowd would probably disagee) have agreed on some common best practices for licensing their coffee, which allow it to be mixed to form special blends etc. Some of the best practices are outright subversive, and have led, through network effects, to some of the coffee from this market appearing in many Starbucks coffees -- which are marketed as "fair trade". Although many of the people who buy them aren't aware of the details of how this obscure market has made the world a better place.

Now back to our hippie and his coffee, which doesn't meet the norms of the market, so cannot be included in its blends, and cannot contribute to the ongoing network effect. Is the hippie actually going to leave the world better than it was before?

"Is the hippie actually going to leave the world better than it was before?"

According to who's principles? (and isn't that the point of the OP?)

I thought the hippie's goal was to sleep at night, now we have to compute the global utility function of his whole existence based on what Starbucks is doing? How does this apply to what raganwald is talking about? Perhaps this extension of the analogy has gone off the rails a bit.

The market down the street and Starbucks will decry the hippie for trying to prevent them from using his beans. But they are his beans and he has every right to set terms and conditions of sale. His goal is that those who do receive his beans and make special blends, etc. will give the same freedom to those who end up drinking the coffee as they have with his coffee beans. If the hippie's goal is coffee drinker freedom, he is likely going to leave the world a better place. If his goal is spreading his beans far and wide regardless of the restrictions on the coffee drinker at the end, he won't reach his goal.

(Or am I imagining a GPL vs BSD analogy?)

I thought it was a jsmin "do no evil" analogy. Even Apple ships GPL code

Socialist or Libertarian we should just look at the point being made..

Developers don't HAVE to develop for any specific platform. Corporations don't HAVE to distribute software they don't want.

If you want your applications to be truly 'open' then develop them for the web and don't append a licence.

The reason people are developing for platforms like iOS, is because companies like Apple provide an easy entrance to a massive market. If you want to tread on their turf, you have to play by their rules. And that is fair enough.

If the big corporations are really getting it wrong, then users and developers alike will eventually abandon their platforms for a better one; and life goes on.

If we want to make a change.. then manufacture better espresso machines, design more appealing pods or grow better beans.

I think this is a good piece for what it addresses. However, market capitalism (or whatever it is we have) is more complex.

This does not address the issue of monopsony: I may like my corner store, and spend my money there, but long-term they are going to fall to Wal-Mart because everyone ends up shopping there, because Wal-Mart has the power to dictate to its suppliers what the price to them will be. I guess the software equivalent is App-Mart.

Similarly, if I have a cool new device, but major platform wants big bucks for me to get "certified" as interoperable or to include my driver, this could be a stumbling block. (However it seems like standards have really been adopted, and the internet is widespread enough that this might no longer be an issue.)

Overall, I think the playing field is really being leveled now, with widespread network access and clouds and stuff. I (we) might be too exposed to the free and open possibilities, but it does seem like there is (has been?) a revolution.

Is software political? After internet access being a basic human right, should the right to choose ones software be one as well?

Regarding the coffee analogy:

Nothing would stop an individual from purchasing a large amount of coffee from the hippie, processing it into pods, and selling those pods through the big chains. Sure, the hippie could refuse to sell you more coffee, but then he is no longer giving "other people the freedom to make [a] choice compatible with their personal beliefs." While I like the initial premise, I just don't think this comparison completely fits.

Purchasing, yes. Purchasing. That's a rather important word. Consider its implications for a while, and I suspect you'll see the point.

I don't follow. You can do whatever you like with gifted items too.

Free/open source software is not a gift, even an MIT license does not give you total freedom to do whatever you want.

To make a pure gift of code to the world, you would have to put it in the public domain (and even then there are odd legal issues in some jurisdictions).

Yes, but the point of the top-level comment was the analogy being a poor fit.

The hippie isn't selling coffee, he's giving it away with terms, but you can clearly lie to the hippie and use the fruits of his labor in a way in which he's specifically asked for them not to be used.

I think your second sentence is the thesis that the metaphor is trying to refute, though. Refusing to give you something under terms that you would like is not removing your freedom any more than any other copyright, it's offering you an option other than growing your own.

Um, the analogy clearly states that the hippie is selling the beans:

    A better comparison would be that someone writing free software is like a hippie
    who grows his own coffee beans and sells them at the side of the road by his farm

Wow, I remember actually going back to check that and I still got it wrong. Must have been distracted by something shiny. Criticism still applies, though. Part of the cost of buying the coffee is his terms. He's giving you an option that you didn't have before, but if the cost is too high, there's always Starbucks.

This is why I used the term “selling.” There’s always an “exchange of consideration” with software that is not placed in the public domain.

It fits completely. If you purchase the coffee, you've exchange money for coffee, and expressed rights. The same could be said for GPL'ed code. I can purchase the code with specific rights. MySQL is a prime example of this happening in the software world.

Thank you. I think the coffee analogy is a good one and I believe that it is important that we, as technologists, express our personal values through our work. Also, I don't get this "open source is socialism thing". Although some (e.g. Stallman) may wish to see a socialist coders' paradise, 1) he's certainly entitled to that objective, and 2) the open source movement is much larger than that. These days, picking a license is often just part of selecting a business model. Companies life or die based on the ecosystem they create around their software.

I think I agree with you, as I said, writing free software is more like going into competition with “The Company” than it is like organizing a union. Why not expand your ideas into a blog post? Could be excellent material...

Well, just to be a contrarian, I don't agree with your analogy. The analogy is more like the hippie selling people beans, but then putting a condition on the sale so that people couldn't then put the beans into a pod compatible with their favourite coffee machine. This annoys people for the same reason that DRM annoys people - deep down inside, we feel that when someone gives us something, it is now ours to do with as we like. GPL-style licenses break this unstated assumption, as does DRM stopping you from watching your favourite TV show on your media player of choice.

In fact in the case of the coffee-growing hippy, it's worse than that. He doesn't mind if you personally take your beans and put them in a pod, but this operation is time consuming and requires a not-insignificant investment in plant to make the pods. It would be wonderful if someone else could start a business doing this stuff for you and everyone else, but they can't, because the hippy wants everyone to buy into their value system, using the oh-so-good coffee beans as a trojan horse.

Yes, I know, you're probably screaming something about entitlement right now. But let's bring it back to software. Most people in this world are not capable of writing software, so they're thrilled when someone comes out with an app that meets their need just right. But then that app gets pulled from the app store because the author included some GPLed code. This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.

The only thing I’m screaming about is the idea that your views deserve a wider audience than here, especially with everyone derailed into a debate about what is or isn’t Libertarian(tm) :-)

> This is the equivalent of the kid with the bat losing at a match of cricket, so he leaves, and now the other kids can't play. They generally aren't impressed. Note that if the kid had to leave because it was dinner time, or his parents were calling him, or he just broke his arm, the wouldn't be any drama. I suspect that many people feel that someone pulling code from an app store for ideological reasons is more like sulking than leaving because it was dinner time.

What if the kid leaving with the bat found out that the people who control the playground had imposed some rules that are not agreeable to him, and in his opinion are not favorable to the other kids at large?

Thanks for the encouragement! I think the discussion about values and work is very important and I appreciate that you brought it up on your blog. Hopefully, a bit got through on HN before it degenerated...

How is Stallman's version of free software socialist? I've heard this before, and I don't understand it.

Well, to call anyone a socialist outside the domain of political science is being a bit facetious. However, a loose analogy could be made. Socialism is about the government owning the means of production. The analogy would be "the base of existing software" = "means of production" and "Free Software Foundation" = "government". Stallman appears to want the copyright for all software to be held by the FSF and licensed as either GPL or AGPL. The analogy breaks down in the sense that, unlike a government, the FSF has no coercive power (beyond the value of their code base). Given the FSF's (relative) lack of coercive power, I don't think anyone should take seriously people/organizations that raise alarmist concerns about it.

I actually think “little-s socialism” is about the workers owning the means of production, not the government. The difference is palpable when we’re trying to fit that word onto software development.

Government owning the means of production would be the government issuing licenses to write software. Workers owning the means of production would be that anyone can write a program without needing a license (or the fear of patent litigation from monopolists).

Licenses are anti-socialist to me, as are patents.

The whole “government runs everything” thing is sometimes called big-S Socialism, sometimes called Fascism, sometimes called Communism... But it isn’t the little-s socialism I had in mind when I wrote the post.

The government running everything is trading the farmer for some pigs.

I generally agree with most of what you are saying, but honestly this litte-s socialism, fascism, communism thing you are doing is making me gnash my teeth a bit :)

Socialism was and is at its core about the working class as a whole owning the means of production, becoming the only social class in existence and in effect ending the cycle of class struggle that has defined human history for the past few thousand years (at the very least since Marx & Engels first formulated scientific socialism. Utopian socialists had similar visions of a future society but usually lacked the framework to clearly articulate their criticisms of existing societies).

The term Communism, although used since the XIX century, became mainstream in the XX as a reaction against the perceived reformism or capitulation against capitalism of the then-called "socialist democrats" of the Second International. Technically, though, Communism only means the end-goal of the socialist struggle, again a classless society where everyone works according to their capacity and receives according to their needs (see 'The Critique of the Gotha Program' by Marx, or Lenin's 'State and Revolution' where the distinction between the revolutionary transitional stage and the classless, stateless end-goal of Communism is clearly made. Yes, Lenin thought a society without any State at all was desirable). The fact that States ruled by Communist Parties implemented imperfect versions of socialism, or had any number of problems small or big, in no way should make you pretend that the definition of Communism is "the government owns everything". Or, much worse, that it is in some sense just the same thing than Fascism. This makes no sense historically or theoretically, and is about as accurate as pretending that parliamentary democracy in industrialized nations is at its core all about spending 10% of their GDP in weapons and bombing the shit out of third world countries.

I'm not sure the comparison to unions is proper. Let's see. Unions are about limiting freedom - limiting freedom of employees to work where the want and do what they want with they money (with unions, they can't work unless they join the union, they have to pay union duties and they have to abide by unions rules), and limiting the freedom on employers to hire (or cease to hire) anybody they want on conditions that are freely negotiated between them. Now, some may consider this limiting of freedoms beneficial and desirable, but it's limiting anyway.

Now, most of the people in free software movement are the exact opposite of that - they want to expand other people's choices and let them do more stuff, not less. However, some fraction of the movement (and I'm not going to name names, anybody is free to guess who they are) does want to limit choices of others in order to make them behave in ways they approve. They believe it is for the better of all, but however you take on that question is, you must recognize there's this agenda and the goal of it is to limit choices of other people in order to make them behave in a certain way. Of course, they do not go nearly as far as unions do - while unions may very well be able to deny you the use of your own property and work, these people would only at the worst deny you the use of the fruits of their work, not yours, which is completely different league.

So while for the most of the software movement comparison to unions is completely off base, there's some semblance of analogy between some parts of it and unions, but even there it's only hint of resemblance, far short of being in the same ballpark.

This is ridiculous - your view of unionism is way off reality. Some points just on the first paragraph:

> with unions, they can't work unless they join the union

Er. No. This is a 'closed shop' (compulsory unionism), illegal in most of the Western World, and not advocated by the great majority of unions either.

> limiting freedom of employees to work where the want and do what they want with they money

Errr. Unions don't stop employees from changing jobs or spending their money how they want. I don't understand where you get this from at all.

> limiting the freedom on employers to hire (or cease to hire) anybody they want on conditions that are freely negotiated between them

Part of the freedom to negotiate conditions is the freedom (non-compulsory) to allow a union to negotiate on your behalf. Although this doesn't always work out well for either party, I don't see how you can say that allowing a worker to appoint a union in this way is reducing anyone's freedom.

Closed shops are perfectly legal in the US. Only 23 states in the US have right-to-work laws.

"Errr. Unions don't stop employees from changing jobs or spending their money how they want. I don't understand where you get this from at all."

Unions demand (in closed shops) from employees to give them part of the money as dues, and compel them to participate in union activities (such as strikes, etc.). It is true they do not limit how they rest of the money is spent - but I never claimed they take all the freedoms away. I claimed they limit them - by requiring payments and forcing to take part in their actions.

"Part of the freedom to negotiate conditions is the freedom (non-compulsory) to allow a union to negotiate on your behalf"

This is true, however in many union shops you do not have this choice. You either accept collectively bargaining conditions or you can not be hired. You can not just come to your employer and negotiate separately. Appointing somebody to negotiate on your behalf does not limit freedom, giving him exclusive right to negotiate - and that's how many unions are working in the US - does.

> Now, some may consider this limiting of freedoms beneficial and desirable, but it's limiting anyway.

You have an odd definition of "freedom"; who is more free: the un-unionized warehouse worker who is hired by the week by a shell temp agency, or the unionized warehouse worker who can negotiate a sane contract, decent wage, and sue in cases of abuse.

No, my definition of freedom is not "odd", yours is. You are confusing "free" with "comfortable" - you can be perfectly comfortable (highly paid, well fed and cared for, respected, etc.) and be a slave (look into the ancient world - famous Aesop, for example, was a slave), or be completely free and be a penniless hobo. Freedom has nothing to do with salary. You can say you would gladly give up your freedom for a decent wage and union lawyers - fine, it's your choice. But you can not make this choice for anybody else. That's their freedom.

Personally, I think all ism-proponents are missing the point. De facto, lots of systems work and have worked.

My own ideal system would be some kind of wacky mix of libertarianism, scandinavian-style safety nets, green politics, minimum guaranteed income, heavy state support for startups, etc. But I don't pretend that this is The Way.

I'm much more interested in what you might call a taoist approach. To change the macrocosm, first change the microcosm. The key to everything is personal development.

I think we as hackers can make a difference by influencing personal development on a wide scale. Case in point: e-learning sites like Khan Academy.

Since when does a post about free software turn into a political discussion on HN?

For me, free software is about practical concerns, not activism: I don't want to depend on one company or entity, especially if I don't pay them. But even if I do pay them, I'll have troubles in using their binary blob if they go bankrupt.

So, it's about ensuring I have the ability to maintain control over the software I use in case the current maintainer stops maintaining it.

I like this post and most of your posts. You have full freedom to spend your time in whatever way you want. That being said: I don't understand why you feel the need to respond to a silly analogy that someone wrote 429 days ago in a comment responding to a comment of yours. I doubt you are reaching anyone that would agree with this analogy and if you were, I doubt you would convince them of their silliness. The analogy makes no sense whatsoever (at least, it is completely incomprehensible to me and I don't understand how anyone could come up with it) and the clueless are usually so unconsciously incompetent they wouldn't understand your retort if it was covered in chocolate sprinkles. I feel I've been cheated out of a more insightful post by this 'oslic'.

I wrote the post back then, not today.

Writing free software is not like giving away free coffee. Writing free software is like design parts for coffee machines and giving them away for free. Software is the medium, not the content.

>I do not lose because I cannot run a free program on my iPhone.

That's some peculiar logic.

I get the feeling the vast majority of people don't have a clue what socialism even means. Instead, they parrot the silly definitions that come from sources using the term as a political cudgel.

Thankfully, we have you to point this out for us.

Crockford has total license to create any license he wants, of course, but I absolutely hate that license of his, not just because the lawyers are right -- "evil" is not a term substantiated with definition, and all terms in a legal document should be defined and specifc -- but also because insofar as he has expressed opinions about what constitutes evil, I disagree with him.

The YUI documentation, and similar JS documentation from Yahoo!, is chock full of the term "evil" used as if it were an official technical term. At Yahoo!, it probably is. Crockford identifies certain features of JS as "evil" in his book.

This is a generational divide between modern open source and ancient open source. In ancient open source, being judgmental and controlling was socially acceptable; in modern development, if you don't like a feature, you either don't use it, or you create a meta-language which compiles to your target language and excludes the undesired feature.

Leaving the features out of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" was enough - if he'd left it at that, he'd have sent the same message without the weird moral condemnation.

Technically, it's possible that using eval() in the context of any of Crockford's open source code is against the law. Even Richard Stallman has never been that much of a dick.

In ancient open source, being judgmental and controlling was socially acceptable;

This in the middle of a rant that is highly judgmental :-P

The simple fact is, in “modern" software development, you are free to route around Mr. Crockford’s license if you so desire. Being a “dick” and being ”controlling” would be to do something like patent his thingummy and prevent anyone else from using it or their own implementation of the same functionality.

If you’re free to write your own thingummy, he is not controlling or judging you, he is controlling and judging himself by deliberately choosing a smaller audience/market for his work, much as the hippie in my story has deliberately chosen to make less money by not selling to the big chain.

Don’t take it so personally!

OK, judgemental yes, fair enough, but not being a dick? Saying "you can't use my software because your code is evil" is not going to win anybody points for diplomacy.

Also, the vagueness of it is actually quite passive-aggressive. In functional terms, putting that in a legal document means "you can use this for anything you want, unless I decide that I don't like it after the fact." It's not an important passive-aggressive action to Crockford, I'm sure, because for him it's just a formality he's turned into a joke, but it does actually set him up with ridiculous power to disrupt a business's operations should he so choose.

Even if you’re being judgmental you may yet have a point (Ad Hominem Tu Quoque fallacy on me)...

Saying "you can't use my software because your code is evil" is not going to win anybody points for diplomacy.

Could would not say the same thing about GPL or any other license that is not completely free?

Saying "you can't use my software because you don’t give YOUR code away for free" is not going to win anybody points for diplomacy.

I can’t bring myself to believe that Mr. Crockford was scheming to waylay lawyers and BigCo when he wrote that line. I also doubt he was trying to ignite an anti-evil fire. Most importantly, I even doubt he imagined that there might be some disagreement about what is or isn’t evil. If there was, what makes you think he would have the right to decide?

Perhaps a court of law would rule that only the Vatican can decide what is or isn’t “evil.” His license doesn’t include the usual lawyerly language that he sets the rules and has the right to change the rules arbitrarily and without notice.

Thus, I agree that his license is not what you ro I might find convenient, but I am not persuaded that he was being dickish. Impish, perhaps. Thoughtless of the consequences, maybe. But not full-on dickish.

To borrow a word I just learned, your argument that he’s a dick is phallacious.

;-)

The terms of the GPL are clearly spelled out and have a legal meaning that people have tried very hard to make unambiguous. The Free/Non-free debate happens outside of the interpretation of the rules.

If I made a license that said: "You may modify and distribute this so long as you do not violate the spirit of Free Software", then I've made an ambiguous license like Crockford's, where it seems like I could probably withdraw permission from anyone for any reason that suits me, at any time.

If you have a license under terms that are unclear - you don't really have a license. In some contexts that will made a difference to you, and you'll have to find some other solution than to run this software.

But as a piece of performance art, I think Crockford's license is brilliant.

"Phallacious" is hilarious.

Re yr first half, Stallman diplomacy vs Crockford diplomacy, Stallman seriously implies people who disagree with him are evil, while Crockford jokingly states it outright. So serious implicit vs joking explicit. Are they both less than perfect diplomats? Yes. But Crockford annoys me more because I don't use anything Stallman-related anyway, and although Stallman weirds me out, I kind of prefer serious, nuanced disagreement to blanket condemnation and completely unfounded presumptions of moral authority.

I don't know if you've ever been to Silicon Valley, but a guy with a lot of corporate authority, hand-waving away as "evil" any language use which he disagrees with, is a lot more noxious on his home turf in the southern end of northern California than he is as some random thing you read about on the Internet.

I apologize for the structure of that sentence. I'm a bit tired this morning.

Anyway as to this part:

Not what I'm saying at all. I don't care what he thought or intended, I care what he did.

If there was, what makes you think he would have the right to decide?

I'm not saying he would have the right. I'm saying he has the privilege. That is to say, the language is sufficiently vague that he could sue almost anybody who used his software for almost anything they did with it. Some people believe that any and all forms of business are evil. Crockford could claim to agree, and use that to sue any business. Some people think all homosexuality is evil, all Christianity, all whatever. The term's lack of specificity constitutes a bona fide risk for any business. Crockford could decide freaking cupcakes are evil if he wants to and take that shit to court to shut down some bakery's web site. It's ridiculous.

Making the lawyers dance just because you can is certainly turnabout, and some say turnabout is always fair play, but to me it just seems irresponsible, self-indulgent, and lame.

To use your analogy, Stallman gives away coffee as long as people agree not to resell it. Most people give coffee away for free and all you have to do is agree not to hold them responsible if the coffee makes you sick (MIT license). Crockford sells you coffee on the condition that you not sue him if it makes you sick, but he also reserves the right to sue you if you do literally anything he disagrees with.

In practical terms, "evil" is so vague as to be unenforceable, but if it's in a legal document, then you can take people to court with it. Dragging somebody into court is expensive for them even if you lose and pay their court costs. There's still lost time and extra stress.

I mean follow that analogy through. Can you imagine the heinous pain in the ass if Crockford one day decides Google's/Facebook's/whoever's privacy invasions make it evil and demands they rewrite whatever they have which uses his code? That's like saying "I'll give you coffee for free, but I reserve the right to remove it from your digestive system at any time." Somebody would have to take existing code apart and rewrite it. Pain in the butt for some giant corporation, but imagine how much worse it'd be for some bootstrapped startup.

The use of "evil" in the Yahoo! docs disgusts me, although nowhere near as much as the YUI API does. I realize it was just a joke, but if it's in a legal document then it's legally binding, and in my entirely personal and idiosyncratic opinion, it reeks of Silicon Valley's arrogance and contempt for small businesses and fair business dealings. Yahoo! can afford to throw lawyers at any small business in the world. It's a very, very, VERY abstracted version of the joke where an aristocrat puts a sword to a peasant's neck and laughs about how he could run them through with it at any moment if he felt like it.

Ha ha ha.

Uh, did you mean to comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693108 ?

Raganwald made his post either after or during a Twitter discussion with me. I'm pretty sure his post was more a response to the Hacker News discussion you linked to than to my own tweet or two, but it looked like an ongoing discussion to me, so I continued it from where it had left off.

This sounds like libertarianism to me, not socialism (small S or not.)

Libertarianism is the term for people who believe in the Non-aggression principle. (NAP)[1]

The NAP says "The initiation of force is immoral."

Thus libertarians believe that it is immoral to initiate force (against the innocent) though it is moral to defend yourself with force against its initiation.

Ragenwald rightly points out that the free software movement is more like going into competition with the company. Don't like the policies of a for profit (or even another open source) project? Build your own and compete.

The NAP makes it really easy to see the morality of various actions. Apple excluding software that is incompatible with the kind of store it wants to make: Moral. You might not like it, but it is not aggression.

The GPL restricting the way that software licensed under it is distributed or modified? Moral. You might not like it, but it is not aggression.

The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a "workers collective": Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP.

Those same workers leaving to form your own auto company organized around your socialist ideals: Moral

The difference between libertarianism (those who agree with the NAP) and socialists, is that socialists do not agree with the NAP. This may sound like a tautology, but how many socialists oppose: (just to pick some topical examples.) -- Minimum wage laws -- Laws that require companies to recognize and negotiate with unions -- Universal healthcare -- Mandatory coverage terms for health insurance

All of the above require the use of violence (or its threat) to coerce people to act in a way that the socialists approve of.

Libertarians (by principle) oppose these positions because they violate the NAP. Socialists often support them. Also, practically, libertarians believe that all of the above make people worse off, increase poverty, etc. The NAP is the principle, but the philosophy involves recognizing the economic effects of violating the NAP are always worse than respecting it.

I've always seen the open source movement as intrinsically libertarian, and in a way, capitalist. If you don't like the terms of what's out there- compete. Getting others to contribute their time to make the product better is just an efficient form of competition. It works better for some types of software than others, but it is moral.

[1] Its popular these days, especially among those who came to call themselves "libertarians" because they like Ron Paul, to think it just means "freedom". But this isn't accurate. The founders of the Libertarian movement were clear, and the Libertarian Party required all members to sign a pledge to abide by the NAP as a condition of membership.

Minor note: enforcement of GPL (and copyright) would be considered aggression (or threat thereof) by some libertarians because it consists in the state abridging life, liberty or property through imprisonment or seizure of property in response to non-aggressive actions.

I would think enforcement of GPL would be considered defensive because it would be protection of (intellectual) property.

More specifically, the GPL is a contract you agree to when you use the product. While strictly speaking it should be a more explicit contract, strictly speaking there's a lot of those kinds of issues with our society.

The GPL is saying "Here's my work, I'll trade it with you on these terms". The aggression would be in breaking those terms.

I believe some (e.g. Rothbardian) libertarians only consider title-transfer contracts to be enforceable.

You can consider the GPL a contract, but consider the hypothetical situation: I download a GPLed software, implicitly accepting the license/contract. Then I violate it by giving you a copy of the software without making you accept the GPL.

If the GPL is just a contract, then you can now distribute the software as you wish, since you're not bound by such contract. Copyright, on the other hand, doesn't work like that: everyone is bound by default, and you need a license like the GPL to "break free" from copyright's restrictions.

>More specifically, the GPL is a contract you agree to when you use the product. While strictly speaking it should be a more explicit contract, strictly speaking there's a lot of those kinds of issues with our society.

Wrong. You do not agree to anything by using GPL software. You must abide by the GPL terms upon redistribution to maintain permission granted by the license.

It is not a contract. The differences between license law and contract law are significant. Groklaw covers the issue thoroughly.[1]

>The GPL is saying "Here's my work, I'll trade it with you on these terms". The aggression would be in breaking those terms.

The GPL does not say that. It says "Here is my work. You may redistribute it under these same terms." It has no requirement you give your changes back to the original author. No trading[2] occurs.

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851

[2] Yes, there is the special case of submitting patches upstream which is by convention, not by license or contractual obligation.

Depends on whether you think IP is legitimate property. See the book "Against Intellectual Property" for one side.

Intellectual property is an artificial right granted by the government. Even the existence of patents, trademarks, and copyrights depend on the government.

Edit to clarify: Personal (physical) property rights are considered inherent rights. Outside of any national border, you still own your personal property, because that is a natural right. Governments can enforce property rights, but they don't create them.

Against Intellectual Property[1], a monograph by intellectual property lawyer and libertarian legal theorist Stephen Kinsella, tries to show inconsistencies in pro-IP libertarian and furthermore argues that IP is not a valid form of property, and that it collides with physical property rights.

[1]: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf

If copyright enforcement is considered agression, then GPL enforcement is never initiation of agression. The GPL only needs to be enforced in response to someone else's copyright claims.

> This sounds like libertarianism to me, not socialism (small S or not.)

My feeling is you've not read some of raganwald's other writings which more clearly explicate socialism, the way he's using it here:

"Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society. They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth within a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system of exploitation. They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential."[1]

[1] http://raganwald.posterous.com/hello-my-name-is-reginald-and...

Correct, I'd read this one piece and followed the "small s socialism" link to read that piece.

Libertarians would have many issues to take with the quoted perspective, which is why I think the term "libertarian socialist" is an oxymoron. (I know, socialists insist that they invented the term libertarian, but socialism has a history of coopting any movement that becomes popular.)

I'm sorry, but you are, perhaps unwittingly, spreading disinformation. The political term "libertarian" was coined by an anarcho-communist, to evade a French ban on anarchist literature in 1857. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Etymology) About a century later, some US right-wingers appropriated the term to mean an extreme form of capitalism.

In a culture which is indoctrinated so deeply that words can't even mean what they mean, it's little wonder why we stumble so badly despite careful explanations of the anarchist movement's history and goals, and despite the internet at our fingertips. No wonder why some will argue so aggressively, rather than simply googling and humbly asking questions to relieve their ignorance. Anarchism is not some set of axioms, nor is it defined by some dictionary. It is a social movement.

I respect your right to your views and to express them. The only trouble I have with your comment is that it mixes two things:

1. Explaining Libertarianism and the relationship between my words and its ideals, and

2. Professing the truth of Libertarianism.

I like the parts where you explain what Libertarians believe. I don’t believe those same things, mind you.

I didn't mean to characterize you, but your thesis. I apologize to the extent that I did this.

I didn't read nirvana's comment as conflating your views and Libertarianism. Where is this happening?

Try the very first sentence on for size: "This sounds like libertarianism to me, not socialism (small S or not.)"

What's funny about your response, to me, is that 'libertarian,' outside of the U.S., and in Europe especially, is generally associated with an anarchist position, and most anarchists are socialists or communists. The associations with the French revolutionaries is strong.

"The first anarchist journal to use the term 'libertarian' was La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, published in New York City between 1858 and 1861 by French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque." [1]

The U.S. Libertarian Party's use of the word is an intentional effort by free market supporters to express their support of a certain kind of "hands-off" policy without the baggage of the left.

You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. The stance your describing above is actually a deontological ethics which takes aggression and coercion as its principal 'bad acts.' That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

Your position is also incoherent, to be blunt. You say that "using force to take property from others violates the NAP." You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force, if I understand correctly. I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place? If your answer is that that force is not used, then I ask you whether it is okay for me to follow you around with a gun, as long as I never actually use it. If your answer is that property is a natural right or a self-evident 'thing,' I ask you to please explain why you feel this way.

I don't want to start a political flame war, but these are the issues at the heart of the article's claims. I'd love if you'd be willing to engage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#History

I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

Libertarians are often anarchists because they believe the state cannot exist without violating the NAP. The state (By definition as an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a geography) thus uses violence to conquer a land and takes for itself rights that naturally belong to the people.

>You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force,

I don't see how this follows from anything I said. I can't connect it so, I can't respond.

>You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe. This is consistent across the US, and in my experience, among libertarians across the world. This is consistent with the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, Rothbard and Nolan, and with the philosophical groundwork and economics that they took inspiration from.

FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

> I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

You'll be glad to know, then, that Proudhon, the first to self-describe as an anarchist, is also perhaps most famous for coining the phrase "property is theft". It's hard to imagine how socialists could be co-opting anarchism, given that both ideologies were born in the same intellectual climate and have, as a matter of historical fact, been associated time and time again.

You said: "The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a 'workers collective': Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP." Am I wrong in taking this to mean that you consider a workers' occupation an act of force?

> I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe.

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which lead you to believe that defining a term, enumerating your own beliefs, and speaking for an entire political movement, are one and the same.

> FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

Do you object to my using of Wikipedia to simply note the existence of a leftist journal calling itself "The Libertarian" over a hundred years prior to the founding of the U.S. Libertarian Party? If so, feel free to read the French yourself:

http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/libertaire.htm

No engagement with my second-to-last paragraph, I see. I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not.

Edit: spelling.

"I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not."

The entirety of both of your responses consists of either inaccurate characterizations of what I've said, of history, or of me. You have, on more than one occasion made derogatory characterizations of me, and you close with the above ad hominem. This is a form of anti-intellectualism which I will not indulge further. I shouldn't have given you the benefit of the doubt, but unlike you, I am generous that way.

I'm genuinely sorry that you feel that way.

Those are not my feelings, they are the objective fact of reality. I'm sorry I wasted time giving you the benefit of the doubt when your only intention was to engage in personal attacks.

If you were "genuinely sorry" for your actions, you would apologize for them.

Quite frankly, I don't see too much to take offence at in cmhamill's words.

It really doesn't appear to me that there was an intention to attack you personally, although it was perhaps blunt in places.

If you want to raise the level of discourse on the internet is it your obligation to object to people's core statements, rather than ancillary fallacies that might surround them.

Did you ever answer this from cmhammil?

    I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

If I make a chair, and I claim it as mine, where's the force?

If I take the chair from you, you'll force me to give it back (or rather the police will, on your behalf).

...which sounds reasonable enough to non-anarchists. But consider something closer to our hearts:

If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

> If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

Ultimately, in the legal system implementing patent laws. However, as you well know, patents and chairs aren't the same kind of property, in that chairs are a rivalrous good and patents are not.

Nowhere. But that's not property, right? I mean, that's a man claiming he owns a chair.

Now let's say I steal your chair. This is the moment in our narrative where we get to see whether you and I live in a society that adheres to the property principle.

If I steal your chair, and everyone gets sort of angry with me, and I say shove off and sit on my new chair, then we live in a society where the property principle is at most weakly enforced.

Let's say I steal your chair and get arrested. That implies that there are police, who are funded by some kind of entity which has taken it upon itself to enforce property rights. Which means that the means by which property becomes a real social fact is force enacted by, say, the state, against those who choose to disregard the principle.

Thus in a society where the property principle is taken for granted, that principle is in itself upheld by the implicit threat of force.

I could just as easily say that theft occurs via the threat of force, explicit or implicit: I don't resist your theft because, usually, I know or strongly suspect you have a firearm, or a knife, or a greater willingness to use your muscle mass to rearrange my organs.

So, if I resist your theft, am I asserting property rights or am I exercising my right to self-defense?

I'd personally be inclined to say that what you're doing when you resist my threat is contingent upon what kind of social arrangement we find ourself in.

In a Western-style parliamentary republic, your action will probably be interpreted as asserting property rights. If my intentions were obviously physically harmful, then we can throw in the self-defense, too.

But let's change the chair to something more consequential—a small crate of canned food. Let's say that you and I both know that you are not lacking for resources or food, and that I am homeless. And let's say that I steal this crate.

According to the interpretation of the NAP which takes property rights as a fundamental and does not admit of property already being an act of aggression in the first place, I'm the criminal, and you'll be in the right (maybe an asshole, but in the right) to resist my theft.

But assuming all the above, is it any more of an aggression to take your food (assuming I'm not off to stab you or whatnot) than for you to benefit from a societal interpretation of rights that threatens me with retaliation if I attempt to feed myself?

Perhaps it is easier to explore the limits of individual ownership when they are taken to the extreme, rather than to a minimum asshole status example.

Consider that an entrepreneur could obtain ownership of an entire nation purely through voluntary contracts that mutually benefited the parties involved. This differs from a despot only in justification of ownership being based in rights rhetoric rather than the divine. If the new king decides to shutdown all of the factories and farms so he can have more hunting land, what are the counterparties supposed to do? Lay down their plows and quietly consent to death?

At the point where individual ownership creates a power structure over other citizens' ability to use their labor to reproduce society's needs, that ownership has obligations of higher moral standing than the individual owner's whims. I tend to think preventing people from working to help themselves is even more abhorrent than merely hording resources, so better highlights the limits of ownership. Which power structures we consent to in our economic ecosystem and which individuals we offer to run them should always be up for renegotiation.

I do not believe "Ad Hominem" means what you seem to think it means. Furthermore I don't think anyone has ever won an argument by calling out the names of random logical fallacies. The purpose of them is you call them out, in your own head, to yourself. And then you use that information to explicitly examine and question the argument at hand. Oftentimes it is not necessary to point out any fallacy at all if the overall conclusion of the argument does not depend on the truth value of the fallacious statement- So the best strategy in argument then, is to first identify what that overall conclusion is, identify the premises that the conclusion depends on, discarding any premises that are irrelevant, and address those explicitly. To call out things like "strawman!" and "ad hominem" is to be pointlessly distracted, or, in a less charitable reading, a strategy intended to distract the reader, so you can avoid having to do all that hard work of addressing the person's actual argument. I believe in this case it is the latter, but I may give you the benefit of the doubt if you can come back and address the content of the argument instead of throwing a fit and refusing to negotiate with intellectual terrorists, as you have.

You're arguing on semantics. Anarchy has been split up into sub groups specifically because it can be taken to mean multiple things. Now there are Anarcho-capitalists (American Libertarians), Anarcho-socialists, Anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Of course; virtually all arguments are semantics. I was simply looking for clarification into nirvana's intended meaning. That that involved getting into the semantics of anarchism/socialism/libertarianism/what-have-you is the nature of this kind of discussion.

If I was concerned with finding the 'right' answer, or pushing my own political ideology (which happens not to be any of those currently under discussion), then I could see why we'd need to have a discussion about what 'anarchism' with or without adjectives really is.

I was, however, only concerned with the history of these ideologies (as a former student of precisely this topic). I had hoped to probe into that by bringing up the diverging uses of the category libertarian in the broader history of European politics and the divergence of U.S. political categories from those.

Certainly never meant to upset anyone.

You are technically correct, which Futurama calls 'the best kind of correct', but it isn't really.

When you're arguing about what kind of thing a thing is, you can call that a semantic argument, but if you're trying to characterize something that exists in practice, this is different from fighting over dictionary definitions.

(Interestingly, I got into the contrapositive of this argument on HN the other day: I tried to use a math term to mean something closely related to the standard definition, and people jumped on me for misusing it.)

You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. Bakunin was in the first international with Marx, Russian anarchists participated in the 1917 revolutions, etc etc. Your idea that socialists are trying to "co-opt" anarchism is probably due to a misunderstanding of what socialism is both historically and currently. Socialists and anarchists had a similar goal, which was to create a society free from coercion, whether by force or by need. While socialism failed at this rather spectacularly in practice, the authoritarian states of Mao and Stalin were never the end goal of socialists.

Also, your offhand dismissal of a quite well cited wikipedia article was rather classless tbqh. We know wikipedia is crowd sourced and vulnerable to bias, but to ignore cited factual statements because of that just leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions of both anarchism and socialism.

"You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. "

I find it amazing that you're using a strawman- something I've never said, and don't believe-- as an excuse to call me names.

Anarchism is incompatible with socialism and communism. That is what I pointed out. You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government, and if you have a central government, you have no anarchism.

"is probably due to a misunderstanding of "

You're projecting on me....

" was rather classless"

... and characterizing me based on YOUR characterization: "offhand dismissal " and then you outright lie: "to ignore cited factual statements" (two lies by my count there) is used as an excuse to rationalize more ad hominem: " leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions"

Why is it, so often, people refuse to argue to the points and instead insist on arguing to the person?

I made my points in my original comment. All of these references to history of socialism are completely irrelevant to my point, I wasn't even talking about socialism, I was talking about libertarianism.

You two are bringing it up as an opportunity to manufacture rationalizations to engage in ad hominam, nothing more.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.

> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.

> communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government

It's really not. Socialism is about collective ownership of property, state socialism is only a subset of socialism. But perhaps you could explain why prominent anarchists like Bakunin aligned themselves with socialists when their ideals were so diametrically opposed? It seems like you're using rather ahistorical definitions of anarchism and socialism.

All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

> The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

How can we debate the necessity of the existence of government when we can't even decide what a government is?

We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.

Anarchism is not predicated on the lack of government. Anarchism only requires non-hierarchy. It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

> It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

A government can only exist when it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in most situations. How can that, where only one group can use violence without being punished for it, possibly fail to impose a hierarchy?

Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.

> Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

I'd say that 'government' would be nothing more than a debating society, like the League of Nations, and just about as useful in preventing, say, homicide as the League of Nations was at preventing WWII.

>dorkburlger.

I don't engage with people who are begin dishonest, as you are, or people whose only form of "debate" is to characterize their opponent, or call them names, as you have.

Elsewhere several people have disagreed with me, attempted to show contradictions in my position, and surprisingly enough, they didn't need to resort to ad hominem or dishonesty to do it.

You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government

Uh, of course you can. Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves. Sure, they were legally protected by the state, but they didn't need its actual interference. In fact, even after the importation of slaves from Africa was illegalized in the US, thousands continued to be imported just because the ban wasn't enforced.

Even in modern times and in countries were slavery was abolished, this is still true. For example, the Brazilian government had to free 4500 slaves just in 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/brazil-slavery-p...

There's also the hundreds or thousands of women who are forced to marry in their teens by their own parents and husbands-to-be, without the government doing anything except letting it be. It's a major problem in India, Pakistan and even in Britain.

> Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves.

I think an Anarchist would call this a kind of de-facto government. It certainly had a monopoly on the use of force.

Calling the ethics as described above "deontological" is risky and ill-advised because that term is commonly used to describe Kantianism and a use of the categorical imperative[1]. These two (if taken seriously) rule out a marketplace because participants treat each other solely as a means to an end. Deontology, as it is commonly referred to, and the NAP are incompatible systems of ethics.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Kantianism

My understanding was that 'deontological' simply means (indeed, almost literally means) having been derived from rules. Deont being the Greek to refer to duty or rule.

Kantianism is probably the most famous from of all the deontological ethical systems. But structurally the NAP and the categorical imperative serve the same purposes in Kantianism and nirvana's libertarianism, respectively: they provide the principle by which all other actions are held to account.

And that principle differs irreconcilably in NAP and Kantianism, so using "deontology" here is not helpful.

Except that Kantianism is by no means the only form of deontology, and in fact has nothing to do with any of this.

I do _not_ mean deontological in a derogatory sense. I mean it descriptively in contrast to consequentialism.

Edit: To quote your own source, "The non-aggression principle, also known as the non-aggression axiom and zero aggression principle, is an ethical stance which states that any initiation of force is illicit and contrary to natural law. It is the basic moral axiom of deontological libertarianism, most upheld by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Non-aggre...

First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.

> First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Simple: anarchism refers to the belief that governments are unnecessary and/or unjustified; socialism refers to the opinion that the means of production ought not to be owned by private individuals or entities.

> Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.

Depends who you ask! These words all have different meanings across societies and cultures. I don't think these ideologies can be collapsed into points or regions along a spectrum.

Hmm... I had forgotten about that particular definition of socialism- but, if the means of production are not owned by individuals, they must either be commons or government owned. In anarchy there is no government, so the means must be "owned" by all, but how do you maintain such a structure in a government-less society...

Very good question. That's probably one of the largest sources of division between various anarchist schools.

One way to tackle the problem is to separate governance from the state, and say that we want a governance structure accountable to the workers, and populated by workers, but no associated state apparatus—no police, no army, no state lines, etc.

Many forms of anarchism turn into a kind of pastorial agrarianism because of this. It really is hard to come up with a governance structure beyond a certain size that meets the accountability requirements for the kind of society socialism wants, and so many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council.

many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council

The irony is that as best I gather, the founding fathers were shooting for much the same! (Federalism)

(Of course that was states rather than small towns or something, but states were far less populous then- and Rhode Island is still pretty small!)

Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course.

This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky considers his anarchism a straightforward extension of the principles of enlightenment political philosophy to industrial society.

There's a layered irony, of course: most of the founding fathers were members of a political and economic elite which openly favored aristocracy and commerce over the 'regular folk.' Not all of them of course. The American Revolution was a strange tenuous cooperation between an economic elite that saw independence as the way out of a mercantile demand on the part of Britain, and a political class which was versed in Enlightenment political philosophy and saw an opportunity for using Locke and Montesquieu as a handbook for a new kind of government.

> most anarchists are socialists or communists

How would this work? How would they enforce a 'no-ownership' or 'communal-ownership' principle without a state to prevent people from claiming and defending private property?

I never said the position was coherent or viable. ;)

That said, I think there are various answers.

One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles. Anarchists who are also pacifists naturally reject this option.

Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property. John T. Private can take his guns and go live in the woods if he wants to, what is essential is that the majority of property is public and therefore private property does not give a specific class control over the output of others' labor.

Another position, and this was Proudhon's, is that there is a distinction between personal property and private property. Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves. As industrial society developed, fending for yourself because less and less plausible, and eventually the choice was between selling the output of your labor for (a socialist would say) less than its cost, or dying, basically.

Calling that choice barbaric is the essence of the social-anarchist critique of capitalism.

> One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles.

How is that not a government?

> Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

> Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property.

This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

> Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves.

This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

> How is that not a government?

You could call it that. But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

> I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

Okay, now you're being much more specific.

> This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

I'm not sure; where does it lead? ;) But really, we already have massive social pressure to conform, that's how societies work. Anarchism doesn't get rid of that. Anarchism isn't utopianism, or at least not only utopianism.

> This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

What do you mean? Distinctions never exist a priori, they're always conceptual tools for the sake of delimiting between situations.

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

Not quite; according to most anarchists you're still kosher, unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation. Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

> unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation.

So... how do we figure that? Seriously: How do we do the math in every possible case to ensure I'm not exploiting the person who freely agreed to work for me?

> Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Most anarchists need to study the Sorites paradox.

> But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

This means there still would be a hierarchy based on the fact that, one, a government with no ability to make binding resolutions is pointless; two, unless some group has the ability to veto others the body gets mired in endless debate due to bikeshedding; three, despite the previous point, most people don't want to govern nearly as much as they want to argue over the trivial things they feel entitled to have an opinion on, so trying to even things out by putting everyone into government would require a draft backed by, you guessed it, the threat of force.

> Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

I understand this. I wonder what someone who actually believed in this would be saying.

"So... how do we figure that? Seriously: How do we do the math in every possible case to ensure I'm not exploiting the person who freely agreed to work for me?"

By "freely agreed", do you mean it in the restricted sense that the worker was not physically coerced to work?

> By "freely agreed", do you mean it in the restricted sense that the worker was not physically coerced to work?

Only as a first step; it has to be more complex than that, which is one reason unions exist (in the ideal world with ideal unions that accurately represent the needs of the people they represent).

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

How does a homestead become owned? Many accounts for such a transition tend toward some labor-mixing theory. But then the field owner invites someone else to mix their labor with the field and that mechanism is now denied to the new person. Why does an appeal to labor-mixing confer ownership in one instance but not any part of it in the other?

> Why does an appeal to labor-mixing confer ownership in one instance but not any part of it in the other?

You can't say that in general: I could hire on the hand for partial ownership in the farm. However, the actual answer is that the hand freely agreed to the deal and does not want partial ownership of a family farm.

> what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

One has a natural right to at least one property: one's own body. A natural right that is routinely violated in most so called 'free' societies; I should add. This notion of property is established (and recognized) without the threat of force, implicit or otherwise.

Now assume the existence of only one person on the entire planet. None of our political philosophies have any effect on the dealings of that one person. If another person is added however, the two have now the possibility of interaction over a limited resource. The two can attempt aggression as a means of securing the resource, or they can attempt to set out a contract. That is, a set of rules that determine how the two deal with scarcity. For example, they can agree that the person who finds something first shall consider it their property.

The two can reach this conclusion in the absence of any force, implicit or otherwise. They can reach this conclusion in the spirit of cooperation, or for entirely selfish reasons: to avoid or at least minimize the stress of conflicts.

The two can indeed introduce the possibility of aggression as a means of enforcing the contract. But if you think closely, you will see that this aggression is not defined as an initiation of force, but rather as a response to it. That is, contract or not, the first person to go against the will of the other is the aggressor. And since there is no political philosophy which prohibits one to defend themselves - libertarianism included - it seems safe to assume that everyone would agree: the return aggression is justified.

So all the contract winds up doing, is codifying the interaction and determining exactly what the two view as aggression. For example, unilateral contract termination is typically viewed as such.

When scaled up to more than two persons, the complexities increase, but the principles remain the same. A contract is a document that governs interaction. This is markedly different from a person who governs interaction in that the contract requires the agreement of all parties involved, whereas a tyrant simply imposes his or her will, unconcerned about the will of others.

Libertarianism is a way of thinking that rejects the initiation of force. It is not a way of thinking that denies the existence of force. Neither does it deny the necessity of force -- but only in response to it.

I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential. In libertarianism, the government is the objective enforcement of contract laws and the defender of rights. Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

That is the _opposite_ of libertarian desires for freedom from the desires of others. Why would any libertarian desire this?

I'm going to speculate, as I'm not well versed in the history of libertarianism, but I suspect it grew out of anarchism inasmuch as it was a righteous rejection of government abuse. You see this occurring today with the Occupy movement; the government has failed and rejected its duties, therefore they reject the government. I consider this throwing the baby out with the bath water.

With regards to the NAP and force, the American founding fathers regarding the 2nd Ammendment did not even believe the government should have a monopoly, but instead the whole of the populace should hold its propensity for tyranny in check with its own force so to speak. This is consistent with the libertarian value of the right to defend oneself. Force is therefore permissible whenever necessary to rectify the violation of one's rights (contract law being subsumed by this). As far as whether violating my (property) rights is an initiation of force, according to the NAP[1] it is:

     Specifically, any unsollicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property, including that person’s body, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficiary or neutral to the owner, are considered violent when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination, as based on the libertarian principle of self-ownership.

So at the end, the obvious glaring disparity between socialist and libertarians is whether the right to own property is in fact a right. Socialists as you see here (comments), obviously refuse to acknowledge the assumption of this right. Unfortunately, the natural progression of having no right to own property is the socialist value that everyone else has a right to your own mind, sweat, etc... Or in other words, we are all beholden to the desires of others as all that we own, even ourselves, are community property.

This in my mind is the most unimaginable tyranny of all, and thus I see socialism as fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

> I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential.

Perhaps I haven't been clear, but I'm pretty sure I'm (mostly) agreeing with you.

U.S. Libertarianism is incompatible with most forms of anarchism espoused by those who use the term.

The term "libertarian," however, has a much longer history in Europe, associated with the spiritual heirs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and so forth. Which is, to me, a fascinating transition in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word.

Also, I would note that:

> Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

is your editorializing. No self-described anarchist would accept that definition, and neither would most political scientists.

If you mean, on the other hand, that any form of anarchy as espoused by those who self-identify as such would lead to the kind of scenario you describe, then there's a whole other issue.

I was operating under the notion that we were discussing political philosophies as espoused by those who advocate them, not the plausibility of those philosophies as they might be plausibly implemented in the world.

The fact that the non-aggression principle cannot stand without an underlying philosophy is precisely why Ayn Rand, who originated that principle, rejected the U.S. libertarians' attempts to promulgate that principle in a way that was divorced from her philosophy.

Libertarianism is basically anarchism + property rights + government that enforces freedom.

Socialism isn't a specific ideology, it's just a declaration that some collective involuntary actions are legitimate for the good of the group. People who label themselves as socialists range from neo-nazis to hippie farm collectives. Most libertarians believe in involuntary collective enforcement of contracts, many in involuntary collective protection of property, and some in involuntary collective enforcement of exclusive monopolies on intangibles like songs and arrangements of bits.

It's important how you define the initiation of force.

When you sign a contract, you've voluntarily consented to its enforcement. When you're born, you've earned the right to your body, and I think the "involuntary" action is when someone violates this property right. When you trade your labor with someone else for property, you've voluntarily entered that relationship, and thus accrued right to that property (provided it wasn't previously stolen.) Land ownership is a more complicated issue. Your assertion about intellectual property is inaccurate, libertarians only believe in intellectual property rights protected by contract, not government.

I don't think libertarians believe in any collective. A collective is an abstraction. This is what trips people up. They think the "USA" is an entity, its not, its a collection of people. If I don't have the right to pull a gun on you and take your money, I don't get that right simply because I claim to be part of a collective.... but somehow many people feel that you do. Libertarians don't. Many people feel that if someone is part of a "government" or some other "collective" that this somehow gives them power over others they wouldn't have as individuals. An extreme example for counter argument is, do 5 guys get the right to rape a girl simply because they out number her and took a vote? Libertarians would say no. So, I don't think libertarians agree with "involuntary collective enforcement" in general.

>It's important how you define the initiation of force.

This is absolutely true. One thing that I've discovered is that many people I debate with think that using violence to accomplish ends they see as moral or justified is not an initiation of force (they'll even insist it is not violence.) This stumps me completely. I recognize where violence is, I feel, justified (namely in response to an initiation of force) and I'm willing to defend it. I don't have to pretend that it isn't what it is. And in the issues you bring up, some of them do bring up thorny areas (Which would require more debate than can fit here.) Abortion is the classic quandary... I'm pro-choice, but the nature of the issue makes it less cut and dry.

However, these are exceptions that prove the rule. Using the initiation of force as an indicator its easy to recognize the morality or immorality of many situations that seem to otherwise trip people up.

Everyone needs food, right? Should the government force people to work in fields to provide it, so that everyone in society is fed?

libertarians only believe in intellectual property rights protected by contract, not government.

Actually, not all libertarians. Ayn Rand, for example, considered them an extension of natural rights: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...

EDIT: Anyone care to point out where is the post wrong? I'm not a Rand follower, but as far as I know she's considered a libertarian and the quotes make her position very obvious.

> she's considered a libertarian

Ayn Rand was quite vocal about her contempt for libertarianism, though the actual distinctions she made are not entirely clear to me.

Oh, OK. I mentioned her because Kinsella uses her position as an example of pro-IP libertarians. I wasn't aware she didn't consider herself libertarian.

Your post is not wrong, it is correct. You're getting down votes because you mentioned Rand without condemning her. I gave you and up vote.

One of the numerous errors Rand made was condemning the libertarian movement, but this is pretty hilarious because she was good friends with Rothbard. I believe her use of the word "libertarian" predates the libertarian movement and she's referring to the socialist/communist/"anarchists" of years before.

Part of Rand's philosophy is the Non-Aggression Principle. Some "Objectivists" criticize libertarians for not adopting the whole philosophy and focusing on the NAP.

But every follower of Rand is a Libertarian-- BY DEFINTION-- since both groups subscribe to the NAP.

Your point about Rand's support of IP is correct, and you corrected an over broad statement I made. I didn't think that it needed further illumination because you were correct, but now that I see you're getting down voted, I wanted to assure you that you were right.

Your assertion about intellectual property is inaccurate, libertarians only believe in intellectual property rights protected by contract, not government

I don't think anyone who calls themselves libertarian (edit: should have been 'anyone who is libertarian') could approve of any kind of government. Your argument about collectives taking a vote to justify actions applies just as readily to theft and extortion as it does to rape. That is essentially what every government does to its citizens by taxing them — a sufficient number of people have voted by proxy to take a certain amount of your property gains and use force in order to ensure that you comply.

There is a bigger problem with enforcing intellectual property rights by contract. It is easy to illustrate with a book. Let's say that a book has as its first page, the terms and conditions of sale which are, basically, standard copyright provisions. If the first buyer of the book loses the book, is the person who finds the abandoned property still bound by the terms and conditions of the sale? Perhaps, perhaps not. If the book becomes old and worn and some pages fall out, including the terms and conditions of sale, whoever finds the book can't be aware of the rights protected by this contract. Similarly, an unscrupulous person can violate the terms and conditions of sale, and all violations of the contract thereafter can only be attributed to that one unscrupulous person. Enforcing a copyright contract is simply untenable with physical objects. And with digital objects, assuming the absence of Digital Restrictions Management. It seems that free market forces would make most copyright-via-contract schemes unpopular.

I don't think anyone who calls themselves libertarian could approve of any kind of government.

But some obviously do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minarchism

My questions would be: how many contracts am I signing by simply doing what I like? Am I violating a contract by getting in your car and driving it away? Am I violating a contract by installing a program on my computer? Am I violating a contract by singing a song? Have I initiated force in any of these cases? Are there rights that are granted when I haven't explicitly signed a contract?

If so, how will those rights be enforced? If those rights are enforced by voluntary collective policing, in what way can I defend myself against their declarations of more implicit rights? Basically, if I draw a picture of Mohammed, have I initiated force? What about if you leave your door unlocked, I walk into your house, then drink your milk straight out of the carton? Is this an initiation of force, and if it is, what if you lack the size to prevent me from doing it?

Lastly, if I walk down skid row with a private bodyguard and a wad of $100 bills, offering to buy people as slaves? If they sign, are they my slaves? If they escape, have they initiated force? Is there an involuntary limit to what can be signed away?

tl;dr I'm not getting a clear idea of who defines initiation of force, who enforces violations, and how are the weak protected from the strong. I realize the last one may be a bit of a straw man, because libertarians may not feel that protecting the weak from the strong is moral, but I'm not sure about this.

"My questions would be: how many contracts am I signing by simply doing what I like?"

The answer to these questions depends on information you're not giving in your hypotheticals. For instance:

>"Am I violating a contract by getting in your car and driving it away? ... Have I initiated force in any of these cases? Are there rights that are granted when I haven't explicitly signed a contract?"

I don't know. Did you just sign a rental agreement with me where I give you the right to use the car in exchange for the payment you just gave me? Or are you someone I've never met whose stealing my car?

If we had a society that was just when it comes to the really obvious issues-- like, rape, murder, theft, etc, then we could debate the morality of you singing a son (I'm assuming your hypothetical is singing a song that is copyrighted by someone else, but in my society there would be no implicit copyright.)

I'm not trying to evade. IF you steal my car, it is an initiation of force. If you walk into my house when you don't have permission, its an initiation, whether the door was unlocked or not.

>"and if it is, what if you lack the size to prevent me from doing it?"

I'm addressing the moral question of whether its an imitation or not. The practical question of how to defend against such initiations is a broader topic.

"Is there an involuntary limit to what can be signed away?"

That's also a good topic for debate.

I'd like to start, though, by focusing on the obvious initiations of force-- groups of people using violence to take from others, and groups of people waging wars on the innocent, or incarcerating people for doing drugs, etc.

The NAP doesn't imply there are no grey areas at all-- there are grey areas.

But the NAP does let you see that a lot of areas that people think are white are actually black. That the war on drugs is not only ill advised, but a criminal enterprise.

I have a real beef with this "reasoning from axioms" stuff when it gets taken as a dogma. Maybe you don't take it as a dogma. I am also yet to see a working libertarian society, so it's all just academic posturing as far as I'm concerned, much like all this atheist utopianism I keep hearing about. Frankly, I don't see anything intrinsically immoral about forcing other people to do or not do things using force. You can't opt out of society with the numbers we have now.

The problem as I see it is not adhering to some principle or another it's that everything is too big and too centralised. I like a lot of what people like Ron Paul are saying, but if we were to give them a free run for a few decades we'd need a new reactionary movement to undo all the problems resulting from their own excesses. People need to let go of the idea that a person can "crack the code" of society and figure out the right ethics for all time.

I'm saying that I'm not stealing your car, I'm driving a car, and to introduce "stealing" and "your" involves implicit social contract and collective enforcement. I'm trying to imply that libertarianism is a sort of socialism that has a particular set of values that it finds important to preserve by force. It just simply defines a violation of those values as an initiation of force in order to claim that it is only taking a hard line on freedom of association, expression, and contract.

Virtually every modern society claims to support freedom of association, expression, and contract, until it violates the public order, when it transforms into a initiation of force by terrorists. It all depends on how you define the public order.

edit: to directly answer your question, I'm a guy who you've never met who breaks your car window, gets into your car, and drives away. If you happen to run into me later, I make no attempt to physically prevent you from getting in your car and driving away, although I have fixed the window and changed the locks.

Thanks for honestly emphasizing "initiation". http://sethf.com/essays/major/libstupid.php analyzes why that qualifier renders the statement almost meaningless. I, at least, found his points convincing.

I read quite a bit of that, despite the very hostile opening, and found it to be a quite a rant. He seems to be claiming that everything is relative, and thus the NAP is meaningless.

I really don't think the initiation is so meaningless. I know that a lot of people like to rationalize the initiation of force because they think the ultimate result is better (Which gets into practical debates, and at the end of the day is still an ends-justify-the-means argument.)

It is true that the NAP is meant to be something everyone should agree with, because we believe everyone is naturally a libertarian and just gets convinced otherwise via a lot of sleight of hand, and rationalizations.

I'd be willing to discuss it if you can provide a concrete example where the NAP fails to provide the right outcome. Or where initiation becomes "meaningless".

I certainly don't deny that there are sticky areas (abortion and rights in land being two of them.)

Let's take his example of whites-only and blacks-only drinking fountains. Would a black person drinking from a whites-only fountain have constituted "initiation of force"? And similarly, was Rosa Parks' refusal to vacate her seat an "initiation of force"?

More context is needed, and preferably one without a racial component. (For instance, the racial rules on Rosa parks bus were put in place by the local government, not a private bus company.)

Do you think that a gay couple should be forced to rent out the room they listed on craigslit to an adamant and vocal bigot who hates gays?

Freedom of association is a basic human right, correct? I don't have the right to force some woman I like to associate with me if she thinks I'm disgusting.

That doesn't change if the reason she thinks I'm disgusting is because I'm black.

In the former, I'm just a creep, in the later, she's the bigot. It doesn't really matter.

Racism and other bigotry goes away the more free and open an economy is. The companies run by bigots will underperform, and freedom of association goes both ways- you can refuse to do business with them, and a racist business will lose customers from all races.

Saying that gays can't get married violates freedom of association, but so does saying that you have to have a minimum wage (its dictating terms of a private relationship.)

The passing of such laws, I consider, an initiation of force.

PS- I up voted both of your posts. Not sure why you were down voted. I much prefer your attempts to challenge my position on the merits to the ad hominem I've gotten from others.

> Racism and other bigotry goes away the more free and open an economy is.

That was not true in the racist southern society where the majority of the population was born into a tradition of racism. In a racist society a business will be much more successful by catering to the desire of its customers for white-only water fountains, etc. A business that tries to integrate will suffer a loss of the majority of its customers and that majority is also the wealthier portion. So in such a society a free economy will tend to reinforce existing racism. We needed authoritarian civil rights laws and the threat of force to begin reversing that racism.

0. You seem to have ignored "the more free and open an economy is." which recognizes both that there are degrees "more free and open" and that these are factors that help it go away. The south to some extent lacked them.

1. In the south, racism was going away. Maybe not as fast as people would like, but it was going away.

2. Much of the racism in the south was perpetrated by governments, not by businesses.

3. The south was, after the civil war, subjugated to the will of the north in a form of (probably racist) enslavement of the entire region. The avoiding of this subjugation is why many free blacks in the south fought on the side of the confederacy during the civil war. (while its notable that the north enslaved people via conscription to fight on their side in the civil war.)

At any rate, I wouldn't call the south after the civil war until the 1960s a completely free and open economy.

4. These authoritarian civil rights laws perpetuated racism, they didn't end it. In a way they codified racism by saying "black people can't compete on their own in the market place" which is a racist perspective.

It's interesting how a lot of libertarian theorists also happen to have all these racist historical and social theories.

Let me respond with my opinion:

If a water fountain is a private object, then the owner can pass whatever restrictions he or she wants on its use.

However, during the Jim Crow era those restrictions were passed by the government as part of a policy of institutionally enforced segregation. The governments passage of those laws constitutes an "imitation of force" on both the water fountain owners and users.

Under a libertarian analysis, that would depend on whether the segregation is imposed by government or by the relevant property owner. If the government mandates segregation, it has initiated force. Violating a private property owner's rules would be initiation of force.

Note that in the US, we've never actually tried the system where private discrimination is neither required nor forbidden. We went straight from the mandatory discrimination of Jim Crow to the forbidden discrimination of the Civil Rights Act. So no one really knows how actual freedom of association would work out in practice. It is unfair therefore to try to taint libertarianism as equivalent to Jim Crow, but likewise one should be skeptical of libertarian claims that things would work out all right under such setup.

I am failing to understand how NAP can be applied to the initial gain of property rights.

A business man makes space ship goes to asteroid belt mines resources and sells them on earth. Does he own what he mined? Who owned it before he mined the asteroid?

Another example which emphasize the problem differently. Lets pretend N libertarians one day wake up in a rather large box. At the center, bottom floor of the box is a food dispenser that can dispense a near infinite amount of food.

Bob is the first person to wake up and discovers the food dispenser. Knowing the value of this natural resource he claims it as his property. He later trades food from the food dispenser for favors from everyone else in the box. The other libertarians have to do what Bob asks otherwise they will not get food since they are not willing to break the NAP.

It is not clear to me that when Bob claims the food dispenser as his property and then trades the food it dispenses for favors weather he is breaking NAP or not.

Does NAP solve these type of problems or do libertarians use a secondary guiding principle to solve them?

> Bob is the first person to wake up and discovers the food dispenser. Knowing the value of this natural resource he claims it as his property. He later trades food from the food dispenser for favors from everyone else in the box. The other libertarians have to do what Bob asks otherwise they will not get food since they are not willing to break the NAP.

Examples like this often provide strong challenges to the right-wing libertarian view on property. As a left-libertarian, I'd like to offer that some of us do consider monopolization of natural resources to constitute aggression, since resources are originally unowned. This is known as Georgism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Thanks for the response, I have read little of libertarian philosophies so it is nice to get overview from nirvana and yourself.

If don't mind answering another question, if georgism is the left-libertarian answer what is the right-libertarian answer?

I was about to type the exact same opening line, then saw your post with a well crafted response. My response to the article at first was: "whoever equates open source software with socialism has no idea what either open source software or socialism is." In that, both the author (of the article, not the quote), you, and I agree. Great response, thanks!

Thanks for the fantastic articulation of the distinction between socialism and libertarianism especially with regards to FOSS. Personally, I am adamantly libertarian and adamantly anti-socialist, something that at times I find at odds with the socialist factions within FOSS communities. Nonetheless, I find the large minority (majority?) of libertarian/free-market capitalists within the community to be encouraging, though they tend to be less vocal.

At the core of the issues is the use of force and the NAP. One way this is often contentiously illustrated in the US is with government protected labor unions. As a libertarian, I view labor unions as the to-be-encouraged populist counter to incumbent monopolies, yet I find myself all too regularly unwilling to support them due to their violation of the NAP and insistence on socialist values/tactics. This is unfortunate, since it seems to create a de facto support of wealthy "capitalists" by libertarians in the view of detractors.

Government protected labor unions are the populist equivalent of corporatism, corrupt by definition, allowing workers to explicitly violate employment agreements without repercussions. Until government protected labor unions are abolished, they'll consistently fail to receive support from a large majority of the people that may share their otherwise noble intentions, pay for the value you create. The problem of course with socialists though is that value should be objectively decided by others, aka the _free_ market.

The software community and Silicon Valley seem to have gotten at least this part right, an oasis amongst many tragically morally unsupportable industries. (I would absolutely _love_ to whole-heartedly embrace support of the teachers union, but cannot.)

You make some good points about labor unions. On one hand, a voluntary association is intrinsically moral, and it could be a force for positive good.

I don't know if you've read it or not, but Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in one lesson" is a great book. [1]

One of the chapters covers unions and he shows how economically they cannot in the end benefit workers. However, even if they are inefficient or foolish, workers have a right to form associations. Its just that employers have a right to refuse to negotiate with them.

It is interesting how libertarian the software community is, and silicon vally, in some regards-- unions being a good example. And yet in other regards they seem often to be hardcore socialist. I find it perplexing.

[1] You can get it here: http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/

I'd like to also recommend Hazlitt's book: it is an extremely well-written exploration of commonly-held (even today) economic fallacies. Hazlitt's display of circumspection alone is worth the read.

Thank you. I've already started reading it.

I think the main reason why there is such a large difference in the modern software industry is that unlike almost every other industry, individual developers wholly own the means of production and distribution. This is why software companies tend to have an ethos much more like a syndicate.

In other industries, workers do not own the means of production and/or distribution, therefore they MUST transact with capital owners to engage in business, creating a much more hostile relationship.

> This sounds like libertarianism to me, not socialism (small S or not.)

Yes, but this happens a lot with you! There isn't a day that goes by without a post from you where you take some hook and use it to put up a wall of text (or even several walls) about the libertarian view ;).

This response, and your personal attacks in general, are why Hacker News is not what it could be. You're getting up votes not on the quality of your response, but because you adhere to the same ideology as the up vote brigade. (which makes your disclaimer in your profile amusing.)

One of the reasons I generally don't respond to responses to my comments is that so often they are along these lines.

Do you want to try and make me feel ashamed for making my comment (Something that is doomed to failure) or would you rather have a productive discussion?

Which answer do you think is better for the site?

And, for the record, I often go weeks without posting here because I have work to do.

No, it just struck me that when I saw the link I already knew you would be right in there with a huge comment and sure enough there it was.

As for hacker news not being what it could be, it is what it is and it is pretty good. Much as I try to kick the habit I keep coming back and reading.

I apologize for any offense I caused. I really like most of your stuff but the libertarian rants can get a bit much at times.

As for the vote counts, I could not care less. I'm happy they're no longer on public display since they were a great distraction.

Capitalism and liberty are a requisite for entrepreneurship -- which is what this forum is about. Just like this community opposes regulation that is harmful to entrepreneurship, I think we should recognize philosophies that oppose entrepreneurship (socialism, fascism, communism, etc). I personally enjoy hearing the pro-liberty view point that is commonly dismissed as nutty or juvenile.

Also from wikipedia: >Socialism /ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/ is an economic system characterized by social ownership and control of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy

There seems to be a myth that socialism means anti-capitalism. This is not true. You can have private, but managed private companies working in a socialist countries. You have have a fully capitalist country but with socialised essential state assets.

"The NAP is the principle, but the philosophy involves recognizing the economic effects of violating the NAP are always worse than respecting it."

Why are they always worse? A very contrived example: a company choosing to pay significantly lower wages for, say, black people does not violate NAP. They might not like it, but nobody forces them to work for that particular company, right? But is this a global economic benefit?

Free of regulations (most of which do violate NAP), entities with power will search for a local optimum, and the thing with local optima is that they can be surprisingly low, but impossible to get out of without external force.

>"Why are they always worse? A very contrived example:"

Thank you for providing an example, but your example is not of someone violating the NAP. I was saying that if you violate the NAP the result is worse than if you don't. An example: Minimum wage laws increase unemployment, by preventing jobs that would otherwise exist from being created.

Your example of a company discriminating in pay is, unfortunately, consistent with the NAP. The NAP doesn't ensure people make the best choices, it just draws a line between moral and immoral. I believe that a company that discriminates in this way will do worse than companies that don't.

I'm not clear what the point you're making about optima is... I don't think that discrimination is optimal, even if it is moral.

"The NAP makes it really easy to see the morality of various actions."

I beg to differ. To take one example, we know for a fact that the pollution from coal fired power plants causes serious illness for thousands to millions of people a year. I've never met a libertarian who could explain to me how this situation is resolved via the NAP.

Second, I've never met a libertarian who really followed the NAP. How does the NAP deal with a serial killer?

Third, isn't the NAP a faith based belief? Why adhere to the NAP? Isn't it possible that we could measure the effect of some use of government force, and through that force it does good for the society at large? Why would we not use force in that way other than a faith based belief in the NAP?

NAP allows for defensive violence; i.e. if someone is violating your rights you can defend yourself.

Stopping a serial killer & pollution are both cases where someone's rights have been violated.

How would a libertarian society deal with pollution from coal fired plants?

How is this hard to understand: If the coal plants are proven to be harming the populace, they are aggressors. However, I don't think coal-fired plants necessarily kill the planet (or people).

It certainly harms people (http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html)

But you didn't really answer the question. How would a libertarian society deal with them? Would such a society ban all coal fired plants, and if so how would it be enforced? Would someone weigh the pros and cons, if so who and how? Would such a society every establish a regulatory body to actively monitor plants and limit their pollution?

I'm not a politician or a philosopher. My guess, however, is that pollution of air and flowing waters can be controlled through Libertarians' concept of property rights, since the pollution thereof has an effect on other peoples' private properties.

Therefore, regulation seems likely and moral, though it isn't necessarily the only option.

Isn't regulation the government using forces to collect taxes which it then uses to use force to have inspections?

My problem with libertarianism is that it always turns into a lot of hand waving from the libertarian. They start off saying that government force is a great evil, then I bring up something like pollution and suddenly the argument is much more nuanced, "well of course we'd have to use force". Exactly, of course you have to use force.

Once we admit this, what does libertarianism mean? How is it different from what we have today?

Well, libertarians I speak to tend to acknowledge the need for some government. You're setting up a false dichotomy.

No I'm not, the problem is that libertarians talk in circles. "It's never acceptable to use force!!!". What about xyz. "Well of course you use some force". Ok, so what does libertarianism mean? "taxation is violence!!!". Um, but don't you need taxes to pay for that government you said we needed a minute ago. "Well of course :confused look:". So what does libertarianism mean again?

Many people think that voluntary arrangements can be made to provide police actions. That way the police defend the people and treat them well, since that's who pays their salary. It would quickly lead to end of all victimless crimes, as no one would pay for that type of enforcement & those being targeted would be able to hire their own protection forces. Am advocating something like this for the entire united states - of course, not. But I'd be very interested in seeing these ideas tried voluntarily by willing participants.

I'm highly skeptical. Weren't lynchings in the south a voluntary "police action". Who would be held accountable for such actions, and how?

Let's also be clear that you are advocating the use of force. No one has yet explained how the NAP could possibly work in real life.

I made a thread on yakkstr, I'd love to discuss in detail.

http://yakkstr.com/posts/6923-Libertarianism

I'd prefer to talk here, merely because I remember to check this, but I posted over there too.

The key to this experiment is not that it will be perfect, but that it will be more stable and more reliable overall -- there will still be problems, nothing is perfect -- all we want is better.

As for lynchings and other mob behavior, that can happen with police too. For example, see the rise of the Black Panthers in response to oakland california police abuse. And the subsequent introduction of gun legislation to strip the citizens of their defense against abusive police. Or, to godwin myself, look at the nazis. When it comes to mob violence the governments of the world surely outnumber private instances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party#Origins

As for the philosophical underpinnings, there are quite a few good books: Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia lays out a framework, he makes some deductions that result in a monarchist state -- but that is in no way guaranteed from his premises.

David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom addresses this: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freed...

More on private defense agencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agency

Here's Rothbard on self-defense http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/twelve.asp

Rothbard on private defense agencies - http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap13.asp

and finally Hoppe on the same issue: http://mises.org/journals/jls/14_1/14_1_2.pdf

I'll do my best to address any questions/objections/etc you may have :) None of these works are perfect, and these ideas are relatively recent and haven't been tried so who knows what would really happen :)

This is a fair amount of reading, but it's way more thorough than anything I can quickly type up :)

You've got to admit that HN isn't meant for long running conversations. But if you prefer it, so be it :) Here's what I posted over on yakkstr:

You gave me a lot of reading material which will take me a little while to go through, in the meantime I'll give you my point of view.

Given some policy proposal we should attempt to measure it's effectiveness and determine if it leads to a better outcome than we currently have. If it does, we should adopt it. We have to figure out what it means to be "better", but I think we can agree easily in many cases.

My problem with philosophies like libertarianism is that they start with some accepted truth (i.e. NAP) before any attempt is made to measure or predict an outcome. It's effectively a faith based belief. Let me give one example, I think it's clear that our country benefited enormously from public education. That is the government using force to take money from some people to pay for schools for other people. I'm pretty sure this is diametrically opposed to libertarian philosophy, but we are better off for it. Why would we not do something good based on a philosophical ideal like libertarianism, communism, etc? Why start from an ideology rather than measuring what does and doesn't work? If you identify yourself as a libertarian then you're psychologically less likely to accept evidence for a policy that goes against the ideology.

You are correct this isn't great - lets move to email. danny ---- dannygagne ----- com

As for your objections. A pragmatic approach, where we only look at outcomes is flawed in a few interesting ways.

1. We cannot know for sure the effectiveness of any given action so it's still a guess. 2. It's an ends justifies the means world philosophy 3. It has no moral basis, anything is good as long as the end result is what you want.

I prefer to take a process based philosophy, if each step along a path is moral then the end result is moral even if it's negative or suboptimal.

For instance, the argument about creating a better society one could easily be used for a totalitarian eugenics program.

Libertarians aren't against public schooling, just the manner in which it is funded. If you look at how much government schools cost and how poorly the perform, I think it's clear that private solutions are superior. Since the market allows experimentation and gives people a choice on what type of school they want instead of a bureaucrat deciding for them. This can be replicated through school vouchers/school choice and relaxation of standards.

I kind of meandered off topic, but I think it boils down to a faith in people to create what they need. If people value school, which they do, then they will find a way to provide it.

Except all the countries with good education outcomes have the state heavily involved in schooling. There are tons of countries that don't have he state heavily involved, and they have far worse outcomes.

Like I said, it's faith based adherence to ideology versus measuring outcomes and trying to do what works.

Also, the problem with basing anything on morality is that we all have different moralities. Whose do we choose and why? Perhaps we measure outcomes and base it on that with a few, generally accepted, moral constraints?

Bruno Latour writes about this sort of thing as a paradox of modernism, in which nature is purified from society (Boyle) and society is purified from nature (Hobbes), the net result being that political philosophies and matters of nature don't fit together very well.

How does NAP deal with property rights? Pretty much all the property in the entire world was gained through aggression.

There seems to be a lot of hard data that supports the NAP and limited government. Think of communist vs capitalist countries, economic freedom vs standard of living, regulated vs non-regulated industries, etc.

Hm, I think if you made a list of all the countries that are a decent place to live that the vast majority of them would have large central governments. All of which use force to collect taxes for things like universal healthcare, social security, public schools.

I'm pretty sure NAP says that the government can't force you to pay taxes for public schools.

They do but the larger governments tend to do worse. I suggest ypu take a look at the economic freedom index.

"They do but the larger governments tend to do worse."

Larger compared to what? I think places with the smallest most ineffectual governments are all hell holes. Every decent society has a large central government. The "economic freedom index" is a bit of a misnomer. They define freedom as a government large enough to protect rights. So right out the gate freedom is redefined as a large government that uses force to impose civil society.

Let me pick one example. Your freedom index lists Switzerland as "Free". Switzerland has government imposed universal healthcare. That sounds like a lot of government to me, how about you!

One last thing, none of the countries listed as "FREE" are anything close to a libertarian society based on the NAP.

To apply the NAP to property in good faith, one would need to have an unbroken chain of rightful lockean property acqusition - through free trade or by mixing one's labour with unclaimed land - since time immemorial. Clearly, this is not the case.

More reading: http://mutualist.org/id4.html

Really awesome writing.A true example of libertarianism. Thanks for explaining the definition of freedom so well,

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