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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

I get your point, but I think you are missing the glaring nuance here...

He is basically saying if you are reading this and you were affected its in your best interest to participate in catching this guy and 'persuading' him to give us the bitcoins...

he isnt appealing to government or some over arching entity or morality.

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Yes he is! In fact he appeals to morality just about every other sentence. It's rather hilarious.

I think you're assuming his appeals to morality is the same as asking for government intervention. In fact, I read this just the opposite, and I would bet this is exactly NOT what he is asking for.

Libertarianism has a lot of morality, it's just a different morality. That morality is to maximize independence of each individual. Obviously that's not a promotion of murder, nor a neutrality against murder (as an example of one moral), it's absolutely against the imposition of one will "unfairly" on another, through violence. It would characterize needlessly violent drug busts by swat teams as such imposition of will through violence.

Clearly, you're an ultra-liberal. That's fine, but you don't have to be illogical, come on.

Hm, but libertarians also believe in the right to free association. I'd say the morality of libertarianism is:

'political power should be viewed with greater skepticism than any other form of indirect power'

Libertarians have a strong sense of morality based on property rights. You might be thinking of anarchism.

Anarchism has a strong sense of morality based on communal rights. It's not strictly amoral (and in fact is very far from it).

I wasn't clear, I didn't mean to imply that anarchism has no morality, just that it isn't based on individuals' property rights. (At least, that's my understanding of it.)

I won't pretend to fully understand it either, but self-proclaimed anarchists that I've talked to online have indicated that they do respect private and personal property. A man could own a baseball bat in the property sense, but a company could not own property at all (or at least, property they expect not to be damaged by an anarchist).

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