Coercion Libertarianism K

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Coercion/Libertarianism Shell..........................................................................................................................3 Link Extensions................................................................................................................................................5 Link Extensions................................................................................................................................................6 Link Extensions................................................................................................................................................7 Link Extensions................................................................................................................................................8 Answers to: “It’s Voluntary”.............................................................................................................................9 Redistribution Morally Wrong.......................................................................................................................10 Redistribution Morally Wrong........................................................................................................................11 Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion”..............................................................................................................12 Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion”..............................................................................................................14 Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion”..............................................................................................................14 Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion”..............................................................................................................16 Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” ...........................................................17 Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” ...........................................................18 Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” ...........................................................19 Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” ...........................................................20 The K Turns the Case.....................................................................................................................................21 Value to Life Impacts......................................................................................................................................22 Value to Life Impacts......................................................................................................................................23 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................24 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................25 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................26 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................27 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................28 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................29 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................30 Coercion is Immoral.......................................................................................................................................31 Right to Property is Foundational...................................................................................................................32 Right to Property is Foundational...................................................................................................................33 Right to Property is Foundational...................................................................................................................34 General Impact Extensions.............................................................................................................................35 General Impact Extensions.............................................................................................................................36 General Impact Extensions.............................................................................................................................37 Answers to: “Commodification”....................................................................................................................39 Answers to: “Private Coercion Worse” .........................................................................................................40 Answers to: “Private Coercion Worse” .........................................................................................................41 Answers to: “Pragmatism”.............................................................................................................................42 Answers to: “Coercion Ok Because All Resources Were Once Unowned”...................................................43 Answers to: “Profit is Not a Labor Income”..................................................................................................45 Answers to: “Regulations Help Americans so not Coercive..........................................................................46 Answers to: “Absolute Property Rights Allow Slavery”...............................................................................47 Answers to: “Libertarianism Isolationist”......................................................................................................48 Answers to: “Ending Coercion Benefits Elites”.............................................................................................49 Answers to: “Ending Coercion Benefits Elites”.............................................................................................50 Answers to: “Minimal State is Coercive”.......................................................................................................51 Answers to: “State Good”...............................................................................................................................52 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................53 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................54 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................55 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................56 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................57 Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism”.................................................................................................58 Answers to: “Need to help people”................................................................................................................59 Answers to: “Need to help people”................................................................................................................60 Answers to: Warlords Turn.............................................................................................................................61 Answers to: Warlords Turn.............................................................................................................................62

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Altruism Immoral...........................................................................................................................................63 Altruism Immoral...........................................................................................................................................64 Property Rights Are Foundational..................................................................................................................65 Permutation Answers......................................................................................................................................66 Permutation Answers......................................................................................................................................67 Alternative: Non-Governmental Social Control............................................................................................68 Uniqueness Answer: Half The Economy Is Controlled Now.........................................................................69 Link Answers..................................................................................................................................................70 General Answers.............................................................................................................................................71 Property Rights Answers................................................................................................................................72 Property Rights Answers................................................................................................................................73 Property Rights Answers................................................................................................................................74 Property Rights Answers................................................................................................................................76 Libertarianism Doesn’t Protect Rights...........................................................................................................77 Economic Redistribution Good......................................................................................................................78 Economic Redistribution Good......................................................................................................................79 Economic Redistribution Good......................................................................................................................80 Taxes Are Moral.............................................................................................................................................81 Taxes Are Moral.............................................................................................................................................82 Charity Doesn’t Solve the Need for Redistribution........................................................................................83 Self-Determination Answers...........................................................................................................................84 Libertarianism Immoral..................................................................................................................................85 Objectivism Bad.............................................................................................................................................86 Objectivism Bad.............................................................................................................................................87 Objectivism Bad.............................................................................................................................................88 Nozick Indites.................................................................................................................................................89 Nozick Indites.................................................................................................................................................90 Nozick Indites.................................................................................................................................................91 Aff: Rand Indites............................................................................................................................................92 Aff: Rand Indites............................................................................................................................................93 Altrumism/Private Charity Doesn’t Solve......................................................................................................94 Altrumism/Private Charity Doesn’t Solve......................................................................................................95 Egoism Answers.............................................................................................................................................96 Reason Isn’t Absolute.....................................................................................................................................97

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Coercion/Libertarianism Shell A. Link: FOREIGN AID COERCES AMERICANS Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 5/20/06. To conclude our discussion, the primary plank of a libertarian foreign policy program for America must be to call upon the United States to abandon its policy of global interventionism: to withdraw immediately and completely, militarily and politically, from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, from everywhere. The cry among American libertarians should be for the United States to withdraw now, in every way that involves the U.S. government. The United States should dismantle its bases, withdraw its troops, stop its incessant political meddling, and abolish the CIA. It should also end all foreign aid—which is simply a device to coerce the American taxpayer into subsidizing American exports and favored foreign States, all in the name of "helping the starving peoples of the world." In short, the United States government should withdraw totally to within its own boundaries and maintain a policy of strict political "isolation" or neutrality everywhere.

B. Impact: A LIFE OF GOVERNMENT COERCION IS NOT WORTH LIVING BECAUSE IT IS NOT CONTROLLED BY THE PERSON WHO IS LIVING IT, DEATH IS PREFERABLE. Joseph Raz, philosopher, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, 1986, p. 307 One way to test the thesis of the primacy of action reasons is to think of a person who is entirely passive and is continuously led, cleaned, and pumped full with hash, so that he is perpetually content, and wants nothing but to stay in the same condition. It’s a familiar imaginary horror. How do we rank the success of such a life? It

is not the worst life one can have. It is simply not a life at all. It lacks activity, it lacks goals. To the extent that one is tempted to judge it more harshly than that and to regard it as a ‘negative life’ this is because of the wasted potentiality. It is a life which could have been and was not. We can isolate this feature by imagining that the human being concerned is mentally and physically effected in a way which rules out the possibility of a life with any kind of meaningful pursuit in it. Now it is just not really a life at all. This does not preclude one from saying that it is better than human life. It is simply sufficiently unlike human life in the respects that matter that we regard it as only a degenerate case of human life. But clearly not being alive can be better than that life.

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C. The alt. is to reject coercion in every since especially how it is perpetuated in the 1AC We must say no! Sylvester Petro, professor of law, Wake Forest University, Spring 1974, TOLEDO LAW REVIEW, p. 480. However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway – “I believe in only one thing: liberty.” And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume’s observation: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Djilas. In sum, if one believes in freedom as a supreme value, and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.

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Link Extensions 1. MANDATORY SERVICE THREATENS FREEDOM Eric Gorhman, sociologist, State University of New York, NATIONAL SERVICE: CITIZENSHIP AND POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 40 Another, more intractable, problem is that coercive national service violates freedoms and constitutional protections. While very strong legal cases can be made against such a plan,' the moral case against coercive service is even stronger. Coercive service violates the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and freedom from involuntary servitude that are a basic part of what it means to be human. They violate these basic characteristics which define human nature, and as such infringe upon the capacities of individuals to live a full life with corporeal autonomy and intellectual integrity. Moreover, coercive service violates the individual's right to property, and does so without the due process of law.

2. FOREIGN AID COERCES AMERICANS Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 5/20/06. To conclude our discussion, the primary plank of a libertarian foreign policy program for America must be to call upon the United States to abandon its policy of global interventionism: to withdraw immediately and completely, militarily and politically, from Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, from everywhere. The cry among American libertarians should be for the United States to withdraw now, in every way that involves the U.S. government. The United States should dismantle its bases, withdraw its troops, stop its incessant political meddling, and abolish the CIA. It should also end all foreign aid—which is simply a device to coerce the American taxpayer into subsidizing American exports and favored foreign States, all in the name of "helping the starving peoples of the world." In short, the United States government should withdraw totally to within its own boundaries and maintain a policy of strict political "isolation" or neutrality everywhere.

ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED NATIONAL SERVICE TURNS COERCIVE AND TRIGGERS TYRANNY Bruce Chapman, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, NATIONAL SERVICE: PRO & CON, ed., Williamson Everson, 1990, p. 134. Alexis de Tocqueville saw in our own early history that the genius of voluntary association was Alrierica's superior answer to the leadership energy provided in other societies by aristocracies. But government, he warned, may seek to direct the voluntary sector in the same way it erroneously seeks to control industrial undertakings: Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new task, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules. It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.,

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Link Extensions 3. THE DEMAND UPON THE STATE THAT THE AFFIRMATIVE MAKES IN THEIR PLAN TEXT ENTRENCHES THE COERCIVE FORCE OF THE STATE ON SOCIAL RELATIONS Jayan Nayer, law professor, Warwick, Fall 1999, p. Following this transformation of the material political-economy of the colonized, or “ordered,” colonialism entrenched the “state” as the symbolic “political” institution of “public” social relations. The effect of this “colonization of the mind” was that the “political-economic” form social organization – the state – was universalized as common, if not “natural,” resulting in a homogenization of “political” imagination and language. Thus, diversity was unified, while at the same time, unity was diversified. The particularities and inconveniences of human diversity – culture and tradition – were subordinated to the “civilized” discourse of secular myths (to which the “rule of law” is central), n16 while concurrently, humanity was formally segregated into artificial “states,” enclosures of mythic solidarities and common destinies.

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Link Extensions 4.

A RADICAL FRAMING OF LIBERTARIAN POLITICS IS CRITICAL BY RELENTLESSLY ATTACKING STATIST POLICIES WE CAN USHER IN A CAPITALIST UTOPIA GENDER PARAPHRASED Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 5/20/06. There is another vital tactical reason for cleaving to pure principle. It is true that day-to-day social and political events are the resultants of many pressures, the often unsatisfactory outcome of the push-and-pull of conflicting ideologies and interests. But if only for that reason, it is all the more important for the libertarian to keep upping the ante. The call for a two percent tax reduction may achieve only the slight moderation of a projected tax increase; a call for a drastic tax cut may indeed achieve a substantial reduction. And, over the years, it is precisely the strategic role of the "extremist" to keep pushing the matrix of day-to-day action further and further in his direction. The socialists have been particularly adept at this strategy. If we look at the socialist program advanced sixty, or even thirty years ago, it will be evident that measures considered dangerously socialistic a generation or two ago are now considered an indispensable part of the "mainstream" of the American heritage. In this way, the day-to-day compromises of supposedly "practical" politics get pulled inexorably in the collectivist direction. There is no reason why the libertarian cannot accomplish the same result. In fact, one of the reasons that the conservative opposition to collectivism has been so weak is that conservatism, by its very nature, offers not a consistent political philosophy but only a "practical" defense of the existing status quo, enshrined as embodiments of the American "tradition." Yet, as statism grows and accretes, it becomes, by definition, increasingly entrenched and therefore "traditional"; conservatism can then find no intellectual weapons to accomplish its overthrow. Cleaving to principle means something more than holding high and not contradicting the ultimate libertarian ideal. It also means striving to achieve that ultimate goal as rapidly as is physically possible. In short, the libertarian must never advocate or prefer a gradual, as opposed to an immediate and rapid, approach to his goal. For by doing so, he undercuts the overriding importance of his own goals and principles. And if (the libertarian) he himself values his own goals so lightly, how highly will others value them? In short, to really pursue the goal of liberty, the libertarian must desire it attained by the most effective and speediest means available. It was in this spirit that the classical liberal Leonard E. Read, advocating immediate and total abolition of price and wage controls after World War II, declared in a speech, "If there were a button on this rostrum, the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!" The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty. Of course, he knows, too, that such a magic button does not exist, but his fundamental preference colors and shapes his entire strategic perspective. Such an "abolitionist" perspective does not mean, again, that the libertarian has an unrealistic assessment of how rapidly his goal will, in fact, be achieved. Thus, the libertarian abolitionist of slavery, William Lloyd Garrison, was not being "unrealistic" when in the 1830s he first raised the glorious standard of immediate emancipation of the slaves. His goal was the morally proper one, and his strategic realism came in the fact that he did not expect his goal to be quickly reached. We have seen in chapter 1 that Garrison himself distinguished: "Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend." Otherwise, as Garrison trenchantly warned, "Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice."

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Link Extensions 5. THE STATE ISN'T FIT TO ENFORCE VIRTUE. Murray Rothbard, Professor of Economics, Polytechnic Institute of New York, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 94. Which group in society are to be the guardians of virtue, the ones who define and enforce their vision of what virtue is supposed to be? None other, I would say, than the state apparatus, the social instrument of legalized violence. Now, even if we concede legitimate functions to the policeman, the soldier, the jailer, it is a peculiar vision that would entrust the guardianship of morality to a social group whose historical record for moral behavior is hardly encouraging. Why should the sort of persons who are good at, and will therefore tend to exercise, the arts of shooting, gouging, and stomping, be the same persons we would want to select as our keepers of the moral flame?

TAXATION IS FORCED LABOR Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p. 172. Whether it is done through taxation on wages or on wages over a certain amount, or through seizure of profits, or through there being a big social pot so that it's not clear what's coming from where and what's going where, patterned principles of distributive justice involve appropriating the actions of other persons. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. If people force you to do certain work, or unrewarded work, for a certain period of time, they decide what you are to do and what purposes your work is to serve apart from your decisions. This process whereby they take this decision from you makes them a part owner of you; it gives them a property right in you. Just as having such partial control and power of decision, by right, over an animal or inanimate object would be to have a property right in it.

ACCEPTANCE OF ANY REDISTRIBUTION SNOWBALLS Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p. 27. If some redistribution is legitimate in order to protect everyone, why is redistribution not legitimate for other attractive and desirable purposes as well? What rationale specifically selects protective services as the sole subject of legitimate redistributive activities?

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Answers to: “It’s Voluntary” 1. EVEN “VOLUNTARY” NATIONAL SERVICE COMPELS Eric Gorhman, sociologist, State University of New York, NATIONAL SERVICE: CITIZENSHIP AND POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 32. But the distinction between compulsory and voluntary national service is not always a useful one, because in certain instances one may feel compelled to enroll in the service despite a structure that appears voluntary. Put in other terms, volunteerism cannot occur in a vacuum, but manifests itself in a particular socioeconomic context. For instance, a desperately poor individual may feel that national service is his or her only hope for a steady income. Or an individual who wishes to go to college, but can only afford it if he or she has completed a term of national service, can be said to have his or her choices constrained, and thus has not willed his or her participation in complete freedom. Finally, one may experience enormous social pressure from family or school authorities to enroll in a national service program. In all of these instances, one could not say that these individuals volunteered for service, without stretching the notion of volunteerism beyond an acceptable Emit.

2. THE VOLUNTARINESS OF THE PROGRAM CONCEALS ITS COMPULSORY NATURE Eric Gorhman, sociologist, State University of New York, NATIONAL SERVICE: CITIZENSHIP AND POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 58. Even where federal regulations do not apply, state and local regulations might. For the rest of the program is to be governed by state and local bureaucracies, and any private agency participating in the program must comply with guidelines established at these levels. Samuel Halperin of the William T. Grant Foundation, and a member of Youth Service America, contends that "we must insist on standards for service that are every bit as rigorous as the standards that govern our best schools, business, and factories. And these standards can be ensured only through some sort of regulation. At some level the individual participant, and the agency involved, will be subject to more state power than he, she, or it would be otherwise. The claims that these individuals volunteer or that the constituent agencies are voluntary conceal a compulsory structure to the system.

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Redistribution Morally Wrong 1. REDISTRIBUTION IGNORES JUST ENTITLEMENTS TO PROPERTY Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p. 160. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them. From the point of view of the historical entitlement conception of justice in holdings, those who start afresh to complete "to each according to his " treat objects as if they appeared from nowhere, out of nothing.

2. NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO ANOTHER'S PROPERTY Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p. 238. The major objection to speaking of everyone's having a right to various things such as equality of opportunity, life, and so on, and enforcing this right, is that these rights require a substructure of things and materials and actions; and other people may have rights and entitlements over these. No one has a right to something whose realization requires certain uses of things and activities that other people have rights and entitlements over. Other people's rights and entitlements to particular things (that pencil, their body, and so on) and how they choose to exercise these rights and entitlements fix the external environment of any given individual and the means that will be available to him. If his goal requires the use of means which others have rights over, he must enlist their voluntary cooperation.

3. EFFECTS ON OTHERS DON'T CREATE ENTITLEMENTS TO ONE PERSON'S PROPERTY Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY', STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p. 269-70. Suppose you own a station wagon or a bus and lend it to a group of people for a year while you are out of the country. During this year these people become quite dependent on your vehicle, integrating it into their lives. When at the end of the year you return, as you said you would, and ask for you bus back, these people say that your decision once more to use the bus yourself importantly affects their lives, and so they have a right to a say in determining what is to become of the bus. Surely this claim is without merit. The bus is yours; using it for a year improved their position which is why they molded their conduct around it and came to depend upon it.

4. REDISTRIBUTION MAKES COMPASSION INVOLUNTARY Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p.167. We should note in passing the ambivalent position of radicals toward the family. Its loving relationships are seen as a model to be emulated and extended across the whole society, at the same time that it is denounced as a suffocating institution to be broken and condemned as a focus of parochial concerns that interfere with achieving radical goals. Need we say that it is not appropriate to enforce across the wider society the relationships of love and care appropriate within a family, relationships which are voluntarily undertaken.

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Redistribution Morally Wrong 5. REDISTRIBUTION IMPLIES CONSTANT INTERFERENCE IN PEOPLE'S LIVES Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, 1974, p.163. The general point illustrated by the Wilt Chamberlain example and the example of the entrepreneur in a socialist society is that no end-state principle or distributional patterned principle of justice: can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people's lives. Any favored pattern would be transformed into one unfavored by the principle, by people choosing to act in various ways; for example, by people exchanging goods and services with other people, or giving things to other people, things the transferrers are entitled to under the favored distributional pattern. To maintain a pattern one must either continually (or periodically) interfere to stop people from transferring resources as they wish to, or continually interfere to take from some persons resources that others for some reason chose to transfer to them.

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Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion” 1. NO MATTER WHAT ANOTHER STATE IS DOING, YOU ARE NEVER JUSTIFIED IN PUNISHING INNOCENTS TO GET THEM TO COMPLY – IF THIS TYPE OF INTER-STATE WARFARE IS LEGITIMATED, SO IS NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION. Murray Rothbard, Academic Vice President of the Ludwig Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY, 1982, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/fifteen.asp DOA 5/20/06. EACH STATE HAS AN assumed monopoly of force over a given territorial area, the areas varying in size in accordance with different historical conditions. Foreign policy, or foreign relations, may be defined as the relationship between any particular State, A, and other States, B, C, D, and the inhabitants living under those States. In the ideal moral world, no States would exist, and hence, of course, no foreign policy could exist. Given the existence of States, however, are there, any moral principles that libertarianism can direct as criteria for foreign policy? The answer is broadly the same as in the libertarian moral criteria directed toward the “domestic policy” of States, namely to reduce the degree of coercion exercised by States over individual persons as much as possible. Before considering inter-State actions, let us return for a moment to the pure libertarian stateless world where individuals and their hired private protection agencies strictly confine their use of violence to the defense of person and property against violence. Suppose that, in this world, Jones finds that he or his property is being aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have seen, for Jones to repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But, now we must ask: is it within the right of Jones to commit aggressive violence against innocent third parties in the course of his legitimate defense against Smith? Clearly the answer must be “No.” For the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute; it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong, and criminal, to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is starving, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We (or, rather, the victim or his heirs) may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand C’s “higher” culpability in this whole procedure, but we still label this aggression by A as a criminal act which B has every right to repel by violence. To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more) a criminal aggressor as Smith is. The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e., if “war” breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their “just war”: to steal others’ property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact if Smith’s crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill some innocent people; and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, “give me liberty or give me death.” The absurdity of this “defense” should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: “Give me liberty or give them death”—surely a far less noble battle cry. War, then, even a just defensive war, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals themselves. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion. It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals,

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modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even “conventional” aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification. This is why the old cliche no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political good that can be pursued in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny so mass murder— indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself—is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now all too possible.

2. GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION INTO THE MARKET EVEN TO BLOCK THE SALE OF THE PRODUCTS OF COERCION IS UNJUSTIFIED. WE SHOULD BOYCOTT THESE GOODS RATHER THEN RELY ON INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE. Samuel Bostaph, Head of the Economics Department, University of Dallas, WHO HAS THE RIGHT, 1997, p. http://www.fff.org/freedom/1297e.asp. What this means to Americans in practical terms is that the federal government's coercive power would be used to prevent American citizens from freely engaging in trading activity with Chinese people, institutions, and government agents. Any American violating the specifics of the sanctions would be subject to criminal prosecution. Thus would the ends of justice in the pursuit of human rights supposedly be served. But would that indeed be justice? By what right does the federal government of the United States sanction its own citizens for international trades it deems inappropriate? And if our government fails to do that — or lacks the power to punish the offending government — is there anything that an individual American can do about the involuntary use of human beings, innocent of any real crime, in the production process of another country? The first question is relatively easy to answer. The Congress of the United States has no legitimate right to forbid or obstruct the international trading activities of its citizens. …. all [people] are held to be created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights — among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it is a commonplace that property rights must be protected if the other rights are to have substance. Property rights have no substance if one cannot freely use or alienate one's property, given that such use directly violates no one else's rights. Further, the purpose of all nondespotic forms of government is held to be to protect those political rights, using powers granted by those governed "to effect their safety and happiness." Rather than using its powers for this purpose, however, our government now uses the same techniques as those governments it wishes to sanction — imprisonment, confiscation, and fines. American traders who fail to obey U.S. trade sanctions are robbed of their wealth or consigned to prison or both — much as is done in China to people convicted of violating Chinese economic laws (as differentiated from laws prohibiting violence against person or property). It also is argued that current federal government trade policies are legitimate exercises of its sovereignty. There is no truth to this claim. The United States government is not sovereign; the people are — and the federal government legitimately possesses only enumerated powers. As argued above, obstructing trade is not among them. In sum, there is no basis in the Constitution of the United States or in the political philosophy that underlies the Constitution to impose trade sanctions on the American people. It

does not matter how egregious the human rights abuses are in the countries targeted by those sanctions. Human rights in the United States cannot legitimately be violated in response to human rights violations in other countries. Now to the second question: what does a civilized person do in response to the human rights situation in China — or anywhere for that matter? The answer is that he does what he would

. If I believe that Christmas lights made in China have been involuntarily made by people imprisoned (as was Harry Wu) for exercising their rights of free speech or press or religion or peaceful use of property or peaceful association or any other human right stemming from their basic rights to life and liberty, I can refuse to buy it. And I can try to persuade others to boycott it. I can join voluntary associations to boycott and urge others to do so as well. ,,,,,, the right of individuals to use economic sanctions is part of their freedom. A nondespotic, legitimate government cannot deny or supplant that right with measures that contradict liberty. Economic sanctions are not the proper province of the government of the United States. For that matter, neither is the power to regulate trade in any respect. These are matters of individual freedom and conscience. So, this Christmas, let's boycott Chinese goods made with slave labor. But let's leave the U.S. government out of it. Let's fight tyranny with freedom. do if offered a product by people he abhors, or one he suspects was obtained immorally, or just one he doesn't want. He responds to the offer with a refusal

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Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion” 3. UTILITARIANISM OF RIGHTS FAILS, HUMAN NATURE AND INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE MEANS WE SHOULD ALWAYS ERR ON THE SIDE OF HUMAN DIGNITY Loren Lomasky, philosophy professor, University of Minnesota, PERSONS, RIGHTS, AND THE MORAL COMMUNITY, 1987, p. 18. It might prove to be the case that by violating the rights of one person, five equally grave rights violations will be averted. If so, then a “utilitarianism of rights” will endorse the one rights-violation act while a side constraint account will reject it. But how can this rejection be presented as anything other than a single-minded fanaticism that

devours its indebted beneficiary in the case of preserving it? “You maintain that the protection of rights is of great, even transcendent value. Very well then more upholding of rights is better then less. If one violation is necessary to prevent many others your own principles ought to lead you to prefer the former. Yet you obstinately resist.” How is this criticism to be countered? The problem that has been identified is that rights may prove to be inconvient. They set up barriers which neither private individuals nor governmental bodies may breach at their pleasure. To be sure, that may often be advantageous in a morally unproblematic way. Human beings are notoriously susceptible to temptations to pursue their narrow selfinterest at the expense of the well-being others. Were sympathy and beneficences the strongest and most universally shared emotions, it might be feasible to do without barriers of any kind –moral rules, rights, legally enforceable obligations—and rely instead on the promptings of individuals’ hearts to secure a decently livable life for all. Unfortunately, the animal we are is much more recognizable in the Hobbesian caricatures than in this idyllic alternative. So incursions must be prevented if we are to attain a tolerably decent measure of sociability. By recognizing each individual as a bearer of rights all are afforded some protection against the predations that would otherwise ensue. Even when arguments for overriding rights are couched in the most highminded terms, faced with referenced to the general welfare or the need for mental sacrifice in a just cause one may suspect that the rhetoric is meant to yield the most for power or personal attainment History is a textbook for cynics. Having read from it, we may be prompted to insist on undeviating respect for rights, no matter how beckoning are inducements to the contrary, because we have no confidence in people’s ability to discriminate accurately and dispassionately between incursions that will maximize public good and those that will debase it. If we are to err either on the side of too much flexibility or excess dignity, better—far better the later.

Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion” 4. THE AFF HAS TO WIN ABSOLUTE SOLVENCY, THE LINK TO COERCION IS 100% EVEN IF THEY WIN THEIR IMPACT IS WORSE, THEY HAVE TO SOLVE IT COMPLETELY OR THE RISK OF OUR IMPACT IS LARGER. GOVERNMENT REGULATION FAILS SO OUR POSITION OUTWEIGHS Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 146 The general consensus among scholars is that, by the standard economic measure of cost benefit, the government’s regulatory policies and actions have failed. In a number of studies it has also been shown that the avowed goals of regulation have not, in fact, been achieved by regulation. Comparative analyses show, on the other hand, that in the absence of regulation those same goals are being attained. Despite the wide acceptance of the methods employed in these studies, the results have not produced the deregulation that they would appear to warrant. In view of the lack of significant progress in that direction, some have advanced theories aiming to explain why deregulation is not proceeding. Henry G. Manne, for example, originally proposed that bureaucrats were acting in pursuit of their self-interest, which resulted, in part, in their refusal to institute deregulation measures. Having revised his theory in some measure, Manne later proposed that, in addition to the bureaucrats, the managers of regulated firms were acting in

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pursuit of their self-interests, promoted regulatory activities in the face of evidence showing the failure of these in terms of costs and benefits of their avowed purpose. 5. NOT TREATING RIGHTS AS ABSOLUTE CREATES A HOBBESIAN WAR OF SPECIAL INTERESTS THAT DESTROYS ALL RIGHTS Tibor Machan, Philosophy Professor, Auburn,INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR RIGHTS, 1989, pp. 119-21. By not treating basic human rights as basic, all Gewirth and others do is invite some other set

of principles we will have to turn to when we need to make principled decisions about what people are free or not free to do. Or, more likely, they leave the matter to the discretion of those who sit as judges in the courts. Indeed, the current legal climate, in which any strong political interest group can secure the protection of some alleged right to well-being — to be provided with medical care, child-care facilities, a museum, the preservation of an historical building, a subsidy, or the imposition of a tariff upon a foreign import business — suggests what can be expected of a welfare state, a system that embraces both the limited right to liberty and the limited right to welfare. The resulting situation is a kind of Hobbesian war of special interests against all other special interests, each demanding the protection of its alleged liberty or welfare rights. Gewirth, like Gregory Viastos before him, seems to forget that rights are basic principles of political life and that making them inherently unstable deprives them of their essential character. To make rights nonabsolute within the legal context is to open a Pandora’s box of bureaucratic arbitrariness producing the very situation that the moral-political principles we know as human rights were explicitly designed to render impermissible. Instead of treating human rights as contextually deontological, as principles rather than piecemeal rules of thumb, Gewirth and Dworkin are inviting the elitism that utilitarianism requires — that is, certain leaders whose value-judgments must be imposed on the rest whenever they find it intuitively certain or in some other fashion warranted to override basic human, individual rights. There is a snowballing effect arising from this kind of utilitarian thinking. Such thinking ought to be avoided and alternatives to solving the problems for which the violations of rights seemed to be justified should be sought.

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Answers to: “We Prevent Coercion” 6. FORCING MINDSETS CAN’T SOLVE BECAUSE PEOPLE CIRCUMVENT THE LAW. ONLY CHANGING MOTIVES WITH PERSUASION CAN CREATE CHANGE. Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 131-2. If people are selfish and greedy, as this defense contends, then their selfishness and greed will merely show up at a different place in a regulated market—namely, in the offices of politicians and special interest groups. If persons are selfish and greedy as a general, persistent trait (instead of merely now and then, off and on, depending on goodwill that is just as probable as it opposite), it does not appear that this could be eradicated by passing regulatory statues and by creating government agencies. Indeed, the law and economic and public choice schools of economic analysis make exactly this point: Starting with their assumption that all human beings are essentially utility maximizers, they show that this implies that in the public sector people carry on just as the would in the private sector—aiming to fulfill their own desires or vested interest. And that certainly undermines the view that such persons would guard the marketplace instead of seek whatever economic advantage they could get by their role as such guardians.

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Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” 1. EXPANDING THE ROLE OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECTIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS JUSTIFIES ANY COERCION, INCLUDING WAR. Frank van Dun, Senior Lecturer of Philosophy of Law at the University of Maastricht, JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES, Fall 2001, p. http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_4/15_4_1.pdf. Even in the richest states, budgetary limitations often lead to sharp confrontations between pressure groups and vested interests in various social, economic, and cultural domains. Using the term “human rights” to describe one’s interests does not change this fact of real-world limits. Rather, it creates the risk of inflating political rhetoric and passion, now that the flag of human rights flies over almost the whole arena of government policy. Each policy option can be interpreted at one and the same time as both a measure to further some human right and as an indication of the neglect or even violation of any number of other human rights. Therefore, there is at all times unlimited room for weighing various “rights” and for setting and revising priorities. The political and administrative bodies to which this weighing of rights has been entrusted or that have succeeded in monopolising it have ample opportunities for expanding their power and influence. Nothing remains of the old idea that a right is worthy of respect in all circumstances except, perhaps, the most extreme emergency. The human rights of the UD are not and cannot be absolute, even in the most normal of circumstances—unless anything short of Utopia should count as an emergency. By their very nature, they are susceptible to continuous weighing, negotiation, and qualification. They are a politician’s delight, for every human right translates into “a right to more government intervention on its behalf.” This is no less true for the ghosts of natural rights that linger in the first half of the UD than for the economic, social, and cultural “rights” in the rest of it. Of course, we should not confuse the ghost and the real thing. For example , Article 2 of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen clearly states what a person’s natural rights are: liberty, property, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and resistance to oppression. In the UD, on the other hand, a person is not informed that his life, liberty, security of person, and property are his fundamental rights. He is told only that he has the right to life, liberty, and security of person (Art. 3) and property (Art. 17). He should not expect more. For it is obviously inconsistent to claim that everyone is entitled to the full realisation of the economic, social, and cultural “rights” and at the same time to claim that any person’s fundamental rights are his life, liberty, and property. The administration of the former requires the concentration of massive coercive powers of taxation and regulation in the hands of the state, and so must presuppose that a person’s life, liberty, and property are not his rights. However, this inconsistency evaporates once we realise that the UD’s “rights to life, liberty, property” do not specify to whose life, liberty, or property a person has a right. It rules out the possibility that he has an exclusive right to his own life, liberty, or property, but it does not rule out that some or all others have an equal, or perhaps more pressing, claim on those things in order to enable them, say, to enjoy the arts or a paid holiday. Thus, a person’s life, liberty, and property are thrown upon the enormous heap of desirable scarce resources to which all people are said to have a right. As such, they, too, end up in the scales with which political authorities, administrators, and experts are supposed to weigh the ingredients for their favoured policy-mix. Here we catch our first glimpse of the shadow of Hobbes behind the contemporary notion of human rights: the person who believes he has “a right to everything” is likely to find out that there is no thing that is his right. A Hobbesian Predicament The following thought experiment will bring out the Hobbesian character of the UD’s conception of human rights. Imagine two people, the only survivors of a shipwreck, who find refuge on a small deserted island. They have with them nothing but their human rights, in particular their “right to work” and all that it entails according to Articles 23, 24, and 25 of the UD. One can imagine what will happen if they sit there insisting on their “right” of being employed by the other at a just and favourable wage, or to receive an unemployment compensation high enough to allow them an existence worthy of their dignity. One can also imagine what will happen if, instead of just sitting there, they attempt to enforce their human rights against one another: their own version of Hobbes’s war of all against all. Finally, one can easily imagine what would happen if one of them won that war: Hobbes’s solution for the incompatibility of their “rights” would emerge. The winner could then arrange for himself a nice unemployment compensation (e.g., a tax on an-other’s labour) to match his new-found dignity as a ruler, and keep the other man quiet by leaving him as much as is consistent with “the organisation and the resources of their state.” Indeed, starvation, universal war, and the Leviathan State are the only possible outcomes under a regime of human rights—and only the latter outcome is compatible with survival. Imagining a two-person situation makes this conclusion clear, but its validity does not depend on the numbers. Large numbers only serve to obscure the logic of the situation. the burden of taxation and regulation just below the threshold of revolt.

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Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” WE MAY HAVE OTHER MORAL OBLIGATIONS BUT THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD ONLY ENFORCE PROPERTY RIGHTS ANY OTHER SYSTEM REPEATS THE WORST ATROCITIES IN HISTORY. Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 89-90 That last line of the last chapter no doubt scandalizes many readers, as does the conception of politics it evinces. “Surely there is more to morality than property rights, and more to social life than exchanging property!” they might be tempted to respond; “And surely there is more to community than the collective safeguarding of that property! What a cold and heartless — indeed, positively counter- utopian —conception of human life is embodied by such a view!” They would, of course, be absolutely right to think this. Where they go wrong is in assuming that Nozick would think, or is required by his position to think, any differently in assuming that Nozick’s political philosophy is intended to be a complete social philosophy. They go wrong also in assimilating “morality” to justice, “social life” to politics, and “community” to government. For justice is not the whole of morality; not all of social life is politics; and genuine human community definitely is not the same thing as government action. Justice the securing of which is the chief end of political action — is, however important, but one virtue among others. Sometimes what is called “justice” is not justice at all, but a mask for something decidedly unvirtuous, such as envy. One suspects that the demand for equality is a case in point; certainly one suspects this when one considers that equality as an ideal is rarely argued for by it proponents, and is almost never argued for very well (Nozick 1974. chapter 8). There are, in any case, virtues that are as important as justice, and some that are more important. Temperance, prudence. fortitude, faith, hope, and love are cases in point, and only a fool could believe that the practice of these virtues will be guaranteed if only we hit upon the right government program. Government itself, however high-flown the rhetoric often spouted in its defense, is, it must always be remembered, nothing more than brute force, the getting of people to do things or to refrain from doing things by the threat of violence. Sometimes, as when the defense of individual rights is involved, such force is necessary; it remains force nonetheless. And when it involves the imposition of redistributive taxation or paternalistic regulation, it involves nothing more than some people forcing other people — innocent people who have violated no one else’s rights — to do things against their will, to submit to the will of those doing the forcing. Whether or not one thinks such arm-twisting is morally justified, it is dishonest, indeed perverse, to talk smugly as if it is the quintessence of “community.” Nor can politics — which in a nonlibertarian society amounts to little more than the struggle to be the ones who get to force the others, even if “for their own good” — plausibly be regarded as a paradigmatically social activity, at least not if “social” is meant to connote an ideal of high-minded cooperation. A conception of human life that sees all questions of morality, and indeed everything of value, as necessarily entailing a political program backed by the police power of the state and the threat of litigation, is one that can only be described, charitably, as deficient; less charitably, as warped. We need, in Nozick’s view, to learn “to see through the political realm” (1974, x). We need to get beyond the tendency — a very modern tendency that would have surprised earlier generations — reflexively to think of all problems as having a political solution, of all progress as dependent on government action. We need in particular to stop thinking in utopian terms—or rather, to stop thinking of utopia in political terms. The utopias of the past have usually been implemented in a political fashion, and they have universally failed, often catastrophically — think the French Revolution, Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago. They have also involved the imposition of one group’s vision of utopia on everyone (indeed, this is part of the reason why they have failed). If utopian thinking is to be realistic and to have a future, it must avoid these errors.

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Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)”

NEGATIVE RIGHTS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO PRESERVE THE INVOLIABILITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND PREVENT CONFLICTS BETWEEN RIGHTS Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 37-8 This brings us to a second feature of Nozick’s conception of rights, namely that they are essentially negative. A right to X just is a right not to be hindered in using something you own, X, as you want to use it. It is not a right to have X if you don’t already own it and no one wants to give or sell it to you. Your right to your TV set is just your right not to have it damaged or taken from you against your will; it is not a right that someone should buy you a TV set. Your right to life is just the right not to be killed; it is not a right that others should provide you with what you need to live. You own your life, so no one has the right to take it from you. But by the same token, others own their lives, bodies, labor, and the things they produce with their labor, and thus no one has a right to take those things from them. In particular, you do not have the right forcibly to take, or have someone else take, other people’s resources simply because you want or need them, even if you need them to live (just as you have no right to take their body parts from them even if you needed those to live). A right to what you need in order to live would be a positive right a right to something that someone else must provide you with, as opposed to a (negative) right that someone merely refrain from doing something to you. So-called rights to welfare, health care, education, and the like would be positive rights. But there simply are and can be no such fundamental positive rights on a libertarian view. For no one has a basic right against other people that they must provide things for him; to assume otherwise is to assume, in effect, that a person at least partially owns other people’s property, including their labor, if I claim a right to education, for example, I am in effect claiming that other people must provide me with an education — it won’t just fall out of the sky, after all — which means I’m claiming a right to a part of their labor, i.e. whatever labor must go into paying the taxes that fund my state-run school. But no one has a right to anyone else’s labor — people own their own labor, and cannot morally be forced to give up some of it for others. If you want voluntarily to help me out in paying my tuition. and sign a contract saying you’ll do so, that’s one thing — in that case, I do have the right to your money, because you’ve agreed to provide it but if you don ‘t agree, I have no such right, and I and the government are stealing from you if we take your money anyway. Now many rights that people claim to have are positive rights of this sort. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, is filled with claims not only to negative rights, but also to many positive rights — rights to education, health care, even “periodic holidays with pay”! But all such claims are bogus, and the alleged “rights” pure fictions conjured out of thin air. For they conflict with the fundamental rights of self-ownership, and make people slaves to the realization of others’ desires and needs. Being essentially negative, a person’s rights function, in Nozick’s terminology, as moral side-constraints on the actions of others (1974, 28-35). Respecting others’ rights, that is, isn’t to be understood merely as one goal among others that we might seek to maximize, leaving open the possibility that violating rights in some circumstances for the sake of achieving some other good is an acceptable trade-off. Rather, one’s rights constitute a set of absolute restrictions within which all other people must behave with respect to him, and override all considerations of utility or welfare. They lay down the ground rules for our behavior towards others — telling us that, in anything we do, there are certain things we must not do. “Side constraints upon action reflect the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means,” Nozick says; “they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable” (1974, 30-31). Being inviolable, their rights are also inviolable — those rights cannot be overridden for any reason. Nor, given that rights are negative, is there any danger that they might conflict, which would put their inviolability in doubt. If your having a right to X just means that I cannot interfere with your use of X, and my right to Y just means that you cannot interfere with my use of Y, then there is no conflict between our rights: All we’re required to do is to leave each other alone. But if I also claim a positive right to Z, and Z requires the use of X, then our rights inevitably will conflict, for the only way I can get Z is if you give me X. Positive rights will generally, and obviously, lead to such conflicts — surely another reason to be suspicious of them. Negative rights, however, will not. Such rights are perfectly compatible with one another, and thus with the notion that rights are inviolable.

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Answers to: “We Uphold Positive Rights (Right to food/water/etc)” POSITIVE RIGHTS ENSLAVE OTHERS Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p. 96. Jobs, food, clothing, recreation (!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values-goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide: them? If some men are enticed by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, i;s not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as "the right to enslave. "

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The K Turns the Case 1. COERCION AND INDUCEMENTS UNDERMINE TRUE SERVICE Bruce Chapman, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, SERVICE: PRO & CON, ed., Williamson Everson, 1990, p. 134. True service, then, has a spiritual basis, even for some outside the Judeo-Christian tradition per se. Fulfillment of an obligation to government, in contrast, has a contractual basis unless it is founded on an outright commitment to a coercive utopianism. Either way, it is not true service. Nor can enrollment in a government-funded self-improvement project or acceptance of a government job be called true service. Indeed, when coercion or inducements are provided, as in the various national service schemes, the spirit of service is to that degree corrupted. In practice the service in a federal program of national service would be contaminated by governmental determination of goals, bureaucratization of procedures, and, inevitably, government insistence on further regulating the independent sector with which it contracted. National service would tend to demoralize those citizens who volunteer without expectation of financial reward and stigmatize the honest labor of people whose fields were invaded by stipened and vouchered volunteers. Government intervention is always a potential threat to the voluntary sector. When totalitarians have come to power in other Western countries, they have sought to absorb this sector, conferring official sponsor ship on certain organizations and scorning others, thereby inculating in the citizenry the government's valuation even on use of free time. Although in the United States totalitarianism is not a current danger to our liberal democracy, coercive utopianism is always a legitimate concern.

2. COERCION IS NOT JUSTIFIED TO EVEN DECREASE THE NET VIOLATION OF RIGHTS: THIS IS A FRAMING QUESTION THAT PRECEDES ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS Roger Pilon, Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs, Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies, TWO KINDS OF RIGHTS, December 6, 2001, p. http://www.cato.org/current/terrorism/pubs/pilon011206.html DOA 4/20/06. As the Declaration of Independence says, the main business of government is to secure rights, but legitimate government can't do it by any means. It can't violate rights in the name of securing them. That frames the issue. Between those boundaries—and given a world of uncertainty—the devil is in the details. Governments too restrained leave rights exposed. By contrast, societies that trade liberty for security, as Ben Franklin noted, end often with neither. Thus, the government's war against terrorism implicates two kinds of rights—the rights governments are instituted to secure, and those they must respect in the process. At this writing, it appears that the terrorist attacks of September 11 resulted from a massive government failure to protect rights of the first kind. Predictably, friends of government are now saying that an undue regard for rights of the second kind led to that failure. That may be true, but it may also be special pleading. Were agencies prohibited from talking to each other in the name of privacy? Or did they simply fail to coordinate efforts? Those are the kinds of questions that need answering. At this juncture, therefore, it 's difficult to say which civil liberties are most at risk. Certainly, as September 11 demonstrated, the liberties we created government to secure are at risk. But can we better secure them and remain free? Yes, if we act smartly. Above all, whether with surveillance or searches or due process, judicial oversight must be preserved—for citizens and non-citizens. It's the final safeguard for liberty.

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Value to Life Impacts 1. GOVERNMENT COERCION DESTROYS THE VALUE TO LIFE AND CANNOT BE MORALLY JUSTIFIED Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 68-9. All governmental action that does not serve to repel or retaliate against coercion is antithetical to any respect for human dignity. While it is true that some people should give to others to assist them in reaching their goals, forcing individuals to do so plainly robs them of their dignity. There is nothing morally worthwhile in forced giving. Generally, for a society to respect human dignity, the special moral relations between people should be left undisturbed. Government should confine itself to making sure that this voluntarism is not abridged, no matter how tempting it might be to use its coercive powers to attain some worthy goal. 2. A LIFE OF GOVERNMENT COERCION IS NOT WORTH LIVING BECAUSE IT IS NOT CONTROLLED BY THE PERSON WHO IS LIVING IT, DEATH IS PREFERABLE. Joseph Raz, philosopher, THE MORALITY OF FREEDOM, 1986, p. 307 One way to test the thesis of the primacy of action reasons is to think of a person who is entirely passive and is continuously led, cleaned, and pumped full with hash, so that he is perpetually content, and wants nothing but to stay in the same condition. It’s a familiar imaginary horror. How do we rank the success of such a life? It

is not the worst life one can have. It is simply not a life at all. It lacks activity, it lacks goals. To the extent that one is tempted to judge it more harshly than that and to regard it as a ‘negative life’ this is because of the wasted potentiality. It is a life which could have been and was not. We can isolate this feature by imagining that the human being concerned is mentally and physically effected in a way which rules out the possibility of a life with any kind of meaningful pursuit in it. Now it is just not really a life at all. This does not preclude one from saying that it is better than human life. It is simply sufficiently unlike human life in the respects that matter that we regard it as only a degenerate case of human life. But clearly not being alive can be better than that life.

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Value to Life Impacts 1. LIBERTARIANISM BEST RESPECTS THE NATURE OF HUMANS AS FREE, RATIONAL INDIVIDUALS Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 48. Once an individual chooses to live, that individual has committed himself to living well or properly, namely in accordance with his nature; libertarianism is the political theory which best takes into account man's nature, namely, his essence as a free, rational living being whose conduct can only be made morally worthwhile by the individual himself by sustaining his commitment. This kind of life, with all of the diversity and universality it entails - based on the broad human and highly specialized individual and other characteristics every individual possesses - is what should be chosen by each individual.

2. LIBERTY IS NEEDED FOR FULFILL OUR HUMANITY Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 47. When life emerges in reality, objective values emerge too. The living have a lot to lose by dying. And in the case of human life, value considerations take on a moral component because individual human beings are responsible to identity the values that will sustain and improve their lives - that is, because of the phenomenon of free will. Since we are responsible - like it or not - for living well or badly, we must eschew any substitute for this responsibility lest we shed our very humanity in the process. Thus political liberty. The philosophy that underlies the robust theory of libertarian politics can be seen, thus, to secure a natural as distinct from a supernatural - place for objective personal, social, and political norms.

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Coercion is Immoral 1. OUR ETHIC CAPTURES ALL OF YOUR OFFENSE BECAUSE WITHIN A MINIMAL STATE INDIVIDUALS ARE FREE TO SET UP WHATEVER SYSTEM THEY PLEASE WHEREAS UNDER A COERCIVE GOVERNMENT LIBERTARIANISM IS DENIED Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 37-8. . Some individuals within the context of a minimal state may want to do this, of course, and opt to participate, say, in a community that seeks to emulate the freewheeling entrepreneurs of Gait’s Gulch in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged But others may prefer to set up a socialist society or a hippie commune, while yet others opt instead for a morally austere Puritan commonwealth or Buddhist sangha or Muslim umma. In a sense, then, libertarianism

doesn’t even require that people accept the minimal state as the optimal political system! For people are free to set up, within its boundaries, quasi-states of whatever size and degree of intervention in people’s lives they wish, provided that people are allowed voluntarily either to submit themselves, or refuse to submit, to such more-than- minimal quasistates. All of these societies will be possible within the larger, encompassing framework of the libertarian minimal state. The beauty of the minimal state is that it doesn’t require these differences to be settled. Every individual and group is free to set up whatever arrangements it likes, so long as they do not force everyone else to go along. And this includes non-libertarians. It is usually thought that libertarianism itself requires that everyone live according to a laissez faire capitalist ethos, but that isn’t so. Some individuals within the context of a minimal state may want to do this, of course, and opt to participate, say, in a community that seeks to emulate the freewheeling entrepreneurs of Gait’s Gulch in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged But others may prefer to set up a socialist society or a hippie commune, while yet others opt instead for a morally austere Puritan commonwealth or Buddhist sangha or Muslim umma. In a sense, then, libertarianism doesn’t even require that people accept the minimal state as the optimal political system! For people are free to set up, within its boundaries, quasi-states of whatever size and degree of intervention in people’s lives they wish, provided that people are allowed voluntarily either to submit themselves, or refuse to submit, to such more-than- minimal quasi-states. All of these societies will be possible within the larger, encompassing framework of the libertarian minimal state. The teachings of the Church, then they can set up their community too, and no one can stop them. Each community can preach to the members of the other if the others are willing to listen, and try to convince them to defect; but they cannot coerce members of the other group to give up their preferred ways, nor can they force members of the other group to support the propagation of their own views. B can’t force members of A to go to Sunday school or to fund the distribution of Bibles; A can’t force the members of B to send their employees to multicultural sensitivity training or to fund the distribution of condoms. True tolerance is a two-way street it requires those who claim to be “tolerant” and “open-minded” not to force others to be; it leaves open the possibility that what some people consider tolerance and open- mindedness, other people have a right to regard as a collapse of ethical and intellectual standards. Some critics of Nozick acknowledge the attractiveness of this proposal, but suggest that it isn’t as fair to all points of view as it sounds: For wouldn’t members of a socialist society constantly be tempted to flee to a neighboring capitalist society, with its greater individual wealth? Wouldn’t people who decide to give up such a life (and thus sell their communally held land) find it difficult to come back to it (due to a rise in land prices) should they change their minds yet again? (Wolff 1991, 135). But surely this sort of objection is rather pathetic — a complaint to the effect that “If we let everyone choose what sort of utopia they’d like to live in, they might not choose the way I’d like them to!” But so what? (Presumably purveyors of Nazi and Communist “utopias” would find it difficult to attract many Jews or “bloodsucking capitalists” to enter into their villages and voluntarily agree to be liquidated. Should we feel sorry for them on that account?) Why should we expect that every utopian experiment will be able to get off the ground? No political philosophy could guarantee that. But libertarianism at least allows everyone to try to attract people to participate in their utopian

experiments. It allows even the socialist and liberal egalitarian to make a go of their proposals. By contrast, the socialist or liberal would forbid laissez faire capitalists even the chance to do this.

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Coercion is Immoral 2. ONLY THE THESIS OF SELF-OWNERSHIP CAN JUSTIFY THE CLAIM THE SLAVERY IS IMMORAL Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 32-3 In addition to this Kantian principle, however, Nozick appeals to another idea which has a long history in libertarian thought and which many commentators (e.g. Cohen 1995, 67; Wolff 1991, 7-8) take to be the more fundamental element of Nozick’s system. This is the thesis of self-ownership, the notion

that each individual human being has complete and absolute ownership of (themselves) himself -- of his body, talents, abilities, and labor (Nozick 1974, 171-172). Or as John Locke, an early proponent of the thesis, put it: “Every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his” (1963). You are, that is to say, your own property; you own yourself. Probably for most people, this principle will seem just intuitively correct. But for anyone who doubts it, the main argument given in its defense is that unless we assume the truth of the thesis of self ownership, we have no

way of explaining the immorality of many practices we all consider clearly immoral. Take slavery, for example. It is almost universally acknowledged nowadays that slavery is a very great evil. But why is it, exactly? It cannot merely be for the reason that slaves are often treated badly. For slaves are sometimes treated very well by their masters, even forming bonds of affection with them; yet surely, it is still seriously wrong for even a “kindhearted” master to keep a slave. The only way to explain why this is so is that in making someone a slave, a slave owner simply violates the slave’s property rights in himself: No one else can properly own you, because you already own yourself, and a slave owner is in effect stealing from you.

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Coercion is Immoral 3. COERCION IS IMMORAL BECAUSE IT DENIES INDIVIDUALS THE CAPACITY TO DEVELOP AS MORAL AGENTS. Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 37-8 More hopeful is the strategy, pursued by a large number of libertarian philosophers, of appealing to a broadly Aristotelian account of morality (Mack 1981; Machan 1989; Rasmussen and Den Uyl 1991; Smith 1995). On

Aristotle’s view, the fundamental moral question is not “What is the right thing to do?” but rather “What traits of character should I develop?” Only when one has determined what traits these are -that is, what habitual patterns of action count as virtues can one go on to answer the subordinate question of how one ought to act in a particular case (the answer being that one should act the way someone possessing the virtue relevant to that situation would act). What count as the virtues, in turn, are just those qualities most

conducive to enabling human beings to fulfill the potentials which distinguish them as the unique sorts of beings they are — those qualities, that is, which best allow human beings to flourish given their distinctive human nature. Given that human beings are by nature rational animals, we can flourish only if we practice those virtues governing practical and theoretical reason. It follows that we have reason to acquire intellectual virtues like truthfulness and practical virtues such as temperance and courage, and to avoid such corresponding vices as licentiousness and cowardice. Given that human beings are also by nature social animals, we can only flourish if we practice also those virtues governing interaction with other human beings, so that we have reason to acquire such social virtues as honesty and loyalty. Though the moral life will involve decision-making about

what to do in a particular concrete situation, then, it involves more basically the gradual development of a good character by the taking on of the virtues and the weeding out of vices — it essentially involves, that is, a process of self-perfection. Only a person who voluntarily decides to do so can carry out this process, however virtue must be freely chosen if it is truly to count as virtue. Moreover, the specific requirements of virtuous behavior depend to a considerable extent on the unique circumstances of the situation and the individual person involved, circumstances knowable only to that person himself in the concrete contexts of moral decision- making. The moral

life, then, is only fully possible under conditions wherein the individual is capable of self-direction (in Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s terms), the absence of coercion and interference from outside forces. Allowing others such self-direction is necessary too if the individual is to allow those others also to develop the virtues; and in general, respecting others’ autonomy is essential if one is successfully to cooperate with them as fellow citizens, and thus fulfill one’s own nature as a social being. Given the centrality of self-direction to

self- perfection, then, respect for the rights of self-ownership turns out to be required for the successful pursuit of the moral life.

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Coercion is Immoral HUMAN NATURE MAKES LIBERTARIANISM THE ONLY MORAL SYSTEM THE FACT THAT HUMANS ARE RATIONAL MAKES THEM DEPENDENT ON SELF-OWNERSHIP. Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 50. Other libertarian theorists take other aspects of the moral life and of human nature, understood in more or less Aristotelian terms, to call forth a distinctly libertarian account of rights. Ayn Rand, for instance. argued that the reality of natural rights, and in particular the possibility of forming rights to the resources one needs in order to live, is a precondition for the very survival of man as a rational animal (1964). (Nozick, incidentally, rejected this specifically Randian approach to defending natural rights, though Den Uyl and Rasmussen have challenged his objections. See the essays by Nozick, Den Uyl and Rasmussen in Paul 1981.) Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe argue that the right of self-ownership is presupposed in the very use of one’s body to act within the world, and in particular in the use of one’s rational faculties and body parts (e.g. one’s mouth) in argumentation, so that one cannot so much as try to argue against self- ownership without falling into a pragmatic self-contradiction. Loren Lomasky (whose position is not precisely an Aristotelian one though it shares a certain family resemblance to such an approach) focuses on the fact that human beings are “project pursuers,” who for the successful execution of their often radically diverse projects require the sort of autonomy guaranteed by libertarian rights. All these accounts, however, have in common the notion that the existence of the rights of self-ownership follows from deeper moral facts that are themselves determined by objective human nature.

THEIR ETHIC IS CHILDISH, SELFISH AND DESTROYS THE ABILITY OF HUMANS TO TREAT EACH OTHER WITH DIGNITY Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 49-53 As the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton argues with respect to the particular kind of solipsistic fantasy world occupied by the consumer of pornography: [F]antasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a pliant surrogate. And it is important to see why this matters. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all, it is difficult and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence, make demands that we may be unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, a desire that fixes upon an individual, and sees that individual as unique and irreplaceable, if people are to make the sacrifices upon which the community depends for its longevity.

It is far easier to take refuge in surrogates, which neither embarrass us nor resist our cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in which the erotic force is dissipated and the needs of love denied. The viewer of pornography, Scruton argues, is attracted to it precisely because the people who occupy the fantasy are undemanding, ready to serve the viewer’s whims without question and on his own terms. But real romantic relationships are not like that — they demand, if they are to succeed, that a person learn unselfishly to put his lover’s needs, wishes, feelings and vulnerabilities on at least an equal footing with his own, that he move beyond the self and toward the other. Absorption in pornography makes it difficult to do this, as it ingrains a tendency to remove sex in the viewer’s mind from the interpersonal contexts that concretely shape it in the real world, with all their complications and emotional attachments — to regard it in a self-gratifying way that objectifies the other person, rather than in self-giving and other- regarding terms. Hence the stress in traditional conservative thinking on the need for flourishing human

virtue of chastity to confine sexual passion to the context of total commitment to another human being in marriage. Similarly, human beings need, if they are to flourish in their other (and usually less intimate!) relationships to beings to cultivate the

other human beings to learn to regard those others as subjects and not objects, as fellow rational beings with their own needs and purposes, not selfishly and narcissistically as if they were figments of our own imaginations who exist and have significance only to the extent that they fulfill our own needs. Respecting another’s self-ownership is a mark of moral maturity, reflecting one’s recognition that that other person does not exist for you, to cater to your needs at your will he is not your creation but an objective reality in his own right, and thus cannot be used by you against his will as a resource. The socialist or liberal egalitarian — who insists, in effect, that others’ efforts and resources be directed or redistributed to fulfill his own needs and desires — would, on this view, be analogous to the occupant of Nozick’s “experience machine” world or like the onanist of Scruton’s pornography example, childishly demanding that the world be re-made to conform to his will. It is he, rather than the Nozickian libertarian, who is thus more plausibly accused of “selfishness.” Respect for self-ownership is in fact profoundly unselfish — a necessary condition for dealing with other people in a manner that respects their independence and dignity, making possible the kind of human community that our nature as social beings requires us to work for.

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Coercion is Immoral OUR ETHIC PREVENTS INDIVIDUALS FROM BEING USED AS A MEANS TO AN END Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 31-2 In articulating his view of the nature and basis of individual rights, Nozick appeals to a fundamental moral principle whose best- known formulation derives from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant is famous for (among many other things) his “Categorical Imperative,” the dictum that one ought always to “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” That, in any case, is the first formulation Kant gives the Imperative. A second formulation, more relevant for our purposes, goes as follows: “Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only” What does this mean? The basic idea is this: An individual human being is not a mere object or thing, nor just an animal, but rather a person, a rational being with the capacity for free moral choice, and has, accordingly, a special dignity and value. He has his own purposes and ends, and these must be respected as long as they are consistent with respect for the purposes of others. He is not to be interfered with in the uncompelled choices he makes, as long as he refrains from interfering in the choices made by others. He is above all not to be regarded as a resource for others, an instrument that may be used at will for another’s purposes. Unlike a piece of unliving matter or an unintelligent brute, he is not properly a means to other people’s ends; he is, rather, an end in himself. That a person cannot be regarded as a means only, but always as an end, entails, in Nozick’s view, that a person has certain rights. In particular, he has a right not to be treated in any way that involves using him as a resource for others, or which conflicts with his fundamental autonomy as a free, rational agent. He cannot be killed, or maimed, or stolen from, or taken as a slave. But he also cannot properly be forced to use his talents, abilities, and labor to assist others, if he chooses, rightly or wrongly, to refrain from assisting; he cannot be forced to refrain from engaging in behaviors others regard as self- destructive, even if they really are self-destructive, if those behaviors do not involve violating anyone else’s rights; and so forth.

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Coercion is Immoral THE SIMPLICITY OF THE UNDERLYING PREMISES OF LIBERTARIANISM PUT THE BURDEN OF PROOF ON THE AFFIRMATIVE’S ETHIC Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 53. In any case, as we’ve seen, such development is not required to provide Nozick’s libertarianism with a powerful justification the thesis of self-ownership is plausible enough by itself to do that. But we can end this long chapter — necessarily long given how crucial individual rights are to Nozick’s project by noting that even if that thesis were entirely lacking in justification, it is difficult to see why

this would be especially problematic for Nozick. For why should we assume that it is he who has to justify the thesis? Why not assume instead that it is Nozick’s opponent who must justify his rejection of it? The burden of proof. I want to suggest, does in fact clearly lie with the opponent, and not with Nozick. For there are really only three possibilities: Either you own yourself, or other people do, or no one does. The last seems plainly false: Are we really to believe that no one owns your hand or your heart? Not even you — which would entail that you have no more of an entitlement to them than I do? But then if someone really does own them, it isn’t just obvious who it is, namely you? They’re attached to you, after all, and not to anyone else; indeed, your body and its parts seem to be you, or at least are partially constitutive of you. Are we expected to believe instead that someone else at least partially owns your hand or heart or other body parts, then Which parts exactly, and on what terms? Do you own the fingers of your hand, but not the thumb? Or do you co-own them all — in which case, do you require someone’s permission if you want to use them, or can you use them only on Thursdays and Sundays, say? And who exactly are the true owners or co-owners if not you? Your family? Friends? The government? (City, state, or federal?) And what exactly gives them ownership and not you? Are we really expected to believe that there is a serious problem in justifying your claim to use your body and labor as you wish, but no problem in justifying the government’s claim to use them as it wishes?!

Why do non-libertarians demand justification of the thesis of self-ownership but not for, say, the thesis of community-ownership or the thesis of state-ownership? (Of course, someone might respond that God owns us, so that we cannot own ourselves though presumably most of Nozick’s socialist and liberal critics wouldn’t say this. But self-ownership is no more inconsistent with belief in God than private property is. In both cases, we can suppose that God owns everything but allows us to act as stewards of what He owns, and holds us to account for how we use it. God owns the land your farm is on, say, but allows you to hold that land as your private property and forbids others from stealing it, or anything else, from you. Similarly, God owns you, but allows you to hold yourself as private property, and forbids others from stealing that property from you. On this view, “self-stewardship” would perhaps be a more appropriate term than self-ownership.) The notion that anyone else has a rightful claim, enforceable by law, over your body, its parts, or your abilities, talents, and labor thus seems itself entirely undefended, and indeed indefensible. At any rate, the assumption that you are the owner of these things seems the obvious

The thesis of self-ownership has a presumption in its favor; it is “innocent until proven guilty.” But then, so is the libertarianism that Nozick says follows from it. It is not Nozick who needs to “provide foundations” for or justify his libertarianism, then — it is his critics who need to justify themselves. default position to take.

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Coercion is Immoral ONLY FRAMING RIGHTS IN TERMS OF PROPERTY AND SELF OWNERSHIP CREATES A CONSISTENT SYSTEM, THE AFFIRMATIVES ETHIC SETS RIGHTS AGAINST EACH OTHER DESTROYING THEIR ABSOLUTE NATURE. Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 36-7 The notion that all genuine rights are property rights is a very important one in libertarian theory; indeed, many libertarians hold that

the reason controversies about whether rights are “absolute” seem so intractable is precisely because of a failure to understand that all rights are property rights (1998, 113-120). For instance, people often assert that the right to free speech is not absolute, since it would surely be wrong to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater; and they then conclude that rights in general must be rather loosely defined and subject to any number of qualifications and restrictions by government. Notoriously, where exactly to draw the line in any principled way becomes impossible to determine. But when we understand that there is no “right to free speech” over and above the right to use one’s body parts and other property, the difficulties disappear. The reason I cannot shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater is not because rights are less than absolute: I still have an absolute right to use my mouth as I see fit, consistent with your right to use your property as you see fit. But you, having that absolute right to your property — a theater, perhaps — also have a right not to allow anyone on it who does not (at least implicitly) promise not to yell “fire!” If I really want to yell it, I can still do so — as long as I do it on my own there is no other way in which the notion of rights can coherently be understood. Rothbard, for example, suggests that

property. In general, the rights we have are just rights to use our property — whether body parts or parts of the external physical world as we see fit. Thus, if we don’t have a property right in some particular thing, we have no right to it at all. If I don ‘t own any printing equipment, and no one wants to sell or lend me any, then I will be unable to propagate my views very widely, however much I may freely use my hands to write them out. No right of mine is violated by this, however — there is no “right of free speech” or “right to a free press” that is so violated, because those rights are nothing more than the right to use what I do own the way I see fit. As the libertarian philosopher Jan Narveson puts it, “Liberty is Property” (1988, 66).

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Coercion is Immoral A ETHIC THAT ARISES FROM A JUST SYSTEM BY JUST STEPS IS JUST THIS EXAMPLE PROVES YOUR SYSTEM ARE ILLEGITIMATE Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 38-9 Nozick elucidates and defends the entitlement theory by appealing to a thought experiment involving Wilt Chamberlain, the famous basketball player . Suppose there is a society in which a certain distribution of wealth and income — call it Dl — prevails, and let it be any end-result or patterned distribution that an opponent of Nozick would insist upon. To keep things simple, let’s imagine that Dl is an equal distribution of wealth (though the argument will come out the same whatever distribution we choose). Nozick’s opponent will have to grant that Dl is a just distribution — after all, he’s the one who decided on it. Now let’s suppose further, that among the members of this society is Wilt Chamberlain. Chamberlain is popular, and many people want to see him play basketball. Imagine, however, that he insists on playing only if those who come to watch his games pay him an extra 25 cents, dropping a quarter in a special box at the gate before entering the sports arena. Some people will prefer to keep their money and will stay home. But others will happily part with their 25 cents in order to watch him play; and let’s suppose that over the course of the season, I million of them do so. What we have at the end of the season is thus a new distribution of wealth, D2; and this distribution breaks the original pattern, being unequal, since Chamberlain now has $250,000 more than anyone else has. So now we want to ask: Is Chamberlain entitled to his money? And is the new distribution D2 ajust distribution? The answer, Nozick says, is obviously yes. For each individual in Dl was entitled to what (they) he had, as Nozick’s own critic, being the one who chose Dl, must acknowledge; so no one can complain that the starting point was unjust. But neither can anyone complain that any of the steps from Dl to D2 were unjust. For some of the individuals in Dl freely chose to exchange some of their holdings with Chamberlain — they thus have no grounds for a complaint of injustice. The others didn’t make this choice, but they thus still have the shares they had under Dl — so they have no grounds for a complaint either. But then no one has grounds for a complaint of injustice, either against Chamberlain or against D2 itself; and thus there is no injustice. “Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just,” Nozick says; in particular, D2 is perfectly just, and Chamberlain has a right to his newly gained wealth. This implies, though, that all end-result and patterned theories of distributive justice are false. For such theories hold that to be just, a distribution of wealth must fit a certain pattern. Yet the Chamberlain example clearly shows that a distribution can be just without fitting any particular pattern. D2 is perfectly just even though, unlike Dl, it is not an equal distribution; so egalitarian theories ofjustice, which hold that only an equal distribution can be just, are just wrong. A similar result would follow if we imagined instead that Dl was a distribution according to need, labor, merit, or what have you. In each case, people freely choosing to pay Chamberlain 25 cents (even if he doesn’t need it, or doesn’t work as hard as others, or may not be morally exemplary) will break the favored pattern, and yet this won’t result in an unjust distribution. So a just distribution does not require that those who need, work, or merit the most get the most. The Wilt Chamberlain argument shows, then, that criticisms of capitalist societies to the effect that “x% of the population own much more than x% of the wealth,” or that there are people in them who work hard but deserve or need much more than they have, are without force.

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Right to Property is Foundational LIFE LIBERTY AND PROPERTY ARE ALL BASIC RIGHTS John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p. 5. It will already be evident that libertarian doctrine is embedded in a view of the rights of man. Each human being has the right to live his life as he chooses, compatibly with the equal right of all other huma~a beings to live their lives as they choose. All man's rights are implicit in the above statement. Each man has the right to life: any attempt by others to take it away from him, or even to injure him, violates this right, through the use of coercion against him. Each man has the right to liberty: to conduct his life in accordance with the alternatives open to him without coercive action by others. And every man has the right to property: to work to sustain his life (and the lives of whichever others he chooses to sustain, such as his family) and to retain the fruits of his labor.

THE RIGHT TO PROPERTY FOLLOWS FROM THE RIGHT TO LIFE Ellen Frankel Paul, Professor of Political Science, University of Colorado, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 284. From the rights to life and liberty (that is, from the essential motility requirements to sustain life, from [1], comes the right to property, i.e., the right to that with which one has a) mixed one's labor by removing it from a state of nonownership, or b) acquired by means of a voluntary exchange, bequest, gift or inheritance. Without property in that which one has labored to attain, one could not sustain one's life. Life is the good for any individual and property is a necessary requirement for preserving that good.

PROPERTY IS NEEDED TO PROTECT OTHER RIGHTS John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p. 5. People often defend the rights of life and liberty but denigrate property rights, and yet the right to property is as basic as the other two; indeed, without property rights no other rights are possible. Depriving you of property is depriving you of the means by which you live.

ANY INTERFERENCE WITH PROPERTY VIOLATES RIGHTS John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p6. Where do my rights end? Where yours begin. I may do anything :[ wish with my own life, liberty and property without your consent; but I may do nothing with your life, liberty and property without your consent. If we recognize the principle of man's rights, it follows that the individual is sovereign of the domain of his own life and property, and is sovereign of no other domain. To attempt to interfere forcibly with another's use, disposal or destruction of his own property is to initiate force against him and to violate his rights.

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Right to Property is Foundational PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE ESSENTIAL TO A RATIONAL LIFE PLAN John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p. 8. Depriving people of property is depriving them of the means by which they live-the freedom of the individual citizen to do what he wishes with his own life and to plan for the future. Indeed, only if property rights are respected is there any point to planning for the future and working to achieve one's goals. Property rights are what makes long-range planning possible - the kind of planning which is a distinctively human endeavor, as opposed to the day-by-day activity of the lion who hunts, who depends on the supply of game tomorrow but has no real insurance against starvation in a day or a week. Without the right to property, the right to life itself amounts to little: how can you sustain your life if you cannot plan ahead? and how can you plan ahead if the fruits of your labor can at any moment be confiscated by government?

HISTORICALLY, POLITICAL FREEDOM ACCOMPANIES ECONOMIC FREEDOM Mlilton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics, CAPITAL.ISM AND FREEDOM, 1962, p9-10. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend )f historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.

NO SOCIETY IS FREE POLITICALLY WITHOUT ECONOMIC FREEDOM Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM, 1962, p9. Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.

NO FREE SOCIETY EXISTS WITHOUT ECONOMIC FREEDOM Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate Economist, FREE TO CHOOSE, 1980, p3. A predominantly voluntary exchange economy, on the other hand, has within it the potential to promote both prosperity and human freedom. It may not achieve its potential in either respect, but we know of no society that has ever achieved prosperity and freedom unless voluntary exchange has been its dominant principle of organization.

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Right to Property is Foundational ECONOMIC FREEDOM IS ESSENTIAL TO PRESERVING POLITICAL FREEDOM Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM, 1962, p8. Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second lace, economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.

LOSS OF ECONOMIC FREEDOM ENSURES TYRANNY Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate Economist, FREE TO CHOOSE, 1980, p.xvi-ii. Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination or economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

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General Impact Extensions EACH USE OF COERCIVE FORCE PAVES THE ROAD FOR MASSIVE ATROCITIES Harry Browne, former Libertarian presidential candidate, executive director of public policy at American Liberty Foundation, editor of Liberty Magazine, financial advisor and economist, WHY GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WORK, 1995, p. 66-7. The reformers of the Cambodian revolution claimed to be building a better world. They forced people into reeducation programs to make them better citizens. Then they used force to regulate every aspect of commercial life. Then they forced office workers and intellectuals to give up their jobs and harvest rice, to round out their education. When people resisted having their lives turned upside down, the reformers had to use more and more force. By the time they were done, they had killed a third of the country’s population, destroyed the lives of almost everyone still alive, and devastated a nation. It all began with using force for the best of intentions—to create a better world. The Soviet leaders used coercion to provide economic security and to build a “New Man”—a human being who would put his fellow man ahead of himself. At least 10 million people died to help build the New Man and the Workers’ Paradise. But human nature never changed—and the workers’ lives were always Hell, not Paradise. In the 1930s many Germans gladly traded civil liberties for the economic revival and national pride Adolf Hitler promised them. But like every other grand dream to improve society by force, it ended in a nightmare of devastation and death. Professor R.J. Rummel has calculated that 119 million people have been killed by their own governments in this century. Were these people criminals? No, they were people who simply didn’t fit into the New Order—people who preferred their own dreams to those of the reformers. Every time you allow government to use force to make society better, you move another step closer to the nightmares of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. We’ve already moved so far that our own government can perform with impunity the outrages described in the preceding chapters. These examples aren’t cases of government gone wrong; they are examples of government—period. They are what governments do—just as chasing cats is what dogs do.

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General Impact Extensions THIS SOVEREIGN MANAGEMENT IS FUNDAMENTALLY VIOLENT: THE DESIRE TO CONTROL OTHERS BY FORCE IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF CONFLICT Dr. Mary J. Ruwart, PhD, former pharmaceutical research scientist, former Assistant Professor of Surgery, HEALING OUR WORLD: THE OTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE, 1993, p. http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/ruwart_all.html. Humankind is poised on the brink of an evolutionary leap. In the last few decades, we have become increasingly aware of the source of our inner peace and enrichment. Depending on our personal background, we express this great discovery differently. The practical, down-to-earth individuals among us "take responsibility for our lives" as described in Wayne W. Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones. Those of us with a metaphysical outlook "create our own reality" as Shirley MacLaine did in Out on a Limb. The spiritual among us know that "the kingdom of God is within" and follow The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck). Sometimes we simply "find ourselves" through the power of love as Richard Bach did in The Bridge Across Forever. Ultimately, our inner harmony and abundance depend on how we react to our outer world. The creation of peace and plenty in our outer world, however, frequently seems hopelessly beyond our control. In the past century, we've supported widespread social reform. Nevertheless, people are still starving in a world capable of feeding all. In our own country, homelessness and poverty are on the rise. Violence is no longer limited to overseas wars: our streets, even our schools, are no longer safe. The environment that nurtures us is ravaged and raped. When we acknowledge how our reactions contribute to our inner state, we gain control. Our helplessness dissolves when we stop blaming others for feelings we create. In our outer world, the same rules apply. Today, as a society, as a nation, as a collective consciousness, "we" once again feel helpless, blaming selfish others for the world's woes. Our nation's laws, reflecting a composite of our individual beliefs, attempt to control selfish others at gunpoint, if necessary. Striving for a better world by focusing on others instead of ourselves totally misses the mark. When others resist the choices we have made for them, conflicts escalate and voraciously consume resources. A warring world is a poor one. Attempting to control others, even for their own good, has other undesirable effects. People who are able to create intimacy in their personal relationships know that you can't hurry love. Trying to control or manipulate those close to us creates resentment and anger. Attempting to control others in our city, state, nation, and world is just as destructive to the universal love we want the world to manifest. Forcing people to be more "unselfish" creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease. We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and shortsightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern! In seeking to control others, we behave as we once did as children, exchanging our dime for five pennies, all the while believing that we were enriching ourselves. When a concerned adult tried to enlighten us, we first refused to believe the truth. Once awareness dawned, we could no longer be fooled, nor was laborious deliberation necessary for every transaction. Once we understood how to count money, we automatically knew if we benefited from such a trade. Similarly, when the fact and folly of controlling others first come to our attention, we're surprised and full of denial. I certainly was! When we care about the state of our world, however, we don't stop there. I trust you are concerned enough to persevere and to consider seriously the shift in consciousness this

Once we have the courage to accept responsibility for our part of the problem, we automatically become part of the solution, independent of what others do. We honor their nonaggressive choices (even if they are self-ish) and stop trying to control them. In doing so, we dismantle their most effective means of controlling us. Others only ignite the flames of war and poverty. We feed the flames or starve them. Not understanding their nature, we've fanned the sparks instead of smothering them. Not understanding our contribution to the raging inferno, we despair that a world full of selfish others could ever experience universal har-mony and abundance. Nothing could be further from the truth! Widespread peace and plenty can be created within our lifetime. When we understand how to stop fueling the flames of war and poverty, we can manifest our dream. book proposes.

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General Impact Extensions GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION THREATENS THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE Bruce Chapman, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, SERVICE: PRO & CON, ed., Williamson Everson, 1990, p. 135 Government's undue influence and controls on the volunteer service se r are especially dangerous to the country's religious institutions. The largest share of the money (46 percent)6 and likely the largest share of service activities in the volunteer service sector come from churches and synagogues. Government cannot tread in this field except with big feet, and the ground is filled with the landmines of the separation-ofchurch-and-state issue. As government intervenes in the roles of religious institutions, it diminishes them. Worse, it may chose to play favorites, providing paid volunteers for the service activities of one church because its activities are considered constitutional (for example, day care) while denying them to another (for example, day care where religion is part of the schooling). "Without intending" it, in Tocqueville's phrase, the government's use of tax monies in this way can distort churches' choices, tempting them to follow the government's money rather than their own consciences.

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Answers to: “Capitalism is Naziism” NAZI GERMANY WAS BUILT ON ECONOMIC STATISM George Reisman, Professor of Economics Pepperdine, THE ECONOMICS OF FASCISM, 2005, p. http://www.mises.org/story/1937 accessed 4/18/06. When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism? Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed. The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands. What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. ….socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism's imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.) At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government's control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special importance. The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well. We can start with the fact that the financial self-interest of sellers operating under price controls is to evade the price controls and raise their prices. Buyers otherwise unable to obtain goods are willing, indeed, eager to pay these higher prices as the means of securing the goods they want. In these circumstances, what is to stop prices from rising and a massive black market from developing? The answer is a combination of severe penalties combined with a great likelihood of being caught and then actually suffering those penalties. Mere fines are not likely to provide much of a deterrent. They will be regarded simply as an additional business expense. If the government is serious about its price controls, it is necessary for it to impose penalties comparable to those for a major felony. But the mere existence of such penalties is not enough. The government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions. It has to make people fear that in conducting such a transaction they might somehow be discovered by the police, and actually end up in jail. In order to create such fear, the government must develop an army of spies and secret informers. For example, the government must make a storekeeper and his customer fearful that if they engage in a black-market transaction, some other customer in the store will report them. Because of the privacy and secrecy in which many black-market transactions can be conducted, the government must also make anyone contemplating a black-market transaction fearful that the other party might turn out to be a police agent trying to entrap him. The government must make people fearful even of their long-time associates, even of their friends and relatives, lest even they turn out to be informers. And, finally, in order to obtain convictions, the government must place the decision about innocence or guilt in the case of black-market transactions in the hands of an administrative tribunal or its police agents on the spot. It cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price. In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of "economic crimes," in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people. If the government is unwilling to go to such lengths, then, to that extent, its price controls prove unenforceable and simply break down. The black market then assumes major proportions.

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Answers to: “Commodification” MARKET COMMODIFICATION OF INDIVIDUALS ENHANCES HUMAN DIGNITY AND SOCIAL INTERCOURSE Michael Shapiro, law professor, University of Southern California, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH LAW REVIEW, 1994, p. 760-1. The aim here is to elaborate briefly on matters suggested earlier concerning the effects of markets on the ways in which their inhabitants view each other. Markets are often criticized because they are

thought to commodify its members and their interactions: the contingent bonds associated with fungible things seem to become associated with persons. On the other hand, our bonds to persons outside our group may be as thin as those to objects--although we may bond in certain ways to special objects, in markets or out. (Market critics speak of human alienation and fetishism of commodities. Yet the market's commodification of medical care, despite the contingencies it reflects and the restricted fungibility it promotes, is hardly an unrelieved disaster. There are advantages associated with being dealt with in limited ways as a commodity. Markets are regimes in which people have choices they might otherwise not have. Of course, they may "lose" choices by comparison with other systems: nonmarket regimes bear their own sets of options which may not be available in markets. Final comparative evaluations are not offered here--only the promotion of comparisons. To transform a formerly nonsalable entity into a commodity (one's organs, for example) creates obvious options. More generally, markets may enhance possibilities of certain forms of social intercourse, community, beneficial exchange, and human respect by replacing some highly restrictive criteria of association (e.g., kinship) with ability to pay. No doubt these enhancements are not always pure benefits. And it is hard to compare the restrictiveness of an ability-to-pay criterion with kinship or status criteria characteristic of other distributional systems. (As always, issues about markets should be evaluated in light of the hovering question: "Compared to what?") Nevertheless, a practice of viewing people indifferently as fungible, anonymous sources of supply (though not necessarily as themselves commodities) is one way of reinforcing equality, autonomy, and even community (all in certain senses). Fungibility is not the same as objectification. Moreover, many recommendations for health care reform reflect the felt necessity of structuring behavior through marketlike incentives in this way. Commodification in a sense? Perhaps so, and perhaps properly so.

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Answers to: “Private Coercion Worse” GOVERNMENT’S MONOPOLY ON FORCE COMBINED WITH STRUCTURAL BIASES AGAINST POSITIVE CHANGE ENSURE THAT IT IS MUCH WORSE THEN PRIVATE COERCION Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 22-3 Those who bemoan the power of big business are thus naïve if they suppose that government agencies are somehow immune to its corruptions — indeed, they are less immune. If you think Microsoft is too powerful, imagine a Microsoft that was able to force you to pay for its software, under threat of imprisonment, that was able to force (again through imprisonment) other companies not to manufacture any competing software, and that was inclined to change the things about its services you didn’t like only if you could convince 51% of its other “customers” to make the same complaints (and probably not even then); imagine also that Microsoft has a monopoly not only on software but on dozens of other services (social security, postal services, etc.), an army, police, courts of law, and exclusive rights to try and punish you for refusing to comply with its directives — imagine all this, and you’ve begun to imagine the power of the state. The real Microsoft, on the other hand, is powerless compared to all that — regardless of how many other people buy its software, if you don’t like Bill Gates or his products, you can tell him to buzz off and then go buy a Mac, and he can’t do a thing about it! The inherent inefficiencies of governmental agencies, and their tendencies to act in ways not in line with — indeed, even contrary to — the reasons for which they were created, are the subject of a whole branch of economic research known as public choice theory (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). This research sheds light on why the complaints one hears today about government services — about the post office, public schools, the management of public lands, and so on — are the very same complaints one hears year after year, election cycle after election cycle. The problems never seem to get fixed, and it is no accident that they don’t. For as we’ve seen, given the incentives governing the actions of the state and its officials incentives very different from those governing the market — there is every reason to expect that such problems will arise, and that far from being solved by the state, they are likely to get worse.

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Answers to: “Private Coercion Worse” GOVERNMENT FORCED CHOICE IS WORSE- IN A SOCIETY A PERSON CAN USE THEIR OWN PROPERTY INCLUDING INTELLIGENCE AND PHYSICAL SKILLS TO INFLUENCE FACTORS AGAINST THEM. THE PROSPECT OF EXCHANGE OF GOODS FOR THE PERSON’S SERVICES ALWAYS MEANS THE PERSON HAS A CHANCE OF PERSUADING OTHERS. WITH THE GOVERNMENT, THE PERSON HAS NOTHING TO PERSUADE BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT CAN ACQUIRE WHATEVER THE PERSON HAS TO OFFER WITH GUNS. Richard Epstein, law professor, University of Chicago, FORBIDDEN GROUNS, 1992, p. 79. With discrimination in ordinary markets, each person gets to sell his labor to the parties most favorably disposed to him, and need not transact with any other person. With force, he risks life and limb at the hands of his worst enemy, and he secures no permanent peace by buying off that enemy if others threaten harm as well. In a world in which there is a large number of individuals, all with different tastes, temperaments, and abilities, the spread in sentiment from the most sympathetic to the most hostile is likely to be very substantial. Potential victims can adopt strategies if evasion to escape the string of discrimination, no matter how irrational and prejudiced. It is far harder to outrun a bullet.

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Answers to: “Pragmatism” PROTECTING RIGHTS IS PRAGMATIC ANY OTHER WORLD VIEW JUSTIFIES GROSS VIOLATIONS OF LIBERTY Tibor Machan, philosophy professor, Auburn, LIBERTY AND THE HARD CASS, 1992, p. xv-xvi. Is the championing of flexibility a good idea? Is it a valid approach to politics and law making? A hint that it might not be is the fact that even pragmatists may recoil from their own approach when they think the values at stake are too important to be forsaken even a little. No self-respecting moral theorist would propose that when a man forces a woman to have sex with him, the moral and legal status of the act should be mulled anew with each case. Instead everyone accepts the principle that a person has the right to choose with whom he or she will have sex and thus that any clear violation of this right is grounds for sanction. But this is the opposite of being pragmatically flexible without regard for principle. Imagine how members of a jury in a rape case might deliberate if they were eager to be flexible and avoid being “rigid.” They would steer clear of blind obedience to “dogmatic” principles— such as the need to respect the rights of the victim or to be objective about the evidence for the guilt of the defendant. Rather, the jurors would attend to such emotionally resonant considerations as whether the perpetrator is a nice person, has appealing attributes, serves the community vigilantly, promotes economic prosperity, paints well, or throws a football well. The distress of the victim may or may not enter into such a calculation. After all, what if the victim has a checkered past, is rude to the bailiff, or just doesn’t emote well on the stand? By the standard of pragmatic flexibility, basing decisions on such factors may well be unimpeachable. By contrast, a principled approach would not gainsay that it is a violation of basic human rights to rape someone or that determining the guilt of the defendant on this score is the only purpose of the proceedings. Is being principled “mere ideology”? Is it “simplistic”? Is it deficient in appropriate flexibility? No. Nor would it be simplistically ideological and excessively rigid to judge various other social matters by reference to certain tried and true principles, ones we have learned over many years of human experience with community life.

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Answers to: “Coercion Ok Because All Resources Were Once Unowned” Even If This Is True It Does Not Deny Our Arguments Since Individuals Could Be Destitute For Other Reasons And It Doesn’t Matter Since It Relies On An Absurd Notions Of Property Rights Edward Feser, Loyola Marymount Philosophy Professor, ON NOZICK, 2004, pp. 81-2 The critique of taxation as theft, unlike the argument about forced labor and self-ownership, might indeed seem to depend upon a controversial theory of property rights; and thus here, Nozick’s critics often claim, there is a serious weakness in his position. For whatever Nozick says about just transfers of wealth, why (it is asked) should we assume that the more fundamental principle of just acquisition of previously unowned portions of the natural world gives people absolute property rights in those portions? Why can’t we take at least some of it in taxes? Indeed, doesn’t the Lockean Proviso require us to do so, given that “enough and as good” has clearly not been left for others to acquire, most if not all of the earth’s natural resources having been acquired long ago? And should we really grant that the world is initially unowned in the first place? Don’t we all collectively own it (Ky’mlicka 1990, 117-118)? The first thing

are exasperatingly unspecific about what exactly it is they are supposed to show. Precisely how much taxation is entailed by these considerations, of what type and for what purposes? If the idea is that there ought to be taxation for the purposes of funding welfare programs for those destitute persons who have presumably been disadvantaged by violations of the Lockean Proviso, how are we to determine exactly who these persons are? After all, most people around today never had a chance to acquire previously unowned resources, yet most people are not destitute. Why assume that those who are destitute are destitute because of violations of the Lockean Proviso? (Maybe they would have been destitute in any case — perhaps the bad to note in response to such objections is that they

decisions or bad luck that led them to destitution in the actual world would have led them to destitution even in a world where they

even if this would justify taxation for welfare programs and the like, how would it justify government spending on arts and research, schools and museums, and all the other things egalitarians typically want government to fund? (Are we to suppose that all presently destitute people would have flocked to art exhibits if only they had a chance to acquire unowned resources.) Furthermore,

had had a chance to acquire land in the state of nature?) Moreover, how would it justify a strictly equal distribution wealth, or distribution according to need, merit, or the like? And

would it justify an income tax, a sales tax, or both?

How about tariffs? An what rate of taxation, exactly? Thirty percent? Fifty percent? Sixty (Why?) Not only do Nozick’s egalitarian critics not answer such questions, they never even consider them. In any case, such objections in fact have

the notion that all of us collectively own all natural resources is a non-starter. For one thing, it is simply implausible: Are we really to suppose that we all collectively owned Greenland, say, before anyone set foot on it, or own the center of the earth now — or for that matter, that we all collectively own Pluto or the Andromeda galaxy? What would it mean to claim ownership, collective or otherwise, of places on which no one has in any way had any impact, or of places no one can even get to? If an individual person or corporation claimed ownership of the nothing like the force Nozick’s critics assume them to have. To begin with,

center of the earth, they’d be laughed at, and rightly so. But wouldn’t the claim that all of us own it be equally laughable? Surely these claims are manifestly absurd, not because there is anything intrinsically absurd or unjust about ownership of the center of the earth — or of Pluto or Andromeda — per se, but rather because, given that no one currently has anything like the influence or power over such places that are in ordinary cases constitutive of ownership, there’s no sense to be made of the suggestion that anyone (yet) owns them at all. Until someone does something with a resource, that is, it seems obvious that there can be no question of anyone, either collectively or privately, owning it.

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Answers to: “Need to Help the Poor” MARGINALIZATION IS INEVITABLE- PHILANTHROPIC CAPITALISM SOLVES BEST Richard Hiskes, specialist in political theory and public policy, COMMUNITY WITHOUT COERCION: GETTING ALONG IN THE MINIMAL STATE, p. 138. Nozick's in-principle acceptance of "total communities" not founded on interest also serves to refute a particularly odious criticism of his utopia, and by extension, of his whole theory of individualism. This criticism has been cited in review after review and essentially refers to the possibility that those in society with little to offer a utopian association in the way of useful goods or abilities, such as the aged, sick, poverty-stricken, or intellectually deficient, will simply be left out in the cold to live out their lives in misery and solitude. Obviously, there is something rather fatuous and petulant about this accusation in the first place, for as Charles King points out, "there is no reason to suppose that individuals in his [Nozick's] state would be cold and unfeeling in any greater proportion than in any other arrangement." In addition, however, the total communities that Nozick suspects will emerge in the utopian framework clearly refute this charge, for in such associations helping others and "caring" may be the reason for cooperating in the first place, and might even necessitate (and justifiably so in Nozick's view) considerable redistribution of wealth."

LIBERTARIANISM IS THE MOST FLUID SYSTEM HIERARCHIES ARE CRUSHED BY FREEDOM OF EXCHANGE Johan Norberg, fellow, Timbro institute, IN DEFENSE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, 2003, p. 90 That economic freedom is not an enemy of equality comes as a surprise to everyone who has been told that capitalism is the ideology of the rich and the privileged. In fact, this is precisely backward. The free market is the antithesis of societies of privilege. In a market economy, the only way of holding on to a good economic position is by improving your production and offering people good products or services. It is in the regulated economies, with their distribution of privileges and monopolies to favored groups, that privilege can become entrenched. Those who have the right contacts can afford to pay bribes. Those who have the time and knowledge to plow through bulky volumes of regulations can start up business enterprises and engage in trade. The poor never have a chance, not even of starting small businesses like bakeries or corner shops. In a capitalistic society, all people with ideas and willpower are at liberty to try their luck, even if they are not the favorites of the rulers. Globalization contributes to this tendency because it disturbs power relations and emancipates people from the local potentates. Free trade enables consumers to buy goods and services from a global range of competitors instead of the local monopolists. Free movements of capital enable poor people with good ideas to finance their projects. Freedom of migration means that the village's one and only employer has to offer higher wages and better working conditions in order to attract labor, because otherwise the workers can go elsewhere .

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Profit is Not a Labor Income” CAPITALISTS DO PROVIDE LABOR INCOME George Reisman, professor of economics, Pepperdine, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FREEDOM, 1985, p. http://www.mises.org/story/1729. doa 4/20/06, p. http://www.mises.org/story/1729.. I shall argue that in a capitalist economy, no less than in a pre-capitalist economy, profit is still a labor income— an income attributable to the labor of businessmen and capitalists—and that this is so even though profits are for the most part earned as a rate of return on capital and tend to vary with the amount of capital invested. The variation of profits with the size of the capital invested is perfectly compatible with their being attributable to the labor of those who earn them, because in a capitalist economy the labor of profit earners tends to be predominantly of an intellectual nature—a work of thinking, planning, and decision making. At the same time, capital stands as the means by which businessmen and capitalists implement their plans—it is their means of buying the labor of helpers and of equipping those helpers and providing them with materials of work. Thus, the possession of capital serves to multiply the efficacy of the businessmen's and capitalists' labor, for the more of it they possess, the greater is the scale on which they can implement their ideas. For example, a businessman who thinks of a better way to produce something can apply that better way on ten times the scale if he (or she) owns ten factories than if he owns only one. The fact that in the one case the same labor on his part leads to ten times the profit as in the other case is perfectly consistent with the whole profit still being attributable to his labor. The compound variation of profits with the passage of time is also perfectly consistent with the fact that they are the product of the businessmen's and capitalists' labor. The relationship of profits to the passage of time derives from the fact that profits vary with the size of the capital invested per period of time. If one can earn profits in proportion to one's capital in any given period of time, then if investment for a longer period is to be competitive, one must earn the profits that one could have earned in the shorter period plus the profits one could have earned by the reinvestment of one's capital and its profits. It should be realized that wages, too, which no one disputes are attributable to the labor of the wage earners, vary with things other than the expenditure of labor by the wage earners—for example, with the state of technology and the supply of capital equipment and with competitive conditions in other industries. For an income to be attributable to labor, it is by no means necessary that the performance of labor be the only factor determining its size. In fact, by such a standard, virtually nothing could be attributed to human labor beyond what people could produce with their bare hands. Income is to be attributed to the performance of labor, despite its variation with the means employed and with other external circumstances, on the principle that it is man's labor which supplies the guiding and directing intelligence in production. It is only on this basis that a worker using a steam shovel, for example, is to be credited with digging the hole he digs, no less than a worker using his bare hands, for he guides and directs the steam shovel. Guiding and directing intelligence, not muscular exertion, is the essential characteristic of human labor. As von Mises says, "What produces the product are not toil and trouble in themselves, but the fact that the toiling is guided by reason." Guiding and directing intelligence in production is, of course, supplied by businessmen and capitalists on a higher level than by wage earners—a circumstance reinforcing the primary productive status of profits and profit earners over wages and wage earners.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Regulations Help Americans so not Coercive COERCION IS LEGITIMATELY APPLIED ONLY WHEN IT PREVENTS AN INDIVIDUAL FROM DIRECTLY HARMING OTHERS, NOT WHEN IMPOSED TO HELP THE GROUP BEING REGULATED. Candace Gauthier, Ph.D., philosophy professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS JOURNAL, 2000, p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kennedy_institute_of_ethics_journal/v01 0/10.4gauthier.htmlaccessed 5/20/2006.. Second, based on John Stuart Mill, the choices even of those possessing the capacity for rational agency need not be respected when the resulting actions pose a risk of harm or actually cause harm to others or to the society. This limit is best developed in Mill's distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct and in his defense of the principle of liberty. Mill's principle of liberty, like Kant's principle of humanity, establishes a standard for our treatment of others. The principle states that ". . . the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant."

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46

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Absolute Property Rights Allow Slavery” ONLY THE THESIS OF SELF-OWNERSHIP CAN JUSTIFY THE CLAIM THE SLAVERY IS IMMORAL (GENDER MODIFED) Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 32-3. In addition to this Kantian principle, however, Nozick appeals to another idea which has a long history in libertarian thought and which many commentators take to be the more fundamental element of Nozick’s system. This is the thesis of self-ownership, the notion that each individual human being has complete and absolute ownership of (themselves) himself -- of his body, talents, abilities, and labor. Or as John Locke, an early proponent of the thesis, put it: “Every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his” (1963). You are, that is to say, your own property; you own yourself. Probably for most people, this principle will seem just intuitively correct. But for anyone who doubts it, the main argument given in its defense is that unless we assume the truth of the thesis of self

ownership, we have no way of explaining the immorality of many practices we all consider clearly immoral. Take slavery, for example. It is almost universally acknowledged nowadays that slavery is a very great evil. But why is it, exactly? It cannot merely be for the reason that slaves are often treated badly. For slaves are sometimes treated very well by their masters, even forming bonds of affection with them; yet surely, it is still seriously wrong for even a “kindhearted” master to keep a slave. The only way to explain why this is so is that in making someone a slave, a slave owner simply violates the slave’s property rights in himself: No one else can properly own you, because you already own yourself, and a slave owner is in effect stealing from you. INDIVIDUALS CANNOT SELL THEMSELVES INTO SLAVERY Chris Sciabarra, philosophy professor, NYU, TOTAL FREEDOM: TOWARDS A DIALECTICAL LIBERTARIANISM, 2000, p. 231-2 Rothbard , like Marx, believes that labor , under capitalism, is a commodity , in the sense that labor service (or, in Marx’s terminology, “labor power”) can be alienated and exchanged for goods and services. Yet , Rothbard claims that “a (hu)man can alienate his labor service, but he cannot sell the capitalized future value of that service . In short , he cannot…sell (themselves) himself into slavery and have this sale enforced —for this would mean that his future will over his own person was being surrendered in advance.” A person cannot alienate his own will, because he (they) have has sovereign control over (their) his own mind and body. This will cannot be transferred to another .

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47

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Libertarianism Isolationist” LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T ISOLATIONIST Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 50. There is another, less fundamental but quite emotion-packed issue on which libertarians and conservatives are frequently in serious disagreement, namely, foreign policy. The foreign policy of a free society, as its domestic policy, stresses the social primacy of liberty. This amounts to a strict foreign policy of defensivism, as explained in a recent essay by Professor Eric Mack. Some libertarians insist on an isolationist foreign policy, but that cannot be derived from the libertarian political framework, contrary to their contentions.

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48

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Ending Coercion Benefits Elites” GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION ALLOWS ELITES TO KEEP POWER COERCION IS KEY NOT MONEY Tibor Machan, PRIVATE RIGHTS & PUBLIC ILLUSIONS, 1995, p. 126 It was government intervention, not the workings of the free markets, that helped these people attain their exclusive economic power. It was government dispensations, in the form of special protection to some against the forces of competition that gave privileged protection to barons’ wealth and thus enabled them to engage in monopolistic practice , thereby driving competitors to the brink of disaster. The railroads , for example, gained enormous power as a result of the earliest federal subsidy program . FREE MARKETS REDUCE CORPORATIONS ABILITY TO COMMIT CRIMES Johan Norberg, fellow, Timbro institute, IN DEFENSE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM, 2003, p. 211-12. What has happened in the age of globalization is not that corporations have acquired more power through free trade. They used to be far more powerful-and still are-in dictatorships and controlled economies . Large, powerful corporations have always been able to corrupt public institutions by colluding with rulers and hobnobbing with them on luncheons and dinners. They have been able to obtain protection through monopolies, tariffs, and subsidies just by placing a phone call to political leaders. Free trade has exposed corporations to competition. Above all, consumers have been made freer, so that now they can ruthlessly pick and choose even across national borders, rejecting those firms that don't measure up . Historical horror stories of companies governing a society de facto have always come from regions where there has been no competition . People living in isolation in a small village or a closed country are dependent on the enterprises existing there, and are forced to buy what they offer at the price they demand, enriching a tiny clique at consumers' expense. Sometimes capitalism is accused of having created monopolies and trusts, enormous associations of businesses that flourish, not by being best, but by being biggest and squelching competition. But this is not brought about by capitalism. On the contrary, free trade and competition are the best guarantees of a competitor penetrating the market if the dominant firm misbehaves .

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Ending Coercion Benefits Elites” BIG BUSINESS OFTEN USES STATISM FOR CONTROL Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 4/20/06.

Big business support for the Corporate Welfare-Warfare State is so blatant and so far-ranging, on all levels from the local to the federal, that even many conservatives have had to acknowledge it, at least to some extent. How then explain such fervent support from "America's most persecuted minority?" The only way out for conservatives is to assume (a) that these businessmen are dumb, and don't understand their own economic interests, and/or (b) that they have been brainwashed by left-liberal intellectuals, who have poisoned their souls with guilt and misguided altruism. Neither of these explanations will wash, however, as only a glance at AT&T or Lockheed will amply show. Big businessmen tend to be admirers of statism, to be "corporate liberals," not because their souls have been poisoned by intellectuals, but because a good thing has thereby been coming their way. Ever since the acceleration of statism at the turn of the twentieth century, big businessmen have been using the great powers of State contracts, subsidies and cartelization to carve out privileges for themselves at the expense of the rest of the society.

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50

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “Minimal State is Coercive” MINIMAL STATE CAN DEVELOP FROM ANARCHY WITHOUT VIOLATING RIGHTS, WHICH MEANS IT IS MORAL Edward Feser, philosophy professor, Loyola, ON NOZICK, 2004, p. 79. Suppose there is no state — people live in an anarchic society, a ‘state of nature,” as political philosophers have traditionally described it. Being self-owners, individuals have rights, and they will want to protect these rights against infringements by other individuals. They could do this on their own — standing guard over their property, making sure to stay well-armed while going about their daily business, and so forth — but this is inconvenient and time consuming, and there are lots of other things they’d rather be doing. Inevitably, individuals will band together to form mutual protection societies, agreeing to “watch each other’s backs” as it were, perhaps taking turns monitoring everyone’s property for extended periods of time. Eventually, some will get the idea that there is money to be made in protective services, and will devote themselves full-time to running protective agencies, private firms providing protection services to subscribers for a fee. Different such firms will compete with one another for customers. Larger and more resourceful firms will, because they can provide better protection at a cheaper price, tend to attract more subscribers. And given that so much is at stake — one’s property, liberty, indeed one’s very life this is one market where bigger will be seen necessarily to mean better, and most individuals will flock to the most powerful agency. Furthermore, there will, unavoidably, be conflicts between the clients of different firms. Sometimes, of course, this will be because one party is simply and clearly in the wrong. But often both parties to a dispute will be well-meaning: Fred may genuinely believe, on the basis of good evidence, that Bob has stolen his property, while Bob is in fact innocent and has been framed. Fred will reasonably want his protection agency to arrest and punish Bob, while Bob will reasonably want his agency to protect him against false arrest and undeserved punishment. How will their respective agencies settle this dispute? They could simply go to war but battle is costly, and will become increasingly frequent if firms are not careful to determine in the first place whether or not their clients are in fact innocent. It will thus pay for agencies to agree to settle disputes between clients by appealing to a neutral third party — a private arbitration firm, say, which numerous firms may retain as well as to require their clients to sign over all rights to finding and punishing the guilty to the agencies themselves, so that unnecessary disputes between agencies are not caused by some individual client’s ill-considered vigilante behavior. There will thus be a tendency within the state of nature toward a kind of natural monopoly where protection services are concerned toward a single dominant agency or a single confederation of agencies united by commitment to common arbitration procedures (Nozick 1974, 15-17). The ultra-minimal stale So far the society we’re describing is still an anarchist one — there is no state, though there is an entity that has many of the state’s features, i.e. the dominant protective association. But this entity will, Nozick argues, inevitably take on the features of a state, and do so in a way that is entirely morally legitimate. How so? Consider that, however large the dominant agency, there will still be those who do not subscribe to it — independents who seek to go it alone or to stick with smaller firms which refuse to deal with the dominant agency. How will the dominant agency deal with disputes between its clients and these independents? Will it simply allow them to arrest, try, and punish its clients on their own — perhaps using procedures that are unreliable, or exacting extreme and unjust punishments on those found guilty? Nozick argues that it cannot and will not. The dominant agency has been hired to protect its clients’ rights it cannot allow those rights to be threatened by hotheads who are not careful enough in determining guilt, or who are prone to excessive punishments. It will thus have to announce a general policy of forbidding independents and rival agencies from applying procedures and punishments that it has not itself approved. The dominant agency, then, can and must legitimately engage in prohibition of activities that put its clients’ rights at risk. But in prohibiting such risky behavior and requiring its own clients to cede to it their rights to punish offenders — in setting itself up, that is, as the sole authorizer of legitimate violence — the dominant agency has taken on one of the defining features of a state. It has become what Nozick calls an “ultra-minimal state” (1974, 26). Prohibition and compensation This ultraminimal state acts justly in prohibiting independents from engaging in behavior that puts its own clients at risk. But those independents do, after all, still have a right to protect their own rights — something the ultra-minimal state has now forbidden them to do. So the ultra-minimal state cannot legitimately rest with prohibition of their self-protection. It must (morally must) provide compensation for this prohibition. And this means that the ultra-minimal state must itself provide these independents with protective services. It may charge an independent for providing these services to him, but only an amount the independent would have had to spend anyway in protecting himself — any costs over that amount must be borne by the ultra-minimal state and thus, by extension, by the ultra-minimal state’s clients. With this turn of events, however, the ultra-minimal state has taken on a further feature of a full-blown state, in that it provides protection for everyone in the geographical area it occupies, and charges them for that protection. It thus engages in a kind of taxation — but this taxation (and only this taxation) does not amount to theft. Its original clients pay voluntarily to retain its services, after all; and though their payments may end up partially subsidizing the protection of the independents, this too is simply part of the package they voluntarily agreed to in signing up with the agency, rather than being a kind of coerced aid to the needy in the form of welfare. The independents are also at least partially charged for protection, but only an amount they would have paid anyway to protect themselves, and only insofar as they insist on engaging in behavior that potentially puts others’ rights at risk. So the ultra-minimal state, in providing compensation for prohibited risky activity, violates no one’s rights. But in doing so, it has in effect moved beyond being an ultra-minimal state to being a full minimal state, full stop. Our original anarchist community has, then, developed inexorably and in an entirely morally legitimate manner into a minimal state. There thus can be no principled objection on the anarchist’s part to Nozick’s minimal state. For such a state practically and morally has to arise out of anarchy itself.

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51

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “State Good” EVEN IF YOU WIN A LINK TO THIS ARGUMENT, WE WILL IMPACT TURN ITA TRULY ANARCHIST SOCIETY FACILITATES A TYPE OF COMMUNITY THAT FORCES INDIVIDUALS TO WORK TOGETHER FOR MUTUAL SURVIVAL- A COMMUNITY BASED ON REPRESSION, HOWEVER, STIFLES THIS CREATIVITY. Richard Hiskes, specialist in political theory and public policy, COMMUNITY WITHOUT COERCION: GETTING ALONG IN THE MINIMAL STATE, 1982, p. 4750. Godwin's statement also indicates the reason why individuals require community in the anarchist view. For Godwin, ever the thinker of the anarchist camp, the intellectual diversity of persons not only motivates but forces them to participate in the reciprocal "opening of the soul" that characterizes community, for no person is himself complete or self-sufficient intellectually, but needs others, their knowledge, and special abilities to complete his own. Additionally, the anarchist community is one marked by a mutual sharing or reciprocity-not only of one's intellect, but of one's feelings and very self. Proudhon insists that each member of the anarchist community "recognizes his own self in that of others, and is completed or fulfilled in that recognition intellectually and emotionally. The interdependence and reciprocity of the anarchist community demonstrates that even though the goal of anarchism is, as Kropotkin states, "free play for the individual, for the full development of his individual gifts-for his individuation ," this goal not be attained by the individual in isolation. Rather, the achievement of true selfhood in the anarchist sense requires the most intimate kind of interpersonal communion and reciprocal awareness. This dependency upon others does not threaten individual freedom in their anarchist community, however, for as Bakunin argues, freedom is not a fact springing from isolation but from reciprocal action, a act not of exclusion, but, on the contrary, of social interaction-for the freedom of every individual is simply the reflection of his humanity or his human right in the consciousness of free men, his brothers, his equals. For the anarchists, freedom is the source of man's dignity and sense of self-worth, but as the quotation from Bakunin points out, freedom and the fruits of its exercise are only possible in the community. What the anarchists mean by freedom is the opportunity to exercise one's own reasoning power in making decisions, and the fact that intellectual self-sufficiency is unattainable does not alter the primary imperative of freedom-that persons make their own decisions. The belief that government in order to exist must violate this imperative is why anarchists are anarchists forms what is after all the most fundamental argument of anarchism: the extent that a person prides himself on his unique attribute of rationality and the ability to reach intelligent decisions is the extent that he must resent government as an encroachment on the exercise of that ability. The capacity to exercise what Godwin calls one's "independent judgment" is then what underlies the anarchist idea of freedom and the concomitant repudiation of government, but it is also the source of selfrespect. Because the capacity for independent judgment is what makes man worthy of respect, it is something that cannot be freely given up or contracted away without compromising the dignity and worth as a human being of the one who commits such an act. To do so, as in the most common case of submission to government, is in Godwin's words, to "become the most mischievous and pernicious of animals, to annihilate my individuality as a man." Suspending one's rational judgment trips the individual of his own sense of self-respect, and it is for the prevention of such a dehumanizing act that community, for the anarchists, is so essential. By providing the reciprocal exchange of ideas and the mutual support in the functioning of every person's attribute of reason, the anarchist community preserves the dignity of all, and most of all, each person's sense of self-respect. Also, the capacity for rational judgment that others possess stimulates respect for them while it increases respect for oneself, thus making the communal reciprocity and opening of the soul not only necessary for personal growth but desirable, for as Kropotkin points out, such an experience is itself an enrichment of the self.

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52

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” COMMUNITARIANISM ELIMINATES INDIVIDUAL MORAL RESPONSIBILITY AND TENDS TOWARD THE CREATION OF POTENTIALLY TYRANNICAL, MAJORITY-DIRECTED SYSTEMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL Candace Gauthier, Ph.D., philosophy professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS JOURNAL, 2000, p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kennedy_institute_of_ethics_journal/v01 0/10.4gauthier.htmlaccessed 5/20/2006.. As part of the social control provided by praise and blame, the assignment of moral responsibility operates within a pluralistic democratic society by permitting areas of life in which the individual may choose and act, free of coercion and constraint, but with the understanding that these choices and actions are subject to judgment and criticism by others in the community. However, communitarians sometimes appear to go even farther, to seek even more social control based on a shared vision of the good life that is determined either by the majority or by the elites. This tendency is an "excess" of the communitarian movement that may lead to a "tyranny of the majority." Pushing the laudable communitarian concern with shared values and the common good to this extreme would destroy the individual, create persons "constituted by the group's shared aims," and "leave little or no room for criticism of the group will" (Kuczewski 1997, pp. 106-8). Moreover, without individuals who are free to make choices based on their traditions, histories, and a variety of communal influences as well as their own consideration of all of these factors, moral responsibility has [End Page 344] no meaning. Once the force of law is behind shared values and how they are to be honored in individual lives and decisions, we would have a level of control through legal coercion that would leave little room for moral responsibility based on the voluntarily chosen actions of moral agents. Thus, the imposition of communal values, in all areas of life, would jeopardize the social practice of assigning moral responsibility for individual action.

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53

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” MULTIPLE CHECKS ENSURE INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS WON’T CAUSE SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION Allen Buchanan, philosophy professor, University of Arizona, ETHICS, July 1989, p. 858. If one believes, as John Stuart Mill did, that the best forms of human life, including the most fulfilling forms of community, may differ for different sets of individuals and that there still may be progress to be made in developing new and better forms of community, then the fact that the liberal individual rights facilitate peaceful change is clearly a point in their favor. Mill also thought – quite correctly, I believe – that the recognition of these individual rights did not threaten limitless change and uncontrolled fragmentation of communities. For one thing, he was quite aware of the tight grip tradition has on most people. For another, to form a new community an individual must attract a significant number of others to her banner and sustain their allegiance if she is to succeed. If the human need for community is as strong as communitarians believe, then one would expect that, in general, new forms of community will emerge and thrive only if they serve those needs, and participants in failed alternatives will seek to reattach to their previous communities. Hence, Mill may be right in concluding the flexibility for peaceful chance provided by liberal individual rights outweighs the risk of excessive fragmentation and stability. MULTIPLE CHECKS ENSURE INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS WON’T CAUSE SOCIAL FRAGMENTATION COMMUNITARIAN ETHICS ARE INELUCTABLY COERCIVE Allen Buchanan, philosophy professor, University of Arizona, ETHICS, July 1989, p. 858. A fourth related point is that individual rights are inherently anti-paternalistic in a way that group rights are not. Within a group right, some one person or subset of the group has the ultimate say as whether to exercise that right. Even if others decided on the basis of a sincere commitment to doing what is best for the individual subgroup, it is still they, not he, who are in control. Unless the radical communitarian can show that group rights provide such superior protection for community as to outweigh the cumulative forces of these advantages of individual rights, he will not make good the charge that the cautious communitarian argument is infected by an individualistic bias.

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54

Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” COMMUNITY OBLIGATIONS CAN BE FULFILLED WITHOUT THE USE OF COERCION Candace Gauthier, Ph.D., philosophy professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS JOURNAL, 2000, p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kennedy_institute_of_ethics_journal/v01 0/10.4gauthier.htmlaccessed 5/20/2006.. Mill is especially helpful in responding to the communitarian critique of respect for autonomy because he is careful to emphasize that his conception of liberty is neither selfish nor indifferent to the self-regarding behavior of others. Mill (1978 [1859], pp. 74-75) identifies a number of ways in which members of the community should influence each other toward the "self-regarding virtues," which include education, conviction, persuasion, encouragement, and advice. However, he rejects the coercion of the law and the overwhelming power of public opinion as illegitimate forms of control over selfregarding conduct (Mill 1978 [1859], p. 9). The practical application of these principles from Kant and Mill does not require a concept of the self as unencumbered or isolated in its decision making. Kant's concept of the person, with the capacity for rational [End Page 340] agency, is based on human freedom from natural forces, not our freedom from attachments and commitments to other persons or the influence our histories, traditions, and families have on our values, choices, and actions. Kant is pointing out that we are neither like chairs, without the capacity for choice or action, nor like nonrational animals, whose actions are determined by instinct and the forces of nature. As persons, we are the products of our families, traditions, and communities. Yet, because we are persons, our actions may be the result of more than these influences. They may also be the result of our rational capacities. Moreover, according to Kant, our choices and actions are not supposed to be based simply on our own goals and ends. Rather, Kant believes that the moral law will lead us to recognize duties and obligations we have to others, for example, to respect and further their ends. Such obligations could certainly be directed toward the shared goals of the community as a whole. For Mill, even self-regarding choices and actions are properly

subject to influence from others, for example through their natural reactions to an individual's self-destructive behavior. In fact, he advocates our responsibility to help each other ". . . distinguish the better from the worse . . ." through conviction, encouragement, persuasion, and education (Mill 1978 [1859], pp. 74-76). Furthermore, in the category of other-regarding behavior Mill includes the risk of damage not only to specific others, but to the society, as well (p. 80). Contemporary characterizations of respect for autonomy clearly reflect the influence of Kant's principle of humanity and Mill's principle of liberty. Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, for example, recognize this influence and include elements from both Kant and Mill in their discussion of the principle of respect for autonomy. Beauchamp and Childress (1994, pp. 125-28) describe what it means to respect an "autonomous agent." It is ". . . at a minimum, to acknowledge that person's right to hold views, to make choices, and to take actions based on personal values and beliefs." This includes both ". . . obligations of nonintervention in the affairs of persons . . ." and ". . . obligations to maintain capacities for autonomous choice in others . . . ." However, they emphasize that this principle is not absolute, but ". . . has only prima facie standing and can be overridden by competing moral considerations." The moral considerations noted here are based on harm to individuals or to the community. They

Respect for autonomy, within the limits described here, is an essential component of a pluralistic democratic society. It is necessary for the social practice of assigning moral responsibility to rational agents for their choices and actions. Moreover, this social practice is part of an important method of social control through which the community's interests and goals are furthered. include, for example, endangerment to the public health and

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potential harm to innocents. [End Page 341]

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS ARE ESSENTIAL TO THE RATIONAL AND NONVIOLENT MODIFICATION OF EXISTING AND FORMATION OF NEW COMMUNITIES Allen Buchanan, philosophy professor, University of Arizona, ETHICS, July 1989, p. 858. First, individual rights to freedom of religion, thought, expression, and association facilitate rational, nonviolent change in existing communities as well as the rational, nonviolent formation of new communities. Individual rights do this by allowing individuals who are dissatisfied with current forms of community to advocate and try to develop alternatives, even when the majority of their fellow members (or official members of the community) do not share their views. If rights to freedom of expression, association, thought, accrued to communities, not to individuals, then they would protect existing communities from intrusion by other communities or state agencies. But they would not provide protection for the formation of new communities or for modifications for existing communities, so far as either of these two types of changes originate in the beliefs and actions of an individual or a minority MOST COMMUNITARIANS AGREE; SYNTHESIS OF INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNALITY IS NET BENEFICIAL TO ATTAINING FREEDOM AND EQUALITY Susan Hekman, political scientist, University of Texas, JOURNAL OF POLITICS, November 1992, p. 1106. MacIntyre and Sandel advance the most comprehensive critique of the subject of liberalism, but they are by no means the only communitarian critics of liberalism writing today. An examination of this communitarian literature reveals a definitive pattern of argument, a pattern that conforms more closely to the work of Sandel than of MacIntyre. Sandel attempts dialectical synthesis between modernity and communalism, between the “good” aspects of the modernist subject and a socially constructed subject. Most communitarian critics also attempt a synthesis between the individualism of modernity and communitarian values. MacIntyre’s conception of community in which individuals have a largely ascribed status is rarely expressed in this literature. Instead, most communitarian writers attempt to argue that individuality and communality are not antithetical and that the communities they oppose to liberal individualism do not oppose some of the virtues of individualism, most notably freedom and equality.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” LIBERALISM INCORPORATES THE CONCEPTION OF THE COMMON GOOD BY DELEGATING POWER AWAY FROM THE GOVERNMENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE. THE TWO ETHICAL REGIMES ARE COMPLIMENTARY SYSTEMS, PARTICULARLY IN THIS INSTANCE, AS BOTH IDEOLOGIES DISPARAGE GOVERNMENTAL COERCION Candace Gauthier, Ph.D., philosophy professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina, KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS JOURNAL, 2000, p. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kennedy_institute_of_ethics_journal/v01 0/10.4gauthier.htmlaccessed 5/20/2006.. The defenders of liberalism have attempted to respond to these charges and to identify some of the shared interests of a pluralistic democratic community. Joel Feinberg believes that liberalism includes a conception of the common good and a number of shared interests such as mutual tolerance, respect, public service, patriotism, charity, and cooperation. James Childress has defended the principle of respect for autonomy in health care against attacks by communitarians, describing it as ". . . an important moral limit and as limited." He explains that this principle is not based on an ideal of the autonomous person, nor does it disregard the influence of authority and tradition on our personal decisions. It is actually, Childress argues, "a principle of obligation" because it calls attention to respect for the autonomy of others. Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings have responded to the distortion of autonomy and individualism that is characteristic of modern liberal society by recommending a balance between autonomy and social control. Ezekiel Emanuel believes that a consensus is building among liberals and communitarians that a shared conception of the good is necessary to resolve political issues in our society. Moreover, there may even be agreement on the relevant conception of the good, itself. Emanuel writes, "[b]oth envision a need for citizens who are independent and responsible and for public forums that present citizens with opportunities to enter into public deliberations on social policies."

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Answers to: “We Boost Communitarianism” LIBERAL INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS ARE CRITICAL TO THE PROTECTION OF COMMUNITIES AGAINST THE TOTALITARIAN STATE. Allen Buchanan, philosophy professor, University of Arizona, ETHICS, July 1989, p. 858. How the liberal individual rights protect community. Consider the rights to freedom of association, expression, and religion, which the liberal champions. Historically, these rights have provided a strong bulwark against attempts to destroy or dominate various communities within nation-states. They allow individuals to partake of the alleged essential human good of community by protecting existing communities from without and by giving individuals the freedom to unite with other like-minded others to create new communities. This “communitarian” argument for the liberal political thesis can in fact be strengthened. At least in our century, the greatest single threat to communities probably has been totalitarianism. As the name implies, the totalitarian state recognizes no limit on its authority, seeking to control every aspect of it’s citizen’s lives. It cannot tolerate genuine communities within its boundaries because they would eliminate the individuals independence upon and allegiance to the state. And it is a matter of historical record that totalitarian regimes have employed the most ruthless measures to undermine traditional communities – the family and the church in particular – in the name of achieving an all inclusive political community. The liberal political thesis, in contrast, is a direct and explicit rejection of the totalitarian state. So to the extent the totalitarian state is a threat to communities, we should regard the priority on individual civil and political rights usually associated with liberalism as the protector of community, even if the liberal political thesis is itself silent as to the importance of community in good life.

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Answers to: “Need to help people” LIBERTARIANISM WOULD BENEFIT THE POOR John Hospers, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, THE LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE, Tibor Machan, ed., 1974, p20. Should government have no role in assisting the needy, in providing social security, in legislating minimum wages, in fixing prices and putting a ceiling on rents, in curbing monopolies, in erecting tariffs, in guaranteeing jobs, in managing the money supply? To these and all similar questions the libertarian answers with an unequivocal no. "But then you'd let people go hungry!" comes the rejoinder. This, the libertarian insists, is precisely what would not happen; with the restrictions removed, the economy would flourish as never before. With the controls taken off business, existing enterprises would expand and new ones would spring into existence satisfying more and more consumer needs; millions more people would be gainfully employed instead of subsisting on welfare, and all kinds of research and production, released from the stranglehold of government, would proliferate, fulfilling man's needs and desires as never before. It has always been so whenever government has permitted men to be tree traders on a free market.

THE FREE SOCIETY IS BEST FOR EVERYONE Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 49. So as to achieve such feats as a matter of individual responsible,, it is necessary that everyone enjoy the freedom in society that human beings can insure for each other without in any way being required to become indentured to others. Therefore, the free society, via the respect of everyone's naturally derived rights to life, liberty and property, is the best political order for every human being.

LIBERTARIANISM WOULD STIMULATE PRIVATE CHARITY Richard A. Epstein, Professor of Law at University of Chicago, REASON, May 1993, p.60. We have to let go of the allure of universality, which is today treated as though it were an undeniable ethical imperative. In part the slack will be picked up by a resurgence of private charitable care, which hospitals could provide if freed of their regulatory burdens.

REDUCED STATISM INCREASES CHARITY Richard A. Epstein, Professor of Law at University of Chicago, KANSAS LAW REVIEW, Winter 1992, p.314. The first of these is to organize some voluntary charitable institutions whereby medical care is given out free of charge. Before the rise of the public assistance programs, hospitals and private physicians routinely provide health care on just this basis, in an effort to bridge the gap between utility and wealth.

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Answers to: “Need to help people” WELFARE PROGRAMS DON'T BENEFIT THE POOR Douglas J. Den Uyl, Professor of Philosophy at Bellarmine College, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLICY, Winter 1993, p.216-7. In addition, in democratic systems welfare programs become "commodified," that is, traded like other goods or services in exchange for political concessions and like benefits through a process of log rolling and interest-group competition. This tends to make welfare less a moral matter of the relief of suffering and more a political mechanism for catering to middle-class desires for security.

WELFARE CREATES DEPENDENCY Douglas J. Den Uyl, Professor of Philosophy at Bellarmine College, SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLICY, Winter 1993, p.216. But the problem with this sort of account is that putting it into practice may provide perverse incentives to free-ride on the provision of welfare by others and to strategically exploit the system, either by exaggerating one's own need for welfare, or by advancing programs for one's own benefit that others will have to pay for.

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Answers to: Warlords Turn THERE ARE MULTIPLE CHECKS ON WARLORDS Robert Murphy, adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and teaches economics at Hillsdale College, BUT WOULDN'T WARLORDS TAKE OVER, 2005, p. http://www.mises.org/story/1855, http://www.mises.org/story/1855 accessed 5/10/06.

Third, people need to really picture the nightmare scenario to see how absurd it is. Imagine a bustling city, such as New York, that is initially a free market paradise. Is it really plausible that over time rival gangs would constantly grow, and eventually terrorize the general public? Remember, these would be admittedly criminal organizations; unlike the city government of New York, there would be no ideological support for these gangs. We must consider that in such an environment, the law-abiding majority would have all sorts of mechanisms at their disposal, beyond physical confrontation. Once private judges had ruled against a particular rogue agency, the private banks could freeze its assets (up to the amount of fines levied by the arbitrators). In addition, the private utility companies could shut down electricity and water to the agency’s headquarters, in accordance with standard provisions in their contracts. Of course, it is theoretically possible that a rogue agency could overcome these obstacles, either through intimidation or division of the spoils, and take over enough banks, power companies, grocery stores, etc. that only full-scale military assault would conquer it. But the point is, from an initial position of market anarchy, these would-be rulers would have to start from scratch. In contrast, under even a limited government, the machinery of mass subjugation is ready and waiting to be seized.

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Answers to: Warlords Turn STATES CONSTANTLY COLLAPSE INTO CIVIL WAR A LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY OFFERS THE BEST DEFENSE Robert Murphy, adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute and teaches economics at Hillsdale College, BUT WOULDN'T WARLORDS TAKE OVER, 2005, p. http://www.mises.org/story/1855, http://www.mises.org/story/1855 accessed 5/10/06. On two separate occasions in the last couple of weeks, people have asked me a familiar question: “In a system of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ or the free-market order, wouldn’t society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords?” Unfortunately I didn’t give adequate answers at the times, but I hope in this article to prove the adage that later is better than never.APPLES AND ORANGES When dealing with the warlord objection, we need to keep our comparisons fair. It won’t do to compare society A, which is filled with evil, ignorant savages who live under anarchy, with society B, which is populated by enlightened, law-abiding citizens who live under limited government. The anarchist doesn’t deny that life might be better in society B. What the anarchist does claim is that, for any given population, the imposition of a coercive government will make things worse. The absence of a State is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to achieve the free society. To put the matter differently: It is not enough to demonstrate that a state of private-property anarchy could degenerate into ceaseless war, where no single group is strong enough to subjugate all challengers, and hence no one can establish “order.” After all, communities living under a State degenerate into civil war all the time. We should remember that the frequently cited cases of Colombia and now Iraq are not demonstrations of anarchy-turned-into-chaos, but rather examples of governmentturned-into-chaos. For the warlord objection to work, the statist would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized. The popular case of Somalia, therefore, helps neither side.[i] It is true that Rothbardians should be somewhat disturbed that the respect for non-aggression is apparently too rare in Somalia to foster the spontaneous emergence of a totally free market community. But by the same token, the respect for “the law” was also too weak to allow the original Somali government to maintain order. Now that we’ve focused the issue, I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly State. Private agencies own the assets at their disposal, whereas politicians (especially in democracies) merely exercise temporary control over the State’s military equipment. Bill Clinton was perfectly willing to fire off dozens of cruise missiles when the Lewinsky scandal was picking up steam. Now regardless of one’s beliefs about Clinton’s motivations, clearly Slick Willie would have been less likely to launch such an attack if he had been the CEO of a private defense agency that could have sold the missiles on the open market for $569,000 each . We can see this principle in the case of the United States. In the 1860s, would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services? CONTRACT THEORY OF GOVERNMENT I can imagine a reader generally endorsing the above analysis, yet still resisting my conclusion. He or she might say something like this: “In a state of nature, people initially have different views of justice. Under market anarchy, different consumers would patronize dozens of defense agencies, each of which attempts to use its forces to implement incompatible codes of law. Now it’s true that these professional gangs might generally avoid conflict out of prudence, but the equilibrium would still be precarious.” “To avoid this outcome,” my critic could elaborate, “citizens put aside their petty differences and agree to support a single, monopoly agency, which then has the power to crush all challengers to its authority. This admittedly raises the new problem of controlling the Leviathan, but at least it solves the problem of ceaseless domestic warfare.” There are several problems with this possible approach. First, it assumes that the danger of private warlords is worse than the threat posed by a tyrannical central government. Second, there is the inconvenient fact that no such voluntary formation of a State ever occurred. Even those citizens who, say, supported the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were never given the option of living in market anarchy; instead they had to choose between government under the Articles of Confederation or government under the Constitution. But for our

If, by hypothesis, the vast majority of people—although they have different conceptions of justice—can all agree that it is wrong to use violence to settle their honest disputes, then market forces would lead to peace among the private police agencies. Yes, it is perfectly true that people have vastly different opinions concerning particular legal issues. Some people favor capital punishment, some consider abortion to be murder, and there would be no consensus on how many guilty people should go free to avoid the false conviction of one innocent defendant. Nonetheless, if the contract theory of government is correct, the vast majority of individuals can agree that they should settle these issues not through force, but rather through an orderly procedure (such as is provided by periodic elections). But if this does indeed describe a particular population, why would we expect such virtuous people, as consumers, to patronize defense agencies that routinely used force against weak opponents? Why wouldn’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements, and submitted their legitimate disputes to reputable, disinterested arbitrators? purposes, the most interesting problem with this objection is that, were it an accurate description, it would be unnecessary for such a people to form a government.

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Altruism Immoral EGOISM IS JUSTIFIED BY VIEWING EACH PERSON AS AN END IN HIM OR HERSELF Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p. 27. The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others-and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. Tc live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.

HUMAN LIFE REQUIRES SELFISHNESS Leonard Peikoff, Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College, THE OMINOUS PARALLELS, 1982, p. 308309. Man's mind requires selfishness, and so does his life in every aspect: a living organism has to be the beneficiary of its own actions. It has to pursue specific objects--for itself, for its own s:ike and survival. Life requires the gaining of values, not their loss; achievement, not renunciation; self-preservation, not selfsacrifice. Man can choose to value and pursue self-immolation, but he cannot survive or prosper by such a method.

ALTRUISM INEVITABLY LEADS TO THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE Leonard Peikoff, Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College, THE' OMINOUS PARALLELS, 1982, p. 302. If sacrifice is equated with virtue, there is no stopping the advance of the totalitarian state. "It goes on and will go on," said Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, so long as men telieve that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it." "The world," said Roark, "is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. " It was true in 1943, when The Fountainhead was published. It is just as true and much more obvious today.

ALTRUISM UNDERMINES FREEDOM Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p95. America's inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

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Altruism Immoral COERCION IS THE FLIP SIDE OF ALTRUISM Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p81. Humility and presumptuousness are always two sides of the same premise, and always share the task of filling the space vacated by self-esteem in a collectivized mentality. The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends. The more neurotic he is or the more conscientious in the practice of altruism (and these two aspects of his psychology will act reciprocally to reinforce each other), the more he will tend to devise schemes "for the good of mankind" or of "society" or of "the public" or of "future generations" or of anything except actual human beings.

CHARITY IS A PERSONAL NOT A COLLECTIVE CHOICE Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p80. Only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help others; society - as an organized political system - has no rights in the matter at all.

RIGHTS GUARD HUMANS AGAINST VIOLENCE Leonard Peikoff, Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College, THE OMINOUS PARALLELS, 1982, p310. Man's rights, Ayn Rand observes, can be violated only by physical force (fraud is an indirect form of force). A political system based on the recognition of rights is one that guards man against violence. Men therefore deal with one another not as potential killers, but as sovereign traders, according to their own independent judgment and voluntary consent. This kind of system represents the methodical protection of man's mind and of his self-interest, i.e., of the function and purpose on which human life depends.

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Property Rights Are Foundational PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE ESSENTIAL TO ALL OTHER RIGHTS Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL, 1967, p. 18. In regard to political economy, this last requires special emphasis: man has to work and produce in order to support his life. He has to support his life by his own effort and by the guidance of his own mind. If he cannot dispose of the product of his effort, he cannot dispose of his life. Without property rights, ao other rights can be practiced.

AN EFFECTIVE RIGHT TO LIFE REQUIRES PROPERTY RIGHTS Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, 1964, p. 94. The right to life is the source of all rights--and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

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Permutation Answers CANNIBALIZATION DA – WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM ALLOWS THE GOVERNMENT TO CO-OPT LIBRATORY MOVEMENTS AND RE-DEPLOY THEM TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF INFINITE EXPANSION – THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT MOVEMENT IS PROOF OF THE SUCCESS OF THIS TACTIC Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr, President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, WHAT SHOULD FREEDOM LOVERS DO, April 20,2004, p. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?control=1499&id=71. If often happens that an ideological movement will make great strides through education and organization and cultural influence, only to take the illogical leap of believing that politics and political influence, which usually means taking jobs within the bureaucracy, is the next rung on the ladder to success. This is like trying to fight a fire with matches and gasoline. This is what happened to the Christian right in the 1980s. They got involved in politics in order to throw off the yoke of the state. Twenty years later, many of these people are working in the Department of Education or for the White House, doing the prep work to amend the Constitution or invade some foreign country. This is a disastrous waste of intellectual capital. It is particularly important that believers in liberty not take this course. Government work has been the chosen career path of socialists, social reformers, and Keynesians for at least a century. It is the natural home to them because their ambition is to control society through government. It works for them but it does not work for us. In the first half of the 20th century, libertarians knew how to oppose statism. They went into business and journalism. They wrote books. They agitated within the cultural arena. They developed fortunes to help fund newspapers, schools, foundations, and public education organizations. They expanded their commercial ventures to serve as a bulwark against central planning. They became teachers and, when possible, professors. They cultivated wonderful families and focused on the education of their children. It is a long struggle but it is the way the struggle for liberty has always taken place. But somewhere along the way, some people, enticed by the prospect of a fast track to reform, rethought this idea. Perhaps we should try the same technique that the left did. We should get our people in power and displace their people, and then we can bring about change toward liberty. In fact, isn't this the most important goal of all? So long as the left controls the state, it will expand in ways that are incompatible with freedom. We need to take back the state. So goes the logic. What is wrong with it? The

state's only function is as an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. That is its distinguishing mark. It is what makes the state the state. To the same extent that the state responds well to arguments that it should be larger and more powerful, it is institutionally hostile to anyone who says that it should be less powerful and less coercive. That is not to say that some work from the "inside" cannot do some good, some of the time. But it is far more likely that the state will convert the libertarian than for the libertarian to convert the state.

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Permutation Answers Contradictions destroy the libertarian program (Gender Paraphrased) Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 4/20/06.

Thus, the libertarian must never allow him (or her)self to be trapped into any sort of proposal for "positive" governmental action; in his perspective, the role of government should only be to remove itself from all spheres of society just as rapidly as it can be pressured to do so. Neither should there be any contradictions in rhetoric. The libertarian should not indulge in any rhetoric, let alone any policy recommendations, which would work against the eventual goal. Thus, suppose that a libertarian is asked to give his views on a specific tax cut. Even if he does not feel that he can at the moment call loudly for tax abolition, the one thing that he (or she) must not do is add to his support of a tax cut such unprincipled rhetoric as, "Well, of course, some taxation is essential . . . ," etc. Only harm to the ultimate objective can be achieved by rhetorical flourishes which confuse the public and contradict and violate principle.

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Alternative: Non-Governmental Social Control EFFECTIVE NON-GOVERNMENT MEANS OF SOCIAL CONTROL WOULD EXIST IN LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY. Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p.45. Voluntary approaches to social direction, in the variety of ways we refer to as ostracism, rebuke, boycott, etc., are available for use to everyone and anyone. These ways can be developed into massive and severe instruments of social control and change. It would be quite illegitimate to dismiss these methods as ineffectual, especially in light of the entirely ineffectual character of coercive efforts to promote or stifle personal and social development. The libertarians cannot and will not give the false promise that coercion will guarantee the rooting out of evil and the promotion of good. The libertarian is prepared, however, to spell out realistic noncoercive prospects of achieving these ends. Outside the government's proper peacekeeping and retaliatory functions, there is ample room for the libertarian to introduce non-political means so as to cope with the problems and challenges of personal and social life. LIBERTARIANISM ALLOWS VOLUNTARY ALTERNATIVES TO STATE COERCION Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p44-5. Libertarian political theory holds it as a violation of the nature of man to engage in coercive dictation of other people's social practices, sexual habits, religious affiliations, and so forth. Nevertheless libertarianism does not preclude other means for advancing social goals. Some of these are close voluntary substitutes for outright coercion. Moreover, parental responsibility in a free society (along libertarian lines) would not preclude the use of physical force against a child within the dictates of reason. A child is normally incapable of making rational decisions concerning its behavior and could, unless at times forcibly yet reasonably forbidden from doing so, place itself in severe danger. This form of coercion is not excluded in libertarian theory. LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY PROMOTES VIRTUE Tibor Machan, Professor of Philosophy, University of San Diego, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p44. LIBERTARIAN POLITICAL THEORY implies that a government functions properly when it upholds justice in human relations by the standard of natural human rights--as initially developed in John Locke's Second Treatise and given more depth and scope by contemporary libertarians. Such a government would fulfill both the ancient and the modern role of state, namely, the encouragement of virtue and the promotion of peace and prcsperity. The former would be achieved by securing liberty for all, which is a necessary condition for the virtuous life in society. If one acts because of coercion or its threat, one cannot make moral choices. A legal system in which freedom is not protected and preserved prevents individual moral responsibility. So government that protects and preserves human freedom encourages individual moral responsibility and human virtue.

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Uniqueness Answer: Half The Economy Is Controlled Now Bruce Chapman, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, NATIONAL SERVICE: PRO & CON, ed., Williamson Everson, 1990, p. 154. This is not a market economy. Government spending is 45 percent of total national income. There are federal, state, and local controls way beyond that-immigration controls, the tariff, minimum wages and hours. Half the economy is government controlled.

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Link Answers 1. CITIZENSHIP REQUIREMENTS ARE NOT COERCIVE Bruce Chapman, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, NATIONAL SERVICE: PRO & CON, ed., Williamson Everson, 1990, p. 187. A government that requires us to do something endemic to democratic`citizenship is engaged not in an act of coercion but in an act of training for citizenship. I feel as strongly about democracy as you do about war. I do not want to see Americans go in unready for citizenship. Our democracy cannot survive unless Americans are citizens. Most Americans-adults and young people-are inadequate citizens who do not even bother to use the ballot, let alone do much else. The nation as a whole and our schools in particular have a responsibility to find ways to make people citizen-ready for the great enterprise of democracy-.-N

NATIONAL SERVICE ISN’T SLAVERY 2. Donald Eberly, Exectutive Director, National Service Secretariat, NATIONAL SERVICE: PRO & CON, p. 226. National service would be unconstitutional and a return to slavery. This refers to a form of service that would put anyone in prison who refused to serve. It may or may not be constitutional, but as an idea with few supporters and of little interest to congressional advocates of national service, mandatory service is irrelevant to today's national service debate.

3. NATIONAL SERVICE ISN’T COERCIVE Eric Gorhman, sociologist, State University of New York, NATIONAL SERVICE: CITIZENSHIP AND POLITICAL EDUCTION, 1992, p. 41. This objection can be addressed in a number of ways. First, individuals would be coerced into national service not because they are human, but because they are citizens of the United States. As such, they have responsibilities to the state as well as rights, and they must fulfill those responsibilities in order for their rights to be protected. Thus, it is not necessarily their natural rights that are being violated-for freedom of expression and property can be defined in a number of ways-rather their civil or societal rights are being earned. Individuals are not only entitled to particular rights and privileges from government, they are also obliged, through a moral duty, to preserve the social structure and culture which ensures those rights and privileges." Second, the argument that we must move away from an individualist conception of the citizen comes into clear relief here. For national service can be a vehicle by which people come to under stand that they owe duties to the national community, and that they are not merely the recipients of federal benefits and privileges. That is, national service can be a way for individuals to increase their understandings of their political communities, and by doing so become more clear about their rights and privileges. Through political education individuals can come to a more immediate understanding of their capabilities as human beings, and so augment their freedoms rather than have them restricted. This last point also implies that national service need not be national servitude. Where people object to coercive service they do so because they assume the program is in some sense servitude; but a program could be designed which minimizes its servile characteristics. As I discuss below, none of the contemporary proposals for national service do so, because they emphasize the work and socializing aspects of national service. These proposals thus presume that most enrollees would serve a particular project or industry that they would not normally. But were national service to be founded on political education, critics could not easily argue that coercing people into such a program violates their rights. The purpose of the program would be to apprise participants of their rights. This could be a program where individuals are taught the workings of government as well as new political ideas; in such a way they could come to a greater understanding of their capacities as citizens: Indirectly; this may help them assess their abilities as human beings. )

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General Answers EXTINCTION OUTWEIGHS Murray Rothbard, Dean of Austrian School, Head of Mises Institute, FOR A NEW LIBERTY: THE LIBERTARIAN MANIFESTO, 1973, p. http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p263. accessed 4/20/06.

Many libertarians are uncomfortable with foreign policy matters and prefer to spend their energies either on fundamental questions of libertarian theory or on such "domestic" concerns as the free market or privatizing postal service or garbage disposal. Yet an attack on war or a warlike foreign policy is of crucial importance to libertarians. There are two important reasons. One has become a cliche, but is all too true nevertheless: the overriding importance of preventing a nuclear holocaust. To all the long-standing reasons, moral and economic, against an interventionist foreign policy has now been added the imminent, ever-present threat of world destruction. If the world should be destroyed, all the other problems and all the other isms—socialism, capitalism, liberalism, or libertarianism—would be of no importance whatsoever. ANARCHO-CAPITALISM WOULD GIVE RISE TO REGIMES OF DOMINATION AND OPPRESSION, THIS POSES THE SINGLE GREATEST THREAT TO HUMAN EXISTENCE Noam Chomsky, philosopher, CHOMSKY ON ANARCHO-CAPITALISM,2004, p. P. http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/chomsky-on-ac.txt.

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of "free contract" between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

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Property Rights Answers 1. PROPERTY RIGHTS CAN BE OVERRIDDEN Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p9-10. Like Scanlon, Judith Jarvis T'homson is skeptical about the possibility of defending the absolutely inviolable character of Nozickian property rights. This skepticism derives from a number of examples in which our intuitions incline us toward the view that the property rights in question may be overridden by other considerations. Thomson then asks what is it, at the margin, which sustains the moral invincibility of a property claim and conversely, what is it that justifies the infringement of a property right when we are morally persuaded to ignore it? Property claims are to be sustained, she argues, when, in addition to having acquired title to an object in suitable ways, we value that object highly. Such claims may be overridden when a life will be lost in the absence of an infringement of rights. This demonstrates, Thomson argues, that rights are derivable from human interests and needs and this in turn suggests that the constraints that rights impose upon redistribution are not as inflexible as Nozick's deontological conception of them leads him to believe.

2. PRIVATE PROPERLY MAY LIMIT FREEDOM Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p. 20. Furthermore it call be plausibly contended, according to Ryan, that private property inhibits freedom rather than expands it. The transition from common ground to enclosed ground in England rendered large tracts of land inaccessible to those who formerly had the free use of it. Indeed, Ryan argues against Nozick that the right to acquire personal property from nature is a source of increasingly constricted autonomy.

3. PROPERTY RIGHTS RESTRICT FREEDOM Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 147. That property-rights increase some people's freedom by restricting others' is obvious when we think of the origin of private property. When Amy unilaterally appropriated land that had previously been held in common, Ben was legally deprived of his freedom to use the land. Since private ownership by one person presupposes non-ownership by others, the 'free market' restricts as well as creates liberties, just as welfarestate redistribution both creates and restricts liberties. Hence, as Cohen puts it, 'the sentence "free enterprise constitutes economic liberty" is demonstrably false'.

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Property Rights Answers 4. THERE'S NO RIGHT TO PROFIT FROM UNDESERVED TALENTS Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1.990, p 125. But there is a deeper problem with Nozick's self-ownership argument. Nozick has not adequately confronted Rawls's claim that people do not have a legitimate claim to the rewards of the exercise of their undeserved talents. I have tried to show that we can get a Rawlsian distributive scheme even without denyirg self-ownership, since redistribution could arise from the requirements of a fair theory of access to external resources. But I still think that Rawls's denial of self-ownership was perfectly sound. I think that we can treat people's talents as part of their circumstances, and hence as possible grounds, in and of themselves, for compensation. People have rights to the possess:ion and exercise of their talents, but the disadvantaged may also have rights to some compensation for their disadvantage. It is wrong for people to suffer from undeserved inequalities in circumstances, and the disadvantaged have direct claims on the more fortunate, quite independently of the question of access to external resources.

5. PROPERTY RESTS ON FORCE, HENCE IT CAN BE LEGITIMATELY REDISTRIBUTED Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 108. The historical answer is often that natural resources came to be someone's property by force, which raises a dilemma for those who hope Nozick's theory will defend existing inequalities. Either the use of force made the initial acquisition illegitimate, in which case current title is illegitimate, and there is no moral reason why governments should not confiscate the wealth and redistribute it. Or the initial use of force did not render the acquisition illegitimate, in which case we can, with equal justification, use force to take it away from its current owners and redistribute it. Either way, the fact that initial acquisition often involved force means that there is no moral objection to redistributing existing wealth.

8. ILLEGITIMATE INITIAL ACQUISITION OF RESOURCES JUSTIFIES REDISTRIBUTION Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 109. Because most initial acquisition was in fact illegitimate, Nozick's theory cannot protect existing holdings from redistribution. But we still need to know how acquisition could have arisen legiamately. If we cannot answer that question, then we should not only postpone the implementation of Nozick's principle of transfer until historical titles are ascertained or rectified, we should reject it entirely. If there is no way that people can appropriate unowned resources for themselves without denying other people's claim to equal consideration, then Nozick's right of transfer never gets off the ground.

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Property Rights Answers 9. SINCE INITIAL ACQUISITION WAS UNJUST, THERE ARE NO LEGITIMATE ENTITLEMENTS Jonathan Wolff, philosopher, ROBERT NOZICK, 1991, p. 141. Second, initial appropriation remains undefended by Nozick, and this may well be because it is indefensible on libertarian grounds Allowing people virtually unlimited appropriation of the world will importantly restrict what others can do, thus undermining their liberty and self-ownership. Thus Nozick's concept of ownership itself generates conflicts, and so The project of allowing no restrictions upon ownership itself falls into incoherence.

10. BECAUSE TALENTS ARE UNDESERVED THERE IS NO RIGHT TO BENEFIT FROM THEM MATERIALLY Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p.105-6. There are many ways in which liberals respect individuals' claims over their own talents. Liberals accept that I am the legitimate possessor of my talents and that I am free to use them in accordance with my chosen projects. However, liberals say that because it is a matter of brute luck that people have the talents they do, their rights over their talents do not include the right to accrue unequal rewards from the exercise of those talents. Because talents are undeserved, it is not a denial of moral equality for the government to consider people's talents as part of their circumstances, and hence as a possible ground for claims to compensation. People who are born naturally disadvantaged have a legitimate claim on those with advantages, and the naturally advantaged have a moral obligation to the disadvantaged. Thus, in Dworkin's theory, the talented owe insurance premiums that get paid out to the disadvantaged, while in Rawls's theory, the talented only benefit from their talents if it also benefits the disadvantaged.

PROPERTY RIGHTS AREN'T ABSOLUTE Tom Beauchamp, Department of Philosophy at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, RIGHTS OF HEALTH CARE, Thomas Bole III and William Bonderson, 1985, p121. The rights not to he coerced and to private property are rights of great importance, but not so important or precise in scope as to be absolute. Nothing about either right suggests more than prima facie status. Accordingly, any moral right - such as the right not to be harmed -- that is weightier in the circumstances can override the right not to be coerced or the right to hold property.

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RADICALLY DIFFERENT INHERITANCES ARE INTUITIVELY UNJUST Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 41. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of the entitlement theory are immediately apparent. On the one hand, can it really be just that one baby should come into the world with a multi-million dollar trust fund, the best possible schooling, and family connections with the nation's leading politicians and financiers awaiting him, while another baby faces life in a dingy apartment with no money and nothing else to help him on his way in the world? Neither baby at the moment of birth can possibly deserve anything; an equal division would therefore seem the only just cne.

MARKET TRANSACTIONS INVOLVE MORE THAN SELF-OWNED POWERS Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p. 107. Nozick claims that market exchanges involve the exercise of individuals' powers, and since individuals own their powers, they also own whatever comes from the exercise of those powers in the marketplace. But this is too quick. Market exchanges involve more than the exercise of self-owned powers. They also ir:volve legal rights over things, over external goods, and these things are not just created out of nothing by our selfowned pawers. If I own some land, I may have improved the land, through the use of my self-owned powers. But I did not create the land, and so my title to the land (and hence my right to use the land in market exchanges) cannot be grounded solely in the exercise of my self-owned powers.

OUR NATURAL TALENTS AREN'T OUR PROPERTY Norman Daniels, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, JUST HEALTH CARE, 1985, p121. Still others (Rawls 1971) challenge the implicit assumption that our natural talents and skills are our property in the sense that we deserve, and are entitled to benefit from, their use in any way that we can through free exchanges. They argue that such endowments are themselves 'undeserved' and should work to true advantage of everyone, not just their possessors.

DESERTS DON'T JUSTIFY PROPORTIONAL BENEFITS John Christman, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Spring 1986, p.167. All that this notion of desert (the concept constitutive of morality per entails is that after a laborer develops an unowned resource, she or he deserves gratitude or praise (if developing the resource benefits everyone). But this does not. imply that the laborer deserves a proportional or fitting benefit for the service. I do not wish to claim that principles of desert overall are without justification (though some doubts on this score can be raised), but it should be clear that the concept of desert that is necessarily included in any system of morals leaves open the question of what is deserved besides praise or blame itself: what is deserved beyond that is a question answerable only with a separate moral argument, one which takes into consideration the distribution of benefits generally.

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Property Rights Answers LIBERTARIANISM IGNORES THE UNFAIR BARGAINING POWER OF THE WEALTHY John Christman, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic. Institute, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Spring 1986, p.175. Nozick does not take seriously the special disadvantage that beset` a person who is comparatively worse off than her neighbors. I am not here referring only to envy but for example to the differential bargaining power among individuals that is made possible by severe inequalities in wealth. By owning all those al wells you will be able to outbid me for any new object or resource that comes along and thus worsen my entire life prospects by your presence. PURE CAPITALISM ISN'T JUSTIFIED BY SELF-OWNERSHIP Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p.118-9. I have tried to show that the principle of self-ownership does rat by itself generate a moral defence of capitalism, since a capitalist requires not only ownership of her self, but also ownership of resources. Nozick believes that self-ownership inevitably leads to unrestricted property-rights, but we are in fact confronted by a variety of economic regimes that are compatible with self-ownership, depending on our theory of legitimate appropriation, and our assumptions about the status of the external world. Nozick believes that self-ownership requires that people be entitled to all the rewards of their market exchanges, but different regimes vary in the extent to which they allow self-owning individuals to retain their market rewards. Some will allow the naturally talented to translate their natural advantages into unequal ownership of the external world (although not necessarily to the extent allowed by Nozick); others will redistribute market income so as to ensure that the naturally disadvantaged have equal access to resources (as in Rawls or Dworkin). Self-ownership is compatible with all these options.

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Libertarianism Doesn’t Protect Rights LIBERTARIANISM UNDERMINES SOCIAL AUTHORITY, LEADING TO OPPRESSION Robert Nisbet, Professor of Sociology, Columbia, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p22. Libertarians, on the other hand, appear to see social and moral authority and despotic political power as elements of a single spectrum, as an unbroken continuity. If, their argument goes, we are to be spared Leviathan we must challenge any and all forms of authority, including those which are inseparable from the social bond. Libertarians seem to me to give less and less recognition to the very substantial difference between the coercions of, say, family, school, and local community and those of the centralized bureaucratic state. For me it is a generalization proved countless times in history that the onset of ever more extreme political-military power has for its necessary prelude the erosion and collapse of the authorities within the social bond which serve to give the individual a sense of identity and security, whose very diversity and lack of unconditional power prevents any escape-proof monopoly, and which in the aggregate are the indispensable bulwarks against the invasion of centralized political power - which of course is unconditional. But I do not often find among libertarians these days any clear recognition of the point I have just made.

UNFETTERED LIBERTY LEADS TO SELF-DEFEATING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER Norman Daniels, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, JUST HEALTH CARE, 1985, p.120. Some critics argue that such a system of unfettered liberty will tend over time to accumulate concentrations of power and wealth which undermine the possibility of there being fair and truly free exchanges between economic and political unequals. Thus, even in the name of liberty, it is important to constrain liberty.

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Economic Redistribution Good 1. INCOME REDISTRIBUTION ENHANCES SELF-DETERMINATION Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 122. Libertarians claim that liberal welfare programmes, by limiting property-rights, unduly limit people's selfdetermination. Hence the removal of welfare redistribution programmes (Nozick), or their limitation to an absolute minimum (Fried), would be an improvement in terms of self-determination. But that is a weak objection. Redistributive programmes do restrict the self-determination of the well off to a limited degree. But they also give real control over their lives to people who previously lacked it. Liberal redistribution does not sacrifice self-determination for some other goal. Rather, it aims at a fairer distribution of the means required for self-determination. Libertarianism, by contrast, allows undeserved inequalities in that distribution-its concern with self-determination does not extend to a concern for ensuring the fair distribution of the conditions required for self-determination. In fact, it harms those who most need help in securing those conditions. If each person is to be treated as an end in herself, as Nozick says repeatedly, then I see no reason for preferring ;a libertarian regime to a liberal redistributive one.

2. REDISTRIBUTION ISN'T AN AFFRONT TO DIGNITY Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p122-3. Finally, Nozick might argue that welfare redistribution denies people's dignity, and this dignity is crucial to treating people as equals (e.g. Nozick 1974: 334). Indeed Nozick often writes as if the idea that other people have claims on the fruits of my talents is an assault on my dignity. But this is implausible. One problem is that, Nozick often ties dignity to self-determination, so that it will be liberal regimes, not libertarian ones, which best promote each person's dignity. In any event, dignity is predicated on, or a byproduct of, other moral beliefs. We only feel something to be an attack on our dignity if we are already convinced that it is wrong. Redistribution will feel like an assault on dignity only if we believe it is morally wrong. If we believe instead that redistribution is a required part of treating people as equals, then it will serve to promote, rather than attack, people's sense of equal dignity.

3. NOZICK'S CONCEPT OF DIGNITY REQUIRES ACCESS TO RESOURCES Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p. 150. But, we have seen, the notion of dignity and agency that Nozick relies on, based on the idea of acting on one's conception of oneself, requires rights over resources as well as one's person. Having independent access to resources is important for our purposes, and hence our purposive freedom, but that argues for liberal equality not libertarianism.

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Economic Redistribution Good 4. IF MEANINGFUL LIFE HAS VALUE, WE HAVE A DUTY TO PROVIDE FOR ITS MATERIAL BASIS Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p1011. Scheffler rejects these political inferences drawn by Nozick from the intrinsic value of leading a meaningful life. For Scheffler, if there is such value then the rights which it sanctions are qualitatively different from Nozickian ones. Scheffler argues that if a meaningful life has moral value then the capacities required to nurture them are valuable as well. These capacities cannot be employed unless the material conditions necessary to their support are met. The provision of those conditions includes that quantity of distributable goods necessary to ensure a reasonable chance to all of leading a meaningful life. Hence, the centerpiece of Nozick's axiology leads to the very welfare rights which he set out to oppose, according to Scheffler.

5. REDISTRIBUTION IS JUSTIFIED ON UTILITARIAN GROUNDS Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 50. Utilitarianism has no problem in justifying a substantial amount of compulsory redistribution from the rich to the poor. We all recognize that $1,000 means far less to people earning $100,00 than it does to people trying to support a family on $6,000. Therefore in normal circumstances we increase the total happiness when we take from those with a lot and give to those with little. Therefore that is what we ought to do. For the utilitarian it is as simple as that. The result will not absolute equality of wealth. There may be some who need relatively little to be happier, and others whose expensive tastes require more to achieve the same level of happiness. If resources are adequate the utilitarian will give each enough to make him happy, and that will mean giving some more than others.

6. UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES THE WELFARE STATE Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p50-1. None of the arguments Nozick uses against Rawls is decisive when invoked against a utilitarian position. Utilitarianism gives a clear and plausible defense not merely of progressive taxation, welfare payments, and other methods of redistribution, but also of the general right of the state to perform useful functions beyond the protection of its citizens from force and fraud. Utilitarianism also provides an argument in defense of the claim behind Williams's argument for equality-that society should, so far as its resources allow, provide for the most important needs of its members.

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Economic Redistribution Good 7. VIOLATIONS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES DON'T JUSTIFY REJECTING THE WELFARE STATE Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p193. Naturally any opposition to the power of governments will meet with a certain sympathy from observers of the contemporary scene, and Nozick emphasizes the connection between his view and the fight against legal regulation of sexual behavior, drug use, and individual life styles. It is easy to develop an aversion to state power by looking at how actual states wield it. Their activities often include murder, torture, political imprisonment, censorship, conscription for aggressive war, and overthrowing the governments of other countries-not to mention tapping the phones, reading the mail, or regulating the sexual behavior of their own citizens. The objection to these abuses, however, is not that state power exists, but that it is used to do evil rather than good. Opposition to these evils cannot be translated into an ot jection to welfare, public education, or the graduated income tax.

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Taxes Are Moral 1. TAXES ARE JUSTIFIED BY SUFFICIENTLY GOOD ENDS Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 199. Moreover, there is a big difference between suddenly expropriating half of someone's savings and attaching monetary conditions in advance to activities, expenditures, and earnings-the usual form of taxation. The latter is a much less brutal assault upon the person. Whether this kind of limitation of individual liberty should be permitted, to acquire resources for the promotion of desirable ends, is a function of the gravity of the violation and the desirability of the ends.

2. TAXATION LEGITIMATELY CORRECTS NATURAL INEQUALITIES Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 100. Let us assume that I specified an initial distribution D1 that was in line with Rawls's difference principle. Hence each person starts with an equal share of resources, regardless of their natural talents. But at the end of the basketball season, Chamberlain will have earned $250,000, while the handicapped person, who may have no earning power, will have exhausted her resources, and will be on the verge of starvation. Surely our intuitions still tell us that we can tax Chamberlain's income to prevent that starvation. Nozick has persuasively drawn on our intuition about acting on our choices, but his example ignores our intuition about dealing fairly with unequal circumstances.

3. THE AMOUNT ONE WORKS IS STILL SELF-DETERMINED, DISTINGUISHING IT FROM FORCED LABOR Jonathan Wolff, philosopher, ROBERT NOZICK, 1991, p. 91. Under a modern system of progressive taxation you will be taxed if you earn more than a certain amount of money, and how much you will be taxed depends in part on how much work you decide to do. Forced labor rarely includes the option of deciding how much labor to do.

4. TAXATION DOESN'T SIGNIFICANTLY DAMAGE SELF-DETERMINATION Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p.122. A liberal regime which taxes the unequal rewards of undeserved talents does limit some people's selfdetermination. But it is an acceptable limit. Being free to choose one's own career is crucial to selfdetermination, but being free from taxation on the rewards which accrue from undeserved natural talents is not. Eien if one's income is taxed in accordance with Rawlsian principles, one still has a fair share of resources and liberties with which to control the essential features of one's life. Taxing income from the exercise of natural talents does not unfairly disadvantage anyone in their substantive self-ownership, their ability to act according to their conception of themselves.

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Taxes Are Moral 5. TAXATION REDISTRIBUTES FREEDOM RATHER THAN LIMITING IT Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p147. As soon as we ask that question, Flew's equation of capitalism with freedom is undermined. For it is the owners of the resource who are made free to dispose of it, while non-owners are deprived of that freedom. Suppose that a large estate you would have inherited (in the absence of an inheritance tax) now becomes a public park, or a low-income housing project (as a result of the tax). The inheritance tax does not eliminate the freedom to use the property, rather it redistributes that freedom. If you inherit the estate, then you are free to dispose of it as you see fit, but if I use your backyard for my picnic or garden without your permission, then I am breaking the law, and the government will intervene and coercively deprive me of the freedom to continue. On the other hand, my freedom to use and enjoy the property is increased when the welfare state taxes your inheritance to provide me with affordable housing, or a public park. So the free market legally restrains my freedom, while the welfare state increases it.

6. TAXES DON'T VIOLATE RIGHTS John Christman, Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Spring 1986, p.165. Also, as Kearl has pointed out, persons who gain entitlements through embedded labor may enter into a market, the function of which serves to reduce inefficiencies, reduce externalities, and lower negotiation costs which all increase the net social product produced from those entitlements without demanding extra labor from individual traders Thus, taxation which redistributes that extra product would amount to a limitation of the ownership rights of the traders over the commodities in question but not constitute an encroachment on the rights anyone has to her or his labor (since the product redistributed is from the increased efficiencies of the market mechanism, not increased labor.

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Charity Doesn’t Solve the Need for Redistribution 1. CHARITY ISN'T A SUBSTITUTE FOR STATE REDISTRIBUTION Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 199. Nozick would reply that such ends can be achieved by voluntary donations rather than by compulsion, and that people who are well-off and who deplore the existence of poverty should donate significant portions of their assets to help those who are unfortunate. But this is no more plausible coming from Nozick than it was coming from Barry Goldwater. Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be.

2. REDISTRIBUTIVE TAXATION IS PREFERABLE TO VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTION Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 200. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily. The latter is an excessively demanding moral position because it requires voluntary decisions that are quite difficult to make. Most people will tolerate a universal system of compulsory taxation without feeling entitled to complain, where they would feel justified in refusing an appeal that they contribute the same amount voluntarily. This is partly due to lack of assurance that others would do likewise and fear of relative disadvantage; but it is also a sensible rejection of excessive demands on the will, which can be more irksome than automatic demands on the purse.

3. RELIANCE ON VOLUNTARY REDISTRIBUTION THREATENS SOCIAL STABILITY Maadison Powers, Senior Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics YALE LAW AND POLICY REVIEW, 1992, p. .354. Social stability may depend upon more than the provision for individual acts of benevolence. It may be important to the reservation of the bonds of community, not simply that the needs of at least fortunate are met, but that they are met in a way which emphasizes the communal rather than the purely individual character of beneficence. If our overriding aim is to preserve individual liberty while maintaining strong allegiance to public institutions, then it is plausible to argue that commitment to public institutions is most effectively promoted when then needs of its members are met through collective action undertaken y government. Leaving the needs of the less fortunate to be met by private charity, for example, may reinforce in the recipients a sense that society has simply left their fate to the good work of the privileged few. A collective societal response to individual need, by contrast, affirms a stronger commitment to the well-being of its members, and it is likely to generate as fragile bonds of loyalty. If this is true, then we should value public provision for basic needs such as health care over the sum of individual acts of private charity meeting human needs at the same level of benefit to the beneficiaries.

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Self-Determination Answers 1. LIBERALISM, NOT LIBERTARIANISM, MAXIMIZES SELFDETERMINATION Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p.121-2. What regime best promotes substantive self-ownership? Self-determination requires resources as well as rights over one's physical being. We are only able to pursue our most important projects, free from the demands of others, if we are not forced by economic necessity to accept whatever conditions others impose on us in return for access to needed resources. Since meaningful self-determination requires both resources and liberties, and since each of us has a separate existence, each person should have an equal claim to these resources and liberties. But, if to, then the concern for self-determination leads us towards liberal regimes, not libertarian ones.

2. REDISTRIBUTION PROVIDES THE GREATEST EQUAL FREEDOM Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 150. What if libertarians adopt the purposive definition, and claim that the free market provides us with the most important liberties? Whether or not unrestricted property-rights promote one's most important purposes depends on whether or not one actually has property. Being free to bequeath property can promote one's most important purposes, but only if one has property to bequeath. So whatever the relationship between property and purposive freedom, the aim of providing the greatest equal freedom suggests an equal distribution of property, not unrestricted capitalism.

3. LIBERTARIANISM UNDERMINES SELF-DETERMINATION Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto, COh1TEMPORARY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1990, p 152. Libertarianism shares with liberal equality a commitment to the principle of respect for people's choices, but rejects the principle of rectifying unequal circumstances. Taken to the extreme, this is not only intuitively unacceptable, but self-defeating as well, for the failure to rectify disadvantageous circumstances can’t undermine the very values (e.g. self-determination) that the principle of respect for choices is intended to promote. The libertarian denial that undeserved differences in circumstances give rise to moral claims suggests an almost incomprehensible failure to recognize the profound consequences of such differences.

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Libertarianism Immoral 1. EXCESS LIBERTY CREATES A MORAL VACUUM Robert Nisbet, Professor of Sociology, Columbia, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 20. For the conservative, individual freedom lies in the interstices of social and moral authority. Only because of the restraining and guiding effects of such authority does it become possible for human beings to sustain so liberal a political government as that which the Founding Fathers designed in this country and which flourished in England from the late seventeenth century on. Remove the social bonds, as the more zealous and uncompromising of libertarian individualists have proposed ever since William Godwin, and you emerge with, not a free but a chaotic people, not creative but impotent individuals. Human nature, Balzac correctly wrote, cannot endure a moral vacuum.

2. LIBERTARIANISM WOULD UNDERMINE THE MORAL BASIS OF THE LIBERAL STATE Walter Berns, Professor of Government, Georgetown, FREEDOM AND VIRTUE, George Carey, ed., 1984, p. 32-3. I think what I have said above is sufficient to illustrate my point: we were founded on liberal principles, but we used the public authority in nonliberal ways. We did so partly out of habit, I suppose, and partly because there were men--Horace Mann, the central figure in American public schooling, is a good example-who reflected on our situation and who knew that a liberal state could not be perpetuated with simply selfinterested citizens. Men had to be taught to be public-spirited, to care for others, to be at least somewhat altruistic. In the course of time, and partly as the result of Supreme Court decisions affecting public education, public support of private education, and, of course, the censorship of obscenity, we have ceased to use the public authority in these ways. We can now be said to be living off the fat we built up in the past. I shudder to think of what would happen if we moved all the way from liberalism to libertarianism.

3. NOZICK'S LIBERTARIANISM WOULD STARVE 10% OF THE PUBLIC Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p3. While Brian Barry could inveigh in Political Theory, . . . the intellectual texture is of a sort of cuteness that would be wearing in a graduate student and seems to me quite indecent in someone who, from the lofty heights of a professorial chair, is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens (if he recognizes the word) by eliminating all transfer payments through the state, leaving the sick, the old, the disabled, the mothers with young children and no breadwinner and so on, to the tender mercies of private charity, given at the whim and pleasure of the donors and on any terms they choose to impose. The varied responses to the Nozick book in contrast to its predecessor, largely reflect the chasm which separates their respective visions of the good society.

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Objectivism Bad 1. OBJECTIVISM HAS TOO NARROW A VIEW OF THE SELF Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p, 140. I reject Objectivism, not because it is self-centered or because it seeks self-aggrandizement. I criticize it for being selfish in the pejorative sense of restricting the horizons of the Self so as to leave the self-center, not enriched but impoverished, not blown up but withered and blighted. The Self of the Objectivists runs the risk of the only child-it is not unloved, but it is likely to be spoiled, ailing, and fretful, due to overprotection and the too close attention which prevents the growth of responsible freedom.

2. OBJECTIVISM IGNORES AUTHENTIC CHOICE AND SOCIALITY Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 148. Objectivist Man is both an ideal and a reality. He represents only one of the possibilities for the human species. Existentialism rejects Objectivism because it ignores the two sources of existentialist despair instead of seeking some way to overcome them. Objectivism hides the fact that to be free to become what one chooses means also that one must choose what one feels one ought to become. Objectivism tries to evade the knowledge that to exist means not only to be-in-the-world but to-be-with-others.

3. OBJECTIVISM LEADS TO ANARCHY THEN TYRANNY John Robbins, ANSWER TO AYN RAND, 1974, p. 133. I must conclude, then, that as Rand has failed to present a coherent ethical theory, so she has failed to present an intelligible political theory. Her political philosophy, like all secular political philosophies, leads logically to anarchy and/or totalitarianism. It cannot furnish the basis for a free society, despite the brilliant rhetoric that seeks to persuade in lieu of pedestrian logic. Its acceptance by a large segment of the American citizenry will hasten the future of the "boot stamping on the human face forever, " for it will first fire the flames of anarchy, and, second, load the guns of tyranny.

4. OBJECTIVISM LOGICALLY LEADS TO ANARCHY John Robbins, ANSWER TO AYN RAND, 1974, p. 125-6. Objectivism leads logically to anarchy, because if the individual is sovereign he may not properly be forced to "delegate" his rights to the state or government. The Sovereign Individual has every right to refuse to pay taxes, ignore subpoenas, refuse to serve in the armed forces, ignore courts of laws avoid jury duty, retaliate against the police force, and take all measures necessary to the preservation of his rights, including, one supposes. since government is entirely derivative, issuing subpoenas, forming his own armies, and establishing his own courts and judicial procedures.

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Objectivism Bad 5. OBJECTIVISM WOULD LEAD TO A POLICE STATE OR GENOCIDE William O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy„ University of Southern California, WITH CHARITY TOWARD NONE, 1971, p, 217-8. This being the case, Miss Rand is once again, faced with two alternatives: (1) the maintenance of a police state (a sort of free enterprise Sparta, characterized by the passive elimination of the helots as a logical and therefore unavoidable consequence of progressive penury) or (2) the active elimination of the depraved poor in a morally-legitimized purge in retaliation against real or threatened revolution.

6. OBJECTIVIST WOULD LEAD TO GENOCIDE John Robbins, ANSWER TO AYN RAND, 1974, p. 132. Since infants, as well as unborn children are not human by Rand's definition, there would be no immorality in infanticide. To my knowledge Rand has not publicly endorsed that position, but on pain of inconsistency, she must. For the same reason, her philosophy leads logically to the approbation of euthanasia. In fact, because men make themselves, some are better made than others, who are rather poorly made. Logically, then, Rand will be forced to approve the liquidation of imbeciles, morons, idiots, the retarded and mediocre who don't think, the men who . . . do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, like trained animals, the routine of sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand their own work, . . . mental parasites....

7. OBJECTIVISM FAILS TO VALUE OTHERS Ayn Rand, philosopher and novelist, CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL, 1967, p. 146. The indifference with which Objectivist heroes regard all who do not minister to their own self-interest amounts finally to regarding them as objects. Rand and Branden may caution us to remember that the other is an end in himself; somehow he never becomes an end to anyone except himself.

8. OBJECTIVISM CAN'T ENSURE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p146. There is no way to insure that a free market will actually foster the potentialities of all free minds. Since the family structure is left intact, Objectivism certainly makes no provision for equal opportunity for all children. The intellectual elite, whose superior talents and rational morality will have won their place at the top, will owe a large part of their success to chance. Rand's rejection of the demand to love and look after the worthless members of one's family might reduce nepotism a bit; it seems unlikely that leading industrialists will try hard to seek out and develop those who can't make it in their given circumstances but who might if help were given.

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Libertarianism Kritik

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Objectivism Bad 9. OBJECTIVISM LETS US IGNORE VIOLENCE AGAINST OTHERS Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 145. Some time ago, a large number of people in a New York apartment house watched while a man attacked and killed a woman on the sidewalk In such a situation, an Objectivist in that apa:-tment might have come to the woman's aid either because he valued her or because he was righteously indignant over the violation of a principle which he valued. Nothing in his philosophy would make him feel guilty if he did not decide that intervention ministered to his own self-interest. He might simply pull the drapes and complain of the inadequacy of the police force and the faulty education system. If we allow this incident to symbolize the broader social environment, we must say that Objectivism goes beyond nonintervention. It comes dangerously close to defending the right of the attacker to act in the light of his own mistaken doctrine. This fact I insist upon despite the fact that one of the frequent Objectivist laments is directed toward our leniency toward the criminal.

10. OBJECTIVISM CREATES A NEW HIERARCHICAL CONFORMITY Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 141. "We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective," John Gait says of himself and his companions. That is true for Rand as well, and it is what is fundamentally wrong with her Objectivist ethics. In turning her eyes away from whatever cannot be reduced to the objective, she cancels out vast areas of human experience. Subtly a new conformism is introduced. Those who approve of this portrait of man and who have the best ability to liken themselves unto it form a distinct elite at the top. Those with less talent but who accept the validity of the model have smaller rewards but dwell in relative content lower down in the pyramid. Anyone else lives as discarded rubble on the surface. He is not incorporated into the structure of things. He is tolerated and ignored-so long as he does not interfere.

11. OBJECTIVISM WON'T LEAD TO AN OPEN SOCIETY Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 148. Finally we see that existentialism and not Objectivism is really in favor of an open society to foster the growth of unique self-centers, each one pursuing its genuine self-interest and allowing every other to do the same. Objectivism is for free enterprise but not for the free creation of values.

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Libertarianism Kritik

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Nozick Indites NOZICK DOESN'T JUSTIFY HIS MORAL ASSUMPTIONS Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p5. Williams quarrels, as well, with the plausibility of Nozick's hypothetical narrative which depicts the development of the minimal state. It represents, according to Williams, a bizarre departure from any common sense account. Finally, he makes the point that Nozick's view of distributive justice relies on normal intuitions rather than on argument and that competing intuitions can always be found with as great a claim upon our moral sensibilities as those propounded by Nozick.

NOZICK DOESN'T DEFEND HIS BASIS FOR NATURAL RIGHTS Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p192-3. To present a serious challenge to other views, a discussion of libertarianism would have to explore the foundations of individual rights and the reasons for and against different conceptions of the relation between those rights and other values that the state may be in a position to promote. But Nozick's book is theoretically insubstantial: it does not take up the main problems, and therefore fails to make the kind of contribution to political theory that might have been hoped for from someone of his philosophical attainments. In the preface he announces that he was converted to libertarianism by the decisive force of the arguments, but no such arguments appear in the book. He has left the establishment of the moral foundations to another occasion, and his brief indication of how the basic views might be- defended is disappointing.

NOZICK'S INTUITIONS CONCERNING ENTITLEMENT AREN'T WIDELY SHARED Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 195 Nozick's intuition is that each person is entitled to his talents and abilities, and to whatever he can make, get, or buy with his own efforts, with the help of others, or with plain luck. He is entitled to keep it or do anything he wants with it, and whomever he gives it to is thereby equally entitled to it. Moreover, anyone is entitled to whatever he ends up with as a result of the indefinite repetition of this process, over however many generations. I assume that most readers of Nozick's book will find no echo of this intuition in themselves, and will feel instead that they can develop no opinion on the universal principles of entitlement, acquisition and transfer of property, or indeed whether there are any such universal principles, without considering the significance of such principles in their universal application.

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Libertarianism Kritik

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Nozick Indites NOZICK DOESN'T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF RIGHTS Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 196. The fact is, however, that Nozick's moral intuitions seem wrong even on a small scale. He denies that any of the rights he detects may be overridden merely to do good or prevent evil. But even if it is not permissible to murder or maim an innocent person to promote some highly desirable result, the protected rights do not all have the same degree of importance. The things one is supposed to be protected against are, in order of gravity; killing, injury, pain, physical force, deprivation of liberty of many different kinds (movement, association, and activity), destruction of one's property, taking of one's property, or the threat of any of the above (with all their variations in gravity). It is far less plausible to maintain that taking some of an innocent man's property is an impermissible means for the prevention of a serious evil, than it is to maintain that killing him is impermissible. These rights vary in importance and some are nofi absolute even in the state of nature.

NOZICK DOESN'T MORALLY JUSTIFY THE MINIMAL STATE Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy, New York University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 203-4. Nozick's attempt to refute the anarchist view that even a minimal state will violate individual rights is not, I think, successful. He argues at length that a minimal state could arise by an invisible process from a state of nature without the process violating anyone's rights people could voluntarily join private protective associations, one of which would naturally achieve dominance over a territory even if not everyone had agreed to join. It could then exercise limited control without violating anyone's rights. This is supposed to show that a minimal state is morally permissible. But why should the mere conceivability of such a process persuade an anarchist of that conclusion? He would already have been prepared to admit that a minimal state established by unanimous agreement of the participants would be allowable. He just believes no actual state will he of this sort. Similarly, he may credit Nozick with having imagined another way in which ;t minimal state "could" arise which violated no one's rights, even though based on less than unanimous agreement. But the likelihood of any actual state meeting these moral conditions will he almost as low. The rejection of anarchism requires the rejection of its moral premises.

THE UTILITARIAN ARGUMENTS REQUIRED TO REJECT ANARCHY UNDERMINE NOZICK'S LIBERTARIANISM Jeffrey Paul, Professor of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, READING NOZICK, 1981, p. l l. In his essay, "Nozick on Unproductiviry: The Unintended Consequences," Eric Mack draws a still more startling conclusion. He argues that the deontically fixed moral boundaries delineated in Nozick's theory of rights are systematically undercut by him through the introduction of the utilitarian criteria for compensation that he employs to support his rejection of anarchism in Part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. If Mack is right, then Nozick has eviscerated his own libertarian-entitlement theory of rights in ways that would delight many of his critics but are clearly unintended.

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Nozick Indites NOZICK'S UTOPIAN EXPERIMENTS WOULD PROBABLY FAIL Peter Singer, Professor of Philosophy, Mona.sh University, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed., 1981, p. 38. All three sections are well worth reading, although the third is the slightest. Here Nozick, finding incredible the supposition that there is one best form of society for everyone, proposes instead a "metautopia"-a framework for many diverse utopian experiments, all formed of voluntary communities, so that no o:ne can impose his version of utopia on others. Within a community people may voluntarily adopt redistributive measures, and those refusing to participate may be excluded from the community; but within a nation, which would include many communities, there should be no compulsory redistribution. The idea is appealing because it enhances individual freedom. But there; are serious objections that are not adequately considered. Could a community that wanted a lot of redistribution survive the departure of the wealthy members whose moral principles are weaker than their desire for wealth? Could it withstand the pressure of applications to join from the down-and-outs left to starve in neighboring communities run by ruthless capitalists?

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Aff: Rand Indites RAND FALSELY ASSUMES THAT ACTS HAVE OBJECTIVE VALUE Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 147. Rand argues that in all human relations one must give justice, not mercy. A man's success is measured by the objective value of what he has produced. Clearly implied here is the idea that the man himself is measured, that he has his objective value. It is on this basis only that any absolute justice or absolute judgment can be based. Such absolute judgments could be defended only if acts were in themselves tangible entities which could be weighed without reference to their inner subjective environment. This the existentialist denies while Objectivism surreptitiously assumes it to be true.

RAND FALSELY ASSUMES THE CERTAINTY OF MORAL STANDARDS Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado. AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 132-3. Rand goes much farther than this. For her, values and morals are subject to the same sort of rational appraisal as tables are. In many ways, it would be a great relief if this were so. It would all be so easy. The stakes are as clearly outlined as the First National Bank. The rules are laid down and written out. Best of all, one need never ask whether the game is really worth playing or what constitutes good sportsmanship. The existentialist, on the other hand, confronts his freedom in anguish. What he sees is not a twofold choice as definite as the old one which Christianity proffered. He realizes that all is open. His freedom is not just the choice between thinking and not thinking, between seeing what is right or refusing to see it. He knows that being free means creating standards of right and wrong. It means that there is no one right pattern for man, but many possible patterns to be discovered and invented. God Almighty has not been deposed merely in order that Mother Nature-or Daddy Warbucks-might sit there, passing out the blueprints.

RAND FALSELY ASSUMES AN ABSOLUTE OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 131. There is always in Rand's work an implicit reference to an absolute judgment which stands outside the immediate involvements of the individual life, which remains human and yet is never caught up in human affairs. The truth is that her system needs Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. John Galt cannot replace him. The assumption that the totally objective point of view exists and is accessible for everyone is only wishful thinking.

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Libertarianism Kritik

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Aff: Rand Indites RAND DOESN'T OBJECTIVELY ESTABLISH HER CONCLUSIONS Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed, 1981, p222. Let me, in closing, reiterate that my purpose has been to examine Miss Rand's arguments for her conclusions. It has not been to argue that death is a value, or that we should sacrifice others to ourselves, or that people don't have rights to our non-interference in their lives, or to demean the virtues of rationality, honesty, integrity, productiveness, pride independence, justice. It has been to see whether, in her published work, Miss Rand indeed objectively establishes her conclusions. She doesn't.

RAND FALSELY ASSUMES AN A PRIORI HUMAN NATURE Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p. 128. Rand's view of man retains the old acorn theory. Man's potentialities may be hidden, but they resemble the embryo oak tree. The question is simply whether the individual will be, as it were, a bigger, stronger oak or a more feeble one. Everyone knows what a good oak tree ought to be and how to judge it. Oak tree nature and human nature are equally limiting. Sartre has pointed out that it is precisely this ideal pattern which is in question. Being a man means deciding what man will be.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Altrumism/Private Charity Doesn’t Solve PRIVATE CHARITY DOESN'T PRODUCE SOLIDARITY Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, THE EXAMINED LIFE, 1989, p.289. "Well, why don't those who want and need such a society voluntarily contribute to pay for its public programs rather than taxing the others, who don't care anything about it"? But a program thus supported by many people's voluntary contributions, worthy though it might be, would not constitute the society's solemn marking and symbolic validation of the importance and centrality of those ties of concern and solidarity. That can occur )nly through its official joint action, speaking in the name of the whole.

RAND'S CONCEPT OF ALTRUISM IS DEFECTIVE William O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, WITH CHARITY TOWARD NONE, 1971, p201. At basis, Miss Rand's concept of altruism is defective on three grounds: 1) Altruism is neither the opposite nor the contrary of egoism. It is merely one way in which egoism manifests itself. It is, in essence, that type of self-gratification which is achieved by identifying oneself with, and subsequently participating in, the wellbeing of others on a psychological level. 2) The goal of altruism is neither "suffering" nor "pain" but the active elimination of suffering and pain-which is a substantially different thing altogether. 3) Altruism does not require the creation of suffering (pain) as a condition for its alleviation, because suffering is a continuing aspect of the human condition. In addition, altruism does not exclude a concern with additional non-altruistic (or extra-altruistic) values. Since it is basically a manifestation of egoism, it in no sense excludes noncontradictory types of purely personal commitment, and there is no particular reason why altruism cannot be supplemented by other, and essentially non-altruistic, types of behavior as well.

RAND ARTIFICIALLY SEPARATES EGOISM AND ALTRUISM William O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California, WITH CHARITY TOWARD NONE, 1971, p. 201. Miss Rand's definition of the term "altruism" is both untenable and slanted. To begin with, she sets up a totally, artificial dichotomy between egoism and altruism. There are few modern philosophers who are willing to accept the basic findings of contemporary empirical psychology who would not agree with Miss Rand's basic contention that man is at basis self-seeking and capable of realizing value only through the medium of subjective (and therefore personal) satisfaction. To say, however, that subjective satisfaction precludes a realization of pleasure through some sort of ego-identification with the well-being of others simply does not follow.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Altrumism/Private Charity Doesn’t Solve Rand's idea of altruism is too simplistic Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p135. One can be concerned for and attach value to what pleases others without thereby giving up all interest in oneself. Rand uses "altruism" as though it always and only meant preferring another's good at the expense of one's own. Rand, in denouncing altruists, includes such diverse groups as the early Christians, the Medieval Church, nineteenth-century Utilitarian,s and the Democratic proponents of the New Deal. (For the Kennedy administration, she adds the epithet "Fascist.") When she uses "altruism" in argumentative passages like the one just referred to, Rand presents altruism as a concept closely related to the Christian idea of Original Sin.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Egoism Answers EGOISM IS SELF-CONTRADICTORY G.E. Moore, Professor of Philosophy Cambridge University, PRINCIPIA ETHICA, 1903, p99. The only reason I can have for aiming at 'my own good,' is that it is good absolutely that what I so call should belong to me - good absolutely that I should have something, which, if I have it, others cannot have. But if it is good absolutely that I should have it, then everyone else has as much reason for aiming at my :having it, as I have myself. If, therefore, it is true of any single man's 'interest' or 'happiness' that it ought to be his sole ultimate end, this can only mean that man's 'interest' or 'happiness' is the sole good, the Universal Good, and the only thing that anybody ought to aim at. What Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good - that a num:)er of different things are each of them the only good thing there is - an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorou;,gh refutation of any theory could be desired.

EVEN RAND CAN'T CONSISTENTLY DEFEND EGOISM Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed, 1981, p219. "To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose". Is it? 'We have action, endorsed by Miss Rand, in the novel Atlas Shrugged, which appears incompatible with this. In the novel, John Gait risks his life to save that of Dagny Taggart, whom he loves, and he says that he will kill himself if she is tortured to make him talk.

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Libertarianism Kritik

You can change my name as much as you want but I will always be Kunta

Reason Isn’t Absolute REASON DOESN'T ANSWER ALL PROBLEMS Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p130 What Rand ignores is that there is a wrong, avoidable manner of employing emotions instead of reason and a necessary and proper way in which emotions must come to the aid of reason in all fully conscious and significant living. One must, for example, choose between the possibilities of a low-keyed existence and a life of more intense happiness but with more anxiety and suffering. One must somehow balance a shorttime peak of happiness against a longer-term possession of more subdued content. One may be obliged to choose between a higher salary with greater prestige in an unattractive location against less money and fame in a place one loves. Reason cannot decide here. Even if someone claims that the qualitative may somehow be transformed into a quantitative calculation, the process of decoding is not a mathematical one.

REASON ISN'T THE HUMAN ESSENCE Hazel Barnes, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, AN EXISTENTIALIST ETHICS, 1967, p128. Reason, instead of being essence and self-evident guiding principle, is but one part of man. Rand, like Aristotle, sees man as differentiated from other animals by his reason and so concludes that reason, being the essentially human, is that which mankind should most develop. Without quibbling as to whether animals in reality do or do not possess a rudimentary reason, we may point out that reason is not the only distinguishing factor of the human. It seems equally clear that human emotions are not all or always the same as animal emotions. The primary difference appears to be the emergence of self-consciousness in the human being, but to equate self-consciousness with reason is simply wrong.

RATIONAL EFFORT ISN'T NECESSARY; ONE CAN LIVE AS A PARASITE Robert Nozick, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard, READING NOZICK, Jeffrey Paul, ed, 1981, p214. There are two forms to the parasite argument, a consequential one ;and a formal one. The consequential argument is that being a parasite won't work in the long run. Parasites will eventually run out of hosts, out of those to live off, imitate, steal from. (The novel Atlas Shrugged argues this view.) But in the short run, one can be a parasite and survive; even over a whole lifetime and many generations. And new hosts come along. So, if one is in a position to survive as a parasite, what reasons have been offered against it?

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