Secondly, whether or not you are injured by my inaction is irrelevent: [...] |
In a free society, statements like this would have very serious consequences to your reputation. You are responsible for the harm you cause, whether it is through action or inaction. If you store tires on your property, it is your obligation to make sure they don't catch on fire and pollute your neighbors. If you promise to spot someone while he's bench-pressing, that creates an obligation to at least try to help and not leave that person trapped under a barbell. Etc. And there are some natural obligations you are born into, the foremost of which is to reproduce.
At least one of these examples, pollution, involves a violation of rights. It would be the fact that I violated rights that I get punished for, not the fact that I harmed somebody. Take another example: Suppose I open up a shop over the road from you, offering a similar product, at a better price, and so successfully attract much of your business away from you. Plainly my action has harmed you. But we wouldn't say that i should be punished, because, even though my action has harmed you, it has not violated your rights - you had no right that the customers I attract away from you do business with you and not me.
Take another example, suppose you deeply loathe the colour blue, and I walk in front of you whilst wearing a blue shirt. Clearly this has harmed you again - you are worse off than you were when you view didn't include me in a blue shirt. But we don't say this should be punishable, because you had no right that I refrain from wearing blue or walking in front of you whilst doing so.
It is violations of rights, or risks of violations of rights, that are the offense here, not the harming, or risk of harming.
[...] But that doesn't mean that taking an extra day's weekend is a crime, or a rights violation, because you have no right that people work when they have not agreed to. |
Nature does not dictate how many hours people should work, that is an individual decision incentivized by the reward you get in exchange for working. We have a little thing called money to make sure everyone pulls their economic weight.
Nature does dictate the realities of reproduction, there is no sufficient reward for it. That's why we need to create a means of exchange to encourage people to pull their demographic weight. Failure to do so is demographic communism, and that simply does not work - the lazy benefit from the hard work of others, the incentive to be productive declines, and so does the output.
OK, so the "lazy" benefit from the hard work of others. Big deal. What is wrong with benefitting from the hard work of others? When has benefitting from the work of others been something that libertarians think should be punishable?
Food production is necessary for survival. Self-owners may well decide not to produce any more food. Civilisation would collapse, and humanity die out. Does that mean that it would be OK to force people to work on plantations? |
That cannot happen - when the price of food goes high enough, more people will be willing to produce it.
This is false, since my example involved people who valued their leisure time more than money (they were willing to take a pay cut in order to get an extra day's holiday).
Yes, all these terrible things could happen. But that still doesn't alter the fact that forcing people to have kids, or provide for those that are having them, is a violation of their rights. |
Could? Given the current trend, what would prevent them?
And the arguments you are making are identical to the arguments of the people who fail to recognize property rights. "Boo hoo hoo, forcing us to work for our money and pay for stuff is theft." They fail to understand the incentives behind economic production, and you fail to understand the incentives behind biological reproduction.
It has nothing to do with incentives, and all to do with property rights. In fact, it is you that is being the communist here, since it is you that is advocating violating property rights, nationalising people, on the grounds that doing so ensures or increases the economic wellbeing of all.
There are no positive rights. |
Only if you base your understanding of rights on wishful thinking rather than reality.
No, on coherence. The notion of positive rights entails a contradiction, because positive rights clash both with each other and with other rights, creating incompossibilities of rights and their correlative duties. Since contradictions cannot exist, then, positive rights cannot exist.
They are inherently contradictory, generating incompossibility problems, both with negative rights, and with each other. |
Failure to comply with your wishful thinking is not a contradiction. Failure to comply with the reality of nature is.
I'm not sure how this even addresses my point. Look, take a commonly claimed positive right, a "right to a decent home." Now suppose that there is a decent home, but it can only house one family at a time. Plainly one family excercising their "right to a decent home" entails violating the other family's "right to a decent home," since the former deprives the latter of their "decent home." But if the latter got the home, the former would be deprived of it. Plainly it is impossible for either rightholder to exercise their right without violating the rights of the others. In fact, merely having asuch a right would be a violation of the identical right in others.
This is why positive rights are an incoherent nonsense. They cannot exist.
They also can only exist at a given time and under given circumstances, and so cannot be considered human rights, as they cannot exist at all times and places that humans can exist. |
Says who? Just because a certain circumstance isn't perpetual doesn't mean it isn't a part of human nature. Emergencies happen. Things change. And don't forget that on a long enough time-line, there's no such thing as human nature. We evolve. Things that are true of us aren't true of primate ancestors, or of the primordial goo from which we ultimately originate. Absence of rights among monkeys is what made it possible for them to compete and evolve into man!
Rights are based on the collective competitive advantage that arises from cooperation - which is only true once a certain level of civilization is reached. The cavemen, who could not possibly grow enough food for everyone, did not have rights as we do today, even though they were almost identical to us genetically. If a hypothetical a super-human force were to put human feral children onto an other Earth-like planet, thus creating an isolated culture of human beings whose level of development is similar to cavemen, the reality of their existence would make rights harmful and unnatural. They'd need to figure out how to build simple tools, hunt, domesticate animals, grow food, utilize fire, and all other civilization advances from scratch, which won't happen overnight. In the meantime, every day will be a struggle for survival. They would have the opposite situation with birth rates than we're having, more children than can possibly survive, thus creating competition within the species for the limited resources available. This competition, which initially is very violent, is what drives civilization forward.
When all human beings lived in tribal "gift economies" there was no need for money, but that need gradually emerged as societies became more sophisticated, and it is downright impossible to have a stable society beyond the hunter-gatherer level without explicit "property rights" and some recognized means of exchange. The same applies to post-industrialized societies and the "childless tax".
All this just proves that these positive rights you have made up only purtain to particular humans at particular times, and so are not rights that all humans have by virtue of being human. It would be odd to call them human rights, then.
No. Actively preventing you from leaving would constitute false imprisonment. Failure to help you leave wouldn't. |
That's kind of like putting a plastic bag over someone's head and saying "you have the right to live, but not to breathe the air on my property".
It isn't, because putting a plastic bag on your head involves me actively doing something. You wandering onto my land doesn't.
That isn't to say that you'd owe me a limo ride off your property, I may have to call someone or pay for the taxi myself, but then you'd be obligated to let that taxi get to me and leave with me on board,
No I wouldn't. Because...
which is still a limitation of your property rights for the sake of my positive right to free exit.
Ta da!
Plus, suppose there were only room in the taxi for you, but both you and somebody else were lost on my land, in advertdly. If you took the taxi, wouldn't you be preventing the other person from leaving? And isn't preventing their leaving a violation of their "positive right to free exit"? But if they were to prevent you from violating their right to free exit by taking the taxi yourself, wouldn't they be violating your "positive right to free exit"? How does either of you exercise this right without violating the righ of the other, or prevent their right being violated without also violating the right of the other? It seems that your "positive right to a free exit" would entail a "right to violate a positive right to free exit," as well as a right to violate my property rights against trespass. Contradiction upon contradiction!
And you could be asked to yield your property rights further by a subpoena duces tecum, so that evidence about that plane crash can be effectively gathered.
I can be asked to yield my property, sure. But if I say "no," coming onto my property anyway, or forcing me to provide it, would still be a violation of my property rights.
You didn't ask some retard to rob a convenience store, killing the clerk and leaving you as the only witness, yet you have an obligation to appear at his trial, I certainly do not. Forcing me to do so would be forced labour.
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Yes, forced labor.
And, as a self-owner, I have rights against forced labour.
Which I'm in favor of in this circumstance, just like I'm in favor of a person with no money naturally being "forced" to work if no one is willing to feed him for free.
Somebody who works to get money for food because nobody else will feed him is not being "forced to work."
You can always choose death, but if you choose to live then you must live within the context of reality and its requirements, both individual and collective.
The difference is that if nobody will feed me, then my alternatives are that I either work or die, whilst under forced labour I must either work, or somebody does something to me. My starving doesn't involve somebody doing something to me, just refraining from doing something for me.
A legal system that forces people to turn up in court is not based on fundamental natural rights, but on violating them. You will find precisely this issue discussed in Rothbard's For a New Liberty. |
I'm a huge fan of Rothbard's theories, but they're just that - theories. Capitalist Minarchism is pretty much a proven fact at this point, but Anarcho-Capitalism still needs to be experimented with, and that won't happen overnight. We need to take one step at a time, conduct voluntary experiments, and adjust our theories as needed. If we fail to apply rational fallibilism to our ideas, then we're hardly much better than Marxist thugs or Jihadists!
The section in
For a new Liberty referred to doesn't relate to anarchism, but to the implications of observance of man's rights, one of which is that it is unjust to force a person to testify in court.