Libertarian Purity Test

[MacFall]

Justice is not a fallacy, unless you believe that no obligation of restitution is incurred by an aggressor.

[MacFall]

It was before the state perverted it.

[MacFall]

Justice, referring to the payment of debts incurred by harm caused to another individual, is at least as old as recorded history. As in, Sumer. The concept is much, much older than the English word.

[MacFall]

It did in Anglo-Saxon common law, which predates statuatory law by centuries.

[BonerJoe]

There is only one libertarian purity test: do you want to initiate violence or not?

[MacFall]

There is only one libertarian purity test: do you want to initiate violence or not?

^ this

I think that as far as political quizzes go, the LPT is one of the more useful ones. But once somebody has become familiar with libertarian ideas in general, the NAP is the only test we need. Whether one is a libertarian is a qualitative question; political quizzes tend to be quantitative.

[MacFall]

And there were other, older civilizations which had restitutional justice. If we're going by which concept is older, Sumer had restitutional justice, and it's the oldest civilization of which we know. But we were discussing the meaning of the world "justice", which originated from a French word which was used to describe the payment of debts. When it was adopted into Middle English after the Norman Invasion, the word referred to the legal practice of equity in A.S. Common Law, which today we call restitution. It didn't even have anything to do with government officials until three hundred years after that, and then only referred to an adjudicator of equity cases (excluding the practice of magistrates). It wasn't until late in the eighteenth century that a "justice" had any role other than adjudicator and became associated with statuatory law. Yet even today, people understand that there can be such a thing as "unjust law", so the concept of justice as it was originally understood perists, even more than 250 years after its perversion by the state. It is a completely accurate term to describe restitution, and besides, it's only two syllables instead of three.