At 11:10 AM -0400 8/25/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > >>>"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem >>>of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small >>>children and great nations." -- David Friedman, >>>_The_Machinery_of_Freedom_ >> >> >> It's one of my favorites, too. >> >> One hopes that if there is an afterlife he has a chance to explain it >> to his six million fellow Jews who went to the crematoria chanting >> this mantra. >> >> Or he could fly to Rwanda and tell this to the Hutus and Tutsis. > >Touché. Nietzsche's "Where are your claws?", and all that. > >Certainly the creation of superior force-capability, and the will to use >it, especially on people who can't or won't fight back, creates >situations like the above. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is >chock-a-block with examples of the same kind of thing throughout human >history. > > >It's interesting, nonetheless, that the cases above are perfect examples >of exactly what David Friedman (for those here who don't know of him, >he's the current intellectual standard-bearer for anarcho-capitalism, a >"law and economics" professor in Santa Clara, and the son of Milton and >Rose Friedman) was talking about: nation states using force as a poor >solution to the distribution of limited resources. Well, to cite another German philosopher, Heidegger, one has to consider one's "thrown-ness." We are _thrown_ into situations not necessarily of our making. In this context, it does little to cite the historical reasons why _states_ caused the problems in 1930s Germany or in 1990s Rwanda. For the person in those places at those times, his situation, his thrown-ness, was what mattered. And this is the context for deciding whether to use "direct use of physical force." The Hutu facing a gang of machete-wielding Tutsis, or vice versa, would be well-advised to use his FAL to mow them down. Ditto for Jews in Hitler's Germany, Kulaks in Stalin's U.S.S.R., and in a hundred other such examples. My point was that aphorisms about how "violence never accomplishes anything" and variants like the Friedman quote, fail to recognize the ground truth, the thrown-ness of the situation. Of course, libertarians often play the game of saying "but in the cases you describe, you are not _initiating_ force, merely defending yourself." Of course. So take all of my comments about "X needs killing" to mean "X has intitated the use of force and reasonable men will kill X if necessary to defend themselves." Same result, just more awkward. And with no more semantic meaning than saying "X needs killing." Just syntactic sugar. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
