kevin Bjornson wrote: KB> no state has ever enforced or achieved a monopoly of force in it's estate (territory). Therefore, "states" are a figment of the imagination <KB
No group of particles in the real world has ever conformed to the ideal gas laws, but that doesn't mean gases are a figment of the imagination. There obviously is a conceptual category into which UN member organizations fall, but Al Qaeda and mafias don't. If you're going to insist that this category should not be called 'state', then productive discussion with you with will be needlessly difficult. BH> If an institution has no more authority over you than what you've voluntarily granted it by explicit contract, <BH KB> You're right, it wouldn't be a government. But nobody is proposing that political system. <KB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman KB> Negative exsternalities are a form of aggression, therefore should have fines but those would not be taxes. <KB And who is going to issue me my 50-cent fine for the pollution my car emits when I drive to work this morning? Rothbard's answer <http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/air-pollution.html> is self-consciously embarrassing: MR> While the situation for plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian law, there is a partial way out. In a libertarian society, the roads would be privately owned. This means that the auto emissions would be emanating from the road of the road owner into the lungs or airspace of other citizens, so that the road owner would be liable for pollution damage to the surrounding inhabitants. Suing the road owner is much more feasible than suing each individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be responsible for. In order to protect himself from these suits, or even from possible injunctions, the road owner would then have the economic incentive to issue anti-pollution regulations for all cars that wish to ride on his road. <MR Thus for each of the dozen or so private roads I would need to use to get from my house to Yahoo's campus in Sunnyvale, I would not only have to have a toll-paying arrangements with each one, but I'd also have to have an anti-pollution certification arrangement with each one. As comical as this scenario may be, it gets even funnier when you consider who would be filing the tort claims in court. Anarcholibertarians hand-wave about class-action lawsuits at this point, but since so many externalities have many victims and many victimizers, these class action suits would have to be "bilateral" ones, which are even clumsier than regular class actions. Micro-polluters could just opt out of every defendant class, and force plaintiff classes to target each of them with millions of individual non-bilateral class actions. I know of nothing in current law that stops environmental groups from today attempting the sort of bilateral class actions that Rothbardians think could handle negative externalities. And yet no court system has ever produced the outcomes they advertise -- just as mafia families have never behaved like anarchocapitalist protection agencies. Auto emissions aren't even the hardest case for the micro-tort theorist, as other forms of micro-pollution do not have roads as a hypothetical legal aggregator for them. Air and water pollution from individual land holdings would be an even harder case. As with every other solution to textbook market failures I've heard proposed by anarcholibertarians, their tort-based approach to negative externalities would be either laughably inefficient or would reduce in practice to the pretty much the same rules that a minarchist state would enforce. Even 2004 LP presidential contender Aaron Russo, a conspiracy theorist who claims the Rothschild family controls the Federal Reserve, recognized the kookiness of the LP dogma on pollution: "I think the Libertarian Party has never had a good policy on the environment. I've never heard a good one, and I've been looking for one for months, and I'm hoping to find new ideas on how we can handle the environment. On this issue, to tell you the truth, there's a bit of confusion in my mind. But the stock answer that I've been hearing about the environment is not good in my view. Sue your neighbor, sue this one, sue that one, those aren't good answers for me." See my July 2004 article <http://ca.lp.org/cf/CF-200407.pdf> in California Freedom for more on this. KB> Land rents are a concept of Henry George. Georgism has been thoroughly discredited and few if any economists take him seriously. <KB One Nobel-Prize winning economist said <http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/Friedman.html> "The least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land - the Henry George argument of many, many years ago. [...] The property tax is one of the least bad taxes, because it's levied on something that cannot be produced - that part that is levied on the land." That economist's name was Milton Friedman. I too oppose the extreme form of Georgism that denies title to land and says anyone can be outbid to take over their lease. Writing in the 19th century, George was not equipped to make the best case for the land value tax. For a modern defense of land value taxation, see <http://www.econjournalwatch.org/pdf/FoldvaryIntellectualTyrannyApril2005.pd f> Geo-Rent: A Plea to public economists by Santa Clara University economist Fred Foldvary, who coined the term geolibertarian. Susan Hogarth wrote: SH> I can't understand this obsession with Rothbard you and several others of the reform caucus seem to have. Why do you constantly bring him up? <SH This forum is named "LPplatform-discuss", and Rothbard not only co-wrote the original version of the pre-Portland platform in 1975, but his writings are by far the most prominent and detailed defense of the ideas embodied in it. SH> I think you definitely will need another political party if you want to start proposing and defending new taxes. What I cannot understand is why you thought the LP was the right political platform from which to propose new taxes. <SH I want to reduce the government's share of GDP from its current nominal 30% (which doesn't even count regulatory burdens) to no more than 5%, and then see how much more of government we can privatize when we get there. It's just not a serious position to claim that 1) this position is aptly characterized as wanting "new taxes", or 2) the LP isn't the right party for advocating such radical reductions in the size of the nanny state. The best way to move America in a given direction in Nolan space is to aggregate into the same party everyone who prefers that direction. In any multi-dimensional analysis of American's political views, Americans cluster mostly in the 2-D plane defined by the Nolan chart, and even more so along the Left-Right diagonal of the Nolan plane. As noted by Duverger's Law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duvergers_Law> , this in combination with plurality voting rules means that successful third parties cannot arise along that diagonal without being co-opted by the two existing major parties already encamped on that line. The Authoritarian/Populist quadrant has been kept mostly infertile for a third party by Republican co-opting. Similarly, Republican electoral success from the Right quadrant has led extreme rightists to work from within the GOP instead of from without. The Greens have embarrassed the LP by building the strongest third party in a quadrant dominated by the Democratic Party and its special-interest rent-seeking patronage machine. The LP has seriously botched its opportunity to build a third party in the utterly vacant North quadrant. To propose there be more than one party in our quadrant is to admit that our activism is a self-indulgent exercise in political expression as a <http://www.reason.com/links/links021204.shtml> consumption good, rather than a serious effort at increasing liberty. On the other hand, it's nice to be reminded of just how far from tyranny America actually is, that self-proclaimed freedom-fighters so clearly believe they can afford the luxury of a balkanized freedom movement.
