Starchild wrote on lpsf-discuss (where I'm banned): SC) I have the impression that you believe (and feel free to correct me if I'm using inaccurate wording) that government by definition necessarily involves systemic initiation of force, and therefore any system which would prohibit systemic initiation of force would amount to anarchy. (SC
Close. You're conflating Government and State, and you're omitting a crucial point about maintenance of a monopoly on retaliatory force. Again, see Does <http://libertarianmajority.net/does-zero-aggression-absolutism-imply-anarch ism> Zero-Aggression Absolutism Imply Anarchism? SC) Once you accept the general principle of a right to self-determination and political secession, as I do, I find it very difficult to come up with a reasonable argument against allowing individual secession, although it does seem to come very close to resulting in anarchy. (SC "If an institution oversees the retaliatory force only of the people who formally sign up, then it doesn't have a monopoly and so it's not a state, but rather is more like a neighborhood watch club on steroids. Thus ZAPsolutism will always either reduce to anarchism or allow for exceptions that make it morally equivalent to coercive minarchism." SC) This would appear to amount to allowing individual secession, yet a government would still exist, so it would not consider the situation to be anarchy. (SC There would be governance/government, but there would technically be no state. The LP has a government, but the LP is not a state. SC) Wouldn't the kind of platform you've been advocating in which the LP would self-identify as always seeking more liberty (direction-oriented rather than destination-oriented) also imply things like allowing individual secession and not forcing people to trial, but do so without the virtue of spelling these things out as desirable goals, therefore making it likely that many people would ignore the platform's implications and be intellectually inconsistent in settling for various government force-initiations while claiming to stand by the platform? How would they be less incoherent in your view, than those who simultaneously defend the Non-Aggression Principle and support limited government? (SC The idea of "always seeking more liberty" is my Pledge proposal, but isn't actually in the Platform I'm advocating. The Pure Principles Platform is directional not in the sense of explicitly saying "always more liberty", but in the sense that it points away from the current nanny state and generally toward a set of available principled destinations, without endorsing one of them as the most principled. Thus the 3P doesn't endorse or condemn any of: * the minarchist idea that abstaining <http://libertarianmajority.net/does-abstaining-from-aggression-minimize-it> from aggression fails to minimize it, or * the green libertarian idea that it's wrong to license micro-aggression against the environment, or * the geolibertarian idea that taking or enclosing something isn't the same as making it, or * the anarcholibertarian idea that there are no principled handholds on the slippery slope between zero-aggression absolutism and fascism. 3P doesn't imply any directionality or spatial arrangement among these competing ideas. Nor are the differences among these ideas fairly represented by the one-dimensionality of my Pledge proposal, or even by the two-dimensionality of the Nolan Chart. I don't think you can necessarily rank all the Major <http://libertarianmajority.net/major-schools-of-libertarianism> Schools of Libertarianism in either of these two schemas -- especially when you overlay the 17 or so Free <http://libertarianmajority.net/free-variables-in-libertarian-theory> Variables in Libertarian Theory. The relevant dimensionality here is much higher than just 1 or 2, and collapsing this N-space to one or two dimensions introduces a form of quantum uncertainty in where their N-dimensional shadows should fall. :-) SC) If a direction-oriented approach does imply support for what you see as anarchist views (SC It doesn't -- but nice try. :-) SC) Is the EcoLibertarian site yours, by the way? I'm not sure that I agree with all of it, but it's very well-written and contains important points I do agree with, like consideration of other species and geo-libertarian ideas about land, that many libertarians ignore. I would be interested to see a full list of your websites, as you seem to have a lot of stuff out there. (SC Yes, it's mine -- thanks, and sorry about the site proliferation. :-) My libertarian-related sites are now: * LibertarianIntelligence.com <http://libertarianintelligence.com/> - a semi-objective blog that reports on news and opinion related to LP reform, with links to all the below * LibertarianMajority.net <http://libertarianmajority.net/> - resources and advocacy about Platform and LP reform * EcoLibertarian.org <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/> - my site devoted to green-/geo-libertarianism * KnowingHumans.net <http://knowinghumans.net/> - my blog about politics, philosophy, science, and technology * MarketLiberal.org <http://marketliberal.org/> - my original libertarian-related site, and the portal to my congressional campaigns * MarketLiberal Y! Group <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/> - my open email forum to which I cc: all my public correspondence * HumanKnowledge.net <http://humanknowledge.net/> - my attempt to systematically summarize human knowledge and philosophy * Holtz.org <http://holtz.org/> - my personal/family site, with archives of my older writing SC) Can a person declare herself a "political entity?" If not, why not? (SC Because Robinson Crusoe is not a polity. :-) And no, I'm not going to give a minimum number of people that can secede. The secession plank from my EcoLibertarian manifesto says: "A community may secede from a surrounding community if 1) secession is supported by a majority within the seceding community, 2) the majority does not violate any rights of any minority, 3) the rules of the seceding community are at least as compatible with human freedom as that from which it seceded, and 4) the seceding community agrees to compensate its parent for any continuing impact on the parent's resources or use of the parent's services."
