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My questions would be: how many contracts am I signing by simply doing what I like? Am I violating a contract by getting in your car and driving it away? Am I violating a contract by installing a program on my computer? Am I violating a contract by singing a song? Have I initiated force in any of these cases? Are there rights that are granted when I haven't explicitly signed a contract?

If so, how will those rights be enforced? If those rights are enforced by voluntary collective policing, in what way can I defend myself against their declarations of more implicit rights? Basically, if I draw a picture of Mohammed, have I initiated force? What about if you leave your door unlocked, I walk into your house, then drink your milk straight out of the carton? Is this an initiation of force, and if it is, what if you lack the size to prevent me from doing it?

Lastly, if I walk down skid row with a private bodyguard and a wad of $100 bills, offering to buy people as slaves? If they sign, are they my slaves? If they escape, have they initiated force? Is there an involuntary limit to what can be signed away?

tl;dr I'm not getting a clear idea of who defines initiation of force, who enforces violations, and how are the weak protected from the strong. I realize the last one may be a bit of a straw man, because libertarians may not feel that protecting the weak from the strong is moral, but I'm not sure about this.

1 comments

"My questions would be: how many contracts am I signing by simply doing what I like?"

The answer to these questions depends on information you're not giving in your hypotheticals. For instance:

>"Am I violating a contract by getting in your car and driving it away? ... Have I initiated force in any of these cases? Are there rights that are granted when I haven't explicitly signed a contract?"

I don't know. Did you just sign a rental agreement with me where I give you the right to use the car in exchange for the payment you just gave me? Or are you someone I've never met whose stealing my car?

If we had a society that was just when it comes to the really obvious issues-- like, rape, murder, theft, etc, then we could debate the morality of you singing a son (I'm assuming your hypothetical is singing a song that is copyrighted by someone else, but in my society there would be no implicit copyright.)

I'm not trying to evade. IF you steal my car, it is an initiation of force. If you walk into my house when you don't have permission, its an initiation, whether the door was unlocked or not.

>"and if it is, what if you lack the size to prevent me from doing it?"

I'm addressing the moral question of whether its an imitation or not. The practical question of how to defend against such initiations is a broader topic.

"Is there an involuntary limit to what can be signed away?"

That's also a good topic for debate.

I'd like to start, though, by focusing on the obvious initiations of force-- groups of people using violence to take from others, and groups of people waging wars on the innocent, or incarcerating people for doing drugs, etc.

The NAP doesn't imply there are no grey areas at all-- there are grey areas.

But the NAP does let you see that a lot of areas that people think are white are actually black. That the war on drugs is not only ill advised, but a criminal enterprise.

I'm saying that I'm not stealing your car, I'm driving a car, and to introduce "stealing" and "your" involves implicit social contract and collective enforcement. I'm trying to imply that libertarianism is a sort of socialism that has a particular set of values that it finds important to preserve by force. It just simply defines a violation of those values as an initiation of force in order to claim that it is only taking a hard line on freedom of association, expression, and contract.

Virtually every modern society claims to support freedom of association, expression, and contract, until it violates the public order, when it transforms into a initiation of force by terrorists. It all depends on how you define the public order.

edit: to directly answer your question, I'm a guy who you've never met who breaks your car window, gets into your car, and drives away. If you happen to run into me later, I make no attempt to physically prevent you from getting in your car and driving away, although I have fixed the window and changed the locks.

I have a real beef with this "reasoning from axioms" stuff when it gets taken as a dogma. Maybe you don't take it as a dogma. I am also yet to see a working libertarian society, so it's all just academic posturing as far as I'm concerned, much like all this atheist utopianism I keep hearing about. Frankly, I don't see anything intrinsically immoral about forcing other people to do or not do things using force. You can't opt out of society with the numbers we have now.

The problem as I see it is not adhering to some principle or another it's that everything is too big and too centralised. I like a lot of what people like Ron Paul are saying, but if we were to give them a free run for a few decades we'd need a new reactionary movement to undo all the problems resulting from their own excesses. People need to let go of the idea that a person can "crack the code" of society and figure out the right ethics for all time.