[drostie]

I guess what I'm trying to say is, "look one level down." You're very concerned with who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns. What the government, or a government-like institution, does that you don't like is not "have a monopoly on force" but rather "arbitrarily prevent competition." You say "If government is not such as to allow competition... the rest of the environment is doomed." That's just as true at the level of these government-like institutions. They control an environment and can certainly doom it.

I think your response earlier took the form "not so! there's an entire environment outside the university which does not necessarily suck!". But there's also an entire environment outside of your present government that does not necessarily suck. A modern state isn't much more than a bureaucracy tied to territory. (There is a pretense of independence from other institutions but in reality that can often be compromised by military actions, treaties, and sanctions.) To be fair, since World War II the countries of this world have gotten much more shy about letting people cross their borders, and it's much less like driving into the university quad and a bit more like requiring swipe-card access and ID to enter a university cleanroom. But let's not mistake rights exercised with rights possessed.

Actually, most of this way of thinking comes to me from stefbot. Stefan Molyneux is... well, let me put it this way: when he says something I agree with, I become much more skeptical of that thing: so I actually treat him as having a negative correlation with reliable knowledge. This happened most prominently when I started reading his tome on objective moral facts. I would like, on a good day, to believe in objective moral facts. This has been shaken by reading his work which attempts to prove them.

So, like, if you just listen to the very first Freedomain podcasts, he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, and all the while he seems to be perfectly happy about this embedding. I will confess that I had given up Objectivism many years before I first heard this podcast, and no longer considered myself a libertarian at this point, but this was the moment where I started being really skeptical of the libertarian promise. That is where I started to think about to what extent libertarians really oppose totalitarianism, if it can exist in government-like examples.

Maybe this phrasing of the problem goes too far, and it's only a suspicion: but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc."

The difference between the ancap and the ansoc, and the reason that I find the ansoc view really interesting, is that the ansoc feels free to say, "yeah, that's all total crap because the government can't own the land either." By saying that the government obtained its "rule" over the land by being a big bloody bully, and questioning that legitimacy, anarcho-socialism actually has something of a place to stand. But it's about as radical as the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and emptiness, and I'm not sure that such a powerful negation is a wise idea.

I'm rambling at this point, so I'll shut up now.

[vukk]

Indeed, maybe more weight should be given to opposing such institutions. Though I'm still not convinced that the government should not be fixed first, and indeed I think that it is required to do so to be able to fundamentally affect those govt-like institutions.

I think your policy with stefbot is very healthy.

> ".. who has the monopoly on force, but that's not actually vital to your concerns."

> "...but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc.""

This is a great observation, though I do not agree completely. I feel that this applies to ancap very much and the only argument I've heard that could be applied here has been "But it would result in better situation overall if the govt was successfully opposed, even if new ones arise", and that is not very convincing indeed if the resulting situation will fall back to suck (democracy by anarchy as I've heard it called). If someone here is ancap I'm very interested in their response to this. The reason I do not agree is because there is no real way of you creating your own government/country to compete with the existing ones, for the land area is limited and the governments are asserting that monopoly on force you find non-vital on their respective areas (if they weren't asserting it, how would they exist, thus it is indeed vital by definition). I guess I'm saying that you don't have the right to claim ownership and assert it by force if it makes you immune to competition (also, I now realize, patents). This separates govt-like institutions from governments. Go ahead and pick it apart, please, I just pulled it out of my bag by following my own reasoning.

But indeed, because of discussions like this, my mind might be very different tomorrow.

> "... he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, ..."

Yeah this is something one has to be constantly aware of. And it's actually surprisingly easy to be aware if one has the luxury of having smart people care enough to listen to you, but very hard otherwise. The thing to be aware of is that many have their thoughts about the perfect government, but ultimately you would have to be a totalitarian dictator to actualize them. You forcing people to live in your ideal is fundamentally no better than others doing so. A realization I've seen linked to Voluntaryism, which I feel has similar emptiness you describe with ansoc, but I'm really not knowledgeable enough to say anything of actual value about it.

Following this forward, one ends up in the dilemma, if I oppose government power, how can I uphold belief that I have the right to decide for others? After all changing a government to minarchy would be forcing it's current inhabitants to live in it or move away, and some of them might be democrats who do not want that minarcy of yours. Can I really believe that I have the right to do this?

Either one has to appeal to reasonableness and practicality, and that is very very suspect, much like a big furry frightening monster offering candy, or one turns his/her thoughts on to ancap or ansoc or voluntaryism or something else, all of which have their own problems, some of which were very briefly touched in this discussion. And again we are back in thinking about our ideal world. Frak.

Also on the issue of land and asserting private ownership on it, though I assume that you are aware of this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism