They must drink a lot of "Victory Gin" at The Times!  Well put Tibor I could not agree with you more.  It used to also be true that the media used to act like a watchdog for the people against the excesses of government.  Sadly The Times now resembles The Pravda...

Eva's is a truly picky comment.  The classical liberal political/social philosophy was never fringe in American history! And classical liberalism is the predecessor of libertarianism.

Isn't there a difference between saying that something close to a consistent libertarian ideology was central to the Founding and the original American political tradition, and saying that such an ideology is marginal in political life today and as it has been for many years? Going solely by what Dr. Machan quotes, the NYT's claim seems correct on its face. The libertarian ideology has in fact been "long on the fringes of American politics." This doesn't mean that it was never otherwise. Now, if the whole editorial ignores the centrality of such ideas to the Founding in a way that makes the writer's argument dishonest, that's a different complaint. Or perhaps the passage means something different from what it seems to mean as quoted in isolation.

Gabriel,

Many FF's would not be considered to hold libertarian beliefs by today's definition of 'Libertarianism'. For example Adams, and Hamilton.

Re Adams, the dispute with Jefferson continued for their entire lives. Re Hamilton, kindly refrer to The Federalist Papers.

Otherwise, it's rather debatable to assume that 1790-ish 'libertarians' would agree with ideas and policies devised by 2000-ish issues and situations. To find this particular  arche-trace of thought going back 200 years would involve connecting real people from past to present--ostensibly the academic demands that Machan had to oblige to obtain his own PhD.

Barring proof to the contrary, one must assume that all politics is local and contemporrary.

Eva

- By what right can a government use force?<<<<<

According to Spinoza, the purpose of a government is what a democratically- elected government says that it is.

Within this context, governments assure individuals of personal rights in matters so deemed as 'personal' and 'private'.

From this it follows that the people who elected the government to represent their interests would want the laws en-forced.

Why do a majority have any moral right to do whatever they want to the minority?

There are two people in a room and one of them wants to kill the other and take their stuff (the other guy isn't up for it at all). They are in a stalemate. And clearly there is no moral right to kill and steal. But then another guy walks into the room and the vote changes. Now two of them can gang up on the other, kill and steal by right??? That makes no sense, does it?

Voting is handy, objective and fair way to settle items where no moral rights are being violated by a vote.  But then that presumes that one believes there are such things as moral rights... instead of believing the only rights are legal.

Look at it the other way.  If there are moral rights that exist prior to government being in existence, it changes the entire picture.

Government's purpose is to implement those moral rights that govern the use of force in society.

You won't like to hear this, but gang rape IS a majority using force to get its way with a minority. The purpose is whatever the majority decides which means that there are no moral ends. That's what happens when you don't recognize moral rights - you can only imagine that there is some magic whereby rights get created out of thin air by a group getting togethter and having a vote.

If there are moral rights then we find ourselves with guidelines that we can hold a democracy within. Then democracy becomes a useful mechanism that can resolve conflict without ever being a Gang rape. Gang rape 'becomes' immoral and always is wrong no matter what the law says or people vote. No majority has the right to rape a victim because they have the numbers.

The use of force should be done morally. How can that be done? By making all laws follow those moral laws that govern the use of force. But this can't work if morality is relative and any group can make up its own set of moral rules and claim theirs are the one to follow (like Sharia). It must be universal, based upon human nature and non-contradictory.
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Within this context [democracy], governments assure individuals of personal rights in matters so deemed as 'personal' and 'private'.

'Deemed' by who? Governments only have force and the threat of force and confiscation as their basic tools. They can't give anybody anything that they don't first take from someone else. And it is governments that determine the difference between public and private, between personal and public. We once had a private health delivery system, now we don't - government decided. What I said on a telephone was once private, but now NSA has deemed it as no longer private.

Precisely the reason why I don't vote. Voting is an endorsement of outcome, regardless of who wins. I won't endorse the infringement of my liberties by submitting them to a democratic process.

* There are no morons--or elementary particles of morality that one is able to discover that will embody in some detail those general ethical principles that everyone has already agreed uupon, anyway.

Your attempt to apply principles of physics to morality isn't called for. Would you look for logic particles and not finding them declare that there is no such thing as logic.  Lets throw out history, logic, reason, fallacy, etc.

The way you end that sentence is stunning. You are requiring that if such particles of morality were discovered that they would have to embody in some detail those ethical principles that everyone has already agreed upon.  Is this the case with physics or medicine?  Can some scientific principle exist only if it is already agreed upon by everyone?  Reason is not consensus taking.  Truth isn't consensus.

You need to look to your divisions between philosophy and science to see where you have absorbed a rule of thumb or generalization that is forcing you to make serious mistakes. You really think that there is nothing that we can discover, or have discovered, regarding human nature? Or that such a discovery could never, once understood, be proscriptive?
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Morality/ethics can be said to be objective to the extent that they become agreed-upon concepts.

You need to check on your definition of "objective" - if everyone in the world thinks that tinker bell is real and created a magical powder, that doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make their belief objective.
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** It's common-sense to say that anyone with power to make laws will enforce them.

That tends to be true, but not to the point. Their ability to make and/or enforce a law doesn't make it of value, or good for the society or good for individuals, or morally right.
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There is no such thing as 'property' which lies outside the conceptual boundaries of a given society.

There are moral rights which are defined as property rights, and there are legal property rights. When we say that man has a moral right to his life, that is a statement that is intended to transcend specific societies and to be univeral to all societies. It is a statement the he is the owner of his life and not someone else. It is saying that even if people group together they do not magically acquire the right, as a group, to violate a right.  There might be a society that thinks it can murder people at will, but that doesn't make it right.  Because a society believe in slavery doesn't mean that the enslaved person isn't the moral owner of his body and his life.  His moral property rights are being violated by that societies legal property rights.

The term 'right' is about actions and specifically about those actions that don't require permission.

No right is to an object but all rights are to actions. When the action involves an object, then we use the term property rights, but they are rights relative to actions involving that object. My right to my life is a statement about the actions life requires (life is a process - a series of required actions). A person's rights to their life include their rights to their body (its use, its care, women's rights to their reproductive systems, etc.)

Moral rights are purposeful. They are about enabling the greatest liberty in a social circumstance. That is something that can be messy to fully grasp, much less implement, but it is objective because it is born of logical inference from human nature. Those things we can't do by "right" we can still do with permission. This difference between right and permission is our guidance on the boundaries between individuals. Without moral principles we can't form laws that suit that same purpose of establishing liberty - we'd have no standard to parse from.
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The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s property is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play it short-range and starve when their prey runs out—just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be “practical” if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.

 

          Ayn Rand

Eva:

Morality/ethics can be said to be objective to the extent that they become agreed-upon concepts.

This statement is really offensive to me. Was slavery moral because most of the people in the southern states agreed that it was? Of course not. Was slavery immoral in the northern states because most people thought it was? Of course not. It was immoral because if one accepts that 'life' is one's standard then slavery is immoral because it is anti-life. A slave cannot pursue his life's goals. Spinoza, Machivelli, or whoever, or whatever they said is irrelevant. Just because Moses or Jesus said that murder was immoral doesn't make it so. All your demonstrations of your erudition and lecturing on history are useless in determining what is immoral/moral.

If you want to challenge the Objectivist view that life should be one's standard of morality you should do so but paddling around in this collectivist slough of irrelevancy leads nowhere.

Sam

I appreciate the effort Eva puts into her posts, but she suffers from a particularly severe case of academitis and most of it falls into the tl;dr category. If she could get her average post length down by half and cut out 90% of the snooze-inducing namedrops that presumably impress her professors, then she might engage the reader a bit more. On both Rebirth of Reason and Objectivist Living, she's prone to making absolutist statements, gussied up in academic jargon, that any typical high school student could rebut just by thinking the concepts through in a few real-world contexts. For example, her authoritative but blatantly untrue assertion that possibilities have no effect on reality until the events actually come to pass. Insurance... risk management... hello?

I am, however, glad that Eva is free to post here (I noticed she was placed in moderation briefly, then removed from it). The petty tyrant who runs Objectivist Living has driven off most of his new commenters through overly aggressive moderation, and I see he's deleted some of Eva's posts and warned her against playing "power games," whatever that means. He targeted me with the same vague accusations and then banned me, so I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of such hypocrisy and abuse. If rhetoric is truly bullshit, then let it stand or fall on its own merits, I say. The commenters here are smart enough to sort it all out for themselves and don't need such paternalistic stewardship.