Anarchism

Michael Marotta wrote:

Steve Wolfer's claim that force is allowed by anyone and everyone in pursuit or defense of rights is not at all Ayn Rand's own expressed viewpoint. In her interview with Henry Mark Holzer, she said that the Roman Empire had objective law. Latterday Objectivists disagree with that, claiming that objective law can only be founded on a correct understanding of rights which Roman law often lacked.

Two points: First, anyone and everyone DOES HAVE the right to use force in defense of their individual rights and contrary to what Marotta thinks, that is in agreement with Ayn Rand's views. (If he makes up a straw-man argument saying I advocate shooting at the police for something like attempting to enforce a blue law, then he shouldn't be taken seriously since the context of recent posts did not require that I address such specifics. And clearly, not addressing those does not make me an advocate of "stealth anarchism.")

She wrote: "The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative." [Ayn Rand, page 108, The Virtue of Selfishness.]

She has never written anything that denies the individual the right to use force to defend themselves while under attack - that is NOT part of the monopoly on the use of RETALIATORY force that is granted to government.

Second, perhaps Mr. Marotta is conflating "objective law" with "law based upon Objectivist principles". Objective law is law that is written and that describes acts in an unambiguous fashion so as to permit a uniform and consistent interpretation. This is "objective" being used NOT in reference to the philosophy created by Ayn Rand, but as an adjective in an epistemological context and in opposition to "subjective." In the realm of law, "objective" is without regard to the founding principles under a particular law. Objective law can be (and has been) written to support altruistic/collectivist principles. For example, there is now a law in NY city that prevents a business from selling soft drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces, which violates the individual rights, of those who would like to sell larger drinks, but that is, none-the-less, objective law (written, unambiguous, clear and specifies the specific consequences, etc.)

I have always taken the position that a government must be based upon objective law AND that such law be derived from individual rights - those are two separate requirements.

(Mr. Marotta needs to do more than refer to "latterday Objectivists" whatever those are, as an authority or explanation of his position.)
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Ayn Rand was very clear regarding Law, Objective and Non-Objective. That link contains extensive quotes of hers regarding objective law. Here are but two:
"All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it." Ayn Rand, The Nature of Government, page 110, The Virtue of Selfishness.

And from the same essay, page 109, "A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws."

She states that the RETALIATORY use of force requires objective laws, rules of evidence, rules defining enforcement procedures, and punishment. She states that without these we will fail in barring the use of force from social relationships and that this is the task of a proper government. This is how you create an enviroment that most favors voluntary association based upon individual rights. I put retaliatory in upper case because it does not always mean the same as the immediate exercise of self-defense during an attack on ones rights. If a person is attacked by a mugger, there may not be a government agent close enough to be of help in defense, but the government agencies can none-the-less act much later in time to convict and punish the mugger - an exercise in retaliatory use of force that is not needed to defend a right at the time it is threatened.

I find myself in complete agreement with what Rand has written in this area and so I don't understand Marotta's objections are to what I've written and I can only conclude that he misunderstands what I've written.

Perhaps he confuses moral rights with legal rights. Non-self-defense, retaliatory use of force might be moral, yet still be illegal under a system of laws that Ayn Rand and I would agree with. It is a practical matter that the state be given a monopoly on the use of non-self-defense, retaliatory force but that doesn't mean that it would be immoral for a person to kill someone who, say, raped and murdered their child, but was not convicted because of a lack of evidence.

Post 21

Thursday, July 19 - 9:44pm

I certainly agree with Michael Marotta where he asks John Howard, "What are you advocating that we do not have?" To be specific, what do you claim will create this environment where the initiation of force is significantly less likely to be used?
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Mr. Howard wrote:

This phony argument, when reduced to its schematic essence is as follows: when the populace is free to make their own decisions by majority rule, they will act as barbaric savages, but when they choose a few of their own to make their decisions for them, those few will act like a gentleman's club of Objectivists, and won't reflect the mob's evil by making evil laws, like Jim Crow laws. Of course they won't.

This fantasy ignores the basic truth that if the population is 70% bastards and it elects a government, the government will be 80 - 90% bastards since nasty people always seek power with greater enthusiasm than their nicer neighbors.

Mr. Howard seems content to imply that because people can behave badly (individually or in groups) that there is no difference between mob rule or rule by objective law based upon individual rights. His argument boils down to saying because there are people who act without laws that might kill someone, there is no purpose or value to having a government with laws that we enforce against murders and just because we Objectivists sit around being in opposition to murder doesn't change that.

Such foolishness. It denies that men can ever project valid ideals into working structures while at the same time claiming that not even trying will end up working out better!
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Steve: "Anarchists have alleged that a free market will provide 'laws' (and their enforcement) but that entails a logical error."

John: "No it doesn't. In this context, free market merely refers to majority rule. That is the only just way to have a single body of law that applies to everyone. The only alternative is for law to be decided by a ruling minority against the wishes of the majority."

"Free" in this context, and anytime it is used as an adjective for "market" means an absence of intitated force, fraud, or theft. Whether done by a single person, a minority, or a majority. Mr. Howard is calling for laws that a majority agree with - let us remember Nazi Germany, or let us examine the way women are treated in Islamic Theocracies. But he is saying "that is the only JUST way to have a single body of law that applies to everyone." [my emphasis]
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Morality won't be found in numbers. If there is only a single individual who lays down a law that every other person in the world disagrees with, but the law is an objectively written law that prohibits the initiation of force, then that law is moral and just - it isn't about numbers of people, it is about creating an environment that most favors voluntary association where initiation of force, fraud and theft are against the law, and the law is enforced. This requires a government.
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Anarchy, as many, many of us define it, is majority rule on law. The only alternative is minority rule. ... Steve is trying to argue that a minority will make better law than a majority. There is no reason to believe that and he offers no reason.

Defining anarchy as majority rule on law is nonsense. Unless you include the requirement that there shall be no monopoly of law which is enforced by government. After all, what is meant by "rule" in that sentence? The use of force by anyone who choses to enforce whatever they think is the law? If they are a minority with more power and force than the majority, what would stop them? Who writes down this law? Such fuzzy nonsense.

Mr. Howard says that I am arguing that a minority will make a better law than a majority. False. I've never said that. I've said that it isn't the numbers that matter - it is if the laws are objective, based upon individual rights, and enforced.

We have a republic - the majority elect the rule makers (except for a few communities where the people engage in direct democracy and make the rules themselves). The prinicple of majority rule is observed, but with the key understanding that government will be limited to the powers granted by the constitution which is intended to hold laws created to those that protect individual rights. It is far, far from perfectly implimented, but it is exactly the right approach.
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Mr. Howard says,

There is no reason for law to be 'staffed'. There is no need for government employees of any kind. There is no proper function of law other than self defense of the individual and that is the proper function of every individual in society, not an elite. Everyone has a right to delegate their self defense to whomever they wish (when possible in the marketplace).

This is exactly what we see in places like war-lord ridden Somali. Pick the war-lord to whom you will pay-off and bow to in hopes that your rights will be protected. When physical force and the threat thereof is allowed as a tool of negotiation and association, that is what will compete in the marketplace. Real freedom requires that force be put under tight control, and that requires a monopoly on law and the delegation of retaliatory force to a government. All this nonsense about majority and minority is a smokescreen to hide the simple fact that Mr. Howard's system allows force to be used by anyone at anytime for any reason and the only 'law' governing that use is whatever works will prevail - at least for a while. The 'law' of the jungle. He calls for laws "crafted by majority rule" but with no monopoly on law or of retaliatory force, no government, no staffing of the law, this is all just an abuse of language.

Post 22

Friday, July 20 - 7:29am

Michael:

re: That sheds a bit of light. Some cities in Northern Europe have found that removing traffic signals improves flow and increases safety. It has little to do with the "law" per se and more to do with the culture, which is why Aristotle said that tradition is stronger than law. If you do not respect other people because you do not respect yourself, no one else is ever safe.

I think you raise an excellent point, and I totally agree that is the foundation. Without a supportive culture and tradition, manufactured law is ultimately wishes on paper, because the biggest beast in the jungle -is- the local tribe, always.

It is why at least some our FF(TJeff comes to mind) recognized, as part of the American experiment, if it was going to succeed, a system of teaching the new American culture needed to be put in place, or the experiment was going to fail. (And so he got busy building UVA, a public university, which he considered his proudest life achievement...)

Do you think Northern Europe benefits from a far more homogeneous culture than modern America?(I do.) Was their cultural reasonableness lessons learned from life in a harsh environment?(I don't know.) Was it harsh lessons(or reassurances?)learned from a distant early history of delivering some of the world's baddest megapolitical baddasses, pouring over the contintent?(I still don't know why, I just believe it-- their modern homogenous level of reasonableness, their ability to live together-- is so.)

The Northern Europe example is indeed a counter example to the Bangladesh example. Opposites in climate as well, perhaps apropos of nothing.

So where is America in that spectrum? Drive in Boston...or NYCity or Phila. And they have traffic laws! Not the same as Cleveland or even Chicago. The midwest has the nation's most polite and reasonable drivers.

LA is an oddity; it is so jammed most of the time that it is barely possible to drive like an ass. How do you sit in traffic...aggressively?

My ass hurts from pulling these numbers out, but forgive me; let's assume 97% of Americans are perfectly reasonable, rational educated enlightened peace loving folks capable of self-organizing into a polite orchestra of respectfully navigating the public commons.

Is that the same as believing that number is 100%?

And if it is only 3% megapolitical psychopaths, then doesn't that sound just like Germany in the 20s?

What got loose in Germany wasn't anarchy although it was insanity; what got loose in Germany was faulty principles, widely held and widely defended. And yet America in 2012 is no more widely enlightened than Germany in the 20s, and yet, that experience demonstrates that a fringe 3% willing to leverage violence is able to lead the tribe to hell when the principles of freedom are not widely defended.

Without support of those principles, backed by a model of government that supports those principles, then America runs the exact same risk of conceding to the mega-political whims of the ever present insane 3% willing to leverage violence to scratch their itch.

regards,
Fred

Post 23

Wednesday, July 25 - 9:03pm

John,

You interacted with Steve:

Steve: "Anarchists have alleged that a free market will provide 'laws' (and their enforcement) but that entails a logical error."

John: "No it doesn't. In this context, free market merely refers to majority rule. That is the only just way to have a single body of law that applies to everyone. The only alternative is for law to be decided by a ruling minority against the wishes of the majority."
[Steve:] "Free" in this context, and anytime it is used as an adjective for "market" means an absence of intitated force, fraud, or theft. Whether done by a single person, a minority, or a majority. Mr. Howard is calling for laws that a majority agree with - let us remember Nazi Germany, or let us examine the way women are treated in Islamic Theocracies. But he is saying "that is the only JUST way to have a single body of law that applies to everyone." [my emphasis]
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Morality won't be found in numbers. If there is only a single individual who lays down a law that every other person in the world disagrees with, but the law is an objectively written law that prohibits the initiation of force, then that law is moral and just - it isn't about numbers of people, it is about creating an environment that most favors voluntary association where initiation of force, fraud and theft are against the law, and the law is enforced. This requires a government.

I agree with Steve. Besides "rule of the few" (dictatorship), and "rule of the many" (contractarianism), there is a third way: "rule of natural and objectively-moral (conclusively justifiable) law" You are looking at the situation like a logical positivist -- or, at the very least, like a legal positivist. In legal positivism, all law starts out as someone's desire. In legal positivism, there is nothing to base law on, except that it is the law that you happen to want in any given place, and at any given time. Steve's examples of Nazi Germany and Islamic Theocracy hold weight here.

Ed

Post 24

Friday, July 27 - 11:16am

I apologize for the cross-posting - I seldom fall victim to it - but I just put some of this on MSK's Objectivist Living in a similar topic thread.

Florida's problematic gated communities
By Bonita Burton, Special to CNN
updated 9:59 AM EDT, Wed March 28, 2012

"Be as paranoid as possible!"

The screed from our homeowner association manager arrived in our mailbox printed inside a cheery holiday border. The message continued: "Our neighborhood is as safe as we make it. Make no mistake about it, you must be on your guard! Report suspicious behavior or individuals that do not belong in our community."

The call to arms echoed the strident sentiment of neighbors left nervous by the robbery of our home the day before. While we slept unaware at the back of an upscale gated community in Windermere, Florida, intruders came through the front door, took our big-screen TV, laptops and all of the presents from under the Christmas tree.

No matter that we hadn't activated our security system and most likely forgot to lock the door. Hysterical efforts to fortify the perimeter were in full swing.
Fenced in against their own insecurity, residents living within the perimeter revere active vigilance. Those who want to play border patrol and muscle outsiders around can easily do so unchecked.
"When you discourage drive-through traffic and pedestrians, it becomes abnormal to see someone walking. And now you've created a situation where two people alone are hazardous to each other because there's no one else around, no cars driving by, no eyes on the street, " Harris added.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/28/opinion/burton-florida-gates/index.html

Arresting Developments
DECEMBER 19, 2001
When Police Power Goes Private

On January 2, 1998, Miguel Valdes, a private security guard working for a Florida bank, shot a customer for double parking. Nobody would disagree that Valdes went way over the line. In contrast to public police, private police enjoy only a clearly circumscribed set of powers to enforce public laws. They have the power of citizen's arrest and the capacity to eject trespassers from private property. But beyond this, private police may not use physical force, pursue, detain, search, or seize. Overzealousness may be a constant temptation for what some people derisively call "cop wannabes," but we usually know overstepping when we see it. But now reverse the private-public arrow, and consider another problem: public police enforcing private rules. Put away the image of a liveried private security guard brandishing a gun at you for double parking, and imagine instead a uniformed police officer coming to your door and telling you to mow your lawn. This actually happens.

But policing remains a special case: it engages laws or rules, which are social constructions, and force and space, which are physical entities. Each can be either public or private; but here blurring of the lines is not so easily done, and the social consequences are potentially far greater. It is not physically possible for a police officer to wear two kinds of uniform—public and private—at the same time, even if she is enforcing two different sets of laws. Nor is it possible for two different sets of laws to govern the same physical space, even if both a public government and a private government have jurisdiction over it.
http://prospect.org/article/arresting-developments-0

As Fred and I discussed the traffic flows in Europe and Bangladesh, no laws can protect you against a culture of disuse, abuse, decadence and decay. Ayn Rand insisted that politics is the last thing to worry about. Get the metaphysics and epistemology right, and the rest will follow.

German town removes traffic signs.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18217318

Ipswich, England is among half a dozen others
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html

It's science!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=removing-roads-and-traffic-lights

But as Fred pointed out, it depends on culture, because in Dhaka, Bangladesh, they just step over the bodies...

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/27, 11:18am)

Post 25

Saturday, September 8 - 12:25am

In the end, it comes down to the fact that the majority needs a way to impose its ideals on the minority, and the majority just can't do that without getting organized.

If you are faced with aggressive force, you defend yourself. The person who aggressed against you apparently didn't believe in the same principles as you. If you defend yourself successfully, you are asserting your principles over his. You are imposing your ideals on him - "NO, you can't do this to me."

In the real world you're not always capable of winning that fight by yourself. The aggressor will probably have people willing to back him up who agree with his principles. You'll need the same. If you live in a small village in the mountains that never has contact with the outside world, you can probably impose your principles on the aggressors in the form of a good, old-fashioned feud without any need for real organization.

If you actually have contact with the wide world, then you are going to need to ally yourself with many thousands, millions of people even. After all, there are millions opposed to you - look at how many socialists exist now who are willing to force your employer to take money out of your check and redistribute it for you. You either need to convince the whole world to see things your way, or you need to have a big enough gang to overcome them. On the scale of millions of people, you simply won't be able to organize that gang without writing down some rules and standard operating procedures. Millions of people can't all write down the rules, so you'll have to pick someone to do the actual writing. Realistically, millions of people won't even agree on what the rules should be, so they will have to compromise a little bit - You might decide that you have so much in common with these people that it's better to accept a little bit of what YOU perceive as aggression from them than to be in a constant state of war with them AND your mutual enemies at the same time (or maybe you won't, and then they'll just impose their principles on you the same way that real-life aggressors are doing to you right now). Of course, somebody will have to negotiate these compromises, and millions of people can't all negotiate with one another at the same time, so some smaller group of people will have to do the job. Even with millions of allies, you probably won't be able to impose your ideas about non-aggression on the entire world. If you try to do that, you will run out of resources and fail. You will need to decide exactly how much of the world you have the resources to defend against aggression. Damn, this is starting to sound an awful lot like a representative government with geographical borders.

I don't mean to sound like a smartass. I'm just trying to get the point across that the only way to live in a peaceful anarchy is if everybody, or at least a vast, overwhelming majority of people, all hold the same non-aggressive principles. That just can't happen outside of the possibility of a small, isolated village somewhere. In the real world you will have no choice but to physically impose your non-aggression principle on large groups of people who do not believe in it. To do that you will need some way to organize the people who agree with you, and that organization will end up looking very much like a government. If it doesn't, then some large group of people who hold principles opposed to yours WILL form something that looks like a government, and they will crush you with it. In fact, they already have.

Post 26

Saturday, September 8 - 12:10pm