| | I wrote, "John, you still haven't answered my question. Do you agree with Rand's view of rights or not?" He replied, Yes but I'm not interested in being tricked into some syllogistic contradiction. Then you don't have a clue on what her view of rights actually is. It might help to sit down and actually read what she had to say on the subject. Every thing Rand said was not devoid of its context as you also make an exception for "dire emergencies". No, but her context is very clearly spelled out in her essay, "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness. She also discussed this issue with Gerald Goodman of Columbia University in 1960, in a radio interview entitled "Morality and Why Man Requires It." Goodman asked her the following question about the ethics of emergencies: "Supposing you are washed ashore after a shipwreck, and there is a locked house which is not yours, but you're starving and you might die the next moment, and there is food in this house, what is your moral behavior?" She answered as follows: "I would say again, this is an emergency situation, and please consult my article 'The Ethics Of Emergencies' in _The Virtue Of Selfishness_ for a fuller discussion of this subject.
"But to state the issue in brief, I would say that you would have the right to break in and eat the food that you need, and then when you reach the nearest policeman, admit what you have done, and undertake to repay the man when you are able to work. In other words, you may, in an emergency situation, save your life, but not as "of right." You would regard it as an emergency, and then, still recognizing the property right of the owner, you would restitute whatever you have taken, and that would be moral on both parts."
For the rest of the interview as it applies to this issue, see: http://www.jeffcomp.com/faq/murder.html
Observe that Rand regards the above example as an emergency in which your life is at stake, not a normal social context. She would not, therefore, have agreed with you on the right of the government to tax its citizens.
In fact, she says as much in her essay, "Government Financing in a Free Society," in which she writes: "What would be the proper method of financing the government in a fully free society?"
This question usually asked in connection with the Objectivist principle that the government of a free society may not initiate the use of physical force and may use force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use. Since the imposition of taxes does represent an initiation of force, how, it is asked, would the government of a free country raise the money needed to finance its proper services?
In a fully free society, taxation -- or, to be exact, payment for governmental services -- would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government -- the police, the armed forces, the law courts -- are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.
I wrote, "Secondly, I did not say that we have the right to be free from any kind of force. I said that we have the right to be free from the initiation of force, not from retaliatory force.
"As for arresting someone, the police must have proof that he's a bona fide suspect -- they must have evidence sufficient to suspect him of the crime. Otherwise, he's presumed innocent of reasonable suspicion, in which case, the police have no right to arrest or detain him. If they do, they are initiating force against him." So how is it that the suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Because, unlike the arresting officers, a jury is capable of judging him guilty or not guilty through careful deliberation and with much greater access to evidence, so the defendant has a right to be convicted only if his guilt is ascertained beyond a reasonable doubt. Obviously, the arresting officers are not capable of rendering a final verdict, given their limited information, but they must nevertheless be able to arrest a suspect, otherwise the courts couldn't render a verdict with the suspect in custody, or incarcerate him if he is found guilty. It seems you make contextual distinctions here about the application of retaliatory force (which so do I). In one instance you say as long as you are reasonably suspected of a crime but not proven to have committed a crime, it is ok to use force. I completely agree with this. Obviously not all types of retaliatory force are the same and they are to be used appropriately given the specific context of reality we are discussing. It would be wrong to arrest someone of a crime even with reasonable suspicion and then deny them a trial. We would agree with that because we are saying this isn't a reasonable application of retaliatory force. So obviously we can sit here and discuss what is or isn't reasonable uses of retaliatory force, and we most certainly have disagreements over the concretes of when this principle applies and doesn't apply. Right? Well, yes, but you're saying that the initiation of force is proper even against people who are not suspected of any crime and who haven't been identified as initiating force. I originally wrote:
Can we for example trust a private militia that answers to their customers to effectively quarantine an outbreak of a deadly and highly communicable disease? To which you respond: Yes. If the people carrying the disease are a threat to their customers, then we can trust the competing agencies to do a better job of protecting their customers than a public agency would do; if the competing agencies fail, they must answer to their customers and will lose business. If the government's monopoly fails, what other recourse do people have, when the government is the only show in town? As you well know, governments are notoriously inefficient in whatever they do, whether it's defending people's rights or protecting their health. Really? We can trust the private militia to quarantine the customers against their will to which pay for this militia? I mean do you seriously believe a private militia could objectively apply retaliatory force while answering to the subjective whims of their customers' demands, whether those demands be reasonable or not? They're not answering to the subjective whims of their customers' demands. They're governed by objective rules of evidence and procedure and operate under the government's rules and regulations. Their customers are the ones having forced used against them. If they have the ability to drop one militia and hire another you can't expect any kind of objectivity to the application of retaliatory force. Why not? People hire private investigators to solve cases for them and there is no issue there regarding their objectivity. One of the most famous private eyes of all time is the legendary Jay J. Armes, who solved kidnapping cases for wealthy celebrities that the police and FBI were unable to solve. He was a real-life James Bond, a black-belt in karate, who had an arsenal of weapons, a fast car equipped with a rear mounted closed-circuit TV camera, revolving license plates and full-range communications equipment, along with a private helicopter and a 20,000 volt electrified fence along his property protecting him from his enemies, as several attempts had been made on his life by the criminal underworld. If his clients didn't like him, they were free to find another P.I., but that didn't compromise his objectivity; if anything, it made him more dedicated and more efficient. Just because the free market is efficient in producing widgets, it doesn't mean every widget is objectively good. And likewise farming out every aspect of retaliatory force to the subjective desires of the consumer will not result in a fair application of retaliatory force. There will always be the demand for a customer's subjective idea of justice, and the desire for that privately hired militia to meet the demands of that customer, whether the customer's idea of justice is valid or not. The point you're overlooking is that these private agencies would have to follow the government's rules and regulations; otherwise, they'd be arrested and prosecuted for violating the law, just as rogue cops are today.
I wrote, "The only time it is legitimate to initiate force is an emergency in which one's own life depends on it, since one's life is one's highest value. The government cannot do it on behalf of others, and certainly not as a matter of public policy in order to defend people's rights. It makes no sense to violate rights in order to defend people's rights from being violated, which is a contradiction in terms." So while it is a contradiction for government to do this, it is not a contradiction for an individual to initiate force in an emergency in which one's own life depends on it? What's good for one is not good for the other? Why? Because the starving individual who is stealing food in order to survive is not stealing money in order to defend people against having their money stolen, which is a contradiction in terms.
I wrote, "What it means to violate someone's rights is to initiate force against him. Even if you initiate force in an emergency to save your own life, you still owe the victim compensation." And likewise, so too must the government. But weren't you saying that the government has the right to steal people's money as a matter of public policy in order to finance its activities? Are you now saying that the government must pay the money back?? That doesn't make any sense, John!
I wrote, "If you quarantine someone who has a deadly communicable disease, you are not initiating force against him if, without being quarantined, he would expose others to his disease. By exposing others, it is he who would be initiating force against them. You, therefore, have a right to prevent him from doing so by quarantining him, in which case, you're using retaliatory force, not the initiation of force." You can't effectively quarantine a geographical infected area without inadvertently quarantining some people who do not have the disease. It is an impossibility in that scenario to distinguish who has the deadly communicable disease and who doesn't until tests can be conducted. In that case you are presuming everyone to be guilty until proven innocent. Not really. You wouldn't have the right to quarantine the area in the first place, if you didn't already have sufficient proof that a substantial portion of the population in the area were infected and that others who have yet to show any symptoms could also be. The purpose of quarantine is to stop individuals from assaulting others with their highly deadly communicable disease, even if it means some may fall. It's not a contradiction because failure to take action of quarantine will result in the deaths of so many more people, and those that are not infected yet in that quarantine area do not have the right to endanger the rest of the country. It is in an individual's rational self-interest to see it is better for them to live under a government that has that power than under one that doesn't. Right, and the government that I favor would have that power. And finally, just to address the increduilty that I would prefer to reserve judgement to see if voluntary taxes would effectively protect man's rights, I am operating from what I experience today in my life. Right now my life is relatively peaceful and tranquil. I am wealthy, I have a large home, and while I abhor some of my taxes going to pay for needless welfare programs I don't feel the same when it pays for the American military and my local and state police and courts. The fact that relatively speaking my life is peaceful and tranquil would suggest the burden of proof here is not on me to say voluntary taxes will not work, the burden of proof is on others who say my life would still be relatively peaceful and tranquil under a system of no compulsory taxes. Don't act like I'm way out of left field for remaining a little skeptical people would still pay for a 500 billion dollar a year Army. Like I said I think it's worth trying only for the fact it really has never been tried before. But the burden of proof is on the people who advocate something that has never been tried before ever in the history of mankind concerning the funding of force protection, in a country today with little to no threat of foreign invasion with a fair amount of peace and tranquility for the individual, it's a hard argument to accept it is a given fact voluntary taxation will be better. Maybe it is, I don't know and neither do I think anyone else on this forum does either. Better by what standard? By the standard of respect for people's rights? Absolutely, if you hold, as Rand does, that taxation is theft. The fact that your life might be less peaceful than it is now if government theft were abolished does not justify your continuing the practice. Other people's lives and property are not yours to dispose of.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were a wealthy slave owner, and that emancipation might negatively impact your lifestyle and cause you to be less well off than you are now. Would you be justified in placing the burden of proof on those who advocate freeing the slaves, because it's hard for you to accept that a free labor market will be better? Of course, you wouldn't. Then why do you think you're justified in placing the burden on those who advocate freeing the taxpayers on the grounds that it's hard for you to accept that voluntary taxation will be better? That voluntary taxation is "better" is proved by the fact that respecting people's rights for the sake of protecting them is better than violating people's rights for the sake of protecting them, which is proved by the fact that moral integrity is better than moral hypocrisy.
- Bill
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