Intellectual Property - In All Fairness!

[Rassah]

Money will buy justice and protection. The people with the most money will be best protected, do they'll make all the rules.

I guess so. Would they be printing their money, or getting it from selling crap and services to poor unprotected people?

[Hawker]

No. It provides a central database and only ONE land registry so there are no conflicts and fraudulent claims.

If what you say was true, title research companies and title insurance would not exist. Where are those few hundred $$$ that I pay every time I buy or refinance a house going to?

That is to address fraud, missing documents, disputes, etc. within the context of law. Your system has no laws, thus there is no basis to anyone's claim.

Who said liberland has no laws? Contract law exist outside of government, and is based on prior decisions, which are fundamentally based on private property rights. Why would these contract laws not exist in liberland, if everyone thought it was a good idea to keep them going for the sake of being able to keep business going?
As contract law is based on property and personal rights, I assume it is not against libertarian philosophy? Maybe a libertarian can confirm this?

In a libertarian world, everyone has their own concept of property and personal rights.  I've been through this with b2c, fred and a few others.  

Contract law cannot exist outside of government as otherwise you would have competing arbitration systems, some based on christian law, some on sharia law, some on common law and so on.  Each has its own way of interpreting contracts and they come to different conclusions.  Without a state, you can't have a single law.

Besides, people will have nukes so they are under no obligation to respect any law.  Some simply won't.

[Rassah]

Question. Would most people who currently pay taxes for government police, if they no longer had to pay taxes, would be able to afford to pay that exact same amount of money for private police?

I'll leave you to discover the imbalance of your solution. I'll give you some hints: competition implies multiple services.

Multiple services, and threat of substitutes. Just as power company monopoly can be subverted by windmills and solar panels, security company services can be subverted by apparently easily available nukes.

[AyeYo]

Money will buy justice and protection. The people with the most money will be best protected, do they'll make all the rules.

I guess so. Would they be printing their money, or getting it from selling crap and services to poor unprotected people?

Maybe they were born into it. It's irrelevant how they got it.

[Rassah]

Question. Would most people who currently pay taxes for government police, if they no longer had to pay taxes, would be able to afford to pay that exact same amount of money for private police?

I'll leave you to discover the imbalance of your solution. I'll give you some hints: competition implies multiple services. How many police can be brought to bear on a particular problem when collecting revenue from customers?

Competition implies multiple services AND threat of substitutes. People often forget the second one. Just as overly expensive coke can be substituted with milk or orange June, or power company monopolies can be substituted with windmills and solar panels, private security forces can be substituted by apparently easily obtainable nukes.

[Rassah]

Why? We all use different courts. The whole notion of a court means that they deal with cases in which one party loses and one wins. Seems like for every court out there, half the people will not be in support of that court.

Do half the people disagree with a government court where you live???  

Yes, but they are forced to follow the decisions and can't just run off to a competing court for a favorable decision, so it's not an issue.

You said half the people disagree with a court, not a court's decision. Why do they still use that court if half the people think it's unfair? Or did you really mean half the people, after choosing a court they want, just disagree with the decisions?

Because they don't get to choose courts that agree with them. They don't get to go somewhere else if they don't like the decision. They can't just ignore the decisionif they don't like it.

They can do all of that and more in lib tard land.

You people are making up a world that does not exist. Companies and individuals have the right to chose what court to take their issues to. They must agree to abide by the decision of the court, but they have a choice is picking the court they believe will be the most fair. Courts also have an incentive to be most fair, otherwise they lose their jobs. If you pick a court that you both agreed was fair, it rules against you, and you don't agree with the decision, that's your problem, and no one in liberland or current government would support you, because you were the one who picked the court. If you do decide to go against it's ruling, no one will object to someone else enforcing it by force, since, again, in both systems the outcome will be seen as just.

[Rassah]

Why? We all use different courts. The whole notion of a court means that they deal with cases in which one party loses and one wins. Seems like for every court out there, half the people will not be in support of that court.

Do half the people disagree with a government court where you live???  

A lot do - they would prefer sharia courts.  Particularly when there is a property dispute between a man and a woman, you'd see Sharia courts getting a lot of business if it were a free for all.

Btw, Sharia courts are technically private arbitration, and are already legal, even in US. If a woman doesn't want to use one, she just has to not agree to that specific arbitration (and if she is forced to, that's a different matter entirely).

[AyeYo]

Why? We all use different courts. The whole notion of a court means that they deal with cases in which one party loses and one wins. Seems like for every court out there, half the people will not be in support of that court.

Do half the people disagree with a government court where you live???  

Yes, but they are forced to follow the decisions and can't just run off to a competing court for a favorable decision, so it's not an issue.

You said half the people disagree with a court, not a court's decision. Why do they still use that court if half the people think it's unfair? Or did you really mean half the people, after choosing a court they want, just disagree with the decisions?

Because they don't get to choose courts that agree with them. They don't get to go somewhere else if they don't like the decision. They can't just ignore the decisionif they don't like it.

They can do all of that and more in lib tard land.

You people are making up a world that does not exist. Companies and individuals have the right to chose what court to take their issues to. They must agree to abide by the decision of the court, but they have a choice is picking the court they believe will be the most fair. Courts also have an incentive to be most fair, otherwise they lose their jobs. If you pick a court that you both agreed was fair, it rules against you, and you don't agree with the decision, that's your problem, and no one in liberland or current government would support you, because you were the one who picked the court. If you do decide to go against it's ruling, no one will object to someone else enforcing it by force, since, again, in both systems the outcome will be seen as just.

Then your system is not voluntary as claimed. Your system is not coercion free as claimed. The non aggression principle is just smoke blown up peoples asses. Your system us as tyrannical and coercive as the state you claim to hate.

[Rassah]

So please, explain how you defend yourself against a lunatic with a nuke?

If he intends to keep it as a collector item, use it for industreal safe uses, or otherwise is not using it to threaten or harm people, I don't do anything.
If he is threatening to harm people, I would hope that he values his own life. If he does, I pay to send a black ops team to relieve him of his nuke and/or his life. If he doesn't value his life, I send that team to relieve the nuke manufacturer of theirs.

Now, what answer were YOU expecting, or rather what would YOU do in that situation? (Like, if you lived near the border in India, and knew that Pakistan sold a nuke to your neighbor)

[AyeYo]

So please, explain how you defend yourself against a lunatic with a nuke?

If he intends to keep it as a collector item, use it for industreal safe uses, or otherwise is not using it to threaten or harm people, I don't do anything.
If he is threatening to harm people, I would hope that he values his own life. If he does, I pay to send a black ops team to relieve him of his nuke and/or his life. If he doesn't value his life, I send that team to relieve the nuke manufacturer of theirs.

Now, what answer were YOU expecting, or rather what would YOU do in that situation? (Like, if you lived near the border in India, and knew that Pakistan sold a nuke to your neighbor)

Hahahaha! Omg this shit is rich!

And what do you do if he doesn't threaten anyone, he just detonates it with no warning. Not many terrorist organizations give people a heads up before blowing shit up.

[Rassah]

Everything is voluntary, therefore laws are useless. They may exist, but no one can be forced to follow then or be punished for not following them, therefore they are useless and effectively do not exist.

I think I finally see what the problem is. Everything is voluntary, but more importantly, everyone will do everything in their own self interest. That second part you're all ignoring, and is the part that will keep a business from screwing their customers, a security company from extorting their clients to the point where they become unproductive, a nuke company from selling products that destroy the people paying for those nukes, private courts from screwing customers and making decisions majority will consider unjust, etc. Everyone has their own version of property and contract law only to the point that they have their opinions on those laws respected by others. If everyone agrees it is just, it's a law until they don't. If everyone agrees to spend their money at a place of business, if is in business until they don't. If a business agrees to follow the contracts and rules established by other businesses in that market, it will continue to be able to do business with the customers and suppliers in that market until it stops. There is no law that says you must buy your stuff from Wal-Mart or Target. No law that says Ford must buy their tires from Firestone. No law that you must use arbitrage if you buy your cell phone service from AT&T. But if you or they do, they must agree to the contracts they have signed, with pens and dollars, or be thrown out, lose parts suppliers, or lose their service.
The fundamental part of libertarian greed and self-serving, as I understand it, is doing as much as you can to get as many others as possible to give as much as they can to you. If you want to come up with examples of how THAT will be a problem, feel free to. Likely I may join you. But as mentioned too many times, other people's money and production capacity is what keeps all the strawmen mentioned so far in check.

[NghtRppr]

Everything is voluntary, therefore laws are useless. They may exist, but no one can be forced to follow then or be punished for not following them, therefore they are useless and effectively do not exist.

If you are found guilty of stealing my property and refuse to turn it over, you will be forced to do so. It's a shame you don't even understand the system you're criticizing. You'll never convince any libertarians that they are wrong until you can at least make a cogent argument.

[AyeYo]

Everything is voluntary, therefore laws are useless. They may exist, but no one can be forced to follow then or be punished for not following them, therefore they are useless and effectively do not exist.

If you are found guilty of stealing my property and refuse to turn it over, you will be forced to do so. It's a shame you don't even understand the system you're criticizing. You'll never convince any libertarians that they are wrong until you can at least make a cogent argument.

See above. Your system is obviously not as advertised.

[Rassah]

Money will buy justice and protection. The people with the most money will be best protected, do they'll make all the rules.

I guess so. Would they be printing their money, or getting it from selling crap and services to poor unprotected people?

Maybe they were born into it. It's irrelevant how they got it.

FYI, my greay-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a very wealthy count, was born into it. He blew it all on women and gambling (and in a way, saved my family by making it a much smaller target many years later when communists took over Russia). Many athletes suddenly end up with millions,as do lottery winners. They almost all end up broke. Point is, wealth isn't just something fixed, it's something that must be worked on and maintained. Granted, sometimes the methods to maintain it suck *coughMurdochcoughKochBrotherscough*, but regardless, someone is still paying something to someone to keep it going.

[Rassah]

Then your system is not voluntary as claimed. Your system is not coercion free as claimed. The non aggression principle is just smoke blown up peoples asses. Your system us as tyrannical and coercive as the state you claim to hate.

Sorry, their, their, and their. The big difference, it seems to me, is that voting is done with dollars, not voices (more specifically with everyone's shopping dollars, not the few's campaign dollars), and regulation is left to market forces instead of arbitrary political and special interest forces. Perhaps that system does suck. Not having the capacity to predict every possible aspect of how such a system might turn out (I can't predict the future), I wouldn't know. I suspect you wouldn't either.

[AyeYo]

Money will buy justice and protection. The people with the most money will be best protected, do they'll make all the rules.

I guess so. Would they be printing their money, or getting it from selling crap and services to poor unprotected people?

Maybe they were born into it. It's irrelevant how they got it.

FYI, my greay-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a very wealthy count, was born into it. He blew it all on women and gambling (and in a way, saved my family by making it a much smaller target many years later when communists took over Russia). Many athletes suddenly end up with millions,as do lottery winners. They almost all end up broke. Point is, wealth isn't just something fixed, it's something that must be worked on and maintained. Granted, sometimes the methods to maintain it suck *coughMurdochcoughKochBrotherscough*, but regardless, someone is still paying something to someone to keep it going.

All I need is enough to buy a nuke and then I'm set for life.

[Rassah]

So please, explain how you defend yourself against a lunatic with a nuke?

If he intends to keep it as a collector item, use it for industreal safe uses, or otherwise is not using it to threaten or harm people, I don't do anything.
If he is threatening to harm people, I would hope that he values his own life. If he does, I pay to send a black ops team to relieve him of his nuke and/or his life. If he doesn't value his life, I send that team to relieve the nuke manufacturer of theirs.

And what do you do if he doesn't threaten anyone, he just detonates it with no warning. Not many terrorist organizations give people a heads up before blowing shit up.

Then, if i am still alive, I go after whoever sold him that nuke, and/or whoever helped him to raise the money to buy it. Why, what would your government do if a nuke was detonated, if its regulations that failed to stop fertilizer bombs and terrorism fail to prevent a nuke too?

[fergalish]

I'll be the first to admit it, LiberLand does require everyone to take more responsibility for themselves.

Ok, great - you've agreed with my post from a while ago!  Here it is again:

... IF EVERY SINGLE PERSON THE WHOLE WORLD WIDE suddenly changed their nature and started behaving honestly, it might work.  ...

Now, that didn't take too long -- only 26 pages!  Maybe in another 26 you'll admit that MightMakesWinnerMakesRight is actually an unavoidable consequence of resource scarcity.  Now can you give us a reason why would people become responsible citizens in LiberLand when they don't do it *even* under threat of being forcefully imprisoned?  If all you want is a hypothetical discussion of what libertarianism would be like and how nice it would be under certain, perhaps improbable, circumstances, that's fine.  But you seem to believe, in this thread, that you consider the above condition to be a likely possibility.  If so, can you justify yourself?  If not, would you clarify exactly what your argument is please?

If you believe humans do not act humanely, by what logic do you allow the majority to elect a minority to have even greater power over all than a normal individual!?

By their nature, humans do not act humanely.  Reduced to the minimum, man organises into small social groups of maybe a few hundred individuals, each group with a single authoritative leader, and competes with other groups for resources.  The 'invention' of society, facilitated by the discovery of agriculture, changed all that -- and man changed from a nomadic to a social lifestyle.  As social groups grew, thanks to the success of agriculture, members had to learn to cooperate, even where they were not dependent on one another.  There had to be a 'social norm'.  To answer your question: I allow politicians control over me, because I genuinely think that the alternative would be worse for everyone, me included.  And one person having more power than others is nothing new.  It's been like that since time immemorial.  But, ideally, the ruling class should be checked and controlled by the population and, crucially, an independent judiciary.  And also because election time always comes around.  Sadly in our corrupted world, the politicians are literally getting away with murder.

I think the blatantly obvious reason (though maybe not to everyone) is that the state answers to whichever political party is in charge, or worse, whichever politician happens to be corrupt and in the pocket of a megacorporation

I agree with this.  Modern states are corrupt, it has to do with equality and megacorporations.  This is one of the reasons I would not like libertarianism - it would ultimately lead to MightMakesWinner, and mega-corporations controlling all our lives but with no public oversight - no elections, no independent judiciary, 'politicians' accountable to no-one.  Although, instead of politicians, we would have CEOs looking no further than their own pockets.

Yes, we get it, some people just like to fight. You can't prove your government would be able to handle that issue any better than a libertopia.

They already did - they regulated the fertiliser trade.  Case closed.

I can't take back the millions of deaths already caused by smallpox, nukes and car bombs, and I can't say that any version of Libertopia would make all of that go away either any more than yours does/did.

Oh but it did.  Do you think that, if the nuclear trade were unregulated, no terrorist organisation or crackpot millionaire would have used one by now?

When is the last time the IRA lit off a nuke?

...Just because something hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't

Every day that goes by in which the IRA, and any other terrorist organisations, DON'T set off a nuke, is a glowing tribute to the non-proliferation treaty.

Jews have been killed and nukes have been used on people. Your point?

Nukes have only been used in an anarchic libertarian context - one member using a nuke against another member within an anarchic libertarian framework. Interpret the result how you wish. The various court systems and privates security firms may not have resolved the matter to your liking.

Excellent point.

When was the last time someone in totally ungoverned Somalia lit off a nuke?

Another excellent point.  No-one in Somalia can get nukes because the trade is so well regulated.

More fail, though I can see why you'd get confused. I'm not here to argue the points of the other guys. I'm just here to question the validity of your premises.
Would privately owned nukes held by corporations for the purposes of asteroid mining or asteroid defence be out of the question btw?

Rassah, this is a terribly terribly terribly bad question.  Are you somehow suggesting that, in LiberLand, a representative of the Asteroid Defence & Mining Company is going to travel door-to-door, looking for people to pay a contribution so that they'll defend your property from an asteroid?  And what, if you don't pay, and the asteroid looks like it's heading for your property, like, they won't shoot it down (well, up)?

I really thought privately held nukes were the limit of absurdity, and I tried the raindrop-triggered nuke just to see if b2c & fb had their limits.  But privately funded asteroid defence???  Man, that wins  

What company in their right mind would sell him, just a random stranger, nukes, at the expense of liability to millions of people, or risk of having their own facilities blown up? And why would he spend hundrens of millions on a nuke for the purpose of just hiking wherever he wants? Why not just spend those millions to buy the land to hike on outright?

What poor worker in a uranium enrichment plant will not sell material at a vast profit to himself, so some crackpot organisation can bomb a city on the other side of the world, in a nation that this poor worker doesn't care about, or maybe even actively dislikes?

[Libertarianism] has NEVER been chosen by any society ever,despite the fact that it is an option. So obviously it's not a better option, based on your own reasoning. If that isn't correct, give a detailed explanation why.

Actually, it has been tried, in Spain.  Guess what, though?  It failed.  Externalities.  Greek city-states were also a close approximation.  Guess what?  Failed too.  Externalities again.  Sucks huh?

[Rassah]

Money will buy justice and protection. The people with the most money will be best protected, do they'll make all the rules.

I guess so. Would they be printing their money, or getting it from selling crap and services to poor unprotected people?

Maybe they were born into it. It's irrelevant how they got it.

FYI, my greay-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a very wealthy count, was born into it. He blew it all on women and gambling (and in a way, saved my family by making it a much smaller target many years later when communists took over Russia). Many athletes suddenly end up with millions,as do lottery winners. They almost all end up broke. Point is, wealth isn't just something fixed, it's something that must be worked on and maintained. Granted, sometimes the methods to maintain it suck *coughMurdochcoughKochBrotherscough*, but regardless, someone is still paying something to someone to keep it going.

All I need is enough to buy a nuke and then I'm set for life.

Yep. There's an old Soviet joke:
"I wish I had enough money to buy the entire Volga river, with all the ships on it."
"Why the hell do you want a river with all those ships?"
"I don't. I just wish I had that much money."

Likely if you managed to get the few hundred mil required to buy a nuke, you'd have way better uses to put it to.

[FredericBastiat]

I'll be the first to admit it, LiberLand does require everyone to take more responsibility for themselves.

Ok, great - you've agreed with my post from a while ago!  Here it is again:

... IF EVERY SINGLE PERSON THE WHOLE WORLD WIDE suddenly changed their nature and started behaving honestly, it might work.  ...
Now, that didn't take too long -- only 26 pages!  Maybe in another 26 you'll admit that MightMakesWinnerMakesRight is actually an unavoidable consequence of resource scarcity.  Now can you give us a reason why would people become responsible citizens in LiberLand when they don't do it *even* under threat of being forcefully imprisoned?

Those two quotes don't even share any synonyms, much less the same words, how could they possibly have the same meaning? They're not even a close substitute for what I said, fail. It's the best interest of everybody everywhere to act in a non-violent, respectful way. War, generally speaking, is too expensive to maintain. One way out is to play nicely. Most forceful means are a disincentive to improve.

By their nature, humans do not act humanely...To answer your question: I allow politicians control over me, because I genuinely think that the alternative would be worse for everyone, me included...

If I didn't think any human acted humanely, there would be no point to any type of ideology, including yours. I daresay, yours would be the first to fail, the quickest. Having someone else control you makes you a minion and a sucker. Keep drinking the Koolaid. Oh, and don't check for poison, there isn't any.

I agree with this.  Modern states are corrupt, it has to do with equality and megacorporations...

Any state, individual, or collective, is corrupt if it violates the NAP. Pretty obvious. No need to doll it all up with fancy words like Nation, Society, State, Government, Modernity, Advanced, or Leadership etc.