Hello again, my lovely friend (I really do enjoy this, more than you know… it helps me test my positions, which is something I really appreciate. Thank you. 
)…
You write:
On your “right to discriminate” post, I’m sensing a disconnect between reality & your ideals. You say that violating property compromises liberty. In the 1950′s south, a group of white men could deprive liberty from black men & women simply by deciding not to do business with them. Imagine a black person with no possessions in the middle of Alabama. Now, how would this man survive? He can get no job, therefore no money. He can’t even grow his own food, as he has no land. Do you feel liberty would be preserved if we allowed this?
This is going to end up being much more of an actual discussion, I think. I’m going to try to take a socratic approach here.
What, in your opinion, are men entitled to merely by virture of their existence?
How about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? At least one of these must be compromised in my example above. The man will starve to death if the land owners decide not to do business with him.
Perhaps the land owners would allow him to submit to becoming a slave again. However, while he would have life, he would not have liberty nor the pursuit of happiness.
His life is not compromised as far as I can tell. No one was murdered in your example. His liberty isn’t compromised, either, as he’s not locked in a cage or tied to a tree or anything of that nature. But note that the statement is that a man is entitled to “the pursuit of happines,” not that happiness itself is guaranteed. He is entitled to pursue happiness so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others. I consider this all to be inherent to a proper understanding of and respect for the property of others, something which obviously didn’t exist during the times of slavery in this history of the US.
In the case of the slaves of the south before the civil war, they were bound against their will. Those who bound them are responsible for making the slaves whole again. This may not mean that they do business with them, but it means that they sould at least acquire the means to find someone who would. Now… That’s not to say that it would have happened that way, necessarily. Trying to insert this philosophy into a deeply rooted cultural situation like that of the south in the early to mid 1800s doesn’t really work. There is no guarantee that the former slave owners would make any sort of amends.
His life is compromised. How will he eat, and thus survive? He has no land and no access to work to buy food. His only choice if he wishes to live is to take his food by force.
I feel my example is valid as I know that there are people that would do this. They wouldn’t kill the black man, but they wouldn’t do business with him. If a critical mass of people existed around this man, he would be prevented from living.
Let me ask you this, then. In this example, where people were not forced to do business with him and chose not to, how would he survive without resorting to theft or violence? Or, it is your point that there would *never* be a time where all of the people around this man would all refuse to do business with him?
He has no right to land, or to work, or to food. If he takes his food by force, he certainly risks consequences of such an act (i.e. people defending themselves and their property against him in such a way that might lead to his injury, and I believe they would be right to do so).
Your example isn’t valid becuase a society comprised majorly of free market capitalists doesn’t logically exclude sections of their potential customer base for such arbitrary reasons as skin color. It also doesn’t make sense to apply this logic in a world that endorses slavery, something absolutely contrary to the free market capitalist moral structure. People who would refuse to do business with a man who wasn’t a known criminal en masse would have to be a society that didn’t operate on such libertarian principles.
I would argue that there probably would be a time when no one would do business with a man, but that would generally be a point when doing business with him would tarnish reputation an/or limit their ability to do business with others, i.e. if the man was a known thief or something to that extent.
IF we had a society of free market capitalists, I might agree with you. We don’t, nor have we ever had a society of people all agreeing to a single way of doing things.
For example, in this country, we have people ranging from anarchists to totalitarians, from communists to capitalists. There has never been a long-lasting group of any of these that I have ever heard of, and I think it is unrealistic to expect it. We have to then figure out how to have a functional society that accepts all of these differences.As a counter-point to your presumption of free market capitalists, I would submit that communism would be the ideal society, in its purest form. Everyone does the work that they are most skilled at, and everyone shares the result. The issue is always that communism results in some people, usually the party leaders, that enjoy a greater share of the result than the workers have. This is part of why it has never worked, but by definition, those party leaders are not *true* communists.The repeating failure I’m seeing in your logic is that it assumes a perfect society where there never has been one. If I saw a society filled with the people you describe, I can agree with many of your points. What I’m really curious to hear from you is the middle ground; the real world results of your views that can be applied to the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.
I don’t assume a perfect society. I assume that most people are, at their core, good… i.e. not out to hurt/kill/steal from others. I expect that there will always be thieves, murderers, rapists, and people who want power over others. I simply expect people to learn to protect themselves against them rather than rely on others for their protection. It is trading liberty (i.e. the ability to opt out of doing business with a specific person) for “protection” that leads to the tyranny we observe today.
One thing I will say, people today seem to be largely addicted to the situation they are in. As long as they are, nothing I propose will ever have a chance at succeeding. I still hold out hope that people can change.
To this point, I don’t see us finding a way to agree:
“I simply expect people to learn to protect themselves against them rather than rely on others for their protection. ”
I submit that we have already done this. It started with settlers defending their land on their own. They quickly discovered that those that wished to harm them could still do so with greater numbers. It required that they work with their neighbors for protection.
The problem is that if 9 of 10 people agreed to help defend the area, the 10th person still benefited as a result, even without choosing to help.
If my neighborhood had its own private security force, and one member refused to pay, what then? Do we remove that person from our neighborhood, or use threat of violence to force him to pay? In either case, how does it differ from taxes & police?
You shun him. He has no inherent right to either your association or passage through your property. If he’s entirely self-sufficient, he’s no concern of yours. If he’s not, he will be pressured by his neighbors to take part in the protection plan on pain of not being allowed to leave his own property. The difference between taxes and police is that he still has the option of not participating and his property is not compromised.
How is “not being allowed to leave his own property” different for being jailed for tax evasion? We’re talking about the same thing from my PoV. The government IS our neighbors, it is the combined will of all of us for protection, infrastructure, etc.
Let’s set aside security, since the associated benefit of the non-payer is harder to visualize. We all decide to build roads, and every house chips in. 20 years later, we decide the roads need repair, but one person doesn’t chip in. Explain to me how denying access to the road is any different from using threat of confinement in jail.
The difference may be subtle in this case to you, but it isn’t to me. If property is sacred, he has every right to remain on his property and to keep his property so long as doing so doesn’t violate the property of others. He has absolutely no right to the property of others, ever. Refusing to permit him passage across your property is not the same as locking him in a cage where he’s beaten if he doesn’t go to bed on time.
With regard to the roads: That one person needn’t be permitted access to the road. The difference is simple: You don’t get to use the property of others who don’t consent for you to do so. Jail is different because it denies a man his own property in his body. You haven’t violated his body or his land by not allowing him passage from his own land.
And I think you have a narrow view of how roads would work…
It doesn’t make sense that we would all pitch in now and never pay another penny until the road needed to be fixed. That’s not how it works today, even.