NNLFAQ
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(Part of the Non-Non-Libertarian FAQ at the Liberals and Libertarians web site. Comments to Glen Raphael.)
last modified 1/25/96
In this section Mike Huben lists a bunch of what he calls "bumper sticker phrases" used by libertarians. He criticizes these for being short and simple, and apparently feels compelled to rebut each one. But one thing he seems oblivious to is that many of the phrases he has chosen are primarily used as signatures. A signature phrase has the exact same purpose as a bumper sticker does: it says something about the sort of views held by the poster without taking up too much bandwidth.
Signature qu otes by their very nature must be short and simple. The logical response to a signature you dislike is to come up with a retort that is just as pithy to use as your own signature line. If you are clever enough, other people will adopt your quote as their own.
Huben writes:
Bumper sticker analogies are as poor a method of understanding libertarianism (let alone anything else) as science fiction. Too bad so many libertarians make such heavy use of those methods.
However, Libertarians make most of their serious arguments in actual studies, books, magazines, and essays. Anyone who is interested in libertarian topics should try reading a few of those in addition to quotes like this:
To this Huben responds:
When you contract for government services, you are a customer, not a slave. If you think you cannot change with whom you contract, you have enslaved your self.
The government sets the terms of the contract. The government can arrest me; I cannot arrest the government. The government can force me to work; I cannot force the government to work. The government even sets the terms on which I may leave the country. This makes me a customer?
Perhaps as an unreachable goal.
So what? If you agree with that goal, you're basically a libertarian. Even if you think it's unreachable (and many do). The whole point of the libertarian movement is to try to get as close as we possibly can to that goal. Yes, it might be unattainable; we know that. But it's still a good goal. There are a great many goals that are probably unattainable that people still value and work towards. For instance, trying to entirely prevent all rapes and murders and burglaries in your state this year is an unreachable goal. Should we therefore throw up our hands and not even try to improve matters?
Certainly Jefferson practiced differently than this[. ..]
Trust me, libertarians are aware of this. By modern standards Jefferson was not libertarian in his personal life. And you can even find a few quotes that reinforce that. But this particular quote stands on its own merits and needs no further defense from me.
But if you want get into a founder quoting contest[...]
I don't. You'd lose, but it would waste a lot of space for no good reason. So I'll tell you what: you feel free to use your favorite founder quotes in your signatures, and we'll use ours in ours. One reason libertarians like to quote Jefferson is to emphasize that they aren't quoting Hamilton... :-)
Libertarians might endorse their interpretation of the initial quote without the backing of Jefferson:
No, they endorse the initial quote with the backing of Jefferson. Deal with it. :-)
[...]However, we could make a pretty good case that voters in the US have always known that they could vote themselves benefits from the Public Treasury.
No we couldn't. The US is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, and until recently the constitution strictly limited the degree to which government could hand out benefits. The above quote is arguing against making the US a pure democracy. Since a lot of people have lately been advocating making the US more of a direct democracy, this quote comes up a lot. If you don't find it relevant to your concerns, ignore it.
Indeed, it's been done pretty often. Yet we've lasted 200+ years.
Not as a pure democracy, we haven't. Nor, for that matter, as a strictly limited republic.
Did Ayn Rand pay her taxes out of friendship then? That's a new one on me.
No, she paid th em out of force rather than out of choice. I choose to give money to the Nature Conservancy, but I am forced to give money to the state. See the difference?
People who compare us to animals usually know little about animals and less about people.
There's one little problem: that quote doesn't compare people to animals. Oops, try again!
Huben writes:
Almost all charitable organizations use other people's money.
But they usually ask before taking it out of your paycheck.
What they overlook is that, in many philosophical and religious systems (including Judaism and Islam), charity isn't a virtue of the giver: charity is the relief of the receiver.
This quote is clearly using charity in the Christian sense of the word, so even if there are other religions that have different conceptions of charity they don't invalidate the quote. I'm Jewish but that doesn't mean I haven't heard of "faith, hope and charity."
It does not follow from the moral obligation to take care of the needy that government is the appropriate instrument with which to fulfill that obligation.
(BTW, my own objections to coerced charity are practical, not religious.)
Corporate feudalism isn't any prettier merely because the corporations prattle about free markets. Strawmen are SO easy to create. The presumption that the US government is the equivalent of mob rule is ludicrous.
The "mob rule" quote is actually a sort of shorthand for something whic h I'll call the "How many men?" moral argument. If he wants to rebut something, he should rebut the actual argument rather than a signature-line version of it, or he'll just make himself look silly. So here it is, the "How Many Men?" argument:
Suppose that one man takes your car from you at gunpoint. Is this right or wrong? Most people would say that the man who does this is a thief who is violating your property rights.
Okay, now let's suppose that it's a gang of five men that steals your car? Still wrong? Still stealing? Yup.
Now suppose that it's ten men that stop you at gunpoint, and before anything else they take a vote. You vote *against* them taking your car, but the ten of them vote for it and you are outvoted, ten to one. They take the car. Still stealing?
Let's add specialization of labor. Suppose it's twenty men and one acts as negotiator for the group, one takes the vote, one oversees the vote, two hold the guns, one drives. Does that make it okay? Is it still stealing?
Suppose it's one hundred men and after forcibly taking your car they give you back a bicycle. That is, they do something nice for you. Is it still stealing?
Suppose the gang is two hundred strong and they not only give you back a bicycle but they buy a bicycle for a poor person as well. Is it still wrong? Is it still stealing?
How about if the gang has a thousand people? ten thousand? A million?
How big does this gang have to be before it becomes okay for them to vote to forcibly take your property away without your consent? When, exactly, does the immorality of theft become the alleged morality of taxation?
I'll grant in advance that this argument is "evangelistic" in that it is
simple, effective, and I knew it off the top of my head. But what's actually *wrong* with
it? Note that "you don't have to stay here and be taxed, you could always move to
another country" is not an acceptable retort, because I don't have to stay in the
neighborhood where a single thug steals my car either. The fact that I can avoid some
petty crime by moving to a different neighborhood does not excuse that crime or the
criminals. If living in East Palo Alto doesn't mean I consent to a "social
contract" which includes having my car broken into, then living in the US doesn't
mean I consent to a "social contract" which includes income taxes.
it applies to EVERY political theory.
That's the whole point. 'nuff said.
We are not a simple democracy: we are a representative democratic republic:
Funny how you forgot this earlier. Yes, this quote is indeed an argument against simple democracy. If you don't advocate simple democracy, feel free to ignore this quote! (see how easy that is?)
there are not direct elections of laws and there is a constitution that limits what laws can be enacted.
"Used to limit, sort of" would be more accurate. Now that the Commerce Clause and others have been stretched as far as they have it is not at all clear what limits still remain. For instance, we passed a constitutional amendment to ban alcohol once because it was thought at that time that the federal government didn't have the power to ban a recreational drug like that. Later on the government became capable of banning any drug it felt like banning, and even of extraditing foreign drug suppliers to stand trial under US law.
Mike Huben writes:
Have you read "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority"?
No Treason" is a lengthy rant that doesn't take longer than the first paragraph to begin its egregious errors. For example, in the first paragraph: "It [The Constitution] purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago." Thus he focuses his attention on the Preamble, and evidently ignores Article VII, which says EXACTLY who contracted for the Constitution
Suppose I wrote a document which I called the "NNL Constitution" that included the line, "Glen Raphael hereby has the legal right to seize Mike Huben's television and automobile."
In Article VII of this document I would have it say, "The ratification of the
conventions of three Fiefdoms shall be sufficient for the establishment of this
Constitution between the Fiefdoms so ratifying the same. Done in Convention, by the
unanimous consent of the Fiefdoms present, the nineteenth day of January, in the year one
thousand nine hundred and ninety-six. In Witness whereof, we have hereunto subscribed our
names."
[signatories FOR FIEFDOMS omitted.]
" I'd sign this as a representative of my fiefdom. I'd get T im Starr and Caliban to sign for the other two. Starr would be operating as the representative of a fiefdom defined to include you and your property, having been duly chosen for that role in a popular vote that didn't happen to include you. Now, is the NNL a valid document with respect to YOU? The answer is clearly no. No matter what the document says, the people who signed that document didn't have your power of attorney so they have no ability to contract on your behalf. They can make binding contracts with each other but not with you, unless you consent to it.
He's wrong on this simple matter of fact: the constitution says who contracted with whom.
And our NNL constitution says who contracted with whom. Does that mean I get to take your stuff? If not, then maybe Spooner is worth a second look.
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