j summ,

I'm familiar with the argument and the historical context of the Declaration.

What I'm not familiar with is what part of the document would justify this parenthetical:

"hence all men, colonist as well as titled nobility (in england) are created equal."

I have no idea where you got the "(in england)" from. Certainly, it's not in the text. As far as I can tell, you made it up; what the text says is that all men are created equal and endowed by God with unalienable rights, which particular governments (the text does use the plural here, so it is clear that Jefferson et al. are talking about more than just their own government), at best, only exist to recognize and secure.

"hey, you say you have a declaration of independence, right? point out to all of us, the names of the other countries ,"

I have no idea what your point is here. The entire point of the "endowed by their Creator" business is that rights belong to people because of their nature and their relationship with God, not because of their relationship to a "country." The long list of complaints are not intended as a defense of the rights that are listed in the opening paragraphs; rather, the position that human beings have those rights is held to be "self-evident," that is, not needing any defense. What that long list of complaints is, is an attempt to apply the universal principle that human beings have rights, and that governments only have legitimate authority when they defend those rights, to the particular circumstances of the relationship between the British Crown and the American colonies. While the application of the principle is certainly local, I can find absolutely nothing in the text which would give any reason to believe that the general principles themselves are supposed to be limited. On the contrary, what the text says is that those principles are universal and self-evident.

"besides great britian and the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"

Actually, the Declaration names fourteen "countries," if by "countries" you mean independent states -- Great Britain, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. "The united states of America" was not the name of a "country," or of a government, in 1776. The word "united" is a description of the relationships that the states claimed to have as newly "free and independent states." The notion that there was some general government called "the United States of America" was completely foreign to the signers of the Declaration. No such government existed until the adoption of the Constitution, about a decade later.

Kinsella: Rad, in fact it is you guys who are bringing up the origin of the term.

Not in this thread. We’ve had more than one discussion about it elsewhere, of course. Nobody else except you has been arguing about the origin of the term in this thread, either — not David Gendron, not Francois Tremblay, and not Roderick Long. But my point above has nothing to do with that debate. So why do you keep trying to change the subject from what my comment was about (your attempt to “clarify” by ignoring your interlocutor’s speaker meaning) to some other debate that I didn’t so much as mention (the provenance of the term “capitalism”)?

Kinsella: So I think it’s disingenuous to suggest it was just a few Austrian economists.

Who said it was? Not me. My point didn’t have anything to do with this kind of philological question. It had to do with your non-responsive “answer” to David Gendron’s question.

Kinsella: What exactly do you disagree with in my position?

What I’m disagreeing with at the moment is your rhetorical approach to Gendron’s question. As I said:

The point is that when you start responding to what somebody else said, your understanding of the claim ought to be based on what they seem to mean by the terms they use, not what you’d like to mean by them. … “Clarification” by means of ignoring your interlocutor and substituting a question you find easier to answer is cheap rhetoric, and wildly uncharitable.

This has nothing to do with the details of the philological question about the different meanings of the word “capitalism.” That’s another debate for another day. It has to do with how you’re responding, or rather not responding, to your conversation partner in this specific conversation.

"the declaration of independence, the constitution and its bill of rights cover US, not everyone, everywhere."

Man, you must have a different copy of the Declaration from me. Mine says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ALL MEN are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Emphasis added.

I certainly don't know how the Declaration would be limited to U.S. citizens, anyway, since there was no such thing as the United States of America when it was written, and no such thing came into existence until about 10 years later.

Not that it matters much. If there were some imaginary Declaration of Independence which only said that all U.S. citizens enjoy the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then that imaginary document would be a stupid fraud. Natural rights are not created by documents; they belong to every person as a birthright, simply because they are people. That's something that many conservatives also claim to believe when they talk about rights coming from God, not from government. But if so, then it's manifestly inconsistent with the other views they express about the rights of people who aren't U.S. citizens.

Ryan, If you've never been to Santa Cruz, maybe you could chill it a bit on the amateur sleuthing about who's "coordinating" with what and who does or does not "commit a large amount of political violence" in a rather insular and peculiar small community with an unusually transient population? I notice that we seem not to be discussing the earlier liberal immigration rights rally at all, and now are exclusively discussing SubRosa, the shop one link down the chain. Does that mean you're retracting your earlier speculation about "coordination with" SubRosa? You ask: "Is SubRosa denying that the first man arrested, Jimi Haynes, worked at the cafe for a year?" Yes, they are. You also ask: "Is it just a coincidence that anarchist symbols were among the graffiti sprayed in the attack?" No, I expect it's not. There are some self-identified anarchists who genuinely believe that street riots, and in particular trashing capitalist businesses, are legitimate and productive tactics for social transformation. And other anarchists who do not believe that. Besides that, there are also lots of people loosely associated with radical politics who like to use Anarchist dress and symbols for their radical flair, but know little or nothing about Anarchism as a body of ideas or as a social movement. To the best of my knowledge, there has been no fatwa from the Supreme Anarch of all the Anarchists which would tell everybody what to believe or what to do. Anyway, you do understand the difference between "random people passing through who identify with Anarchism," "customers who happened to be at the SubRosa cafe at some point in time," and "members of the organization that runs the SubRosa cafe," no? You ask: "Since SubRosa proudly proclaims that it 'challenges the commercialism and rampant capitalism of downtown Santa Cruz,' why would it be unlikely for their members to attack said commercialism and capitalism in downtown Santa Cruz?" Not everybody who "challenges" something physically attacks the person or property of the people responsible for it. Of course, you already know that -- you yourself apply the same distinction when you complain about media paranoia about violence supposedly coming out of Tea Party opposition to Fed power-grabs. Maybe you should keep the same standards when it comes to people you're less familiar with. You ask: "Do the people in the Youtube videos belong to another anarchist collective?" I wouldn't know. There's a lot of anarchist collectives in northern and central California, but not all self-identified anarchists are members of "collectives." And those anarchists who do like to participate in street riots often use loose networking and signaling to come up with ways of pulling together a riot without having any central coordinating committee to plan it out. You ask: 'Even if the violence were not perpetrated by SubRosa members, why does the collective deny any responsibility for the atmosphere it created by "challenging" the commercialism and capitalism?' See above. Opposing a form of society that you consider destructive or immoral doesn't mean that you therefore take on responsbility for anything that any random person happens to do against people who represent something destructive or immoral. This is the same kind of political baiting routinely, and dishonestly, used by establishment liberalism against conservatives who oppose statist power-grabs. Why use the same kind of rhetoric yourself?

Kinsella: If we are talking semantics,

But David Gendron didn’t ask a question about semantics. He asked a question about your position on “capitalist property rights and profits.” You tried to change the subject and make it about semantics by disregarding what he meant, and inserting a meaning of “capitalism” which you already know (from conversational context) is not the meaning that he had in mind, because that other meaning makes it easier on you rhetorically. That seems to me counterproductive. If you think his meaning wasn’t precise enough, in any case, can I suggest that a better approach would be to ask him what he means?

Kinsella: a reasonable approach is to look at the dictionary, not to argue tendentiously about the origin of a term.

Come on, pull the other one. You obviously don’t follow the dictionary approach when it comes to terms like “Anarchy;” I don’t know why you expect everyone to revert back to grade-school level tertiary sources when it comes to “capitalism.”

But this is, in any case, beside the point. Nobody here is arguing, tendentiously or otherwise, about “the origin of a term,” except for you. You’re the one who has spent time in these comments repeatedly asserting that “some of the left-libs” are trying to “change the meaning” of the term “capitalism,” as if the preferred right-libertarian usage were the original baseline usage. Which is factually absurd, but not the point of my comment above. The point is that when you start responding to what somebody else said, your understanding of the claim ought to be based on what they seem to mean by the terms they use, not what you’d like to mean by them. And if you don’t know well enough what they do mean, that the end of developing an “understood language to convey concepts” is better served by asking people what they mean, and working from there, than it is by pretending as if they really meant by the terms what you mean by them, and expecting everyone else to play along. “Clarification” by means of ignoring your interlocutor and substituting a question you find easier to answer is cheap rhetoric, and wildly uncharitable.

absurdsequitur: If the objection that Francois is raising is that Objectivist literature is being taught WITHOUT REFERRING TO IT as Objectivist literature, then fine, that’s a sustainable objection, given that Objectivism as I understand it is explicitly a Statist (minarchist) system. … I think most people’s objection here is that you COMPLETELY jumped the gun as to the intent of this course, simply ‘judging the book by it’s cover’, or in this case by it’s authors

Ayn Rand’s position (and hence the orthodox Objectivist position) is minimal-statist, but The Market for Liberty is a market anarchist book, not a minimal-statist book. The Tannehills were deeply influenced by Objectivism, but (like some other Rand-influenced libertarians, e.g. Roy Childs) they disagreed with the orthodox Objectivist position on the State, and wrote The Market for Liberty as an elaboration of why the state should be abolished and how a peaceful stateless society might work.

Anyway, while it’s not a minimal-statist text, Gary has plenty to say about the background of the book, and plenty of disagreements with the text, which anyone who listens to the lectures rather than flipping the fuck out over minimal course descriptions will hear all about. Personally, I haven’t spent much time dwelling on the caveats that Gary offers, though, because, like you said, Tremblay’s being an asshole, and what I really object to is the intellectual Stalinism on display from Tremblay when he condemns a course based solely on their use of a disapproved textbook — which, in turn, is based on the (bizarre, but revealing) tacit premise that someone teaching a course would obviously only pick a textbook that she agrees with. In a non-totalitarian intellectual climate, teachers aren’t expected to offer up a defense of the texts they choose or prove their ideological correctness to avoid being called “a traitor” to The Movement.

David Gendron: I have no problem with the rest of his paper. But the more I read about this debate, the more I see a semantic debate.

Well, it clearly has something to do with the meaning of words — that’s why Gary leads off his paper by distinguishing three different senses of the word “capitalism.” The debate Gary is having in that paper is actually more than a purely semantic debate — but the important point I want you to see is that it’s not a debate where he and Carson (say) are on opposite sides, not even semantically. It’s a debate where he and conventionally pro-capitalist “libertarians” are on opposite sides.

The point of the paper is to explain why he sides with Carson and against the capitalists. (Hence, he first explains the capitalism-1 usage, and then explains why he doesn’t use the term “capitalism” that way — because it’s potentially confusing, and tends to confuse a position he accepts — market anarchism — with a position he rejects — support for the practices of actually-existing capitalists.)

Tremblay: Dude, have you ever been on an anarchist forum? I am downright open-minded and angelic compared to most anarchists, who would basically shoot any ancap on sight.

Dude, I’ve been actively involved in the Anarchist movement for 9 years now (not “forums,” on-the-ground organizing), and I don’t know where these “most anarchists” are, but I sure haven’t met them. From what I can see, there are a handful of screamers on those Internet forums, who piss and moan anytime something that vaguely reminds them of “anarchocapitalism” comes up — most of them people who were directly involved in the Usenet Wars at alt.anarchism in the 1990s. But the consensus opinion among a handful of screamers on the Internet is not “most anarchists.” Offline in the scene or in organizing spaces, that kind of kneejerk hostility is hardly ever seen. (While I’m not an anarcho-capitalist, I am sometimes mistaken for one, because I do sit around at Anarchist bookfairs with stuff by Rothbard and Hess included among the items on my table. And yet I haven’t been “shot on sight” yet.)

All I’m doing is keeping ancaps honest, and they need plenty of it.

As you please. But Gary Chartier’s not an anarchocapitalist. Neither is Brad Spangler, or most of the other people affiliated with C4SS.

Kinsella: Is Rothbard a libertarian, even, by the standards of the more virulent anti-property “left-libertarians”?

Well, I think that he obviously is, but you know, this is not necessarily a question that can be resolved simply by definition of the term “libertarian.”

If you’re using the word “libertarian” the way that many anarchists have historically used it — not referring to some particular political movement, but rather using it as a term meaning the opposite of “authoritarian” — then the question about whether or not somebody like Rothbard is “a libertarian” is not just going to depend on semantic considerations about what to call anti-statism. Part of why (say) anarcho-communists object to calling Rothbard a “libertarian” is because they think that some of his core commitments (e.g. to for-profit commodity exchange) are authoritarian forms of social organization. I happen to think that they are wrong about some of that — in particular, that market exchange and private property rights are actually radically libertarian, not authoritarian, forms of social organization. Which is just to say that I’m an individualist and a mutualist, not a communist. And which is part of the reason I’m happy to call Rothbard a “libertarian” without qualification, in spite of my disagreements with him about other things. But the underlying debate about whether markets and property are liberatory or authoritarian forms of social organization is a substantive debate that market Anarchists have with other Anarchists, not just a semantic quibble that we can distinguish and define our way out of.

Kinsella: David, sure, of course, if by “capitalist” you mean an advanced free market of a libertarian, property-rights respecting society. How could one not be in favor of property rights and profit?

In other words: “David, sure, of course, if by ‘capitalist’ you mean something that I already know you don’t mean by it, then in that other sense of the word, which has nothing to do with your question, how could one not be in favor of property rights and profit?”

I agree that it’s important in these conversations to clarify the meaning of one’s terms. But can I suggest that this approach to clarification is perhaps not the most productive one?

Count me interested.

P.S.: You seem to have confused Roderick Long (the dude who blogs at Austro-Athenian Empire) with Lew Rockwell (head of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, LewRockwell.com, etc.). Roderick is the guy who linked to your post, not Lew.

HTH.