Gene:

So, if we found some regime where anti-theft laws were enforced by summarily hanging starving people who stole a loaf of bread — and such regimes have existed! — then defending *any* laws against theft would be a “moral obscenity”?

I suppose you intend this as a reductio. But if so, you haven’t understood the argument you’re trying to reduce. My complaint had nothing essentially to do with the severity of the government violence inflicted on immigrants, or with the disproportion between the violence and the “offense.” If you’re wondering what it did have to do with, let me suggest that the bit about storming private homes and dragging people out of them; so is the bit about “political inversion of reality.” The appropriate question to ask in this context is, “Who are the real trespassers?”

Hope this helps.

Gene Callahan:

Property rights are social creation[s] in the first place….

As is systematic geometry. Does it follow that it is “ridiculous” to suggest that “society” may not “have a say” in whether the sum of the internal angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles?

In any case, what people here were discussing was not whether or not “society” should “have a say.” They were discussing whether governments should. I have quite a few friends and neighbors who are undocumented immigrants. They are admittedly no part of the United States government; but they are part of “society” ’round here. (A far more peaceful, productive and pleasant part of the society, as it happens, than Metro, ICE, or most other agents of the government.) If you intend to support government border laws, then your suggestion is that a substantial portion of society ought to be stripped of its “say,” and silenced by the dominating will of a tiny, politically-privileged minority of the population. If that’s how your theory of political representation works out, O.K., but you’ll need to actually provide some argument for accepting that theory, and you ought to drop the pretense that you’re talking about what “society” says or wants or does. What you’re actually talking about is drowning out a large segment of society with the amplified bellowing of political marching orders.

I should also mention that — since the real-world enforcement of border laws constantly involves government agents storming workplaces and homes, kicking in doors, demanding papers, dragging people out of their houses in the middle of the night, carrying their bound captives off to hellhole “detention camps,” and forcibly exiling them from the peaceful private enjoyment of their own homes — the attempt to defend this sort of hyper-aggressive political invasion of private property by appealing to people’s commonly-accepted rights to the privacy of their homes and to secure their own property against trespassers is a moral obscenity, and the worst sort of up-is-down, black-is-white political inversion of reality.

Gene:

A similar problem: There are millions of people here in New York City who are prevented from going and living in luxury townhouses on the Upper West Side, despite the fact they were no part of the agreement as to how the current “owners” got those apartments and never consented to the “agreement”!

That would sound like a “similar problem.” If all American territory were the property of the United States government, as those townhouses are the property of their owners. But it is not.

Your right to evict trespassers from your home is a right of unilateral command, not a right that derives from any contract with the trespasser or with third parties. I’m OK with that; I have a fairly straightforward reason why you wouldn’t need prior agreement to have the authority to give commands about that kind of thing (any minimally adequate theory of private or possessory property will do). Does Mullet have a similarly straightforward reason for asserting the right of a government to command tremendous numbers of people not to set foot on land which doesn’t belong to the government in the first place, or to assault, seize and exile people for being on private land even with the permission of the owner? If he or she does have such an account, then the appeal to “contracts” between governments is nugatory. If she or he does not have such an account, then the appeal to “contracts” between governments won’t help get closer to one. In either case, the appeal to “contracts” between governments is pointless, question-begging or both.

Yes, our national and state boundaries exist only as contractual agreements between governments,

If they exist only as contractual agreements between governments, then why are they enforced on millions of people who are not part of either government, and who never consented to the “agreement?”

I mean, if Felipe Calderon wants to sign a contract saying he won’t ever go to Texas without the permission of the United States government, I got no problem with him signing that contract, and I got no problem with him being held to it. But he has the right to sign for himself, not for everybody else in “his” country.

Of course, if you believe that governments can dictate non-negotiable, irrevocable obligations on people who were never asked for their consent, never agreed to the terms, and cannot opt out of the demand by any means, you’re welcome to hold that belief, and to try to defend it. But you are then obviously talking about unilateral commands, not about contracts, and you may as well give up the fiction that “agreement” has anything to do with it.

scineram:

If I pull a shipwrecked from the ocean can I just toss him back whenever I want or do I have to carry to the closest harbor?

This is doubly irrelevant. First, because the analogy of rescue is inappropriate. Whatever duties you may have to rescue those in distress, they derive first, from the condition that they were in before the emergency, and second, from the condition of distress that the emergency puts them in relative to that original condition. But there is no original condition in the case of a pregnancy — there was nothing at all before the conception — and afortiori no condition of distress to be rescued from. Second, because there are obvious issues of alienability and proportionality involved with someone who will be, quite literally, living inside of your body that are not issues with someone who will be riding on your ship. (Imagine that, in order to keep the shipwreck victim alive, you not only have to keep her on the ship; you also have to let her drink your blood every day for the rest of the voyage; or give her a kidney; or whatever you like. Suppose you agree to this in the beginning, but then change your mind. Well, maybe you should have thought things through more before you agreed to it. But I do not think that the shipwrecked has a right to hold you down and take the blood, or the kidney, by force. Not even if it’s just to tide her over until you reach the nearest safe harbor. Do you?

But I think you’ve been around long enough to know that this kind of “off-the-boat” or “out-the-airlock” example has already been discussed to death. Why raise it again now as if nobody had ever heard of it?

Bob:

But it’s hard to see how working for an institution that pays you with money collected via taxation is parallel to that example.

Well, you know, Auburn University is getting about $156,000,000 this academic year from state government, plus about $17,000,000 from the Feds’ “fiscal stabilization” grants to state government institutions. And about $315,000,000 from tuition and student fees. And about $150,000,000 from other sources (e.g. endowment income, gifts, etc.) Now for those (like Roderick, like me) who consider taxation to be theft, the $173,000,000 from government appropriations represents money that was stolen from taxpayers and then handed over to the University. That sucks, and governments should not do that. But the $465,000,000 from students, gifts, endowment income, etc. does not represent money stolen from taxpayers. I don’t know what you imagine to be happening in the accounting department at AU, but I can promise you that they don’t have a special vault where they put all and only the stolen money, so they can (ha ha, take that taxpayers!) pay professors or staff out of the pelf they have seized. What actually happens is that it all gets thrown into a big general fund and then apportioned out to a number of smaller funds, with the (minority of) funds that are stolen getting mixed in with the (majority of) funds that were not stolen, in such a way that it is impossible even in principle to divvy up the payments in order to determine which portion is the stolen portion, or to trace back the stolen portion to any particular set of victims that it would have been stolen from. If you want to get all down in the casuistry here then you ought to take more care to represent the case accurately: Roderick is not being paid out of “money collected via taxation,” but rather out of money which was partly collected via taxation, mostly collected via voluntary means, and which is managed in a way little different from that of any other government-subsidized enterprise. (To be sure, I think that government subsidies to companies suck, and that they ought to be abolished. But I do not think it is ipso facto hypocritical for a taxation-is-theft anarchist to work for, say, General Motors or to work as a doctor or nurse at their local government-subsidized hospital.)

For one thing, by working for the state, you certainly contribute to its projects.

I don’t know what you’ve said that would entitle you to that “certainly.” Could you explain what specific projects of the state (of Alabama?) Roderick is contributing to, and how he is contributing to them? If the answer is something like, “Well, he is contributing to the successful operation of Auburn University by teaching and doing research,” then don’t you think it matters whether or not the “projects” in question are, or are not, things that would be done anyway, and would be worth doing in their own right, if (especially if) the state were not involved in them?

Well, if you’re all into the villainy and such. It is definitely the role (of the major interesting roles) that would be the most accessible to a good contemporary script-writer and a good contemporary actor. (There’s a lot going on with Maeglin, but not much that would really be beyond their ken.)

In an ideal production of the Fall of Gondolin, I think that the real plum role would actually be that of Turgon. He is a great character (awesome in the classic sense), but also in many ways a sort of Denethor-figure,(*) who would call for some subtle writing and real acting chops. But having seen the botch they already made of Denethor in ROTK, no matter how much I may enjoy and admire their virtues, I would have to realistically expect something less than the ideal from Jackson, Walsh and Boyens on that particular point. (**)

(*) I mean Denethor as he is before the wounding of Faramir and his final madness.

(**) But probably not in the same way that they botched Denethor. What would be more likely is that they’d simply fail to see the likeness in motives and position–and portray him as much less complicated in his goodness than he actually is. Maybe they’d manage to toss in a bit of flashback-angst over the Kinslaying.

MBH:

If I accuse you of being for the murder of toilet-users, and you tell me that you’re against the murder of toilet-users, then I would take your defense in context. Your welcome to take mine out of context, though it wouldn’t be very intellectually honest.

The “context” of your statement was the “… but here’s why my nominal opposition to ‘civilian deaths’ has no effect on endorsing civilian-massacring humanitarian wars.” This is the same kind of “Of course… but…” crap that everyone says about government wars and it’s always the part that comes after the “but” that’s practically efficacious, never the part that comes after the “Of course.” If it weren’t for that specific sentential context I wouldn’t have made the snarky remark in the first place.

As a side note, erasing your agency by referring to “civilian deaths” is also a typical rhetorical move. It makes sense on the internal logic of consequentialism (because consequentialism reduces moral agency to the vanishing point) but that’s one of the problems with consequentialism. The specific question is not whether you are “OK with civilian deaths” (as if it were a matter of balancing a ledger to find out whether action or inaction would lead to more of those) but whether you’re OK with killing them yourself, or with calling on others to kill them for you.

I don’t know the numbers, but a single civilian death opens this manifestation of (3) up to being — justifiably –considered a failure.

I agree with you about that. I don’t typically endorse moral failures, or plans which are almost guaranteed to be moral failures. But that’s why I don’t endorse government wars.

Certainly, but that would be an argument against that particular manifestation of (3), not an argument against (3) per se. … But no amount of screw-ups in a particular mission count as arguments against (3) per se.

O.K. So it sounds like we are going with “Patriotically Correct fantasyland” here. I agree that there are some logically possible worlds in which a war against the Libyan government would not be decisively defeated by moral considerations. (Say that Captain America drops in and personally beats the hell out of Momar Gaddhafi without injuring any civilians, of whatever allegiances, in the process.) The question is how remote those possible worlds are from @. In the actual world we inhabit, where the normal laws of physics apply and no known military has Captain America at their disposal, there is no way that modern governments engage in this kind of Kinetic Activity without dropping large bombs on large urban targets from several thousand feet in the air, and in the actual world we inhabit there is no way to go around dropping large bombs on large urban targets from several thousand feet in the air without massacreing a lot of civilians — indeed, making it so that the overwhelming majority of people you kill will be civilians.

You know, you could say a lot of things about Kevin's writing. But if the claim is that he's interested in being conciliatory towards the Ludwig von Mises Institute, I'm not sure how that would become one of the things you could say. Have you actually read anything he's written about the "Misoids?"