Comments Elsewhere

Macker:

One need only respect others rights insofar as it is reciprocal.

Me:

This is obviously false. If someone steals $20 you have the right to use force against her in self-defense in order to recover the $20 and any additional compensation for the time and money lost in recovering it. You do not have the right to steal from her willy-nilly, let alone to enslave her or burn her property or kill her. If you believe that any failure to respect rights allows you to treat the violator as an unperson, then you are not a libertarian; you are just unhinged.

Macker:

When I am talking about reciprocity I am not talking about it in an incident by incident sense. I am talking in a meta sense. I don’t have to respect the property rights of someone who holds the position that I have no property rights.

Of course, this position is even worse: you are no longer holding that people may forfeit their rights by violating yours (a position which is untenable but at least grounded in concrete actions), but rather holding that they may forfeit their rights by holding evil beliefs.

Do you earnestly believe that you have the right to assault the person or loot the property of, say, an avowedly anti-propertarian Communist? If not, why not—given that you claim to be under no obligation to recognize the rights of those who “hold the position” that you don’t have property rights? If so, why do you hold such a monstrous position?

Macker:

Why should I?

Because rights are natural and inalienable. People have them even if they explicitly deny that they have them. They are not contingent on acting in the right way. (Someone who violates my rights does not thereby become an unperson. They just have no right—and never did have any right—to use force to stop me from recovering compensation.) Far less are they contingent on having the right beliefs.

In fact, I have no problem whatsoever with locking said person up for the rest of their life.

I’m not interested in what you do or don’t have a problem with. I’m interested in what sort of argument you could possibly give to justify locking people up for ideological “crimes”.

I also don’t see how you could think I would be stealing from such a person. How you can possibly steal anything from someone who does not believe that property exists.

Because property rights are a matter of objective fact. They are not erased when someone stops believing in them.