Occupy Wall Street: An Anti-State/Freedom Perspective

Pickin' my pocket AGAIN with your "social justice"?

What's the best demand you've seen at the OWS? I've seen a bunch of halfassed ones, I'm waiting for a real gem...

Well said unimatrix0.

Agree, that was part of my recommendation. A global constitution that transcends today's nations and binds all people of Earth under a democracy with equal and fair rights.

do you really want to eliminate all regulation on corporations ?

do you really want all schools to be private and public services to be private , private fire department , post office .....

Okay -- did you read the entire article? The first sentence in my comment came from the author of the article. My comment is the 2nd sentence; and for clarification: this is the definition of statism: the theory or practice of concentrating economic and political power in the state, resulting in a weak position for the individual or community with respect to the government. I see it as the politicians (especially in America today) being the statists and this OWS movement is scaring the shit out of them -- ergo, while they shit WE 99% are going to show them WHERE they can shit! I want them to be a lot more afraid, but it's nice to see that the current power structure is starting to crack.

Isn't most of what we are going thru related to a serious LACK of regulation on corporations? I want a helluva lot MORE regulation on EVERY level when it comes to corporations/banks/politics/law! I AM NOT A STATIST!

Think of a service you're sure needs to be public. Name it. Im sure I can find you a place where there is a private version, working just fine. Schools? Heck yes. Fire department? Mine's volunteer where I am. Private post? Sure, FedEx, DHL, UPS... Heck, I have private water, power, internet, gas, and 911 service where I live, and if the HOA had picked up the tab, the roads would be, too.

You must be rich to afford all those separate bills each month . To hell with the poor , 'eh ?

Libertarians , like mike shanklin , (the libertarian propagandist) are against regulation of any kind and want to privatize all services . It was my understanding , that since you used his label "statist" you agreed with that . he has , i believe , a website you can find with his name .

It costs me about $1100 a month for EVERY bill including the mortgage. The GI Bill is paying me to go to college, and the usual loans and the pell grant are covering everything else. I'm just not stupid enough to think it's CHEAPER to put it all into my taxes and pretend I'm getting it for free.
Hang on, did you just try to INSULT me and call me rich?
wow. Shrug off the guilt, guy. :-\

Like most people who throw around the term "statist" you are deeply confused. If you want more regulation than you are a "statist" - who do you think does the regulating?

Thanks for the laughs!

Are you making a connection between use of a single word and political affiliation?

What is the unAmerican take on libertarianism?!? Isn't there only one true form of individual liberty, the nonaggression principle?!?

Non-Aggression Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

P.S. You do realize that I claim no nation, correct? I just want to be an individual. I don't want any nation states... not even an American nation state.

It has to do with the conceptual confines of what resources can properly be considered "private property" at all by anyone,....ever.

Non-Aggression is INDEED the common philosophical uniting principle,....but the issue of 'the state/ greater community "taking with coercion private property" unjustly' is defined greatly by WHAT ONE CAN ETHICALLY OWN . It changes the formula somewhat.

You are very correct remmans . Who owns the air ? Who has the right to poison it , so that people become ill and die ? Who owns the water ? All life on this planet needs water . All water is connected by the water cycle . Who has the right to poison the water so that life ends there ? Apparently BP owns the entire gulf coast ... where both air and water are poisoned now ... all the money in the world cannot bring back the dead . It is an insane way of doing things that would end all . We must not allow it to continue . We will not .

Agreed . +^d

If I had to name it and keep it short, I'd say you can own any THING and no ONE. :)

the air is a thing .... so you can own it ?

Owning air is a stupid concept, and is completely different from poisoning air that others breathe.

dear bill , i was responding to russ_tavares comment , he is a big boy and can speak for himself , unless of course , you are just another sock puppet of his ....

Oh, fiddlesticks. For some reason the site let ME respond to YOU, even though YOU were responding to someone ELSE. Forgive me, Dear Sir. I'm calling tech support now.

You just cant own,....for example,..."air",.....unless you keep it to yourself,...and add nothing to it I MUST share,..........and I don't absolutely NEED that air to survive because there is no other source.
- note that "but I got there first" is NOT a valid ethical argument .

( Then we come to terms, or fight. )

Anyone between the FCC and Scuba tank manufacturers seem to think so. In fact, I'm pretty sure I have a grievance if you let MY air out of MY tires, too.

Ownership and ethics are different concepts. I can own the last canteen of water as I walk through the desert, and it will be up to me whether I share or not. Assume this scenario takes place two different ways: One person shares their water, and they both die before they reach civilization... Or one person can "be selfish" with the water, and he, at least, makes it to the nearest water source.
If I don't know which situation I'm in, ahead of time, I'm not ethically bound to kill myself for another man.
You CAN fight me for it, but know that I'll dump it before I let you kill me.

What if others wanted to own the gulf-coast so that SOMEBODY had an injury they could sue BP over? As is, nobody owns the ocean, so nobody has standing but the government...

Exactly. BUT - NEITHER individual would be "in the right" - they would just be two equally needy individuals prone to conflict

So,....each is EQUALLY "right" to proceed as they wish.

p.s. note that "simply keeping the canteen" is NOT a "non aggressive" act, as both parties realize that SIMPLE POSSESSION is likely to prove fatal to the non possessor. ( following your scenario )

Also, by your calculus,....the "spoils of life" do seem to belong to the DECISIVE,.....and the SWIFT.

( Obviously,....all things being equal,....the guy without the canteen needs to get hold of it BEFORE it can be dumped,.....his motivation is equal in all ways to the other guys,....as is his ethical footing. "Survival of the ruthless est " and all that )

Certainly each has the right to proceed as they wish... But neither has the right to initiate violence. Where does that leave you?

I'm afraid you're simply wrong here. Keeping the canteen is the LEAST damaging act. And for the religious, giving away the canteen is in fact suicide by your same point.
In this case you are attributing the death of the other person to the first, note that terminal dehydration while not under arrest or incarceration is the fault of the individual and nobody else. This scenario is similar to seeing a man in front of a speeding car. You're not OBLIGATED to run in front of said car to TRY to help him.

If it's my canteen, and losing it assures my death, the only ways I can prevent this are MAD, and violent action. Should I threaten to dump the canteen so that there is nothing to steal from me, or should I simply shoot my aggressor? The third choice is to lay down and die, and NO theory I've ever heard of calls for that.

You seem to have a certain, uhm,...extra sympathy for the fellow who simply happens by circumstance to have the canteen first. An equally valid question is " What do YOU, as the other fellow do ?\

I'm thinking, without "violence,.....we certainly end up with a lot of "wrestling" , or someone simply standing in the path of the whoever is holding the canteen.

( The man without, could always make the case "I just HAPPEN to be in your path,....and this ground is mine to stand on,.....after all,.....I got here first. ( It might start to look like something of a lively dance,.......until exhaustion and dehydration set in for both EQUAL partners. )

"Keeping the canteen is the LEAST damaging act".

I simply disagree,.....or at least,.....fail to be convinced that that is certainly the case,.....at least in regards to anyone but the original canteen holder,.........both would seem to have an equal chance to survive if they had it, unless you modify the scenario .

My point is simply that the original "ownership" of the canteen in this circumstance is arbitrary and has no particular ethical weight in and of itself.

p.s. all that is conclusively evidenced, is that 'canteen holder no. 1' certainly WANTS his canteen. Its in his personal best interest -go figure.

It's not "sympathy" that causes a person to defend human rights. It's justice.
If you have a right to property (and... let me know if you disagree. If you do, why?) then you have the ultimate ability to determine its use. I own my body, for example. Does it matter that putting a bolt-gun into my brain could free up enough biological material in organs, glands, and other transplants to save fifteen to twenty lives? That's what the utilitarian perspective will lead to: the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or one.
The man without any water can "happen" to stand in my path, but I can "happen" to change my path, as well. If he's willing to take that to its logical conclusion, he will be unlawfully imprisoning me, endangering my life, and making threats of bodily harm. In that case, I fail to see that he's any more worthy of the water than he was when we started, likely less so, and I bet I can outlast the guy.

I gotta say, going to this desert with no canteen seems like consenting to your own death to me, anyways. Your final sentence implies to me that on top of that lack of forethought, the aggressor also shares a lack of empathy. So he socialist solution is that they share the water, and both die halfway to the nearest city. What did that get them? Is there a high score for sharing under those circumstances? Resources are finite, and your body has needs, those are not man-made restrictions. If I put water into my canteen, who has a higher claim to it than I do? Unless I stole it (and.. for this you'll have to consent that water can be owned) I can decide its disposition, unilaterally.

I hope i never have to argue with you remmans ....

Thank you , well said !

The conclusion is that if person 1 shows up in town with his canteen, he can send help to the other guy. If person number TWO shows up in town, he's not going to want anyone testifying as to how that came about, and if NOBODY shows up in town, socialism has been served.

you've made the assumption that these people are identifying with a nation instead of a society. "american" rather than "Free men" for example.
And before you extend this rant to me, I served TWO tours in the military, and I pulled my ass off limited duty, told the doc I was "magically better" after 9/11 to get on the next ship headed to the gulf, and reenlisted out there. So yep, some of us ARE posting here.

In all fairness,....now you are simply continuing to add "story elements" that didn't necessarily exist at the outset.

1) canteen holder, - was not originally defined as "having judiciously brought the canteen through forethought into the desert unlike his short sighted companion" ( or something close to that ) He could have found it sitting on a stone, in the middle of the desert, by sheer luck and happenstance five minutes before the other guy shows up.

My response - possession, in and of itself,....may be 9/10ths of the law,.....but it sure as hell aint 9/10ths of ethics.

2) the act of 'walking away with the canteen' is TAKING AWAY literally the chance of life itself . . .NOT "simply taking away a rightfully held object".
The act of the other fellow standing in the way is essentially simply taking

dig it - EQUAL power and control. Canteen holder no. 1 COULD just set it down on the ground and stand there. No violence to EITHER in unequal measure.

3) ' needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ' is digression from the philosophical center of the path of this discussion - the needs of the ONE v.s. the needs of the ONE ( the OTHER one )
It has to do with the ETHICS of "first come first serve,....I got it, so its rightfully mine," ;
the ETHICS of "property rights" as a concept,....itself .

4) Water cant ETHICALLY be owned,....it can be "legally" traded about as a functional matter of pragmatic distribution in a tribe, nation, whatever,.....but that is ONLY a cultural conceit and convenient commercial FICTION ; it has no TRUE ethical standing as an absolute AT ALL.

You didn't want to concede that the obvious was obvious: That of two men in a desert, if one of them has a canteen, it probably didn't magically pop up in front of him: he most likely had the foresight to bring it. I didn't THINK it had to be stated, but now that it has, you want to complain and make a big deal about it? Ok, now everyone stare at the guy who thought this was an unfair comment, he needs more attention... :-\

Possession, in and of itself, has nothing to do with ethics. TAKING possession from someone else who has a prior claim to their canteen however, is unethical theft in ALL circumstances, and is never ok. This isn't Les Miserables, and nobody is pursuing a guy for stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving family: This is stealing a loaf of bread from a guy whose LAST WORLDLY POSSESSION is that loaf of bread.

Do I have a right to kill you to save my life? If you've never considered these questions, you should watch the SAW movies, and see what you feel is the correct choice.

So you will accept that there is enough of something to save one life, but not two, and will NOT accept that ownership of it has already determined the outcome. What do you propose should take its place?

You said "pragmatic". Now I get to play 'gotcha', as you tried to dismiss my "utilitarian" comment. I want to know if you think those are different, and how.

Of course water can be owned, same as dirt can be owned, gold can be owned, money and furniture and all kinds of material goods can be owned. You either respect personal property, or you don't. I'm beginning to see where you fall on that, but the ball is in your court to convince me otherwise. Property rights are human rights, and I suggest you respect them. You'd want people to respect YOURS, right?
Your ethical standing must understand that you can take a previously unowned thing and alter it, improve it, capture it, and it is yours. The SECOND guy to happen upon it can take it if the first guy is WILLING to give it, or trade it, but to do otherwise is to steal that part of the first person's life that he invested into capturing, smelting, whittling, taming, scooping up, relocating, or whatever else one has to do for the resource in question.

if that's tl;dr, I'll give you a short answer, the only ethical thing to do is respect others' rights. Rights trump ethics.

In short - I reject the premise of "property rights" being ANYTHING OTHER than a social convention,....a convenient collective FICTION,....to help us manage to work together WHEN WE MUST,..... - NO - there IS NO SUCH THING IN THE "MIND OF GOD",....or as an ethical absolute,......however you would prefer to frame that concept in respect to your personal philosophical world view and ethical system vocabulary.

I believe I led into this entire post with a statement to that effect . . . .

But in case I somehow neglected it -THAT IS PRECISELY MY STANCE on "property" ; it is a secondary,..........waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay secondary,....MEANS or ELEMENT of achieveing ethical principles,......that ACTUALLY ARE 'ethical principals'.

A shovel is NEVER an "ethical principal" -whether you think you "OWN" it or not.

Rights are based on Ethics, in so far as they are worthy of discussion in the philosophical abstract AT ALL ; all other "rights" are a matter of tribal commerce and deal cutting,.....like most "laws";.....simply conventions for collectively getting things done and maintaining order/balance in the herd, pack, flock, whatever. They are subject to review, modification, and evolution as the cultural/individual/collective boundaries shift.

Most "Rights", at best, only have conceptual merit in regards to pursuing a COLLECTIVE "social good or justice",.....if there is any "RIGHT" as an isolated individual,....( this is not my final thesis on this -but it would be something along these lines ),....it is to "pursue your own nature" or "fully exploit yourself" ,....something like that. Someone once threw "pursuit of happiness" out there,.... but I have always found that to be a tad wishy-washy and on the "Hallmark Poetic" side.

To "sum up" ; STUFF isnt sacred,....and "the RIGHT to stuff" isnt either.

Its all about -"how do we make "stuff" serve, or be,....whatever,........ THE MOST GOOD, or promote the most good. You have to start with trying to define "the good" and extrapolate from there -and it damn sure aint gonna start out with "this is MY hammer" looming high above conceptual creation.

me either - it takes a long time talking to me -I am wearing myself out !

I should have held fast to statement no. 1 of mine on this post - - -
" As a leftist anarchist I don't feel the need to explain my philosophical differences with the "American" take on Libertarianism as I have done so on c u r r e n t before,..... "

I think what I have here,...... is, as the youthz o' today say ; is a " FAIL" on my part.

I blame beer.

oh, so you basically shouldn't have any problem with someone coming and taking anything you "own". Heck, if there are no absolutes, who's to say the "thief" is actually stealing at all? If he's got stuff in his hands that you used to think of as "yours", I guess you'll stop and think "well, it's just stuff, I didn't have to work THAT long to earn the money to get that" perhaps?

Nobody ever even TRIED to claim a shovel, or any object, was an ethical principle. But the ACTIONS you need to do to acquire it are subject to scrutiny.

I agree about the ACTIONS being required to acquire it ,....( as WELL as to KEEP it ),....being most properly subject to scrutiny ! I think we are on the same page with that one.

p.s I can PERSONALLY have a "problem" with ALL SORTS of things that effect me without them being "ethically absolute",......often things are more about psychology than philosophy.

Ethics are no more than your diligence in observance/respect for other people's rights.

You seem to have trouble comprehending rights. Just because you don't value "stuff" that highly doesn't give you a right to ignore other people's rights to stuff, any more than someone's distaste for alcohol gave them the right to outlaw its use by others. YOU don't have the right to choose others' values for them, nor their possessions, nor their work-habits. Decreeing that rights are somehow lesser in the individual than the collective is frankly a highly ignorant idea. Where do rights come from? How could a collective gain rights that are not delegated to it?
"Stuff" is all integral to using your labor. YOU, yourself are not functioning at anywhere near peak performance without ALL kinds of tools. Want to make furniture? I bet you can't use the flat of your hand, this isn't Minecraft. If someone takes your tools, you're not a furniture-maker for a while, you're a consumer looking for more tools. "Stuff" is JUST like air: You don't give it a second thought, until you don't have any, anymore.

some of your argument either rambled or escaped me there at the end, so I'll go back a bit: Isolated individuals have ALL the rights that man can have. People have tried to make the argument that groups of people have more rights, people have tried to make the argument that groups of people can't have as MANY rights (due to conflicts), but the truth is that if any group dynamic changed rights, they wouldn't BE rights. If they can be taken away, then those are Privileges. If they're NOT privileges, and you try to take them away, then you're simply doing wrong. There's a reason "wrong" is the opposite of "right". It's not just a trick of wording.

This sounds like you'd agree then that there is no "right to not be offended". That one gets people, sometimes.

I do agree. But there is no "sin" in being offended either - that one is truly ethically NEUTRAL.

Mostly... Depending on why you're offended by a thing, ie, why you want a thing not to be as it is...
If you're taking offense at things like your neighbor always having the hottest girls over, or the nicest toys, that's envy, and 'thou shalt not covet'... :)

HUZZAH ! I DO BELIEVE we have achieved "common ground" !

+^d !

Works for me! :)

It's foolish to use Somalia as your go-to economy for Libertarianism, when Somalia is a picture perfect example of only one thing: Africa. Should I point to the Congo and tell you that this is how a highly controlling government always turns out? Perhaps you'd do better to reference Hong Kong. Maybe even something middle eastern, like Dubai with the world's only 7 star hotel...

To proclaim that we should pay taxes because otherwise our wages would go down is to say that life would be better for someone, but maybe it wouldn't be us, so we should say screw the other guy... On the other hand, it's working on at least two flawed premises: One is that we're taking those things for granted, like roads, and mail service, and that if we stopped paying those in taxes we wouldn't HAVE those things anymore. This should be corrected. Of course it's private corporations who PHYSICALLY build the roads, just that presently government is who pays them. My last HOA owned its roads, and they did just fine in that neighborhood. UPS would probably take on letter-carrying as soon as the USPS folded, but of course we'd still have to pay for each letter... The other is that when you say that the companies would take note that our monetary needs had dropped, and they could get away with lowering our pay, WHY would our monetary needs drop? The only reduction in cost of living would be done through competition in what is presently a non-competitive government bloated monopoly.

Yeah, I don't have 60,000 youtube friends and maxed out at 5000 facebook friends... that must have nothing to do with it.

Believe it or not, you don't have to have comments to get it up, it just takes hundreds of people voting on it. Why do they always have to comment?!?

Further, you are using forced collectivism on people, I am not. I am not breaking the nonaggression principle, you are. I didn't even write this article, but I posted it because I agree with much the writer has to say.

What conspiracy theory are you referring to?!? The FACT that government has nothing different from you and me but the "legal right" to use aggressive coercion on peaceful people. That is a fact. Taxation is involuntary, and government is a coercive monopoly. That is not some off the wall conspiracy theory, that is a fact...

Non-Aggression Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Nobody said that OWS was owned by anyone, in fact the article itself says
"The Occupy Movement is by no means monolithic. Indeed, it has no unifying theme at all."
The point is, far too many want the government to 'solve' the problems they are protesting against, when it is the government that helped create the problems. And that is what's anti-freedom...government. So people who want more government are basically anti-freedom, so I don't see what is dictatorial or hypocritical in pointing that out.

It's my article, hombre. There is a difference between freedom for collectivism's sake and pure freedom, which lets the chips fall where they may. Ancoms have a scheme in mind from the start. I advocate anarchism without hyphens. If you want to go play commie games with those who agree with you, I could not possibly care less. Freedom is the point.

you know its funny when I talk about a system in which we all work a little so that we all can have everything we want of a matterial nature I'm told its utopian and a pipe dream. you want us all to agree to go back to a time of no law because you think there will be no more "coercive monopoly" or "aggressive coercion on peaceful people"? Cause what? we are all gonna just play nice with each other? Your plan does not even have the benifit of being utopian it just a lame pipe dream you all perpetuate cause you have failed at the current game and think changing the rules will help your odds. It wont. People like you and shanklin would be the first to die on your knees as better armed men who will out number you take what they want from you and your loved ones. So ya, I'll stick with my commie dreams thanks there is safty in numbers after all. you would know this if you had not been living the soft life, and instead had even a iota of experiance in any conditions aproching what you propose.

you are correct. anyone who has been around current for any length of time knows shanklin and a few of his toadies use multiple sock puppet accounts to vote stories up.

I've been here a few times to notice that you follow him around to vote a lot of his things DOWN, so it's hardly unbalanced... Interestingly though, I KNOW a lot of the people voting his stuff up, and they're not the same person. I mistakenly made a second account myself a few weeks ago because I thought I had been signing in using facebook, but I had been using one of my email accounts. I hope you aren't using me as one of your examples...

You are one of shanklin's sock puppets - indeed you might be shanklin himself - you only show up for shanklin's libertarian spam.

I don't follow shanklin around, I happen to be a member of the community that comments on all sorts of posts. However, most long time community members so despise shanklin and his goons that at this point they simply ignore his posts.

That's hilarious. Anyone who agrees with Shanklin is Shanklin. I haven't heard that crap since 4chan was posting tons of OWS threads and anyone who didn't agree with them was getting "Hello officer, lurk harder, I smell bacon".

Here's a hint: Maybe the rest of the community is smarter than you. Take their hint. As it is, you're a troll when you come here.

the trolls are you and shanklin - pushing your ignorant libertarian swill. Maybe if you were something more than a shanklin sock puppet people would not think of you as a shanklin sock puppet - but if the sock fits - wear it!

Whatever. Once you're outed as a troll, you've got no power. Say "i know you are but what am I" all you want, you're just here to be a shit-stirrer, and if this is how you want to waste your life, I'll pop in now and then to oblige you.

Don't you have some taxes to go pay, or something?