From: mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: Labelling laws.
Date: 16 Dec 1992 16:23:23 GMT
Organization: CenterLine Software, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: 140.239.2.36

In article <1992Dec15.093330.28514@genie.slhs.udel.edu> starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) writes:
>In article <1gioqmINNhlr@armory.centerline.com> mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes:
>}Your "evidence" is merely an appeal to authority at best.  What else does
>}name-dropping of Nobel Prizewinners constitute?
>
>Direct refutation of the claim that libertarians include nothing more than
>century-old cranks and arguments.

I notice you change my claim to make it fit your argument better.  My claim
was that "libertarians... have nothing but old, discredited arguments made
more than a hundred years ago by cranks and laughed at even then."

>}Second, you haven't shown that this claim is exclusively libertarian
>}as opposed to capitalist.  Otherwise you might just as well claim that
>}libertarianism is the same as capitalism.
>
>Actually, I would make this claim.  They're synonymous.

Here lies the root of your misunderstanding.  Libertarianism is an extremely
specialized restriction of capitalism.  One that theoretically forbids coercion
and fraud.  Sort of like an ideal gas law.  Real gases in the real world do
not behave according to ideal gas laws because of a huge assortment of factors
such as phase changes, chemical reactions, and a host of other factors.
Likewise, real capitalism has always had coercion and fraud.  For example,
the slave trade was a purely capitalist phenominon.  Slaves were not owned,
captured, or sold by governments to any significant extent.  That was done
by private enterprise.  Worldwide.  It is only due to the intercession of
governments that it has been abated.

>}Once again, you are merely appealing to authority and not describing a
>}single new uniquely libertarian claim or combination of claims.
>
>Note the introduction of a qualification on the claim: now for there to be
>any libertarian arguments not made by century-old cranks, the arguments
>must be "uniquely" libertarian.  This is nonsense, Mike, pure sophistry.

You sound just like a Marxist proclaiming that all science is the product
of the proletariat.  I'm sorry, but you simply cannot claim any parts of
economic science you want are libertarian, just as creationists can't
claim parts of geology are creationist.  If they claim theory of
sedimentation under Biblical flood conditions: that's DISTINCTLY creationist.

>What example?  I missed it.

Here is the example Spooner argument I refuted.  (paraphrased) "Why should
I be contractually bound by the consititution?  The people who wrote it and
signed it are all dead".  My response was: "Do all the contracts signed by
a corporate officer become unenforceable when that officer dies?  Hardly.
The whole purpose of organizations is to allow contracts and other interaction
independent of particular individuals."

And of course there are other counterarguments that I've made as well, having
to do with explicit contract (for immigants, members of the armed forces,
and officeholders), contract by acceptance of citizenship, and social
contract.  And all these contracts are revocable.

Mike Huben

Strephon: "Have you the heart to apply the prosaic rules of evidence to a
	   case brimming with such poetical emotion?"
Chancellor: "Distinctly."
	From "Iolanthe", by Gilbert and Sullivan.