Principled stances on taxation:
- “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
- “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
- “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
- “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
- “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.
If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:
“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.
In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.
“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “
Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.
(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)
Citizenship is gaslighting.
The Police is Mobsters.
Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.
There’s a reason for it:
The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).
Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)
Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.
When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.
http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/
(via mhd-hbd)
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #rape cw #steel feminism · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink
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argumate reblogged this from ilzolende and added:Did you mean: mandatory memes
ilzolende reblogged this from shieldfoss and added:I realize this isn’t primarily about mandatory art, but nonetheless mandatory art is the worst.
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nentuaby reblogged this from michaelblume and added:This is… So silly. If the consequentialist position sounds wildly different from the “unprincipled capitalist” position...
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michaelblume reblogged this from sinesalvatorem- placid-platypus reblogged this from sinesalvatorem and added:
I go with “Claiming you own property is theft but acceptable for the Greater Good.”
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brin-bellway liked this- anotherpersonhasclaimedthisus said: I mean even if you discovered these universals people would still complain about their illegitimacy. Games these days have “artificial difficulty” after all.
slartibartfastibast reblogged this from neoliberalism-nightly and added:“Again this is sneaking in a concept of morality as an actual physical thing that can be discovered as facts about the...
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sinesalvatorem reblogged this from shieldfoss and added:Tag yrself I’m a principled consequentialist.
neoliberalism-nightly reblogged this from argumate and added:I mean if that’s your claim then you should just said earlier. I don’t see how it is sneaking stuff in since you have to...
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