I love how everyone dodged _”An honest question to libertarians: do you believe that your wealth and position in society has nothing to do with the use of force?”_

Not one person came forward and admitted that our caucasian-male-dominant society is the result of thousands of years of oppression and violence from that very demographic against the rest of the world. Privilege was not won by non-aggression (so much for trying to use it as an axiom).

_”The mob’s appetite to steal from our labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges is effectively insatiable._

YOUR labor??? The last time I checked, the wealthy elite were making money off the combination of their ideas and the LABOR OF THE MOB.

_”If you believe that a voting majority can ever make a moral claim to a non-zero share of my labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges, then tell us: how much can the majority demand before the claim becomes immoral?”_

Well, in the case of Wal-Mart workers, they can demand in wages what they are currently receiving from the taxpayers in the form of welfare. Every 200 person Wal-Mart in the country is responsible for over 400,000 A YEAR in taxes in the form welfare that their laborers qualify for (based on their income). Total Wal-Mart supercenters in the country? more than 2,000. Total annual federal taxpayer money that gets funneled into WalMart for neglecting to pay their employees a living wage? over 1 BILLION dollars per year.

So I have an idea – in a society where employers become wealthy off the labor of others, how about they pay their emloyees a living wage (welfare magically goes away when nobody qualifies for it anymore), and we will call that MORALITY.

Wages have inexplicably, and inexcusably stagnated for the past 40 years. This is why you are paying taxes to put food on other people’s tables, and this is when credit became spending power and when family savings disappeared. So let me ask you something, Brian: How much longer can the wealthy few demand work-for-zero from their own laborers before the claim becomes immoral?

After all, without wage laborers, those great ideas that you’ve “labored” over are nothing but DAYDREAMS floating around in your head.

try reading the post you are responding to, and the included links. Once you have read and understood the material, I’ll be interested in your opinion.

I would be much less worried about the Greens if they explicitly opposed all centralized social management of the economy. I’m not afraid of socialism at the community, county, or even state level, because people and capital could vote with their feet and thus would tend to veto it.

However, most of us lose more of what we could have had because of it than what we gain.

Thus I see no contradiction between what you said and what others have said.

• Landholders enjoy land prices artificially raised by growth limits, zoning rules, and capitalization of tax-financed government services.
• Homeowners enjoy subsidized or guaranteed mortgages.
• Renters often enjoy rent controls and eviction limits.
• Stockholders benefit from corporations being shielded by limited liability, and from bailouts socializing their losses.
• Exporters enjoy subsidies; importers enjoy tariffs and quotas.
• Fossil fuel companies generally don’t pay market prices for resource severance.
• Nuclear power companies enjoy legislated limits on their liability.
• Agribusiness and farmers enjoy subsidies, price controls, land set-asides, below-cost water, import quotas/tariffs, etc.
• Media corporations enjoy restrictions on technology for manipulating content, and excessive copyright tenure.
• Pharma, software and others enjoy unreasonable patent advantages.
• Land developers enjoy eminent domain abuses.
• Seniors enjoy a retirement pyramid scheme and health insurance funded via inter-generational theft.
• Union workers enjoy antitrust exemptions, and laws about closed shops, prevailing wages, good-faith bargaining, etc.
• Employees enjoy restrictions on employers regarding wages, hours, hiring, and firing.
• Teachers, nurses, firemen, police, prison guards, and many other government workers receive excessive disability and retirement benefits in exchange for their bloc voting.
• Doctors, lawyers, many engineers and other “professionals” enjoy competition limits via occupational licensure.

This list of rent-seekers is just a start — you could add to it using almost any item from this list of agencies and laws to abolish. Of course, many people are both victims and beneficiaries of various kinds of rent-seeking and force-initiation. My judgment is that the benefits of all this force initiation generally flow 1) from the more-productive to the less-productive (whether poor or wealthy), 2) from competitive sectors to monopoly-ridden sectors, and 3) from the young to the old.

Still, even if you could make the case that more coercion leads to more plenty for most, as a peacenik, I would not support high levels of coercion. I’d prefer a peaceful, more spartan existence to a coercive, affluent one.

If you mean mine personally, yes, the initiation of force and its ripple effects are certainly responsible for making me much poorer than I could be. I would say that the same is true for most people, although a small minority of people are much wealthier relative to other people – not necessarily in absolute terms – than if government was not exempt from laws against initiation of force and fraud.

As a geolibertarian, I definitely believe that a large fraction of society’s wealth (land) and income (geo-rent, polluting production, resource extraction) involves unjust appropriation. That’s why I think there is so much room for resonance between greens and eco/geo-libertarians.

I put myself through college and then took jobs in Silicon Valley that have made me modestly wealthy — even though American governments have taken from me about half of all that I have ever earned. Yes, I drive on government roads and attended monopoly government schools etc., but I vehemently reject the notion that past government “investments” of stolen money into such projects can justify present or future thievery against my body, labor, peaceful production, or voluntary exchanges. All I will concede is that government investments and services often get capitalized into land value, and so I will tolerate that government replace all its claims on my clean work and peaceful trade with a claim on the geo-rent of the land from which I exclude other people. That way, government can’t grow beyond the value that the community (through local land markets) places on government’s services.

Past injustice can never justify present or future injustice. Claims for damages and reparations should be settled by judges and juries, not by demagogues and voting mobs. The mob’s appetite to steal from our labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges is effectively insatiable. If you believe that a voting majority can ever make a moral claim to a non-zero share of my labor, peaceful production, and voluntary exchanges, then tell us: how much can the majority demand before the claim becomes immoral? How can we know when that line has been crossed? Do you even admit that such a line must exist at least in principle?

The choices I make in life largely determine my position in life. Sure, some things are out of my control, but in the things I CAN control, I choose to not aggress against my friends, family, coworkers and neighbors. What my forefathers did is out of my hands. The past is the past and there is nothing we can do to change that. What we, as individuals, can do is to CHOOSE peaceful, consentual behavior over the use of force now and in the future.

Greens favor less government power in many areas where Democrats and Republicans favor more – military buildup and intervention, police powers, drug prohibition, corporate welfare and upward transfers of wealth (ie Wall St bailouts), and a number of other civil liberties questions.

The Green key value of decentralization applies to both government and economic power.

Completely agreed and a great answer to those libertarians who keep painting Greens as statist (opposite of libertarians). It just so happens that those are key issues for me.

However, sometimes it’s wise to go with economies of scale (to save your tax dollars, by the way). For example, only 5% of money spent on Medicare goes to bureaucracy, while the figure for private insurance companies is more like 20-33%.

I don’t think that holds up under examination, and what I would propose would be different from either.

The Green approach in a nutshell is “bigger government is not better, smaller government is not better, better government is better.”

True, but only in the context that government is best which governs least, and ultimately – there’s no government like no government.

Exactly. And yes, you read that right.

Libertarian economist Robin Hanson wrote an interesting speculation about this in 2007:

Many people say they favor redistribution from the rich to the poor because they feel sorry for the poor. The poor suffer from having too little money, and it doesn’t take much money to help them a lot. In contrast, the rich won’t miss that money much.

These redistribution advocates usually aren’t very interested in redistributing across the world to poor nations, or across time to poor eras. So they usually explain that they just don’t feel much sympathy for such distant poor.

Such advocates also usually aren’t very interested in giving money to people who suffer because they are short, ugly, boring, clumsy, unpopular, etc. Yet a bit of money might go a long way to brighten these lives as well. Explanations offered for why folks sympathize with the poor but not the short etc. have long left me puzzled.

Garrett Jones has just convinced me that a pretty simple explanation is available: the redistributive urge just doesn’t have much to do with sympathy. Our ancestors would sometimes notice that some folks in the tribe had a lot more tangible portable stuff than the rest, and those with less would then be tempted to find an excuse to grab a bunch of that stuff.

Would-be-grabbers would look for the most believable excuse they could find. Sometimes the excuse would be that stuff-holders had violated some tribal norm and needed to be punished. (Hence our hyper-willingness to believe the rich freely violate treasured norms.) But lacking a better excuse, they’d fall back on the old favorite, that those with less stuff would sure appreciate each thing more than those with lots.

Our ancestors weren’t in the habit of making up similar excuses to grab stuff from the tall, pretty, witty, coordinated, or popular, for the obvious reason that those people didn’t usually have much stuff to grab. So our ancestors focused on finding excuses to grab stuff from people with lots of stuff for the same reason folks have given for robbing banks, “Because that’s where the money is.”