The Rockwell Manifesto

[Yvonne]

Lew's new book, 'The Left, The Right & The State" is out!
In his intro, Lew writes: "In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state's power should be expanded. The left has a laundry list and the right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the world and its inhabitants: liberty." Read it all here please:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/left-right-and-state.html

This book is sure to go to the top of Ron's Reading List.

[Truth Warrior]

The Rockwell Manifesto (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=173784)

[lodge939]

He has a chapter on "legalize drunk driving" :mad:

Uh, no.

[Truth Warrior]

He has a chapter on "legalize drunk driving" :mad:

Uh, no.

Legalize Drunk Driving by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/drunkdriving.html)

[lodge939]

Legalize Drunk Driving by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/drunkdriving.html)He makes some good points, but not good enough.


Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. I agree with the obvious rebuttal

[Truth Warrior]

He makes some good points, but not good enough.

I agree with the obvious rebuttal Lew's overall reasoning works for me TOO. ;)



"The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." ~ Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)

[libertea]

Works for me.

I got stopped twice at checkpoints in Mexico last week and had to take a breathalyser. I would refuse if they stopped me in the US. I am not about to argue with El Transito. My 6 yr old asked me why we were stopped and I let out my rant then.

[lodge939]

Too often libertarians just want no laws at all. I saw an article where Rothbard got all bent out of shape over the UK sending a task force to the Falklands even though Argentina started that war for no reason. He basically said Argentina are right to pointlessly invade the island because Britain had an Empire and is evil!

[Conza88]

Too often libertarians just want no laws at all. I saw an article where Rothbard got all bent out of shape over the UK sending a task force to the Falklands even though Argentina started that war for no reason. He basically said Argentina are right to pointlessly invade the island because Britain had an Empire and is evil!

Non aggression axiom + property rights.

War breaks both = i.e you are not a Libertarian if you support War. I.e You FAIL epically.

:)

[Conza88]

He makes some good points, but not good enough.

You haven't made any. And thus you fail remarkably.


I agree with the obvious rebuttal

Your rebuttal is that it is ok to make illegal actions, based on ASSUMPTIONS.

Great. Do you really need me to come up with examples on how insane and idiotic that is? :rolleyes:

[tremendoustie]

Works for me.

I got stopped twice at checkpoints in Mexico last week and had to take a breathalyser. I would refuse if they stopped me in the US. I am not about to argue with El Transito. My 6 yr old asked me why we were stopped and I let out my rant then.

I disagree with all unjustified search and seisure, and any checkpoint, but I agree that drunk driving should be illegal. If a particular activity has a very high probability of causing harm to others, it's reasonable to outlaw it. For example, if you shoot a gun at someone but the gun misfires, it's still attempted murder. Likewise, if a particular drug frequently caused users to start a psychopathic murdering spree, it would make sense to illegalize it.

I think it is a matter of degrees -- if an activity could be reasonably pursued without the expectation that property damage or injury to others would result, it should be legal.

The government, of course, has gone way too far down the path of illegalization, but I would agree with a law against drunk driving.

[Truth Warrior]

Too often libertarians just want no laws at all. I saw an article where Rothbard got all bent out of shape over the UK sending a task force to the Falklands even though Argentina started that war for no reason. He basically said Argentina are right to pointlessly invade the island because Britain had an Empire and is evil!

Here's MY ONE law:

"Do as you please - but harm no other in their person or property."

Think about it. How much more is REALLY needed? Shut down the frickin' "law factory", Congress. :p :rolleyes:

[Shadow of a Doubt]

The idea that drunk driving should be decriminalized is a technicality. Many libertarians who advocate it also advocate private roads, in which case the road company would be setting the rules and could ban drunk driving if it wanted to.

[Conza88]

The idea that drunk driving should be decriminalized is a technicality. Many libertarians who advocate it also advocate private roads, in which case the road company would be setting the rules and could ban drunk driving if it wanted to.

It's not even a technicality.

WHO is the victim of drink driving? WHO!??!?!

NAME ONE.

The Law is meant to be about JUSTICE. You can't have fken justice when there is NO LEGITIMATE VICTIM. :)

[lodge939]

Non aggression axiom + property rights.

War breaks both = i.e you are not a Libertarian if you support War. I.e You FAIL epically.

:)
See this is what I mean. If you were living in France in 1940 you would gladly submit to Nazi rule, because opposing them would mean war :rolleyes:

[Truth Warrior]

See this is what I mean. If you were living in France in 1940 you would gladly submit to Nazi rule, because opposing them would mean war :rolleyes: 99+% of the French did. :p

[Shadow of a Doubt]

It's not even a technicality.

WHO is the victim of drink driving? WHO!??!?!

NAME ONE.

The Law is meant to be about JUSTICE. You can't have fken justice when there is NO LEGITIMATE VICTIM. :)

I agree entirely, but individual liberty arguments, while being correct, are not very persuasive. It has to be demonstrated that any problem that can supposedly be be solved by government can also be solved by freedom. For example, if it were somehow possible for the government to improve the economy by intervening then that makes peaceful mutual self-interest impossible. Arguments for taxes would be justified by saying that, "we must hurt you in order to help you," or some nonsense like that. It may sound absurd to people who already get it like us, but I know some leftists who follow that train of logic because they have a faulty view of economics.

Once someone understands the world, then things like property rights and the non-aggression axiom become obvious, but not until then. Remember that morality is derived from reality, and not the reverse.

[The_Orlonater]

If someone invades, slaughter them or better yet do what the Swiss do.

I don't think we have to go over this. :p

[Scofield]

You can't have complete liberty without a morally just populace. We do not have a morally just populace. We are materialistic, self-centered douchebags who don't give two thoughts about our fellow man. As long as we're making bank, fuck everyone else.

I agree with DUI laws (note: only because of our current state of society), simply because the people aren't going to stop driving drunk just because it's the morally responsible thing to do, but more so because there is a penalty for doing so. I feel if we get rid of all driving drunk laws, the amount of incidents will increase exponentially.

Not enough people with morals, ethics, and principle. When this country begins to regain the aforementioned traits, then we can get rid of the DUI laws. Until then, we can't maximize our Liberty. It sucks, but it's the truth.

[Truth Warrior]

You can't have complete liberty without a morally just populace. We do not have a morally just populace. We are materialistic, self-centered douchebags who don't give two thoughts about our fellow man. As long as we're making bank, fuck everyone else.

I agree with DUI laws (note: only because of our current state of society), simply because the people aren't going to stop driving drunk just because it's the morally responsible thing to do, but more so because there is a penalty for doing so. I feel if we get rid of all driving drunk laws, the amount of incidents will increase exponentially.

Not enough people with morals, ethics, and principle. When this country begins to regain the aforementioned traits, then we can get rid of the DUI laws. Until then, we can't maximize our Liberty. It sucks, but it's the truth.

Hello NWO. :p "Ordo ab Chao" :rolleyes:

[tremendoustie]

You can't have complete liberty without a morally just populace. We do not have a morally just populace. We are materialistic, self-centered douchebags who don't give two thoughts about our fellow man. As long as we're making bank, fuck everyone else.


Two points:

1: Of course actions that constitute violence against others should be illegal, based on the principle of self-defense. If, however, it is immoral to use violence to get others to behave in a personally moral way, it doesn't become moral because the others are scumbags.

2: If we're all materialistic self-centered douchebags, where are your great leaders coming from? Could it be that the leaders will be materialistic self-centered douchebags too, except they'll have even more power? In fact, given that materialistic self-centered douchebags would tend to love political power even more, where they get to use the threat of violence against others to achieve thier goals, could it be that the leaders would be even more douche-like than the general populace?

[DeadheadForPaul]

Lew Rockwell is most likely the author of the racist articles in the Ron Paul Newsletter.

He should be shunned by our movement

[Truth Warrior]

Lew Rockwell is most likely the author of the racist articles in the Ron Paul Newsletter.

He should be shunned by our movement Explain THAT to Ron. Without Lew, Ron would not have run for POTUS. ;)

[DeadheadForPaul]

Explain THAT to Ron. Without Lew, Ron would not have run for POTUS. ;)

A lot of bad, ignorant people can occasionally do positive things

I am not sure whether Rockwell is simply a bad person or if he is just misguided.

Ron Paul is a human being just like any of us, and he can make a mistake. Blinded by his loyalty to a close friend, Paul refuses to blame or attack Rockwell for associating racism with his campaign

Does anyone really believe that Dr. Paul has NO IDEA who wrote those articles? Of course he does. I pray to God that he was not responsible. More likely, Rockwell and a handful of other radical ideologues abused their positions and used Ron Paul's name to further their agenda. That agenda is to expand their movement by reaching out to neo-confederates, white supremacists, etc.

As a movement, we must distance ourselves from these racist views if we want to have any chance of breaking into mainstream politics.

Do you want to see liberty candidates elected in office? I do. And journalists will dig up these connections to racists such as Rockwell. Aren't we fighting a tough battle to begin with? We are going against the odds already and to further damage our ability to win elections is insane

[lodge939]

Lew Rockwell is most likely the author of the racist articles in the Ron Paul Newsletter.

He should be shunned by our movementgot any proof? :eek:

[The_Orlonater]

Racist Rockwell, I heard a Krugmanite say that. :rolleyes:

[DeadheadForPaul]

got any proof? :eek:

First source: http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

If you look at the articles and people referenced on LewRockwell.com, you see the tacit approval of racists and their ideas. I always found references to Sam Francis and neo-Confederates as unnerving, but I wanted to believe that Rockwell was helping the liberty movement

It has been no secret in libertarian circles that Rockwell has utilized controversial means to "grow" the movement. It is also no secret that he was a chief ghostwriter in the Ron Paul newsletter

Connect the dots.

Reason is hardly the only group of people putting this forth...

[DeadheadForPaul]

Racist Rockwell, I heard a Krugmanite say that. :rolleyes:

Does that make it false?

Wacky Greens say that our foreign policy is based on imperialism, fear, and lies. Is that wrong just because a Green said it?

How about we judge the validity of an idea or claim by the facts rather than WHO SAID IT.

[The_Orlonater]

Does that make it false?

Wacky Greens say that our foreign policy is based on imperialism, fear, and lies. Is that wrong just because a Green said it?

How about we judge the validity of an idea or claim by the facts rather than WHO SAID IT.

And you know the Reason magazine article is true?

[lodge939]

First source: http://www.reason.com/news/show/124426.html

If you look at the articles and people referenced on LewRockwell.com, you see the tacit approval of racists and their ideas. I always found references to Sam Francis and neo-Confederates as unnerving, but I wanted to believe that Rockwell was helping the liberty movement

It has been no secret in libertarian circles that Rockwell has utilized controversial means to "grow" the movement. It is also no secret that he was a chief ghostwriter in the Ron Paul newsletter

Connect the dots.

Reason is hardly the only group of people putting this forth...if this is true, he should resign from the Mises Institute as well. I'm reading Human Action at the moment and it's clear Mises despised racists.

[DeadheadForPaul]

And you know the Reason magazine article is true?

1.) Reason provides a pretty solid case
2.) If you do some research into what long-time libertarians have to say on this matter, you will find that there is more than ample evidence in support of their claim

3.) Logically, this is the only scenario that makes sense. I was perplexed by the newsletter controversy for several months. I knew Ron Paul did not write it, and yet, how did he not know who wrote those articles when the 4 people on the newsletter payroll were 3 of his relatives and Lew Rockwell? During this time, Lew Rockwell was the editor and chief writer...

This leaves us with 4 possible conclusions:
1.) Ron Paul wrote the racist articles
2.) Lew Rockwell wrote the racist articles
3.) A ghostwriter wrote the racist articles and Lew Rockwell green-lighted their publication (Given that he was chief editor/writer)
4.) Ron Paul green-lighted these articles

Come to your own conclusion.
Either Paul or Rockwell (or both) are responsible for the publication of these articles

[Leadman584]

I read the Rockwell article and came away with a different take.

The Feds coerced the states to accept an arbitrary bac level of .08 as intoxicated. It used to be .10 not too long ago. So if Barry decides it should be .05 or lower, there is already precedent. It is a slippery slope. At some point, anyone exiting a bar is guilty. If you swerve to miss a dead squirrel on the road, "here's you DUI".

[Andrew-Austin]

He has a chapter on "legalize drunk driving" :mad:

Uh, no.

Why doesn't he just argue for privatized roads?

[jmlfod87]

The idea that drunk driving should be decriminalized is a technicality. Many libertarians who advocate it also advocate private roads, in which case the road company would be setting the rules and could ban drunk driving if it wanted to.


This statement should have ended the debate IMO.

For those of you arguing "the probability of creating an accident increases" I have this to say: more black teens commit crimes than white teens. The probability of committing a crime increases with a change in skin color. According to your logic we should incarcerate all teenagers who are black for being black in order to greatly reduce crime.

If roads were privatized this would be a nonissue. However as long as roads are public it is immoral to punish those who are engaging in activities that do not amount to aggression. There are many people who drink and drive all their lives and never cause an accident. It is not drunk drivers who kill people, it is drunk drivers who kill people, who kill people.

[Scofield]

Except you can't punish a person for something they cannot help.

You don't have to drink and drive. Those who do made a choice to do so.
You can't help it if you're black. Those who are have no choice in the matter.

There is a difference.

What you're essentially saying is that we should be aloud to go into public streets and shoot our muskets into the air. As long as no one is hurt, what's the problem?

[lodge939]

Sure, if they were private, the rules can be whatever the road owner wants.

They're public though, and IMO highways spending is a decent use of my tax dollars.

Why not argue against road markings or rules?

"How dare the government decide which side of the road I drive on! How dare they limit my driving freedom with stop signs!"

[Truth Warrior]

Scratch a STATIST and reveal the AUTHORITARIAN "control freak" barely hidden under the surface. :rolleyes:

[jmlfod87]

In a libertarian society we don't punish people who are LIKELY to commit acts of aggression, we punish those who COMMIT acts of aggression.

People who own guns are more likely to kill people than those who dont. Should we ban guns as well?

The list goes on. Punishing someone for a victimless crime is immoral, period.

[powerofreason]

Except you can't punish a person for something they cannot help.

You don't have to drink and drive. Those who do made a choice to do so.
You can't help it if you're black. Those who are have no choice in the matter.

There is a difference.

What you're essentially saying is that we should be aloud to go into public streets and shoot our muskets into the air. As long as no one is hurt, what's the problem?

How stupid are you? In a free society, you follow the rules set by owners of private property. If you're on a road and the road owner doesn't want you to fire weapons on his road then you can't do it. Likewise, he can ban drinking and driving. Likewise, he can ban black people from his road. There is a built in penalty in that he will gain no revenue from black people. You're just another statist idiot flailing around for reasons to control the lives of others.

[Truth Warrior]

In a libertarian society we don't punish people who are LIKELY to commit acts of aggression, we punish those who COMMIT acts of aggression.

People who own guns are more likely to kill people than those who dont. Should we ban guns as well?

The list goes on. Punishing someone for a victimless crime is immoral, period.

Unfortunately, we're LIGHT YEARS from a "libertarian society". :( Here the BARBARIANS rule. :rolleyes:

[powerofreason]

You can't have complete liberty without a morally just populace.

You are wrong. Socialists envision a "New Socialist Man" who will be a productive and happy citizen of a socialist paradise. In order for their socialist utopia to actually be a utopia the nature of man needs to change. With the free society, this is not so. All that is required for a free society to come about is for good people to stop supporting the State. Reigning in the State, making it follow the Constitution (for any length of time), now that is utopian thinking. If there are people in our society who are immoral, which obviously there are, where do you think they will gravitate to? Probably the monopoly on force (State). This is why you have competition in the realm of courts, police, etc. so that bad people can't utilize the power of an almighty State to enrich themselves at the expense of the citizens. And do all other sorts of horrible things, as my signature shows.

[powerofreason]

What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist

by N. Stephan Kinsella


Butler Shaffer’s recent LRC article, What is Anarchy?, prompted discussion on the Reason blog and inspired me to set down a few ideas I’ve also had along these lines.

Libertarian opponents of anarchy are attacking a straw man. Their arguments are usually utilitarian in nature and amount to "but anarchy won’t work" or "we need the (things provided by the) state." But these attacks are confused at best, if not disingenuous. To be an anarchist does not mean you think anarchy will "work" (whatever that means); nor that you predict it will or "can" be achieved. It is possible to be a pessimistic anarchist, after all. To be an anarchist only means that you believe that aggression is not justified, and that states necessarily employ aggression. And, therefore, that states, and the aggression they necessarily employ, are unjustified. It’s quite simple, really. It’s an ethical view, so no surprise it confuses utilitarians.

Accordingly, anyone who is not an anarchist must maintain either: (a) aggression is justified; or (b) states (in particular, minimal states) do not necessarily employ aggression.

Proposition (b) is plainly false. States always tax their citizens, which is a form of aggression. They always outlaw competing defense agencies, which also amounts to aggression. (Not to mention the countless victimless crime laws that they inevitably, and without a single exception in history, enforce on the populace. Why minarchists think minarchy is even possible boggles the mind.)

As for (a), well, socialists and criminals also feel aggression is justified. This does not make it so. Criminals, socialists, and anti-anarchists have yet to show how aggression – the initiation of force against innocent victims – is justified. No surprise; it is not possible to show this. But criminals don’t feel compelled to justify aggression; why should advocates of the state feel compelled to do so?

Conservative and minarchist-libertarian criticism of anarchy on the grounds that it won’t "work" or is not "practical" is just confused. Anarchists don’t (necessarily) predict anarchy will be achieved – I for one don’t think it will. But that does not mean states are justified.

Consider an analogy. Conservatives and libertarians all agree that private crime (murder, robbery, rape) is unjustified, and "should" not occur. Yet no matter how good most men become, there will always be at least some small element who will resort to crime. Crime will always be with us. Yet we still condemn crime and work to reduce it.

Is it logically possible that there could be no crime? Sure. Everyone could voluntarily choose to respect others’ rights. Then there would be no crime. It’s easy to imagine. But given our experience with human nature and interaction, it is safe to say that there will always be crime. Nevertheless, we still proclaim crime to be evil and unjustified, in the face of the inevitability of its recurrence. So to my claim that crime is immoral, it would just be stupid and/or insincere to reply, "but that’s an impractical view" or "but that won’t work," "since there will always be crime." The fact that there will always be crime – that not everyone will voluntarily respect others’ rights – does not mean that it’s "impractical" to oppose it; nor does it mean that crime is justified. It does not mean there is some "flaw" in the proposition that crime is wrong.

Likewise, to my claim that the state and its aggression is unjustified, it is disingenuous and/or confused to reply, "anarchy won’t work" or is "impractical" or "unlikely to ever occur."1 The view that the state is unjustified is a normative or ethical position. The fact that not enough people are willing to respect their neighbors’ rights to allow anarchy to emerge, i.e., the fact that enough people (erroneously) support the legitimacy of the state to permit it to exist, does not mean that the state, and its aggression, are justified.2

Other utilitarian replies like "but we need a state" do not contradict the claim that states employ aggression and that aggression is unjustified. It simply means that the state-advocate does not mind the initiation of force against innocent victims – i.e., he shares the criminal/socialist mentality. The private criminal thinks his own need is all that matters; he is willing to commit violence to satisfy his needs; to hell with what is right and wrong. The advocate of the state thinks that his opinion that "we" "need" things justifies committing or condoning violence against innocent individuals. It is as plain as that. Whatever this argument is, it is not libertarian. It is not opposed to aggression. It is in favor of something else – making sure certain public "needs" are met, despite the cost – but not peace and cooperation. The criminal, gangster, socialist, welfare-statist, and even minarchist all share this: they are willing to condone naked aggression, for some reason. The details vary, but the result is the same – innocent lives are trampled by physical assault. Some have the stomach for this; others are more civilized – libertarian, one might say – and prefer peace over violent struggle.

As there are criminals and socialists among us, it is no surprise that there is a degree of criminal-mindedness in most people. After all, the state rests upon the tacit consent of the masses, who have erroneously accepted the notion that states are legitimate. But none of that means the criminal enterprises condoned by the masses are justified.

It’s time for libertarians to take a stand. Are you for aggression, or against it?

Notes

1. Another point: in my view, we are about as likely to achieve minarchy as we are to achieve anarchy. I.e., both are remote possibilities. What is striking is that almost every criticism of "impracticality" that minarchist hurl at anarchy is also true of minarchy itself. Both are exceedingly unlikely. Both require massive changes in views among millions of people. Both rest on presumptions that most people simply don't care much about.
2. Though the case for anarchy does not depend on its likelihood or "feasibility," any more than the case against private crime depends on there never being any acts of crime, anarchy is clearly possible. There is anarchy among nations, for example. There is also anarchy within government, as pointed out in the seminal and neglected JLS article by Alfred G. Cuzán, "Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?" Cuzán argues that even the government itself is in anarchy, internally – the President does not literally force others in government to obey his comments, after all; they obey them voluntarily, due to a recognized, hierarchical structure. Government's (political) anarchy is not a good anarchy, but it demonstrates anarchy is possible – indeed, that we never really get out of it. And Shaffer makes the insightful point that we are in "anarchy" with our neighbors. If most people did not already have the character to voluntarily respect most of their neighbors’ rights, society and civilization would be impossible. Most people are good enough to permit civilization to occur, despite the existence of some degree of public and private crime. It is conceivable that the degree of goodness could rise – due to education or more universal economic prosperity, say – sufficient to make support for the legitimacy of states evaporate. It’s just very unlikely.

January 20, 2004

[Scofield]

How stupid are you? In a free society, you follow the rules set by owners of private property. If you're on a road and the road owner doesn't want you to fire weapons on his road then you can't do it. Likewise, he can ban drinking and driving. Likewise, he can ban black people from his road. There is a built in penalty in that he will gain no revenue from black people. You're just another statist idiot flailing around for reasons to control the lives of others.


If you want private roads to have their own rules, go to Washington. I agree with allowing individuals to regulate what goes on, on their private property.

It can be argued though, that Congress' power to create post roads meant all roads, as there weren't vehicles when the Constitution was created so there was no need for many roads/highways. Who is to say the Founders wanted privately owned roads?

[lodge939]

The Founder's viewed government a necessary evil. Keyword necessary

[powerofreason]

If you want private roads to have their own rules, go to Washington. I agree with allowing individuals to regulate what goes on, on their private property.

It can be argued though, that Congress' power to create post roads meant all roads, as there weren't vehicles when the Constitution was created so there was no need for many roads/highways. Who is to say the Founders wanted privately owned roads?

Who's to say the founders are right? Who's to say the Constitution is right?

[Scofield]

Who's to say the founders are right? Who's to say the Constitution is right?

It is our "rule of law" until it is changed or removed.

If you don't like it, change it or remove it. That is why they implemented an amendment process.

It is not a perfect document, it does have it's flaws. I will not argue that.

[malkusm]

The key here is that drunk driving increases the risk that others will be harmed. As long as we have a public road system, as we will for the foreseeable future, you agree to abide by a certain set of rules to use the road. This isn't the case when you are in the comfort of your own home when you choose to engage in risky behavior, because the negative ramifications of the behavior are limited to only affecting you. Example: starting a fire in your living room floor.

Similarly, you shouldn't legally be allowed to park your car on a freeway with the lights turned off and sit there. It endangers you - that's not the problem, nor is it with drunk driving. The problem is the other person on the road who has an accident due to your poor judgment.

There is a limit to what the state should do, and there are not many circumstances where the state should be active (rather than passive) in preventing crimes from occurring. However, if a person should morally have no control over the life and actions of another human being, how can you justify allowing another person to do something that deliberately increases the risk for all drivers on the road?

[powerofreason]

It is our "rule of law" until it is changed or removed.

If you don't like it, change it or remove it. That is why they implemented an amendment process.

It is not a perfect document, it does have it's flaws. I will not argue that.

LOL, classic answer. You make it sound like I just have to walk on over to the Constitution with some white out and a pen and make some changes.

But here's the reality. In order to amend the Constitution, you need a hell of a lot of people on your side. In other words, you need to be on the side of the democratic majority. Who's to say the majority is right? The fact is, majorities are often wrong. Democracy is no way to run a government if you value freedom at all.

But what if I don't want to be governed by your laws? What do I do then?

You say it is the "rule of law" but its not MY rule of law, it is YOUR rule of law. I don't accept it, and I don't have to. Sure, I will still be arrested and thrown in jail for breaking this set of rules I don't agree with, but how does that make it right? The only legitimate rules are the rules people set for their own private property, and the only law worth respecting is Natural Law. My rights are innate, government may violate them but that doesn't mean they don't exist. A right is simply a claim to exercise just violence against another person. For example, if I have the right to own justly acquired property, which I do, then I may use violence against you to stop you from taking it. My rights originate not from some god or government, but from logic and reason. There are rules that need to be respected in order for the human race to survive and thrive.

[Scofield]

Just don't drink and drive.

If this were a direct violation of your Liberty, where it made it impossible for you to live in this country, I would side with you. However, driving drunk doesn't quality as such, as there is no benefit. There is not one benefit to driving drunk, if you can point me to one, maybe I'll change my mind.

I know, it sucks that the majority have control over you, but it's only for this minor situation. If you want to buy land, and build a road, and then drive drunk on it...do it. No one can take away your right to do that, nor should they have the power to do so. But driving drunk on public roads put lives in danger, that's not a fact you can argue against. You can't shoot your gun in public unless you have means to do so (protect your rights). If you can find me a reason for you to protect your rights, while driving drunk, I'll side with you.

Say you are being chased by a guy who wants to kill you, after you've been drinking, and you hop in a car and drive away to save yourself. Then a cop pulls you over and gives you a DUI for drunk driving, even though you were only doing it to save your life. You take your DUI to trial, and that's were jury nullification comes in.

But driving drunk, just for the hell of it, or because you're too lazy to find another way, is irresponsible and absolutely unwarranted. It should not be tolerated, as my right to live is more important than your right to drive drunk.

[powerofreason]

Just don't drink and drive.

If this were a direct violation of your Liberty, where it made it impossible for you to live in this country, I would side with you. However, driving drunk doesn't quality as such, as there is no benefit. There is not one benefit to driving drunk, if you can point me to one, maybe I'll change my mind.

I know, it sucks that the majority have control over you, but it's only for this minor situation. If you want to buy land, and build a road, and then drive drunk on it...do it. No one can take away your right to do that, nor should they have the power to do so. But driving drunk on public roads put lives in danger, that's not a fact you can argue against. You can't shoot your gun in public unless you have means to do so (protect your rights). If you can find me a reason for you to protect your rights, while driving drunk, I'll side with you.

Say you are being chased by a guy who wants to kill you, after you've been drinking, and you hop in a car and drive away to save yourself. Then a cop pulls you over and gives you a DUI for drunk driving, even though you were only doing it to save your life. You take your DUI to trial, and that's were jury nullification comes in.

But driving drunk, just for the hell of it, or because you're too lazy to find another way, is irresponsible and absolutely unwarranted. It should not be tolerated, as my right to live is more important than your right to drive drunk.

Well personally, I would drive extra well if I had to drive while intoxicated (for whatever reason). If I was really drunk, I would drive really slow. OH WAIT, COPS PULL YA OVER FOR THAT, BETTER DRIVE AT AN UNSAFE RATE OF SPEED.

I think jury nullification at a DUI trial would probably be a sign of the apocalypse.

I'll post the Rockwell article and if you still don't see this issue from the liberty point of view then I can't help you.

[powerofreason]

Legalize Drunk Driving

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.


[Note: This column was written before the news came out last night that George W. Bush was arrested on a DUI charge 24 years ago. He was stopped in Maine for driving too slowly and briefly veering onto the shoulder of the road]

Clinton has signed a bill passed by Congress that orders the states to adopt new, more onerous drunk-driving standards or face a loss of highway funds. That’s right: the old highway extortion trick. Sure enough, states are already working to pass new, tighter laws against Driving Under the Influence, responding as expected to the feds’ ransom note.

Now the feds declare that a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent and above is criminal and must be severely punished. The National Restaurant Association is exactly right that this is absurdly low. The overwhelming majority of accidents related to drunk driving involve repeat offenders with blood-alcohol levels twice that high. If a standard of 0.1 doesn’t deter them, then a lower one won’t either.

But there’s a more fundamental point. What precisely is being criminalized? Not bad driving. Not destruction of property. Not the taking of human life or reckless endangerment. The crime is having the wrong substance in your blood. Yet it is possible, in fact, to have this substance in your blood, even while driving, and not commit anything like what has been traditionally called a crime.

What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law arbitrary, capricious, and contingent on the judgment of cops and cop technicians. Indeed, without the government’s "Breathalyzer," there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law.

Sure, we can do informal calculations in our head, based on our weight and the amount of alcohol we have had over some period of time. But at best these will be estimates. We have to wait for the government to administer a test to tell us whether or not we are criminals. That’s not the way law is supposed to work. Indeed, this is a form of tyranny.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.

This is why the campaign against "racial profiling" has intuitive plausibility to many people: surely a person shouldn’t be hounded solely because some demographic groups have higher crime rates than others. Government should be preventing and punishing crimes themselves, not probabilities and propensities. Neither, then, should we have driver profiling, which assumes that just because a person has quaffed a few he is automatically a danger.

In fact, driver profiling is worse than racial profiling, because the latter only implies that the police are more watchful, not that they criminalize race itself. Despite the propaganda, what’s being criminalized in the case of drunk driving is not the probability that a person driving will get into an accident but the fact of the blood-alcohol content itself. A drunk driver is humiliated and destroyed even when he hasn’t done any harm.

Of course, enforcement is a serious problem. A sizeable number of people leaving a bar or a restaurant would probably qualify as DUI. But there is no way for the police to know unless they are tipped off by a swerving car or reckless driving in general. But the question becomes: why not ticket the swerving or recklessness and leave the alcohol out of it? Why indeed.

To underscore the fact that it is some level of drinking that is being criminalized, government sets up these outrageous, civil-liberties-violating barricades that stop people to check their blood – even when they have done nothing at all. This is a gross attack on liberty that implies that the government has and should have total control over us, extending even to the testing of intimate biological facts. But somehow we put up with it because we have conceded the first assumption that government ought to punish us for the content of our blood and not just our actions.

There are many factors that cause a person to drive poorly. You may have sore muscles after a weight-lifting session and have slow reactions. You could be sleepy. You could be in a bad mood, or angry after a fight with your spouse. Should the government be allowed to administer anger tests, tiredness tests, or soreness tests? That is the very next step, and don’t be surprised when Congress starts to examine this question.

Already, there’s a move on to prohibit cell phone use while driving. Such an absurdity follows from the idea that government should make judgments about what we are allegedly likely to do.

What’s more, some people drive more safely after a few drinks, precisely because they know their reaction time has been slowed and they must pay more attention to safety. We all know drunks who have an amazing ability to drive perfectly after being liquored up. They should be liberated from the force of the law, and only punished if they actually do something wrong.

We need to put a stop to this whole trend now. Drunk driving should be legalized. And please don’t write me to say: "I am offended by your insensitivity because my mother was killed by a drunk driver." Any person responsible for killing someone else is guilty of manslaughter or murder and should be punished accordingly. But it is perverse to punish a murderer not because of his crime but because of some biological consideration, e.g. he has red hair.

Bank robbers may tend to wear masks, but the crime they commit has nothing to do with the mask. In the same way, drunk drivers cause accidents but so do sober drivers, and many drunk drivers cause no accidents at all. The law should focus on violations of person and property, not scientific oddities like blood content.

There’s a final point against Clinton’s drunk-driving bill. It is a violation of states rights. Not only is there is no warrant in the Constitution for the federal government to legislate blood-alcohol content – the 10th amendment should prevent it from doing so. The question of drunk driving should first be returned to the states, and then each state should liberate drunk drivers from the force of the law.

November 3, 2000

[TheConstitutionLives]

This statement should have ended the debate IMO.

For those of you arguing "the probability of creating an accident increases" I have this to say: more black teens commit crimes than white teens. The probability of committing a crime increases with a change in skin color. According to your logic we should incarcerate all teenagers who are black for being black in order to greatly reduce crime.

If roads were privatized this would be a nonissue. However as long as roads are public it is immoral to punish those who are engaging in activities that do not amount to aggression. There are many people who drink and drive all their lives and never cause an accident.


- Booyah! My thoughts exactly.

[lodge939]

If I was really drunk, I would drive really slowHave you ever been "really drunk"?

[RSLudlum]

I say criminalize cellphone talking, fast food eating, book/map reading, and all oral intercourse while driving!!!!

Why???

BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!!!!



:p

[powerofreason]

Have you ever been "really drunk"?

Once. Not a huge fan of alcohol.

[RSLudlum]

My wife just got back from the gas station and said she overheard 2 cops discussing their personal quotas for tonight. One said he's shooting for 15 and the other said 20. So, drunk or not, be careful out there. They're out to make their pay tonight.

[Conza88]

See this is what I mean. If you were living in France in 1940 you would gladly submit to Nazi rule, because opposing them would mean war :rolleyes:

WRONG again. :)

You have a legitimate right to defend your property.

You were saying? :rolleyes:

I actually took the "Would you have been a Nazi test?" . Obviously far from being scientific. Regardless... I'm part of the 5% on the entire people who have ever taken the test, who would have joined "La Resistance". :cool:



Once someone understands the world, then things like property rights and the non-aggression axiom become obvious, but not until then. Remember that morality is derived from reality, and not the reverse.

The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard (http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics.pdf)

[AggieforPaul]

I'm passing on this. Rockwell has some retarded ideas (like legalizing drunk driving), and he seems to be the culprit behind the racist newsletters. I can't support racism, or the man who supposedly contributed to the biggest subversion of the RP campaign.

[AggieforPaul]

Can I ask those who support legal drunk driving a question?

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

We will never actually win an election if we demand such rigid ideological purity at the expense of results. Is being able to drink and drive as important as ending the Fed and ending the American Empire? Its not even close. We need to focus on what matters and try to actually win something for once instead of constantly having a circle-jerk of self congratulations about our supposed ideological purity.

[Conza88]

I'm passing on this. Rockwell has some retarded ideas (like legalizing drunk driving), and he seems to be the culprit behind the racist newsletters. I can't support racism, or the man who supposedly contributed to the biggest subversion of the RP campaign.

You just called Liberty a "retarded idea". You fail remarkably in your inability to use logic & reason. Instead, like a good little socialist - you think with your emotions.

Racism? LOL. Isn't that ummmmmmmmmmmmm... collectivism - the very opposite of individualism. :rolleyes: Calling Lew Rockwell a racist is like calling Stalin a free market anarchist. It is fcken delusional.


Can I ask those who support legal drunk driving a question?

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

We will never actually win an election if we demand such rigid ideological purity at the expense of results. Is being able to drink and drive as important as ending the Fed and ending the American Empire? Its not even close. We need to focus on what matters and try to actually win something for once instead of constantly having a circle-jerk of self congratulations about our supposed ideological purity.

When you get a criminal conviction for the rest of your life, when you have HARMED NO-ONE, NOR DESTROYED ANY PROPERTY, or as a matter of fact - done NOTHING WRONG, and you are fined, jailed etc - for NO LEGITIMATE REASON, WHAT, SO, EVER...

Then I give a fuck.

As far as your retarded strawman goes - answer me this. Who the fuck is campaigning on the right to drink drive? LMFAO. :rolleyes:

You still haven't answered my proposed question; WHO IS THE VICTIM OF DRINK DRIVING?!?

In summation: this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCU36pkH7c)

:)

[Mini-Me]

You just called Liberty a "retarded idea". You fail remarkably in your inability to use logic & reason. Instead, like a good little socialist - you think with your emotions.

Racism? LOL. Isn't that ummmmmmmmmmmmm... collectivism - the very opposite of individualism. :rolleyes: Calling Lew Rockwell a racist is like calling Stalin a free market anarchist. It is fcken delusional.



When you get a criminal conviction for the rest of your life, when you have HARMED NO-ONE, NOR DESTROYED ANY PROPERTY, or as a matter of fact - done NOTHING WRONG, and you are fined, jailed etc - for NO LEGITIMATE REASON, WHAT, SO, EVER...

Then I give a fuck.

As far as your retarded strawman goes - answer me this. Who the fuck is campaigning on the right to drink drive? LMFAO. :rolleyes:

You still haven't answered my proposed question; WHO IS THE VICTIM OF DRINK DRIVING?!?

In summation: this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCU36pkH7c)

:)

I'm not going to get into the drunk driving pissing match, but IF Lew Rockwell wrote the newsletters (which is certainly debatable) - which contained collectivist rhetoric in general, regardless of whether the author believed it - then AggieForPaul made a perfectly reasonable comment about how he cannot support Rockwell because he cannot support racism. The author (Rockwell?) might* not have been racist in the strictest sense of the word, but they were surely collectivist comments, soooo...anyway.

*I say "might" because that Kirchik slob took almost every comment out of context, and after reading the original in-context quotes, I realized the context was far more relevant than I expected.

[Conza88]

I'm not going to get into the drunk driving pissing match, but IF Lew Rockwell wrote the newsletters (which is certainly debatable) - which contained collectivist rhetoric in general, regardless of whether the author believed it - then AggieForPaul made a perfectly reasonable comment about how he cannot support Rockwell because he cannot support racism. The author (Rockwell?) might* not have been racist in the strictest sense of the word, but they were surely collectivist comments, soooo...anyway.

*I say "might" because that Kirchik slob took almost every comment out of context, and after reading the original in-context quotes, I realized the context was far more relevant than I expected.

You're not going to enter the debate, because you will lose. That's what happens when you hold a flawed position, as the statist defenders of 'PUNISHMENT TO VICTIMLESS "crimes"' do.

Who is the victim? There isn't one. The law is unjust. PWND.

- What exactly was the point of your comment? You basically said it was collectivist <-- :rolleyes: then you back tracked at the end. Care to hold a real position on the matter?

Rockwell ain't a collectivist. Reality, logic and reason say so. I suggest you both re-read the newsletters, the primary document source, then state your case. :rolleyes:

I suggest you then go do some research about the Walter Block controversy at Loyola. You can start here. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block112.html) Same principle. Hissy fit bullshit from political correct socialists. The whole newsletter affair is retarded and for good reason. I further suggest you go read the articles written by Gordon. The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard by David Gordon (http://www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon37.html) & there is a part 2.

Thats just a bit of a background on the matter...

[Mini-Me]

You're not going to enter the debate, because you will lose. That's what happens when you hold a flawed position, as the statist defenders of 'PUNISHMENT TO VICTIMLESS "crimes"' do.

Who is the victim? There isn't one. The law is unjust. PWND.


You don't even know what position I hold on drunk driving, and here you are acting like a complete asshat and throwing around inane statements like "PWND." Are you just spewing insults in every possible direction and trying to pick fights, like a deranged drunk flailing his fists in the middle of a crowded pub? I didn't want to join the drunk driving "debate" (pissing match) because I honestly didn't care enough to comment on it at the time. I had better things to do, but I wanted to give a reason for ignoring the thrust of your post and responding to one particular comment I objected to (because I objected to your bullyish treatment of AggieForPaul).

More importantly, I honestly don't even have a particularly strong position on the issue! It's a more subtle issue than many might realize (including you), but now that you've seen fit to criticize my position, which you previously knew LITTLE TO NOTHING of (and you're the guy who calls people out on making assumptions?!?), I will share my thoughts:

I can see both points of view, and to answer your question, the victim in question is the other person hit by the drunk driver. Of course, "aggression" isn't always committed anyway (though aggression isn't a very precise word, because it's generally accidental), and that's important to take into consideration. The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it.

To give more specific thoughts, I'll consider an extreme example of the same kind of situation, dividing it into two sections, the first being the rule and the second being the punishment:
The rule: Should private school officials be able to stop/prevent people from recklessly driving monster trucks drunk at 100 MPH on children's school playgrounds at lunchtime? Obviously, they should. This is easy to justify using private property rights when it's a private school. The stock libertarian response becomes less clear when we're talking about a public school (public property)...obviously, in a perfectly free world, such an issue would not exist, but we DO have public schools. As long as public schools exist, would it be just for school officials (although not the property owners) to prevent people from doing this? I would say YES. Should not the same logic apply to roads? By driving on a private road, you are bound to the ruleset of the property owner. In the United States, I imagine the rules of travel on private roads would include, "Drive on the right side of the double-yellow, and if you don't, any subsequent accidents will be considered your fault," "Don't drive drunk," etc. Of course, just like we have public schools, we have public roads. These roads are presumably owned by the collective public, who create and enforce rules of the road through government laws. Ownership is a whole lot more fuzzy here, as well as the moral authority of anyone claiming to represent the owners...but just because there is no individual property owner, should there truly be no rules whatsoever? If people are allowed to drive drunk, why should they not be permitted to drive on the left side of the road, ignore stop signs, etc.? These rules provide a context with which to decide who is at fault in the case of accidents ("aggression"), and they also give officers, who are the [supposed] representatives of the owners (the people), the grounds on which to remove uncooperative people from their property. Because of this, while I may or may not be entirely comfortable with the idea of public roads in general, I certainly believe that drivers must follow some set of rules when driving on them, so long as they do exist (just like drivers must follow a set of rules on private roads). It is difficult to ascertain ownership and who should be making the rules, but the idea that rules exist should not be all that objectionable. Furthermore, a rule against drunk or reckless driving isn't entirely unreasonable.
The punishment: Property owners have the right to remove drunk, disorderly, reckless, etc. drivers from their roads...and I believe it is reasonable to allow government officials - a proxy for the owners of public roads - to remove drunk, disorderly, reckless, etc. drivers from public roads as well. For repeat offenders, it's reasonable to ban them from driving on such roads, just like private property owners might. Hell, they might even be justified levying trespassing charges, etc. However - and this is where I agree with you - I do not believe drunk driving should carry penalties like jailtime, fines, etc. when there is no injured party from an accident. The law, with its associated penalties and such, IS unjust, but that is because of the penalties, not the fact that roads have rules that drivers are obligated to follow.

So...are you satisfied? I may not agree with you entirely, but I do in part, and more importantly, you made one hell of an assumption saying I refused to join the "debate" because I'd "lose," considering you didn't even know which side I fall on. Now that I've elaborated on my stance on this tertiary issue that I don't even really care about, will you try to treat people on this board with more respect instead of continuing to be the most belligerent damn poster I've ever seen in my life?



- What exactly was the point of your comment? You basically said it was collectivist <-- :rolleyes: then you back tracked at the end. Care to hold a real position on the matter?
I didn't backtrack. Whoever wrote those newsletters certainly had some collectivist bones in his body and in his mode of thinking, even if he didn't believe collectivism should be legislated. At the end of my post, I mentioned that they weren't necessarily racist, but I never backtracked on my point that they expressed some collectivist viewpoints. As Ron Paul says, racism is just a particularly ugly (specific) form of collectivism. It's collectivism manifested as hate. After reading the newsletters in context (from the original source), I'm no longer entirely convinced the author was actually racist (as in, hateful), but the author was certainly comfortable speaking in terms of groups (rather than individuals) nonetheless. That's not collectivism in the sense of government policy, but it's still collectivist thinking, and I can understand someone wanting to distance himself from it.



Rockwell ain't a collectivist. Reality, logic and reason say so. I suggest you both re-read the newsletters, the primary document source, then state your case. :rolleyes:

I suggest you then go do some research about the Walter Block controversy at Loyola. You can start here. (http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block112.html) Same principle. Hissy fit bullshit from political correct socialists. The whole newsletter affair is retarded and for good reason. I further suggest you go read the articles written by Gordon. The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard by David Gordon (http://www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon37.html) & there is a part 2.

Thats just a bit of a background on the matter...

I know about the Kochtopus, and I agree that the newsletter affair was "retarded" as it pertained to Ron Paul and his campaign. Personally, I have a pretty high opinion of Lew Rockwell, all things considered. You don't need to convert me. :rolleyes: However, I can nevertheless politely respect Aggie's personal decision to distance himself from the actual author (who was not Ron Paul, and who might have been Rockwell), even if I don't make the same choice...and that is where I differ from you.

IF the author was Rockwell, that means that at least at the time, Rockwell indeed thought/wrote in terms of collectivist groups...regardless of the fact that his opinions towards law/rights are entirely individualist. After all, almost everyone has some cognitive dissonance or inconsistent beliefs, because no human being is "all rational - all the time." Lew Rockwell is no exception. IF the author was Rockwell, I completely understand AggieForPaul's decision not to associate himself with him, because of the aforementioned collectivist (borderline racist) comments. Furthermore, if AggieForPaul comes to the conclusion that the letters were not only collectivist but specifically racist even after reading them in their original context, I might not share his opinion, but I'd certainly respect it.

Are we clear now? :rolleyes: You're right that my comment didn't seem to have a very direct point, in the sense that I wasn't actually taking a stance on either argument in question. My main point, which I tried to sugarcoat as much as possible, was this: Like a playground bully, you mercilessly ridiculed AggieForPaul for making a perfectly reasonable comment. I didn't want to get drawn into the drunk driving pissing match, but I wanted to point out that you were being unreasonable towards AggieForPaul, because IF Rockwell wrote those newsletters, then Aggie's aversion to him is not entirely unwarranted. I was hoping you would read my post and think to yourself, "Maybe I judged Aggie too quickly and harshly." Obviously, that didn't happen, and you instead came out swinging against me. :rolleyes: Without saying it in so many words - and now I will - I was calling on you to give AggieForPaul a bit more respect and stop being such an insulting know-it-all. I don't understand why it's so hard for you to see, but your attitude is not winning over hearts and minds, and it's making you an absolutely terrible representative for your viewpoints.

[Conza88]

You don't even know what position I hold on drunk driving, and here you are acting like a complete asshat and throwing around inane statements like 'PWND."

You were defending aggie's position by & large. You don't do that unless you think I am wrong. I get self righteous against people who don't use their brains & prefer ignorance / irrationality / illogicality. This is one of those times.


"You're not going to enter the debate, because you will lose. That's what happens when you hold a flawed position, as the statist defenders of 'PUNISHMENT TO VICTIMLESS "crimes"' do.

I assumed & what do you know - I was right.


More importantly, I honestly don't even have a particularly strong position on the issue! It's a more subtle issue than many might realize (including you), but now that you've seen fit to criticize my position, which you previously knew LITTLE TO NOTHING of (and you're the guy who calls people out on making assumptions?!?)

It's not subtle. I do realise every facet of my position. I criticized your position? No. But I am now... which is exactly the position I thought you held, surprising that.


I can see both points of view, and to answer your question, the victim in question is the other person hit by the drunk driver.

:rolleyes: Come on you're better than that.

And what is a person hit by a sober driver? The DRINK DRIVING IS IRRELEVANT. Property has been damaged. It does NOT matter if you caused the damage because you poked yourself in the eye, had to blow your nose or had a few drinks. THE RESULT IS THERE, GIVEN.

You have prescribed that there has in fact BEEN a crash or accident; that is COMPLETELY FALLACIOUS & w-r-o-n-g.

You ASSUME that has been a crash or property damage. You have attempted to reframe the debate / argument = EPIC fail.

We are talking simply DRINK DRIVING.

This is exactly like Hate Crime... "do you really care if you are killed by someone with joy in their heart, or hate in their heart? You are still dead."

i.e "Do you really care if you are killed by someone who is drunk, or sobre? You are still dead."

How I Won in the Election - John Sophocleus (http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/Sophocleus.mp3) (25min:30s+)


The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it.

Reparations by Walter Block. (http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/block/block10.mp3)


To give more specific thoughts, I'll consider an extreme example of the same kind of situation, dividing it into two sections, the first being the rule and the second being the punishment:
The rule: Should private school officials be able to stop/prevent people from recklessly driving monster trucks drunk at 100 MPH on children's school playgrounds at lunchtime? Obviously, they should. This is easy to justify using private property rights when it's a private school.

Should private school officials be able to stop/prevent people from recklessly driving monster trucks at 100 MPH on children's school playgrounds at lunchtime?

GUESS WHICH one word I left out. And tell me how it changes anything? :rolleyes: I know where you'll go with this next, that is if you continue to fail to see the light. Which is fine... Socratic method is slow like that.


The stock libertarian response becomes less clear when we're talking about a public school (public property)...obviously, in a perfectly free world, such an issue would not exist, but we DO have public schools. As long as public schools exist, would it be just for school officials (although not the property owners) to prevent people from doing this? I would say YES. Should not the same logic apply to roads? By driving on a private road, you are bound to the ruleset of the property owner.

The STATE owns the property. Not the people. Not you, nor I, nor anyone else.

The State by Murray Rothbard (http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/rothbard/foranewliberty/3.mp3)

It CANNOT be just. Just like stealing from A, then giving to B - CANNOT be called compassion.

EVEN according to YOUR own philosophy, a minimal state. Defence of LIFE, LIBERTY and PROPERTY - this VIOLATES the states minimal role. It is violating Liberty, voluntary actions where there are no victims.

If you accept your FLAWED premise then there is NO limit to what the state can do. And they WILL go that far. Illegal to use a cell phone... illegal to eat etc! :eek:

FASCIST!


In the United States, I imagine the rules of travel on private roads would include, "Drive on the right side of the double-yellow, and if you don't, any subsequent accidents will be considered your fault," "Don't drive drunk," etc. Of course, just like we have public schools, we have public roads. These roads are presumably owned by the collective public, who create and enforce rules of the road through government laws. Ownership is a whole lot more fuzzy here, as well as the moral authority of anyone claiming to represent the owners...but just because there is no individual property owner, should there truly be no rules whatsoever? If people are allowed to drive drunk, why should they not be permitted to drive on the left side of the road, ignore stop signs, etc.? These rules provide a context with which to decide who is at fault in the case of accidents ("aggression"), and they also give officers, who are the [supposed] representatives of the owners (the people), the grounds on which to remove uncooperative people from their property. Because of this, while I may or may not be entirely comfortable with the idea of public roads in general, I certainly believe that drivers must follow some set of rules when driving on them, so long as they do exist (just like drivers must follow a set of rules on private roads). It is difficult to ascertain ownership and who should be making the rules, but the idea that rules exist should not be all that objectionable.

No Road Rules (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1x6Rjx6W0) "View of a one way street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia."


Furthermore, a rule against drunk or reckless driving isn't entirely unreasonable.

For private roads it is reasonable. For public, it is tyrannical.


The punishment: Property owners have the right to remove drunk, disorderly, reckless, etc. drivers from their roads...and I believe it is reasonable to allow government officials - a proxy for the owners of public roads - to remove drunk, disorderly, reckless, etc. drivers from public roads as well. For repeat offenders, it's reasonable to ban them from driving on such roads, just like private property owners might. Hell, they might even be justified levying trespassing charges, etc.

Punishment? For what? Driving your car whilst under the influence? You wrongfully assume there will be damage caused.

Deprivation of Liberty. Removal of Freedom of movement... is what you advocate here. The state gets to relocate someone simply because they are drunk? That's your premise - why just keep it to roads? :rolleyes:

However - and this is where I agree with you - I do not believe drunk driving should carry penalties like jailtime, fines, etc. when there is no injured party from an accident. The law, with its associated penalties and such, IS unjust, but that is because of the penalties, not the fact that roads have rules that drivers are obligated to follow.[/QUOTE]

:confused: Drunk driving = driving drunk. There is no inherent victim, there is an individual driving a motor vehicle whilst drunk. There is no victim. How can you fail to see this blind, stark, reality? :rolleyes:


So...are you satisfied? I may not agree with you entirely, but I do in part, and more importantly, you made one hell of an assumption saying I refused to join the "debate" because I'd "lose," considering you didn't even know which side I fall on. Now that I've elaborated on my stance on this tertiary issue that I don't even really care about, will you try to treat people on this board with more respect instead of continuing to be the most belligerent damn poster I've ever seen in my life?

I am only satisfied with the truth. Where you do not agree with me (Lew Rockwell... and anyone with a brain) it is because you are wrong. This is not just said, but logically sound through praxeology, a priori / deductive reasoning.

I am only an ass to those that prefer ignorance to knowledge. Emotion to that of logic & reason.


I didn't backtrack. Whoever wrote those newsletters certainly had some collectivist bones in his body and in his mode of thinking, even if he didn't believe collectivism should be legislated. At the end of my post, I mentioned that they weren't necessarily racist, but I never backtracked on my point that they expressed some collectivist viewpoints. As Ron Paul says, racism is just a particularly ugly (specific) form of collectivism. It's collectivism manifested as hate. After reading the newsletters in context (from the original source), I'm no longer entirely convinced the author was actually racist (as in, hateful), but the author was certainly comfortable speaking in terms of groups (rather than individuals) nonetheless. That's not collectivism in the sense of government policy, but it's still collectivist thinking.

Yes, the author wasn't racist - thus aggie's comment was wrong. Thanks for admitting it. :)

90% of the NBA is black. Ohhhh racist!? :rolleyes:


Are we clear now? :rolleyes: You're right that my comment didn't seem to have a very direct point. I was sugarcoating my main point, which was this: Like a playground bully, you mercilessly ridiculed AggieForPaul for making a perfectly reasonable comment. While I didn't want to get drawn into the drunk driving pissing match, I wanted to explain that you were being unreasonable towards AggieForPaul, because IF Rockwell wrote those newsletters, then Aggie's aversion to him is not entirely unwarranted. In other words, without saying it in so many words, I was calling on you to give AggieForPaul a bit more respect and stop being such an insulting know-it-all. I don't understand why it's so hard for you to see, but your attitude is not winning over hearts and minds, and it's making you an absolutely terrible representative for your viewpoints.

AggieforPaul =

- Called Lew Rockwell a racist.
- Said he has some retarded ideas, including this very issue.
- Begged the question that Lew had something to do with the biggest subversion to the RP campaign
- Asked WHO THE FUCK CARES?
- Pitched a strawman argument about people actually using this as a platform.

THAT is what you are defending. And excuse me.. you then try condemn for for ridiculing that? lmao :rolleyes: I respect everyone 100% from the get go - with me, you don't earn respect, you can only lose it. And once you fail, it is hard to get it back. The above lunacy constitutes a loss of respect. On the other hand, to those who have open minds and question their reality - I have the up most respect.. and should someone cease their lunacy and come around to reality, then things wld obviously change.

[Mini-Me]

Stripping out some smilies again...


You were defending aggie's position by & large. You don't do that unless you think I am wrong. I get self righteous against people who don't use their brains & prefer ignorance / irrationality / illogicality. This is one of those times.

Get off your high horse. No, I was not defending Aggie's position by and large. Reread my first post. I made no comment on the drunk driving issue in the first post (only to say I wasn't making a comment, which you took issue with, drawing me into a pointless debate on a subtle topic I have ambivalent feelings on and which I care little about). The ONLY thing I wanted to say was that you were treating Aggie unfairly with respect to his Lew Rockwell position.



I assumed & what do you know - I was right.

It's not subtle. I do realise every facet of my position. I criticized your position? No. But I am now... which is exactly the position I thought you held, surprising that.



Come on you're better than that.

And what is a person hit by a sober driver? The DRINK DRIVING IS IRRELEVANT. Property has been damaged. It does NOT matter if you caused the damage because you poked yourself in the eye, had to blow your nose or had a few drinks. THE RESULT IS THERE, GIVEN.
...which is what I mentioned in the very next sentence.



You have prescribed that there has in fact BEEN a crash or accident; that is COMPLETELY FALLACIOUS & w-r-o-n-g.

You ASSUME that has been a crash or property damage. You have attempted to reframe the debate / argument = EPIC fail.
Jesus Christ, arguing with you is like arguing with a child. You just responded to the first sentence of a complete paragraph by "schooling" me on things I already know and mentioned in the subsequent sentences, which I will repeat here. I'll bold the sentences you APPARENTLY MISSED:

I can see both points of view, and to answer your question, the victim in question is the other person hit by the drunk driver. Of course, "aggression" isn't always committed anyway (though aggression isn't a very precise word, because it's generally accidental), and that's important to take into consideration. The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it.
Clearly, I don't "ASSUME" any of the things you say I assume. For the sake of completeness, I made the obvious statement that , the victim you're asking about is the person whose body or property was hit. OBVIOUSLY there is not always a victim, and by acting as though I'm trying to obfuscate this, you're only betraying your own desire to lash out at other posters at every possible opportunity. Writing replies to your posts is a chore, and I tire of defending myself from your brain-dead insinuations. Of COURSE there is not always a victim, which I clearly acknowledged in the bolded portions of my paragraph above! I merely mentioned who the victim was (in the case of an accident) for the sake of completeness. That said, I'm not stupid. I knew all along how you were framing the argument, and I already knew you were asking who the victim was as a simple setup so you could scream, "FAIL! THERE IS NO VICTIM! BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH!" :rolleyes: That's why I carefully made sure to elaborate on the fact that I understood this already. Unfortunately, I forgot that no clarification would ever be good enough for you to say, "Okay, continue," to anyway, because of your propensity for tearing into people rather than seeking common ground. EPIC FAIL.



We are talking simply DRINK DRIVING.


This is exactly like Hate Crime... "do you really care if you are killed by someone with joy in their heart, or hate in their heart? You are still dead."

i.e "Do you really care if you are killed by someone who is drunk, or sobre? You are still dead."

How I Won in the Election - John Sophocleus (http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/bb05/Sophocleus.mp3) [I](25min:30s+)



Reparations by Walter Block. (http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/block/block10.mp3)
Blah, blah, blah. Deliberately sidestep your opponent's clear agreement on a point here, drop a link to mises.org or lewrockwell.com to demonstrate intellectual superiority and learnedness there, act like a total asshole the whole time...check, check, check.

I already addressed and agreed with everything you said by my statement, "The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it."

Of course, that's not good enough, because acknowledging my agreement on that point would mean you'd have to pass up an opportunity to be confrontational and have an argument.



Should private school officials be able to stop/prevent people from recklessly driving monster trucks at 100 MPH on children's school playgrounds at lunchtime?

GUESS WHICH one word I left out. And tell me how it changes anything? I know where you'll go with this next, that is if you continue to fail to see the light. Which is fine... Socratic method is slow like that.

Of course you know where I'm going with this: Driving drunk isn't necessarily dangerous. Driving recklessly is dangerous, and drunkenness is merely one major cause of recklessness. It's not so much that my argument is predictable as it is that I already laid out my argument in my last post. Here, in this post, I just explicitly spelled out that recklessness is what endangers people...as you expected me to. Still, it's such an obvious point that I'm only filling in that blank for the sake of completeness.



The STATE owns the property. Not the people. Not you, nor I, nor anyone else.

The State by Murray Rothbard (http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/rothbard/foranewliberty/3.mp3)

It CANNOT be just. Just like stealing from A, then giving to B - CANNOT be called compassion.

EVEN according to YOUR own philosophy, a minimal state. Defence of LIFE, LIBERTY and PROPERTY - this VIOLATES the states minimal role. It is violating Liberty, voluntary actions where there are no victims.

Yes, I know all that. Believe it or not, I have a lot of sympathy for the anarcho-capitalist position, especially because of its moral and ideological purity. I'm just not entirely convinced of its stability. I may eventually come around, I may not - but it's not looking like you'll be helping with that any time soon. In any case, both of our opinions on the justification behind the state's existence are irrelevant in the context of weighing the drunk driving issue under the present assumption of state-owned roads. Because it's essentially a non-issue when it comes to privately owned roads, the only meaningful debate anybody can have about drunk driving must necessarily be within the context of a society with a state and state-owned roads.

By the way, if we accept the idea that the state is the legitimate owner of the roads, then the issue becomes more clear: They make the rules, and no matter what the rules are, we are bound to follow them. After all, they're the property owners, right? ;) However, I say this in jest, because I do not actually subscribe to the idea that the state legitimately owns the roads. In a working version of today's world, the collective public is currently the legitimate owner of the roads, and the state would be at best merely the agent of the public (legitimately). In reality, the legitimate owners of the roads are spread disproportionately throughout the public (depending on who paid in what), because the money was taken by force, and the state is less of an agent of the shareholders and more of an usurper. Still, let's pretend that the laws governing rules of the roads were implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (like with the shareholders of private roads). Would these rules not be entirely valid, on the basis of property rights? Ultimately, all rules of the road derive from property rights. Of course, the laws governing rules of the road are not exactly implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (weighting proportionally, etc.). Similarly, because everyone is forced to be a shareholder of every road equally within large geographical areas, free market competition between roads with different rules becomes impossible. However, the shareholders nevertheless do hold claim to the road, and they are therefore within their rights to come up with terms and conditions for passage, and that includes the possibility of a ban against drunk drivers. While it's impossible for shareholder votes to be taken and tallied correctly in practice (and what we have at the moment is at best a gross approximation by the usurper state :rolleyes: ), it still holds in principle.



If you accept your FLAWED premise then there is NO limit to what the state can do. And they WILL go that far. Illegal to use a cell phone... illegal to eat etc! :eek:

FASCIST!
I still haven't submitted my hypothetical checks and balances to writers on Lew Rockwell's site to examine, but in any case, you still have not bothered to seriously address them yourself. Until you do, you already know I disagree with your blanket assertion that the state cannot be controlled by any means, and it's pointless to continue trying to convince me otherwise without first addressing the specific counterargument I offered in another thread.



No Road Rules (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1x6Rjx6W0) "View of a one way street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia."
That's a clever and workable solution for future roads, although I do personally find one-way roads to be entirely frustrating. What about current roads, though? This is all fine and dandy, just like arguing for an anarcho-capitalist society in which drunk driving laws become moot (because of private road ownership), but it doesn't really address the issue at hand.



For private roads it is reasonable. For public, it is tyrannical.
With such low standards for tyranny, what do you call the concentration camps of Kim Jong-Il? You know, to uh...differentiate them from laws against drunk driving? Hyperbole aside, laws against drunk driving on public roads are at worst unreasonable, not tyrannical. I gave an argument above explaining why they might be rationalized as reasonable (paragraph on shareholders, etc.). Of course, the counterargument is transparently obvious, considering the lack of 1:1 correspondence with private roads and shareholders. The degree to which such rules are unreasonable is directly proportional to the degree to which the reality of our situation diverges from a scenario in which the shareholders' votes are properly counted and tallied (and then a bit more to compensate for the fact that there's no competition). Personally, I think road rules against reckless driving in general (or drunk driving in particular) are probably more reasonable than not...but as I mentioned before, I have no strong opinion, because it's such a subtle issue.



Punishment? For what? Driving your car whilst under the influence? You wrongfully assume there will be damage caused.

Deprivation of Liberty. Removal of Freedom of movement... is what you advocate here. The state gets to relocate someone simply because they are drunk? That's your premise - why just keep it to roads? :rolleyes:
Here, you're reframing the argument. My premise is simply that property owners can kick people off their properties, ban them from their properties, etc. This is not inherently an argument against freedom of movement, though freedom of movement does get pulled into the equation when the state is the property "owner" in question. It's a special case, and it certainly deserves special attention and caution as well, because - among other reasons - the state is not really the legitimate property owner in the first place (the public "shareholders" are). Still, my basic premise is not the general supremacy of the state, but merely the idea that property owners can set terms and conditions on the usage of their land.

*Actually, freedom of movement can come into conflict with property rights at other times, too - even private property rights in an anarcho-capitalist world. What if your neighbor somehow buys up all of the land surrounding your property and forbids you from ever trespassing on his land? Technically speaking, leaving your house (or coming back) would be a violation of your neighbor's property rights. Would you be justified in violating his property rights to make passage?



Drunk driving = driving drunk. There is no inherent victim, there is an individual driving a motor vehicle whilst drunk. There is no victim. How can you fail to see this blind, stark, reality?
I do see this particular blind, stark, reality. I fruitlessly took painstaking steps in my last post to make sure you knew that I did, too. Of course, you don't care about that, because you'd rather ignore our points of agreement and argue against a straw man who doesn't understand anything you're saying.



I am only satisfied with the truth. Where you do not agree with me (Lew Rockwell... and anyone with a brain) it is because you are wrong. This is not just said, but logically sound through praxeology, a priori / deductive reasoning.

I am only an ass to those that prefer ignorance to knowledge. Emotion to that of logic & reason.

Here you are acting like a self-satisfied, smug know-it-all again, and the sad thing is, your posts are comprised less of logic than of yelling, hand-waving, raging against straw men, anger at disagreement of ANY degree, and arrogant putdowns. Your conceit that anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong or brainless is simply laughable. It is not only unwise and unhealthy, but perhaps borderline crazy, to have such immutable and closed-minded certainty in your knowledge and opinions that you leave open no possibility for being even slightly mistaken. You claim that I think with emotion instead of logic or reason, yet many of your posts are little more than emotional tirades against other posters whose disagreement apparently frustrates you to the very point that you can't even take the time to write complete and proper sentences. In fact, you go so far as to rail against my posts (and against me) simply because I don't have the same level of conviction or absolute faith in anarcho-capitalism as you do! I don't disparage your views, and I even acknowledge the possibility that they may ultimately be correct, yet every bit of caution I might have to subscribe wholeheartedly to them is apparently some mortal sin in your eyes. :rolleyes: The way you debate has nothing to do with logic or reason, even if you might have initially come to your viewpoints using those faculties. Rather, the way you debate has everything to do with using brute force to shout down your opponents, and it stems from your intolerant religious fundamentalism against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper in the Church of Anarcho-Capitalism. It's silly how you have to literally write down that you have superior logic, as if that makes it true. Why must you brag that your arguments are logically sound, through praxeology (do you even remember what the word means? You're using it wrong, and if I were to stoop to your level of patronizing assholishness, I might just link you to a primer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)), a priori / deductive reasoning, etc.? Don't just tell me I'm wrong. Show me. Don't just tell me you showed me, either - actually show me. :rolleyes:

Now that I've beaten you over the head with a reed repeatedly: Look, I'm not trying to be a jerk to you, but I don't take crap from anybody, and I have no qualms against striking back when provoked. I don't have any idea how to get you to chill out and stop being so demeaning, but at least consider that it's not working. You want people to start listening to you, right? As I said before, you are not winning over hearts and minds with your approach. If anything, you're driving them away.



Yes, the author wasn't racist - thus aggie's comment was wrong. Thanks for admitting it.

90% of the NBA is black. Ohhhh racist!? :rolleyes:

Yeah, because that's exactly what the newsletters said. :rolleyes: The context certainly put things into better perspective and helped to redeem the author in my eyes, but casting stones against Aggie merely because he still doesn't approve (or want to associate himself with the author)...well, that I do take issue with. To put this back into context, the original comment I objected to was, "Racism? LOL. Isn't that ummmmmmmmmmmmm... collectivism - the very opposite of individualism. Calling Lew Rockwell a racist is like calling Stalin a free market anarchist. It is fcken delusional." The first part was patronizing beyond reason, and Aggie was not in fact "fcken delusional" for having his opinion, because - while I do disagree with his assessment - there are enough grains of truth to make it an opinion a reasonable person might still hold.



AggieforPaul =

- Called Lew Rockwell a racist.
- Said he has some retarded ideas, including this very issue.
- Begged the question that Lew had something to do with the biggest subversion to the RP campaign
- Asked WHO THE FUCK CARES?
- Pitched a strawman argument about people actually using this as a platform.

THAT is what you are defending. And excuse me.. you then try condemn for for ridiculing that? lmao :rolleyes: I respect everyone 100% from the get go - with me, you don't earn respect, you can only lose it. And once you fail, it is hard to get it back. The above lunacy constitutes a loss of respect. On the other hand, to those who have open minds and question their reality - I have the up most respect.. and should someone cease their lunacy and come around to reality, then things wld obviously change.

Conza, it's absurdly easy to lose your respect, and your apparent requirements for respecting people are ridiculously high compared to how you present them. In reality, you treat just about everyone who doesn't worship your every opinion, like complete crap. I'm a great example, because I've said many times that I acknowledge the possibility that you and the other anarcho-capitalists might be right, and I have sympathy for your views. I may even someday advocate them, if I become sufficiently convinced. I'm quite open-minded, but that's not good enough, is it? Since having any kind of reservations whatsoever against agreeing entirely with the almighty Conza88 is apparently "lunacy," well...who DOESN'T lose your respect, other than people who agree with you 100%? Seriously, get over yourself and have some common decency towards other posters. I'm in no way qualified to label a personality quirk as something pathological, but the way you treat anyone who doesn't worship the ground you walk on is pretty disturbing: It reminds me a bit of someone with narcissistic personality disorder lashing out against a former source of narcissistic supply who slighted him. I care little about having your respect, because this isn't about you, and I'm not in some contest to please you. Instead, all I want is for you to start treating people with the common courtesy that civilized adults afford each other. It's long past time for you to grow up and start doing so...and until you do, your words will continue to turn away potential allies than bring them to your way of thinking.

(I'd like for you to reply to this post with, "Okay, I'll try to tone down the attitude." Unfortunately, I'm expecting another tiresome reply along the lines of the ones I just got. Prove me wrong.)

[powerofreason]

If you believe that aggression (i.e. stealing, killing, defrauding, etc.) is wrong you are an anarchist. If you believe aggression is sometimes justified then you are a liberal/conservative/Constitutionalist/Socialist/Marxist/Leninist/Nazi/National Socialist/minarchist etc, etc.

[DeadheadForPaul]

Conza, if the statements in those newsletters are not racist, then I do not know what is.

Maybe you can ponder that while you clean your white robes.

[powerofreason]

Conza, if the statements in those newsletters are not racist, then I do not know what is.

Maybe you can ponder that while you clean your white robes.

Rofl. But really, what proof do you have that Lew wrote the newsletters?

[TruthisTreason]

Lew's new book, 'The Left, The Right & The State" is out!
In his intro, Lew writes: "In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state's power should be expanded. The left has a laundry list and the right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the world and its inhabitants: liberty." Read it all here please:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/left-right-and-state.html

This book is sure to go to the top of Ron's Reading List.

My copy just arrived today. :D

[0zzy]

Rofl. But really, what proof do you have that Lew wrote the newsletters?

testimony from Ron Paul's chief-of-staff.

[Original_Intent]

Here's MY ONE law:

"Do as you please - but harm no other in their person or property."

Think about it. How much more is REALLY needed? Shut down the frickin' "law factory", Congress. :p :rolleyes:

I got no problem with allowing drunk drivers, but the penalties for killing someone due to driving while intoxicated should be SEVERE.

That goes for anyone who drives without the capacity to do so safely. If some little old lady runs over someone and it turns out she has 20/300 vision and couldn't see over the steering wheel to start with - the penalty should be nuts.

People should be free to use their own judgement, but if they willfully endanger others and it actually results in injury or death - I am not saying death penalty, but the consequences should be harsh imo.

Of course some bleeding heart will come along and say there was no intent, and punishing the party at fault does not bring anyone back, etc etc etc.

[powerofreason]

testimony from Ron Paul's chief-of-staff.

Not good enough for me. He could've just had a grudge against him.

[Conza88]

No, I was not defending Aggie's position by and large. Reread my first post. I made no comment on the drunk driving issue in the first post (only to say I wasn't making a comment, which you took issue with, drawing me into a pointless debate on a subtle topic I have ambivalent feelings on and which I care little about). The ONLY thing I wanted to say was that you were treating Aggie unfairly with respect to his Lew Rockwell position.

You drew yourself in. I don't control your actions. Supporting Lew Rockwell doesn't mean you are thus supporting racism.


...which is what I mentioned in the very next sentence.


90% of the time your pushing the alternate & wrongful position, with your long winded "points" that really do amount to nothing but rambling. Then you give one sentence that you attempt to use as a clarifier. All you need to do is delete the other 90% of wrongfulness & then its aces.


Jesus Christ, arguing with you is like arguing with a child.

Says the baby with a rattle.


Clearly, I don't "ASSUME" any of the things you say I assume. For the sake of completeness, I made the obvious statement that , the victim you're asking about is the person whose body or property was hit.

YES, but we are not talking as if a CRASH or destruction of property has occurred. We are simply debating DRINK DRIVING. You hop in your car, you've had a drink, you get home safely, you shut off the car, you go to sleep.

That is it. That is what the WHOLE debate is about. There is no victim. NOW, if the person was to get pulled over whilst on the way home, Aggie et all statists would contend you have committed a crime.


OBVIOUSLY there is not always a victim, and by acting as though I'm trying to obfuscate this, you're only betraying your own desire to lash out at other posters at every possible opportunity. Writing replies to your posts is a chore, and I tire of defending myself from your brain-dead insinuations. Of COURSE there is not always a victim, which I clearly acknowledged in the bolded portions of my paragraph above! I merely mentioned who the victim was (in the case of an accident) for the sake of completeness.

It's not for the sake of completeness - it is IRRELEVANT. You're bringing up points that have no basis for the argument at hand. You're the one wasting time bringing up points that aren't an issue.

Once there is a crash etc - then rights have been violated and the proper libertarian position (which I - Lew Rockwell hold), then it would be dealt with. This is not in question.


That said, I'm not stupid. I knew all along how you were framing the argument, and I already knew you were asking who the victim was as a simple setup so you could scream, "[I]FAIL! THERE IS NO VICTIM! BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH!"

That's why I carefully made sure to elaborate on the fact that I understood this already. Unfortunately, I forgot that no clarification would ever be good enough for you to say, "Okay, continue," to anyway, because of your propensity for tearing into people rather than seeking common ground. EPIC FAIL.

There is no victim. A 5 year old could understand this. A consumes beverage, A drives motor vehicle home without incident, A gets into bed and goes to sleep. Who is the victim? Where is the crime? Whose property has been violated? If you agree to all this, then why have you explicably bothered to write your reply, which you consider a chore. Again you write 90% defending the wrong, irrational positions then pop in a few corollaries. How about cutting out the BS aye?


Blah, blah, blah. Deliberately sidestep your opponent's clear agreement on a point here, drop a link to mises.org or lewrockwell.com to demonstrate intellectual superiority and learnedness there, act like a total asshole the whole time...check, check, check.

Wtf did I side step? You have NOTHING to say to it do you? Because it's the truth.

We are talking simply DRINK DRIVING.

This is exactly like Hate Crime... "do you really care if you are killed by someone with joy in their heart, or hate in their heart? You are still dead."

i.e "Do you really care if you are killed by someone who is drunk, or sobre? You are still dead."

What you just did = Ad Hominem fallacy.

* Argumentum ad Hominem = Translation:
"Argument against the man" (Latin)
* The Fallacy of Personal Attack
Exposition:
A debater commits the Ad Hominem Fallacy when he introduces irrelevant personal premisses about his opponent. Such red herrings may successfully distract the opponent or the audience from the topic of the debate.


I already addressed and agreed with everything you said by my statement, "The actual act of damaging person or property should be outlawed and punished (or more precisely, the victim should seek redress), not necessarily any reckless behavior that might lead to it."

Of course, that's not good enough, because acknowledging my agreement on that point would mean you'd have to pass up an opportunity to be confrontational and have an argument.

Delete practically every other sentence bar that and I'll relent. 90% BS iust doesn't cut it. More to the point, this point was never originally being debated. It is the Libertarian position - property damaged, then you get reparations. Your point is moot.


Of course you know where I'm going with this: Driving drunk isn't necessarily dangerous. Driving recklessly is dangerous, and drunkenness is merely one major cause of recklessness. It's not so much that my argument is predictable as it is that I already laid out my argument in my last post. Here, in this post, I just explicitly spelled out that recklessness is what endangers people...as you expected me to. Still, it's such an obvious point that I'm only filling in that blank for the sake of completeness.

No, it's predictable. It's how the statists reason. Even driving recklessly... no-one on the roads, its 3 am - no property damaged, no harm caused = Who is the victim? What the statists want to do is legislate against assumptions; that you are more of a danger to society and that for that simple reason, you should be punished.

Eg. A professional formula one driver, a guy who races cars for a living, many years of experience and skill - has several beers and hops in a car to drive home. He is slightly drunk.

You then have an 80 year old asian woman (stereotyping), with bad eye sight who is sober and hasn't driven for years.

Whose going to be the better driver? :rolleyes: - The state says the Asian lady and punishes the formula one driver.


Yes, I know all that. Believe it or not, I have a lot of sympathy for the anarcho-capitalist position, especially because of its moral and ideological purity. I'm just not entirely convinced of its stability. I may eventually come around, I may not - but it's not looking like you'll be helping with that any time soon.

I can only show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through it. You've got to help yourself.

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer

ACTUALLY reading some anarcho-capitalist material would be a GREAT start.


In any case, both of our opinions on the justification behind the state's existence are irrelevant in the context of weighing the drunk driving issue under the present assumption of state-owned roads. Because it's essentially a non-issue when it comes to privately owned roads, the only meaningful debate anybody can have about drunk driving must necessarily be within the context of a society with a state and state-owned roads.

No, it is directly relevant.

"As long as public schools exist, would it be just for school officials (although not the property owners) to prevent people from doing this? I would say YES."

And I made the point; it can never be called just.

ie."Just like stealing from A, then giving to B - CANNOT be called compassion."


By the way, if we accept the idea that the state is the legitimate owner of the roads, then the issue becomes more clear: They make the rules, and no matter what the rules are, we are bound to follow them. After all, they're the property owners, right? ;)

Why... how totalitarian / statist of you! ;)


However, I say this in jest, because I do not actually subscribe to the idea that the state legitimately owns the roads. In a working version of today's world, the collective public is currently the legitimate owner of the roads, and the state would be at best merely the agent of the public (legitimately). In reality, the legitimate owners of the roads are spread disproportionately throughout the public (depending on who paid in what), because the money was taken by force, and the state is less of an agent of the shareholders and more of an usurper.

The state is not legitimate. You cease to be an owner of said property, once it is stolen. If someone robs me, and takes all my money in my wallet - $100. I don't contend that I am still the owner of that $100 now do I? :rolleyes:


Still, let's pretend that the laws governing rules of the roads were implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (like with the shareholders of private roads). Would these rules not be entirely valid, on the basis of property rights?

Ohhh pretend, something not based in reality! Yay! :) Rules of the road - set by the legitimate private property owners, if there was a private organization, a company or corporation that builds and owns the private roads, those that have legitimate title to that property, who can DO what they WANT with it at a moment notice, who can RIP it up if they so choose at their whim for no other reason than they wanted to - they can set the road rules.

Don't attempt to correlate the state and private organizations - it is fallacious and flawed. There is no comparison.

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." – Murray N. Rothbard


Ultimately, all rules of the road derive from property rights. Of course, the laws governing rules of the road are not exactly implemented in accordance with a vote of the actual legitimate shareholders (weighting proportionally, etc.). Similarly, because everyone is forced to be a shareholder of every road equally within large geographical areas, free market competition between roads with different rules becomes impossible. However, the shareholders nevertheless do hold claim to the road, and they are therefore within their rights to come up with terms and conditions for passage, and that includes the possibility of a ban against drunk drivers. While it's impossible for shareholder votes to be taken and tallied correctly in practice (and what we have at the moment is at best a gross approximation by the usurper state ), it still holds in principle.

Lmao, no it doesn't hold in principle. And here you go again, you are defending the state and going off in inane tangents.

Property rights? Are you insane. The State does not HOMESTEAD anything - Lockean principle of property rights and the FOUNDATION of Libertarianism. The State robs, it has no RIGHT to property. It is theft and coercion.

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone." – Frédéric Bastiat

Yes, you know this.. yet persist in its defence at every turn. :rolleyes:


I still haven't submitted my hypothetical checks and balances to writers on Lew Rockwell's site to examine, but in any case, you still have not bothered to seriously address them yourself. Until you do, you already know I disagree with your blanket assertion that the state cannot be controlled by any means, and it's pointless to continue trying to convince me otherwise without first addressing the specific counterargument I offered in another thread.

It's not Lew Rockwells site. It is the LvMI (http://mises.org/Community/forums/). Your premise is flawed. Why should I waste my time with the content of the argument, when it is the FORM, the very essence of it that it is wrong. Unfortunate that you can't see that.


That's a clever and workable solution for future roads, although I do personally find one-way roads to be entirely frustrating. What about current roads, though? This is all fine and dandy, just like arguing for an anarcho-capitalist society in which drunk driving laws become moot (because of private road ownership), but it doesn't really address the issue at hand.

You missed the point. Cambodia, public ownership of roads - no road rules. Did you not see people going all ways? Current roads - its the same there. It entirely addresses the issue at hand, and in fact destroys you proposition.


With such low standards for tyranny, what do you call the concentration camps of Kim Jong-Il? You know, to uh...differentiate them from laws against drunk driving? Hyperbole aside, laws against drunk driving on public roads are at worst unreasonable, not tyrannical. I gave an argument above explaining why they might be rationalized as reasonable (paragraph on shareholders, etc.). Of course, the counterargument is transparently obvious, considering the lack of 1:1 correspondence with private roads and shareholders. The degree to which such rules are unreasonable is directly proportional to the degree to which the reality of our situation diverges from a scenario in which the shareholders' votes are properly counted and tallied (and then a bit more to compensate for the fact that there's no competition). Personally, I think road rules against reckless driving in general (or drunk driving in particular) are probably more reasonable than not...but as I mentioned before, I have no strong opinion, because it's such a subtle issue.

What high standards of LIBERTY I have. Your argument for them was baseless and as you afore mentioned; PRETEND. Not based on reality, good luck with that one. Yet you now try to pawn it off as reasonable? Since when is fiction reasonable? :rolleyes:

When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny. – Thomas Paine

Getting a life long conviction, criminal charges, fines etc. When I FEAR the violence that will inevitably result, the arrest and jail time etc.. for doing an act where NO-ONE WAS HURT, WHERE THERE IS NO VICTIM... that is when I fear the government, that is when there is tyranny.



Here, you're reframing the argument. My premise is simply that property owners can kick people off their properties, ban them from their properties, etc. This is not inherently an argument against freedom of movement, though freedom of movement does get pulled into the equation when the state is the property "owner" in question. It's a special case, and it certainly deserves special attention and caution as well, because - among other reasons - the state is not really the legitimate property owner in the first place (the public "shareholders" are). Still, my basic premise is not the general supremacy of the state, but merely the idea that property owners can set terms and conditions on the usage of their land.

Rofl. No, I am MAINTAINING the argument. This is what has been argued the entire time. The State is not the rightful property owners - EPIC fail, flawed premise. <-- Yet you realise this, yet still persist in the lunacy - you cling to your flawed position regardless. Rather sad. PRIVATE property owners CAN set the terms and conditions of the useage of their land - YES, NOTHING has EVER been said against this. But the STATE is NOT the legitimate owner, it has no right even by minarchist standards to legislate against drink driving.


*Actually, freedom of movement can come into conflict with property rights at other times, too - even private property rights in an anarcho-capitalist world. What if your neighbor somehow buys up all of the land surrounding your property and forbids you from ever trespassing on his land? Technically speaking, leaving your house (or coming back) would be a violation of your neighbor's property rights. Would you be justified in violating his property rights to make passage?

More socialist none sense. This has been addressed countless times. In a free market you would write into the contract access rights. As simple as that. If you want an extended analysis - ask and I'll go bother to find it. (The question gets asked daily basically at the Mises.org forums.)


Your conceit that anyone who disagrees with you must be wrong or brainless is simply laughable. It is not only unwise and unhealthy, but perhaps borderline crazy, to have such immutable and closed-minded certainty in your knowledge and opinions that you leave open no possibility for being even slightly mistaken.

Wrong. You think It is plausible to state that I came from being a chomskite leaning socialist in a year to an anarcho capitalist because I had conceit of anyone who disagrees with me must be wrong? LMFAO. Most absurd statement I've ever heard. I'm always open minded and check my premises always. When I realise I am wrong, I take up the new position I believe to be right and defend it until I get shown or deduct otherwise. What you at me is straw.


You claim that I think with emotion instead of logic or reason, yet many of your posts are little more than emotional tirades against other posters whose disagreement apparently frustrates you to the very point that you can't even take the time to write complete and proper sentences. In fact, you go so far as to rail against my posts (and against me) simply because I don't have the same level of convictionor absolute faith in anarcho-capitalism as you do! I don't disparage your views, and I even acknowledge the possibility that they may ultimately be correct, yet every bit of caution I might have to subscribe wholeheartedly to them is apparently some mortal sin in your eyes.

There is no emotion in the arguments, logic or reasoning. In the delivery and content I mix it in yes. But it comes AFTER the conclusion has been reached, not BEFORE.

It has nothing to do with you being a minarchist and not accepting anarcho-capitalism. That I hardly care about. It has everything to do with you being a conservative (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard75.html), a gradualist and not an abolitionist. You DEFEND the state in practically every exchange we have. To me, that is defending robbers, liars, theives, war criminals etc. it is unacceptable.


The way you debate has nothing to do with logic or reason, even if you might have initially come to your viewpoints using those faculties. Rather, the way you debate has everything to do with using brute force to shout down your opponents, and it stems from your intolerant religious fundamentalism against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper in the Church of Anarcho-Capitalism.

It stems from my intolerance against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper of reason, knowledge, truth and above all - Liberty.


It's silly how you have to literally write down that you have superior logic, as if that makes it true. Why must you brag that your arguments are logically sound, through praxeology (do you even remember what the word means? You're using it wrong, and if I were to stoop to your level of patronizing assholishness, I might just link you to a primer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology)), a priori / deductive reasoning, etc.? Don't just tell me I'm wrong. Show me. Don't just tell me you showed me, either - actually show me. :rolleyes:

Based on praxeology. Human action. Not using it wrong, sorry. I suggest you read Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises.

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/schuller.pdf - More specifically the last page.


You want people to start listening to you, right? As I said before, you are not winning over hearts and minds with your approach. If anything, you're driving them away.

I only vent at those that are close minded or wish to remain willfully ignorant, who refuse to think logically about the situation. I don't drive anyone away who already wasn't gone.


Yeah, because that's exactly what the newsletters said. The context certainly put things into better perspective and helped to redeem the author in my eyes, but casting stones against Aggie merely because he still doesn't approve (or want to associate himself with the author)...well, that I do take issue with. To put this back into context, the original comment I objected to was, "Racism? LOL. Isn't that ummmmmmmmmmmmm... collectivism - the very opposite of individualism. Calling Lew Rockwell a racist is like calling Stalin a free market anarchist. It is fcken delusional." The first part was patronizing beyond reason, and Aggie was not in fact "fcken delusional" for having his opinion, because - while I do disagree with his assessment - there are enough grains of truth to make it an opinion a reasonable person might still hold.

It is not reasonable to think a prime advocate of Individualism is a racist. The Founder of the Mises Institute, someone who agrees fundamentally with Mises Human Action - ain't a racist. To contend so is delusional.

4. Racial Polylogism

"Marxian polylogism is an abortive makeshift to salvage the untenable doctrines of socialism. Its attempt to substitute intuition for ratiocination appeals to popular superstitions. But it is precisely this attitude that places Marxian polylogism and its offshoot, the so-called “sociology of knowledge,” in irreconcilable antagonism to science and reason. It is different with the polylogism of the racists. This brand of polylogism is in agreement with fashionable, although mistaken, tendencies in presentday empiricism.

It is an established fact that mankind is divided into various races. The races differ in bodily features. Materialist philosophers assert that thoughts are a secretion of the brain as bile is a secretion of the gall-bladder. It would be inconsistent for them to reject beforehand the hypothesis that the thought-secretion of the various races may differ in essential qualities. The fact that anatomy has not succeeded up to now in discovering anatomical differences in the brain cells of various races cannot invalidate the doctrine that the logical structure of mind is different with different races. It does not exclude the assumption that later research may discover such anatomical peculiarities.

Some ethnologists tell us that it is a mistake to speak of higher and lower civilizations and of an alleged backwardness of alien races. The civilizations of various races are different from the Western civilization of the peoples of Caucasian stock, but they are not inferior. Every race has its peculiar mentality. It is faulty to apply to the civilization of any of them yardsticks abstracted from the achievements of other races. Westerners call the civilization of China an arrested civilization and that of the inhabitants of New Guinea primitive barbarism. But the Chinese and the natives of New Guinea despise our civilization no less than we despise theirs. Such estimates are judgments of value and hence arbitrary. Those other races have a different structure of mind.

Their civilizations are adequate to their mind as our civilization is adequate to our mind. We are incapable of comprehending that what we call backwardness does not appear such to them. It is, from the point of view of their logic, a better method of coming to a satisfactory arrangement with given natural conditions of ife than is our progressivism.

These ethnologists are right in emphasizing that it is not the task of a historian—and the ethnologist too is a historian—to express value judgments. But they are utterly mistaken in contending that these other races have been guided in their activities by motives other than those which haver actuated the white race. The Asiatics and the Africans no less than the peoples of European descent have been eager to struggle successfully for survival and to use reason as the foremost weapon in these endeavors. They have sought to get rid of the beasts of prey and of disease, to prevent famines and to raise the productivity of labor. There can be no doubt that in the pursuit of these aims they have been less successful than the whites.

The proof is that they are eager to profit from all achievements of the West. Those ethnologists would be right, if Mongols or Africans, tormented by a painful disease, were to renounce the aid of a European doctor because their mentality or their world view led them to believe that it is better to suffer than to be relieved of pain. Mahatma Gandhi disavowed his whole philosophy
when he entered a modern hospital to be treated for appendicitis. The North American Indians lacked the ingenuity to invent the wheel. The inhabitants of the Alps were not keen enough to construct skis which would have rendered their hard life much more agreeable. Such shortcomings were not due to a mentality different from those of the races which had long since used wheels and skis; they were failures, even when judged from the point of view of the Indians and the Alpine mountaineers. However, these considerations refer only to the motives determining concrete actions, not to the only relevant problem of whether or not there exists between various races a difference in the logical structure of mind. It is precisely this that the racists assert.13

We may refer to what has been said in the preceding chapters about the fundamental issues of the logical structure of mind and the categorial principles of thought and action. Some additional observations will suffice to give the finishing stroke to racial polylogism and to any other brand of polylogism.

The categories of human thought and action are neither arbitrary products of the human mind nor conventions. They are not outside of the universe and of the course of cosmic events. They are biological facts and have a definite function in life and reality. They are instruments in man’s struggle for existence and in his endeavors to adjust himself as much as possible to the real state of the universe and to remove uneasiness as much as it is in his power to do so."

That's racist?!11 :rolleyes:

Page 104-105 Human Action.


(I'd like for you to reply to this post with, "Okay, I'll try to tone down the attitude." Unfortunately, I'm expecting another tiresome reply along the lines of the ones I just got. Prove me wrong.)

I'd like for you to reply to this post with, "Okay, I understand I was wrong with that the majority of my writings containing flawed premises. I realise the state is a band of robbers who it is immoral to defend." Unfortunately I'm expecting another tiresome defense of the State and its actions along the lines that I usually get. Prove me wrong.

:D

[Conza88]

Conza, if the statements in those newsletters are not racist, then I do not know what is.

Maybe you can ponder that while you clean your white robes.


Drug Abuse
o As of January 2007, almost 78% of women in prison and just under 91% of men in prison for drug offenses were African American or Latina, even though studies show that Caucasians use, sell, and buy drugs in greater numbers than people of color

http://inkarcerated.intrasun.tcnj.edu/womeninprison/Prison%20Statistics.doc

That is racist! The facts are racist!

Ron Paul Calls for End to Drug War (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8S8N2OG7sU)

Listen to all Ron Pauls statistics. They are racist. http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/4204/maddu7.gif He wants to repeal the law and set them free.. but NO it's racist Gawdamnnittt1111!!! http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/4204/maddu7.gif

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/252/jpistudy.shtml

:rolleyes: If you actually knew me in real life... you'd see how absurd it is to call me a racist. Sorry, the only immoral institution is the State - I don't give a hoot about who, or what you are... you're a unique individual and I apply the same principles to all.

Calling me a racist, is tantamount to believing the world is flat.

[Anti Federalist]

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.

That ^^^^


This is why the campaign against "racial profiling" has intuitive plausibility to many people: surely a person shouldn’t be hounded solely because some demographic groups have higher crime rates than others. Government should be preventing and punishing crimes themselves, not probabilities and propensities. Neither, then, should we have driver profiling, which assumes that just because a person has quaffed a few he is automatically a danger.

And that ^^^^ (which also doesn't sound very "racist" to me)

[DeadheadForPaul]

Rofl. But really, what proof do you have that Lew wrote the newsletters?

Evidence and logic seem to point to him.

I personally believe it given the facts and reaching my own conclusions based on who could have possibly written those statements.

At the time, Rockwell embraced new tactics to expand his movement's ranks by reaching out to the uglier elements of the Right.

As the editor of the newsletter, he had final say in the contents.

Even if Rockwell did not personally write that article, either ROCKWELL or DR. PAUL (or both) approved of their content and allowed them to be published under Dr. Paul's name in a newsletter for public consumption.

At the very best, it shows bad judgment. At the very worst, it shows collectivism and racism

[Conza88]

That ^^^^

And that ^^^^ (which also doesn't sound very "racist" to me)

:eek: Well put indeed! It's exactly right. http://img73.imageshack.us/img73/851/tupus9.gif

[DeadheadForPaul]

Referring to a race of people as "animals" is racist.

Have you actually READ these publications?

Because I have, and I find them EXTREMELY DISGUSTING and EMBARRASSING. I'm embarrassed for Ron Paul, our movement, and myself.

You can download the pdfs of the publications in question here: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=74978161-f730-43a2-91c3-de262573a129

Whoever is responsible for these writings is no friend of liberty, Ron Paul, the Campaign for liberty, or mine.

I believe the evidence convincingly points to Lew. We should not give this man money but rather shun him

[DeadheadForPaul]

Proof of Rockwell's hand in this:

"On January 14, The New Republic published more selections from the newsletters.[73] The new selections included a March 1987 and an April 1988 issue of The Ron Paul Investment Letter, prior to the racist and homophobic invective, which listed Paul as editor.[74][75] However, a later May 1988 edition, (again, prior to the inflammatory content) showed Paul with no role in the publication; Rockwell had replaced him as editor. [76]

When Paul was an editor, there was no racism in the newsletters. However, following his departure as an editor, Rockwell took over. A few months later the newsletter contained extremist writings, homophobic slanders, and racist ramblings.

In a January 16 report for Reason, Julian Sanchez and David Weigel uncovered evidence that Lew Rockwell was involved with the newsletters. According to the report, an unnamed source in the Paul campaign and Timothy Wirkman Virkkala, former managing editor of Liberty magazine, acknowledged Rockwell's role in authoring the letters.

Some newsletters advocated positions seemingly contrary to Paul's voting record or personal statements. One quotation mocks the idea of a holiday for a 'fraud,' and 'pedophile,' like Martin Luther King, yet Paul twice voted in favor of a Federal Holiday for King. [77] Additionally, one newsletter quotes Paul as saying that his medical training made him more keen of "cheap gay tricks," along with other stridently anti-gay language. Yet in a 2007 interview, Paul asserted that his medical training made him more tolerant and less judgmental of homosexuality. [78]

[Brian4Liberty]

Obviously, drinking is not the problem, it is cars.

I wonder what has the worst penalty? If a person has one drink and a) accidently shoots someone or b) gets in an auto accident? The auto accident? And even if that auto accident was 100% caused by another driver, you are still in big trouble. It is a a war on alcohol. Neo-prohibition.

The same people who want to ban alchohol generally want to ban guns too...

[TruthisTreason]

We should not give this man money but rather shun him
I bought the book, ASAP. Looks like it's a good one. I'll let you know.
I visit Lew's webiste daily, I like his look on a lot of the issues. The "newsletters" quotes i've read I didn't find that offensive. Maybe, you could quote some of the more outrageous ones, that you dislike to refresh some of our memories.

Also, suppose someone just agreed with some of the quotes that you don't. Does that make them un American? Or just uninformed on this issue? Would you rather us read Obama's book?

[DeadheadForPaul]

I bought the book, ASAP. Looks like it's a good one. I'll let you know.
I visit Lew's webiste daily, I like his look on a lot of the issues. The "newsletters" quotes i've read I didn't find that offensive. Maybe, you could quote some of the more outrageous ones, that you dislike to refresh some of our memories.

Also, suppose someone just agreed with some of the quotes that you don't. Does that make them un American? Or just uninformed on this issue? Would you rather us read Obama's book?

I suggest that we all read the works of Ron Paul, Thomas Paine, etc. rather than Rockwell. I would recommend reading Obama's book (but not buying it!) so that we can cite Obama quotes to his supporters. I bet we'll know more about Obama than they do - make them look real dumb in a debate :D:cool:

[TruthisTreason]

I suggest that we all read the works of Ron Paul, Thomas Paine, etc. rather than Rockwell. I would recommend reading Obama's book (but not buying it!) so that we can cite Obama quotes to his supporters. I bet we'll know more about Obama than they do - make them look real dumb in a debate :D:cool:

I've read most of Ron Paul. And a few by Mr. Paine. I'm currently reading Bruce Fein Constitutional Peril. Can't bring myself to read Obama.:p

[DeadheadForPaul]

I've read most of Ron Paul. And a few by Mr. Paine. I'm currently reading Bruce Fein Constitutional Peril. Can't bring myself to read Obama.:p

I've read books by Marx, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc.

Know Your Opponent!!!

The best debater can argue the other side...and then tear it apart

[TruthisTreason]

I've read books by Marx, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc.

Know Your Opponent!!!

The best debater can argue the other side...and then tear it apart

I've tried talking to Obama sheep. It's sort of like talking to a brick wall. It wouldn't matter what I said, the wall will just stand there and look at me. :rolleyes: Well, thats my experience with Obama supporters. "Change" "Hope". I checked out his website, during his campaign, I'm sure his book isn't much different. He is basically the same as so many before BIG GOVERNMENT. The same arguments work on all of those kind. I'd rather listen to Europe 72. ;)

[DeadheadForPaul]

I. The same arguments work on all of those kind. I'd rather listen to Europe 72. ;)

:D:cool:

Now that's something I can get behind :D

[Conza88]

I've read books by Marx, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc.

Know Your Opponent!!!

The best debater can argue the other side...and then tear it apart

It helps to know your own side aswell... and their concise criticisms of these clowns. Nader and Dean are hardly worthy opponents... the same goes for Marx - he's just got cult worship which lends him band wagoning credibility.

Can I suggest you read works by Ludwig Von Mises, Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, Hoppe etc... ?

Anything in the Austrian School of Economics. Free audio, pdf's etc..

[Mini-Me]

Stripping out some smilies again...


You drew yourself in. I don't control your actions. Supporting Lew Rockwell doesn't mean you are thus supporting racism.
First two sentences: I was unnecessarily provoked, and that's why I joined the stupid drunk driving pissing match.
Third sentence: I agree that supporting Lew Rockwell doesn't mean you're supporting racism. However, I can understand why someone might feel otherwise. Apparently, things are too black and white in your world to comprehend the distinction, which is why you consistently try to school me on concepts I've already demonstrated understanding of. :rolleyes:



90% of the time your pushing the alternate & wrongful position, with your long winded "points" that really do amount to nothing but rambling. Then you give one sentence that you attempt to use as a clarifier. All you need to do is delete the other 90% of wrongfulness & then its aces.
Another sign you're incapable of compehending subtlety.



Says the baby with a rattle.
...and you base your assessment on what? The fact that I dare to disagree with you? The fact that I dare point out your bullyish behavior and ask you to tone it down? What a childish insult.



YES, but we are not talking as if a CRASH or destruction of property has occurred. We are simply debating DRINK DRIVING. You hop in your car, you've had a drink, you get home safely, you shut off the car, you go to sleep.
Worthless reply, already addressed.



That is it. That is what the WHOLE debate is about. There is no victim. NOW, if the person was to get pulled over whilst on the way home, Aggie et all statists would contend you have committed a crime.
That's where I differ with them. I would consider it to be breaking a rule of the road, like driving on the wrong side. The subtle difference between that and a crime is: Crimes have victims and carry heavy consequences. Breaking rules, well - the only legitimate reason to pull someone over in that case is essentially to stop a ticking time bomb and diffuse a dangerous situation, not to "punish" them. I've already explained why, and I won't bother repeating the same argument that you already proved yourself incapable of comprehending.



It's not for the sake of completeness - it is IRRELEVANT. You're bringing up points that have no basis for the argument at hand. You're the one wasting time bringing up points that aren't an issue.
Let me clarify: I mentioned it for the sake of completeness, specifically because you asked a direct question. I felt the question was irrelevant as well, and in fact it was a trap, but I answered it anyway, and then I clarified with the three sentences you purposely ignored so you could lash out at someone. With as much as you enjoy verbal aggression, I honestly find it hard to believe that you're truly so against physical aggression as well.



Once there is a crash etc - then rights have been violated and the proper libertarian position (which I - Lew Rockwell hold), then it would be dealt with. This is not in question.
Worthless comment, already addressed.



There is no victim. A 5 year old could understand this. A consumes beverage, A drives motor vehicle home without incident, A gets into bed and goes to sleep. Who is the victim? Where is the crime? Whose property has been violated? If you agree to all this, then why have you explicably bothered to write your reply, which you consider a chore. Again you write 90% defending the wrong, irrational positions then pop in a few corollaries. How about cutting out the BS aye?
Worthless comment, already addressed.



Wtf did I side step? You have NOTHING to say to it do you? Because it's the truth.
You sidestepped my clear and obvious agreement on several points and understanding of them, solely so you could act like I understand none of it and scream from your pulpit. :rolleyes:



We are talking simply DRINK DRIVING.

This is exactly like Hate Crime... "do you really care if you are killed by someone with joy in their heart, or hate in their heart? You are still dead."

i.e "Do you really care if you are killed by someone who is drunk, or sobre? You are still dead."
Worthless comment, already addressed.



What you just did = Ad Hominem fallacy.

* Argumentum ad Hominem = Translation:
"Argument against the man" (Latin)
* The Fallacy of Personal Attack
Exposition:
A debater commits the Ad Hominem Fallacy when he introduces irrelevant personal premisses about his opponent. Such red herrings may successfully distract the opponent or the audience from the topic of the debate.

Actually, you're misusing the ad hominem fallacy, but I honestly expect no better. I did not attack your words with respect to the drunk driving argument by attacking the competence/suitability/etc. of the author. I attacked your words on the drunk driving argument by attacking your words directly. I separately attacked your attitude (but not your words on the drunk driving argument) by attacking your attitude directly. Considering one of my two primary arguments here IS that your attitude is absolute shit, it was perfectly valid to point it out. I pointed out that you:
Sidestepped my agreement on many specific points and created a straw man argument to attack (one where the straw man disagreed with everything you were saying and did not already express understanding). By using a straw man, you were starting your argument from false premises. That's a fallacy you engaged in while discussing drunk driving.
Link-dropped to give off airs of superiority. The link-drops were not legitimate arguments, and they were certainly not valid rebuttals for what I said (especially considering I already knew what you were trying to tell me), so for the purposes of the drunk driving argument, I ignored them. However, I might even call them appeals to authority, depending on how they were intended. Calling an irrelevant and egotistical diversion for what it is, is not an ad hominem argument. In any case, my primary purpose here for pointing out the unnecessary and superfluous link drop was pointing out another instance where your debating attitude needs adjustment (and that's entirely valid, considering that's one of my two primary arguments - and in fact, it was the sole reason I joined the thread).
You acted like a total asshole the whole time: Statement of opinion, reiterating my primary thesis that your attitude needs adjustment (because that's what I came to discuss, not drunk driving).



Delete practically every other sentence bar that and I'll relent. 90% BS iust doesn't cut it. More to the point, this point was never originally being debated. It is the Libertarian position - property damaged, then you get reparations. Your point is moot.
I've already demonstrated complete knowledge of this, and I've already demonstrated why, on the basis of property rights, another position may be considered valid and reasonable. Furthermore, I'm not here to join a contest of libertarian purity anyway, so YOUR point is moot.



No, it's predictable. It's how the statists reason. Even driving recklessly... no-one on the roads, its 3 am - no property damaged, no harm caused = Who is the victim? What the statists want to do is legislate against assumptions; that you are more of a danger to society and that for that simple reason, you should be punished.
Once again, you're conflating the ideas of punishment and allowing someone to diffuse a dangerous situation (stop a reckless/drunk/etc. driver when they're driving like a ticking time bomb). Perhaps you HAVEN'T realized my argument is different from that of straw man statists you're ranting against?



Eg. A professional formula one driver, a guy who races cars for a living, many years of experience and skill - has several beers and hops in a car to drive home. He is slightly drunk.

You then have an 80 year old asian woman (stereotyping), with bad eye sight who is sober and hasn't driven for years.

Whose going to be the better driver? - The state says the Asian lady and punishes the formula one driver.
Do you think that's the answer I would give? If not, why argue against the state's position? After all, I am not the state. Argue against the position I actually presented.



I can only show you the door. You're the one who has to walk through it. You've got to help yourself.
Yes, Morpheus. :rolleyes:



"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer

ACTUALLY reading some anarcho-capitalist material would be a GREAT start.
It would. Thankfully, I understand their extremely simple and direct argument here in its entirety. It's quite easy to comprehend. I simply don't believe it's the be-all, end-all of arguments, and that's something you're incapable of accepting. The argument I presented - not the argument statists present, which is the one YOU are arguing against, but the argument I specifically presented - is also reasonable, and it derives from the libertarian principle of property rights, even though it differs from the stock anarcho-capitalist argument. I'm not even arguing that it's necessarily the best viewpoint*, simply that it's valid and reasonable until shown otherwise.

*In fact, I'm quite accepting of the possibility that it may NOT be the best viewpoint. I haven't yet come to a firm conclusion, and I may eventually decide in favor of the anarcho-capitalist viewpoint anyway.



No, it is directly relevant.

"As long as public schools exist, would it be just for school officials (although not the property owners) to prevent people from doing this? I would say YES."

And I made the point; it can never be called just.

ie."Just like stealing from A, then giving to B - CANNOT be called compassion."
Irrelevant to the matter at hand, as I said...because the matter at hand is discussing the drunk driving issue in isolation, assuming our current world with its overarching state and public roads. The argument becomes moot once we start talking about an anarcho-capitalist world, as I said before...which is why it only makes sense to debate it within the framework of public roads.



Why... how totalitarian / statist of you! ;)
Indeed. ;)



The state is not legitimate. You cease to be an owner of said property, once it is stolen. If someone robs me, and takes all my money in my wallet - $100. I don't contend that I am still the owner of that $100 now do I?

Ohhh pretend, something not based in reality! Yay! Rules of the road - set by the legitimate private property owners, if there was a private organization, a company or corporation that builds and owns the private roads, those that have legitimate title to that property, who can DO what they WANT with it at a moment notice, who can RIP it up if they so choose at their whim for no other reason than they wanted to - they can set the road rules.
Yes, exactly - my first point was to establish this. I started from an imaginary scenario, and my next point was to establish the similarities to our actual scenario, keeping in mind the differences. There's not a 1:1 comparison between roads owned by private shareholders and roads owned by the state, but there's still a correlation. I already explained why, and I won't bother repeating myself. You obviously disagree, but that does not necessarily mean I'm wrong.



Don't attempt to correlate the state and private organizations - it is fallacious and flawed. There is no comparison.
If you say so. :rolleyes: The comparison is not direct or 1:1, but it still exists. To the degree that the rules are identical to those favored by the rightful shareholders (the public, proportionate to who paid what), rules of the road set by the state are valid. To the degree that their rules diverge, rules of the road set by the state are invalid. When it comes to setting the rules on a specific property, a democratic "majority rules" vote decides the matter when dealing with private shareholders. Now, it is impossible to get an exact tally of the opinions of the rightful shareholders (proportionate to their [forced] investment) in the case of public roads. However, if the support for a ban on drunk driving is overwhelming enough - and it is - then an exact tally is not necessary. This is why it may be reasonable to hold a democratic vote on rules of the road, and - for example - accept those with 90% support among the public, etc. Of course, there are two caveats:
That's not actually what we do in real life. Point taken. The current law is unjust...but if we DID do it the way I suggest, I would in that case no longer be averse to a rule against drunk driving.
More importantly, the current law is unjust because it levies penalties against drunk drivers (who don't get in accidents) which no property owner or other entity has the legitimate authority to dole out in the absence of actual aggression. My primary objection to current drunk driving laws is the fact that they actually carry legal punishments for breaking the rule. (And yes, in case you haven't been paying attention, I'll reiterate that I DO have problems with the law as it stands.)



"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State." – Murray N. Rothbard
Irrelevant. This is not my argument, but you can pretend like it is if you want.



Lmao, no it doesn't hold in principle. And here you go again, you are defending the state and going off in inane tangents.

Property rights? Are you insane. The State does not HOMESTEAD anything - Lockean principle of property rights and the FOUNDATION of Libertarianism. The State robs, it has no RIGHT to property. It is theft and coercion.

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone." – Frédéric Bastiat

Yes, you know this.. yet persist in its defence at every turn.
Read above and stop arguing against a straw man. I'm not defending the state, as it exists. I'm not defending the law, as it exists. I'm defending the abstract idea that a different kind of rule against drunk driving might be considered reasonable by libertarian principles of property rights, when the rules of the road turn out to be the same ones that the legitimate property owners would choose. To clarify again, the legitimate property owners are the public, in proportion to payment, not the state (even if the state has usurped control). It's a subtle idea, and I don't expect that someone who divides the world into black and white would understand it, but it's nevertheless worlds apart from "defending the state."



It's not Lew Rockwells site. It is the LvMI (http://mises.org/Community/forums/). Your premise is flawed. Why should I waste my time with the content of the argument, when it is the FORM, the very essence of it that it is wrong. Unfortunate that you can't see that.

Sorry, I made a mistake about the website. In any case, even if the argument would go against your moral code, that's irrelevant, because the argument I'm asking you to examine is not a moral argument. The argument is simply that, practically speaking - regardless of whether it's right or wrong - it is indeed possible to restrain the state indefinitely using the checks and balances I suggested. Of course, since you're apparently unable to debate ethics separately from practical possibility, I do not find it surprising at all that you refuse to address such an argument.



You missed the point. Cambodia, public ownership of roads - no road rules. Did you not see people going all ways? Current roads - its the same there. It entirely addresses the issue at hand, and in fact destroys you proposition.
You missed the point yet again. I don't know how to make this any clearer to you. Maybe I should draw a diagram? In America, this would not work for our current roads, as they currently exist. The roads would literally have to be repaved specifically with this kind of plan in mind. With the exception of some roads in the inner city, our roads are two-way and incapable of being trivially converted into one-way roads. They intersect each other directly, even at right angles. Therefore, while it's a cool idea and would work for roads other than the ones that currently exist in America, it's irrelevant to the current argument, which centers around rules of the road on public two-way streets (you know, like the ones that I actually drive on).



What high standards of LIBERTY I have. Your argument for them was baseless and as you afore mentioned; PRETEND. Not based on reality, good luck with that one. Yet you now try to pawn it off as reasonable? Since when is fiction reasonable?
It wasn't a pretend argument, unless you couldn't get past the first couple of sentences. I started with a hypothetical situation and then shifted the argument into the real world from there, explaining the similarities and differences, but reading comprehension seems not to be your forte.

Anyway, as far as your low standards for using the word "tyranny," I think you knew that my point was this: You use the same extremely strong language for horrendous abuses and minor abuses alike. You can do that if you want, but I think most reasonable people will find it silly and excessive.



When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny. – Thomas Paine

Getting a life long conviction, criminal charges, fines etc. When I FEAR the violence that will inevitably result, the arrest and jail time etc.. for doing an act where NO-ONE WAS HURT, WHERE THERE IS NO VICTIM... that is when I fear the government, that is when there is tyranny.
Okay, great. Now where the fuck was I defending that? Please, point it out to me. Point out to me exactly where I said that I agree with the kind of law that entails life-long convictions, criminal charges, or fines. Point it out to me! WAIT - I NEVER SAID THIS! In fact, I specifically said I disagree with such a law, and I actually specifically listed those as reasons why such a law is unjust!

Why do you continue to argue against a straw man argument, other than to "prove me wrong" without having to do the hard work of actually doing so?



Rofl. No, I am MAINTAINING the argument. This is what has been argued the entire time. The State is not the rightful property owners - EPIC fail, flawed premise. <-- Yet you realise this, yet still persist in the lunacy - you cling to your flawed position regardless. Rather sad. PRIVATE property owners CAN set the terms and conditions of the useage of their land - YES, NOTHING has EVER been said against this. But the STATE is NOT the legitimate owner, it has no right even by minarchist standards to legislate against drink driving.
Worthless reply, already addressed...multiple times.



More socialist none sense. This has been addressed countless times. In a free market you would write into the contract access rights. As simple as that. If you want an extended analysis - ask and I'll go bother to find it. (The question gets asked daily basically at the Mises.org forums.)
Socialist nonsense? No, not at all. I didn't even make an argument - I simply mentioned that it's possible (though I suppose I could be wrong), and I asked what you would do in such a situation. :rolleyes: It's an interesting corner case, and an extended analysis would be welcome.



Wrong. You think It is plausible to state that I came from being a chomskite leaning socialist in a year to an anarcho capitalist because I had conceit of anyone who disagrees with me must be wrong? LMFAO. Most absurd statement I've ever heard. I'm always open minded and check my premises always. When I realise I am wrong, I take up the new position I believe to be right and defend it until I get shown or deduct otherwise. What you at me is straw.
You may have been open-minded a year ago, but your words ring hollow considering your attitude today. By the way, your last sentence is borderline incomprehensible. Could you insert another verb, please?



There is no emotion in the arguments, logic or reasoning. In the delivery and content I mix it in yes. But it comes AFTER the conclusion has been reached, not BEFORE.
I agree that you probably came to your initial views using logic and reason, but you're certainly not assessing other posters' arguments using the same.



It has nothing to do with you being a minarchist and not accepting anarcho-capitalism. That I hardly care about. It has everything to do with you being a conservative (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard75.html), a gradualist and not an abolitionist. You DEFEND the state in practically every exchange we have. To me, that is defending robbers, liars, theives, war criminals etc. it is unacceptable.
Do I defend the state? I only defend the abstract idea of a state, just like every single other minarchist in the entire world. Since I don't actually defend the state as it currently exists, your problem is obviously with minarchists in general - unless of course you actually believe I'm making all of the straw man arguments you're constructing for me. I'm a minarchist libertarian with anarcho-capitalist sympathies, yet you're approaching my arguments as if I'm a neocon or something. :rolleyes:



It stems from my intolerance against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper of reason, knowledge, truth and above all - Liberty.
...and considering anarcho-capitalism is the only viewpoint you accept as coming anywhere close to reason, knowledge, truth, and liberty, that's the exact same thing as intolerant religious fundamentalism against anyone who is not a devout and unwavering worshipper in the Church of Anarcho-Capitalism. You're acting as though you're arguing against me, but you're really only proving my point.



Based on praxeology. Human action. Not using it wrong, sorry. I suggest you read Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises.

http://www.mises.org/rothbard/schuller.pdf - More specifically the last page.

Your own viewpoints are constructed using praxeology (though not necessarily correctly), but it has nothing to do with your arguments against other posters, unless you actually believe that being condescending and insulting is the most instrumentally rational way for a human being to act.



I only vent at those that are close minded or wish to remain willfully ignorant, who refuse to think logically about the situation. I don't drive anyone away who already wasn't gone.
Closed-minded? That's certainly not me, considering my openness to anarcho-capitalism. I'm just not sold on it, and I don't believe in your "my way or the highway" approach. If you believe me closed-minded, especially in comparison to yourself, your definition is entirely backwards.

Do I remain willfully ignorant and refuse to think logically? Of course not. You haven't properly addressed my actual arguments - which are logically and rationally constructed - and you instead insist on attacking straw man arguments. The closest you came to addressing my argument on drunk driving was saying, "Don't attempt to correlate the state and private organizations - it is fallacious and flawed. There is no comparison." However, I did in fact make a comparison and explained how and why, and you have yet to properly explain why my logic in making such a comparison is flawed.

No, I think you just like being a self-righteous asshole...and my point is that you need to knock it off. The funny thing is, you act like I'm "already gone" when I'm 99% of the way to anarcho-capitalism anyway. Taking that into consideration, what non-anarcho-capitalists are you actually able to speak with that you do not consider "already gone?" :rolleyes:



It is not reasonable to think a prime advocate of Individualism is a racist. The Founder of the Mises Institute, someone who agrees fundamentally with Mises Human Action - ain't a racist. To contend so is delusional.
Apparently you've never heard of cognitive dissonance? The number one proponent of individuality in the entire world - with respect to law and rights - could nevertheless still be the most flagrant racist in the entire world. On an emotional level, he could think almost exclusively in terms of collectivist groups. He might know those emotions are irrational (and therefore maintain individualist political views), yet he may remain unable to overcome that emotional bias in his thoughts. I'm not saying Lew Rockwell is like this - he's not - I'm just saying that cognitive dissonance is real, and it affects people. No one on the planet is "all rational, all the time," and no one on the planet is entirely 100% consistent in their thoughts. To contend otherwise is delusional.



4. Racial Polylogism

"Marxian polylogism is an abortive makeshift to salvage the untenable doctrines of socialism. Its attempt to substitute intuition for ratiocination appeals to popular superstitions. But it is precisely this attitude that places Marxian polylogism and its offshoot, the so-called “sociology of knowledge,” in irreconcilable antagonism to science and reason. It is different with the polylogism of the racists. This brand of polylogism is in agreement with fashionable, although mistaken, tendencies in presentday empiricism. <snip for space>

The categories of human thought and action are neither arbitrary products of the human mind nor conventions. They are not outside of the universe and of the course of cosmic events. They are biological facts and have a definite function in life and reality. They are instruments in man’s struggle for existence and in his endeavors to adjust himself as much as possible to the real state of the universe and to remove uneasiness as much as it is in his power to do so."

That's racist?!11

Page 104-105 Human Action.
Maybe you should take that up with someone else, considering I'm not actually calling anyone a racist. :rolleyes:



I'd like for you to reply to this post with, "Okay, I understand I was wrong with that the majority of my writings containing flawed premises. I realise the state is a band of robbers who it is immoral to defend." Unfortunately I'm expecting another tiresome defense of the State and its actions along the lines that I usually get. Prove me wrong.


Pfffffffft. Notice that I never asked you to admit you were wrong about anything other than your attitude. In comparison, your hopes for my reply are quite a bit higher and patently unreasonable...as is your attitude in general.

[powerofreason]

You people have too much free time.

[Mini-Me]

You people have too much free time.

...and yet I choose to spend it in the stupidest of ways. :o

[mczerone]

Can I ask those who support legal drunk driving a question?

WHO THE FUCK CARES?

We will never actually win an election if we demand such rigid ideological purity at the expense of results. Is being able to drink and drive as important as ending the Fed and ending the American Empire? Its not even close. We need to focus on what matters and try to actually win something for once instead of constantly having a circle-jerk of self congratulations about our supposed ideological purity.

We care because, fundamentally, the question of how a society answers the threat of drunk drivers needs to be answered. Does a Federal government get to impose a single, biased, inflexible, and possibly flawed solution? Does a State government, for that matter? Does a theoretical "private road owner" have the freedom to allow drunk driving, even allowing for a privatized court/law system? Wouldn't it be reckless for a road owner to allow a driver to continue to operate his vehicle in the presence of others if the owner had a reasonable suspicion of the intoxication?

What I'm getting at is that we need to create a vision of what is tenable under our ideology rather than say scary and off-putting phrases like "ending the American Empire". After all, without first educating the masses, they all think that you are wrong for wanting to end it. They only see the (false) promises of those in power, saying that the Fed is the only solution to maintaining our (over-reaching) standard of living.

Lew and many others that understand the groundwork of economic freedom and true equality in liberty and civil rights are trying to provide this vision of how things could or should work in our vision of the role of government but many lack the linguistic tact to present the more politically incorrect ideas in a manner that welcomes the philosophical opponent. Instead, many of the well meaning intellectuals provide short "sound bites" of their ideas, whether in oral or written presentation, that are used by others to incite a sense of hatred toward our loose band of revolutionaries using emotional bleating instead of intellectually responding.

I don't propose we should do anything to try and edit or censor authors that are affiliated with Liberty - instead we all need to work to refine our ideas in a way that doesn't allow our words to be used against us: though careful editing, marketing, writing, or philosophizing, in which ever combination works for each creating individual (and his financiers, whoever they are).

[TruthisTreason]

I support driving after drinking (although I rarely ever drink). The definition of "drunk" and "legal" are another story. As long as no crime is committed against someone else or someone else's property, then no crime has been committed.

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine that received a DUI on New Years Eve. Nice, to see an article devoted to what I believed (section in Lews' new book). I'm on page 78 of the book, I didn't realize it was a collection of his writings over time; I'm liking it!