These opinions warrantied for the lifetime of your brain.

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Friday, March 27, 2009

If A Jury Can Do It, Why Can't A Legislature?

http://georgedonnelly.com/asides/evolved-into-anarchist

Starchild, class action settlements most assuredly set up permanent policies. I stipulated that my "taxes" are equivalent to class action fines in terms of who they reach and how much they charge.  I further stipulate that my "taxes" would be court-contestable (with loser paying court costs), just as class action settlements are.  The only distinction I leave you is in the process by which the fine/tax is imposed, and not in its effects. If it's not aggression when a jury does it, then it's not aggression when a legislature does it. 

I don't think default contestable fines (i.e. "taxes") on prima facie aggression are themselves aggression.  If you're going to rule out all use of force in any situation in which the target might eventually be able to prove his innocence, then you're ruling out way more than just taxes.  You're also ruling out most judicial processes, and indeed almost anything that isn't immediate bodily self-defense.

Breathing is not aggression. The exact language in my Free Earth Manifesto is: "Production of property via extraction of natural resources from a community commons should require a fee to the community proportional to the decrease in ability of that commons to sustainably support such extraction."

My point about Leviathan was to distinguish Skip's taxation formula from my own.  Skip's formula is used by every government; mine is used by none.  George's attempted point was that geominarchism is on a slippery slope to Leviathan.  His point was so ahistorical that it may not have even registered on you.

"Starvation diet" was a metaphorical name for a diet that makes you lose more than 80% of your weight.  Such a diet nearly always kills a human, but an 80% cut doesn't have to kill a government.

I don't agree that anarchists are the most libertarian of us, for reasons I enumerate at http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/11/none-of-many-zaps-define-libertarianism.html.

Skip, if you think I don't know enough economics, then check out my blog postings on that subject: http://knowinghumans.net/search/label/Economics.  Or visit LPplatform-discuss and do searches like

Kuznets curves
free rider problem
club goods
Tiebout sorting
Pigovian taxes
Nash-Cournot equilibrium
Kaldor-Hicks efficiency
moral hazard
negative externalities
natural monopoly
public choice theory
Pareto optimality
Prisoner's Dilemma
Allais paradox
Coase theorem
asymmetric information
Arrow's theorem