Re: [LongThread] anarchy vs. minarchy - burden of proof

Thomas Knapp wrote:

TK) The proposition was that the burden of proof as to whether the state does X effectively is on the state, not on those who doubt that the state does X effectively. (TK

Since you're ignoring the essay I pointed you to, I'll just start cutting and pasting from it.  The question for us in the LPUS is whether to ask for a complete overturning of how the American polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right to life, liberty, and property. According to the three leading indices of freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than America. To say the burden of proof is on those not asking for this complete overturning is, as I said, to mark oneself as not a serious thinker.

TK)  those advocates have yet to prove that the state reduces the incidence of aggression from a "state of nature" AT ALL (TK

Either you're hiding behind a tendentious definition of "prove", or your mouse is broken and you couldn't click this.  Wake me when you think you can rebut Pinker's claim about "the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men".

Roderick Long wrote:

RL) People sometimes point to the widespread existence of states today as evidence that it's the inevitable form of political organisation. (RL

What I point to are 17 circumstances that 1) aren't going away, 2) the American state copes with, and 3) no anarchic society has ever once dealt with.

RL) The point of my original complaint was not to defend anarchists as correct (though of course we are) but simply to defend anarchists as full contributors to rather than second-class citizens of the party. (RL

Your point would have more force if you were interested in explaining how your point of view wouldn't again make non-anarchists into second-class citizens of the party.  But I've given up on extracting such an explanation from you. Instead, you're gracing us with one-liners making feeble analogies between 1) qualifying language added to the Pledge and 2) arithmetic facts mysteriously omitted from the Pledge.  (The Pledge remains what David Nolan says it always was: a pledge against revolution, not a loyalty oath to anarcholibertarianism.)

[I'm off on a day trip to the wine country; we now return you to your regularly-scheduled parade of strawmen and fallaciously-excluded middles, already in progress.]