Like, the opposite of shitstatistssay.

A bunch of people at /r/CapitalismVSocialism have started a subreddit called /r/CvSBookClub. We will sometimes read anarchist books - and yes, you can vote for ancap books, so you guys won't be excluded.

Join /r/CvSBookClub and you can:

• read stupid socialist books
• debate stupid socialists about aforementioned stupid socialist books
• read ancap books
• debate stupid socialists who think their stupid socialist book is better than your ancap book

Basically, if you've been to /r/CapitalismVSocialism (and a lot of you have, because there are so many fucking ancaps there), then /r/CvSBookClub is essentially that sub, but with books. Come on and try it - nobody's forcing you to read.

If I decided that property rights didn't exist, would I become an anarcho-communist or what?

Societies that teach contentment with our present situation tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in doing respects if adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes - or even for those who just did what those in authority told them - might gain a competitive advantage.

That's from The Demon-Haunted World. That evolutionary view might explain the total dominance of state societies.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Challenger accident. The year before the accident, Roger Boisjoly wrote a memo to management at Morton Thiokol, the defense contractor who manufactured the SRBs in which he explained that his team had discovered that the joints in the SRBs were not performing as they were designed and were vulnerable to failure under certain conditions.

He outlined the problem and wrote,

The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order – loss of human life.

It is my honest and very real fear that if we do not take immediate action to dedicate a team to solve the problem with the field joint having the number one priority, then we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launch pad facilities. 

The day before the launch, Boisjoly and company management had a conference call with NASA representatives. Boisjoly again explained the problem. If the temperature was below 51 degrees Fahrenheit the joints would not properly seal and the SRB could fail. The temperature the next day would be 36 degrees.

Boisjoly later testified

Those of us who opposed the launch continued to speak out, and I am specifically speaking of Mr. Thompson and myself because in my recollection he and I were the only ones that vigorously continued to oppose the launch…

I stopped when it was apparent that I couldn’t get anybody to listen.

Boisjoly recalled,

I wrote the following entry in my notebook after returning to my office. “I sincerely hope that this launch does not result in a catastrophe.” 

He watched the explosion in person the next day.

That's the kind of thing that happens in unaccountable bureaucracies.

In this comment from the Rand Paul AMA, user TedtheGreek_Atheos wrote:

Rothbard said parents should be able to allow their children to starve to death

"the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights."

But don't worry! The free market will come save those poor kids!

He asserted that parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract in what Rothbard suggests will be a "flourishing free market in children". He believes that selling children as consumer.

The Rothbard quote comes from chapter 14 of Ethics of Liberty (incidentally the first Rothbard book I ever read, back when I was a young ancap).

In that chapter, Rothbard argues that children are not born as self-owners, but rather as potential self-owners.

There remains, however, the difficult case of children. The right of self-ownership by each man has been established for adults, for natural self-owners who must use their minds to select and pursue their ends. On the other hand, it is clear that a newborn babe is in no natural sense an existing self-owner, but rather a potential self-owner.

He goes on to argue that the mother (or parents, depending on circumstances) must be seen as the owners of the child,

But surely the mother or parents may not receive the ownership of the child in absolute fee simple, because that would imply the bizarre state of affairs that a fifty-year old adult would be subject to the absolute and unquestioned jurisdiction of his seventy-year-old parent. So the parental property right must be limited in time. But it also must be limited in kind, for it surely would be grotesque for a libertarian who believes in the right of self-ownership to advocate the right of a parent to murder or torture his or her children.

We must therefore state that, even from birth, the parental ownership is not absolute but of a "trustee" or guardianship kind.

Because the his view of legal rights is that that only negative ones exist, Rothbard concludes,

this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.

He is careful directly afterward to note that the question of whether the parents are within their moral rights to do so is an entirely different one.

Rothbard then attacks the opposing position - that parents do have a legal responsibility to feed and care for their children. He frames the position thusly:

1 - parents are the creators of the child through a consensual and freely-chosen act

2 - the child is helpless, more or less.

If we consider first the argument from helplessness, then first, we may make the general point that it is a philosophical fallacy to maintain that A's needs properly impose coercive obligations on B to satisfy these needs. For one thing, B's rights are then violated. Secondly, if a helpless child may be said to impose legal obligations on someone' else, why specifically on its parents, and not on other people?

The answer is fact 1 - that the parents are the ones who created the child, so they have a special legal duty for its care. Rothbard denies this, because

If creation engenders an obligation to maintain the child, why should it stop when the child becomes an adult?

As Evers states: The parents are still the creators of the child, why aren't they obliged to support the child forever? It is true that the child is no longer helpless; but helplessness (as pointed out above) is not in and of itself a cause of binding obligation.

The creation/helplessness explanation doesn't explain why non-biological parents have a legal obligation toward their adopted children, and it doesn't explain why the obligation is limited in time.

Honestly I think this is a weak point. Rothbard only explains why 1 and 2 cannot, on their own, be the basis for the legal responsibilities on the part of the parent, but he does not explain why it could not be that legal responsibilities are the result of a confluence of both 1 and 2 - that the legal obligation is in force only on the creators of the child for the duration that the child is helpless. Also, surely in the case of an adoption, the adopted parents legal obligation would stem from their contractual agreement.

Rothbard counters this with

Finally as Evers points out, suppose that we consider the case of a .

person who voluntarily rescues a child from a flaming wreck that kills the child's parents. In a very real sense, the rescuer has brought life to the child; does the rescuer, then, have a binding legal obligation to keep the child alive from then on? Wouldn't this be a "monstrous involuntary servitude that is being foisted upon a rescuer?" And if for the rescuer, why not also for the natural parent?

The remainder of the chapter is spent arguing, convincingly, that a free market in children would result in more children being taken better care of. Note that the buying and selling of children doesn't mean those children can be used as slaves (rights violation, and all that).

For we must realize that there is a market for children now, but that since the

government prohibits sale of children at a price, the parents may now only give their children away to a licensed adoption agency free of charge. This means that we now indeed have a child-market, but that the government enforces a maximum price control of zero, and restricts the market to a few privileged and therefore monopolistic agencies. The result has been a typical market where the price of the commodity is held by government far below the free-market price: an enormous "shortage" of the good. The demand for babies and children is usually far greater than the supply, and hence we see daily tragedies of adults denied the joys of adopting children by prying and tyrannical adoption agencies. In fact, we find a large unsatisfied demand by adults and couples for children, along with a large number of surplus and unwanted babies neglected or maltreated by their parents. Allowing a free market in children would eliminate this imbalance, and would allow for an allocation sf babies and children away from parents who dislike or do not care for their children, and toward foster parents who deeply desire such children. Everyone involved: the natural parents, the children, and the foster parents purchasing the children, would be better off in this sort of society.

I can personally attest to this. My wife and I want to adopt, but don't want to spend years of our lives and tens of thousands of dollars of our money (given to the state, not the biological parent) in adopting.

In short, the Ad Hominem Rothbard-is-a-baby-killer nonsense is overblown, but at the same time, Rothbard didn't know everything (obviously). Also, it's foolish to dismiss the entire product of his intellect because of this one opinion alone. He put out an incredible amount of intellectual work, the bulk of it very good.

Keep this in mind next time you come across the "move to Somalia" non-argument.

Given this, which is more likely: that the current form of government is the best form, or that the people who think it is are, likely most of the people who have ever lived, wrong about this?

Having been Earthside I know how their minds work,

some. An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts.

Really, if a man's word isn't any good, who would contract with him? Doesn't he have reputation?

From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

The book is 50 years old this year.

Most people agree that there won't be one strat that ends the state, but that it will be a combination of many strategies.

Which do you think are being neglected right now? Which do you think have the most potential?