Mario Rizzo Offers Peace Agreement...

By -
to sack of angry scorpions. Scorpions say they will sign if he just lets them out of the sack.

Comments

  1. Stephan Kinsella4:43 PM

    Thanks Bob. You are heroic.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joaquim4:07 AM

    Thank you Gene, I truly appreciate your honesty and goodwill.

    http://blog.mises.org/archives/011153.asp#c634129

    I hope we all can move forward with decency and reasonableness while we forgive transgressions.

    That Guido, Peter, and Joe have signed on to Mario's call for peace means I hope Tom Woods, Tom Palmer, and Tyler Cowen among many others will as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stephan Kinsella10:28 AM

    Joachim,

    Just to be clear--the strategy does not depend on certain irredeemable carpers all "signing on." The strategy presupposes there will be such people; it counsels ignoring them, and focusing on productive work and healthy, substantive, mutually respectful dialogue and interaction.

    In a way it is reminiscent of how we anarchists view anarcho-topia: we don't believe there would be no crime. There would be no public (state) crime, by definition, but there would still be private crime. We are anarchists even though there will be evil little criminals worming around to harm people on occasion. They just have to be dealt with as a technical problem, like the existence of wild animals, disease, hurricanes, and so on.

    It also calls to mind something I heard on KCRW's Left, Right, Center yesterday--leftist Robert Scheer was objecting to Obama's 30,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan where there are apparently only about 100 reported Al Quaeda members. He said having 100,000 troops there for 100 Al Quaeda members gives them a significance they don't deserve. I think it is similar to the undue attention paid to the snipers and haters and defamers and liars. In Iraq and Afghanistan we ought to just declare victory and come home. Likewise with the internecine Ausro-libertarian wars: declare victory, withdraw the troops, ignore the insignificant popcorn farts on the sidelines, and work with serious, mutually respectful people to advance economic truth and literacy and the message of liberty.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bob Murphy1:27 PM

    Stephan,

    Unfortunately in terms of funding and geography, I think "we" (whether Austro-libertarians or even more so Austro-libertarians associated with LvMI) are the insurgents. :/

    ReplyDelete
  5. Stephan Kinsella1:39 PM

    Bob, well this is the problem with metaphors and analogies. Sure, in that respect we are. But there are other sides to it too. The haters and carpers get attention from their targets and that goads them on and increases their visibility and importance. Hate is impotent without some cooperation of the victim. We should withdraw cooperation; like Atlas shrugging.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more

Against their will / we were taxing against their will / we were young and we were strong and we were taxing against their will

By -
Never one to allow a mistake to go uncompounded by a glaring error, Bob Murphy digs in deeper . He claims that "Taking money from people against their will is not akin to getting on the treadmill; it is akin to killing people against their will." Bob has introduced a largely irrelevant criterion here with his "against their will." Let us start with killing. (No, no, not killing Bob : we still love him despite his obstinacy.) The justice of a killing does not depend at all on whether the "victim" wants to be killed. If I shoot someone who is attempting to set off a nuclear weapon in Times Square, the fact that I killed him "against his will" does not make my killing immoral. And if a friend who is in despair asks me to shoot him in the head, the fact that he wants me to kill him would not make my action moral. Similarly, in taking money from people, the crucial question is whether you are taking it justly or unjustly, not whether they wan...
Read more