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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Life, faculties, production – in other words, individuality, liberty, property – this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
– Frédéric Bastiat
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Oh go on then. Sigh!
This is the sort of idea I come up with at three in the morning and wisely don’t post.
It is confused and confusing, befuddled and bemused.
I cant, for the life of me, see how property rights come, pretanaturally, before man made law, for instance…
So if we find ourselves on a previously unknown island (where no one has “made law”) I can rob you or murder you?
Such things were against the law (i.e. they were crimes) long before there were any statutes against them, and they were against the law long before there were any common law judgements against them.
Law is the effort to apply to the circumstances of times and place the principle of justice (the nonaggression principle – or “hands off”). Only one part of ethics certainly (there are many other virtues apart from that of justice – but not all sins are crimes, for example lacking the virtue of charity is not a crime) and YES there can be good faith disaggreement about how to apply the principle of justice in the circumstances of time a place (so different areas may have different ways of doing things, and one may go along with the majority on some things without being a coward – for one may be wrong about some matter of detail).
However, law is certainly not just the commands of the rulers or rulers (as Hobbes and the other legal positivists would have it) the abritary will of thugs with guns is not law – otherwise terms like “the law”, “our duty to obey the law”, “the majesty of the law” (and so on) would be meaningless. One may make a calculation that one must obey the vast web of arbitary regulations that pass for “law” in the modern world, out of prudent calculation that one can defeat the powers that be (although as some of the regualtions contradict other regulations even slavish submission may not save us) – but there is no moral reason to do so. Indeed there is a moral reason to disobey arbitary regulations as they are based not on an effort to apply the principle of justice to the circumstantces of time and place (i.e. are not “the law” at all) but are simply commands backed by threats – and it is to fail to show the virtue of courage to submit to such threats.
Nor does one have to believe in God to believe in the natural law (indeed Calivinists, like Muslims, tended to be legal positivists – believing that law was a matter of the commands of God based on his “will”). As the Catholic “Schoolmen” used to say “Natural law is God’s law, but if God did not exist natural law would be exactly the same”.
As for Bastiat’s work “The Law” – it is well worth reading.
Asserting something isn’t interesting. The widespread nature of slavery in all human societies until quite recently suggests enlightenment notions of life and liberty are certainly not ‘natural’. As for property, even in modern societies (of which Western societies are a subset), the nature of property is far from clear.
Natural law is like natural human rights. Nonsense on stilts. I wonder if I’ll get quote of the day for that assertion 🙂
No. You are just making an assertion after all… that and the fact you are completely wrong.
Natural Law is nonsense on stilts.
All that bouncing up and down…
Even the Romans admitted that whilst slavery might be allowed under the written laws of all lands it was still against the natural law – it was just that they choose not to follow the natural law.
Aristotle claimed that some people were “natural slaves” – but his argument is full of holes (and he freed his own slaves on his death).
I know well that legal judgments are sometimes not enforced (there were Tudor legal judgements against slavery in England, but there it still was for Mansfield to deal with in England in the 1770’s). And it is often true that people dodge legal principles that will cost them a lot of money (it was 165 years between Judge Sewell’s “Selling Joseph” in 1700 and the 13th Amendment in the United States).
In the 19th century The “slave’s lawyer”, Salmon P. Chase, proved again and again that “slavery” was a series of crimes (abduction [in the case of those not born to slavery], assault [even for those that were], false imprisonment [otherwise “slaves” could just leave] and so on) – but the slave masters were not interested, only a few freed all their slaves voluntarily.
As for “nonsense on stilts” – well Jeremy Bentham wrote a good book “In Defence of Usury” but then he got worse and worse (for his decline see the second volume of Murry Rothbard’s history of economic thought) he ended up even defending state restictions on interest (the very subject in which he made his name attacking state regulations) – and of course there was the decades long crusade (in which he dragged in his friend James Mill) for the special prison in which people would be put (even if they had committed no crime) kept seminaked and worked and worked (with no practical hope of ever being let out) till they died – slavery indeed.
Still “J” may say that is beside the point. Very well “untilitarism” (the supposed alternative to ideas of natural law).
So one is to calculate the “pleasure” of a rapist or rapists against the “pain” of the victim or victims. And if there is greater pleasure than pain rape is to be legal (ditto with all actions or inactions).
Mmmmmmm – bullshit.
What is a crime (a violation of the nonaggression principle) is not determined by a pleause-pain calculation.
“Rule utilty” ideas (of Hume and others) may be of interest (although I still oppose them), but the act untilitarianism of Bentham and his followers is silly.
In case anyone comes out with a semiMarxist account of how Chase was really serving “rising industrial capital” (although how that would apply to Judge Sewall in 1700 is anyone’s guess – in reality he was reacting against going along with popular demands [perhaps in shame at his part in the Salem witch trials – for which he was the only Judge to make public apology] and was seeking justice), Salmon P. Chase (as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) ruled against the “Greenback” fiat money of the Federal government (holding that, under the Constitution only gold or silver coin could be legal tender) even though the northern industrial interests loved fiat money (the whole easy credit idea) and he (Chase) had issued the “Greenbacks” in his capacity as Tresuary Secretary during the Civil War.
Yes that is correct – he convicted himself. The case was not a criminal one – but the implication was plain.
The first Greenback case (in which Chief Justice Chase was in the majority) was overturned by the second Greenback case (in which those who took a more “liberal” view of the Constitution – i.e. did not give a toss about it, or about the principles of law either) were in the majority.
It was not held to be very important at the time – as the Greenbacks did not come back, however it set the scene for the Federal Reserve Board of 1913 (some decades later) and the great credit money bubble of the late 1920’s – that set off the Great Depression.
Then in 1933 President Roosevelt’s people voided all private contracts that were expressed in terms of gold, stole privately held gold by the threat of violence (and so on).
Once one departs from the principles of law (holding that any action of the government is “law”) one can never tell where it may lead.
Blackstone in the 18th century claimed that Parliament could do anything it liked – but then he assumed that Parliament would always be controlled by landed gentleman. Americans (such as John Adams) warned that the power to ignore the principles of law must not be given to anyone (no matter how repectable they are) for such things, sooner or later, end badly.