Anthony Gregory wrote:
AG> Taxation is inherently anti-libertarian. It is theft. It is aggression. <AG
Equitable taxation for the strictly limited purpose of minimizing force-initiation is not anti-libertarian.
AG> Classical liberals can believe in minimizing taxation, but libertarians want to abolish it. <AG
Anarchists (i.e. anarcho-capitalists, or anarcho-libertarians) indeed want to abolish taxation. If they're so proud of this position, they should call themselves by a name that trumpets it, instead of free-riding on the good name of libertarianism.
AG> Consistent libertarians believe that initiating force is immoral, _and_ that it generally fails to achieve social goals, including the minimizing of aggression. <AG
I too believe that initiating force "generally fails to achieve social goals". I just don't dogmatically believe that initiating force will always fail to reduce aggression. That religious tenet is in my judgment obviously false.
AG> Almost everyone claims to believe in minimizing aggression.<AG
No, everyone claims to believe in minimizing whatever it is that they label aggression. You and I agree that only force initiation is aggression. However, leftists think that offering certain contractual choices to economically weak people is also aggression. Rightists think that offering certain hedonistic choices to morally weak people is also aggression.
AG> It does not take a libertarian to say that a war will mean more peace in the end. <AG
That people often falsely say X does not imply that X is always false.
AG> Indeed, what _makes_ a libertarian is opposition to aggression, and refusal to advocate or support it. <AG
You can type it fast, you can type it slow, you can sing it, you can shout it, but merely repeating your aggression-abstention definition of libertarianism is not going to convince me to trade away my anti-aggression definition of it.
AG> There are plenty of things that are important other than minimizing aggression, such as maximizing wealth. But libertarians neither believe that government aggression is the way to maximize wealth, nor do they believe that government aggression is justifiable _even if_ it did maximize wealth. <AG
Yes, there are many things one might make a first-class value in one's political philosophy. Your first-class value is abstention from aggression. My first-class value is minimizing the net incidence of aggression, which is synonymous with maximizing the net incidence of liberty. Perhaps we should just agree to disagree on which of these two values is more libertarian, and spare LPCalPeace the traffic it would take for you to convince me to become an anarchist.
AG> Suppose you were told by a murderer that only by shooting an innocent child in the head could you lead him to refrain from killing three other innocent people. Whether or not it would be an understandable or pardonable offense for you to save the three by murdering the one is a separate question from whether murdering the one is indeed murder, and thus not libertarian. <AG
As has already been pointed out by Mr. Cobb, your hypothetical is obviously tainted by our intuition that killing the child a) wouldn't guarantee the safety of the three innocents, while simultaneously b) encouraging more such threats by murderers. The core question you're trying to raise is in the ethics literature called the Trolley Problem. As formulated at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem, it asks
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
What, pray tell, is the "libertarian" answer?