[ExI] Americans are poor drivers

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou<stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>>
>> ### You cannot compare a competitive situation where you make a choice
>> to buy into one apartment complex among many versus an artificially
>> initiated large monopoly you are born into. You cannot agree to the
>> monopoly, just as the child of a slave cannot "agree" to be a slave -
>> for agreement to be valid, there must be *choice*. Imagine you were
>> born in ancient Rome, where by general agreement your father had power
>> of life and death over his children - do you think your promise of
>> indefinite obedience produced by ruthless flogging would constitute a
>> valid agreement, and it would be legitimate for the Roman state to
>> help your father kill you for a minor disobedience? Same applies to
>> your monopoly - by denying choice it makes itself illegitimate.
>
> If you inherit an apartment then you are forced to follow whatever the
> pre-existing rules for the building are. You can sell it, or you can
> try to change the rules if enough people agree with you. It is
> admittedly harder to change countries than apartments, but we did
> start off talking about anarchists running their roads collectively.

### Well, I said all that I needed to say is in the last sentence of
the paragraph you quoted above, and I rest my case.
------------------
>
> As for slavery and murderous parents, this stems from the idea that
> people can be property, not from considerations of choice and freedom.
> If you think it's OK to sell yourself into slavery then what's to stop
> someone else from saying that it's also OK to sell your children into
> slavery? And what do you think would happen to the children of slaves
> if they were born technically free, but indebted from birth to their
> parents' masters with no way to pay off the debt other than agreeing
> to become slaves themselves? This is what a "free enterprise" system
> could ultimately lead to, the capitalists insisting all the while that
> no-one has been coerced into anything.
>
### I don't want to discuss what you think about hypothetical
"capitalists" using sophistry to circumvent the principle of
non-violence. You refuse to eschew violence, and you just come with
new convoluted justifications for it (above - you posit incorrectly
that under non-violence debt is heritable, therefore non-violence
leads to slavery, therefore, let's use violence! QED).

The list owners are getting bored with our performance, so let's leave
it as is.

Rafal