It turns out property isn't objective and "highest claim" is just as arbitrary a justification as "because we're the government and we say so" so if you're picking between arbitrary justifications it doesn't make a lot of sense to pick the one that all the racists and *******s have picked. Especially when for 90+% of them it's mostly post hoc justification for being racist *******s. For all his terrible word salad postings our good friend missiledog was good enough to convincingly point out the cards missing from the bottom of the house that acism is built from.

Everything flows beautifully and perfectly with pristine crystalline logic from property rights, but property rights are bunk. It's a pity.

PVN is a Bernie supporter.

I remember Nielsio spent thousands on dollars to make his computer as quiet as possible so there was no interference when he listened to music.

Thread needs more MS paints of Murray Rothbard and pictures of borodog's wife imo

TYVM, although I gotta give any positive credit to P-J.Proudhon.

Yeah, the ACer era, which was still in power, so to speak, when I lowered myself into being a Politard, still amazes me. In particular, tools like Google Analytics show exactly zero measurable web presence for ACism before 2008, and here our early Deans of ACism, the odious Nielsio & borodog, had already infested this place by then. And then... pretty much overnight... it was all over. Amazing.

True & true.

One day ACism will once again break free of its prison at Shayol Ghul.

People forget that for every Borodog and peak PVN there were at any given time like a dozen far less intelligent idiots trading up all those threads. Too lazy to dig it up, but there were several civil war threads with a seemingly endless supply of imbeciles tirelessly arguing that continued slavery somehow was consistent with libertarian ideology.

Yeah I actually found some of the ACists interesting but the JV ACist team were the nut low.

The best was was every few months when Adanthar would pull out the Rothbard "Thriving free market in children" quote to the astonishment of the latest batch of freshmen dorm-room AC converts. Oh they don't lead with that one on Mises? How odd.

"he never said that... oh actually it is a good idea, now that I think about it is the ONLY good idea" repeated endlessly, thread after thread

I didn't forget. This is so true. The tier 2 AC-ists made the forum virtually intolerable.

Still pretty proud of this tbh.

I had somehow avoided seeing that Rothbard drivel about children until now. Amazing stuff.

Missed it then, too. For others who might have...

https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights

Freedom!!!!

The parenthetical ending is the best bit. For anyone worried about the fact that in libertopia it's not a crime to starve your child to death, calm yourselves. You'll see there's no need to worry about that when I explain the bit about being able to sell kids to the highest bidder.

Why is it so silly? Isn't the status quo rather silly? Legally allowed to terminate pre-birth, legally allowed to abandon after 18, and legally obligated to take care of in between? It's not like he's arguing that neglect/abandonment isn't immoral, he's arguing that babies and baby-makers would both be much better off if there was a baby market.

<Slowly walks away>

Wowzer that libertopia is some stuff.

Thayer,

In AC-land, there is a flourishing free market in both children and organ donations. Your six year old child, strangely nicknamed Tiny Tim, has tested out as a match for a heart transplant for an old millionaire named Ebemezer. It is illegal to perform this transplant while the child is alive as he cannot consent. You therefore come up with the workaround to starve Tiny Tim to death instead, whereupon his heart can be harvested without the pesky consent issue. The six year old can run away at any time, so you tell him there are space monsters outside the house for the first three days, after which he's too weak to leave the house anyway.

1)Should this be legal?
2)Which part of this is better than the status quo?
3)What percentage of sold children in AC-land have outcomes worse than the status quo?

That six year old must have a big ass heart and is a freak and a weird dude imo.

Or Ebbie is a super rich midget, whatevs.

I'd have gone with "you can't sell children, what the **** is wrong with you" but your approach is valid as well.

A distinguishing feature of the AC cult is a total ignorance of the evil in the world that is averted on a daily basis by the state. For people that are so enthusiastic about the Bastian broken window thing, there's a lot of concentrating on the evils of the state and zero credit for the upsides. For instance, the fact that there is not currently a flourishing child sex slave industry in the US is a result of the efforts of the state.In AC-topia, who exactly would prevent this from happening? (NOTE TO ACists: Please do not actually answer this question, nobody cares what ******ed entirely theoretical answer you think is sufficient here).

Wait, hold up. That is certainly not the best part.

The best part is that Rothbard is thinks it's entirely vexing whether parents should be allowed to starve a deformed baby to death:

I mean you have to appreciate Rothbard here: the great libertarian thinkers and minds are entirely vexed, just entirely distressed by this question of whether parents should have the right starve deformed babies to death.

I've long held the ACist were just missing better PR people. They should have obviously outsourced it to non-AC people. It's like letting their pride in their Confederate apologetics out in public. You don't lead with that, you bury that, it's like something you whisper in the most hushed tones and you don't talk about.

This is exactly like that. Imagine you went to a get-together of what you thought were neutrotypical normal human beings with souls and someone was like, hey, so let's talk about whether I should have the right to starve my deformed baby to death? That would not be a vexing question. The most vexing question would be like "woah what the ****, who brought this freak?!" or maybe "how do I get out of this place and never interact with this person ever again in my life?"

You are entirely correct that the second best thing is that Rothbard assumes it will probably be OK though because the free baby market will include some non-sociopathic participants who might just have a shred of the barest of human decency.

Eh, I disagree. The question is "vexing" precisely because it's hard or impossible to derive basic ideas of human decency from ACist doctrine there. In other words, Rothbard is acknowledging that this is a spot where he'll probably get some pushback prior to the human race accepting the pure crystalline logic and supremacy of ACist ideas.

In contrast, Rothbard actually appears to think that worries people have about child welfare in libertopia will be assuaged by a description of how a free market in children will operate.

Another intriguing discussion of AC and how extremists are being extreme in their views. Even though the subject has come up before, it is always interesting to read the posts on both sides of this debate repeating points made again and again.

This really. Its never going to happen but in a vacuum it isn't that weird. At least its somewhat consistent.