I agree, but "If I, as an adult..." means that we better have a non-arbitrary definition of "adult". But this is not insurmountable, anyone who can prove that they are responsible for their own lives is an adult.
The real problem is secular libertarianism which has been a dead end, it has lost us ground to conservatives when we should be louder about the Christian roots of some of our best ideas (natural law, the rule of law, even the HCR or NAP can be traced back to the golden rule). The Christian God is a God of consent "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.", abolition was largely a Christian movement, the early classical liberals were driven by their faith.
But modern libertarians are materialists for no good reason. This makes it much harder to win over people and allows leftists to claim to represent Christian values when the communists and socialists have always been hostile to Christianity, they do this because they know the value of the religious space modern libertarians have vacated, so do conservatives. There is even the absurd suggestion from some libertarians that faith is incompatible with libertarianism, talk about not knowing your own history.
Abandon objectivists, they don't want to be associated with libertarians anyway. Claim the religious ground that rightfully belongs to us, that way we can show people that consent is based on God's love, property rights are based on humanity's God-given stewardship of the Earth and human/natural rights on our being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). Or just keep being an irrelevant social club that gradually drifts towards progressivism in a desperate attempt to recapture some relevance.
You make a very important observation, that (I think you mean the New Testament) Christ is a purely voluntary choice, and also important to note is that there is no violence (as libertarians, individualists ... and even Objectivists would define it) advocated by Christ.
Many Eastern religions/philosophies are non violent too, as examples Jainism, Taoism, Buddhism without the added dogma.
That has not stopped tyrants to manipulate these platforms to promote violence via them, but then such dogmatic norms be it the Vatican of the past or the Samurai in Japan pre WW2 is in contravention to the pure teachings of these examples.
The other important point is that the atheist driven communism, with its aim to remove the family unit or regulate it like the Chinese Communist Party did with its one child only policy has created even greater pyramids of victims than fascism.
And the black polo neck intellectuals and academics of the West are complicit in this, from Gramsci to Sartre and beyond into the contemporary Wokistas.
Antifa for example has its roots in the Spanish Civil War, or rather the myth that it was a communist opposition to fascism. Actually half the Republicans were liberal democrats, almost a third socialists, Stalinists only a tenth but supported by Stalin hence the myth, and there was a small percentage that were anti Stalin Marxists who must have paid a bitter price at the hands of their Stalinist "allies" but foes.
The atrocities attributed to the Republicans were all from the non liberal democrat half. Few actually know this as the preferred historical narratives promote the communists as being the opposition to Franco, hence the "romance" of Antifa today.
Yes, every good idea gets perverted, that is why libertarians can only identify with "classical" liberalism now instead of just liberalism. I did not know that about the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, that is interesting.
I discovered that quite by accident watching a Spanish TV series on Netflix called the "The Patients of Doctor Garcia" ... well worth a viewing. The references to the "reds" therein are to Republicans, not specifically only the communists. However the communists sought to claim the opposition as theirs through the preferred narrative of Western intellectuals and academics ... I will be writing a more comprehensive article on this on my Substack ... By the way by "black polo necks" I am referring to the actual garments, a signature of Sartre et al ... it was chic to be a European communist back then, and Existentialists seem to have been mostly that ... So you wore a polo neck, a black one, to signal you were an Existentialist/communist. Cigar smoking seems to have been part of that too, whiskey and women as well ...
Yebo, Trevor Watkins' Harm Consent Rule, the HCR, is a practical real world option to the otherwise nebulous Non Aggression Principle, the NAP, that libertarians and like minded mostly refer to.
Your smoking example is excellent, and it shows why the prevailing idea in academia that a genuine free market has "market failures" is a myth.
Coupled to the Nature of Us, the NoU, a genuine free market protected by a minimalist government (Night Watchman or whatever other name describes the same rose) is a solution to any form of initiation of physical force (aka violence) against individuals.
Using your smoking example or the asbestos example in the NoU article linked below, any form of physical harm without consent, from smoking to asbestos to conscription to the Apartheid Pass Law or its Immorality Act or Putin droning civilians or the Maoist "one child only per family" genocide in China, whatever, the HCR + NoU can address these explicitly and at maximal resolution.
Do we really have the luxury in this country not to accept the supervision of a nanny state to stop behaviours that harm others? Sure, in a society where people are truly free to make personal individual choices, we can let go of these top down control or protective measures.
Unfortunately we do not. So if someone is desperate for a job, s/he is effectively forced to go into a smoking area and inhale the restaurant's patron's smoke from his/her addiction. There is nothing fair about this! If we all had the ability to pay for a civil suit to compensate for personal harm done, then yes, get rid of the state's nanny rules.
While I am grateful to you for promoting the principles of the HarmConsentRule (HCR), I am disappointed that there is no acknowledgement of the origins of this rule with the Individualist Movement (www.individualist.one) and its developer Trevor Watkins.
I agree, but "If I, as an adult..." means that we better have a non-arbitrary definition of "adult". But this is not insurmountable, anyone who can prove that they are responsible for their own lives is an adult.
The real problem is secular libertarianism which has been a dead end, it has lost us ground to conservatives when we should be louder about the Christian roots of some of our best ideas (natural law, the rule of law, even the HCR or NAP can be traced back to the golden rule). The Christian God is a God of consent "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.", abolition was largely a Christian movement, the early classical liberals were driven by their faith.
But modern libertarians are materialists for no good reason. This makes it much harder to win over people and allows leftists to claim to represent Christian values when the communists and socialists have always been hostile to Christianity, they do this because they know the value of the religious space modern libertarians have vacated, so do conservatives. There is even the absurd suggestion from some libertarians that faith is incompatible with libertarianism, talk about not knowing your own history.
Abandon objectivists, they don't want to be associated with libertarians anyway. Claim the religious ground that rightfully belongs to us, that way we can show people that consent is based on God's love, property rights are based on humanity's God-given stewardship of the Earth and human/natural rights on our being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). Or just keep being an irrelevant social club that gradually drifts towards progressivism in a desperate attempt to recapture some relevance.
You make a very important observation, that (I think you mean the New Testament) Christ is a purely voluntary choice, and also important to note is that there is no violence (as libertarians, individualists ... and even Objectivists would define it) advocated by Christ.
Many Eastern religions/philosophies are non violent too, as examples Jainism, Taoism, Buddhism without the added dogma.
That has not stopped tyrants to manipulate these platforms to promote violence via them, but then such dogmatic norms be it the Vatican of the past or the Samurai in Japan pre WW2 is in contravention to the pure teachings of these examples.
The other important point is that the atheist driven communism, with its aim to remove the family unit or regulate it like the Chinese Communist Party did with its one child only policy has created even greater pyramids of victims than fascism.
And the black polo neck intellectuals and academics of the West are complicit in this, from Gramsci to Sartre and beyond into the contemporary Wokistas.
Antifa for example has its roots in the Spanish Civil War, or rather the myth that it was a communist opposition to fascism. Actually half the Republicans were liberal democrats, almost a third socialists, Stalinists only a tenth but supported by Stalin hence the myth, and there was a small percentage that were anti Stalin Marxists who must have paid a bitter price at the hands of their Stalinist "allies" but foes.
The atrocities attributed to the Republicans were all from the non liberal democrat half. Few actually know this as the preferred historical narratives promote the communists as being the opposition to Franco, hence the "romance" of Antifa today.
Yes, every good idea gets perverted, that is why libertarians can only identify with "classical" liberalism now instead of just liberalism. I did not know that about the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, that is interesting.
I discovered that quite by accident watching a Spanish TV series on Netflix called the "The Patients of Doctor Garcia" ... well worth a viewing. The references to the "reds" therein are to Republicans, not specifically only the communists. However the communists sought to claim the opposition as theirs through the preferred narrative of Western intellectuals and academics ... I will be writing a more comprehensive article on this on my Substack ... By the way by "black polo necks" I am referring to the actual garments, a signature of Sartre et al ... it was chic to be a European communist back then, and Existentialists seem to have been mostly that ... So you wore a polo neck, a black one, to signal you were an Existentialist/communist. Cigar smoking seems to have been part of that too, whiskey and women as well ...
Yebo, Trevor Watkins' Harm Consent Rule, the HCR, is a practical real world option to the otherwise nebulous Non Aggression Principle, the NAP, that libertarians and like minded mostly refer to.
Your smoking example is excellent, and it shows why the prevailing idea in academia that a genuine free market has "market failures" is a myth.
Coupled to the Nature of Us, the NoU, a genuine free market protected by a minimalist government (Night Watchman or whatever other name describes the same rose) is a solution to any form of initiation of physical force (aka violence) against individuals.
Using your smoking example or the asbestos example in the NoU article linked below, any form of physical harm without consent, from smoking to asbestos to conscription to the Apartheid Pass Law or its Immorality Act or Putin droning civilians or the Maoist "one child only per family" genocide in China, whatever, the HCR + NoU can address these explicitly and at maximal resolution.
For the NoU see: https://thetaooffreedom.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-us-nou?utm_source=publication-search
Do we really have the luxury in this country not to accept the supervision of a nanny state to stop behaviours that harm others? Sure, in a society where people are truly free to make personal individual choices, we can let go of these top down control or protective measures.
Unfortunately we do not. So if someone is desperate for a job, s/he is effectively forced to go into a smoking area and inhale the restaurant's patron's smoke from his/her addiction. There is nothing fair about this! If we all had the ability to pay for a civil suit to compensate for personal harm done, then yes, get rid of the state's nanny rules.
While I am grateful to you for promoting the principles of the HarmConsentRule (HCR), I am disappointed that there is no acknowledgement of the origins of this rule with the Individualist Movement (www.individualist.one) and its developer Trevor Watkins.