ErikM comments on [LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Apprentice 06 January 2014 12:16AM

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Comment author: ErikM 16 January 2014 07:42:37AM 11 points [-]

By analogy: Private property also includes (must include, in my opinion) the freedom to "impose" it on those who don't want it - If Alice has a bicycle which she considers to be her private property and Bob tries to take the bicycle because Bob doesn't believe in private property and doesn't respect the notion of "Alice's bicycle" in the first place, I'm damn well going to side with Alice in telling Bob to go away, and if necessary, threatening violence against Bob.

If you try to form a concept of "strictly voluntary private property" which only applies to those who want it, you hardly have private property at all - you have a standing invitation for people who disagree with you to take your stuff.

Back to the previous topic, the "strictly voluntary segregation" one has in America and most of the West is that if a hundred white people move to the middle of nowhere to establish a segregated whites-only village and build it from the ground up, they're only allowed to have that segregated village as long as every black person in America refrains from moving there. As Eugine notes, it's illegal for one race to take legal measures to keep the other race out. To generalize, members of one race need functionally unanimous, ongoing, unilaterally revocable permission from all members of the other race in order to be segregated at present. (I gather some ghettos, trailer parks etc. have this by being so unappealing that nobody wants to move there.)

The interpretation of "strictly voluntary" as requiring the agreement of the exact people one wants to avoid in the first place strikes me as a questionably high bar, similar to calling a lifetime imprisonment "strictly voluntary" on the grounds that you can leave as long as the warden gives you permission.