Category: Philosophy

Libertarians are not the brightest bulbs. So I want to explain how my obviously correct argument that property is coercive violence works in debates. As a refresher, property is obviously coercive violence because it involves someone excluding everyone else in the world from some piece of the world without their consent and threatening violence against… Continue reading How the property is coercive violence move functions in the debate

I had a long conversation with Noah Smith on the twitter, which was fun. He asked that I first imagine that Person 1 and Person 2 own an apple and an orange respectively. Then he said imagine they 1) do not trade, or 2) trade them. He asks whether (1) or (2) has the same… Continue reading Baselines still useless, a reminder

Part one is here. I’ve been researching how judges deal with tenants using Section 8 vouchers who make claims against landlords for money damages. For instance, when a landlord does not properly maintain the unit (a breach of the implied warranty of habitability), a tenant is generally allowed to receive damages equal to a percentage… Continue reading The Myth of Ownership Affects Judges, Part II

I think of politics on three levels: 1) abstract normative level, 2) ideal institutions level, 3) non-ideal, “second best” level. In day-to-day analysis, people, myself included, move between these levels without making note of it, which can lead to considerable confusion when trying to figure out what label to attach to someone politically. So for… Continue reading Three Levels of Politics

Nothing inherently belongs to anyone. What belongs to who is always a function of policy and the way they construct our economic institutions. Accordingly, all incomes are, at a basic level, politically determined. So, you should not act like some kind of baseline (pre-tax market income for instance) demarcates everyone’s true income, with all other… Continue reading Section 8 Vouchers and the Myth of Ownership