Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

As much as I disagree with Barr and I've repeated that quote countless times, I can't help but think it's utterly stupid. Did Ben Franklin really think we should throw out things like the rule of law and the police? They are an explicit trade of Liberty for Safety. Was he some sort of fundamentalist anarchist?

View on HN

"All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

He also didn't think much of private property.

[1] http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12....

You are intentionally misinterpreting his quote. He doesn't think much of excessive property. Yes, you probably don't need a 3rd home while other people have no homes...

The point should be obvious from the context, that Franklin was very far from any sort of anarcho-capitalist/libertarian extremist.

> Was he some sort of fundamentalist anarchist?

The quote plainly refutes that idea.

His bar for "excessive" is pretty low though. We aren't talking 3rd home, plausibly we aren't even talking 1 home.

Indeed it isn't even one. He says right there, "temporary Cabin".

Yes, and the distinction is completely artificial. Worse, he gets the relationship between property and law exactly backwards. Property rights, even for what some here are calling "excessive" property, were not created "by the public" (meaning by legislators) through the passage of laws. Rather, property rights existed first and laws were passed to rationalize the abridgement of those rights when they proved inconvenient to those in power.

If you take someone else's property for your own use by force without their permission, they are perfectly justified in using force to take your property without your permission. That is the fundamental natural law which underlies property rights, as well as all other natural rights: reciprocation. It doesn't matter who the property belongs to, how much other property they have, or who is doing the taking.

The "fundamental natural law" you appeal to is none of those things, so it would be disingenuous to hold him to it. I'm not sure how I feel about the quote and don't have enough context on his thinking to really judge it, but your rejection sounds dogmatic, not reasoned.

I'm not "holding him to" anything. I'm just stating a fact. It is not logical to claim that it is simultaneously right for you to be able to do something unilaterally to someone else but wrong for that person to do exactly the same thing to you. Not unless you're arguing against the universality of rights in general, anyway, and if you're taking that approach then you can't make any meaningful statements at all about what rights other people may or may not have.

If you take someone's property without their permission there are three possibilities: (1) you admit that it's wrong and deserving of punishment; (2) you claim that taking property without permission is universally right (i.e. that there are no property rights), in which case you can't complain when others take your property; or (3) you claim that rights are not universal, in which case others can claim the right to take your property just as easily as you claim the right to take theirs. Whichever path you choose, the act of theft justifies its own proportional punishment. The same reasoning applies to any other natural right, as they are all based on the principle of reciprocation.

This is neither the time nor the place, but if you're interested in a more complete treatment of the topic I would recommend this paper: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/12_1/12_1_3.pdf

I agree this isn't the time or place, but you are not stating a fact; rather you are choosing a particular framing which is neither unique nor universally accepted.

It doesn't matter whether or not I agree with you or Franklin (or neither) here - I was noting that your attempt at pointing out his "error" is itself logically flawed and does not demonstrate any such error on his part.

You claim that I am "not stating a fact" but it is a fact that any claim that an action is right when done by one person but wrong when done by another is either an internal contradiction or a repudiation of any universal standard for right and wrong. Either way, you can't consistently argue that a proportional response would be wrong after taking that same action yourself.

I should hope that this argument is not "unique", since it's just an application of basic logic, and I really couldn't care less whether the conclusions are universally accepted. The logic is sound whether you accept it or not.

Ah, we seem to be focused on different parts of your state to. The problem you ran into is axiomatic, not logical. You are asserting a concept of property that is not the same as Franklins, and then attempting to refute him based on that framework. He (I thinks least, based on those quotes alone) is proposing a quite different framework, so you have fallen into a type of category error. That is what I was pointing out. It’s all fair to argue that his framework is inferior, but it is illogical to just claim he got it wrong because it doesn’t fit the framework you prefer.

I think this has run its course, it’s not a good media to get into something like this at depth.

Keywords being "essential" and "temporary" in the original quote. Granted, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but Franklin was not advocating doing away with, for example, law enforcement.

Though I would agree it's a quote of triteness and "just so" convenience that gets massively abused.

I wonder how Benjamin Franklin would feel about its common usage nowadays. For specific context I used to use this quote in relation to my dislike of the PATRIOT act and similar, and I never really took any introspection as to whether I was truly defending my position through the use/abuse of the quote. Granted I was literally in middle school at the time, so maybe my lack of a more nuanced position could be forgiven, but a quote is not an argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com