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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked? Preventing the sale of napalm to a triple-arsonist is evil?

I know I'm being a little extreme, but again- what!?!

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Wait, what? There are no transactions that should be blocked?

I'll be a little bit extreme here and agree that there are no voluntary transactions, made between consenting adults, that should be blocked. Any use of force (or threat of force) to try and achieve some social or political end is evil, IMO. Even if the "end" is a noble one, like preventing arson. It's the act of the arsonist which is evil, and intervening to prevent him/her from torching someone else's property is just self defense, which I would consider acceptable.

But, then again, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / voluntaryist, so I'm a bit biased.

How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"? I am radical voluntaryist myself because it's the only way to figure out what is right or wrong, what works and what doesn't. Whenever you have coercion, you cannot have study of human choices (that is, economics and ethics). It is as simple as that. If one wants to be coercive and violent - it's their choice, but it is illogical to claim that it's for someone's good. Because the only way to know anything about good is when you put your guns down and apply reason.

Am I being a bit biased with this idea? Can anybody study human choices by not giving them choices?

How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"?

I just mean, biased relative to what you might call "the mainstream". Luckily I give about half a shit about what "the mainstream" think.

Why would a triple arsonist be walking around free?

If someone sets fire to 3 buildings I expect them to be in prison.

You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if someone would want your ass, they would never find anything in your history against you? With such amount of laws, regulations, police abuse and complex expensive judicial system, you can never feel safe. So please don't think that some abstract triple-arsonist is your biggest threat. Your biggest threat is IRS. When your govt wants to kill some arabs, they will force you to pay for that and you cannot unsubscribe. And then you, not the govt will receive terrorist bombings in response.

And while I don't think that taking drugs is a good idea, I don't think paying for fighting them should be compulsory on the part of general population outgunned by the police and brainwashed in public schools.

He was speaking in clear absolutes, so I think an extreme example is a perfectly valid way to open.

Ok, correction: I think ethics is akin to medicine or nutrition. It really helps if you consistently apply it everywhere in order to prevent extreme scenarios. And when they occur, and ethics do not help, it's not a failure of ethics, but your failure to use ethics to avoid situation when someone actually threatens you with a nuke.

To say that general rule "do not use violence" does not work in extreme cases, is like saying that medicine is useless because it cannot make you perfectly healthy when you have a heart attack. But it is useful because it helps you to prevent heart attack in the first place. And if you ignored the knowledge and now having a heart attack, then how can you say that it is useless?

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