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Comment by anshul | Hacker News Reader

Ooops... availability* My bad...

Anyway, what has

> If they'd been left behind, stranded far away from the "land of opportunity," would they have been better off?

got to do with consent?

That apart, informed consent cannot nullify a crime. That is a well accepted principle. You cannot give informed consent for murder and such stuff. There is a libertarian school of thought that wants to change that but I don't subscribe to that school of thought. Slavery under consent is just as much a violation of human dignity and just as much a crime as far as my views are concerned.

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It isn't "opportunity" without consent.

That apart, informed consent cannot nullify a crime. That is a well accepted principle. You cannot give informed consent for murder and such stuff.

If there's consent, there's no crime, though. You can't give informed consent for murder because if you gave informed consent, it's not murder, but "assisted suicide" or some such. Current law has lots of victimless and presumed-victim crimes, it's true, but I don't subscribe to that school of thought. :)

On the other hand, the Libertarian definition of "consent" is repulsive to me. From their point of view, I "consent" to spend my prime waking hours working on things other than my own (non-monetizable) inventions. Bullshit. It isn't consent unless I have entirely unconstrained choice, and the need to pay for food and shelter is every bit as much of a constraint as the laws of a brutal dictatorship. And I simply don't care if basic goods are expensive because an evil central planner priced them nearly out of my reach, or whether the market had bid them up. The net effect on my life is entirely the same.

Screw Libertarian "consent." Screw their "non-coercion." They are Orwellian concepts: their in-practice meanings in that ideology allow for the exact opposites of what those words mean in everyday language to slide through and flourish.

The need for food and shelter are not things that other people impose on you; you'd have those needs even if you were the only person around. Just sayin'.

> you'd have those needs even if you were the only person around

This is only partially true. Food (and, due to the existence of land ownership, shelter) is more scarce today (in the sense of requiring more effort to obtain) than in the age of hunter-gatherers.

Not to mention, the need for "shelter" in a heavily populated world implies as much the need for protection from other people as for protection from the elements. Thus, in a very real sense, it is a need imposed on me by other people. Even the need for protection from the elements falls into this category. If there were few enough people, everyone could (theoretically) live comfortably in those parts of the world which have a temperate climate year-round.

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