Define Your Terms! (Two in Particular...)

In this blog, I hope to start pissing people off very soon.

But before doing that, we will have to established some prior principled assumptions.  Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, and others expressed the need to "define your terms", and so we shall to do just that for two simple terms.  I will not attempt to create formal definitions (those can be found elsewhere), but simply discuss the terms and logical fallacies surrounding them.

Property
Property is typically defined as something "owned".  But what does this mean, to own something?  To own something is the right, or the privilege, perhaps exclusive, perhaps shared, to control a resource.  It may certainly be possible to share ownership, but only if the terms of dispute are resolvable by contract.  So the idea of "everybody" owning a single item is certainly a mathematical possibility, but a practical nightmare.  A resource owned by "everybody" really means that it is owned by no one, or more specifically, that it is owned by those few who have propagandized everyone to pass themselves off as the arbiters of the "greater good" (i.e. bureaucrats).

When Marxists say that "all property is theft", they may have an interesting point to some small degree.  But saying that we can add one more act of thievery such as the transfer of property to a state is hardly a solution to the theft problem.  And besides, you own your own body, do you not?  Is ownership of your own body theft?  No.  Your body is your property, and unless you are dead, you will always have the best claim to it.  This concept of "best claim" to one's own body also has the added benefit of rendering slavery invalid.

If you are going to argue, "well... OK.  You own your own body but you can't own, say... land."  Ok, then what do you own?  Do you own your toothbrush, or can I take it clean my toilet with it?  This can be extended to other things, your clothes, your home, your car, and so on.

Do you own your children?  No.  As mentioned above, an individual has best claim to himself.  However, in the case of a child, the parent has proxy responsibility for that child until he is old enough to support and care for himself.  I happen to believe that putting an arbitrary age on this (such as 18) is also invalid, but perhaps that is a discussion for another day.  In short, for some children that age may be as young as 12, but for others, well... they may never reach that point.

Property exists, and you own stuff.  Even Mr. Marx does not want his toothbrush used to clean any toilets, so yes, Mr. Marx -- you your arguments are simply self-contradictory.

Violence
If we do not define violence, we cannot see it.  All crimes are crimes against property (defined above).  If you are physically attacked, it is a violation of your personal property, specifically your body.  If I initiate violence, or the threat of it, then I am at fault.  If I respond to an act of violence with violence, then it may be called self-defense.

People will ask:  So, then for self-defense, what is the appropriate proportionality of violence to respond to the initiation of violence?  This is not an easy question, but I think it may suffice to say that less violence is better than more, is it not?  Therefore, if I can fend off a violent offender such as a mugger with a water hose (which I would not recommend, but for the sake of argument), we may consider it to be preferable to shooting him.  After all, he could be mentally ill, and so on.  There are of course counter-arguments to this, that the criminal will attack someone else, etc. etc., but I without going into all of these complexities, I think we can agree that if we were to know in advance that violence can be stopped with violence, then less violence would be better than more.  In self defense, the purpose of violence is to stop the original act of violence, not to punish or deter the assailant of future action.  The reason I say that is for many reasons, but we can start with the utilitarian argument that excessive violence will not actually obtain those goals of ending further violence.  If you disagree with this, go away.  This blog is probably not for you.

I also contend that complete non-violence, or pacifism, although idealistic and perhaps even preferable, is not a realistic option in many cases.  Take the water hose, for example.  If the criminal does not run away when sprayed with cold water, he may just get pissed and kill you.  So yeah, in that case pacifism was a dumb idea.


And there we go!  We defined two terms.  If you disagree with any of the arguments, I'd love to hear it (assuming you are one of the rare individuals out there capable of making rational arguments).  Or, you could show up and say something incoherent, and that could be entertaining as well.