Liberty- it's all or nothing
If you are against liberty in one area, you are against liberty.
If you are for anti-gun "laws", you are against liberty.
If you support cops, you are against liberty.
If you are for the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs, you are against liberty.
If you are wishy-washy about the right of association, you are against liberty.
If you don't respect property rights, you are against liberty.
If you are for a government "solution" to anything, you are against liberty.
You can pick and choose the bits of liberty you personally exercise, but not which bits you unconditionally respect and support. Not and still value liberty.
You may still be a nice person; you may even be mainly "good", but by undercutting liberty anywhere, you undermine it all.
1 or 0? There is no 0.9
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So if you are against my liberty to walk across your yard, you are against liberty? If you are against my liberty to walk away with your money after giving you a bogus IOU, are you against liberty? Are agreements only enforceable by fear? Do you have to have a gun to ensure that people who make agreements with you fulfill their promises?
Both of these are cases of violations of property rights.
Well, kind of, but not only fear of violence; fear of loss of honor or reputation, fear of fiscal responsibility, etc. This is pretty much how contracts work.
There should be some way to enforce that people who enter contracts fulfill their part of the contract or at least make an honest attempt to. That may involve force, but not literally gun ownership by the contract participants.
People who talk about "liberty" seem to love to talk about property rights -- which is the right to exclude everyone else from their property. But consider this: Who owns the air? If someone claimed to own it and tried to charge others for breathing it, their ability to "enforce" that property right would depend entirely on whether "everyone" agreed with their claim of ownership. Bechtel tried to "own" all the water in Bolivia. Even the Rain -- which is the name of the movie about how the populace rejected this claim of ownership. Likewise, if you were stranded on a tropical island and discovered you could survive by eating a particular plant, could you claim ownership of that plant so as to exclude the next shipwreck survivor from that plot of ground and thus deny them any food -- absent some form of payment? The next survivor to arrive on the island is not going to accept your claim of "ownership" of the only food source. The point is that property rights, like all other rights, are nothing more than agreements. And agreements are nothing -- they are completely empty -- absent some way to enforce them. Moreover, even when people do make agreements with genuine intent to honor them, they inevitably go forward interpreting those agreements in their own way -- leading to conflicts over whether the agreement has been violated. So as Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson demonstrated in "The Sovereign Individual" (1997), those who make the guns make the rules.
Okay. Those who have the guns make the rules. So who do you trust with the guns? A small self-selected group ultimately only accountable to itself?
You seem to be confusing "liberty" with "will" or "ability to."
"Liberty" doesn't include violating other people. You have the "freedom" to do those things, but liberty is self limiting. You have the liberty to do ANYTHING which doesn't violate any person or their property.
"Liberty" is the freedom to exercise your rights-- to do what you have a right to do.
Thomas Jefferson said the same thing: "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others."
I think the Mafia would agree with your definition. No limits on me unless I set them myself.
That's not what I said.
You are limited by the equal and identical rights of everyone else. The mafia (and the State, but I repeat myself) don't see it that way.
How are you limited? What is the limitation? If the mafia and the State and the Noble Lord assume rights that you don't like, what is the consequence? Promises are empty until they are actually performed. So if liberty depends on agreements, what is the consequence for someone who refuses to keep his promise to abide by those agreements? And who enforces that consequence? Is enforcement up to the wronged individual? Even if nobody else thinks they were wronged? And what mechanism of enforcement exists besides physical restraint or physical harm? And who comes up with the agreements defined as "liberty" in the first place? And how do you know someone has agreed to them so you can have some basis for confidence in dealing with them?
You are limited by everyone else's liberty. It has nothing to do with anyone else's wishes or any agreements.
If you do something that violates someone else's equal and identical rights, you aren't exercising your liberty, you are just violating them like any common bully would do. Anyone doing this is subject to self defense- which may not be "smart" or safe, depending on the circumstances, but will never be wrong. You may choose not to defend yourself. You may be defended by someone else, or not. But none of that changes the reality of what liberty is or what your rights are.
"Enforcement" is a poor substitute for defense. You are right to defend yourself with violence (physical restraint or physical harm), if you so choose, as long as it is actually defense and not an initiation of force. The bad guys won't like this, obviously.
The Zero Aggression Principle doesn't depend on other people- it is a promise from me to you, telling you what to expect from me. You can accept it or ignore it.
OK. If I understand you correctly, "liberty" is simply a concept which one can use to justify himself in exercising "defense" -- some sort of force or violence -- whenever he chooses to defend. And it likewise justifies one in claiming that he has been wronged, whether he chooses to defend himself or not.
But as a former law professor, I cannot resist the Socratic follow up: "so what?" How does it help anyone to get attached to a word that merely has a circular reasoning back to "If I hit you, it is because I defined to myself that hitting you was merely defense."
You say there is no need for both parties to agree that a certain action gives rise to a grounds for defense. So how is anyone better off by getting attached to, or identifying with, this concept?
Because that's not what it means at all.
If you aren't using force against me nor violating my property, and I hit you, I am not "defending" anything-- I am the attacker. If I use the excuse of "defense", I am lying.
Statist are going to state.