Perhaps you are both right… in the sense that most libertarians do not want to see people starve… but would oppose any forceful coordination e.g. via taxation… and would fail to coordinate otherwise… so at the end, many people would starve, and many non-starving people would say “this is horrible and I don’t want this, but I don’t have enough money to solve this problem alone, so currently my priority is to get more rich, and after I become a trillionaire then I will be able to address the problem of starvation”.
Big-L libertarianism is axiomatic. If the primary axiom is that everything is voluntary, everything else, including the right to life, has to shuffle down.
Voluntariness is a nice applause light, but calling it an “axiom” I am not sure if that even makes sense logically.
If I desire to steal your property, but you threaten to shoot me, so I give up… does it make sense to say that I voluntarily decided to not steal your property? Because if you extend the definition of “voluntary” to include things done under threat of death, then if I threaten to shoot you unless you give me your property, and you don’t want to die so you give it to me, then under the extended definition you also gave me your property “voluntarily”.
As far as I know, the usual definition is “do not initiate violence”, and even that has a lot of gray area around what “initiate” and “violence” mean exactly. If I create negative externalities (for example my factory polutes the air), at which moment does it become a violence? Are smokers violently attacking other people by their smoke? Sick people by breathing? Is it violence to violate someone’s intellectual right? (Some libertarians say “obviously yes”, others say “obviously no”.) Is lying a violence? Is libel? Without exact definition of violence you also can’t have an exact definition of initiation, because if one party does something that is maybe-violence-maybe-not-violence, and the other party responds by clear violence, which one of them was the “initiator” of violence?
tl;dr—most libertarians way overestimate the axiomatizability of libertarianism
The ones I know are exactly the people who say taxation is slavery.
Perhaps you are both right… in the sense that most libertarians do not want to see people starve… but would oppose any forceful coordination e.g. via taxation… and would fail to coordinate otherwise… so at the end, many people would starve, and many non-starving people would say “this is horrible and I don’t want this, but I don’t have enough money to solve this problem alone, so currently my priority is to get more rich, and after I become a trillionaire then I will be able to address the problem of starvation”.
Big-L libertarianism is axiomatic. If the primary axiom is that everything is voluntary, everything else, including the right to life, has to shuffle down.
Voluntariness is a nice applause light, but calling it an “axiom” I am not sure if that even makes sense logically.
If I desire to steal your property, but you threaten to shoot me, so I give up… does it make sense to say that I voluntarily decided to not steal your property? Because if you extend the definition of “voluntary” to include things done under threat of death, then if I threaten to shoot you unless you give me your property, and you don’t want to die so you give it to me, then under the extended definition you also gave me your property “voluntarily”.
As far as I know, the usual definition is “do not initiate violence”, and even that has a lot of gray area around what “initiate” and “violence” mean exactly. If I create negative externalities (for example my factory polutes the air), at which moment does it become a violence? Are smokers violently attacking other people by their smoke? Sick people by breathing? Is it violence to violate someone’s intellectual right? (Some libertarians say “obviously yes”, others say “obviously no”.) Is lying a violence? Is libel? Without exact definition of violence you also can’t have an exact definition of initiation, because if one party does something that is maybe-violence-maybe-not-violence, and the other party responds by clear violence, which one of them was the “initiator” of violence?
tl;dr—most libertarians way overestimate the axiomatizability of libertarianism