"Suppose that Smith, when making his agreement for lifelong voluntary obedience to the Jones Corporation, receives in exchange $1,000,000 in payment for these expected future services. Clearly, then, the Jones Corporation had transferred title to the $1,000,000 not absolutely, but conditionally on his performance of lifelong service. Smith has the absolute right to change his mind, but he no longer has the right to keep the $1,000,000. If he does so, he is a thief of the Jones Corporation’s property; he must, therefore, be forced to return the $1,000,000 plus interest. For, of course, the title to the money was, and remains, alienable."


This is what I was looking for.... thanks Cam for actually addressing the issue instead of deflecting. However I would disagree with the premise that a contract without exchange is simply a promise. If an actor doesn't show up, but hasn't recieved payment, then they should still be liable if payment was specified for the future as it's an agreement to trade in the future.


However it still begs the question of if I own my body, why I cannot sell my body for money even if whatever procedure happens to it may kill me? Why should selling organs be banned for example? And if they shouldn't be banned, why can we not extrapolate from organs to a procedure performed on the entire body regardless of if death would ensue as there is always a chance during an organ donation?

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Aug 5 2014 09:05pm

The logical argument would be that acting as a group, it would almost impossible to act from a single person's own self interested perspective. That is, the basis of laisswz faire is that people act out of their own self interest - disregarding any harms to others, constrained to the point where those harms are so far reaching that they eventually harm the initial actor. This also assumes that the initial actor is both rational and fully informed - which, of course are both unrealistic assumptions.

Group decision making, government in this case, has the ability to overcome some of these unrealistic assumptions. Information asymmetries and imperfections are reduced by a larger pool of collective knowledge shared between the individuals in the group. Cost of obtaining information is also mitigated by pooling funds - the ability to tax. The CIA or any other intelligence agency is a good example of this. Group members can also overcome the irrationality problem by a nature system of checks and balances - a stupid proposal by one group member is likely to be put down by the rest of the group.

The biggest issue and the strongest argument against laisswz faire is found in the problem of obtaining perfect information. I think it is one that everyone has ignored so far, but cuts right to the center of the topic. You can't make a rational decision when you have imperfect information.

But contracts aren't just promises. They are enforceable via the courts, so that aggrieved parties can be made whole. The idea that you can go to the courts and sue for someone's life because they promised it to you in a contract is justifiably absurd. If it would be impossible for the courts to make you whole, shouldn't that logic extend to limiting the validity of a contract? If I write a contract with someone to provide me with the gold contents of Ft Knox, and provide them with recompense for attempting to do so, if they succeed in getting the gold and they don't pay it to me, should I be able to sue them in court to enforce the contract?

do you seriously believe this? I'm just curious as to how dense you are and to the extent you are willing to oversimplify a complex moral conundrum.

Prior to the first trimester, when it is legal in the United States.

Do you not know the Roe v. Wade ruling? Wouldn't surprise me if you thought abortions were legal without qualification.

It is a compromise ruling that leaves nobody happy.

But written into it is the statement that "this court doesn't have the authority to establish when human life starts" smartly, because that is the realm of science and not theology or jurisprudence.

Maybe you should brush up on the law, because anytime beyond the cell being just a non-human blob is regulated by individual states, and aren't you for state's rights anyway? Roe v. Wade is a huge victory for state's rights and women's rights.

Side note, with you, other Paulbots, and Santara, how you believe the state shouldn't interfere with anybody living as long as it is within your worldview. Anything outside of your worldview is labeled as "unfree" written off without any sort of reasoning or any reflection by you guys how it isn't "unfree", just doesn't match up to your worldview. And you all do this in the name of the big Other, in your case Freedom, what others in the past have used God for. You're just would-be tyrants of your own personal tastes.

When you make laws you're attacking freedom because you're using violence to control how people act, period. You can't legislate freedom, especially through rights, which are contradictory to the idea of freedom in general.

Freedom only exists in a state of nature, and to be free we would have to break the social contract and renounce our rights.

This post was edited by Skinned on Aug 6 2014 10:06am

I think this was answered pretty well in that you can decide to stop being a slave whenever you want, however there could be action to compensate the "slave owner" for lost labor he paid for.

As for the Ft. Knox example you are paying for something which is not owned by either party, and so the contract is invalid.

But now I'm still left with this objection

"However it still begs the question of if I own my body, why I cannot sell my body for money even if whatever procedure happens to it may kill me? Why should selling organs be banned for example? And if they shouldn't be banned, why can we not extrapolate from organs to a procedure performed on the entire body regardless of if death would ensue as there is always a chance during an organ donation?"



Gubment taken muh freedumz

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Aug 6 2014 10:10am

Don't you notice how the whole concept of freedom crumbles when you introduce restrictions? Freedom to kill freedom is a paradox which results from elevating it to a status - Skinned called it the "Other".

Freedom sounds like an ideal value, but when it leads to such absurdities there is an inherent fault in systems built primarily around it. One way around is not admitting defeat and just patching the system with restrictions on freedom. Another involves discarding the whole thing. So far it looks like coming up with a system of arbitrary rules that you personally like and let Freedom do the rest.

This post was edited by Neptunus on Aug 6 2014 05:13pm

Then you aren't a slave then, are you? Signing said contract is clearly signing an invalid contract.



I am of the opinion that you CAN do to yourself whatever it is you wish to do, but that doesn't of necessity mean you can contract such powers out to someone else. I believe you should be able to sell your organs to something like a clearinghouse, but ethically, if you wanted to pick your recipient, you should have to donate it freely. I think we could almost overnight eliminate the waiting lists for livers and kidneys. You can't extrapolate minor clinical probabilities to intentional certainty. You might go on to make a separate argument, but I don't see how one begets the other.



Let me get this straight, you're deriding our freedom-based approach for the "rules" not being axiomatic when the system we have currently is much much much less so? Also, aren't we trying to keep the discussion focuses on economics?



See above.

Nice.

I think the most important thing to talk about with the quote is about which incentives guide which groups in a market.

One thing to know, the government's ideal role in laissez faire economics is to protect property rights perfectly with the laws and incentives they put into structure, so in effect, non-interventionism is not possible with it. Handing off that job to the government instead of individuals in theory makes more sense because they do not gain directly from the things they try to regulate (they do in practice =/).

A big argument for laissez faire is that the government's biggest focus on the economy is public appeasement. Instead of only handling property rights they try to steer the market as well, which is tragic because economic contractions are not only common but necessary to curb malinvestment in a market. The government tries to stall big hits in every way possible, and so creates false prices with subsidies/etc that emulate true purchases on a market. It is difficult for the public at large to see these false prices due to government action and the financial crisis will tell you why letting them last longer than they should is bad to the overall quality of life of a population.

Argument against laissez faire... our average citizen isn't intelligent enough to know the economic undercurrents, isn't disciplined enough to change their actions to better work with the flow of interactions, and simply doesn't care about their role as part of a large, complicated, and interconnected society. The government arguably cares more and takes large groups into consideration, but then you also create the appeasement problem.

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Aug 7 2014 09:49am