{"id":23252,"date":"2017-03-12T18:37:07","date_gmt":"2017-03-12T23:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23252"},"modified":"2017-03-12T18:37:07","modified_gmt":"2017-03-12T23:37:07","slug":"a-correction-to-commenter-matt-damon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23252","title":{"rendered":"A Correction To Commenter Matt Damon"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Correction To Commenter Matt Damon<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\"economics\"<\/a>Dear Mr. Damon (I like you: can I call you Matt? You\u2019ll never read this anyway, so I\u2019ll call you by your first name).<\/p>\n

So, dear Matt,<\/p>\n

The cause of liberty needs people with your spirit. However, I\u2019m sorry, but your recent defense of liberty and independence is so much inconsistent that it weakens that spirit.<\/p>\n

Yes, the world is upside-down. But not because, as you say, \u201cthe wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power\u201d, but because the idea of law has been subverted.<\/p>\n

The law intended as non-arbitrary limit to all coercive power (that is as non-aggression principle) has been replaced with the law intended as instrument of arbitrary coercive power.<\/p>\n

In other words, the world is upside down not because the power is held by the wrong people, but because the prevailing idea of law makes political power (i.e. coercive power), whoever holds it, unlimited. And the nature of an unlimited power is to expand.<\/p>\n

When you say that the problem is that \u201cthe wealth is distributed in this country and in the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth\u201d you embrace the same idea of law that makes political power unlimited. That is the same abstract idea of law that produced Nazism, communism and the contemporary democratic totalitarianism: that idea of law is called legal positivism.<\/p>\n

The problem is not that wealth is allocated in the wrong way. The problem is that wealth is allocated. That there is the power to legally allocate wealth. The very possibility of coercive resource allocation implies the unlimited power to coerce people.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Correction To Commenter Matt Damon Dear Mr. Damon (I like you: can I call you Matt? You\u2019ll never read this anyway, so I\u2019ll call you by your first name). So, dear Matt, The cause of liberty needs people with your spirit. However, I\u2019m sorry, but your recent defense of liberty and independence is so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15009,3745,483,7617,643,868],"class_list":["post-23252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-coercive-power","tag-law","tag-liberty-2","tag-mises-institute","tag-power","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23253,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23252\/revisions\/23253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}