Reddit reviews Anarchy, State, and Utopia

I am a rising 3L. It would have been helpful if you gave a bit more information about why in the world you're considering becoming a lawyer. Since you didn't, I'm just going to give you a huge list of links to materials which have informed my general philosophical understanding of law, justice, and the legal profession and hope you find some of it interesting.

Music:

Dead Prez - Fuck the Law

Crass - Bloody Revolution

GG Allin - Fuck Authority

Wesley Willis - It’s Against the Law

Wilco - Against the Law

Golf Wang - Earl

MellowHype - Fuck the Police

KottonMouth Kings and ICP - Fuck the Police

RATM - Fuck the Police

Dead Kennedys - Police Truck

Choking Victim - Money

Anti-Flag - No Borders, No Nations

Utah Phillips - I Will Not Obey

Woody Guthrie - Jesus Christ

Todos Tus Muertos - Gente Que No

David Wrench - A Radical Song

Books:

Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish(PDF Link)

[Thomas Geoghegan - The Law in Shambles](http://www.amazon.com/Law-Shambles-Thomas-
Geoghegan/dp/097281969X)

Rawn James Jr. - Root and Branch

Deborah Rhode - In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession

Alan Dershowitz - Letters to a Young Lawyer

Richard Posner - Overcoming Law (specifically read "The Material Basis of Jurisprudence")

Susan Eaton - The Children in Room E4

Sunny Schwartz - Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All

Angela Davis - Are Prisons Obsolete?

Alan Dershowitz - The Best Defense

John Rawls - A Theory of Justice

Robert Nozick - Anarchy, State and Utopia

Ward Churchill - Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-American Laws

J. Shoshanna Ehrlich - Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens

Film:

Judgment at Nuremberg

A Civil Action

To Kill a Mockingbird

>I'm talking like, 'dawn of man' era, not a post-french revolution state.

The "dawn of man" era is what Hobbes and his predecessors refer to as the "state of nature". Even though Hobbes is writing during the 17th century, he is concerned with establishing how the very first political organizations formed out of the state of nature. Essentially Hobbes is saying that primitive man would make a rational choice to give up a few rights to secure others. Even if you are a primitive man you can realize the benefits of increasing your security through political organization.

It has been a while since I have read the Leviathan so don't take my brief account of what he says as correct. You can read the whole thing for free on the internet http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-a.html#CHAPTERI. However, it is somewhat of a tough read because of the outdated language. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a much more modern book that addresses your concern in the first chapter. It is also one the most influential books of the 20th century. http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465097200

>religion was good.

It very well might of been, but I'm just saying that there are aslo other very good reasons to form political organizations and laws.

This is a very general question, but let me try to point you to what you might be looking for.

If you're looking for people's attitudes on Harper, you can check out this thread from a little while back.

If you're looking for people's ideas on any particular policy, you can either do a search of this subreddit, or ask that question yourself!

If you're looking for people's philosophies, as dmcg12 said, those will be evident if you keep an eye on frequent posters; the more you see them write, the more coherent your picture of their ideas will be. If you're looking at philosophies rather than policies, though, there are philosophers who have produced better arguments than any of us here are likely to be able to articulate in support of their own stances (or at least, they've articulated them in greater detail than I think any of us have done). Some of the best books I've ever read are this (by a Canadian liberal egalitarian/social democrat), this (by a libertarian), and this (by an ex-Marxist Catholic conservative-in-a-way-that's-different-from-most-people-who-call-themselves-conservative). Of those three, I'd start with the Kymlicka, and read at least the chapters on Utilitarianism, Liberal Egalitarianism, and Libertarianism before deciding whether to put down the book. If, however, you take a look at Kymlicka or either of those other books and are intimidated, this does a fabulous job of explaining in accessible language what sort of things people might disagree on, without very strongly coming down on one side or another of such disagreements; it also has outstanding suggestions for further reading. All these books should be in any university library.

That's pretty close. We obviously do have a "right" in the US to a trial by jury, but just like the right to vote, it is not a natural right of human beings. What we do have a right to is to protect ourselves from violence, and to hold those who commit violence against us accountable for their actions.

How we decide to hold those who violate our rights accountable is the process by which we enforce rights, and can take any number of forms. For example, let's say you and I agree beforehand that any future disputes we might have we will take to a wise, Solomon-like king. Or perhaps we decide to settle our disputes based on the outcome of a magic 8-ball. Regardless of how we choose to enforce our rights, so long as we are actually agreeing to this process, our rights will not be violated. Robert Nozick has a good discussion on this in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Now, one might say that trial by jury is the form that our justice process takes, which we have all agreed to as a society. But clearly, the process of determining the judicial process, which I described above, never took place. In short, the fact that the social contract theory is bankrupt means that nobody is, from a rights-based perspective, obligated to serve as a juror. To demand otherwise is to claim ownership over the time and labor of other individuals against their consent.

Different results than what? You're assuming the lack of government will be better, when we see clearly that extreme lacking of government makes life heinous: http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-1

This is why I talk to people like you with such disdain. The arguments here are well-established, and carefully crafted, you just never took the time to go read them.

Someone WILL have a monopoly of power. Warring tribes have designated soldiers to both protect the tribe from other tribes, and to enforce their own code of conduct: no theft or beating children, etc. Show me an instance where some group won't seize control of power and demand that their imposition of power be recognized as a monopoly.

I'll assume you want something akin to a "return to a state of nature." But our governments came from a state of nature. Everything you see around you has developed from the ground up, sometimes is works, sometimes it doesn't. The instances where it doesn't work will eventually fade and die, and the instances that do work will be copied and propagate. Why do you think you know so much better? I strongly believe you to be both foolish, wildly ignorant, and arrogant. You think simple solutions will fix complex problems. But that's so unrealistic. A big part of me simply doesn't care what the solution to some problem looks like, so long as it improves our living standards and allows people the chance at happiness. What else should we be striving for? Freedom from government at the cost of our life-expectancy? Fuck that, and anyone who thinks like that.

If you really want to do yourself a favor, and have any foothold at all for a conversation like this, go read a book. I suggest you start with this one: http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465097200/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375719331&sr=1-1

If your coming from the left I recommend In Defense of Global Capitalism

If your coming from the right maybe For a New Liberty (free online) or Rollback


Other classics:


Anarchy, State, and Utopia -Academic Philosophy, tough read

Economics in One Lesson - Econ, easy read

Man, Economy and State (also free) - Econ, tough read

As for critics of Libertarianism there are tons of them, from idiots like Naomi Klein and Michael Moore to well respected economists. I would check out someone like Amartya Sen. If you read about criticisms of the free market or capitalism for the love of god read someone who is actually criticizing capitalism and not corporatism.

> I refuse to accept the faulty argument that capitalism is fair, or ethical, by any measure.

Just note, my post didn't say anything about capitalism. That said:

Capitalism isn't fair. Socialism isn't fair. LIFE isn't fair. The universe doesn't care about 'fair'. Reality has very basic physical limits that aren't going to be broken by a cornucopia machine. These limits mean that in reality we can't all have everything all the time. Money (or more accurately trade) will exist as long as someone else has something I want, and I have something they want.

If at all serious about this, I'd HEAVILY suggest you read 'Anarchy, State, And Utopia'. This addresses the holes in your utopian philosophy a lot better than I can in a reddit comment. The basic problem is that your vision above will require enforcement of rules by some entity, and this is intrinsically LESS fair and just than our current system. I won't touch on this topic here again, since I don't have time to do it justice.

> There is no reason to think peopke would take so much everything would collapse.

Lets go completely optimistic for a minute and show that money won't disappear:

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A group of people is able to fully cover everything with these machines and has no profit motive. Solar cells above, food below, desalination on the edges. Fully automated. 'Effectively' unlimited energy/water/power.

Awesome. But you honestly don't think people's wants will progress further? Let's focus on energy.

Assuming 100% efficiency (and ignoring boiling of the atmosphere), you're getting 88*10^15 watts. That's enough to support 30,000 2012-era United States of America. That allows the current world population to use 130 times what the US currently uses per-capita.

Now that everything's free and we don't need jobs, population is going to go up with almost no limit. Ah, shit. If we increase to the population density of Singapore, we just increased the population 142 times. Now parts of the population gets LESS energy than today. I'm hesitant to support any project that suggests neutering or unrealistic social education to supersede our genetic desires. There will be still be competition for land, location and status. 'Money' will be involved.

Hell, just assume we want to get everywhere 5 times faster. Thanks to the laws of physics, total energy use just increased by 8 times. And it still takes over a few hours to get from most of the Western world to Asia and Australia. There will be varying levels of service, and realistic limits to how fast you can go in crowded airspace. This becomes a limited good that leads to trae.

And during all this, there are still material shortages. All of a sudden, there's a tulip craze. Like most fads, prices will skyrocket in a bubble until supply catches up. People will be trading things, regardless of your view on 'money' and 'capitalism'.

As a side effect, the temperature of the oceans (assuming we use them as a heat sink, otherwise we'd all die real fast), will be increasing 1 K every 736 days, based on 5.6×1024 Joules/Degree Kelvin. Within a few generations, the oceans will be boiling.

There's also the matter of trying to get off this rock now that we've thrown off the energy balance and started to boil the atmosphere with all the residual heat. People will start competing for the same land. Do YOU want to be stuck on Pluto or Mars? Again, there's a good that will be limited. And it takes a hell of alot of energy. See Energy and Interstellar Travel

These, and other things, will lead to the creation of markets, which will keep money (in some form) flowing. There's also individuals who are dangerous and need to be limited, but that's better addressed via the book referenced above.


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: back to your regularly scheduled discussion :

The best realistic outcome of this project is being able to supply:

• a fully automated machine that gathers solar power, with battery storage
  
  
• a fully automated machine that efficiently grows plants
  
  
• a fully automated machine that constructs itself, the two machines above and other machines as raw material is available
  
  The economy won't go away; minerals/materials do not magically become free and neither does land or human labor (even if only wanting human actors for nostalgic reasons). People's wants and needs will increase. There will still be rationing via some method. 'Free market' is currently the most fair way we have.