Sunday, May 7, 2017

My Response to Walter Block's Non-Response Response

Dr. Walter Block has responded to my post, The Privacy Rights of a Girl in Shower: The Private Property Society to the Rescue, and to a post by Michael Rozeff, Privacy Rights of Girl in Shower.

In his response, Privacy rights? A Non-Response to Rozeff and Wenzel, Dr. Block writes in part:
I regard Bob Wenzel and Mike Rozeff as two of the most gifted and insightful libertarian theorists now actively writing. I highly respect both. Each has made important contributions to our understanding of, and appreciation of, our beloved libertarian philosophy....I shall not now write, substantively, in defense of my recent blog, and in criticism of theirs’. I don’t regard this venue, LRC, as an appropriate venue for leading libertarian theoreticians to thrash out such complex matters, in an attempt to get that proverbial one millionth of an inch closer to the Truth. Instead, I invite both of them to write up their views on privacy and the libertarian theory thereof, in the scholarly peer reviewed refereed journal literature. There, we can issue thousands of words on this subject. In order to help them in this pursuit, I now offer several targets (in my view, the one from Murray Rothbard is definitive), which can easily be incorporated into a reference section, for a scholarly paper: Read the rest here.
I agree with Dr. Block that blog posts are not the appropriate venue to carry on this discussion.

However, I believe my fundamental difference with Dr. Block on this issue is not on privacy per se but rather on the nature of what a libertarian society must look like.

I just don't see how a libertarian society, or what I call a Private Property Society, has room for what I would consider libertarian rule setters who make rules that apply to all property.

That said, I realize that it is I who must make the case for my PPS, and why it is superior to what has been advanced to date in libertarian theory, and I am in the process of doing so in book form. Until the book project is finished, probably at least a year until completion, I will occasionally here at Target Liberty and Economic PolciyJournal.com post comments on my PPS view when it is appropriate to a topic at hand. An index of those comments can be found here. But a journal article would just take me too far off track of a very big project.

 -RW 

2 comments:

  1. Regarding "libertarian rule setters who make rules that apply to all property"...
    It seems likely to me that some PPSs will have these because:
    a) there will probably be hundreds of PPSs
    b) different libertarians want different things.
    For example I can imagine some which are drug free; and I bet most will control who can join.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would think you would need to explain first if they differed markedly from what someone might normally expect.

    ReplyDelete