(Replying here to any new replies on the "Fines for leaving animals out in the cold" thread.)

Being a right winger myself, I find this a bit harsh.

I am no more a "right winger" than I am a "left winger", and I am equally as likely to be called both.

As I've said above, the parliamentary seating arrangements for various socialist parties have nothing to do with my philosophy - which is rationalist, and thus libertarian and individualist, or in other words supportive of free market capitalism.

  using the insulting type will never win over an argument 

I stand by my statement that this forum's massive support for fining people for leaving their animal property outside of their residential property, neither of which would even exist except through the will of the person being fined, is an example of mental derangement - that is emotionally driven violence that is unruled by reason.  The authoritarian nature of this violence resembles any other authoritarian regime, but it were the fascists that most famously used "animal rights" legislation for their propaganda purposes, which of course didn't stop them from butchering millions of human beings for the same statist cause.

We're all human, we all bleed red ('cept those freakin' Vulcans), and we can all have a conversation 

Yes, we can have a conversation, which is what we're doing here, but advocating government legislation against someone is a violent act.  Theft or murder by proxy, even with some religious rituals like voting thrown in, are nonetheless murder and theft!

  because of what Jesus has done for us 

I respect your Right to base your own personal philosophy on whatever interpretations of whatever traditional influences you choose, and your Right to teach that religion to your children, etc - but quoting Jesus (that being his Latin name, it's Josh in English) is a moot point in a debate about objective philosophical issues.  Even Josh's historical existence, much less his "divine nature" and the accuracy of quotations later attributed to him, cannot be objectively verified.  Even if your religion happens to be the right one, it is backed by faith which isn't shared by the entirety of the world's population.  Natural Law must be an objective empirically-verifiable concept that can apply to all rational economic actors, whether they are Christians or Buddhists or Satanists or atheists like me.  Even extraterrestrial beings and artificial intelligence entities (i.e. robots) are theoretically subject to Natural Law!

Yes, I believe "kiddy porn" should be decriminalized as well.

  There's no way a civilization can survive while allowing that kind of depravity. 

Debunked elsewhere, but that debate has no relation to this forum and would probably be unwelcome here.

And, while Luke 17:1-2 can be interpreted to advocate the death penalty for encouraging any conceivable thought-crime, technically it doesn't apply to people corrupting themselves with what may be images if sin.  And most girls in the Biblical times were married off soon after reaching puberty, often even younger than the most common subjects of "kiddy porn" (15-20, remember that the judge decides what is porn and who looks too young), and that's even assuming we're talking about photographs and not drawings, which are also illegal.  I'm sure the Bible still condemns admiring the human body in its full bloom, but luckily that did not get in the way of some of the best art the Christian civilization has produced...

Wow, I responded to this fella ONCE and he called me a Marxist. 

You told me to "go have sex with Ayn Rand's corpse", and I reciprocated your sentiment, substituting what seems to be the strongest influence on your definition of what capitalism is and isn't.

I'm not a Marxist or a communist. I was born in Soviet Russia and lived there for 6 years right before the fall of communism. I know perfectly well, through first-hand experience, about how much communism sucks, thank you.

But you believe that depriving people of their property rights is OK just as long as it makes you happy.  What slogans you carry while you violate people's rights are irrelevant.  A ship named "The Unsinkable" will still sink if you don't patch up its leaks.

It's all about BALANCE.

In any compromise between truth and falsehood, falsehood always wins out.  If I compromise with a person who thinks 2 + 2 is 5 by agreeing even that it's 4.5 or even 4.0000001, do the immutable laws of mathematics change to honor the "balance" between our opinions?  If a thug compromises with his victim to stab him once instead of ten times, does that make the thug innocent?  Of course not!

Total socialism and total capitalism are both flawed.

"Total socialism" is a complete impossibility - even in the worst of fascist / communist dictatorships the "black market" has never been less than 10% of the economy, and often a lot more.  (And any socialist would of course claim that those dystopias were not "true socialism" even in their intention.)  And those societies were only able to function by crawling through the tunnel that more capitalist societies have bored before them - they have never accomplished anything substantively new.  Even the Soviet space program was a massive misallocation of capital into technologies imported from the West, which a more capitalist society was then able to surpass very quickly when the resolve to allocate the necessary capital was created.  Simply copying what others accomplished before you is not an accomplishment!

Societies where the free market constituted well over 90% of the economy are very well documented, and there is only improvement as the free market economy approaches 100%.  And remember that government is by definition involuntary: a small local authority that you've joined voluntarily (ex. a neighborhood association) should be considered a part of the free market instead.  The present-day correlation between economic freedom and prosperity is impossible to deny.  From roads to schools to charity, the government's monopoly on power does not make it magically more competent or efficient than the free market, where all entities are incentivized for innovation and are directly accountable for their results.  Even when it comes to defending individuals' Natural Rights, it is impossible for the government to protect them more than it violates them, just as it is impossible for a person to pull himself up by his bootstraps.  Power always corrupts.

I'm fine with a capitalist system under which social programs exist.
Such as Medicare, food stamps, and lots and lots of taxes to pay for those things.

Social programs create a massive disincentive for people to pull their economic weight, and are inherently more inefficient and corrupt than private charity.  (You can see a good introduction video on thus subject by economist Walter Williams here.)  They encourage unemployment (minimum wage), inflated costs (medicine), and encourage competent individuals to leave the society for one with less of them.  The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you simply run out of competent people to tax!

What bothers me about these so-called "anarcho-capitalists" is that they pretty much believe that the less skilled/ less fortunate members of society deserve to die.

There is an inverse correlation between economic freedom and poverty.  Government hurts the total economic growth, which means higher basic survival costs and less money for charity.  It is impossible for me to imagine someone starving to death in a capitalist society - I myself would give that person a loan, even for the most selfish of reasons, though someone else would probably beat me to it.  A human life is very valuable, the cost of daily bread is not.  Compare that to the hundreds of millions who've starved to death in socialist countries in 20th century alone!

And as someone who was raised on food stamps, I've gotta say, that offends me.

I am not accusing your parents and especially not yourself of any immorality because you were "raised on food-stamps".  Just consider this: would your parents have been successful people if they had lived their whole lives under capitalism, and applied their energy and their intellect to pull their own economic weight?  I think it is very likely that your parents would have been very well-off in a capitalist society, and would have probably used their success to help others voluntarily (ex. community / church / synagogue charity programs, etc).  American socialism and Soviet socialism aren't much different, it's only a matter of degree.  Food-stamps are the crutches that socialism gave to your parents after it itself broke their legs beforehand!

And furthermore, the idea that less fortunate members of society don't deserve support is WAAAAAY more violent than fines/taxes what have you. Come on now.

Your government-imposed "support" is doing a lot more harm than good to the very people you are trying to help, but even if it was not the case, it would still be wrong.  You are free to donate to charity and otherwise help people, just not to use that as an excuse to violate other people's rights.

Expecting someone to exist in the confines of this reality is not "violence".  Sure, it would have been nice if we lived in a universe where everyone was immortal and omnipotent, but that currently is not the case.  We are material beings with limited abilities, and thus our interpersonal behavior is subject to natural economic laws, no differently than how our bodies are subject to the laws of physics.  There is no such thing as a "right" to steal from others - that is a basic logical self-contradiction!  It simply does not compute!

  I was drawing the comparison between eugenics and breeding animals to be 'ideal' for human purposes.

I did not say anything about genetic "ideals", I was simply saying that the vast and growing fraction of animal life on this planet only exists as the result of human intervention and could never support itself in the wild.  What kinds of animals people choose to spend their money on is none of my business, as long as they do it without violating other people's rights.  In fact, it is you who is calling for violence in the name of genetic ideals (or "natural biodiversity" as you put it), taking vast areas of wilderness out of the human economy because some perty birdies supposedly need it more than we do.  Your attempt to somehow associate me with any form of racism continues to backfire.

We could breed

Coincidentally - yes, we could!  PM me, I'll fax you a contract, and if we reach an agreement then I will airmail a sperm sample to a clinic of your choice where you can be artificially inseminated with it.  In the contract you would disavow me of any government-imposed parental responsibilities, but I would be willing to contractually obligate myself to other means of financial compensation (subject to tests proving my paternity, etc).  Seriously.

  so that there are no genetic disorders or even aesthetic imperfections 

I don't think the science is quite there yet, but when it is - parents do have the right to use their reproductive systems however they see fit, with or without genetic alternation.  Human beings (i.e. adults who are not mentally ill) own themselves.  Children, upon reaching a point of physical autonomy (i.e. birth) gains the negative Right to Life as well as the Right to Emancipation.  Etc.  (You can read this elsewhere.)

  and leave the inferior human beings to the mercies of collectors who think them amusing curiosities 

An individual is certainly free to agree to exhibit his or her medical abnormalities for fun and profit (and parents / legal guardians can do this to their children / mentally incompetent adults left in their care), but a "rational economic actor" is a "rational economic actor" - the relative abilities of others do not diminish your capacity to own yourself.

If the intelligence levels of dogs and humans were magically reversed, then dogs would have the Natural Right to own humans as their property, but if dogs magically became as intelligent as humans are today while at the same time humans became an equal order of magnitude smarter than both dogs and humans would have equal Rights.  Rights are about attaining a certain minimal capacity to function as a rational being so that other rational beings gain greater value from cooperating with you and those like you than using you as a natural resource.  You can cooperate with a caveman / pre-human from as far back as 250,000 years ago, but not much further back, and no other known genome or life-form.

If you actually think this is about birds being 'pretty,' then you're even more of an idiot than I thought.

Alright, I will not speculate about what motivations people have to want to proliferate any specific (sub)species of animals, but it does seem that they want to spend more on the (sub)species that are the most useful to them, which in the case of unappetizing birds does most often seem to be their value as pets.

As the human economy continues to grow exponentially while the number of animal and plant (sub)species on earth does not, the cost of protecting any species from extinction in captivity will continue to decline.  The idea of extinction may become extinct before this century is out, but the idea of any animal being unowned by humans needs to die out beforehand.  It's our planet, our solar system, and our universe (until we hear otherwise) - other animals can exist only insofar as we allow them to exist!

Look at me!  I think I'm important!

And if you study epistemology then you can prove it too!  You exist (cogito, ergo sum), you value your own life (or why do you bother feeding yourself?), and you are able to pull the economic weight of your existence (or have others to pull your weight for you).  We can only speculate about whether the first applies to animals, but the third clearly does not.

I have no concept of the idea that maybe human intelligence is not the most important thing in the world!

Um, I work with Artificial Intelligence - I am all about this concept!  I've also expressed some degree of openness to the theoretical possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, etc.  But all of this only supports my argument that we need to define a rational -- not just an emotional -- boundary for what constitutes any living entity's Natural Rights!

I don't have the breadth of mind to envision the possibility that something I don't understand and cannot put into my own terms has any value!

I cannot logically dismiss any speculation that is not logically disprovable, but I have no cause to believe in it either.  For example, you can endlessly speculate that a scary ghost has just materialized under your bed - it wasn't there the last 10,000 times you've checked, but it's there now, and it will teleport you to hell if you don't check this very second.  You cannot logically disprove this possibility, but at some point you will have to reconcile with reality, admit that this hypothetical ghost is not the greatest of your concerns, and try to get some sleep.

I believe it is a great social injustice that such basic necessities as food, clothing, and medicine are commodities to be bought and sold.

You are also free to consider it a "great social injustice" that 2 + 2 adds up to 4, but it nonetheless does, and your objection to it is contrary to basic logic.  The value of those things comes from their scarcity relative to the demand for them.

Everyone naturally wants to spend much of their time on recreation, which tends to produce relatively little economic value, and everyone wants to live forever, rule the world, and have an unlimited quantity of anything they might want at a moment's notice.  Economics is a science that analyzes how rational economic actors must compromise with the reality they live in, and with each-other.  The person who grows your food, manufactures your clothes, or provides your medical services is not your slave!  In order to expect someone to do those things for you, you must convince them to do it without violating their Rights, like by exchanging something of equal value.

It may someday be possible that some cheaper commodities of food, clothing, and medicine become free because the economy will have advanced to the point where the cost of providing those products and services reaches what people are willing to give away, as has already been the case with some computer software.  What will help bring this economic advancement is innovation and improvements in productivity, not emotion and mindless support for government force!

I've lived in the US, in Canada, and in the UK, and I know first-hand - as much as people complain about taxes, the second they find out they need a heart transplant, they're suddenly very, very grateful that the government is willing to pay for it.

Someone's faith in an irrational religion does not make that religion true.  What those people fail to realize is that the government is a net destroyer of economic value: it always needs more in inputs than it can provide in outputs, and that is especially true with health-care (read Mary Ruwart's Healing Our World).  Without government intervention (including all the nonsense about "animal rights"), the cost of a genetically-modified pig heart transplant would be a tiny fraction of what it is today!  There are very few people who actually gain more from government than they lose (aside from the ruling elite themselves), and for those people there would be charity in a freer society as well.

I've watched my mother die, slowly, and seen the frustration and the futility of privatized healthcare.  I've also rushed into the ER while visiting my family in the States, and felt the immense relief of my anxieties as I realized that my provincial healthcare would be willing to cover that.

I sympathize for your loss, and I do not question the validity of your emotions, just their economic accuracy.

No, no it doesn't.  You threw it in a dumpster, you obviously don't want it. 

Dumpsters don't just fall from the sky and empty all by themselves, they are someone's property, and they are located on someone's property.  People use them for the specific benefits that they offer: sanitary advantages, privacy, odor control, ease of pickup, aesthetic benefits over just having a pile of garbage there, etc.  Some people won't object to having homeless people going through their dumpsters, but most would when they realize the potential economic liability of allowing this: greater risk of identity theft, privacy concerns, concerns for liability if you get food poisoning, liability if someone falls asleep in their dumpster and the  trash compactor kills them, littering, crime, etc.  So most people would consider diving through their dumpster to be trespassing.

I never said anarchy and anarchy-capitalism were synonymous, just that they were doomed to fail for the same reasons.

We agree that anarchy (in its traditional concept) does not work.  You've said something about capitalism being doomed because of people choosing happiness over money, and I explained why that is completely nonsensical - "money" (material consequences of your actions) and "happiness" (emotional consequences of your actions) are just different aspects of your "capital" (self-ownership), which under capitalism you have a (negative) Right to have.  You've never made any legitimate points against free market capitalism.

the fact that you wont reply to me is really making me angry..  I'm bored.

I normally try to reply to earliest unanswered posts first.  Make it worth my while, and you can have as much of my exclusive attention as you can afford.  ;)

Dude, the free-state people you linked to and said you were a part of say they are libertarian, and all the ideas you are putting forth are generally labeled libertarian.

The word "libertarian" is a very vague adjective, not a specific political philosophy.  I would rather describe myself as Anarcho-Capitalist instead, which is the term Murray Rothbard used.  A lot of people who are essentially Anarcho-Capitalists have considered using alternative terminology ("free-marketeer", "voluntaryism", etc) but I don't agree.  The word "capitalism" is worth fighting for, and if we don't and just call ourselves something different then what will keep those other terms from being hijacked as well?

I now I didn't put a link into David Graeber's name, but you're a big boy, you can check it out yourself. Maybe in a book and not on wikipedia(gasp!) But dissing something you don't know anything about doesn't make you sound as smart as you think it does. 

There are billions of people who I don't know anything about, and, since my time is finite, I must pick and choose.  After spending a couple of minutes on David Graeber, there is absolutely nothing to indicate that he will be any different than any other socialist I've ever read (ex. Noam Chomsky).  His involvement with the Wobblies is all I need to know to prejudge him an idiot, a parasite, and a thief! 

And I don't put links in my text because the intended reader is incapable of RTFM'ing the things for themselves, but only to highlight that understanding the correct definition of this term is important.  And many of my links are not to Wikipedia but to things I wrote elsewhere in the past, etc.

I just don't agree with the use of the term anarchist to describe free-market economics.

Once again, the term is "Anarcho-Capitalism".  Two words.  Both capitalized.  Eighteen characters.  Seventeen letters.  One dash.

Milton Freeman didn't refer to himself as such. 

No, Milton Friedman was a Minarchist free market capitalist, at least in public, but his son David was an Anarcho-Capitalist.  Minarchism and Anarcho-Capitalism do not necessarily contradict each-other - the former is a more pragmatic politically-actionable version of the latter.  I used to simultaneously consider myself both, but I no longer have any interest in politics - only philosophy, civil disobedience, agorism, and secession.

Keynes was not a free-market economist.  He encouraged FDR to implement programs to jumpstart the economy during the Depression.  The main tenent of his argument was that the economy COULD NOT restore itself after a sharp economic downturn without a large boost from the government - as in spending for job creation.  He also believe in regulation.

That is essentially correct.  I assume you were addressing nmpixie's confusion above.

A market could not work properly without controls.

Are you expressing your own opinion in that last sentence of your post or are you still describing Keynes?  If the former, I will have to disagree with you.  I can name countless examples of government failure, but no true examples of market failure, ever.

My time is pretty valuable actually, but I do choose to allocate a certain amount of it to debating political and philosophical issues over the Internet.  This brings value to me in exercising and thus strengthening my opinions - if someone can prove me wrong, then I definitely would want to know.  After "paying my dues" like this over a decade or two, I will then be better able to later consolidate my ideas into more formal scholarly dissertations.  Someday...

  English is your first language.. most people whose first language is not English would have far more grammatical errors. 

Make it worth my while, and I will provide proof of English not being my first language.  ;)