mattschoch.

Design is Horseshit!

In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic

I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design and I am good at design. But I’ve never called myself a designer.

Here’s my pitch. This talk of designers as the new…

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The distinct libertarian view is that each person completely owns his own body — at least initially, until something changes this (e.g., if a person commits some crime by which he forfeits or loses some of his rights). Implicit in the idea of self ownership is the belief that each person has a better claim to the body that he or she directly controls and inhabits than do others. I have a better claim to the right to control my body than you do, because it is my body; I have a unique link and connection to my body that others do not, and that is prior to the claim of any other person.

Thus we can see that anyone other than the original occupant of a body is a latecomer with respect to the original occupant. Your claim to my body is inferior in part because I had it first. The person claiming your body can hardly object to the significance of what Hoppe calls the “prior-later” distinction, since he adopts this very rule with respect to his own body — he has to presuppose ownership of his own body in order to claim ownership of yours.

The self-ownership rule may seem obvious, but it is held only by libertarians. Nonlibertarians do not believe in complete self ownership. Sure, they usually grant that each person has some rights in his own body, but they believe each person is partially owned by some other person or entity — usually the state, or society. In other words, we libertarians are the only ones who really oppose slavery in a principled way. Nonlibertarians are in favor of at least partial slavery.

This slavery is implicit in state actions and laws such as taxation, conscription, and drug prohibitions. The libertarian says that each person is the full owner of his body: he has the right to control his body, to decide whether or not he ingests narcotics, works for less than minimum wage, pays taxes, joins an army, and so on.

But those who believe in such laws believe that the state is at least a partial owner of the body of those subject to such laws. They don’t like to say they believe in slavery, but they do. The liberal wants tax evaders put in jail — that is, enslaved. The conservative wants marijuana users enslaved.

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Stephan Kinsella (via statehate)

"I’ve been making a new theme from scratch.
It’s a work in progress."