quote of the day – marko kloos

Yes, I know WizardPC beat me to this topic, but someone else saying what I am about to say has never stopped me from saying it before, so why start now?

I have previously explained my position that one’s property is a physical manifestation of one’s life, and thus a person forcibly depriving you of that property is, in effect, retroactively enslaving you, so it should come as no surprise that I completely agree with the sentiments in this post and specifically this paragraph:

In my view, that moral threshold is crossed the second someone steps in front of you with a gun to make you do his bidding under threat of force. It doesn’t matter if the mugger wants to commandeer your life for an hour or a decade–your life is your own, and you have the absolute right to defend every bit of it against unlawful theft. If I’m morally justified to shoot someone over a million dollars of my property, I am justified to shoot them over ten dollars. If I am not justified to shoot them over ten bucks, I’m not justified to shoot them over a million. That’s the only consistent and non-arbitrary application of that moral principle. Any other interpretation puts a dollar value on your existence, and your right to live your life as your own master.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Likewise, if I am morally justified in defending my life and whatever future it will hold for me, then I am morally justified in defending the history of my life, and whatever products it yielded for me – after all, if it is "acceptable" for me to prevent myself from being kidnapped and forced to work for someone else with that someone else receiving the fruits of my labor, it is logically inconsistent for it to be "unacceptable" for me to defend those fruits of my labor I already possess.

As Marko indicated, and as was apparently lost on a large number of his readers (as evinced by their comments), the point of the equation is not the value of the item in question, the point is the threat of force and the fact that some of your life was expended in producing/procuring/fabricating/etc. the item, period.

In the same vein, just because it is morally acceptable for us to defend ourselves and our property, that does not mean we should/will – as one of Hsoi’s self-defense trainers sometimes puts it, optimizing our "TV and beer time" is the whole point of self-defense, and the time lost to making money to buy another bicycle is paltry in comparison to the time lost to court cases for shooting someone over it. However, as Weer’d observes, when someone directly threatens your life over property, you have absolutely no guarantee that providing them that property will secure your life, and thus the only rational course of action (though one you do not necessarily have to take) is to defend your life, and, by extension, your property.

It is not our responsibility to take wild stabs at guessing what other people’s motivations and desires are – it is other people’s responsibility to not threaten us with force if we do not give them what they want, and to not take what is not rightfully theirs. My life, and the time wrapped up in it, is the one thing I can never get back, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will do what I need to to defend it.