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A Participatory Experiment in Political Pluralism

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Xerographica

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Let's have more political parties! Here's how this experiment works.
  1. Decide whether you Agree/Disagree (A/D) with the 10 arguments in the following Self Ownership Survey (SOS)
  2. Combine your A/D responses in order to create a unique identifier (ID) for your party. Prefix the unique ID with "SOS". For example, here is my party's unique ID... SOSDAAAAAAAAD
  3. Reply to this post with your party's unique ID.
  4. Create a google alert to receive a notification when a new webpage contains your party's unique ID.
  5. Create a facebook page, blog, wikipedia entry, website, etc. dedicated to your party in order to make it easy for other people to find and join your party.
  6. If your party has enough members then vote on a user friendly name. You'll still want to attach your party's unique ID to all relevant pages in order to make them easy to find via google searches/alerts.
Here is the Self Ownership Survey (SOS)...

1. Abortion should be illegal - DNA allows us to differentiate between where your fist ends and somebody else's nose begins. If you invite somebody onto your property it doesn't give you the right to initiate violence against them. If somebody is forced onto your property it still doesn't give you the right to initiate violence against them. (A/D)

2. Consensual slavery should be legal - If you fully own yourself then you should be able to partially or fully sell yourself. You should have the right to sell your sex, your kidneys and your entire body. You should be able to sell yourself to anybody else for any amount of time as long as you fully agree to the terms of the contract. (A/D)

3. Polygamy should be legal - If you fully own yourself then you should be able to enter into a marriage contract with as my people as you so choose. (A/D)

4. Business owners should be allowed to discriminate. - Your business is your property. You should be able to do whatever you want with your property as long as your decisions do not violate the property rights of other people. If other people disagree with your business practices then they can express their disapproval by engaging in ethical consumerism. In essence, business owners should have the right to shoot themselves in the foot if they so choose. If they want to send potential customers and/or potential employees to their competitors then that is their prerogative. (A/D)

5. Drugs should be legal - If you fully own yourself then you should be able to harm yourself in any way that you so choose. (A/D)

6. There should be a licence to procreate - You should have the right to be raised by people who were willing to take, and able to pass, a test based on a Parenting for Dummies textbook. It's a violation of your property rights to be raised by people who do not know the basic nutritional, health, safety, emotional, and educational needs of children. (A/D)

7. Children of any age should be allowed to vote (children's suffrage) - Everybody should have the right, completely irrespective of all other factors, to try and protect their interests. By restricting any individual's right to try and protect their interests we are legitimizing the idea that one person can truly know what's in another person's best interests. If one person can truly know what's in another person's best interests then it's reasonable for congress to take our money and spend it in our best interests. (A/D)

8. Campaign contributions should not be restricted - Everybody should have the right to try and protect their interests. By restricting somebody's right to try and protect their interests you are saying that you know for a fact what's in their best interests. How would you respond if somebody told you that they know for a fact what's in your best interests? Would you believe them? (A/D)

9. Taxpayers should be allowed to directly allocate their taxes (pragmatarianism) - We all have a debt to society but no two people have benefited from society in exactly the same way. Therefore, you are the only one that can truly know how you can best repay your debt to society. Voters should determine the functions of government and taxpayers should determine which functions to fund. (A/D)

10. Taxes should be abolished (anarcho-capitalism) - Your property is an extension of yourself. Nobody has a right to take your property. Somebody stealing one penny from you is as morally wrong as somebody stealing your kidney. (A/D)

What is your party's unique ID? Which SOS parties do you predict will be the most/least popular?

You're welcome to debate the topics...but the primary objective of this experiment is to facilitate finding others who share your same set of views with respect to self-ownership.
 
How do you reconcile 1 and 6 with each other?

And beyond that, how do you reconcile both of them with the rest of the list?
 
Harshaw said:
How do you reconcile 1 and 6 with each other?

And beyond that, how do you reconcile both of them with the rest of the list?
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My personal position on abortion and taxes is not consistent with my general stance on self-ownership. If I was a proponent of full-self ownership then I would be against abortion and against taxes. As it is...I take a more pragmatic...rather than dogmatic...stance on those two issues.

In terms of issue 6...I don't see any real inconsistency in terms of my general stance on self-ownership.

How ideologically consistent are you with regards to self-ownership?
 
I'm not the issue.

The issue is, with regards to 6 especially, a "self-owning" individual needs no license from the government to put anything into his/her body, including a kid.
 
Harshaw said:
I'm not the issue.

The issue is, with regards to 6 especially, a "self-owning" individual needs no license from the government to put anything into his/her body, including a kid.
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Errrrr...and I am the issue? Did you miss the part where I said that this is a survey?

Errrrr...you really think the government would allow you to put some random kid into your body?
 
Xerographica said:
Errrrr...and I am the issue?
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I didn't say you were, either.


Errrrr...you really think the government would allow you to put some random kid into your body?
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How could you possibly not get what I was referring to? Do you think I meant taking an existing child and putting him/her into your body? Really?
 
Harshaw said:
How could you possibly not get what I was referring to? Do you think I meant taking an existing child and putting him/her into your body? Really?
Click to expand...

Errrrr...so you want to put a non-existent child into your body?
 
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Xerographica said:
Errrrr...so you want to put non-existent children into your body?
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Yeah, OK. I guess I'm going to have to agree with Viktyr, above. Not much point in engaging you.
 
More parties would definitely raise political consciousness in our country, which we desperately need. I feel our system is pretty stagnant at this point - it's just rolling the ball from one hand to the other. We need to disperse the power and influence, and create more parties that represent the thought demographics. The current two parties also have a lot of old power built in - despite having term limits - in the form of party rules and values.

My only concern is the corruption levels we are now seeing. Could more parties mean more chaos if corruption reaches them too? It could also be that the integrity of the individuals themselves is lacking... but it's hard to be virtuous when certain party practices remain entrenched for years.

I also think that the way the general public examines politics needs a facelift.
 
Isn't slavery inherently non-consensual?
 
Harshaw said:
Yeah, OK. I guess I'm going to have to agree with Viktyr, above. Not much point in engaging you.
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You agree with Viktyr that nobody owns themselves? Doesn't that contradict your position that you can own children?
 
Temporal, glad to hear that you appreciate the value of more parties. So why not take part in my experiment?
 
Xerographica said:
You agree with Viktyr that nobody owns themselves? Doesn't that contradict your position that you can own children?
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Thank you for showing why no one should bother responding to your survey.
 
Xerographica said:
Nobody owns you...not even yourself. Hmmm. So I take it you're unemployed? Or you just work for free?
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Engaging in fair trade for labor does not make a person property. I perform a service and am repaid in kind. And the premise of this question is idiotic.
 
Viktyr Korimir said:
Engaging in fair trade for labor does not make a person property. I perform a service and am repaid in kind. And the premise of this question is idiotic.
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You said that you don't own yourself...yet now you're saying that you do own your labor. If you don't own yourself then what right do you have to your labor? According to you...nobody owns you. Therefore...nobody can own the right to your labor. Which means that you shouldn't even be able to sell your labor...given that it's not yours to sell. That's why I asked if you were unemployed.

So let's try again...do you...or do you not...own yourself?
 
Xerographica said:
You said that you don't own yourself...yet now you're saying that you do own your labor. If you don't own yourself then what right do you have to your labor?
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You are making the assumption that ownership of property is conditional upon self-ownership. This is not necessarily true, and is only generally agreed to be true by libertarian ideologues. I do not "own" my labor; if other people find my behavior useful, they may offer me considerations-- material or otherwise-- to encourage those behaviors. Services are not bought and sold, they are contracted, and the government has the legitimate authority to prohibit and invalidate immoral contracts, including contracts for immoral services.

Xerographica said:
So let's try again...do you...or do you not...own yourself?
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Save your pedantry for someone else. People are not property and may not be owned by anyone, including themselves.
 
Deuce said:
Isn't slavery inherently non-consensual?
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Yes...slavery on it's own is non-consensual. "Consensual slavery", however, differs in that Person A willingly agrees to sell ownership of himself to Person B. This gives Person B the right to sell Person A to Person C...and so on.

It would be regularly slavery if Person A was coerced into slavery. This would be considered in violation of his self-ownership.
 
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