So you support allowing people living in crowded urban areas to slaughter their own animals in their own homes in the plain view, hearing, and smelling of their neighbors?
I personally support people doing whatever they like, because what's very important to me is that I be allowed to do whatever I like without being robbed and kidnapped.
What about processing their own sewage, or manufacturing their own explosives, or operating their own helicopter, or having a rock concert?
For my own part, absolutely. I'm very tolerant.
It goes back to homesteading theory. Who got there first? That determines everything. If Mick Jagger moved in first, no one was around, and he's been holding rock concerts all along, then he has obtained an easement consisting of the right to give off loud vibrations. He homesteaded the noise rights, see, just like he homesteaded the rights to the land when he built his rock palace atop it. He wasn't violating anyone's rights at the time, because no one else was even around to violate. Let's say now a new neighbor moves in who starts a library and objects to the melodious tones wafting over. But can he demand the rocking and rolling to stop and thus get satisfaction that way? No. When he homesteaded the property, he was homesteading "dirty" property so to speak. The easement was already established. If he now wants the property to be "clean", he must approach Mick and pay him or otherwise convince him to relinquish the easement. Otherwise he can't get no satisfaction, not morally.
If, on the other hand, the librarian was there first, he has the right to the quiet and Jagger must pay up to gain the right to upset the existing order.
To look at it another way, either stopping existing noise or stopping existing quiet is upsetting an existing and established order. The established order has the right of way. The newcomer has no automatic right to supplant it. Any new order must buy out the rights-holders of the existing order.
These things -- in the past, today, and in probable future scenarios -- are largely determined by convention. Convention is powerful. What constitutes aggression does not always have a precise and obvious answer. A libertarian society could form in which having body odor in public was considered aggression and punished heavily. Yes, your offensive molecules are going out and accosting the sensory organs of innocents. It clearly could be considered aggression. I would not want to live in a society of such prissies, but that is just a subjective aesthetic preference.
Anyone who can afford to do these things should be allowed to do them anywhere at anytime no matter what the consequences to other people's lives?
Anyone who can afford to
stop these things should be allowed to
stop them anywhere at anytime no matter what the consequences to other people's lives?
Neither is the correct answer. Sometimes the doers have the right of way, sometimes the stoppers. If we all respect each other's rights, we are able to resolve even the most sticky of these situations with a minimum of conflict.
Which is why I can't understand anarchy. I agree with Ron Paul that we need to minimize laws and regulations and return power to more local governments, but I can't quite make the leap to complete anarchy where there is no rule of law and no expectation of any community standards.
Your uneasiness does not have to do with the leap to anarchy, per se.
That leap is the leap to accepting that security, defense, and judicial services can be provided on a free market. Your difficulty in seeing how order could emerge without arbitrary nuisance laws is a difficulty which exists under minarchy as well. Under minarchy there's just one monopoly justice vendor making sure the librarian doesn't violate Mick Jagger's rights, and under anarchy there's multiple competing vendors, that's the only difference. Both libertarian minarchy and anarchy uphold actual rights -- either Mick's or the librarian's -- and neither will violate their rights with arbitrary property-rights-trampling decrees.
