▲ 11 r/ConstitutionOfNepal+7 crossposts

The weak conceptual foundation of Nepalese legal system

Current Nepalese Legal System treats human beings as property of whichever party is running the government. where law treats people guilty until proven innocent.

They claim restricting foreign investments, controlling prices, and limiting travel serve as compassionate measures to retain national wealth, prevent social harm, and shield vulnerable groups from abuse. They claim that the state must override individual autonomy to ensure "the collective welfare of society".

Any valid legal system must recognize the individual as an independent, rational being who owns their own life and the product of their labor.

The Nepalese state overrides ownership by forbidding a salaried worker from investing their savings in foreign markets to secure their future (Act Restricting Investment Abroad, 1964, Section 3).

It criminalizes the possession and trading of cryptocurrencies, stripping individuals of the choice to protect their wealth through voluntary mediums of exchange (Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, 1962, Section 12).

It bans adult women from traveling to specific countries for employment, legally reducing them to incompetent wards (Department of Immigration directives under the Foreign Employment Act, 2007).

The legal framework assumes guilt by default. It's like they have no conception of "Innocent until proven guilty".

Individuals must prove their harmlessness to a regulator before moving their own capital or their own bodies.

The government systematically punishes productive citizens for their ambition by imposing extortionate taxes on vehicles and banning luxury imports (Export-Import Control Act, 1957, Section 3, and the annual Finance Act).

The state guts the essence of private ownership by freezing land plotting and dictating how owners subdivide or dispose of their legitimately acquired real estate (Land Use Act, 2019, Section 4, and Land Use Regulations, 2022).

Bureaucratic interference does it best to try and block digital platforms under the guise of social harmony, denying individuals the absolute right to consume and associate with chosen information (Telecommunications Act, 1997, Section 47, and Cabinet Directives).

Arbitrary minimum thresholds on foreign direct investment dismantle economic freedom, using force to prevent a willing local entrepreneur from accepting capital from a willing foreign investor (Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act, 2019, Section 3).

It mandates trade operations and capping margins at twenty percent, transforming private enterprises into heavily chained servants of the bureaucracy (Black-marketing and Some Other Social Offenses and Punishment Act, 1975, Section 3).

Every one of these statutes forces the citizen to beg for permission before producing or trading.

Constitutional guarantees mean nothing when the daily operational laws systematically violate the right to life, liberty, and property.

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 8 days ago
▲ 3 r/Nepali_Millennials+3 crossposts

The logic on the topic of "illegal immigration"

A right is a moral principle defining and protecting one's freedom of action in a social context. Law can be made to protect or not protect rights. But rights do not come from law. Rights come before laws and rights exists in absence of any government that protects it.

  1. A right is not a grant from the state, a product of consensus, or a courtesy extended to those born within certain coordinates. It is the identification of what a rational being requires, by its nature, to act on its own judgment among other rational beings. That nature does not change at a border, so a rights framework that changes at a border has stopped describing the nature of man and started describing the reach of a jurisdiction, which is a different subject wearing the same word.
  2. The only thing that can justify retaliatory force is the prior use of force, fraud, or theft against an actual party. A crime, properly understood, is not an act a legislature has listed. It is an act that violates another person's right to his own life, liberty, or property. Where no such violation exists, no crime exists, regardless of what a statute names it, because the statute cannot manufacture the metaphysical fact of a victim by asserting one into being.
  3. An exchange freely entered by two parties, each judging it to serve his own life, is the base unit of a rights-respecting society. The identity of that unit does not depend on the geography either party occupies. A boundary is a political fact, not a moral one, and a moral principle cannot be suspended by a political fact without ceasing to be a principle. What was a trade on one side of a line remains a trade on the other side, or the concept of trade has no fixed meaning at all.
  4. To call peaceful movement across a boundary a crime is to treat a line drawn by prior political agreement as though it possessed the same moral authority as a person's body or property, which it does not, since a boundary is not owned in the sense that a person owns his own life and its product. A crime against a boundary is a contradiction, because a boundary is not an entity capable of being wronged.
  5. Legality identifies what a given political system currently enforces. Morality identifies what is actually right, independent of what any system enforces. To collapse the two is to abolish the very standard by which any law could be judged unjust in the first place, which means the collapse is not neutral, it is the elimination of moral judgment itself in favor of raw legal fact.
  6. History is not silent on this question. Every regime that has enforced an unjust law did so with the same formal claim to legitimacy now being invoked, that it was, after all, the law. If the mere fact of legal standing were sufficient to obligate obedience, every one of those regimes would have been owed the same obedience, a conclusion no serious moral framework accepts. The principle that would validate them all cannot be the principle in use here.
  7. A demand for obedience "unless and until the law is changed" is not a neutral procedural stance. It is the substantive claim that a person's freedom to act on his own judgment is properly suspended by whatever a legislature has most recently decided, a claim that make the individual's rights conditional on the outcome of a vote he may have had no part in and no power over. Rights that exist only until revoked by majority decision were never rights. They were permissions.
  8. No one holds "the law is the law" as an unconditional standard, because everyone can name some law severe enough that he would refuse it on principle. The presence of that unnamed threshold, in every person who claims to hold this standard, proves the standard was never really about the law's mere existence. It was always about the law's content, whether that person has admitted it to himself or not.
  9. Consistency requires that a single standard, once adopted, govern every case that standard is relevant to. A standard that identifies theft as wrong because it violates a specific person's right to his property, and then declines to identify unauthorized border crossing as rightful because it violates no one's property, is not applying two different verdicts from one standard. It is applying two different standards and calling both of them rights, which drains the word of the only meaning that makes it useful.
  10. Moral judgment presupposes the capacity to have acted otherwise. The place of one's birth precedes the existence of one's capacity to choose anything at all. To make a person's subsequent freedom of movement contingent on that pre-rational fact is to punish him for something that occurred before he existed as a moral agent, which is not justice delayed. It is the absence of justice, dressed in its procedures.
  11. A system that permits entry only up to a fixed numerical limit, independent of the qualifications or character of those turned away once the limit is reached, is not screening for merit. It is rationing by quota. Advising a person to simply qualify under such a system, when the system's defining feature is that it rejects qualified people once its ceiling is reached, asks him to solve a problem that has no solution available to him, which is not guidance. It is the appearance of guidance offered to conceal the absence of a real path.
  12. To affirm that open movement is the correct principle while affirming that its opposite should be enforced until some future date is not a position, it is two positions in contradiction, held apart only by refusing to ask what each one implies about the other. If restriction violates a right, no future date changes what it is today. If it does not violate a right, then the "principle" of open movement was never a claim about rights, only a preference awaiting convenience.
  13. A conditional agreement, entered by both parties and bounded by explicit terms, generates an obligation whose violation is a real breach, because a real commitment was made and then broken. A person who never entered such an agreement has broken nothing, because there is nothing there to break. Identifying these as the same kind of wrong requires ignoring the only fact that makes a broken promise a wrong in the first place, namely, that a promise was made.
  14. The proper measure of any enforcement action is not whether it is authorized by statute, but whether the statute it enforces identifies an actual violation of another's rights. Enforcement of a law against theft protects a real party from a real loss. Enforcement of a law against peaceful movement protects no one, because it answers no injury, prevents no loss, and defends no right. It does not maintain order. It substitutes the appearance of order for the thing order is supposed to serve, which is the protection of the individual from force initiated against him, not the initiation of force against an individual who has initiated nothing.
reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 10 days ago

The logic of illegal immigration

Note: If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you. looking for feedback only from objectivists.

I am putting in some work on understanding her ideas about immigration. Any feedback on the following from objectivists?

  1. A right is not a grant from the state, a product of consensus, or a courtesy extended to those born within certain coordinates. It is the identification of what a rational being requires, by its nature, to act on its own judgment among other rational beings. That nature does not change at a border, so a rights framework that changes at a border has stopped describing the nature of man and started describing the reach of a jurisdiction, which is a different subject wearing the same word.
  2. The only thing that can justify retaliatory force is the prior use of force, fraud, or theft against an actual party. A crime, properly understood, is not an act a legislature has listed. It is an act that violates another person's right to his own life, liberty, or property. Where no such violation exists, no crime exists, regardless of what a statute names it, because the statute cannot manufacture the metaphysical fact of a victim by asserting one into being.
  3. An exchange freely entered by two parties, each judging it to serve his own life, is the base unit of a rights-respecting society. The identity of that unit does not depend on the geography either party occupies. A boundary is a political fact, not a moral one, and a moral principle cannot be suspended by a political fact without ceasing to be a principle. What was a trade on one side of a line remains a trade on the other side, or the concept of trade has no fixed meaning at all.
  4. To call peaceful movement across a boundary a crime is to treat a line drawn by prior political agreement as though it possessed the same moral authority as a person's body or property, which it does not, since a boundary is not owned in the sense that a person owns his own life and its product. A crime against a boundary is a contradiction, because a boundary is not an entity capable of being wronged.
  5. Legality identifies what a given political system currently enforces. Morality identifies what is actually right, independent of what any system enforces. To collapse the two is to abolish the very standard by which any law could be judged unjust in the first place, which means the collapse is not neutral, it is the elimination of moral judgment itself in favor of raw legal fact.
  6. History is not silent on this question. Every regime that has enforced an unjust law did so with the same formal claim to legitimacy now being invoked, that it was, after all, the law. If the mere fact of legal standing were sufficient to obligate obedience, every one of those regimes would have been owed the same obedience, a conclusion no serious moral framework accepts. The principle that would validate them all cannot be the principle in use here.
  7. A demand for obedience "unless and until the law is changed" is not a neutral procedural stance. It is the substantive claim that a person's freedom to act on his own judgment is properly suspended by whatever a legislature has most recently decided, a claim that make the individual's rights conditional on the outcome of a vote he may have had no part in and no power over. Rights that exist only until revoked by majority decision were never rights. They were permissions.
  8. No one holds "the law is the law" as an unconditional standard, because everyone can name some law severe enough that he would refuse it on principle. The presence of that unnamed threshold, in every person who claims to hold this standard, proves the standard was never really about the law's mere existence. It was always about the law's content, whether that person has admitted it to himself or not.
  9. Consistency requires that a single standard, once adopted, govern every case that standard is relevant to. A standard that identifies theft as wrong because it violates a specific person's right to his property, and then declines to identify unauthorized border crossing as rightful because it violates no one's property, is not applying two different verdicts from one standard. It is applying two different standards and calling both of them rights, which drains the word of the only meaning that makes it useful.
  10. Moral judgment presupposes the capacity to have acted otherwise. The place of one's birth precedes the existence of one's capacity to choose anything at all. To make a person's subsequent freedom of movement contingent on that pre-rational fact is to punish him for something that occurred before he existed as a moral agent, which is not justice delayed. It is the absence of justice, dressed in its procedures.
  11. A system that permits entry only up to a fixed numerical limit, independent of the qualifications or character of those turned away once the limit is reached, is not screening for merit. It is rationing by quota. Advising a person to simply qualify under such a system, when the system's defining feature is that it rejects qualified people once its ceiling is reached, asks him to solve a problem that has no solution available to him, which is not guidance. It is the appearance of guidance offered to conceal the absence of a real path.
  12. To affirm that open movement is the correct principle while affirming that its opposite should be enforced until some future date is not a position, it is two positions in contradiction, held apart only by refusing to ask what each one implies about the other. If restriction violates a right, no future date changes what it is today. If it does not violate a right, then the "principle" of open movement was never a claim about rights, only a preference awaiting convenience.
  13. A conditional agreement, entered by both parties and bounded by explicit terms, generates an obligation whose violation is a real breach, because a real commitment was made and then broken. A person who never entered such an agreement has broken nothing, because there is nothing there to break. Identifying these as the same kind of wrong requires ignoring the only fact that makes a broken promise a wrong in the first place, namely, that a promise was made.
  14. The proper measure of any enforcement action is not whether it is authorized by statute, but whether the statute it enforces identifies an actual violation of another's rights. Enforcement of a law against theft protects a real party from a real loss. Enforcement of a law against peaceful movement protects no one, because it answers no injury, prevents no loss, and defends no right. It does not maintain order. It substitutes the appearance of order for the thing order is supposed to serve, which is the protection of the individual from force initiated against him, not the initiation of force against an individual who has initiated nothing.
reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 12 days ago

The logic of illegal immigration

Note: If you are not an objectivist, this is not for you. looking for feedback only from objectivists.

I am putting in some work on understanding her ideas about immigration. Any feedback on the following from objectivists?

  1. A right is not a grant from the state, a product of consensus, or a courtesy extended to those born within certain coordinates. It is the identification of what a rational being requires, by its nature, to act on its own judgment among other rational beings. That nature does not change at a border, so a rights framework that changes at a border has stopped describing the nature of man and started describing the reach of a jurisdiction, which is a different subject wearing the same word.
  2. The only thing that can justify retaliatory force is the prior use of force, fraud, or theft against an actual party. A crime, properly understood, is not an act a legislature has listed. It is an act that violates another person's right to his own life, liberty, or property. Where no such violation exists, no crime exists, regardless of what a statute names it, because the statute cannot manufacture the metaphysical fact of a victim by asserting one into being.
  3. An exchange freely entered by two parties, each judging it to serve his own life, is the base unit of a rights-respecting society. The identity of that unit does not depend on the geography either party occupies. A boundary is a political fact, not a moral one, and a moral principle cannot be suspended by a political fact without ceasing to be a principle. What was a trade on one side of a line remains a trade on the other side, or the concept of trade has no fixed meaning at all.
  4. To call peaceful movement across a boundary a crime is to treat a line drawn by prior political agreement as though it possessed the same moral authority as a person's body or property, which it does not, since a boundary is not owned in the sense that a person owns his own life and its product. A crime against a boundary is a contradiction, because a boundary is not an entity capable of being wronged.
  5. Legality identifies what a given political system currently enforces. Morality identifies what is actually right, independent of what any system enforces. To collapse the two is to abolish the very standard by which any law could be judged unjust in the first place, which means the collapse is not neutral, it is the elimination of moral judgment itself in favor of raw legal fact.
  6. History is not silent on this question. Every regime that has enforced an unjust law did so with the same formal claim to legitimacy now being invoked, that it was, after all, the law. If the mere fact of legal standing were sufficient to obligate obedience, every one of those regimes would have been owed the same obedience, a conclusion no serious moral framework accepts. The principle that would validate them all cannot be the principle in use here.
  7. A demand for obedience "unless and until the law is changed" is not a neutral procedural stance. It is the substantive claim that a person's freedom to act on his own judgment is properly suspended by whatever a legislature has most recently decided, a claim that make the individual's rights conditional on the outcome of a vote he may have had no part in and no power over. Rights that exist only until revoked by majority decision were never rights. They were permissions.
  8. No one holds "the law is the law" as an unconditional standard, because everyone can name some law severe enough that he would refuse it on principle. The presence of that unnamed threshold, in every person who claims to hold this standard, proves the standard was never really about the law's mere existence. It was always about the law's content, whether that person has admitted it to himself or not.
  9. Consistency requires that a single standard, once adopted, govern every case that standard is relevant to. A standard that identifies theft as wrong because it violates a specific person's right to his property, and then declines to identify unauthorized border crossing as rightful because it violates no one's property, is not applying two different verdicts from one standard. It is applying two different standards and calling both of them rights, which drains the word of the only meaning that makes it useful.
  10. Moral judgment presupposes the capacity to have acted otherwise. The place of one's birth precedes the existence of one's capacity to choose anything at all. To make a person's subsequent freedom of movement contingent on that pre-rational fact is to punish him for something that occurred before he existed as a moral agent, which is not justice delayed. It is the absence of justice, dressed in its procedures.
  11. A system that permits entry only up to a fixed numerical limit, independent of the qualifications or character of those turned away once the limit is reached, is not screening for merit. It is rationing by quota. Advising a person to simply qualify under such a system, when the system's defining feature is that it rejects qualified people once its ceiling is reached, asks him to solve a problem that has no solution available to him, which is not guidance. It is the appearance of guidance offered to conceal the absence of a real path.
  12. To affirm that open movement is the correct principle while affirming that its opposite should be enforced until some future date is not a position, it is two positions in contradiction, held apart only by refusing to ask what each one implies about the other. If restriction violates a right, no future date changes what it is today. If it does not violate a right, then the "principle" of open movement was never a claim about rights, only a preference awaiting convenience.
  13. A conditional agreement, entered by both parties and bounded by explicit terms, generates an obligation whose violation is a real breach, because a real commitment was made and then broken. A person who never entered such an agreement has broken nothing, because there is nothing there to break. Identifying these as the same kind of wrong requires ignoring the only fact that makes a broken promise a wrong in the first place, namely, that a promise was made.
  14. The proper measure of any enforcement action is not whether it is authorized by statute, but whether the statute it enforces identifies an actual violation of another's rights. Enforcement of a law against theft protects a real party from a real loss. Enforcement of a law against peaceful movement protects no one, because it answers no injury, prevents no loss, and defends no right. It does not maintain order. It substitutes the appearance of order for the thing order is supposed to serve, which is the protection of the individual from force initiated against him, not the initiation of force against an individual who has initiated nothing.
reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 12 days ago

What do we mean by "Liberalism"?

(please note that the title is not what popular culture means by that word)

There is one question underneath all political debate, and it is not about tax rates or foreign policy or any of the things people usually argue about. It is this: does your life belong to you?

Not in the sentimental sense. Concretely. Does the product of your labor belong to you, or does some portion of it belong to whoever has the votes to take it? Do your choices (what to ingest, whom to love, what values to hold as your own) belong to you, or are they subject to the moral veto of whoever currently controls the legislature? Does your mind belong to you, or is it on permanent loan from the collective, callable at any time?

Every political coalition operating today answers this question. None of them answer it correctly.

The left says: your economic output belongs partly to society, but your personal choices are your own. The right says: your economic output is mostly yours, but your personal choices are subject to tradition, faith, and the social fabric. Both are offering you half a person. The freedom to earn but not to keep it. Or the freedom to keep it but not to choose how to live. Neither of them has noticed that you cannot split the mind this way.

The same faculty that runs a business is the one that falls in love. The same judgment that directs productive effort is the one that decides what to read, whom to trust, what to believe. Freeing one application of the mind while coercing another is not partial freedom. It is a contradiction. What you actually have is a cage with one side open.

r/NepalLiberal is built around the idea that freedom is not divisible. That the principle "no human being may initiate physical force against another" is either total or it is nothing. That your life belongs to you in full, not in whatever portions this week's coalition can claim jurisdiction over.

That position has a name here. We call it liberalism, returned to something like its original meaning: the philosophy of individual liberation grounded in reason, not the softened political shorthand it has since become. The philosophy holds that reality is what it is regardless of your feelings about it, that reason is the only tool that allows a human being to actually know reality and act in it, and that each individual is an end in himself and not a means to others' ends. These three commitments run beneath everything else discussed here. They are not right-wing positions. They are not left-wing positions either. They occupy a different axis entirely.

Contrast with Conservatism

Conservatism defends economic freedom only on practical grounds ("it produces prosperity," "markets work") while backing state authority over personal choices. That is not a consistent view of freedom. It is freedom as a matter of convenience, surrenderable the moment tradition or faith requires it.

Examine the moral foundation closely and you find the same premise the left uses: altruism, the claim that the individual's highest purpose is service to something outside himself. The conservative names that something "god" or "nation" or "the social fabric." The leftist names it "the collective" or "the working class" or "social justice." The principle is identical. Only the beneficiary of the sacrifice changes.

Contrast with Leftism

There is a genuine, if selective, commitment to personal liberty on the left, and it is not without value. The failure is in not understanding that economic freedom and personal freedom are the same thing described from different angles.

When the state directs the use of your productive output, it has not freed you personally and merely constrained you economically. It has reached into the part of your life where you spend most of your waking hours and installed a supervisor. "You may think what you like, but we decide what you do with what your thinking earns" is not liberation. It is serfdom with better lighting.

The deeper problem is the moral premise underneath all of it: the claim that need generates a right, that the fact of someone's suffering creates an obligation on people who did not cause it, enforceable by law and paid for by compulsion. Altruism as political principle is force with a clean conscience. Both the left and the right, beneath their arguments, are theories about who gets to hold the gun and whose urgency justifies pointing it.

Contrast with Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets the conclusion right and then refuses to do the philosophical work required to defend it.

The non-aggression principle is not wrong. It is just not sufficient on its own. A principle without a foundation is a slogan. And libertarianism, taken as a movement rather than an idea, is a coalition of people who arrived at "don't tread on me" through wildly different routes: some through religious natural rights theory, some through utilitarian calculation, some through a general suspicion of authority that has more to do with temperament than with reasoning, some through a desire to do whatever they please without anyone making them feel guilty about it. These routes do not all lead to the same place. They merely share a border crossing.

When you ask the libertarian why the individual has rights, you get one of three answers: because God said so, because it produces better outcomes, or a shrug dressed up as epistemological humility. None of those answers are adequate. The first outsources your ethics to revelation. The second makes your rights contingent on a calculation that can always come out differently under different assumptions. The third mistakes the absence of a proof for the impossibility of one.

Liberalism holds that rights are not granted, not calculated, and not mysterious. They follow from what a human being is: a being who survives by the use of his rational faculty, whose nature requires the freedom to think and act on his judgment, whose existence cannot be sustained by compulsion without destroying the very thing that sustains it. That is a philosophical argument. Libertarianism, mostly, does not make it.

Contrast with Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism takes the correct insight that the state has historically been the largest engine of coercion in any given society, and uses it to reach the wrong conclusion.

The argument is that if coercion is the problem, government is the problem, and the solution is to replace it entirely with private contract and market provision of all services including justice and defense. This sounds radical in the right direction. It is not. What anarcho-capitalism actually describes, once you trace its implications carefully, is a world where the enforcement of rights becomes a commodity available to those who can pay for it. That is not the absence of a ruling class. It is the absence of any pretense about which class rules.

A proper government, one constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights and prohibited by its own founding documents from initiating force against the citizens it serves, is not the enemy of liberty. It is the institutional form that liberty requires. The alternative to a government that holds a monopoly on retaliatory force is not peaceful voluntarism. It is a dozen competing monopolies with no rule distinguishing retaliation from aggression, and no mechanism for resolving that distinction other than who can afford the better army.

Individual rights require an objective legal framework to be real in practice rather than theoretical. Anarcho-capitalism abolishes the framework and calls it liberation.

What This Community Stands For

>No human being, no group, no government has the right to initiate physical force against another. Not for good reasons. Not for urgent ones. Not for any reasons at all. Force is legitimate only in retaliation against those who initiate it first. Everything else rests on voluntary agreement between individuals who own their own lives.

This community rejects the gun. Not as an aspiration. As a principle.

You do not have to agree with any of that to post here. Disagreement is welcome. Ignorance of the philosophy is not a disqualifier (but bad faith malice is). "Tradition says so" and "the majority wants it" are not arguments, and they will be treated accordingly. If you want answers to serious philosophical questions from people who have thought carefully about these ideas, this is the place for that too; contributors who provide answers go through a vetting process, and the standard for what counts as an answer is high.

The individual is the unit of concern here. Not the class, not the caste, culture or creed, not any group assembled around a shared grievance or a shared identity. The individual, irreducible, sovereign, the one entity whose consent actually determines the moral weight of any act, is the standard by which every idea in this community gets measured.

Welcome.

>"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 23 days ago

What do I mean by "Liberalism"? (Not what popular culture means by it)

There is one question underneath all political debate, and it is not about tax rates or foreign policy or any of the things people usually argue about. It is this: does your life belong to you?

Not in the sentimental sense. Concretely. Does the product of your labor belong to you, or does some portion of it belong to whoever has the votes to take it? Do your choices (what to ingest, whom to love, what values to hold as your own) belong to you, or are they subject to the moral veto of whoever currently controls the legislature? Does your mind belong to you, or is it on permanent loan from the collective, callable at any time?

Every political coalition operating today answers this question. None of them answer it correctly.

The left says: your economic output belongs partly to society, but your personal choices are your own. The right says: your economic output is mostly yours, but your personal choices are subject to tradition, faith, and the social fabric. Both are offering you half a person. The freedom to earn but not to keep it. Or the freedom to keep it but not to choose how to live. Neither of them has noticed that you cannot split the mind this way.

The same faculty that runs a business is the one that falls in love. The same judgment that directs productive effort is the one that decides what to read, whom to trust, what to believe. Freeing one application of the mind while coercing another is not partial freedom. It is a contradiction. What you actually have is a cage with one side open.

r/NepalLiberal is built around the idea that freedom is not divisible. That the principle "no human being may initiate physical force against another" is either total or it is nothing. That your life belongs to you in full, not in whatever portions this week's coalition can claim jurisdiction over.

That position has a name here. We call it liberalism, returned to something like its original meaning: the philosophy of individual liberation grounded in reason, not the softened political shorthand it has since become. The philosophy holds that reality is what it is regardless of your feelings about it, that reason is the only tool that allows a human being to actually know reality and act in it, and that each individual is an end in himself and not a means to others' ends. These three commitments run beneath everything else discussed here. They are not right-wing positions. They are not left-wing positions either. They occupy a different axis entirely.

Contrast with Conservatism

Conservatism defends economic freedom only on practical grounds ("it produces prosperity," "markets work") while backing state authority over personal choices. That is not a consistent view of freedom. It is freedom as a matter of convenience, surrenderable the moment tradition or faith requires it.

Examine the moral foundation closely and you find the same premise the left uses: altruism, the claim that the individual's highest purpose is service to something outside himself. The conservative names that something "god" or "nation" or "the social fabric." The leftist names it "the collective" or "the working class" or "social justice." The principle is identical. Only the beneficiary of the sacrifice changes.

Contrast with Leftism

There is a genuine, if selective, commitment to personal liberty on the left, and it is not without value. The failure is in not understanding that economic freedom and personal freedom are the same thing described from different angles.

When the state directs the use of your productive output, it has not freed you personally and merely constrained you economically. It has reached into the part of your life where you spend most of your waking hours and installed a supervisor. "You may think what you like, but we decide what you do with what your thinking earns" is not liberation. It is serfdom with better lighting.

The deeper problem is the moral premise underneath all of it: the claim that need generates a right, that the fact of someone's suffering creates an obligation on people who did not cause it, enforceable by law and paid for by compulsion. Altruism as political principle is force with a clean conscience. Both the left and the right, beneath their arguments, are theories about who gets to hold the gun and whose urgency justifies pointing it.

Contrast with Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets the conclusion right and then refuses to do the philosophical work required to defend it.

The non-aggression principle is not wrong. It is just not sufficient on its own. A principle without a foundation is a slogan. And libertarianism, taken as a movement rather than an idea, is a coalition of people who arrived at "don't tread on me" through wildly different routes: some through religious natural rights theory, some through utilitarian calculation, some through a general suspicion of authority that has more to do with temperament than with reasoning, some through a desire to do whatever they please without anyone making them feel guilty about it. These routes do not all lead to the same place. They merely share a border crossing.

When you ask the libertarian why the individual has rights, you get one of three answers: because God said so, because it produces better outcomes, or a shrug dressed up as epistemological humility. None of those answers are adequate. The first outsources your ethics to revelation. The second makes your rights contingent on a calculation that can always come out differently under different assumptions. The third mistakes the absence of a proof for the impossibility of one.

Liberalism holds that rights are not granted, not calculated, and not mysterious. They follow from what a human being is: a being who survives by the use of his rational faculty, whose nature requires the freedom to think and act on his judgment, whose existence cannot be sustained by compulsion without destroying the very thing that sustains it. That is a philosophical argument. Libertarianism, mostly, does not make it.

Contrast with Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism takes the correct insight that the state has historically been the largest engine of coercion in any given society, and uses it to reach the wrong conclusion.

The argument is that if coercion is the problem, government is the problem, and the solution is to replace it entirely with private contract and market provision of all services including justice and defense. This sounds radical in the right direction. It is not. What anarcho-capitalism actually describes, once you trace its implications carefully, is a world where the enforcement of rights becomes a commodity available to those who can pay for it. That is not the absence of a ruling class. It is the absence of any pretense about which class rules.

A proper government, one constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights and prohibited by its own founding documents from initiating force against the citizens it serves, is not the enemy of liberty. It is the institutional form that liberty requires. The alternative to a government that holds a monopoly on retaliatory force is not peaceful voluntarism. It is a dozen competing monopolies with no rule distinguishing retaliation from aggression, and no mechanism for resolving that distinction other than who can afford the better army.

Individual rights require an objective legal framework to be real in practice rather than theoretical. Anarcho-capitalism abolishes the framework and calls it liberation.

What This Community Stands For

>No human being, no group, no government has the right to initiate physical force against another. Not for good reasons. Not for urgent ones. Not for any reasons at all. Force is legitimate only in retaliation against those who initiate it first. Everything else rests on voluntary agreement between individuals who own their own lives.

This community rejects the gun. Not as an aspiration. As a principle.

You do not have to agree with any of that to post here. Disagreement is welcome. Ignorance of the philosophy is not a disqualifier (but bad faith malice is). "Tradition says so" and "the majority wants it" are not arguments, and they will be treated accordingly. If you want answers to serious philosophical questions from people who have thought carefully about these ideas, this is the place for that too; contributors who provide answers go through a vetting process, and the standard for what counts as an answer is high.

The individual is the unit of concern here. Not the class, not the caste, culture or creed, not any group assembled around a shared grievance or a shared identity. The individual, irreducible, sovereign, the one entity whose consent actually determines the moral weight of any act, is the standard by which every idea in this community gets measured.

Welcome.

>"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 24 days ago

What do I mean by "Liberalism"? (Not what popular culture means by it)

There is one question underneath all political debate, and it is not about tax rates or foreign policy or any of the things people usually argue about. It is this: does your life belong to you?

Not in the sentimental sense. Concretely. Does the product of your labor belong to you, or does some portion of it belong to whoever has the votes to take it? Do your choices (what to ingest, whom to love, what values to hold as your own) belong to you, or are they subject to the moral veto of whoever currently controls the legislature? Does your mind belong to you, or is it on permanent loan from the collective, callable at any time?

Every political coalition operating today answers this question. None of them answer it correctly.

The left says: your economic output belongs partly to society, but your personal choices are your own. The right says: your economic output is mostly yours, but your personal choices are subject to tradition, faith, and the social fabric. Both are offering you half a person. The freedom to earn but not to keep it. Or the freedom to keep it but not to choose how to live. Neither of them has noticed that you cannot split the mind this way.

The same faculty that runs a business is the one that falls in love. The same judgment that directs productive effort is the one that decides what to read, whom to trust, what to believe. Freeing one application of the mind while coercing another is not partial freedom. It is a contradiction. What you actually have is a cage with one side open.

r/NepalLiberal is built around the idea that freedom is not divisible. That the principle "no human being may initiate physical force against another" is either total or it is nothing. That your life belongs to you in full, not in whatever portions this week's coalition can claim jurisdiction over.

That position has a name here. We call it liberalism, returned to something like its original meaning: the philosophy of individual liberation grounded in reason, not the softened political shorthand it has since become. The philosophy holds that reality is what it is regardless of your feelings about it, that reason is the only tool that allows a human being to actually know reality and act in it, and that each individual is an end in himself and not a means to others' ends. These three commitments run beneath everything else discussed here. They are not right-wing positions. They are not left-wing positions either. They occupy a different axis entirely.

Contrast with Conservatism

Conservatism defends economic freedom only on practical grounds ("it produces prosperity," "markets work") while backing state authority over personal choices. That is not a consistent view of freedom. It is freedom as a matter of convenience, surrenderable the moment tradition or faith requires it.

Examine the moral foundation closely and you find the same premise the left uses: altruism, the claim that the individual's highest purpose is service to something outside himself. The conservative names that something "god" or "nation" or "the social fabric." The leftist names it "the collective" or "the working class" or "social justice." The principle is identical. Only the beneficiary of the sacrifice changes.

Contrast with Leftism

There is a genuine, if selective, commitment to personal liberty on the left, and it is not without value. The failure is in not understanding that economic freedom and personal freedom are the same thing described from different angles.

When the state directs the use of your productive output, it has not freed you personally and merely constrained you economically. It has reached into the part of your life where you spend most of your waking hours and installed a supervisor. "You may think what you like, but we decide what you do with what your thinking earns" is not liberation. It is serfdom with better lighting.

The deeper problem is the moral premise underneath all of it: the claim that need generates a right, that the fact of someone's suffering creates an obligation on people who did not cause it, enforceable by law and paid for by compulsion. Altruism as political principle is force with a clean conscience. Both the left and the right, beneath their arguments, are theories about who gets to hold the gun and whose urgency justifies pointing it.

Contrast with Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets the conclusion right and then refuses to do the philosophical work required to defend it.

The non-aggression principle is not wrong. It is just not sufficient on its own. A principle without a foundation is a slogan. And libertarianism, taken as a movement rather than an idea, is a coalition of people who arrived at "don't tread on me" through wildly different routes: some through religious natural rights theory, some through utilitarian calculation, some through a general suspicion of authority that has more to do with temperament than with reasoning, some through a desire to do whatever they please without anyone making them feel guilty about it. These routes do not all lead to the same place. They merely share a border crossing.

When you ask the libertarian why the individual has rights, you get one of three answers: because God said so, because it produces better outcomes, or a shrug dressed up as epistemological humility. None of those answers are adequate. The first outsources your ethics to revelation. The second makes your rights contingent on a calculation that can always come out differently under different assumptions. The third mistakes the absence of a proof for the impossibility of one.

Liberalism holds that rights are not granted, not calculated, and not mysterious. They follow from what a human being is: a being who survives by the use of his rational faculty, whose nature requires the freedom to think and act on his judgment, whose existence cannot be sustained by compulsion without destroying the very thing that sustains it. That is a philosophical argument. Libertarianism, mostly, does not make it.

Contrast with Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism takes the correct insight that the state has historically been the largest engine of coercion in any given society, and uses it to reach the wrong conclusion.

The argument is that if coercion is the problem, government is the problem, and the solution is to replace it entirely with private contract and market provision of all services including justice and defense. This sounds radical in the right direction. It is not. What anarcho-capitalism actually describes, once you trace its implications carefully, is a world where the enforcement of rights becomes a commodity available to those who can pay for it. That is not the absence of a ruling class. It is the absence of any pretense about which class rules.

A proper government, one constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights and prohibited by its own founding documents from initiating force against the citizens it serves, is not the enemy of liberty. It is the institutional form that liberty requires. The alternative to a government that holds a monopoly on retaliatory force is not peaceful voluntarism. It is a dozen competing monopolies with no rule distinguishing retaliation from aggression, and no mechanism for resolving that distinction other than who can afford the better army.

Individual rights require an objective legal framework to be real in practice rather than theoretical. Anarcho-capitalism abolishes the framework and calls it liberation.

What This Community Stands For

>No human being, no group, no government has the right to initiate physical force against another. Not for good reasons. Not for urgent ones. Not for any reasons at all. Force is legitimate only in retaliation against those who initiate it first. Everything else rests on voluntary agreement between individuals who own their own lives.

This community rejects the gun. Not as an aspiration. As a principle.

You do not have to agree with any of that to post here. Disagreement is welcome. Ignorance of the philosophy is not a disqualifier (but bad faith malice is). "Tradition says so" and "the majority wants it" are not arguments, and they will be treated accordingly. If you want answers to serious philosophical questions from people who have thought carefully about these ideas, this is the place for that too; contributors who provide answers go through a vetting process, and the standard for what counts as an answer is high.

The individual is the unit of concern here. Not the class, not the caste, culture or creed, not any group assembled around a shared grievance or a shared identity. The individual, irreducible, sovereign, the one entity whose consent actually determines the moral weight of any act, is the standard by which every idea in this community gets measured.

Welcome.

>"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 24 days ago
▲ 3 r/IAMALiberalFeminist+1 crossposts

What do I mean by "Liberalism"? (Not what popular culture means by it)

There is one question underneath all political debate, and it is not about tax rates or foreign policy or any of the things people usually argue about. It is this: does your life belong to you?

Not in the sentimental sense. Concretely. Does the product of your labor belong to you, or does some portion of it belong to whoever has the votes to take it? Do your choices (what to ingest, whom to love, what values to hold as your own) belong to you, or are they subject to the moral veto of whoever currently controls the legislature? Does your mind belong to you, or is it on permanent loan from the collective, callable at any time?

Every political coalition operating today answers this question. None of them answer it correctly.

The left says: your economic output belongs partly to society, but your personal choices are your own. The right says: your economic output is mostly yours, but your personal choices are subject to tradition, faith, and the social fabric. Both are offering you half a person. The freedom to earn but not to keep it. Or the freedom to keep it but not to choose how to live. Neither of them has noticed that you cannot split the mind this way.

The same faculty that runs a business is the one that falls in love. The same judgment that directs productive effort is the one that decides what to read, whom to trust, what to believe. Freeing one application of the mind while coercing another is not partial freedom. It is a contradiction. What you actually have is a cage with one side open.

r/NepalLiberal is built around the idea that freedom is not divisible. That the principle "no human being may initiate physical force against another" is either total or it is nothing. That your life belongs to you in full, not in whatever portions this week's coalition can claim jurisdiction over.

That position has a name here. We call it liberalism, returned to something like its original meaning: the philosophy of individual liberation grounded in reason, not the softened political shorthand it has since become. The philosophy holds that reality is what it is regardless of your feelings about it, that reason is the only tool that allows a human being to actually know reality and act in it, and that each individual is an end in himself and not a means to others' ends. These three commitments run beneath everything else discussed here. They are not right-wing positions. They are not left-wing positions either. They occupy a different axis entirely.

Contrast with Conservatism

Conservatism defends economic freedom only on practical grounds ("it produces prosperity," "markets work") while backing state authority over personal choices. That is not a consistent view of freedom. It is freedom as a matter of convenience, surrenderable the moment tradition or faith requires it.

Examine the moral foundation closely and you find the same premise the left uses: altruism, the claim that the individual's highest purpose is service to something outside himself. The conservative names that something "god" or "nation" or "the social fabric." The leftist names it "the collective" or "the working class" or "social justice." The principle is identical. Only the beneficiary of the sacrifice changes.

Contrast with Leftism

There is a genuine, if selective, commitment to personal liberty on the left, and it is not without value. The failure is in not understanding that economic freedom and personal freedom are the same thing described from different angles.

When the state directs the use of your productive output, it has not freed you personally and merely constrained you economically. It has reached into the part of your life where you spend most of your waking hours and installed a supervisor. "You may think what you like, but we decide what you do with what your thinking earns" is not liberation. It is serfdom with better lighting.

The deeper problem is the moral premise underneath all of it: the claim that need generates a right, that the fact of someone's suffering creates an obligation on people who did not cause it, enforceable by law and paid for by compulsion. Altruism as political principle is force with a clean conscience. Both the left and the right, beneath their arguments, are theories about who gets to hold the gun and whose urgency justifies pointing it.

Contrast with Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets the conclusion right and then refuses to do the philosophical work required to defend it.

The non-aggression principle is not wrong. It is just not sufficient on its own. A principle without a foundation is a slogan. And libertarianism, taken as a movement rather than an idea, is a coalition of people who arrived at "don't tread on me" through wildly different routes: some through religious natural rights theory, some through utilitarian calculation, some through a general suspicion of authority that has more to do with temperament than with reasoning, some through a desire to do whatever they please without anyone making them feel guilty about it. These routes do not all lead to the same place. They merely share a border crossing.

When you ask the libertarian why the individual has rights, you get one of three answers: because God said so, because it produces better outcomes, or a shrug dressed up as epistemological humility. None of those answers are adequate. The first outsources your ethics to revelation. The second makes your rights contingent on a calculation that can always come out differently under different assumptions. The third mistakes the absence of a proof for the impossibility of one.

Liberalism holds that rights are not granted, not calculated, and not mysterious. They follow from what a human being is: a being who survives by the use of his rational faculty, whose nature requires the freedom to think and act on his judgment, whose existence cannot be sustained by compulsion without destroying the very thing that sustains it. That is a philosophical argument. Libertarianism, mostly, does not make it.

Contrast with Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism takes the correct insight that the state has historically been the largest engine of coercion in any given society, and uses it to reach the wrong conclusion.

The argument is that if coercion is the problem, government is the problem, and the solution is to replace it entirely with private contract and market provision of all services including justice and defense. This sounds radical in the right direction. It is not. What anarcho-capitalism actually describes, once you trace its implications carefully, is a world where the enforcement of rights becomes a commodity available to those who can pay for it. That is not the absence of a ruling class. It is the absence of any pretense about which class rules.

A proper government, one constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights and prohibited by its own founding documents from initiating force against the citizens it serves, is not the enemy of liberty. It is the institutional form that liberty requires. The alternative to a government that holds a monopoly on retaliatory force is not peaceful voluntarism. It is a dozen competing monopolies with no rule distinguishing retaliation from aggression, and no mechanism for resolving that distinction other than who can afford the better army.

Individual rights require an objective legal framework to be real in practice rather than theoretical. Anarcho-capitalism abolishes the framework and calls it liberation.

What This Community Stands For

>No human being, no group, no government has the right to initiate physical force against another. Not for good reasons. Not for urgent ones. Not for any reasons at all. Force is legitimate only in retaliation against those who initiate it first. Everything else rests on voluntary agreement between individuals who own their own lives.

This community rejects the gun. Not as an aspiration. As a principle.

You do not have to agree with any of that to post here. Disagreement is welcome. Ignorance of the philosophy is not a disqualifier (but bad faith malice is). "Tradition says so" and "the majority wants it" are not arguments, and they will be treated accordingly. If you want answers to serious philosophical questions from people who have thought carefully about these ideas, this is the place for that too; contributors who provide answers go through a vetting process, and the standard for what counts as an answer is high.

The individual is the unit of concern here. Not the class, not the caste, culture or creed, not any group assembled around a shared grievance or a shared identity. The individual, irreducible, sovereign, the one entity whose consent actually determines the moral weight of any act, is the standard by which every idea in this community gets measured.

Welcome.

>"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

reddit.com
u/ANIKAHirsch — 24 days ago

What do we mean by "Liberalism"?

(please note that the title is not what popular culture means by that word)

There is one question underneath all political debate, and it is not about tax rates or foreign policy or any of the things people usually argue about. It is this: does your life belong to you?

Not in the sentimental sense. Concretely. Does the product of your labor belong to you, or does some portion of it belong to whoever has the votes to take it? Do your choices (what to ingest, whom to love, what values to hold as your own) belong to you, or are they subject to the moral veto of whoever currently controls the legislature? Does your mind belong to you, or is it on permanent loan from the collective, callable at any time?

Every political coalition operating today answers this question. None of them answer it correctly.

The left says: your economic output belongs partly to society, but your personal choices are your own. The right says: your economic output is mostly yours, but your personal choices are subject to tradition, faith, and the social fabric. Both are offering you half a person. The freedom to earn but not to keep it. Or the freedom to keep it but not to choose how to live. Neither of them has noticed that you cannot split the mind this way.

The same faculty that runs a business is the one that falls in love. The same judgment that directs productive effort is the one that decides what to read, whom to trust, what to believe. Freeing one application of the mind while coercing another is not partial freedom. It is a contradiction. What you actually have is a cage with one side open.

r/NepalLiberal is built around the idea that freedom is not divisible. That the principle "no human being may initiate physical force against another" is either total or it is nothing. That your life belongs to you in full, not in whatever portions this week's coalition can claim jurisdiction over.

That position has a name here. We call it liberalism, returned to something like its original meaning: the philosophy of individual liberation grounded in reason, not the softened political shorthand it has since become. The philosophy holds that reality is what it is regardless of your feelings about it, that reason is the only tool that allows a human being to actually know reality and act in it, and that each individual is an end in himself and not a means to others' ends. These three commitments run beneath everything else discussed here. They are not right-wing positions. They are not left-wing positions either. They occupy a different axis entirely.

Contrast with Conservatism

Conservatism defends economic freedom only on practical grounds ("it produces prosperity," "markets work") while backing state authority over personal choices. That is not a consistent view of freedom. It is freedom as a matter of convenience, surrenderable the moment tradition or faith requires it.

Examine the moral foundation closely and you find the same premise the left uses: altruism, the claim that the individual's highest purpose is service to something outside himself. The conservative names that something "god" or "nation" or "the social fabric." The leftist names it "the collective" or "the working class" or "social justice." The principle is identical. Only the beneficiary of the sacrifice changes.

Contrast with Leftism

There is a genuine, if selective, commitment to personal liberty on the left, and it is not without value. The failure is in not understanding that economic freedom and personal freedom are the same thing described from different angles.

When the state directs the use of your productive output, it has not freed you personally and merely constrained you economically. It has reached into the part of your life where you spend most of your waking hours and installed a supervisor. "You may think what you like, but we decide what you do with what your thinking earns" is not liberation. It is serfdom with better lighting.

The deeper problem is the moral premise underneath all of it: the claim that need generates a right, that the fact of someone's suffering creates an obligation on people who did not cause it, enforceable by law and paid for by compulsion. Altruism as political principle is force with a clean conscience. Both the left and the right, beneath their arguments, are theories about who gets to hold the gun and whose urgency justifies pointing it.

Contrast with Libertarianism

Libertarianism gets the conclusion right and then refuses to do the philosophical work required to defend it.

The non-aggression principle is not wrong. It is just not sufficient on its own. A principle without a foundation is a slogan. And libertarianism, taken as a movement rather than an idea, is a coalition of people who arrived at "don't tread on me" through wildly different routes: some through religious natural rights theory, some through utilitarian calculation, some through a general suspicion of authority that has more to do with temperament than with reasoning, some through a desire to do whatever they please without anyone making them feel guilty about it. These routes do not all lead to the same place. They merely share a border crossing.

When you ask the libertarian why the individual has rights, you get one of three answers: because God said so, because it produces better outcomes, or a shrug dressed up as epistemological humility. None of those answers are adequate. The first outsources your ethics to revelation. The second makes your rights contingent on a calculation that can always come out differently under different assumptions. The third mistakes the absence of a proof for the impossibility of one.

Liberalism holds that rights are not granted, not calculated, and not mysterious. They follow from what a human being is: a being who survives by the use of his rational faculty, whose nature requires the freedom to think and act on his judgment, whose existence cannot be sustained by compulsion without destroying the very thing that sustains it. That is a philosophical argument. Libertarianism, mostly, does not make it.

Contrast with Anarcho-Capitalism

Anarcho-capitalism takes the correct insight that the state has historically been the largest engine of coercion in any given society, and uses it to reach the wrong conclusion.

The argument is that if coercion is the problem, government is the problem, and the solution is to replace it entirely with private contract and market provision of all services including justice and defense. This sounds radical in the right direction. It is not. What anarcho-capitalism actually describes, once you trace its implications carefully, is a world where the enforcement of rights becomes a commodity available to those who can pay for it. That is not the absence of a ruling class. It is the absence of any pretense about which class rules.

A proper government, one constitutionally limited to the protection of individual rights and prohibited by its own founding documents from initiating force against the citizens it serves, is not the enemy of liberty. It is the institutional form that liberty requires. The alternative to a government that holds a monopoly on retaliatory force is not peaceful voluntarism. It is a dozen competing monopolies with no rule distinguishing retaliation from aggression, and no mechanism for resolving that distinction other than who can afford the better army.

Individual rights require an objective legal framework to be real in practice rather than theoretical. Anarcho-capitalism abolishes the framework and calls it liberation.

What This Community Stands For

>No human being, no group, no government has the right to initiate physical force against another. Not for good reasons. Not for urgent ones. Not for any reasons at all. Force is legitimate only in retaliation against those who initiate it first. Everything else rests on voluntary agreement between individuals who own their own lives.

This community rejects the gun. Not as an aspiration. As a principle.

You do not have to agree with any of that to post here. Disagreement is welcome. Ignorance of the philosophy is not a disqualifier (but bad faith malice is). "Tradition says so" and "the majority wants it" are not arguments, and they will be treated accordingly. If you want answers to serious philosophical questions from people who have thought carefully about these ideas, this is the place for that too; contributors who provide answers go through a vetting process, and the standard for what counts as an answer is high.

The individual is the unit of concern here. Not the class, not the caste, culture or creed, not any group assembled around a shared grievance or a shared identity. The individual, irreducible, sovereign, the one entity whose consent actually determines the moral weight of any act, is the standard by which every idea in this community gets measured.

Welcome.

>"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 24 days ago

Does your life belong to you?

If you are a Non-Resident Nepalese with foreign residency permit living abroad, it is still illegal for you to work with a client that pays in crypto.

You may not be interested in that specific topic but you should care about the underlying premises that made such laws possible.

The whole thing is based on the premise that its okay for your society and the political leaders from where you were born own your life since before your birth and even after your death.

Your life is not a resource the nation borrows and collects interest on. Your labor is not a shared asset held in trust by whoever governs your birthplace this decade. Sovereignty which starts and ends with the individual, or sovereignty means nothing at all.

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 27 days ago
▲ 2 r/Nepal

Does your life belong to you?

If you are a Non-Resident Nepalese with foreign residency permit living abroad, it is still illegal for you to work with a client that pays in crypto.

You may not be interested in that specific topic but you should care about the underlying premises that made such laws possible.

The whole thing is based on the premise that its okay for your society and the political leaders from where you were born own your life since before your birth and even after your death.

Your life is not a resource the nation borrows and collects interest on. Your labor is not a shared asset held in trust by whoever governs your birthplace this decade. Sovereignty which starts and ends with the individual, or sovereignty means nothing at all.

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 27 days ago

Does your life belong to you?

If you are a Non-Resident Nepalese with foreign residency permit living abroad, it is still illegal for you to work with a client that pays in crypto.

You may not be interested in that specific topic but you should care about the underlying premises that made such laws possible.

The whole thing is based on the premise that its okay for your society and the political leaders from where you were born own your life since before your birth and even after your death.

Your life is not a resource the nation borrows and collects interest on. Your labor is not a shared asset held in trust by whoever governs your birthplace this decade. Sovereignty which starts and ends with the individual, or sovereignty means nothing at all.

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 27 days ago

BIG CGT PROBLEM: Capital Gains Tax for Non-Resident NEPSE traders

A NEPSE broker deducts capital gains tax from your trade before the money reaches your account. Settlement happens, and the deduction happens with it, automatic and final. You give no consent, and you get no choice in the matter.

How the Rest of the World Taxes Capital Gains

A trader in Singapore who buys US stock through a US broker pays zero US capital gains tax. The IRS taxes based on residency, not exchange location. The trader's home government decides what gets taxed and at what rate.

The UK, most of Europe, and most of Asia follow the same rule. Tax residency determines the bill. The exchange or broker where the trade happens stays out of the tax calculation entirely.

NEPSE's CGT

NEPSE withholds capital gains tax at the trade level, regardless of where the trader lives. Kathmandu, Dubai, Amsterdam, the deduction happens the same way each time.

For a resident filing once inside Nepal's own tax system, this model works. For a non-resident, this same model creates a second problem.

The Double Taxation

Most countries require residents to report and pay tax on capital gains from NEPSE trades.

One trade produces (probably more than) two tax bills, assessed by two governments.

NCELL Case

In 2016, Sweden's TeliaSonera sold its stake in Ncell to Malaysia's Axiata for over a billion dollars. Telia exited Nepal without paying capital gains tax on the sale. Nepal's Large Taxpayers' Office could not collect from Telia directly, since Telia held no remaining assets inside Nepal after the deal closed.

The tax office turned to Axiata instead, the buyer, and held Ncell liable for a bill the seller never paid. Nepal's Supreme Court backed this position in 2019, ruling that a buyer carries responsibility for a seller's unpaid capital gains tax. The Large Taxpayers' Office assessed a combined liability of Rs 62.63 billion. Axiata paid close to Rs 47 billion (about $421.9 million) between 2016 and 2020 to close the matter, and cited Nepal's tax environment as a factor in its eventual exit from the country in 2026.

The Fix

Nepal has two paths forward. Move capital gains collection toward residency-based reporting, matching global practice and removing the trade-level withholding for non-residents. Or negotiate and codify tax treaties that guarantee non-resident traders a credit for tax already paid to Nepal, closing the double taxation gap without changing the collection method.

Until one of these changes happens, every non-resident trade on NEPSE carries a tax bill that no trader outside Nepal can predict in advance, and you are back to the same dispute that cost Axiata four years and Rs 47 billion.

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 29 days ago

How to get Corporate Tax Clearance certificate in Nepal without any rental/owned corporate address?

I have a private limited corporation for knowledge-work only so I don't need any physical location (Work From Home). So no rent agreement for the company anymore. The actual income tax liability is not an issue but can I get Tax Clearance Certificate for this company without any rental agreement? What to reply when the karmachari asks for rental TDS?

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 1 month ago
▲ 1 r/Nepal

How to get Corporate Tax Clearance certificate in Nepal without any rental/owned corporate address?

I have a private limited corporation for knowledge-work only so I don't need any physical location (Work From Home). So no rent agreement for the company anymore. The actual income tax liability is not an issue but can I get Tax Clearance Certificate for this company without any rental agreement? What to reply when the karmachari asks for rental TDS?

reddit.com
u/CyberTron_FreeBird — 1 month ago