““So if you reject the anarcho-capitalist position, the question immediately resolves into the issue of how much coercive power the government should have.”

Well, apparently as much as it wants. How are you going to stop it when you give it power over you and all of us, claim that anyone who resists is an enemy, and that that state itself IS society? It is the monopolist of violence, like you said.”

I did not say that the state had a monopoly of violence. That’s absurd. Anyone can commit violent acts anytime they choose. I said the state had a monopoly of “legitimate” violence. That legitimacy is conferred upon it by non-state actors, and it is these that control the actions of the state.

““The primary purpose of government is to protect the population from outside attack (national defense), and to protect individuals from each other (the police power).

You recite the catechism well, but who protects the population from the inside attack of the gov’t agents?” The state is controlled by the non-state actors who give it its legitimacy. There is usually some theory, such as the divine right of kings or democratic elections, backing this up. But ultimately it is people, but it is the people acting through various social institutions. In Europe these institutions often involved the aristocracy and the church. In the US, state and local governments play a bigger role. Political parties used to be much more important but have declined due, in part, to our efforts to “democratize” them.

““Private institutions must have the power to enforce their decisions and that power could not be coercive or they would be essentially state institutions.”

No. This right here shows that you’re not really acquainted with libertarianism enough to critique it properlyl. Once again, the NAP means that no person or group may INITIATE force against another. When a person or a group uses force in self-defense (to repel attack, to capture and punish criminals, etc.), that use of force is retaliatory, and it is legitimate insofar as it is carried out properly for that narrow purpose (you cannot become lawless yourself in dealing with the lawless). The STATE is a group of people claiming a TERRITORIAL MONOPOLY on the use of force, but it INITIATES force against the very people it claims to be “protecting.” It does this through the protection racket of forced payments for dubious incompetent “service.””

Agents of the state are likewise not authorized to initiate violence against members of the society unless someone is threatened. You might argue that this is often honored in the breach, and this is true, but the same problem would arise for anarchist forces that had combined for alleged “self-defense.” How do you protect yourself from the people who are supposed to be protecting you? I’ve already noted what happened in the middle ages when the Roman Empire broke down. The peasants hired guards to protect them and the guards became their masters. I don’t see how anarchism prevents a force of “protectors” from becoming masters. Those who have the force will rule. Thus, legitimacy becomes crucial. When you have a legitimate force, you know which force to needs to be contained and controlled and which forces need to be suppressed. Anarchism puts arbitrary vigilante justice on the same level with non-arbitrary law and legitimate rule. It equates mere gang behavior with true and legitimate law enforcement. But criminal gangs merely seek their own advantage whereas law enforcement is about protecting the innocent population. The idea that anarchists can somehow authorize gangs for their own protection and not become controlled by those gangs is extremely naive.

I will grant that the state does have a right to initiate a quasi-violent act in the form of taxation. That is due to the professionalization of the political function. When people defended themselves in militias, the “tax” was in kind. The young men were expected come forward for the defense of the community. If a young man refused to do so, there was no way, other than social pressure, to force him to do so. When young David visited the camp of the Israelite army, he did so to bring food to his brothers who were in the militia. There was insufficient organization even to feed the troops. But as a society becomes larger and more complex, it becomes necessary to professionalize these activities, and that means that taxes are needed to pay the professionals.

What shouldn’t be professionalized are the politicians themselves. This is where we have moved away from self-government. Congress no longer meets for a few months every couple of years and spends most of their time in other professions and living under the laws that they have enacted, and it is unthinkable that a political party would deny re-nomination to a popular president as the Republicans did to President Grant in 1876.

The growth in the size and power of the US government is not due to the monopoly of legitimate power of the government but due to the growth of the size and wealth of the nation as a whole. We don’t see a similar growth in the government of Switzerland, for example. It has grown somewhat, of course, because its wealth has increased. The government of Tibet hardly grew at all under the leadership of the Dalai Lamas because the country remained poor and the population small.

Libertarians have the answer to that at the theoretical level; we do not have the answer at the practical level. We do not know how to keep giant corporations and other special interests from gaining political power and using it for their advantage. But anarchism faces that problem, as I have already pointed out, at a much earlier level than libertarianism does. It faces that problem even before large corporations have a chance to come into existence.

Only one force can be recognized as legitimate within a given boundary, and that force is a state.

“So if you reject the anarcho-capitalist position, the question immediately resolves into the issue of how much coercive power the government should have.”

Well, apparently as much as it wants. How are you going to stop it when you give it power over you and all of us, claim that anyone who resists is an enemy, and that that state itself IS society? It is the monopolist of violence, like you said. Anyone who resists is an enemy of the state, thus an enemy of society, and must be punished, lest we all fall into anarchy where some gang might become a monopolist of violence and loot us, thus depriving us of the peace and security of the monopolist of violence which loots us and protects us from other monopolists of violence who would loot us. Right?

“The primary purpose of government is to protect the population from outside attack (national defense), and to protect individuals from each other (the police power).

You recite the catechism well, but who protects the population from the inside attack of the gov’t agents? Why must protection come from an organized racket, a monopolist that uses violence and threats of violence to force the people it purports to protect to pay it whatever it demands, for however long it demands, without any recourse, and regardless of performance?

And if it is a noble goal to create an institution of protection, why does the state treat it as a crime when people do this voluntarily and peacefully? If the state’s goal was to see people were protected, it would welcome institutions which take the burden off of it. But this is clearly not the goal of the state. Its goal is quite obviously absolute control and domination of a territory. It cares not what the costs are or how effective and efficient it is in dealing with crime since it isn’t a market player. It exists through arbitrary force. It doesn’t have customers; it has subjects. It doesn’t sell a service; it compels people to pay. Those who would normally cease to support it for its abject failures and ever-increasing unbounded costs and its utter perversion of justice are prevented from doing so under threat of punishment. The people are treated as criminals if they refuse to support a gang that claims to be protecting them despite all evidence to the contrary. This is supposed to be “order,” but it is the exact opposite of a civil order. It is the chaos of institutionalized and unaccountable violence, theft, and corruption. Often these regimes end in conflagration, either killing their own subjects or starting unnecessary wars which lead to global chaos. Surely you have something more cogent to say about this than just reciting statist platitudes.

“Private institutions must have the power to enforce their decisions and that power could not be coercive or they would be essentially state institutions.”

No. This right here shows that you’re not really acquainted with libertarianism enough to critique it properlyl. Once again, the NAP means that no person or group may INITIATE force against another. When a person or a group uses force in self-defense (to repel attack, to capture and punish criminals, etc.), that use of force is retaliatory, and it is legitimate insofar as it is carried out properly for that narrow purpose (you cannot become lawless yourself in dealing with the lawless). The STATE is a group of people claiming a TERRITORIAL MONOPOLY on the use of force, but it INITIATES force against the very people it claims to be “protecting.” It does this through the protection racket of forced payments for dubious incompetent “service.”

A private person or institution is not a state unless they attempt to create a monopoly over some group of people they are able to subject through conquest. It is universally acknowledged (except by you perhaps) that a private person or group may act violently in self-defense in any case. The reasons we create institutions to do this for us when we can are very plain: 1) to avoid the pitfalls of vigilantism and feuds, 2) to allow the division of labor to work in bringing forth those best suited to these tasks.

“The only crime defined in the constitution is treason.”

Ah yes, that bulwark of liberty, the constitution. It works like a charm, doesn’t it?

“Ultimately, governments exist precisely because of the failure of the NAG principle.”

Another stab at libertarianism devoid of context or meaning. The NAP (not NAG) is a principle of action, so if you don’t follow it or are NOT ALLOWED to follow it you don’t get what that principle seeks to preserve. And in your case, when your government saints don’t follow their supposedly enlightened rules and the supposed constraints on them, you get mass murder, civil wars, revolutions, burning cities, starvation, mountains of non-repayable debt, etc. Do you understand that the state upends us if we attempt other peaceful arrangements? The argument is precisely that it PREVENTS society from enforcing the NAP and institutionalizing it broadly because it, the state, is the primary violator of it! It’s a gang of thugs claiming to be the enlightened peaceful guardians of “liberty.”

“Humans are social beings by nature and that gives rise to a political function.”

Then you probably should not be advocating the squashing of the political functions which
would arise out of a free society where people are self-directed and not treated like cattle.

“It is INDIVIDUALISM that creates the need for coercive institutions.”

What???

“I think the hierarchy of separate federal, state, and local governments that arose with the founding of our republic is the optimum model of social organization.”

When you outlaw competition, you can call say whatever you want I guess. Anyone who actively dissents from this view will be imprisoned, fined, or killed.

“Unfortunately, we have allowed that model to involve more and more centralized control”

It is destined to do that. When you create a monopoly and force people to support it and endorse it and worship it and sing songs about it, its growth in power cannot be stopped from within that system. As a monopoly it follows the economic pattern of monopolies. It give you monopoly prices and monopoly service. Since it is a monopoly of violence, it will spread its tentacles into every aspect of life. To say “we have allowed” is to miss entirely the nature of a monopoly. If you want to limit monopoly power, you don’t create monopolies! It’s that simple. When institutions are subject to competition, they are “forced” by the market to serve, not rule, their customers. We are trying to de-legitimize the monopolist aspect of the political functions in society because that is nothing other than outright tyranny. No one can argue that it isn’t without falling into contradiction.

What statists argue is that we must have a very large criminal organization in order to save us from individual criminals. The whole argument is absurd. It’s just ancient barbarism dressed up in fancy language that has no discernible relation to reality. Very few people up till now have described the institution of the modern state for what it actually is and actually does. That’s what libertarians are trying to do. When more people break through their programming and realize what’s going on, then “the people” will be better equipped to resist tyranny en masse through non-compliance and through creating and exerting the social power that they have previously forfeited to the state out of ignorance and fear.

“From the point of view of social order, it is the autonomous individual that we have to worry about. ”

Wow. The exact opposite is true. Individual criminals are NOTHING against society. Relative to peaceful society they are weak, stupid, poor, and vastly outnumbered. All they can ever manage in the area of direct crime are relatively small gangs. The problem of social order is the institutionalization of crime when widespread propaganda is used to brainwash people into submitting to ruling gangs under the guise of the “necessary evil” of the state. It’s the greatest con going.

The state turns everything into a racket and everyone into a criminal. They agree to loot their neighbors in exchange for part of the loot. They support outright mass murders like Bush and Obama, people who are consumed with the worship of power and the desire to dominate militarily through violence and lies. There is no gang in the world that can steal TENS OF TRILLIONS from EVERYONE, but your friendly US gov’t can, through creating the Federal Reserve counterfeiting franchise and the IRS shakedown operation. You need to wake up and call a spade a spade. No one’s going to listen to you when you say the state protects us. That is childish nonsense. It’s a fairy tale you’ve been taught to believe in. The reality is a monstrous perversion of society and culture, the impoverishment of billions, and a few hundred million dead bodies. What kind of “order” is that? The devil’s?

“After all, such individuals aren’t always peaceful artists, armchair philosophers, and listless dreamers. Some of them are sons-of-bitches.”

And those are the ones who seek political power, genius. And people like you give it to them!
How can you tell us with a straight face that these sociopaths are our “leaders” and “protectors,” that they bring us “order” and “liberty” and give us “rights”?

If I fall to a misguided mob or professional plunderer that is my fate, you reduce your risk to such an end through your mutual contract at a price you find agreeable. Your security does not have to come at the expense of my autonomy.

Rights are the product of the human institutions which secure those rights.

Human institutions only exist in a abstract sense. Everybody is a individual actor, individual person acting on their own volition and their own self interest. The difference between a ‘posse’ and a ‘vigilante’ is effectively academic. They are both groups acting out of their own self righteousness based on what they think is moral and correct. One group can be wearing a mask and the other a badge, but if the actions are the same and the results are the same then there is no difference.

The state attempts to be the sole group of people with the ‘legal right’ to kidnap, threaten, blackmail and kill not because it’s ethically superior for them to do so, but because it is what is the most advantageous behavior for them to engage in. The people that make up the state apparatus are not automatons whose purpose in life is to carry out the will of the people… they are people with careers to protect. They have their own agendas and goals of their own. As members of the state and engage in violent behavior as they deem appropriate to further their own personal goals.

We are suppose to be living in a Democratic Republic were we have elected officials to represent our viewpoints. The claim is that the federal government derives it’s power from the people. The we have surrendered certain rights and delivered certain powers into the hands of the elected officials so that they may govern effectively.

This is a lie.

It’s a myth perpetuated by the state to give it’s behavior a air of legitimacy. There is not a single person alive that voluntarily gave rights to the government to govern. We are born into the system whether we like it or not, whether we agree to it or not. If we do not obey then we will be meet with violent oppression; depending on our level of resistance.

Just because other governments are worse and that things can be worse does not mean that the current government is legitimate. It does not make their behavior correct or moral or right.

It’s easy to claim that the government performs a important function in preventing oppression from other potential governments and this may be true. That is quite possibly be the only legitimate function of state government: to prevent more oppressive governments from taking over.

However that is the ONLY legitimate function that I can see. The state is evil and it’s behavior is immoral. If it’s behavior is copied by any other group it is automatically deemed criminal completely regardless of the goals or what that group is claiming for it’s motives. It may, however, be a necessary evil.

As such it should be kept to a absolute minimum.

The nation-state is not the only way to deter aggression against peaceful individuals, but the political function cannot be dispensed with. The use of violence can only be deterred by the threat of counter-violence. The question is what use of violence can be considered legitimate, and what use of violence is illegitimate? Few would argue that it is illegitimate to defend yourself, but not everyone possesses that capacity especially against a group that is numerically superior. We make a distinction between vigilantes, who take the law into their own hands, and a posse, which is authorized by the larger community to act. Vigilante’s may be acting on the basis of moral righteousness, but we don’t assume that people are the best judges of their own case. Legitimate acts of violence or threats of violence must be authorized by someone other than the people committing those acts. To argue that those acts are as criminal as the acts of vigilantes, brigands, or gangs is to deny any effective right to be free from violence altogether.

Rights are the product of the human institutions which secure those rights. Abstract theorizing about rights is meaningless without reference to their real manifestation in an imperfect world.

Each bad outcome that you can imagine is possible and indeed many are likely. Replacing them with other bad outcomes, while using force, is simply a lateral move that makes you feel you have achieved your goal at an acceptable price. Once we complete your lateral move and then a few more to make a few more people happy we are back where we started. You have bargained away my right to be free of aggression and if the whole history of statism is a reliable guide no good end will come.

The NAG is irrelevant to the minarchist position. A government is, by definition, a monopoly of legitimate violence. So if you reject the anarcho-capitalist position, the question immediately resolves into the issue of how much coercive power the government should have. The primary purpose of government is to protect the population from outside attack (national defense), and to protect individuals from each other (the police power). Other institutions such as diplomatic institutions and courts to determine criminal guilt and to resolve disputes before they become violent are ancillary, but very beneficial additions to the state’s powers because they also limit violence.

Private institutions must have the power to enforce their decisions and that power could not be coercive or they would be essentially state institutions. But the power of defense and the police power do not need to reside in the same institution, and that is essentially what the Founders did when they wrote the constitution. They gave the national government the power of defense and diplomacy and added the power of currency and of taxation to assure that it had the necessary tools for that purpose. But the police function remained largely with the states. The only crime defined in the constitution is treason.

But the NAG principle does not deal with moral obligations. Private adjudicative institutions are fine as long as people voluntary submit to them. That may work for small groups where social pressure is sufficient to enforce compliance, but in larger societies it is unlikely to be very effective. The most obvious moral obligation involves child custody and child support cases, but other situations are more subtle. You must force parents or private individuals to support these children or you must force the public to support them through taxes. Either way, you are using force. The presence of charities to provide funding and of others willing to adopt the children may alleviate the need for the use of force, but that does not mean that we don’t need government power to deal with the extreme case where private means are inadequate.

Ultimately, governments exist precisely because of the failure of the NAG principle. Humans are social beings by nature and that gives rise to a political function. That function may be largely voluntary or semi-voluntary in small, closely-knit societies where banishment or social ostracism is an unmitigated disaster for most of its members. It is INDIVIDUALISM that creates the need for coercive institutions.

I think the hierarchy of separate federal, state, and local governments that arose with the founding of our republic is the optimum model of social organization. Unfortunately, we have allowed that model to involve more and more centralized control through a greatly expanded role for federal and state governments with far less reliance on local governments and private and voluntary institutions. Humans are largely inclined to self organize into cooperative arrangements, but this is only possible when they are protected from the more violent individuals who are not inclined to yield to more pacific social restraints.

This is why I object to the individualistic model, which emphasizes rights without regard to obligations. From the point of view of social order, it is the autonomous individual that we have to worry about. After all, such individuals aren’t always peaceful artists, armchair philosophers, and listless dreamers. Some of them are sons-of-bitches.

When, for example, the fundamental injustice of slavery finally penetrated the conscience of the civilized world there was only one thing to be done — abolish it forthwith.

Wrong. Most places used incremental transitional arrangements (e.g. “freeing in the womb” in Brazil or a tutelage period in British colonies) precisely in order to avoid the damage done by abrupt abolition (e.g. in the U.S.A.).

Such abolition was radically discontinuous with what had gone before — indeed radically discontinuous with human history from its earliest records — but who will argue that this change was not for the better?

I would, precisely because of its entirely avoidable – and often avoided – collateral damage. That is, it’s a faulty comparison just to consider only abrupt abolition and keeping slavery; of those alone, the former is better – but it’s still far worse than the options not considered.

As we have seen, conservatism is rooted in a disposition to resist rapid and fundamental change …

Wrong. That is not its root at all, though that is a corollary that often follows in particular instances because of the logic of the individual cases. It is actually far more a matter of Viscount Falkland’s dictum during the Civil War (the real one) that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”. There could be cases where abrupt change was desirable, and others in which even incremental, thin end of the wedge change was not.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is always at the mercy of the questions — whose tradition? which customs? what habits?

That’s silly. What count are the traditions, customs and habits of the particular conservative involved, of course – and then it is plain wrong to assert that “If it develops a principled and rational response to these questions then it has ceased to be radically conservative and has begun to move in a direction that, I believe, will lead it to espouse the fundamental position of liberty as the sine qua non of all the virtues, and thus to transmute into a form of libertarianism”.

Libertarianism does not tell you how to live. It does not tell you what your moral obligations are, except honoring contracts and refraining from violating the person and/or property of another. It’s a socio-political principle that is purposely devoid of moral content beyond the rule of non-aggression. Its purpose is to allow maximum freedom within civil society for people to follow their own moral code insofar as it does not conflict with the “reductionist” principle of non-aggression.

Think of it as a universal peace treaty. : )

In a pluralistic society, we require this ethic to be spelled out clearly and adhered to religiously, because otherwise you have the sad state of “culture wars” raging in the political arena where people believe they have the right to make others conform to their morality by force. This conflict over who gets to dominate others is immoral in itself in almost all cases, and what’s worse – it’s totally unnecessary.

What is essential for the acceptance and adoption of this peace treaty in society is for people of all stripes to make a clear distinction between vice and crime. Granted that this may be difficult in some cases, it is actually a moral obligation to do so. We must make a distinction between vice (or sin) and crime so that we take care not to violate the conscience of people who hold different values. In a moral/religious sense, the NAP can be described as the Golden Rule in its negative form of, “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” So it is certainly compatible with at least Christian moral principles. But it doesn’t allow for Christians to force non-believers to be virtuous – which is an idea as alien to true Christianity as it is to true libertarianism.

At issue is not whether there are universals, but which are enforceable upon anyone and everyone by anyone and everyone. Libertarians have boiled this down to natural rights, specifically property rights. In order to be a moral actor, one must of necessity be free of coercion, so within any system of morality people must have freedom of conscience, freedom of action, bound only in the social context by the same set of rights equally applied to others. Libertarianism is nothing but a baseline for civilization. It’s not meant to be anything else.

What is envisioned is a free society wherein people are governed by the most basic and universal rule between them (the NAP), while they then are free to build the specific institutions which conform best to their own needs and desires according to their own philosophy of life, without interference from others who “know better.” People, through free association and economic choice, will decide how to rank their values against others. They will give their own time, energy, and money to institutions they support, not what some ruling cabal forces them to subsidize.

It is within a civil society where the battle of ideas, values, and lifestyles should be “fought” via the positive means of people actually choosing what enriches them and avoiding and de-funding that which doesn’t. It’s just a free market that allows bad arrangements to fail and good ones to flourish.

As far as law is concerned, a free society allows for polycentric law to arise in a naturally decentralized way. This is very important, especially concerning the sticky issues of family and children. Hoppe calls it a “private law society,” and I like that term. It means that in such intimate matters as the family, for example, Catholics would have recourse to cannon law and Muslims to sharia law (with the understanding that people have voluntarily submitted to some social authority that conforms to their values.) There is no reason why marriage, divorce, runaways, child abuse, child custody, etc. could not be handled by ecclesiastical courts of the church where the couple got married. The Church is a perfect example of a private law society. It can handle education, marriage & family issues, health care, insurance, and charity for very large numbers of people. It is a voluntary organization and, freed from the oppression of the state, can and does function very well as its own society. Now just imagine contracts and agreements with other social institutions like free market insurance companies, independent arbitration firms, and detective agencies, throw in various other secular non-religious institutions, and it is not hard at all to see society functioning without the state.

And libertarians would also stress the value and necessity of contract here as well. There is no reason why the community a person belongs to could not witness, adjudicate, and enforce a marriage contract. This is something that has been stripped from the church community by the state – the ability to directly intervene and adjudicate among members of the community. As for inter-community disputes, they can be handled also be pre-arranged contract and dispute resolution provisions. This is something that society naturally does. The state is NOT special as an arbiter or social authority. It is simply one which asserts itself primarily by force and claims monopoly jurisdiction. In fact, in almost all cases, it is the state which has parasitically co-opted previously existing social institutions such as courts and turned them state monopolies. We seek to reverse that process and allow natural institutions of society to come back to life.

This is a very large topic, so I’ll stop here and perhaps comment later on other points you brought up. I think libertarians understand better than anyone else that “we” are society. The problem is that “we” have very little say in actually forming that society. We are oppressed and impoverished and stunted by the state, which is in fact a demonstrably anti-social institution.

You raise some good points, and this is a very big topic. Books have been written on it so I don’t assume that we are going to resolve these issues in a few blog posts. But I do think that it makes a difference what the underlying principles supporting your philosophy actually are. It makes a difference because the details of your program derive from the underlying principles of your philosophy.

You raise the issue of morality and seem to think that morality demands freedom. I see it quite the opposite. Morality is about obligation. Liberty is freedom from obligation. Political freedom does not free you from moral obligations. If you fail to provide for your children, the state will take them away away from you and provide for them. We might say that you have forfeited your rights over your children because of your negligence, but the state must also tax other citizens to provide for support of the children. A strict libertarianism doesn’t allow for the state to tax its citizens except for defense, law enforcement, and protecting property rights. The anarcho-capitalist position doesn’t even allow for that.

I do not believe in natural rights, but I do believe in natural law, although I agree with Hazlett that that is probably a rather bad name for it. Our legal rights are not based on nothing whatsoever, they are based on the nature of the pre-existing social order in which they are promulgated, but that social order itself isn’t necessarily ordained by nature. There are absolute principles of morality. That is what natural law means, but there are not absolute moral rights. Rights and obligations are intertwined. If the law says that a child belongs to its extended family, then the alcoholic father who runs away and abandons his children has not created any legal problem. The grandparents, aunts and uncles step in automatically. There is no need for any court adjudication at all. So the law is different from ours, but the moral principle that dependent children need to be provided for is maintained. But rights cannot be separated from obligations so I agree with natural law but not natural rights.

I mentioned earlier that libertarianism is a reductionist approach, and that is my primary objection to it. A reductionist will say that a brick house is composed of bricks all of which are more or less the same, but a holistic person will point out that a house is something very different than a load of bricks. It is a structure, and wooden house bears far more resemblance to a brick house than a brick bears to a tree.

All the bricks in a brick house are alike, and all the citizens of a polity are, in the libertarian view, also alike. They have the same rights. But such an approach does not come close to accounting for human nature which is far more diverse and far more complex than that. Nor does it adequately describe the structure of the polity itself much less of the entire society. Although all citizens are alike in the libertarian polity, we immediately have to make exceptions. Children under 18 do not have the same rights as adults although a seventeen-year-old does have the same rights as a seventeen-week-old. Adjudicated incompetents do not have the same rights nor do convicted criminals. Parents do not have the same rights as childless people. They have control over children, but they also have responsibilities for the children. Rights always come with exceptions which just demonstrates how inadequate the word is for expressing the true nature of human relationships in civil society.

Imagine you are a member of a pirate gang. You have agreed among yourselves that no moral principles at all will guide your conduct toward your intended victims. Prevarication, murder, rape, torture, cannibalism – any crime whatsoever is entirely within bounds. There is still one situation in which those principles will not work. You cannot apply then to each other. As soon as the members begin to betray, lie to, and murder each other, the group will disintegrate or be defeated. I call these the principles of honor. These are the principles of natural law or morality that are absolute. Specific laws must derive from these principles if they are to be effective in governing a society, but the specific laws themselves will differ from one culture to another and from one context to a different one.

If civil society IS the state of nature for humans, and this is one of the fundamental axioms of conservatism, then any “natural rights” must necessarily be those rights that are conferred upon the people by civil society. Any attempt to “revolutionize” civil society must necessarily destroy many of those rights even if the revolution is an alleged libertarian one.

We should proceed with the cause of liberty, but we should proceed cautiously.

If rights are not inherent in the nature of things, then what are they based on? What else is there other than the nature of things to base rules upon? I don’t see the relevance of such quotes anyway. You can be a libertarian regardless of how you got there philosophically. I would not agree at all with the philosophy of the people you guys are quoting, but I’m sure we would all agree not to initiate force against each other and prefer peaceful cooperation to coercion.

The trashing of natural rights is unfortunate – and you can quote me on that if you like – but it doesn’t turn libertarians into communists. You two guys and the writers you are quoting seem to have a problem with the idea of a fixed morality – or, more than likely – a transcendent one. That is an entirely different question though. So-called conservatives do not differ from libertarians on account of moral philosophy per se. Since many conservatives claim to be Christian, they would certainly not be trashing natural rights in favor of utilitarianism or whatever else purports to explain how and why rules come to be, and yet they are NOT libertarians. And libertarians can vary widely in their philosophies and moralities and yet agree fully on the non-aggression principle.

So the difference between conservatives and libertarians is in the social ethic applied, not the underlying philosophy of what rights are and where they come from, etc.

I think it’s a complete red herring to contrast natural rights with legal rights. You quote Hazlitt to the effect that legal rights “guarantee” rights people never had before. Well, that’s dangerously close to legal positivism if the law becomes the only source of rights. It kinda reduces everything to law and society as you two seem to also be doing. The law creates everything and solves everything. It’s the first word and the last word on everything. Whatever is legal is good and whatever is illegal is bad. Whatever is in law is real and all else is fantasy. The law “guarantees” everything (what a joke!). I’ve heard many people say things like this. For example, “No one has any rights at all. You only have the rights you fight for and win.” To me, that’s not philosophy. It’s an emotional outburst. The only reason people seek codification and enforcement of their rights is precisely *because* they believe they have those rights by nature and demand justice from others in respecting those rights. They are pointing to some standard using rational argument that they demand others assent to. They do not think that circumstances, or the state of the law, or society’s collective views are the final arbiter. They know and recognize that they have a right to life and property regardless of what any ruler or any system or any philosophy says. They want the law and society to RECOGNIZE their rights.

I really do think that libertarians and the libertarian-minded especially should strive not to insert needless false dichotomies into discussions like this. This is the plague of political parties and pundits. We don’t ever need to split people over natural vs legal rights or over moral philosophy in general since our goal is simply a mutual respect for person and property.

I can tell you why I don’t agree with Hazlitt or Burke or Hayek on some of these points, but that is a separate issue. And I still don’t see what conservatism is supposed to actually mean. I certainly don’t see differences in philosophy as any kind of barrier to libertarianism making headway in the world. The libertarian ethic is specifically designed to be applied universally, and so it does not require assent to anything other than a single principle of action.

Because humans are willing to use force against each other, we are forced to respond in kind, and government is about the collective, and legitimate, use of force against recalcitrant individuals.

Your ethical views may obviate the need for a government to restrain your acts. The rest of the world is another matter.

The problem with the above quotes is that they presume a violent and uncooperative world where people are inherently bad.

First and foremost, what world are you talking about?

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita

I make no claim to the exactness of these statistics, but if I use them as a starting point it’s pretty clear that the world is not rife with wanton violence. (Let’s remember these statistics do not tell us the type of murders (i.e. premeditated vs. involuntary manslaughter etc.)

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita

If I take this broader statistic, which fails to describe non-violent vs. violent crimes and the types of crimes committed -many which wouldn’t be crimes in my anarcho-libertarian society (i.e. drugs, prostitution, etc.), we notice the top ten contains mostly first world countries (with hyper-socialist countries like New Zealand, Finland, and Denmark in the top five).

Oh by the way, the xenophobic American media propagated crime capital of the world…Mexico, falls in at #39… below Switzerland at #20 and the good ole highly institutionalized USA at #8.

I suppose you will try to convince me that without your beloved institutions these statistics would be higher. Yet, if you look at the bottom 15 countries, a number of them are considered third world which presupposes the institutions that you value as highly necessary for liberty to exist… are underdeveloped or non-existent.

These statistics beg the question-why is there so much crime in the most advanced countries of the world where institutions are well developed and less crime in underdeveloped countries?…hmmmm

Let me summarize by saying what I find most interesting is how well-intended, overly educated, and extremely well read people are so arrogant in their belief that the world is an evil place when all they have is an armchair view.

So, Rob, what world are you talking about?

I had to shelve my reply to you for a time……you require of me a deeper introspection than most…probably because you’re a fellow anarcho-libertarian. (At least you seem to be based on your numerous replies to Rob.)

To be honest, I agree with many of the distinctions you’ve been making. And if you must know the truth, the original draft of my previous reply read -“You know you’re right. Moral code is a poor choice of words…”

Let me just say that my interpretation of libertarianism comes from a personal orientation, and the challenges to those beliefs are from the streets more than from books.

Through a lifetime of withstanding those challenges, I have come to see libertarianism as an ideal that can be achieved on a personal and social level but not a political level. Like people who embrace religion- a Christian or Buddhist who sees the world through the eyes of their prophet; knowing the world they envision may never come true in their lifetime but believe the potential exists inside every person…that’s how I see libertarianism.

(Thus I have a personal bias in attempting to derive a normative moral value or two from the ethical framework of libertarianism.)

I like your “vacant morality” (again, it inspired thinking) and if I drop my bias and agree with the observation that libertarianism is a “vacant morality”… it is only vacant in respect to morality from a descriptive sense – as in a personal distinction or preference.

But…from an objective or normative sense- nothing could be farther from the truth. We can derive a few, simple, basic normative moral values from libertarian ethics and those are the only (normative not descriptive) values we need.

I’ll bet you got up in time to go to work, and I’ll bet your breakfast did not consist of rice and beans.

I think Hayek was also closer to a libertarian conservative position than to pure libertarianism. In fact, his ROAD TO SERFDOM is, in many respects, a counter part to Burke’s REFLECTIONS, but where Burke critiqued the French Revolution, Hayek critiqued communism and socialism. Of course, Hayek was more concerned with economics due to the nature of his subject, but both men were concerned about the processes which, while claiming to enhance liberty, ultimately led to tyranny.

Thank you for your kind words. No. I haven’t read Hazlett, but you have sparked a curiosity in me. I think Hayek is also closer to the libertarian conservative position than to the pure libertarian view. In fact, his ROAD TO SERFDOM is, in many respects, the same kind of critique of communism and fascism that Burke’s REFLECTIONS

I don’t see much substance to your reply. In fact, it seemed to be mostly misrepresentations of what I said. I did not say that Rothbard believed in “complete” self-sufficiency. You confuse my examples of self-autonomy in the larger philosophical sense with my actual examples of their political application. I did not say the libertarians were the same as French revolutionaries. I said that that is a danger of commitment to a purely ideological approach. I did not say that libertarians opposed institutions to secure rights. I directed my critique only at the “anacho-capitalist” version of libertarianism of which Rothbard was the most prominent proponent. Since I didn’t really say any of the things which you object to, I am puzzled as to what you actually do disagree with.