Governments are not sovereign bodies; only individuals can be. Of course, individuals can, through their sovereignty, form groups to protect their own self-interests. The formation of a government, however, is an automatic and apparently irreversible trade of individual rights and sovereignty for collective security.

Were the United States a proper and contractual organization, each individual citizen would be given an opportunity to either sign a contract with the union, and enjoy the privileges of citizenship or refuse to sign, thus forfeiting the security afforded by such a body, and negotiate to protect himself by another means.

Instead, the notion of patriarchal authority means that because my father, grandfather or great-great-great-grandfather chose to ratify the Constitution by course of naturalization or voting that his state join the Union, I am bound by his contractual obligation to serve that union. This negates my natural right to self-ownership and I am born into slavery.

The false notion that the United States “provides” or “protects” rights has misled virtually everyone. It does neither. What it provides and protects are powers and authorities.

Look at the US Constitution: it outlines the powers and authorities for the various branches of government. The Bill of “Rights” delineates which powers and authorities are reserved to the people and the states.

Going further, the Constitution itself abridges an individual’s natural right to life, liberty and property for the sake of the greater good with the fifth amendment’s “eminent domain” clause. By use of that clause, the government of the United States can take “private property… for public use,” so long as it provides “just compensation.”

Anybody looking to challenge the constitutionality of the IRS, jury duty or conscription need only to look at that clause and the Founders’ weak language that expands the rights of the government to take a man’s property. Be it income, home, guns or labor, the United States has the power to revoke these and then “compensate” by whatever means are deemed “just” by their own courts.

They, of course, compensate by means of “military protection,” public roads, public schools, police, lawmakers, Medicare, Social Security, “environmental protection” and welfare. Under this wide umbrella, the government can plainly state that everybody partakes of the just compensation, thus the Union is automatically entitled to an individual’s property to use as it sees fit.

My sovereignty torn asunder, I can now rest assured that my protection from threats will come from whatever actions Uncle Sam sees fit to take. In exchange, I can be called to protect Uncle Sam from his threats, real and imagined, forfeiting my life, after already having surrendered my rights to liberty and property upon “joining” the Union thanks to unfortunate geography of birth.

Can you point me to an article by Walter block that discusses “negative homesteading”?

As for bringing along innocents, I think one can make the case, as Walter Block has, that no innocent has the right to “negative homesteading”, that is, to force his dire situation upon others. Someone being held hostage by a suicide bomber on his way into a crowded building has no right to prevent a third party from stopping said suicide bomber, even if it means putting down the innocent hostage. In the case of Iraq, again, the situation is nowhere near as clear cut. Many more innocents, perhaps at the fringes of an area set to be flattened, ala Fallujah, were perhaps not necessary sacrifices. And as quasibill points out, the “defensive” party in this scenario is a thieving state, illegitimate from the outset.

Roger,

Yes, and no. Yes, when you think of the United States Government as a living individual, spending it’s own rightfully gained resources. No, when you realize that the government coerces people to support its actions whether they agree with them or not. Further, the point at which innocent third parties are knowingly injured in your response to the threat can be a principled deviation from this sort of reasoning.

Asking specific questions, lacking a developed libertarian society, is the same kind of question that socialists (and minarchists) ask when they wonder who will make bread, where, how much and what kind.

Like it or not, I think that a libertarian society will develop and evolve a code of law (in ways perhaps similar to the Somali Xeer). Right now, there is no market for law and so detailed questions seems like trying to solve a problem that today is simply intractable.