Q & A - IV

Libertarian Hegemony and Land Ownership

Many political philosophies either assume or require a hegemony of thought or belief to be successful. For example, a theocracy can only exist when the religion is consistent in the area governed. Is a hegemony required for Libertarian philosophy to be implemented, or are there means for those who disagree to be involved? (Basically, does it rely on a "people should…" or a assumed shared value?)

Does a libertarian society require a hegemony of thought? Hegemony seems too strong of a word for my answer to be an affirmative. Shared philosophical values would, largely, be necessary for a voluntary society to function well. But such values wouldn't necessarily need to be taught or enforced through force, though there would punitive measures if crimes were committed. 

Should members of a libertarian society all believe the same things? Morally, no. Shared values, on the other hand, are important because of the practical repercussions involved. In general, the standards of libertarian thought could be defined as: the protection of the individual liberty and the use of force only in self-defense. So what would happen if people who didn't agree with those principles tried in live in a libertarian society? Nothing, if they respected the rights of others. The practical repercussions would come into play if they chose not to respect those rights. 

Here are examples of this. If you were a private law man who broke into the home of an innocent man, you may be shot and killed. If you were a criminal who stole someone's property, you may be captured or killed. If you were a political figure (in a non-AnCap scenario) who attempted to tax your citizens, you may find yourself dealing with legal insurrection and personal liabilities. If you unjustly lay your hands on another person, you may be liable. These are all examples of people intruding on the rights of others, and they all arise from deviating from the standards aforementioned. 

Do we need a hegemony of thought in a libertarian society? No. But chances are, people who were not libertarian would likely find themselves in constant trouble due to their actions. Non-libertarians can peacefully exist side-by-side with libertarians, but they can't expect to step on peoples' rights without consequence. That would likely be the litmus test for people seeking to live in a free society. 

♠

Do those that do not own land have the same rights as those who do? Or do those who own the land have rights above other individuals who do not? In a saturated society (such as the urban east coast or southern England) how would one apply libertarianism without reducing most of the population to de facto serfdom under the few landowners?

Rights do not come from owning land. You have the right to own land, sure. Furthermore rights are related to the protection and ownership of property in general. But rights themselves don't actually arise from property; rights arise from the inherent quality of being a human being. This much has to be understood for the next thoughts to be understood. 

Rights may not come from owning land, but owning land will entitle people to use that land as they see fit. What will arise from this, in a voluntary society, is the absence of certain political privileges assumed to be human rights in contemporary America. Voting would take on an entirely different nature, for example. Who would you vote for and to in such a society? There would be no government, so voting for political parties or leaders wouldn't exist. What would exist, would be voting in the way that members of homeowner associations vote. People leasing land or dwellings would have limited control of how they use their leased goods, much in the same way that lessees are contractually limited in what they can do with their apartments now. Another example of absent political privilege would be anti-discrimination laws. In a society where people are free to use their owned property as they wish, discrimination would rise. 

What could we expect in those scenarios used as examples? Land owners might exert disproportionate amounts of control over lessees, sure, but that control would limited to voluntary interactions. People concerned about gaining more control could always find leasers who could cater to them. People could also cooperatively own property through contracts. Compared to historical serfdoms, people would be to exercise freedom of movement (in the form of secession) and dissent on the individual level. This would act as a check on power. The same is true of discrimination. While land owners could discriminate against others, but this freedom also has consequences. Such practices would draw in like-minded people but it would also push away others, and that would limit the growth of such people and organizations. 

A libertarian society could not devolve into serfdom unless the principles of liberty were forgotten. Property rights would limit the influence and power of people, far more so than any current constitution. The ability for the individual to vote his feet and money is a powerful social tool in such a society. Such societies may extend more options to those who own more property but this isn't a social ill; it is just the natural result of people competing and possessing resources in varying amounts.  

♠

Q & A - III

Secession and Law

Does the right of secession render any law or agreement arbitrary? Couldn't one secede from any law or agreement, from business dealings to murder, and just claim they are seceding?

    - How would agreements or contracts be enforced in a voluntary society without resorting to duress?

    - Is the idea of "rule of law" applicable to a voluntary society?

Secession can be a confusing topic, one that is generally made even more confusing when made too abstract. Secession could be understood a few different ways:

I. Right to withdraw from a union, confederation, or other forms of government.

II. "...withdrawing from an organization, union, military alliance or especially a political entity." (Wiki)

III. The right and ability to vote with your feet.

Secession, in terms of the above definitions, is clear to understand. But what about in regards to laws, agreements, pacts, and so forth? We can answer this but first we have to understand the nature of the agreements referenced. What kind of agreements are we discussing? What are these pacts? What form of law do we mean here? I'll briefly discuss these to clear up the topic of secession.

Secession may apply to agreements and pacts but this depends on the context. What kind of agreements and pacts do we mean? Agreement, here, can only really mean something like a treaty or a contract. A pact in this instance would have to refer to a kind of formalized agreement or formalized treaty between two entities. Other definitions of the words wouldn't apply to secession (you can't secede from harmony or consensus, nor from a state of density), so let's focus on the context that does apply. The question at the root of this, based on context, is this: can one exercise the right of secession in regards to treaties, contracts, and legally binding agreements? The answer is yes. Treaties and pacts don't remove the sovereign quality of a group\nation\state through the act of signing it. I will explain more of this below, for sake of clarity. The only issue we have to consider is whether or not a contract or legal agreement details consequences for a breech in contract. If such consequences were agreed upon, then they would likely be legally binding. If they were draconian in nature, it is highly unlikely such a contract would be signed voluntarily and as such this concern is a non-issue.

Does secession apply to law and the rule of law? Certainly. The confusing part about this issue is the form of law enforcement in a voluntary society. In a voluntary society, there would be no monopoly on violence. As such, market forces would lead to the production of private security and law enforcement. Going hand-in-hand with that, we would see that different areas and different clients would naturally prefer to hire security agents to enforce specific laws. Many of the laws, especially those involving victimless crime, that we see today would probably not be enforced and instead would be relegated to housing contracts and housing agreements. Murder, on the other hand, is not a crime that would likely vanish due to its very basic nature (it's ubiquitous in its prohibition across many time-periods and regions). And even if a murder took place in a no-man's land, the insurers and private security forces of the murdered would likely still pursue the murderer regardless. Lastly we must consider the very likely scenario of outlawry. If a person did kill another and then attempted to "secede" from an area where it was illegal (which, again, would likely be almost everywhere), it would likely be the case that such individuals would become outlaws and would find themselves outside the protection of others, and would likely become prey themselves.

Going back to the discussion of contracts and treaties, we need to understand the underlying principle at work. What is the principle, the mechanism, that allows for secession? The right of secession is that, a human right. It doesn't emanate from pieces of paper, nor does it emanate from agreements between people. Human rights, regardless of how you explain their principle source, are an inherent quality in humans. As such, you cannot sign away your own rights and this includes the right of secession. Whatever the nature of the treaty or agreement of political union signed by parties involved, it cannot erase a human right. For that reason, we cannot logically defend the argument that a binding union of sovereign parties can destroy the essential human rights of said parties.

♠

The question of rule of law in a voluntary society is one that I covered before. However I will take this moment to discuss it a bit more here. Agreements and contracts would be enforced through competing courts of law. Accordingly we would see different forms of enforcement depending on the violation at hand. Violations of contract, as opposed to violations of law, would likely have differing forms of enforcement in comparison to, say, rape or murder. And it is important to see a distinction between contract violations and actual law breaking.

Take this scenario as an example. Let's say that in a city, there is no law about smoking. Despite this, a business could have its employees agree, under contract, not to smoke on the job. A violation of this contractual agreement wouldn't be a violation of law, since there is no law against it. The business would then punish the employee either through write-up, firing, or a fine.  In general, I am highly suspect of the idea that private insurers of security would have victimless crimes be illegal, since its clientele would have to pay for law enforcement and coverage themselves. We would likely see a huge amount of variation in the laws in regions, and people would self-segregate based on lifestyle.

Laws, on the other hand, would have to be enforced through the agents of private security companies. Hans-Hermann Hoppe suggests that these would likely be insurance companies, due to the nature of their industry. In such a scenario, people and places would have different companies offering different forms of security coverage and apprehension. While they may employ violence, there is nothing anti-libertarian about this. Violence in defense of self or others is not the creation of aggression; it is a response to aggression. So the rule of law would apply to voluntary societies, but we should expect to see a great diversity in how law enforcement would manifest.

♠

For more on these topics, please see my past post which contains multiple links describing and exploring the topic of private law:

Private Law Enforcement: The Two Farms Revisited

Additionally check out these links:

Nationalism and Secession by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Democracy - The God That Failed 

Mises on Secession

Q & A - II

Libertarian End-Game and the State

What is the end-game of Libertarianism, if there were no opposition? What about your personal philosophy?

An interesting question. Does the libertarian have an end-game? Yes and no. There is an end-game in a general sense but really this end-goal is more of a medial goal. The general, medial goal of the libertarian is to ensure that liberty reigns in his world. Now I use the term world in a specific manner, not to mean "planet", but rather as a "realm that is rightfully his to exert control over". I use this term rather than "nation", "community", "state", and so on, because this realm of control is variable dependent on individual circumstance. I shall explain this further below. 

The libertarian seeks to make his interactions voluntary but the amount that this is possible is very dependent on a variety of factors. Libertarians, in general, don't (or logically can't) seek to promote world-wide liberty. I say "can't" because many do not want liberty and as such would be forced to be free, and it is a violation of the non-aggression principle to do so. It's also a fool's errand anyway, which is why you don't see forced liberty promoted very much. Liberty always manifests at smaller life circles before it can manifest at the larger ones. The libertarian may be only to make his own familial interactions voluntary. Other libertarians may own businesses and thus have the ability to make more voluntary interactions through business. If the libertarian is a citizen of a large nation like the US, then his end-goal would be to try make his life as an American as free as possible. Some use voting for this end, while others just do it through daily choices. In essence, the libertarian's goal is have liberty in as many of her life circles as possible, and this will manifest accordingly based on life situations and place of residence. 

The challenge here is whether or not there can be a single end-game in a thought system that emphasizes the individual, and because of this I say that there cannot be a single end-game. Going back to what I said before, the libertarian end-game is more of a medial goal than a true ending point. Becoming free and exercising voluntary choices are not necessarily the end-game, but instead are the middle of a greater goal. Instead, obtaining liberty is just the means and the end is the ability to lead life on one's own terms. The end-game, so to speak, is to choose your own end-game. Being free isn't just about being free, it's about being able to use your freedom in accordance with will. 

My own personal philosophy has more of a specific goal that builds on the medial goal of acquiring liberty. Without saying too much or too little, it's my political goal to live in a world where people are absolutely free to choose how to live and with whom to associate, where people are free to follow divine law and true will. I envision a world where like-minded people can work together towards common goals for their own benefits, and to usher forth creativity and inspiration towards the goal of self-development and realization of the spirit. I don't see this as Utopian, for I already have had glimpses of such interactions and possibilities in my own life. Rather than Utopian, I see this as what will occur when people have the radical freedom to do what they wilt and form new tribes with mutually shared ideas in mind.  

♠

At what point does rejection of the state become dismantling of the state? Does Libertarianism anticipate an entropic end of the state or does it call for violent overthrow or revolution like Communism? 

I will keep my answer to this question rather brief, since others have written more and better upon it than I myself could wish to at this point. Libertarians wouldn't need a violent revolution or war of any kind. Indeed, a revolution would imply replacing an old order with a new one. So really, libertarians seek independence rather than revolution. And a libertarian war for independence need not be fought with fire and steel, but rather with dollars and consent. Recall what I've said previously about smaller circles of life impacting larger circles of life. As libertarians realize their freedom more and more in their daily lives, they can produce more tangible changes in larger life circles over time. Eventually libertarians will only have to begin to slowly and consistently withdraw their consent to be governed, and to slowly drain the state of its ability to tax them. As time goes on, the state will wither away and become hallow as it has its power to coerce (via taxation) is diminished. No violence is necessary in such a scenario, unless it is in self-defense against a slowly dying state seeking to control people one last time in its death throes.

For a more detailed and eloquent description of this, see this piece from Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

How to Fight the Modern State

♠

Q & A - I

Homesteading and Conquest 

If Homesteading theory gives right of ownership to whomever began to appropriate land FIRST, is there a Libertarian movement to return land to the Native Americans? Why or why not?
    - Does historic conquest supersede original appropriation? IE, England's conquest of Australia, US westward expansion, European colonialism, etc.

I don't know if there is a libertarian movement for Native American land repatriation. It's possible that there is but I simply am ignorant of it. It's been my personal experience that libertarians are generally pro-indigenous (or rather, anti-State) in regards to the plight of the Native Americans. The "why not" is tricky, and worthy of contemplation. 

The first reason I can think of is that, logically, many non-Natives would lose their land and possessions in a hypothetical repatriation, and thus American libertarians would be against it due to rational self-interest. The second reason is that such repatriation would be extraordinarily complex and difficult to actually happen. Native American tribes would have to be able to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they owned the land before other groups of people. The problem here is that it would be difficult to prove such a thing without written documents. We can't expect there to be deeds and bills of sales in every instance, especially when two or more tribes compete for the lands. The result I think we'd see is something like this:

I. The vast majority of Americans being displaced from America.

II. Some groups of Americans, mixed ethnically or otherwise, remaining in America due to a lack of clear land ownership.

III. The few remaining pure and mixed Native American descendants slowly attempt to manage the continent.

A third problem, one not often considered, is what would happen to the infrastructure of America as a whole if a repatriation happened. Much of the physical infrastructure of America is a confusing mix of labor and material from a variety of sources. Since it would be nearly impossible to determine who owns what in such a scenario, we'd likely see much of the physical infrastructure of America completely dismantled and parceled off to non-Native Americans. This, in addition to the departure of the majority of the businesses, schools, and other associations, would immediately turn America into a third world nation. From that point it is likely that the Native Americans, and the others remaining in America, would have to then purchase the goods, services, and immigration of the very people they just removed. A fourth problem is who is and is not considered a Native American. Would mixed peoples count? Would Mexicans count? Would certain Canadians count? This would complicate things even further. It is because of this level of complexity, I don't reckon this to be knot unraveled any time soon. 

Conquest, on the other hand, is more clear cut if it is recent. Recent conquests would not supersede original homesteading and thus repatriation occur, and hopefully the recentness of the conquest would make things more clear than in the case of the Native American. The problem arises when the sands of time obscure the situation. Native tribes were conquering and stealing aplenty in the past, and thus it may not be clear who the truly original owner was.

Take modern Mexico as an example. The US, through war, stole much of Mexican land. Let's say that, for some reason, repatriation would occur. Who would the land go to? The first answer, though false, would be the Mexican nation. This is false because it belonged to someone else before the creation of the Mexican nation. Who did it belong to? Not New Spain, since they took it from the local tribes who lived in those specific areas. If repatriation did occur, it would chop up the land into a multitude of very small city-states based on the tribes who could prove that they originally lived there. And Mexico, as a nation, would hold no claim to those lands. Indeed, much of Mexico would have to be chopped up accordingly. Mexico would be reduced to the original city-state occupied by the Mexica, with the rest of the land going to the various other tribes who lived there before the Triple Alliance and the Spanish conquered them.

The underlying challenge is this: how far down the rabbit hole do we go? War, theft, and plunder are constants in human history. If we followed the challenge of repatriation all the way to its logical end point, we would end up with a large area of land (originally the nation in question) divided into a vast expanse of varying city-states, tribes, and communities. Such an arrangement wouldn't necessarily be negative, but it would be incredibly different than the simplistic outcomes envisioned by many. 

♠

The Social Contract 

What is the difference between a false "social contract" and a collective agreement among a group? Is it just a matter of scale? Can it be done via representatives?

The core falsehood of the social contract is that, despite the name, it is not a contract at all. A contract can be defined as something along the lines of:

I. A formal, legally binding agreement.

II. A written or spoken agreement that is enforceable by law. 

III. A voluntarily made commitment that holds each party to a specific accountability. 

And so on. We find no such qualities in a so-called social contract. It is neither formal nor voluntary. It is neither written nor verbal. We can't even find such a contract to prove that it exists; it only exists in the minds of certain people. So what's the difference between that social contract and a collective agreement? The latter is an actual agreement. For such a collective agreement to be penned, it would have to be a formal agreement that is preserved in a specific form (written or verbal). It would detail the parties involved (that collection of people), what their agreement is composed of, what are consequences of breaching the contract, and so forth. The difference isn't a matter of scale, so much as it is a difference of essence. One is an actual binding agreement (a contract) and the other (the social contract) is a political theory invented in order to explain the roots of human societies. 

♠

Private Law Enforcement: The Two Farms Revisited

Private property, liberty, and the right of free association all go hand-in-hand. It is a mistake to think that civil liberty and economic liberty are opposed; they both spring forth from the same fountainhead of liberty. The following piece addresses secession and the natural outcome of secession from a governmental body; the enforcement of law without a state.

♠

Secession is the natural and logical extension of the right of association. Mises defines this as:

“The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.”

If people secede from a government that means they withdraw from its various forms of inefficient, obtuse forms of law enforcement and peace keeping. What’s the option for people who want to settle disputes in such a society? The option is private security, which can take multiple forms. I would do those various forms injustice if I attempted to briefly summarize them here, so instead I’ll give links to examples of stateless law enforcement in security.

Here is a discussion about stateless, competitive law in Viking-era Iceland:
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long1.html

This paper discusses enforcement of private property in Celtic law:
https://mises.org/journals/jls/1_2/1_2_1.pdf

And lastly we have a discussion about Xeer, the traditional private law of the Somali:
http://mises.org/daily/2701

There’s also the potential for non-traditional forms of private security that would exist in places without traditional systems. To know more about those forms of private security, read the following pieces.

The first political philosopher to write about privatizing law enforcement, Gustave de Molinari, discusses the production of law enforcement in a modern society in this work:
http://library.mises.org/books/Gustave%20de%20Molinari/The%20Production%20of%20Security.pdf

In more recent times, Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses insurance companies producing private security in a stateless society:
https://mises.org/daily/5270

As you can see, private law enforcement is nothing new nor is it even all that radical. People could make their cases about first appropriation without the need for public courts and there would even be competition between private courts to discover the best forms of law enforcement. Indeed, due to the competition between companies we’d likely see an increased quality of law enforcement at increasingly lower costs. This is the opposite of the case now, where there is no incentive for government to provide better law enforcement at a low cost due to monopoly.

♠

Going back to the hypothetical farms, let’s say each farm owner claims that they own the land of the other. Each claims that their ancestors worked the land first and passed the deeds down the generations to them. In a stateless society, there are many options as I have just described. It’s possible that each would file a claim with their respective companies and then the companies would determine ownership based on the evidence provided. There’s also the possibility that the sons would go to regional elders or their respective Goðar to get it figured out, depending on tradition. In any case, there would little incentive for violence or theft, due to the high costs involved.

This is also the case if one son says the other son is using land that is rightfully his and then expects compensation for loss of property. If the son who files for compensation has proof that he owns the land due to his ancestral land title, he will file the claim with the appropriate entity and then that entity will contact the other son’s representative. The key to all this is that one son can prove, beyond doubt, that specific plots of land are his. Without some form of deed, title, or certificate, such a claim would be hard to fulfill. In a stateless society, families would likely take far more care when it comes to crafting wills and keeping property titles secure for further generations.

♠

If you take anything away from this, it ought to be the following. In a state where there is a monopoly on law, people will only have one option. Regardless of how good or bad that option may be, they will only have that single recourse. In a stateless society, many forms of law enforcement are possible, likely with a great deal of overlap in a single region. People will have more options that will be suited to their individual needs, and those options will likely be better and cheaper than what we see now.

A Tale of Two Farms

I am often asked how a stateless society would look and operate. If there was no government, how would law operate? How would people dispute claims without violence? Here is one such example given to me, so that I may discuss such points.

"You and I own two farms. There's a spring that begins in my land and then flows to yours. You and I have a standing agreement that I won't do anything to the water, since your farm depends on it. We both pass the farms on to our sons. Your son decides to continue farming, while my son never learned how. Instead, he blocks up the spring and starts bottling the water to sell. Without this spring, your son's farm is unsustainable as there are no other natural or nearby water sources or means of pumping in more. 

In this example, my son's rights have come into conflict with yours. The spring is on my son's land, and he is rejecting an contract he never agreed to. However, by doing so he has limited what your son can do with his property, thereby passively deciding for him he can no longer farm his own land. Neither son has done anything outside of their rightful property, but by exercising his right to do whatever he wants on his property, he has taken the right for your son to do the same."

♠

Let me begin by stating that there has always been difficulty for political philosophers, though especially libertarians, in determining rights to water and air because of their unique characteristics. But here is my understanding of the solution, as I’ve learned from reading the works of Murray Rothbard. When it comes to land disputes, we need to understand the dispute from a perspective of appropriation, also called “first-ownership-to-first-user”. So in this hypothetical, the son who dams up the river is indeed in the right. His father owned it and passed it along to him, thereby making it his. But this doesn’t actually result in a conflict of rights. The son who was merely using the river did not own it; he was allowed to use the river by the owner. Such a revoking of privilege can happen, especially if there are no precise contracts to prevent its use from being at-will. Thus the son who owns the river wouldn’t be encroaching upon the rights of the farming son; the latter technically does not own the land and only may farm out of the kindness of the river owner (as there is no contract).

Your three options of resolutions amount to: sale of water, communal shame, and violence. Options 1 and 2 are viable in a voluntary society. This is essentially what happens in most of the United States nowadays, where people pay companies to use water. A private owner or companies would change prices arbitrarily but then they would likely suffer loss of a customer base due to failure to compete. Shame is also an important force in a land with minimal laws. If a person does something immoral or is generally an unsavory person, other members of the community can boycott him and pressure him to change his ways or cut him off from goods and services. He would have less people to sell the water to. Option 3, on the other hand, would be unacceptable. Even if they successfully stole the water source, there’s no saying that the son wouldn’t get it back through private law enforcement. 

With that in mind, what options do the sons have in a voluntary society? There are other options that you have yet to consider. Option 4 would be an exchange of goods and services. The son who is using the water to sell could still need produce, as he does not farm. In that case he could pipe in water to the farmer in exchange for crops. Option 5 would be purchasing the water source. The farmer could form a corporation with other farmers and buy the water source from the son who owns it. Option 6 would be that the farmer finds a new supply of water. This could be another water owner or it could be that the farmer surveys the region to find a nearby source to irrigate. So you see, there are other options aside from a monopoly of force. A free market society, by its nature, would favor cooperation and business rather than naked force. There’s no need for obtuse social contracts when you have legitimate, explicit contracts between mutually benefiting individuals.

♠

An important principle, one that I have touched upon, is that of homesteading. This is the "first-ownership-to-first-user" idea I mentioned previously. To discuss homesteading further, I’ve chosen a quote that summaries it very well:

“For remember always the basic principle: that all resources, all goods, in a state of no-ownership belong properly to the first person who finds and transforms them into a useful good (the “homestead” principle).”

In cases involving private land disputes, it’s quite easy to apply. The question isn’t who is currently using the land but who used the land first. The public property disputes are harder because public property, being a quagmire itself, muddles everything up. Private land disputes are easier because we just have to look at who first appropriated the land. Once we found out who appropriated the land first, we would know its rightful owner. Enforcement would fall upon private entities, either companies or individuals. 

So let’s build upon the farm example to illustrate this. There are the two families as before, with their farming disputes. Your son makes part of his land into a golf course and my son uses his land for grazing. The homestead principle is clear on what would happen if my son destroyed the other son’s property through the grazing of cattle: the cattle grazing son would be liable for property damage. You could argue that the golf course was being used for anything and therefore the son owning it would lose title to the land, but I cannot agree with such an argument. It doesn’t matter if the golf course is being used or not; the land was still appropriated first by the family of the golf course owner.

The idleness of the land is irrelevant and doesn’t void the title to the land. Active use of the land, in some form or another, is what produces the ownership in the first place but it doesn’t need to be present continually to keep that land. Consider the alternatives. If active use is what dictates continued land ownership, then you couldn’t leave your land for long out of fear of having it taken by another. If your family had an ancestral home in another city, it could be easily snatched up if no one was attending to that land. You also would have a hard time owning plots of land as a landlord, if you’re waiting for the right moment to develop it into an apartment complex or something like that.

♠

In the situation outlined above, cooperation and profit-seeking would solve the problems. If the rancher wants more land for grazing, he could buy up sections of property from the other son. Or he could strike up a bargain where his cattle have free access to both plots of land, in exchange for a percentage of meat. He could also go in the entirely different direction for his grazing, either buying or appropriating land in those areas as is required. There is no need for destruction or violence in those scenarios, which is more than can be said for the modern state and its monopoly of force.

The Bundy Family Problem

The following piece has been edited from its original form as a series of shorter writings.

♠

The problem of the federal theft of the Bundy family's land, as far as I know, is one of theft. The problem has been muddled on account of the fallacy of public property, but indeed it is theft pure and simple. 

A state cannot sign away the rights of a citizen, except as punishment for some crime. Even in that situation it’s shaky because the accused criminal is being held to laws that he did not consent to abide by. In the instance of living under a state that has not been formed voluntarily, even the revoking of exercising rights in response to a crime cannot be said to be moral for that reason. If it were said to be moral, then a citizen could be locked up or killed on any number of arbitrary political laws made by an unaccountable state. In the instance of living in a voluntary society, a person would be given the choice to either abide by certain laws or leave or secede depending on the case. Thus it is clear that even if the constitution allowed the federal government to encroach upon this man’s rights, it would not be legal or just. The constitution, as good as it is, is not perfect and even some of the Founding Fathers knew this.

You may ask who determines which rights are irrevocable. In general, human rights are seen as irrevocable because they come from nature (or a God). Generally speaking, as a radical libertarian, irrevocable rights are those that directly proceed from the right of private property. Specifically, in this case, self-ownership. This determination is from observing human nature and the application of logic to that observation. While I don’t have the space to write a whole defense of that, I’ll summarize it as the following. People own themselves; this is self-evident fact. From that fact, we can determine that people have the right to: life, liberty, and property. If you kill someone, you are destroying their property. If you take away someone’s freedom, you limit what they can do with their property. If people own themselves, they may use themselves as they see fit. The principle of homesteading also comes from this.

You ask about the best way for an individual or group to respond to unjust law. Both ways can work, though in different ways. Sometimes it is effective to use existing avenues but then moral problems arise. In that case, you’re demonstrating the legitimacy of that false system of law by cooperating with it. So that method can work, though I don’t think it is the most beneficial way. Perhaps that method is best for addressing small problems on the local level, where such legal actions may be most effective. I think the best way, the most beneficial way overall, is to withdraw all forms of support for that government. This means active obstruction, finding ways to stop paying taxes, active law breaking en masse, and in general any form of seceding from that institution.

♠

In the Bundy situation, the problem is muddled by both Bundy and the governments of Nevada and the US as a whole. Bundy ought to understand that his grazing land isn’t the property of Nevada; it’s his family’s property through homesteading. But he instead makes it about Nevada public property, which exposes him to the hypocrisies in that article. By aligning with Nevada, he aligns with a state government that thought it could throw away the rights of its citizens to the federal government. And the federal government, as we saw in the War Between the States, is always more than happy to crush human rights when the opportunity is available.

It’s a case where all parties involved are wrong. Bundy has the land rights because of family homesteading, not because of Nevada. Nevada can’t make binding, perpetual agreements that thwart the rights of all its citizens; at most it could only enforce an agreement amongst those who agreed to it at that moment. The federal government can’t enforce those agreements either, for the same reasons. A good political philosopher to read on this topic is a man named Lysander Spooner, who ran a competing postal service in the mid 19th century until the federal government forced him to stop. 

Now moving from a specific case to a more general one, I ask, who is the community? We have to be suspicious when we see people use the terms “society”, “community”, “the nation”, “a culture”, and so forth. These terms can be convenient short-hands for groups of people but they cannot be understood as actual entities that decide upon laws or behaviors. A community doesn’t decide upon an action or an agreement; only certain individual human beings do that. So individuals in an area can agree to a contract but they cannot enforce that contract on people who didn’t agree to it, even if it may or may not benefit them. If such enforcement happened, it would encroach on the rights of those who didn’t agree to it, especially if it were enforced perpetually on whole generations of people who weren’t even alive when that happened. It is for this reason that secession is so vital to the freedom of minorities and other small groups of people who would dissent against a majority. The next time someone equates secession with bigotry or hatred of minorities, remind them of what I have said here.

Past Creating Future

One of the most closely guarded secrets of magic is that the past creates the future and yet the present can change the past. It is no betrayal for me to publicly state this secret, for it is a secret guarded by the nature of man. Only a man's own power, will, and experiential knowledge can unlock it's gates. And this is true of other esoteric secrets as well; one could paint esoteric knowledge on a billboard and still keep it secret.

♠

Here begins my writings on political philosophy. As I contemplate time and the world before me, the latter in constant flux due to the former, I consider my own past in regards to my political positions. One criticism of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is that his views and definitions change with nearly every passing book. But I say this is no fault; it shows growth and continual power. It is in that manner that I view my own progression of political positions.

When I was in highschool, I often flirted with communism. When I read Marx and certain French political philosophers, I found myself drawn to the idea of a communal existence. With my distrust of authority, I thought that the world would be better if the people themselves were the government of their own villages. But I always couldn't help but notice that such an end goal never seemed to be accomplished, and that governments always seemed strongest and most permanent in that middle transition from capitalism to communistic village. Furthermore, in is within that transition that horrible atrocities occur in the name of a utopia.

By the time I was in college, I had moved onto the position that societies needed to be formed and maintained on a mutually agreed upon basis. I came to this realization after insights gleamed from life experience and history. As I talked to more and more self-proclaimed advocates of the people, I realized more and more that they were either little big men or emasculated intellectuals. Both types harbor the will of murderers, thieves, and dictators. And indeed, this may be why no society has survived the violence of the ever-so-permanent transition from socialism to communism. As I opened the tomes of history, however, I saw alternatives to the death-mongers of the socialist and communist bandwagons.

People say that magic can be found in books. This is false. But one can create magic from books, and what better place to find these books than a good library? There I found examples of constitutional republics and truly democratic tribal societies (as opposed to false democracies found today). My gaze passed from would-be revolutionaries and fell upon great peoples; colonial-era Germanic and Celtic peoples, Icelandic vikings, pagan Irish, and masked farmers in the hills of Chiapas. While these people may not have been perfect or libertarian by any means, at least I started to find alternatives. And alternatives are good, at the least, for getting the wheels of the mind turning.

When I was posted in Zambia I began to truly see the need for such alternatives. Many in Africa blame the whites for the motherland's modern problems. But this is a cop-out, since the truth is hard to swallow, and no men enjoy walking through thorny bush. The problem of the African nations is that there are centralized powers attempting to buy off, control, and dictate the very lives of their citizens. The African nations, in general, attempted to replace the colonial powers that conquered their tribes. They didn't consider dismantling those colonial powers; they only considered replacing white rulers with black ones. The result is that they fell prey to the exact same pitfall that ruined the whites; the continental European idea that society is an artificial construct to be molded by little big men and intellectuals in power. In short: they too succumbed to the might of the state and the economic folly of socialism. The difference between the Africans and Europeans, however, is that the latter has experience using the state to lord over citizenry. The former, on the other hand, has neither the experience nor the tradition of it, and unsurprisingly has all the horrors of the state and little of the supposed benefits.

It took the heat and isolation of Texas to allow myself to fully overcome all resistance that stopped me from embracing a radically free market position. It is now my position that everything must be privatized for liberty to truly flourish. In achieving that goal, we in the United States would also enjoy a transitional constitutional republic that far exceeded the one originally crafted by the Founding Fathers. I say this because such privatization wouldn't be immediate; it would likely be piecemeal and punctuated as groups of people withdraw their consent from the state. And this withdrawal of consent, this secession from the government, originates from the right of self-ownership, which I elaborate upon further in an upcoming post.

♠

This blog will serve two purposes. First it will be a more permanent way for me to keep track of my own writings on this topic. Second it is my intention that the ideas discussed here will act as a springboard for others who still grapple with their own political positions. As my own tale demonstrated, people can change their positions as new information becomes available. If my writings contain such information and help a few out along their paths, then the work will be well worth it.

In passing, however, I also ought to add that these writings will be from the perspective of one who is not Christian in any sense of the word. As such, certain ideas, topics, or forms of writing may be difficult to understand for people who are not magicians or pagans. To those people, all I can say is this: try your best.