The Bundy Family Problem

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

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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.

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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.