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. 

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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

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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. 

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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. 

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