You do not have the right to “do whatever the hell you want.” The correct phrasing of self-ownership and NAP is “you and only you have the right to do anything to yourself.” No one ever has the “right” to punch me in the face. Hence, his rights are not being impinged upon when my police force stops his punch.
This article’s false logic stems from a basic misunderstanding of the nature of source of rights. We do not have the arbitrary right to be free. We have the right to our own bodies and anything we make for ourselves or acquire through contract. Nothing more, nothing less.
Well, you do have the right to do whatever the hell you want as long as nobody complains about it. As Hoppe says, the question of social order simply does not arise for Crusoe alone on his island. There is no lawful or unlawful action for Crusoe as long as he is completely alone. It is not until there is another person with whome Crusoe may come into conflict that the question of social order arises. It is not until your actions come into conflict with another individual that the question arises of who may proceed.
The statist, as a central planner of law, seeks to pronounce a priori rules of who may proceed (always the State, of course) in the case of disagreement and conflict. Common law, on the other hand, arises through the resolution of real disputes. Such law does not restrict action from the outset and it does not restrict by imposition. Rather, it only restricts action as a by-product of individual prudence and calculation (if I do X, I am likely to get into a conflict with Y and - if the case history of the common law is any guide - end up having to pay Z, so I’ll do something else instead) and by its very nature it can only restrict action where conflicts actually arise.
Statutory law, on the other hand, is always in one of two categories: useless or destructive. If statutory law already corresponds to common law, it is redundant and useless. If it conflicts with the common law, it is destructive of human liberty and flourishing.
Well, we have a right to not be punched in the face even if we are unable to protect ourselves. The thing is, we do not have an entitlement to make someone protect us.
I don’t think that’s what the article is claiming anyway. The article’s claim might be the typical “but NAP violates those who want to aggress”
There are three basic negative rights: life, liberty, and property. From these you can derive a right to, say, healthcare, but only in the sense that you have the right to seek out the services of others and medical treatment, etc. If it is a positive right it, ultimately, implies some kind of servitude on the part of someone else that can provide that positive right to you.
@Centinel: That is obviously incorrect. I have many valuables stored in my house but I do not have machine-gun turrets and armed guards walking the rooftop. Anyone with the inclination could break in and steal my stuff. But they don’t. And this is the case almost everywhere in the world at almost all times. This is a puzzling state of affairs since it is clearly more advantageous to the propagation of my genes if I (that is, my offspring) can live at your expense. If there was really naught but the threat of instant retaliation preventing everyone from going out and stealing everyone else’s stuff, then mankind would have perished long ago. Hoppe discusses this in the Myth of National Defense.
@Charles Anthony: “RIghts = My implicit assumption that it is morally correct for me to defend or recuperate with violent force that which I claim to be my property.”
Rights are more than a mere assumption - my rights are all the actions which I calculate I can engage in at a psychic profit or net benefit. This calculation is based on observing how it turned out when others engaged in or attempted to engage in the behavior which I am contemplating.
I don’t actually disagree with this sentiment substantively, but I think it’s better to say that rights are not objective.
I mean, you might as easily say that a conversation doesn’t exist. Objectively, it’s just a bilateral series of grunts and vocalisations to which listeners might impute intersubjective meaning.
Conversation - An implicit assumption that my vocalisations are to be understood as I understand them. To put it another way, an implicit assumption that the person I’m talking to will interpret my words the same way that I do.
People like to say that non-objective things “don’t exist”, but IMO they are going a bit far with that condemnation… Considering that by those standards, they don’t exist themselves.
If he uses “liberty” to mean "freedom from responsibility, then less statism means less liberty. That’s a scary and Orwellian twist of words though. The problem with this kind of argument is that these people are unaware of opportunity costs and therefore expect a free lunch to appear out of thin air when government redistributes money. Once you understand that expropriation does not create goods out of thin air, libertarianism becomes a lot more moral. But these people believe in a free lunch, which is why the libertarian opposition to expropriation appears to eliminate the free lunch that the poor would have enjoyed. Therefore they think libertarianism must be immoral. It’s like calling atheists immoral for being anti-miracle.
Guys, look at what he says on the very first paragraph.
“Once we admit, as the libertarian does, that the state justifiably takes on certain functions, for example, police protection of persons and property, there is no rational basis for believing that the state is unjustified in redistributing tax revenue. We cannot stop, as the libertarian suggests, with the minimal state of classical liberal philosophy.”
This was the main critique of classical liberalism / libertarianism by Rothbard and Hoppe. This is what led to anarcho-capitalism as a more sounder and logical philosophy. They showed by empirical example, and by logical deduction, that even a mild form of minarchism eventually leads to the totalitarian state.
LaFollette is absolutely right when he says that by us accepting that the State takes on basic functions, then what rational basis do we have for it stopping there? His entire article is based around attacking older style libertarianism that IMO does not apply any more to the ‘Mises Institute’ type of libertarianism.
He even mentions Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick as the examples of libertarian resurgence, ie all the socialist libertartians and panderers to statism. To be fair this article was written in 1979.
I agree that rights are not objective in the sense of being externally concrete. As Charles Anthony said, there is no magical force in the universe that dictates or protects anything called “rights”. On the other hand, rights are objective in the sense of being internally concrete - i.e. as concepts in our minds. Since there’s no particular connection between external reality and internal reality (i.e. our minds) that must necessarily be made vis-a-vis “rights”, it follows that rights are subjective.
However, the question of whether or not something “exists” depends upon the meaning associated with the word “exists”.
This is what led to anarcho-capitalism as a more sounder and logical philosophy
Yeah, I caught that too (Rothbard explicitly says that it is what turned him ancap), but since it appears that the author doesn’t make use of it again in his later argument, I decided to drop it (though, as you say, it is easily defeatable).
If he uses “liberty” to mean "freedom from responsibility, then less statism means less liberty
I agree that this is the source of his misunderstanding of libertarian rights. He reduces the philosophy down to an arbitrary, straw man concept of “liberty” which he then defeats.
Plunder and violence are part and parcel of mankind’s history. Open a history book to confirm that fact. In addition, the great societies frequently use violence and plunder to gain and hold power.
Hoppe is wrong.
Maybe that is why anarchists like him are marginalized in society because they are non-violent and incapable of securing or defending power against statists who routinely use plunder to gain power.
I am not not making a judgment on whether plunder and violence is moral, just that it is ongoing and it is effective if you don’t have a better way to gain power and privledge.
Centinel, you seem to have (once again) intentionally misunderstood what Clayton wrote. You also continue your tired intentional conflation of “non-aggression” with “non-violence”. Seriously, who in the world do you think you’re fooling here?
