Should individuals be allowed to own these weapons? My guess is yes, but just wondering what you all think.
Own them, yes. Keep them around other people, no. A threat to do something criminal is a crime itself, and there’s an implicit threat in the proximity of those things to populated area.
What, like a Thought Crime?
But my thought on these weapons is that they have no legitimate role in a civilized society, self-defensive or otherwise, and would be made prohibitive to own through whatever means the community has at its disposal to accomplish this prohibition. Insanely high insurance rates being the most likely avenue in a free society.
It really depends on the yield. Small, tactical nuclear bombs are the safest way to defend from the kind of motorized army that the U.S. fields. One bomb can blow a whole division away, rendering an invasion futile.
The big city-killer bombs mounted on intercontinental missiles are just terror weapons, and in a free society have no strategic use whatsoever.
Now that I think of it, the propagation of nuclear weapons has the same social effect that the move to gunpowder weapons once had. Medieval armies relied on expensive, highly trained troops that became obsolete once you could give anyone a rifle and a month of training to make an army. Tanks are the new knights, but they can’t be put to much use against a nuclear-armed militia.
Individuals would, of course, be ‘allowed’ to own nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. However, as mentioned before, this would probably lead to very high insurance rates for individuals. Also, it is unlikely that anyone would be willing to deal with you if you kept nukes laying around the house.
On the other hand, private defense agencies and militias with a good reputation would probably own tactical nuclear and chemical weapons, as deterrents to large-scale invasions, without too much of a financial penalty. Biological weapons are rather more iffy, as (with current tech, this could change in the future) they are rather hard to control. Large-yield nukes (in excess of a few kilotons, really) would also probably be out of the question.
Again, all of this is completly voluntary. You could keep a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb in your basement for company. People just wouldn’t buy from, sell to, or probably even talk to you.
You’re asking the question from a god’s eye view.
A better question would be: What would you do to an individual who owned these weapons?
No, its not.
If I say to you, “I’m going to sodomize Justin Timberlake”. Have I committed a crime? Of course not. If someone is in danger of having a crime committed against them they are entitled to act in their own defense, but that is entirelly removed from the legal system. Killing in self defense and the death penalty are completely different actions.
No, theres not.
Owning a gun, or a stick of dynomite, near a populated is an equaly implicit threat.
But, in a free society, people owning these devices would not be legally required to have any insurance. Right?
But without an insurance company / private defense angecy to protect them and their weapons of mass destruction there would also be nothing to stop the local community from deciding these weapons are too dangerous to let somebody own, getting together a few dozen men with guns (or a militia) to converge on their place of residence, break in, and take away the weapons to be dismantled.
That’s assuming quite a bit. Assuming that the WMD owner tells the public so they even know about it, assuming that he doesn’t have a big family with their own guns, assuming he can’t use his chemical weapons on the people trying to take them from him . . .
Stop trying to wargame the situation. The question is quite legitimate: would someone who is known to hold weapons of mass destruction be expelled from a community? If so, there is no amount of personal security system that would undo his expulsion.
No, nothing like a Thought Crime. To threaten a person with harm is coercion, and coercion is criminal.
Hopefully the roads would make it illegal to transfer those weapons without some sort of permit only attainable by a respected PDF or militia. So when the roads find out that he/she does have the weapons the roads police can arrest him/her, and put his/her nukes back where they came from, as they could not have gotten to the destination without the illegal use of their roads.
I didn’t know Austrian philosophy allowed for any entity to have the power to forcibly evict someone from their own personal property, when they hadn’t even hurt anyone, stolen from them, or otherwise violated anyones’ rights. Does it?
No, of course not. But people are permitted to forbid such persons and their property from any contact with their own within reason, and I would suggest that in the case of WMD’s that “reason” includes a measure of proximity. But even without that provision, it is very doubtful that any civilized area would do business with such a reckless person - in short, there would be a strong disincentive for the owner of WMD’s to get them anywhere near others, even if it were permitted by law.
So you’re against the government doing something like this, but for allowing an untrained mob band of people to do it? The government cannot use force to restrain these people, but a mob can? The mob is allowed to commit violence?
This is ridiculous. So people would be allowed to have nukes, but it would be illegal to move them? And the road companies would have to search every car!
If the covenant in place requires them not to stockpile dangerous weapons, then they are violating the community’s rights.
There are only individual rights. There are no “community” rights.
I thought Austrian ideas were about private property, not some sort of collective ownership of the land?
Basically, the philosophical ingredient of the question amounts to the decision between absolute individual responsibility (total freedom, anarchism) and selectively chosen protective measures enforced by whatever authority in place (relative freedom, minarchism in the best case).
If you state that “Nuclear weapons threaten the well-being of a community and therefore should be banned”, you’ll also have to endorse a superior power to take measures accordingly. This power, as we all see today, may as well earlier or later infringe upon other freedoms deemed as dangerous, e.g. the freedom to own any kind of arms. We have laid the moral foundation for that by stating a thing should not be allowed because “it’s dangerous”.
If you, on the other hand, rely on road owners to be reasonable and forbid transport of nuclear material, you’ll face a problem of practicability and another problem of endurance. As has been pointed out before, it’d be a big task for road owners to check every car just to carry out that particular regulation. That’s the practical issue. Drivers will eventually get annoyed and profits will fall. Road owners are therewith inclined to change the rules, or a smart road builder is going to set up another road next to the existing one to suck off profits by not making the same mistakes his competitor tripped over. So endurance is not calculable here. Which means that, in the long run, people are still going to get their nukes, either through sloppy controls or through road owners’ desire to maximize profits. Of course, there’s a chance it may not turn out that way, but it’s by no means great enough to count on if you really want nukes out of private hands.
The minarchist is advantaged on the issue as he can weigh dangers with benefits and decide, as an elected lawmaker, on a case to case basis without having to apply Austrian principles. Market anarchists will have to be blunt and say “Yes, we take the dangers of nuclear armageddon for the sake of free humanity”, everything else being an excuse for not sticking to principles.
Needless to say that with hardly controllable bio weapons and WMDs, it’s become a lot tougher to stick to radical market anarchism than it was in the days of gunpowder and Kentucky rifles.