I placed the pillar of nonaggression in here, because the nonaggression principle is the most succinct characterization of a libertarian society. The nonaggression principle holds that no one has the right to initiate force upon another human being. Very simple. A child can understand it. That’s why I like the expression.
You’d be surprised how many adults have trouble grasping it. "What do you mean no aggression, you mean someone takes a swing at me I can’t swing back? I defend myself?" Of course you can defend yourself. Aggression means starting the use of force, initiating it, causing it occur in the first place. That’s the only thing we’re saying no to.
Most people live by the nonaggression principle in their daily lives as they deal with other individuals. But they don’t see how the principle applies to government.
They think if enough people join together and elect government officials with a ballot, then those officials can use force against you—either through taxes or through some penalty for disobeying an arbitrary rule, say failure to wear a seatbelt. Somehow that isn’t considered force. Government officials are ordinary people, and morality applies to them, too.
The other reason for including nonaggression at this point is that the only way for men to violate rights—life, liberty, and property—is by force. Libertarians uphold the inviolate supremacy of individual rights and renounce the use of aggressive force, especially aggressive force applied by government.
Pillar 6: Protection
If one has the right to life, liberty, and property, one has the right to protect these qualities from harm. If they are damaged, one has the right to restore them to their undamaged status, as well as to recover costs caused by person(s) who damaged them. Another way of making this claim is people have the right to self-defense.
We know as a practical matter, not all human beings wish to behave according to the nonaggression principle. They will damage the rights of others… or more accurately, the rights remain pristine (pure), but the damage occurs to the conditions of life, liberty, and/or property. So we need a method for thwarting these aggressors, and to make them pay for any transgressions. Aggressors can be criminals or foreign attackers.
As we’ll discover below, providing for the "common defense" is a main valid reason for establishing a government (the other reason being adjudicating civil disputes). Being that the number of aggressor-criminals in society is vanishingly small and it is inconceivable that any non-US army will invade the United States, our government can be vanishingly small.
Note -
People who violate the drug laws are not aggressor-criminals; they are not aggressors. Therefore, don’t be tempted to include them in real crime statistics. Further, a majority of real crime would not occur without drug prohibition.
But our situation in the United States, the last holdout for the slimmest amount of human liberty, shows a government instead of being the protector has become the aggressor. Our duty as rational beings is to protect our lives and families from the wholesale aggression of the state. Whose state? Our own state.
I don’t think we need to spend much time demonstrating our state’s aggression when the President can lie about reasons for a war, then launch that war, without being impeached. We’ve identified the premises of the Impeachment-911 project; also we’ve presented other crimes by the government on the lives of peaceful, nonaggressive citizens.
Self-defense against an unConstitutional government is the rationale for the libertarian movement and for the Libertarian Party.
Pillar 7: Law
If the initiation of physical force is to be banned from human relationships, and we need to discourage aggressors wisely, a systematic set of rules for human behavior in a political context is advisable. These rules are known as the law.
The concept of legitimate law developed over centuries as common law, in England. Common law is "… based on court decisions, on the doctrines implicit in those decisions, and on customs and usages, rather than on codified statutory laws." The common law for all intents and purposes is the law, the fundamental mechanism for assuring justice in society.
The US Constitution attempted to establish the framework for limits on statutory law by protecting various rights—such as trial by jury, freedom of the press, and so on—that common law custom already provided. The framework also limited statutory law by spelling out exactly what the federal government could do—and nothing further.
For example, statutory law could authorize funding of police, courts, and military; but statutory law at the federal level could not be written, say, to regulate health care. Nor could statutory law at any level violate the Bill of Rights or other "federalized" protections, such as the 14th amendment that codified the end of slavery.
County Sheriff Bill Masters in his wonderful book, Drug War Addiction(6), tells the following story:
In Colorado, where he lives, in 1908, the entire set of statutes fit in one book. As he says, "Murder, rape, assault, stealing, and trespassing were all against the law in 1908 {and against the common law}. Although that time was not entirely peaceful, research shows it was an era when people were free to walk around most towns and cities without fear."
Today, Colorado has more than 30,000 laws filling twelve volumes that stack about four feet high. I’m sure other states go higher. With so many laws, everyone is a lawbreaker and few respect the law. Unfortunately, such disrespect spills over into scorn for the common law.
The runaway state is accompanied by runaway statutory law. No wonder libertarians cast a jaundiced eye toward statutory law in general. If the state is illegitimate, so are its laws. And as we have seen when we discussed the protection pillar, we certainly don’t need much of a government to make the handful of statutory laws we might need.
Pillar 8: Government
The reason for government is to protect and defend the citizenry against criminals and foreign aggressors and to adjudicate legitimate civil disputes among noncriminal parties. Some question has always existed whether government, which claims a monopoly on its services in a given geographical area, is even necessary.(7)
All libertarians and advocates of freedom hold that if government is to exist it must be constitutionally limited and have a republican format—lower case republican simply means a democracy in which power is delegated by the people through representatives. A republic also has the connotation of being nonimperialistic, meaning republics do not attempt to run the governments or the lives of people in other countries.
This observation is particularly timely because of the criminal-aggressor foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney syndicate. Consider Mr. Bergland’s explanation in Libertarianism:
"The first element in the libertarian foreign policy is neutrality or, as some put it, nonintervention. The US Government is not the government of the world and has no authority to act as a government (militarily, economically, or otherwise) in other parts of the world. The globe is covered with governments of sovereign nations, each having authority over its own area."
The founders recognized the tendency for the power of governments to grow, for the people to become increasingly oppressed by the government and victimized by the ruling class, to which the government supplies economic favor and legal privilege.
Let’s not forget what Thomas Jefferson set forth in the Declaration: "Whenever a government becomes destructive of these ends (liberty), it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
Again it’s time for a real change.
Pillar 9: Services
Really, when I assembled the pillars I only wanted to brush back the thinking of millions of people who look to the government as a source of valuable activities such as education, transportation, social welfare, and so on. I want these people to ask themselves what is the service the government provides? Is the government a teacher, a roadworker, a charitable giver? No, of course not.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
— George Washington
Government is force. Only people know how to teach, how to move, how to help one another… without the state. We covered this issue in the State of the State column.
In fact, every legitimate service government attempts to provide is always inferior, sometimes grossly inferior, to what people can provide of their own free will and voluntary cooperation in the marketplace. Look at Medicare and Social Security if you want proof of why we don’t want the state in health care or retirement, respectively. These services belong to you. No one has the right to force you into a crummy government system.
Remember, a government that is powerful enough to do everything for you is powerful enough to do anything to you.
Don’t give up your freedom for the promise of a pathetic little handout, stipend, or dole. Don’t surrender your honor on the fraudulent hope someone else can be forced to pay for something you want. You have no right to have the government steal living energy from other people on your behalf. Just as no one else has the right to steal yours.
Let’s end this system of universal thievery immediately, and then welcome the wealth and abundance that will enter our lives once again as honest producers.
ReasonToFreedom.com, Freedom 101
- Masters, Bill. Drug War Addiction. Lonedell, MO: Accurate Press, 2001. back to text
- Consider the treatment of government by radical individualist-anarchist, Lysander Spooner, in his work, No Treason, The Constitution of No Authority. back to text
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