The following is a slightly revised version of a message I just posted on the LP-Radicals list which I felt was worth sharing with others.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Saying that liberty is the *only* political goal we
should be seeking may be a bit too strong (I think that
transparency in elections, where governments may exist and elections
are held, for instance, is another reasonable goal). I certainly
agree that liberty is our *main* goal. But whether one sees liberty
as the main goal or the only goal, it does not follow that
prioritizing freedom for people living on that part of the earth's
surface known as the United States over freedom for others,
regardless of the relative level of government abuse being
experienced by each should be our goal. That would be a nationalist
goal, not a libertarian one. Libertarianism is about worldwide
freedom for all people, irrespective of nationality or geographic
location.
I further believe that the guiding principle of libertarian
organizations, including the Libertarian Party, should be
libertarianism, not the self-interest of their members. I mention
this because some libertarians have justified nationalism on the
basis that it is in their self-interest to prioritize freedom in the
jurisdiction they live in over freedom elsewhere. I am *not* saying here that it is wrong to
spend more time working on local issues where you live than on issues
that are local to some other part of the world, or even that it is
wrong to spend more time working on local issues than global issues.
I *am* saying that when it comes to matters of triage -- where there
is going to be some aggression at least in the short term whether we
like it or not -- it is wrong to use libertarian organizations to
advance nationalism or self-interest over the Non-Aggression
Principle. And I believe that the interpretation of the Non-
Aggression Principle most faithful to the spirit of that principle is
to minimize aggression where we cannot eliminate it.
While I appreciate commitment to principle, I don't think it's
always realistic to avoid supporting some choices that aren't fully
libertarian, because failing to do so can sometimes produce an even
less acceptable result. Susan Hogarth recently quoted Solzhenitsyn
quoting Pushkin that the only available choices in a particular time
were to be a tyrant, a traitor, or a prisoner. Likewise we may face
scenarios in which *none* of the choices are acceptable from a
libertarian perspective, and in which the way to produce the least-
objectionable of a bad set of alternatives is *not* by doing
nothing.
Let's take the classic balcony hypothetical, and give it a little
twist. Say you and a close friend are discussing libertarian theory
on a 10th floor balcony when she falls off and would plummet to her
death, but manages to grab hold of a flagpole on the 9th floor, when
the owner of the 9th floor balcony comes out and demands she let go
of his flagpole and get off his property immediately! She calls up to
you for help, but you have no means to help her, and she says she's
inclined to trespass by ignoring the guy's demands and climbing onto
his balcony. Nine floors directly below where your friend is hanging on for dear
life, there is a busy outdoor cafe packed with people. If she
falls, as well as dying herself, she is almost certainly going to
land on and injure or kill one or more additional people. Therefore
if she chooses to let go of the flagpole rather than climbing onto
the balcony and trespassing on the balcony-owner's property, she
would be committing aggression against those people in the cafe.
You know that your friend is highly principled and respects
your judgment, and believe she might actually let go and fall if you
don't voice your agreement that it's OK to trespass in this
instance! Do you endorse her trespassing?
The point of this example is to illustrate that we will encounter
circumstances in life, political circumstances among them, where
*none* of the options we have are acceptable from a libertarian
perspective, and there is no way to make it otherwise. In some of
these circumstances, doing nothing (i.e. "keeping our hands clean")
will result in there being *more aggression in the world* than would
have been the case had we "gotten our hands dirty" by reluctantly
tolerating some aggression in order to prevent other aggression.
If the balcony scenario is too hypothetical for you, consider a case
in which Congress is debating the hiring of a special prosecutor, and
funding that office, in order to investigate what members of Congress
believe is an executive branch cover-up of the secret (and
unconstitutional) detention of prisoners for indefinite periods of
time without due process. Obviously the office of the special
prosecutor would be funded with stolen taxpayer dollars, so voting
for this expenditure would be committing aggression, just as surely
as voting to authorize, say, an invasion of Iraq -- the difference is
only a matter of how many dollars are involved, the fundamental
nature of the aggression committed against the taxpayers being the
same in both cases. Yet if the special prosecutor in this scenario is
not funded, the practical result might be a president continuing to
get away with far worse aggression, including in terms of money
stolen from the taxpayers, since the continued expense of
incarcerating large numbers of people who should not be in prison
would likely be greater than the expense of the special prosecutor.
When no aggression is not an immediate option, I believe the
approach most in keeping with the Non-Aggression Principle is *not*
the approach which allows us to keep our own hands the cleanest, but
the approach that results in the least possible amount of aggression
in the world. Extra-national military actions that involve aggression are
of course only justified in response to aggression (for instance a
tyrant violating the life, liberty, and property of people under his
control).
* * *
I also believe that guaranteeing the equal rights of each person
born onto the earth to resources not produced by human labor or
investment -- e.g. land and air -- is philosophically justified. If
someone were able to figure out a way to homestead air and regulate
its usage -- say by "tagging" individual air molecules with their
property stamp -- so that newly born human beings were unable to
breathe without breathing air that belonged to someone else, with
those owning the air adopting the practice of charging people for
breathing, I say this would be a form of aggression against those
being charged. They would be denied their birthright of use of the
common resource of non-human-effort-derived air.
Now obviously we (fortunately!) do not have that situation with air,
but we do have something like it with regard to land. People not born
into the world "owning" land are nevertheless charged for using it by
those who do "own" it by virtue of having been there first to claim
it, or (in most cases now) inherit it. As being charged to breathe
air would be, this is technically a denial of their birthright and an
aggression against them. It is fundamentally no different from saying
that some people, by virtue of having been born into a specific
caste, rank, or nationality, have more basic human rights than others
born into less fortunate circumstances. Inheriting honestly acquired
money or material possessions is different, because these things were
produced by human effort, and no one has the right to have the fruits
of anyone else's labor redistributed for their benefit.
The best way I can think of to protect the equal rights of everyone
to the truly common resource of land is by assessing a land user fee
-- not a tax! -- to be paid on a proportionate basis by people using/
occupying more than their equal share of land (determined by dividing
total market value of land in the jurisdiction employing this system
by the number of people in the jurisdiction to arrive at a per capita
dollar figure representing the maximum dollar value of land someone
can occupy without being assessed a fee) into a fund to be divided
proportionally among those using/occupying less than their share of
land.
I believe this is an approach to land use that is more in keeping
with the Non-Aggression Principle than the land-ownership system that
exists in most countries at present (obviously the state-socialist
system of government owning and controlling the land is worse than
either the traditional libertarian approach or the geo-libertarian
approach I among others favor, and there is no need to consider that
failed system here).
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))