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What libertarianism isn’t

David Z. at …No Third Solution wrote a post that I really liked called The truth about what anarchists want. In response to some immature, lazy, and ignorant blaggers who really don’t know what libertarianism is, or at least don’t know what libertarians envision that libertarianism is (“They want to get together and tear shit up”), David writes:

We don’t want to “get together and tear shit up.” We want to get together and live our own lives! The second people stop pointing their guns at us, is probably the last time they’ll ever hear from us.

The author attempts to sympathize with the political cause, but renounces thusly:

I can understand why people get upset when they feel underpowered from politics. But I see this tearing up as a bad solution to social problems. It’s not a mature way to respond to anything.

And he thinks pointing a gun at people is a mature way to respond to things? He’s off his fucking rocker.
[...]
Let me set the record straight:

We don’t want to “tear shit up” with reckless abandon. We don’t want to destroy all the good things, all the plentiful wealth that man has created through the ages, by virtue of his intellect. What we want to destroy is the systematic enslavement of masses of people, by their governments or others. We want to destroy imperialism and war. We want to destroy slavery. We want to destroy class-warfare, legitimized theft and murder at the hands of the State and its agents. We want to destroy the source of the single, greatest threat to humankind.

We don’t want to ruin all the good things that make life worth living: friends, family, leisure, good health, peace and prosperity. We want community to thrive. We want to see mutual aid, benevolence, free exchange of goods and services, free migration of people.
[...]
Nobody has even attempted to explain why I can’t disagree, without ultimately getting shot.
What the author is telling us to do, is what we’re asking him to do! Judge for yourself. Don’t impose violently upon others who’ve done no harm. We’re trying to demonstrate that the State is a piss-poor solution to any problem. And if he, or others, think it’s a perfectly reasonable solution; let them have it all to themselves.

Just have the decency to leave me out of it.

Have the decency to leave us be. If libertarians had their way, all you Statists could either subscribe to the same insurance, crime-prevention, and adjudication/arbitration services that some us us would, or you could subscribe to different ones. You could run your businesses the way some of us would, or you could run them the way you run them under Statism. You could educate your children the way some of us would, or you could have completely different types of schools. You could spend your money on what you wanted, or you could agree to let disinterested crooks whom you voted specifically against take a certain percentage of your money and spend it on things you wouldn’t have spent it on. You could submit compliantly to all the retirement pyramid schemes, health-insurance rackets, and Orwellian police-state abuses that you wanted, and we wouldn’t stop you, until we were directly threatened.

Why is it that you do not give us the same privileges, the same respect? Does it bother you that you treat libertarians so differently than we would treat you? Or do you not think we would treat you the way we want to be treated? The way we fantasize about being treated on our websites and in our opinion columns every day?

What is it about your morality that makes non-violent non-participation—secession—abstinence—a violation of your moral code?

According to the libertarian moral code, the principle of non-aggression is supreme: no one may in any way harm, violate, or limit another’s person, liberty, or property. No one may force someone else to do anything against his will. In this way every human is an equal moral agent; no one may do to another what may not be done to him.

But, under the Statist moral code as it is revealed in our Statist reality, the majority rules, or at least its “government” does, and its word is the final word. Might makes right. There is no right or wrong, only legal and illegal, permitted by the State or forbidden by the State. And, here’s the kicker: Statists claim that it harms them if anyone peacefully abstains. It is a violation of the Statist “morality” to not submit to the State’s decrees. If they don’t claim they are injured or violated by non-participation, then why is it forbidden? Upon penalty of death?

Along those lines, I recently encountered a comment on some Statist blag that read:

All libertarian arguments boil down to the same thing – they do not wish to abide by any rules that they personally don’t like.

Mmm, almost. We do not wish to be forced to abide by rules we don’t “like,” and conversely we would not force others to abide by any rules that they don’t like. That is the key point, which makes the principle of voluntarism and non-aggression mutual among all humans, and which many Statists don’t appreciate because they don’t care to learn about the ins and outs of libertarian philosophy or the philosophy isn’t stated clearly enough for them. (Fair enough; it is often stated in very abstruse and overly philosophical terms, and why should they care, because they’ve got the guns and will continue to for the rest of our lives?)

Let’s use two simple examples to illustrate how libertarianism is not “everyone following only the rules they like.”

If you have a bunch of stones in your yard, and you like throwing them around, you are perfectly free to throw them wherever, whenever, and however you wish. This is because you are the complete and rightful owner-controller of your property, your body, and your liberty.

Does this give you the right, then, to throw them through the window of your neighbor’s house? They are your stones, after all; it is your arm and hand throwing them, after all; and it is your liberty allowing you to choose where to throw them, after all. The libertarian straw man that unknowledgeable Statists present is perfectly justified in throwing his stones through any and all windows that he pleases. Is this correct?

Don’t be silly. Just as you have rightful ownership of the stones on your (rightfully acquired) land, your neighbor has rightful ownership of his window. He can do exactly what he wants with his window, which for him consists of having the window intact. Your right to throw a stone ends where another man’s window begins.

As a second example: a manager in a business fires one of his workers. The worker doesn’t want to be fired. It is involuntary for him, that’s for sure. Under libertarian philosophy, taken to its fullest extreme, its logical conclusion, is this involuntary situation immoral?

Of course not, because it would be involuntary for the decision-makers in the company to be forced to pay their money to someone they don’t want to pay. The employee wants to work for the manager in exchange for wages, but the manager doesn’t want to pay him, and each condition is undesirable to one or the other party, but undesirable doesn’t mean coercive. It doesn’t mean involuntary. (When I stated above that “It is involuntary for him, that’s for sure,” I was using involuntary in the broad, everyday-English usage, meaning “unwanted, undesirable,” not the more properly constrained usage of libertarian philosophy, in which it means non-coercive.) The fired employee is perfectly free to work elsewhere, or negotiate with the manager, or do anything else that doesn’t involve force or threats of force; the manager has not threatened to use force against the ex-employee, he has simply ended a mutually agreed-upon, voluntary exchange, and absent any violations of contract, he is free to do so. (I’m not going to get into the issue of whether the company’s money is actually “their” money if they don’t own the means of production; I’ll let Charles Johnson and Kevin Carson and others philosophize about that; it is at best tangential to my point.)

I can’t think of a way to run those two simple examples into the ground any more, but I would if I could because apparently it is necessary. Statists just don’t get it. They don’t understand what we want or what a voluntary society would be like. (Or they don’t think a libertarian society would actually be the least bit “free” or “voluntary”; I am much more open to discussions about how well this or that would work in a free society than I am about what libertarians want, or what we mean, or what we do and don’t understand, or what’s right and wrong with the libertarian moral code.)

Maybe you’ll say I don’t understand what a voluntary society would be like; well, just as a free society would be far from perfect but its problems would be fewer, milder, and easier to solve than in the Statist world, my understanding of the nature a truly free society might be far from perfect but it’s a hell of a lot better than any Statist’s conception of it.

What David Z. and I have gone through is what all libertarians believe. No one may do to another what may not be done to him. All humans are on equal moral standing, equally freed and constrained by a sphere of liberty surrounding all of us. Libertarians not only want to abide only by the rules that we “like,” we acknowledge everybody else’s perfect right to abide only by the rules that they “like.” This mutual-nonaggression code results in everyone being obligated to follow the same rules—actually, the same rule: “First, do no harm”—and results in a much clearer, absolute system of moral conduct, not the moral nihilism and other straw-man positions that ignorant Statists ascribe to libertarianism. Therefore, libertarians are the last people you need to worry about ignoring right and wrong and treating others and their property however they please, without regard to others’ rights. As Anthony Gregory has explained, the State is the main entity in our world that follows no consistent or coherent rules and violates peoples rights, in addition to its own constraints and bylaws, at the whims of its controllers. Libertarianism prescribes consistent and absolute laws—natural laws—and libertarians are their utmost adherents.

The commenter who inspired this lesson in libertarianism had a fair bit more to say, all of which was far more depressing and confused than that first sentence. I expected to be able to come back to his excretions several days after first reading them, maintain my composure, and ignore the homicidal/suicidal thoughts that overwhelmed me when I first read them, long enough to refute every last word, but I was wrong. I can’t type much more after reading them again. Misery loves company, so I’m pasting them for you and then curling up into the fetal position and crying myself to sleep:

They like the idea of private property (no matter how obtained), so generally support a government-run police/military/prison structure to enforce ownership. They see no problem with raising taxes from non-property holders to pay for the police who protect the property holders in his case.

In the case of the rest of the regulations they don’t like, for example zoning restrictions, they fail to understand how democracies work. The people select their government and tell it what tasks they want it to perform. Then the will of the majority gets carried out and those who don’t like the limitations just have to take their lumps.

Opting out of those rules you don’t like is not a choice. If you don’t like some law or other you are free to campaign to have it changed or run for office yourself.

If a democracy is imperfect, so that the will of the majority is being thwarted by a powerful minority, then the cure is not to get rid of the democracy but to make it more democratic.

The cure for bad democracy is more democracy, not anarchy.

Posted in Philosophy, Property rights, Unrealistic