Undoubtedly the nonlibertarian will respond that government officials were duly elected by the people according to the Constitution, or hired by those so elected. Thus they may do what is prohibited to you and me. This reply is inadequate. If you and I admittedly have no right to tax and regulate others, how could we delegate a nonexistent right to someone else through an election? Obviously, we can’t.
Read the whole thing to get the context. Or read Michael Huemer’s book to get an even lengthier treatment of the argument.
I think that most people want their own liberty, but they fear the liberty of others. I like to use the acronym FOOL, which stands for Fear Of Others’ Liberty. I think that many of us are FOOLs. I count myself a FOOL, at least to some extent.
Once you are a FOOL, then you may be willing, yea, eager, to delegate the job of constraining someone else’s liberty. We don’t all want to be policemen or prison guards, but most of us are glad that there are people doing those jobs.
If I delegate the job of constraining someone else’s liberty, then, unless I happen to be a despot, those who have the power to constrain someone else’s liberty have the power to constrain my liberty as well. That is roughly what we mean by equality before the law.
In short, I think it is reasonable not to be persuaded to become a libertarian by the sort of arguments Huemer or Richman make. Instead, a FOOL can say, “I do not want violent criminals running around free. I want to delegate to someone else the power to arrest and incarcerate them. I understand that this power might be used against me, but I am willing to live with that.”
Consider Paul Romer:
Across the world, public safety is the most important task facing city governments. In many poor countries, crime holds back the kind of urbanization essential for economic development. Closer to home, Detroit shows us that if they can, people will flee a city that fails to provide basic public safety.
Of course, one day you concede to the government the power to arrest and incarcerate violent criminals, and the next thing you know you have created an institution with the power to penalize people who sign contracts that provide “inadequate health insurance.”
It frustrates me that there are so many FOOLs who support the government using its power to penalize people who sign such contracts, or to penalize people who sell big-gulp soft drinks, or what have you. In short, whatever consensus that might have once existed in favor of limited government has evaporated.
Sometimes, the FOOLs want what amounts to despotism. It happened to Germany in 1933. There seems to be an echo today in Venezuela (the term “enabling law” has a chilling ring to it).
Perhaps there is no way to maintain a consensus for limited government, in which case there is not much middle ground between anarchy and despotism. But to most people, it is plausible that there is a middle ground, and you have to recognize their point of view if you want your arguments to register with them.
If you were to identify the “FOOLS,” you would probably find they all fall in the grouping identified by Michael Oakeshott as the “anti-individual” or “mass man.”
Actually, nearly all classical liberal thinkers would be FOOLs. Oakeshott for sure.
The meaning of “despotism” in this post is so watered down as to become humorous.
It’s always struck me that, if you take seriously the idea that the state should have no powers individual citizens do not posses, that the states power to punish is as problematic as the states power to redistribute. Imagine someone steals my tv at gunpoint, and 2 years later I track him down, take the tv back, and lock him in my basement for four years. Or maybe I enslave him and make him work off a punitive fine I’ve decided on. Isn’t that behavior immoral?
Have any libertarian political philosophers written on this at length? To me, Nozick didn’t, to mind, adequately address this problem, though he probably deserves a reread with this issue in mind. As I recall Nozick basically says the state has the power to do whatever it takes to enforce property rights because they are so important, but why you can use people as a means to uphold property rights but not to redistribute property was never clear to me.
That behavior is immoral, but it’s also immoral when government does the exact same thing, violating habeas corpus, due process, etc. And since the real moral danger of the power to punish has to do with the process by which that power is exercised, it’s again less obvious how important an official government title is to that process. Does a citizen’s arrest become less moral, or do our current indefinite detentions of unconvicted suspects become more moral, because of the titles or lack thereof of the detainers?
However, the big difference I can see isn’t a moral one but is a very important practical one. Centralized government punishment tends to avoid “feuds”, where group B thinks that a punishment from group A was unfair, and retaliates to punish A, who sees this as a new crime worthy of retaliation, ad infinitum, and pray the infinite series does’t diverge. When a government administers an unpopular punishment, the force discrepancy becomes much larger, retaliation becomes nearly unthinkable, and so the total suffering incurred should be much less.
On the gripping hand, when governments do get into “feuds” the death tolls tend to be tens of thousands of times larger, so even a system which merely failed thousands of times more often might still be an improvement.
I’ll cut an’ paste my view of the derivation of government powers from a March comment:
I think it makes more sense to believe that government officials are violating rights without societal reprobation than it does to try to divine an objective model of different rights for government officials.
In the ideal circumstance, where government behaves in a largely libertarian fashion, it is likely that both theories will yield very similar results. But in any circumstance short of that, where government claims powers a libertarian society wouldn’t want it to have, what is the better argument against the intrusion? “Government is not operating within the complex extension of rights that we have derived that can properly be granted to government.” …or… “Government is violating these particular people’s rights, and the claimed reasons do not justify that violation.”
Fundamentally, government is an institution that violates rights without societal reprobation. That very definition is our greatest defense against its abuses.
It’s a good point, and one I think on frequently.
Public pushback does tend to occur when people have more visible insight into the actual force that is happening. For example, I get the impression that the DMCA has been curtailed by the image of teenagers in the subburbs being arrested. All the talk of social contracts goes away quickly in the face of an obviously innocent child being treated like a criminal.
When it comes to labor law, businessmen are not considered good members of society; as much as the general public hates seeing a teenager in handcuffs, we love it if it’s a guy in a suit.
I find this wrong. Modern society fundamentally requires people to found and run businesses, and we should celebrate the people who take the risk of doing so. We should make it easy and normal for one person to hire another, not something that requires a law degree and constant study of this year’s latest statutes.
You seem to be countering an argument that Richman isn’t making. His claim is that you can’t delegate the right to arrest and incarcerate because you don’t have that right in the first place. No one does.
In that case, you have anarchy by assumption. You may believe that, but that is not a way to win arguments against non-libertarians.