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.

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.

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.

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.

The meaning of “despotism” in this post is so watered down as to become humorous.