THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY
by Murray N. Rothbard

This text has been extracted from:
http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics.pdf

. . . 

PART III
THE STATE VERSUS LIBERTY

22. The Nature of the State. 
So far in this book, we have developed a theory of liberty and property rights, and have outlined the legal code that would be necessary to defend those rights. What of government, the State? What is its proper role, if any? Most people, including most political theorists, believe that once one concedes the importance, or even the vital necessity, of some particular activity of the State - such as the provision of a legal code - that one has ipso facto conceded the necessity of the State itself. The State indeed performs many important and necessary functions: from provision of law to the supply of police and fire fighters, to building and maintaining the streets, to delivery of the mail. But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well. 
Suppose, for example, that there are many competing cantaloupe stores in a particular neighborhood. One of the cantaloupe dealers, Smith, then uses violence to drive all of his competitors out of the neighborhood; he has thereby employed violence to establish a coerced monopoly over the sale of cantaloupes in a given territorial area. Does that mean that Smith's use of violence to establish and maintain his monopoly was essential to the provision of cantaloupes in the neighborhood? Certainly not, for there were existing competitors as well as potential rivals should Smith ever relax his use and threat of violence; moreover, economics demonstrates that Smith, as a coercive monopolist will tend to perform his service badly and inefficiently. Protected from competition by the use of force, Smith can afford to provide his service in a costly and inefficient manner, since the consumers are deprived of any possible range of alternative choice. Furthermore, should a group arise to call for the abolition of Smith's coercive monopoly there would be very few protesters with the temerity to accuse these "abolitionists" of wishing to deprive the consumers of their much desired cantaloupes. 
And yet, the State is only our hypothetical Smith on a gigantic and all-encompassing scale. Throughout history groups of men calling themselves "the government" or "the State" have attempted -usually successfully - to gain a compulsory monopoly of the commanding heights of the economy and the society. In particular, the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly over police and military services, the provision of law, judicial decision-making, the mint and the power to create money unused land ("the public domain"), streets and highways, rivers and coastal waters, and the means of delivering mail. Control of land and transportation has long been an excellent method of assuring overall control of a society; in many countries, highways began as a means of allowing the government to move its troops conveniently throughout its subject country. Control of the money supply is a way to assure the State an easy and rapid revenue, and the State makes sure that no private competitors are allowed to invade its self-arrogated monopoly of the power to counterfeit (i.e. create) new money. Monopoly of the postal service has long been a convenient method for the State to keep an eye on possibly unruly and subversive opposition to its rule. In most historical epochs, the State has also kept a tight control over religion, usually cementing a comfortable, mutually supportive alliance with an Established Church: with the State granting the priests power and wealth, and the Church in turn teaching the subject population their divinely proclaimed duty to obey Caesar. But now that religion has lost much of its persuasive power in society, the State is often willing to let religion alone, and to concentrate on similar if looser alliances with more secular intellectuals. In either case, the State relies on control of the levers of propaganda to persuade its subjects to obey or even exalt their rulers. 
But, above all, the crucial monopoly is the State's control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts - the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts. Control of the police and the army is particularly important in enforcing and assuring all of the State's other powers, including the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion. 
For there is one crucially important power inherent in the nature of the State apparatus. All other persons and groups in society (except for acknowledged and sporadic criminals such as thieves and bank robbers) obtain their income voluntarily: either by selling goods and services to the consuming public, or by voluntary gift (e.g., membership in a club or association, bequest, or inheritance). Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion, by threatening dire penalties should the income not be forthcoming. That coercion is known as "taxation", although in less regularized epochs it was often known as "tribute." Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State's inhabitants, or subjects. 
It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. It is true that State apologists maintain that taxation is "really" voluntary; one simple but instructive refutation of this claim is to ponder what would happen if the government were to abolish taxation, and to confine itself to simple requests for voluntary contributions. Does anyone really believe that anything comparable to the current vast revenues of the State would continue to pour into its coffers? It is likely that even those theorists who claim that punishment never deters action would balk at such a claim. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter was correct when he acidly wrote that "the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind." 
It has been recently maintained by economists that taxation is "really" voluntary because it is a method for everyone to make sure that everyone else pays for a unanimously desired project. Everyone in an area, for example, is assumed to desire the government to build a dam; but if A and B contribute voluntarily to the project, they cannot be sure that C and D will not "shirk" their similar responsibilities. Therefore, all of the individuals, A, B, C, D, etc., each of whom wish to contribute to building the dam, agree to coerce each other through taxation. Hence, the tax is not really coercion. There are, however, a great many flaws in this doctrine.
First is the inner contradiction between voluntarism and coercion; a coercion of all-against-all does not make any of this coercion "voluntary." Secondly, even if we assume for the moment that each individual would like to contribute to the dam, there is no way of assuring that the tax levied on each person is no more than he would be willing to pay voluntarily even if everyone else contributed. The government may levy $1000 on Joneseven though he might have been willing to pay no more than $500. The point is that precisely because taxation is compulsory, there is no way to assure (as is done automatically on the free market) that the amount any person contributes is what he would "really" be willing to pay. In the free society, a consumer who voluntarily buys a TV set for $200 demonstrates by his freely chosen action that the TV set is worth more to him than the $200 he surrenders; in short, he demonstrates that the $200 is a voluntary payment. Or, a club member in the free society, by paying anual dues of $200, demonstrates that he considers the benefits of club membership worth at least $200. But, in the case of taxation, a man's surrender to the threat of coercion demonstrates no voluntary preference whatsoever for any alleged benefits he receives.
Thirdly, the argument proves far too much. For the supply of any service, not only dams, can be expanded by the use of the tax-financing arm. Suppose, for example, that the Catholic Church were established in a country through taxation; the Catholic Church would undoubtedly be larger than if it relied on voluntary contributions; but can it therefore be argued that such Establishment is "really" voluntary because everyone wants to coerce everyone else into paying into the Church, in order to make sure that no one shirks this "duty"? 
And fourthly, the argument is simply a mystical one. How can anyone know that everyone is "really" paying his taxes voluntarily on the strength of this sophistical argument? What of those people - environmentalists, say - who are opposed to dams per se? Is their payment "really" voluntary? Would the coerced payment of taxes to a Catholic Church by Protestants or atheists also be "voluntary"? And what of the growing body of libertarians in our society, who oppose all action by the government on principle? In what way can this argument hold that their tax payments are "really voluntary"? In fact, the existence of at least one libertarian or anarchist in a country is enough by itself to demolish the "really voluntary" argument for taxation. 
It is also contended that, in democratic governments, the act of voting makes the government and all its works and powers truly "voluntary." Again, there are many fallacies with this popular argument. In the first place, even if the majority of the public specifically endorsed each and every particular act of the government, this would simply be majority tyranny rather than a voluntary act undergone by every person in the country. Murder is murder, theft is theft, whether undertaken by one man against another, or by a group, or even by the majority of people within a given territorial area. The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice. Otherwise, we would have to say, for example, that any Jews murdered by the democratically elected Nazi government were not murdered, but only "voluntarily committed suicide" - surely, the grotesque but logical implication of the "democracy as voluntary" doctrine. Secondly, in a republic as contrasted to a direct democracy, people vote not for specific measures but for "representatives" in a package deal; the representatives then wreak their will for a fixed length of time. In no legal sense, of course, are they truly "representatives" since, in a free society, the principal hires his agent or representative individually and can fire him at will. As the great anarchist political theorist and constitutional lawyer, Lysander Spooner, wrote: 
they [the elected government officials] are neither our servants, agents, attorneys, nor representatives. ..[for] we do not make ourselves responsible for their acts. If a man is my servant, agent, or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for all his acts done within the limits of the power I have intrusted to him. If I have intrusted him, as my agent, with either absolute power, or any power at all, over the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself responsible to those other persons for any injuries he may do them, so long as he acts within the limits of the power I have granted him. But no individual who may be injured in his person or property, by acts of Congress, can come to the individual electors, and hold them responsible for these acts of their so-called agents or representatives. This fact proves that these pretended agents of the people, of everybody, are really the agents of nobody. 
Furthermore, even on its own terms, voting can hardly establish "majority" rule, much less of voluntary endorsement of government. In the United States, for example, less than 40 percent of eligible voters bother to vote at all; of these, 21 percent may vote for one candidate and 19 percent for another. 21 percent scarcely establishes even majority rule, much less the voluntary consent of all. (In one sense, and quite apart from democracy or voting, the "majority" always supports any existing government; this will be treated below.) And finally how is it that taxes are levied on one and all, regardless of whether they voted or not, or, more particularly, whether they voted for the winning candidate? How can either non-voting or voting for the loser indicate any sort of endorsement of the actions of the elected government? 
Neither does voting establish any sort of voluntary consent even by the voters themselves to the government. As Spooner trenchantly pointed out: 
In truth, in the case of individuals their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent. ... On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he uses the ballot, he may become a master, if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. 
Neither in contests with the ballot - which is a mere substitute for a bullet - because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. ...
Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot would use it, if they could see any chance of meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to. 
If, then, taxation is compulsory, and is therefore indistinguishable from theft, it follows that the State, which subsists on taxation, is a vast criminal organization far more formidable and successful than any "private" Mafia in history. Furthermore, it should be considered criminal not only according to the theory of crime and property rights as set forth in this book, but even according to the common apprehension of mankind, which always considers theft to be a crime. As we have seen above, the nineteenth-century German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer put the matter succinctly when he pointed out that there are two and only two ways of attaining wealth in society: (a) by production and voluntary exchange with others - the method of the free market; and (b) by violent expropriation of the wealth produced by others. The latter is the method of violence and theft. The former benefits all parties involved; the latter parasitically benefits the looting group or class at the expense of the looted. Oppenheimer trenchantly termed the former method of obtaining wealth, "the economic means," and the latter "the political means". Oppenheimer then went on brilliantly to define the State as "the organization of the political means." 
Nowhere has the essence of the State as a criminal organization been put as forcefully or as brilliantly as in this passage from Lysander Spooner:
It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other. ...
But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: "Your money, or your life." And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. 
The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the roadside, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful. 
The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travelers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave. 
It is instructive to inquire why it is that the State, in contrast to the highwayman, invariably surrounds itself with an ideology of legitimacy, why it must indulge in all the hypocrisies that Spooner outlines. The reason is that the highwayman is not a visible, permanent, legal, or legitimate member of society, let alone a member with exalted status. He is always on the run from his victims or from the State itself. But the State, in contrast to a band of highwaymen, is not considered a criminal organization; on the contrary, its minions have generally held the positions of highest status in society. It is a status that allows the State to feed off its victims while making at least most of them support, or at least be resigned to, this exploitative process. In fact, it is precisely the function of the State's ideological minions and allies to explain to the public that the Emperor does indeed have a fine set of clothes. In brief, the ideologists must explain that, while theft by one or more persons or groups is bad and criminal, that when the State engages in such acts, it is not theft but the legitimate and even sanctified act called "taxation." The ideologists must explain that murder by one or more persons or groups is bad and must be
punished, but that when the State kills it is not murder but an exalted act known as "war" or "repression of internal subversion." They must explain that while kidnapping or slavery is bad and must be outlawed when done by private individuals or groups, that when the State commits such acts it is not kidnapping or slavery but "conscription" - an act necessary to the public weal and even to the requirements of morality itself. The function of the statist ideologists is to weave the false set of Emperor's clothes, to convince the public of a massive double standard: that when the State commits the gravest of high crimes it is really not doing so, but doing something else that is necessary, proper, vital, and even in former ages by divine command. The age-old success of the ideologists of the State is perhaps the most gigantic hoax in the history of mankind. 
Ideology has always been vital to the continued existence of the State, as attested by the systematic use of ideology since the ancient Oriental empires. The specific content of the ideology has, of course, changed over time, in accordance with changing conditions and cultures. In the Oriental despotisms, the Emperor was often held by the Church to be himself divine; in our more secular age, the argument runs more to "the public good" and the "general welfare." But the purpose is always the same: to convince the public that what the State does is not, as one might think, crime on a gigantic scale, but something necessary and vital that must be supported and obeyed. The reason that ideology is so vital to the State is that it always rests, in essence, on the support of the majority of the public. This support obtains whether the State is a "democracy," a dictatorship, or an absolute monarchy. For the support rests in the willingness of the majority (not, to repeat, of every individual) to go along with the system: to pay the taxes, to go without much complaint to fight the State's wars, to obey the State's rules and decrees. This support need not be active enthusiasm to be effective; it can just as well be passive resignation. But support there must be. For if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang. Hence the necessity of the State's employment of ideologists; and hence the necessity of the State's age-old alliance with the Court Intellectuals who weave the apologia for State rule.
The first modern political theorist who saw that all States rest on majority opinion was the sixteenth-century libertarian French writer, Etienne de la Boetie. In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, de la Boetie saw that the tyrannical State is always a minority of the population, and that therefore its continued despotic rule must rest on its legitimacy in the eyes of the exploited majority, on what would later come to be called "the engineering of consent." Two hundred years later, David Hume - though scarcely a libertarian - set forth a similar analysis. The counter- argument that, with modern weapons, a minority force can permanently cow a hostile majority ignores the fact that these weapons can be held by the majority and that the armed force of the minority can mutiny or defect to the side of the populace. Hence, the permanent need for persuasive ideology has always led the State to bring into its rubric the nation's opinion-moulding intellectuals. In former days, the intellectuals were invariably the priests, and hence, as we have pointed out, the age-old alliance between Church and State, Throne and Altar. Nowadays, "scientific" and "value-free" economists and "national security managers," among others, perform a similar ideological function in behalf of State power. 
Particularly important in the modern world - now that an Established Church is often no longer feasible - is for the State to assume control over education, and thereby to mould the minds of its subjects. In addition to influencing the universities through all manner of financial subventions, and through state-owned universities directly, the State controls education on the lower levels through the universal institutions of the public school, through certification requirements for private schools, and through compulsory attendance laws. Add to this a virtually total control over radio and television - either through outright State ownership, as in most countries -or, as in the United States, by the nationalization of the airwaves, and by the power of a federal commission to license the right of stations to use those frequencies and channels. 
Thus, the State, by its very nature, must violate the generally accepted moral laws to which most people adhere. Most people are agreed on the injustice and criminality of murder and theft. The customs, rules, and laws of all societies condemn these actions. The State, then, is always in a vulnerable position, despite its seeming age-old might. What particularly needs to be done is to enlighten the public on the State's true nature, so that they can see that the State habitually violates the generally accepted injunctions against robbery and murder, that the State is the necessary violator of the commonly accepted moral and criminal law. 
We have seen clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, it is because intellectuals, whose services are often not very intensively desired by the mass of consumers, can find a more secure "market" for their abilities in the arms of the State. The State can provide them with a power, status, and wealth which they often cannot obtain in voluntary exchange. For centuries, many (though, of course, not all) intellectuals have sought the goal of Power, the realization of the Platonic ideal of the "philosopher-king." Consider, for example, the cry from the heart by the distinguished Marxist scholar, Professor Needham, in protest against the acidulous critique by Karl Wittfogel of the alliance of State-and-intellectuals in Oriental despotisms: 
"The civilization which Professor Wittfogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could make poets and scholars into officials." Needham adds that "the successive [Chinese] emperors were served in all ages by a great company of profoundly humane and disinterested scholars." Presumably, for Professor Needham, this is enough to justify the grinding despotisms of the ancient Orient.
But we need not go back as far as the ancient Orient or even as far as the proclaimed goal of the professors at the University of Berlin, in the nineteenth century, to form themselves into "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern." In contemporary America, we have the eminent political scientist, Professor Richard Neustadt, hailing the President as the "sole crown like symbol of the Union." We have national security manager Townsend Hoopes writing that "under our system the people can look only to the President to define the nature of our foreign policy problem and the national programs and sacrifices required to meet it with effectiveness." And, in response, we have Richard Nixon, on the eve of his election as President, defining his role as follows: "He [the President] must articulate the nation's values, define its goals and marshall its will." Nixon's conception of his role is hauntingly similar to the scholar Ernst Huber's articulation, in the Germany of the 1930s, of the Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich. Huber wrote that the head of State "sets up the great ends which are to be attained and draws up the plans for the utilization of all national powers in the achievement of the common goals ...he gives the national life its true purpose and value." 
Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-moulding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf. But there is another vital aspect of the State that needs to be considered. There is one critical argument for the State that now comes into view: namely, the implicit argument that the State apparatus really and properly owns the territorial area over which it claims jurisdiction. The State, in short, arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given territorial area -larger or smaller depending on historical conditions, and on how much it has been able to wrest from other States. If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property. (This seems to be the only justification for the crude slogan, "America, love it or leave it!," as well as the enormous emphasis generally placed on an individual's right to emigrate from a country.)
In short, this theory makes the State, as well as the King in the Middle Ages, a feudal overlord, who at least theoretically owned all the land in his domain. The fact that new and unowned resources - whether virgin land or lakes - are invariably claimed as owned by the State (its "public domain") is an expression of this implicit theory. 
But our homesteading theory, outlined above, suffices to demolish any such pretensions by the State apparatus. For by what earthly right do the criminals of the State lay claim to the ownership of its land area? It is bad enough that they have seized control of ultimate decision-making for that area; what criterion can possibly give them the rightful ownership of the entire territory? 
The State may therefore be defined as that organization which possesses either or both (in actual fact, almost always both) of the following characteristics: (a) it acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation); and (b) it achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and of ultimate decision-making power over a given territorial area. Both of these essential activities of the State necessarily constitute criminal aggression and depredation of the just rights of private property of its subjects (including self-ownership). For the first constitutes and establishes theft on a grand scale; while the second prohibits the free competition of defense and decision-making agencies within a given territorial area -prohibiting the voluntary purchase and sale of defense and judicial services. Hence the justice of the vivid critique of the State by the libertarian theorist Albert Jay Nock: "The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime" in a given territorial area. "It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or alien."
It must be emphasized that the State does not merely use coercion to acquire its own revenue, to hire propagandists to advance its power, and to arrogate to itself and to enforce a compulsory monopoly of such vital services as police protection, firefighting, transportation, and postal service. For the State does many other things as well, none of which can in any sense be said to serve the consuming public. It uses its monopoly of force to achieve, as Nock puts it, a "monopoly of crime - to control, regulate, and coerce its hapless subjects. Often it pushes its way into controlling the morality and the very daily lives of its subjects. The state uses its coerced revenue, not merely to monopolize and provide genuine services inefficiently to the public, but also to build up its own power at the expense of its exploited and harassed subjects: to redistribute income and wealth from the public to itself and to its allies, and to control, command, and coerce the inhabitants of its territory. In a truly free society, a society where individual rights of person and property are maintained, the State, then, would necessarily cease to exist. Its myriad of invasive and aggressive activities, its vast depredations on the rights of person and property, would then disappear. At the same time, those genuine services which it does manage badly to perform would be thrown open to free competition, and to voluntarily chosen payments by individual consumers. 
The grotesquerie of the typical conservative call for the government to enforce conservative definitions of "morality" (e-g. by outlawing the alleged immorality of pornography) is therefore starkly revealed. Aside from other sound arguments against enforced morality (e.g., that no action not freely chosen can be considered "moral"), it is surely grotesque to entrust the function of guardian of the public morality to the most extensive criminal (and hence the most immoral) group in society - the State. 

23. The Inner Contradictions of the State. 
A major problem with discussions of the necessity of government is the fact that all such discussions necessarily take place within a context of centuries of State existence and State rule -rule to which the public has become habituated. The wry coupling of the twin certainties in the popular motto "death and taxes" demonstrates that the public has resigned itself to the existence of the State as an evil but inescapable force of nature to which there is no alternative. The force of habit as the cement of State rule was seen as early as the sixteenth-century writings of de la Boetie. But, logically, and to cast off the scales of habit, we must not merely compare an existing State with an unknown quantity, but begin at the social zero point, in the logical fiction of the "state of nature," and compare the relative arguments for the establishment of the State with those on behalf of a free society. 
Let us assume, for example, that a sizeable number of people suddenly arrive on Earth, and that they must now consider what sort of social arrangements to live under. One person or group of persons argues as follows (i.e., the typical argument for the State): "If each of us is allowed to remain free in all aspects, and particularly if each of us is allowed to retain weapons and the right of self-defense, then we will all war against each other, and society will be wrecked. Therefore, let us turn over all of our guns and all of our ultimate decision-making power and power to define and enforce our rights to the Jones family over there. The Jones family will guard us from our predatory instincts, keep social peace, and enforce justice." Is it conceivable that anyone (except perhaps the Jones family itself) would spend one moment considering this clearly absurd scheme? The cry of "who would guard us from the Jones family, especially when we are deprived of our weapons?" would suffice to shout down such a scheme. And yet, given the acquisition of legitimacy from the fact of longevity given the longtime rule of the "Jones family" this is precisely the type of argument to which we now blindly adhere. Employing the logical model of the state of nature aids us in casting off the fetters of habit to see the State plain - and to see that the Emperor, indeed, wears no clothes. 
If, in fact, we cast a cold and logical eye on the theory of "limited government", we can see it for the chimera that it really is, for the unrealistic and inconsistent "Utopia" that it holds forth. In the first place, there is no reason to assume that a compulsory monopoly of violence, once acquired by the "Jones family" for by any State rulers, will remain "limited" to protection of person and property. Certainly, historically, no government has long remained "limited" in this way. And there are excellent reasons to suppose that it never will. First, once the cancerous principle of coercion - of coerced revenue and compulsory monopoly of violence - is established and legitimated at the very heart of society, there is every reason to suppose that this precedent will be expanded and embellished. In particular, it is in the economic interest of the State rulers to work actively for such expansion. The more the coercive powers of the State are expanded beyond the cherished limits of the laissez-faire theorists, the greater the power and pelf accruing to the ruling caste operating the State apparatus. Hence, the ruling caste, eager to maximize its power and wealth, will stretch State power - and will encounter only feeble opposition, given the legitimacy it and its allied intellectuals are gaining, and given the lack of any institutional free-market channels of resistance to the government's monopoly of coercion and the power of ultimate decision-making. On the free market, it is a happy fact that the maximization of the wealth of one person or group redounds to the benefit of all; but in the political realm, the realm of the State, a maximization of income and wealth can only accrue parasitically to the State and its rulers at the expense of the rest of society. 
Advocates of a limited government often hold up the ideal of a government above the fray, refraining from taking sides or throwing its weight around, an "umpire" arbitrating impartially between contending factions in society. Yet why should the government do so? Given the unchecked power of the State, the State and its rulers will act to maximize their power and wealth, and hence inexorably expand beyond the supposed "limits." The crucial point is that in the Utopia of limited government and laissez faire, there are no institutional mechanisms to keep the State limited. Surely the bloody record of States throughout history should have demonstrated that any power, once granted or acquired, will be used and therefore abused. Power corrupts, as the libertarian Lord Acton so wisely noted. 
Furthermore, apart from the absence of institutional mechanisms to keep the ultimate decision-maker and force-wielder "limited" to protection of rights, there is a grave inner contradiction inherent in the very ideal of a neutral or impartial State. For there can be no such thing as a "neutral" tax, a taxing system that will be neutral to the market as it would have been without taxation. As John C. Calhoun trenchantly pointed out in the early nineteenth century, the very existence of taxation negates any possibility of such neutrality. For, given any level of taxation, the least that will happen will be the creation of two antagonistic social classes: the "ruling" classes who gain by and live off taxation, and the "ruled" classes who pay the taxes. In short, conflicting classes of net tax-payers and net tax-consumers. At the very least, the government bureaucrats will necessarily be net tax-consumers; other such will be those persons and groups subsidized by the inevitable expenditures of government. As Calhoun put it: 
[T]he agents and employees of the government constitute that portion of the community who are the exclusive recipients of the proceeds of the taxes. Whatever amount is taken from the community in the form of taxes, if not lost, goes to them in the shape of expenditures and disbursements. The two - disbursement and taxation - constitute the fiscal action of the government. They are correlatives. What the one takes from the community under the name of taxes is transferred to the portion of the community who are the recipients under that of disbursements. But as the recipients constitute only a portion of the community, it follows, taking the two parts of the fiscal process together, that its actions must be unequal between the payers of the taxes and the recipients of their proceeds. Nor can it be otherwise; unless what is collected from each individual in the shape of taxes shall be returned to him in that of disbursements, which would make the process nugatory and absurd. ...
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes: one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burden of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers. 
But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government - and the entire course of policy therewith connected. For the greater the taxes and disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the other, and vice versa. ...The effect, then, of every increase is to enrich and strengthen the one, and impoverish and weaken the other. 
Calhoun goes on to point out that a Constitution will not be able to keep the government limited; for given a monopoly Supreme Court selected by the self-same government and granted the power of ultimate decision-making, the political "ins" will always favor a "broad" or loose interpretation of the wording of the Constitution serving to expand the powers of government over the citizenry; and, over time, the "ins" will inexorably tend to win out over the minority of "outs" who will argue vainly for a "strict" interpretation limiting State power. 
But there are other fatal flaws and inconsistencies in the concept of limited, laissez-faire government. In the first place, it is generally accepted, by limited-government and by other political philosophers, that the State is necessary for the creation and development of law. But this is historically incorrect. For most law, but especially the most libertarian parts of the law, emerged not from the State, but out of non-State institutions: tribal custom, common-law judges and courts, the law merchant in mercantile courts, or admiralty law in tribunals set up by shippers themselves. In the case of competing common-law judges as well as elders of tribes, the judges were not engaged in making law, but in finding the law in existing and generally accepted principles, and then applying that law to specific cases or to new technological or institutional conditions. The same was true in private Roman law. Moreover, in ancient Ireland, a society existing for a thousand years until the conquest by Cromwell, "there was no trace of State-administered justice"; competing schools of professional jurists interpreted and applied the common body of customary law, with enforcement undertaken by competing and voluntarily supported tuatha, or insurance agencies. Furthermore, these customary rules were not haphazard or arbitrary but consciously rooted in natural law, discoverable by man's reason. 
But, in addition to the historical inaccuracy of the view that the State is needed for the development of law, Randy Barnett has brilliantly pointed out that the State by its very nature cannot obey its own legal rules. But if the State cannot obey its own legal rules, then it is necessarily deficient and self-contradictory as a maker of law. In an exegesis and critique of Lon L. Fuller's seminal work 'The Morality of Law', Barnett notes that Professor Fuller sees in the current thinking of legal positivism a persistent error: "the assumption that law should be viewed as a ... one-way projection of authority, originating with government and imposing itself upon the citizen. Fuller points out that law is not simply "vertical" -a command from above from the State to its citizens, but also "horizontal", arising from among the people themselves and applied to each other. Fuller points to international law, tribal law, private rules, etc. as pervasive examples of such "reciprocal" and non-State law. Fuller sees the positivist error as stemming from failure to recognize a crucial principle of proper law, namely that the lawmaker should itself obey its own rules that it lays down for its citizens, or, in Fuller's words, "that enacted law itself presupposes a commitment by the government authority to abide by its own rules in dealing with its subjects."
But Barnett correctly points out that Fuller errs significantly in failing to apply his own principle far enough: in limiting the principle to the procedural "rules by which laws are passed" rather than applying it to the substance of the laws themselves. Because of this failure to carry his principle to its logical conclusion, Fuller fails to see the inherent inner contradiction of the State as maker of law. As Barnett puts it, 
Fuller fails in his attempt because he has not followed his own principle far enough. If he did, he would see that the state legal system does not conform to the principle of official congruence with its own rules. It is because the positivists see that the State inherently violates its own rules that they conclude, in a sense correctly that State-made law is sui generis. 
However, Barnett adds, if Fuller's principle were carried forward to assert that the "lawmaker must obey the substance of his own laws," then Fuller would see "that the State by its nature must violate this commitment."
For Barnett correctly points out that the two unique and essential features of the State are its power to tax - to acquire its revenue by coercion and hence robbery - and to prevent its subjects from hiring any other defense agency (compulsory monopoly of defense). But in doing so, the State violates its own laws that it sets down for its subjects. As Barnett explains,
For example, the State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State through its power to tax "legitimately" does just that ... More essentially, the State says that a person may use force upon another only in self-defense, i.e. only as a defense against another who initiated the use of force. To go beyond one's right of self-defense would be to aggress on the rights of others, a violation of one's legal duty. And yet the State by its claimed monopoly forcibly imposes its jurisdiction on persons who may have done nothing wrong. By doing so it aggresses against the rights of its citizens, something
which its rules say citizens may not do. 
The State, in short, may steal where its subjects may not and it may aggress (initiate the use of force) against its subjects while prohibiting them from exercising the same right. It is to this that the positivists look when they say that the law (meaning State-made law) is a one-way, vertical process. It is this that belies any claim of true reciprocity. 
Barnett concludes that, interpreted consistently, Fuller's principle means that in a true and proper legal system, the lawmaker must "follow all of its rules, procedural and substantive alike." Therefore, "to the degree that it does not and cannot do this it is not and cannot be a legal system and its acts are outside the law. The State qua state, therefore, is an illegal system." 
Another inner contradiction of the theory of laissez-faire government deals again with taxation. For if government is to be limited to "protection" of person and property, and taxation is to be "limited" to providing that service only, then how is the government to decide how much protection to provide and how much taxes to levy? For, contrary to the limited government theory "protection" is no more a collective, one-lump "thing" than any other good or service in society. Suppose, for example, that we might offer a competing theory, that government should be "limited" to supplying clothing free to all of its citizens. But this would scarcely be any sort of viable limit, apart from other flaws in the theory. For how much clothing, and at what cost? Must everyone be supplied with Balendaga originals, for example? And who is to decide how much and what quality of clothing each person is to receive? Indeed, "protection" could conceivably imply anything from one policeman for an entire country, to supplying an armed bodyguard and a tank for every citizen - a proposition which would bankrupt the society posthaste. But who is to decide on how much protection, since it is undeniable that every person would be better protected from theft and assault if provided with an armed bodyguard than if he is not? On the free market, decisions on how much and what quality of any good or service should be supplied to each person are made by means of voluntary purchases by each individual; but what criterion can be applied when the decision is made by government? The answer is none at all, and such governmental decisions can only be purely arbitrary.
Secondly, one searches in vain in the writings of laissez-faire theorists for a cogent theory of taxation: not only how much taxation is to be levied, but also who is to be forced to pay. The commonly adopted "ability to pay" theory, for example, is, as the libertarian Frank Chodorov pointed out, the philosophy of the highway robber to extract as much loot from the victim as the robber can get away with - scarcely a cogent social philosophy, and at total variance, of course, from the system of payment on the free market. For if everyone were forced to pay for every good and service in proportion to his income, then there would be no pricing system at all, and no market system could work. (David Rockefeller, for example, might be forced to pay $1million for a loaf of bread.) 
Next, no laissez-faire writer has ever provided a theory of the size of the State: if the State is to have a compulsory monopoly of force in a given territorial area, how large is that area to be? These theorists have not given full attention to the fact that the world has always lived in an "international anarchy," with no one government, or compulsory monopoly of decision-making, between various countries. And yet, international relations between private citizens of different countries have generally functioned quite smoothly, despite the lack of a single government over them. Thus, a contractual or a tort dispute between a citizen of North Dakota and of Manitoba is usually handled quite smoothly, typically with the plaintiff suing or placing charges in his court, and the court of the other country recognizing the result. Wars and conflicts usually take place between the governments, rather than the private citizens, of the various counties. 
But more profoundly, would a laissez-fairist recognize the right of a region of a country to secede from that country? Is it legitimate for West Ruritania to secede from Ruritania? If not, why not? And if so, then how can there be a logical stopping-point to the secession? May not a small district secede, and then a city, and then a borough of that city, and then a block, and then finally a particular individual? Once admit any right of secession whatever, and there is no logical stopping-point short of the right of individual secession, which logically entails anarchism, since then individuals may secede and patronize their own defense agencies, and the State has crumbled.
Finally there is a crucial inconsistency in the proferred criterion of laissez-faire itself: limiting the government to protection of person and property. For, if it is legitimate for a government to tax, why not tax its subjects to provide other goods and services that may be useful to consumers: why shouldn't the government, for example, build steel plants, provide shoes, dams, postal service, etc.? For each of these goods and services is useful to consumers. If the laissez-fairists object that the government should not build steel plants or shoe factories and provide them to consumers (either free or for sale) because tax-coercion had been employed in constructing these plants, well then the same objection can of course be made to governmental police or judicial service. The government should be acting no more immorally from the laissez-faire point of view, when providing housing or steel than when providing police protection. Government limited to protection, then, cannot be sustained even within the laissez-faire ideal itself, much less from any other consideration. It is true that the laissez-faire ideal could still be employed to prevent such "second-degree" coercive activities of government (i.e., coercion beyond the initial coercion of taxation) as price control or outlawry of pornography; but the "limits" have now become flimsy indeed, and may be stretched to virtually complete collectivism, in which the government only supplies goods and services, yet supplies all of them. 

24. The Moral Status of Relations to the State. 
If the State, then, is a vast engine of institutionalized crime and aggression, the "organization of the political means" to wealth, then this means that the State is a criminal organization, and that therefore its moral status is radically different from any of the just property owners that we have been discussing in this volume. And this means that the moral status of contracts with the State, promises to it and by it, differs radically as well. It means, for example, that no one is morally required to obey the State (except insofar as the State simply affirms the right of just private property against aggression). For, as a criminal organization with all of its income and assets derived from the crime of taxation, the State cannot possess any just property. This means that it cannot be unjust or immoral to fail to pay taxes to the State, to appropriate the property of the State (which is in the hands of aggressors), to refuse to obey State orders, or to break contracts with the State (since it cannot be unjust to break contracts with criminals). Morally, from the point of view of proper political philosophy, "stealing" from the State, for example, is removing property from criminal hands, is, in a sense, "homesteading" property, except that instead of homesteading unused land, the person is removing property from the criminal sector of society - a positive good.
Here a partial exception can be made where the State has clearly stolen the property of a specific person. Suppose, for example, that the State confiscates jewels belonging to Brown. If Green then steals the jewels from the State, he is not committing a criminal offense from the point of view of libertarian theory. However, the jewels are still not his, and Brown would be justified in using force to repossess the jewels from Green. In most cases, of course, the State's confiscations, taking place in the form of taxation, are mixed into a common pot, and it is impossible to point to specific owners of its specific property. Who, for example, properly owns a TVA dam or a post-office building? In these majority cases, then, Green's theft or "homesteading" from the State would be legitimate as well as noncriminal, and would confer a just homesteading property title upon Green.
Lying to the State, then, also becomes a fortiori morally legitimate. Just as no one is morally required to answer a robber truthfully when he asks if there are any valuables in one's house, so no one can be morally required to answer truthfully similar questions asked by the State, e.g., when filling out income tax returns. 
All this does not mean, of course, that we must counsel or require civil disobedience, nonpayment of taxes, or lying to or theft from the State, for these may well be prudentially unwise, considering the force majeure possessed by the State apparatus. But what we are saying is that these actions are just and morally licit. Relations with the State, then, become purely prudential and pragmatic considerations for the particular individuals involved, who must treat the State as an enemy with currently prevailing power. 
Many libertarians fall into confusion on specific relations with the State, even when they concede the general immorality or criminality of State actions or interventions. Thus, there is the question of default, or more widely, repudiation of government debt. Many libertarians assert that the government is morally bound to pay its debts, and that therefore default or repudiation must be avoided. The problem here is that these libertarians are analogizing from the perfectly proper thesis that private persons or institutions should keep their contracts and pay their debts. But government has no money of its own, and payment of its debt means that the taxpayers are further coerced into paying bondholders. Such coercion can never be licit from the libertarian point of view. For not only does increased taxation mean increased coercion and aggression against private property, but the seemingly innocent bondholder appears in a very different light when we consider that the purchase of a government bond is simply making an investment in the future loot from the robbery of taxation. As an eager investor in future robbery, then, the bondholder appears in a very different moral light from what is usually assumed. 
Another question to be placed in a new light is the problem of breaking contracts with the State. We have explained above our contention that since enforceable contracts are properly title-transfers and not promises, that therefore it would be legitimate in the free society to resign from an army despite the signing of a voluntary contract for a longer term of enlistment. But regardless of which theory of contract we adopt, such considerations apply only to private armies in the free market. Since State armies are criminal aggressors - both in their actions as well as their means of revenue - it would be morally licit to leave the State's army at any time, regardless of the terms of enlistment. It is morally the individual's right to do so, although again whether such an action is prudential or not is another matter entirely. 
Let us consider in this light the question of bribery of government officials. We saw above, that, in a free society or free market, the briber is acting legitimately, whereas it is the bribee who is defrauding someone (e.g. an employer) and therefore deserves prosecution. What of bribery of government officials? Here a distinction must be made between "aggressive" and "defensive" bribery; the first should be considered improper and aggressive, whereas the latter should be considered proper and legitimate. Consider a typical "aggressive bribe": a Mafia leader bribes police officials to exclude other, competing operators of gambling casinos from a certain territorial area. Here, the Mafioso acts in collaboration with the government to coerce competing gambling proprietors. The Mafioso is, in this case, an initiator, and accessory, to governmental aggression against his competitors. On the other hand, a "defensive bribe" has a radically different moral status. In such a case, for example, Robinson, seeing that gambling casinos are outlawed in a certain area, bribes policemen to allow his casino to operate - a perfectly legitimate response to an unfortunate situation. 
Defensive bribery, in fact, performs an important social function throughout the world. For, in many countries, business could not be transacted at all without the lubricant of bribery; in this way crippling and destructive regulations and exactions can be avoided. A "corrupt government," then, is not necessarily a bad thing; compared to an "incorruptible government" whose officials enforce the laws with great severity, "corruption" can at least allow a partial flowering of voluntary transactions and actions in a society. Of course, in neither case are either the regulations or prohibitions, or the enforcement officials themselves, justified, since neither they nor the exactions should be in existence at all. 
In some areas, a radical distinction between private persons and government officials is acknowledged in existing law and opinion. Thus, a private individual's "right to privacy" or right to keep silent does not and should not apply to government officials, whose records and operations should be open to public knowledge and evaluation. There are two democratic arguments for denying the right to privacy to government officials, which, while not strictly libertarian, are valuable as far as they go: namely (1) that in a democracy, the public can only decide on public issues and vote for public officials if they have complete knowledge of government operations; and (2) that since the taxpayers pay the bill for government, they should have the right to know what government is doing. The libertarian argument would add that, since government is an aggressor organization against the rights and persons of its citizens, then full disclosure of its operations is at least one right that its subjects might wrest from the State, and which they may be able to use to resist or whittle down State power. 
Another area where the law now distinguishes between private citizens and public officials is the law of libel. We have maintained above that libel laws are illegitimate. But, even given laws against libel, it is important to distinguish between libeling a private citizen and a government official or agency. By the nineteenth century, we had fortunately gotten rid of the pernicious common law of "seditious libel," which had been used as a club to repress almost any criticisms of government. Currently libel laws have now been fortunately weakened when applied, not merely to government per se, but also to politicians or government officials. 
Many anarchist libertarians claim it immoral to vote or to engage in political action - the argument being that by participating in this way in State activity, the libertarian places his moral imprimatur upon the State apparatus itself. But a moral decision must be a free decision, and the State has placed individuals in society in an unfree environment, in a general matrix of coercion. The State -unfortunately- exists, and people must necessarily begin with this matrix to try to remedy their condition. As Lysander Spooner pointed out, in an environment of State coercion, voting does not imply voluntary consent. Indeed, if the State allows us a periodic choice of rulers, limited though that choice may be, it surely cannot be considered immoral to make use of that limited choice to try to reduce or get rid of State power. 
The State, then, is not simply a part of society. The brunt of this part of the present volume, in fact, is to demonstrate that the State is not, as most utilitarian free-market economists like to think, a legitimate social institution that tends to be bumbling and inefficient in most of its activities. On the contrary, the State is an inherently illegitimate institution of organized aggression, of organized and regularized crime against the persons and properties of its subjects. Rather than necessary to society, it is a profoundly antisocial institution which lives parasitically off of the productive activities of private citizens. Morally, it must be considered as illegitimate and outside of the ordinary libertarian legal system (such as adumbrated in Part II above), which delimits and insures the rights and just properties of private citizens. Thus, from the point of view of justice and morality, the State can own no property, require no obedience, enforce no contracts made with it, and indeed, cannot exist at all. 
A common defense of the State holds that man is a "social animal," that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of "atomistic individuals" uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State. On the contrary, as we have indicated, the State is an antisocial instrument, crippling voluntary interchange, individual creativity, and the division of labor. "Society" is a convenient label for the voluntary interrelations of individuals, in peaceful exchange and on the market. Here we may point to Albert Jay Nock's penetrating distinction between "social power" - the fruits of voluntary interchange in the economy and in civilization - and "Statepower", the coercive interference and exploitation of those fruits. In that light, Nock showed that human history is basically a race between State power and social power, between the beneficent fruits of peaceful and voluntary production and creativity on the one hand, and the crippling and parasitic blight of State power upon the voluntary and productive social process. All of the services commonly thought to require the State - from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property - can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary 

25. On Relations Between States. 
Each State has an assumed monopoly of force over a given territorial area, the areas varying in size in accordance with different historical conditions. Foreign policy, or foreign relations, may be defined as the relationship between any particular State, A, and other States, B, C, D, and the inhabitants living under those States. In the ideal moral world, no States would exist, and hence, of course, no foreign policy could exist. Given the existence of States, however, are there any moral principles that libertarianism can direct as criteria for foreign policy? The answer is broadly the same as in the libertarian moral criteria directed toward the "domestic policy" of States, namely to reduce the degree of coercion exercised by States over individual persons as much as possible. 
Before considering inter-State actions, let us return for a moment to the pure libertarian stateless world where individuals and their hired private protection agencies strictly confine their use of violence to the defense of person and property against violence. Suppose that, in this world, Jones finds that he or his property is being aggressed against by Smith. It is legitimate, as we have seen, for Jones to repel this invasion by the use of defensive violence. But, now we must ask: is it within the right of Jones to commit aggressive violence against innocent third parties in the course of his legitimate defense against Smith? Clearly the answer must be "No." For the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute; it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong, and criminal, to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or is starving, or is defending oneself against a third man's attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We (or, rather, the victim or his heirs) may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand C's "higher" culpability in this whole procedure, but we still label this aggression by A as a criminal act which B has every right to repel by violence. 
To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him, but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent
crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more) a criminal aggressor as Smith is. 
The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e. if "war" breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones's cause. But Jones and his men have no right, anymore than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their "just war": to steal others' property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact if Smith's crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft. 
Suppose that Jones, in the course of his "just war" against the ravages of Smith, should kill some innocent people; and suppose that he should declaim, in defense of this murder, that he was simply acting on the slogan, "give me liberty or give me death." The absurdity of this "defense" should be evident at once, for the issue is not whether Jones was willing to risk death personally in his defensive struggle against Smith; the issue is whether he was willing to kill other innocent people in pursuit of his legitimate end. For Jones was in truth acting on the completely indefensible slogan: "Give me liberty or give them death" - surely a far less noble battle cry. 
War, then, even a just defensive war, is only proper when the exercise of violence is rigorously limited to the individual criminals themselves. We may judge for ourselves how many wars or conflicts in history have met this criterion. 
It has often been maintained, and especially by conservatives, that the development of the horrendous modern weapons of mass murder (nuclear weapons, rockets, germ warfare, etc.) is only a difference of degree rather than kind from the simpler weapons of an earlier era. Of course, one answer to this is that when the degree is the number of human lives, the difference is a very big one. But a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even "conventional" aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification. 
This is why the old cliche no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively, cannot be used in a libertarian manner. Therefore, their very existence must be condemned, and nuclear disarmament becomes a good to be pursued for its own sake. Indeed, of all the aspects of liberty, such disarmament becomes the highest political good that can be pursued in the modern world. For just as murder is a more heinous crime against another man than larceny so mass murder -indeed murder so widespread as to threaten human civilization and human survival itself - is the worst crime that any man could possibly commit. And that crime is now all too possible. Or are libertarians going to wax properly indignant about price controls or the income tax, and yet shrug their shoulders at or even positively advocate the ultimate crime of mass murder? 
If nuclear warfare is totally illegitimate even for individuals defending themselves against criminal assault, how much more so is nuclear or even "conventional" warfare between States!
Let us now bring the State into our discussion. Since each State arrogates to itself a monopoly of violence over a territorial area, so long as its depredations and extortions go unresisted, there is said to be "peace" within the area, since the only violence is continuing and one-way, directed by the State downward against its people. Open conflict within the area only breaks out in the case of "revolutions," in which people resist the use of State power against them. Both the quiet case of the State unresisted and the case of open revolution may be termed "vertical violence": violence of the State against its public or vice versa. 
In the existing world, each land area is ruled over by a State organization, with a number of States scattered over the earth, each with a monopoly of violence over its own territory. No super-state exists with a monopoly of violence over the entire world; and so a state of "anarchy" exists between the several States. And so, except for revolutions, which occur only sporadically, the open violence and two-sided conflict in the world takes place between two or more States, i.e., what is called "international war" or "horizontal violence." 
Now there are crucial and vital differences between inter-State warfare on the one hand and revolutions against the State or conflicts between private individuals on the other. In a revolution the conflict takes place within the same geographical area: both the minions of the State and the revolutionaries inhabit the same territory. Inter-State warfare, on the other hand, takes place between two groups, each having a monopoly over its own geographical area, i.e. it takes place between inhabitants of different territories. From this difference flow several important consequences: 
(1) In inter-State war, the scope for the use of modem weapons of mass destruction is far greater. For if the escalation of weaponry in an intra-territorial conflict becomes too great, each side will blow itself up with the weapons directed against the other. Neither a revolutionary group nor a State combatting revolution, for example, can use nuclear weapons against the other. But, on the other hand, when the warring parties inhabit different territorial areas, the scope for modern weaponry becomes enormous, and the entire arsenal of mass devastation can come into play.
A second corollary consequence (2) is that while it is possible for revolutionaries to pinpoint their targets and confine them to their State enemies, and thus avoid aggressing against innocent people, pinpointing is far less possible in an inter-State war. This is true even with older weapons; and, of course, with modern weapons there can be no pinpointing whatever. 
Furthermore, (3) since each State can mobilize all the people and resources in its territory, the other State comes to regard all the citizens of the opposing country as at least temporarily its enemies and to treat them accordingly by extending the war to them. Thus, all of the consequences of inter-territorial war make it almost inevitable that inter-State war will involve aggression by each side against the innocent civilians - the private individuals - of the other. This inevitability becomes absolute with modern weapons of mass destruction. 
If one distinct attribute of inter-State war is inter-territoriality, another unique attribute stems from the fact that each State lives by taxation over its subjects. Any war against another State, therefore, involves the increase and extension of taxation-aggression against its own people. Conflicts between private individuals can be, and usually are, voluntarily waged and financed by the parties concerned. Revolutions can be, and often are, financed and fought by voluntary contributions of the public. But State wars can only be waged through aggression against the taxpayer. 
All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State's own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State. On the other hand, revolutions are often financed voluntarily and may pinpoint their violence to the State rulers; and private conflicts may confine their violence to the actual criminals. We must therefore conclude that, while some revolutions and some private conflicts may be legitimate, State wars are always to be condemned. 
Some libertarians might object as follows: "While we too deplore the use of taxation for warfare, and the State's monopoly of defense service, we have to recognize that these conditions exist, and while they do, we must support the State in just wars of defense." In the light of our discussion above, the reply would go as follows: "Yes, States exist, and as long as they do, the libertarian attitude toward the State should be to say to it, in effect: 'All right, you exist, but so long as you do, at least confine your activities to the area which you monopolize.'" In short, the libertarian is interested in reducing as much as possible the area of State aggression against all private individuals, "foreign" and "domestic." The only way to do this, in international affairs, is for the people of each country to pressure their own State to confine its activities to the area which it monopolizes, and not to aggress against other State-monopolists - particularly the people ruled by other States. In short, the objective of the libertarian is to confine any existing State to as small a degree of invasion of person and property as possible. And this means the total avoidance of war. The people under each State should pressure "their" respective States not to attack one another, and, if a conflict should break out, to negotiate a peace or declare a ceasefire as quickly as physically possible. 
Suppose further that we have that rarity - an unusually clear-cut case in which the State is actually trying to defend the property of one of its citizens. A citizen of country A travels or invests in country B, and then State B aggresses against his person or confiscates his property. Surely, our libertarian critic might argue, here is a clear-cut case where State A should threaten or commit war against State B in order to defend the property of "its" citizen. Since, the argument runs, the State has taken up - on itself the monopoly of defense of its citizens, it then has the obligation to go to war on behalf of any citizen, and libertarians must support such a war as a just one. 
But the point again is that each State has a monopoly of violence, and therefore of defense, only over its territorial area. It has no such monopoly - in fact it has no power at all - over any other geographical area. Therefore, if an inhabitant of country A should move to or invest in country B, the libertarian must argue that he thereby takes his chances with the State monopolist of country B, and that it would be immoral and criminal for State A to tax people in country A and to kill numerous innocents in country B in order to defend the property of the traveller or investor. 
It should also be pointed out that there is no defense against nuclear weapons (the only current "defense" being the threat of "mutually assured destruction") and, therefore, that the State cannot fulfill any sort of international defense function so long as these weapons exist. 
The libertarian objective, then, should be, regardless of the specific causes of any conflict, to pressure States not to launch wars against other States and, should a war break out, to pressure them to sue for peace and negotiate a cease-fire and a peace treaty as quickly as physically possible. This objective, incidentally, was enshrined in the old-fashioned international law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, i.e., the ideal that no State aggress against the territory of another - which is now called the "peaceful coexistence" of States. 
Suppose, however, that despite libertarian opposition, war has begun and the warring States are not negotiating a peace. What, then, should be the libertarian position? Clearly, to reduce the scope of assault against innocent civilians as much as possible. Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices for this purpose: the "laws of war," and the "laws of neutrality" or "neutral's rights." The laws of neutrality were designed to keep any war that breaks out strictly confined to the warring States themselves, without aggression against the States, or particularly the peoples, of the other nations. Hence, the importance of such ancient and now forgotten American principles as "freedom of the seas" or severe limitations upon the rights of warring States to repress neutral trade with the enemy country. In short, the libertarian position is to induce the warring States to observe fully the rights of neutral citizens. 
For their part, the "laws of war" were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion by warring States of the rights of the civilians of the respective warring countries. As the British jurist F.J.P. Veale put it: 
The fundamental principle of this code was that hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces actually engaged. ...It drew a distinction between combatants and non-combatants by laying down that the sole business of the combatants is to fight each other and, consequently that non-combatants must be excluded from the scope of military operations. 
In condemning all wars, regardless of motive, the libertarian knows that there may well be varying degrees of guilt among States for any specific war. But his overriding consideration is the condemnation of any State participation in war. Hence, his policy is that of exerting pressure on all States not to start or engage in a war, to stop one that has begun, and to reduce the scope of any persisting war in injuring civilians of either side or no side. 
One corollary of the libertarian policy of peaceful coexistence and non-intervention between States is the rigorous abstention from any foreign aid, aid from one State to another. For any aid given by State A to State B (1) increases the tax aggression against the people of country A, and (2) aggravates the suppression by State B of its own people. 
Let us see how libertarian theory applies to the problem of imperialism, which may be defined as the aggression of State A over the people of country B, and the subsequent maintenance of this foreign rule. This rule could either be directly over country B, or indirectly through a subsidiary client State B. Revolution by the people of B against the imperial rule of A (either directly or against client State B) is certainly legitimate, provided again that the revolutionary fire be directed only against the rulers. It has often been maintained by conservatives - and even by some libertarians - that Western imperialism over undeveloped countries should be supported as more watchful of property rights than any successor native government might be. But first, judging what might follow the status quo is purely speculative, whereas the oppression of existing imperial rule over the people of country B is all too real and culpable. And secondly, this analysis neglects the injuries of imperialism suffered by the Western taxpayer, who is mulcted and burdened to pay for the wars of conquest and then for the maintenance of the imperial bureaucracy. On this latter ground alone, the libertarian must condemn imperialism. 
Does opposition to all inter-State war mean that the Libertarian can never countenance change of geographical boundaries - that he is consigning the world to a freezing of unjust territorial regimes? Certainly not. Suppose, for example, that the hypothetical State of "Walldavia" has attacked "Ruritania" and annexed the western part of the country. The Western Ruritanians now long to be reunited with their Ruritanian brethren (perhaps because they wish to use their Ruritanian language undisturbed). How is this to be achieved? There is, of course, the route of peaceful negotiations between the two powers; but suppose that the Walldavian imperialists prove adamant. Or, libertarian Walldavians can put pressure on their State to abandon its conquest in the name of justice. But suppose that this, too, does not work. What then? We must still maintain the illegitimacy of the Ruritanian State's mounting a war against Walldavia. The legitimate routes to geographical change are (1) revolutionary uprisings by the oppressed Western Ruritanian people, and (2) aid by private Ruritanian groups (or, for that matter, by friends of the Ruritanian cause in other countries) to the Western rebels - either in the form of equipment or volunteer personnel.
Finally, we must allude to the domestic tyranny that is the inevitable accompaniment of inter-State war, a tyranny that usually lingers long after the war is over. Randolph Bourne realized that "war is the health of the State." It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. The root myth that enables the State to wax fat off war is the canard that war is a defense by the State of its subjects. The facts are precisely the reverse. For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only "die" by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting for them. Society becomes militarized and statized, it becomes a herd, seeking to kill its alleged enemies, rooting out and suppressing all dissent from the official war effort, happily betraying truth for the supposed public interest. Society becomes an armed camp, with the values and the morale - as Albert Jay Nock once phrased it - of an "army on the march."  

PART IV
MODERN ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF LIBERTY. 
Having presented our theory of liberty and property rights, and discussed the inherent role of the State vis-à-vis liberty, we turn in this part of the work to a discussion and critique of several leading alternative theories of liberty brought forth in the modern world, by those who are very roughly in the free-market, or classical liberal, tradition. Whatever the other merits of these theories, they will be seen to provide a flawed and inadequate foundation for a systematic theory of liberty and the rights of the individual.

26. Utilitarian Free-Market Economics. 
A. Introduction: Utilitarian Social Philosophy. 
Economics emerged as a distinct, self-conscious science or discipline in the nineteenth century, and hence this development unfortunately coincided with the dominance of utilitarianism in philosophy. The social philosophy of economists, therefore, whether the laissez-faire creed of the nineteenth century or the statism of the twentieth, has almost invariably been grounded in utilitarian social philosophy. Even today political economy abounds with discussion of the weighing of "social costs" and "social benefits" in deciding upon public policy. 
We cannot engage here in a critique of utilitarianism as an ethical theory. Here we are interested in analyzing certain attempts to use a utilitarian ethic to provide a defensible groundwork for a libertarian or laissez-faire ideology. Our brief criticisms will concentrate, then, on utilitarianism insofar as it has been used as a groundwork for a libertarian, or quasi-libertarian, political philosophy. 
In brief, utilitarian social philosophy holds the "good" policy to be the one that yields the "greatest good for the greatest number": in which each person counts for one in making up that number, and in which "the good" is held to be the fullest satisfaction of the purely subjective desires of the individuals in society. Utilitarians, like economists (see further below) like to think of themselves as "scientific" and "value-free," and their doctrine supposedly permits them to adopt a virtually value-free stance; for they are presumably not imposing their own values, but simply recommending the greatest possible satisfaction of the desires and wants of the mass of the population. 
But this doctrine is hardly scientific and by no means value-free. For one thing, why the "greatest number"? Why is it ethically better to follow the wishes of the greater as against the lesser number? What's so good about the "greatest number"? Suppose that the vast majority of people in a society hate and revile redheads, and greatly desire to murder them; and suppose further that there are only a few redheads extant at any time. Must we then say that it is "good" for the vast majority to slaughter redheads? And if not, why not? At the very least, then, utilitarianism scarcely suffices to make a case for liberty and laissez-faire. As Felix Adler wryly put it, utilitarians
pronounce the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be the social end, although they fail to make it intelligible why the happiness of the greater number should be cogent as an end upon those who happen to belong to the lesser number. 
Secondly, what is the justification for each person counting for one? Why not some system of weighting? This, too, seems to be an unexamined and therefore unscientific article of faith in utilitarianism. 
Thirdly, why is "the good" only fulfilling the subjective emotional desires of each person? Why can there be no supra-subjective critique of these desires? Indeed, utilitarianism implicitly assumes these subjective desires to be absolute givens which the social technician is somehow duty-bound to try to satisfy. But it is common human experience that individual desires are not absolute and unchanging. They are not hermetically sealed off from persuasion, rational or otherwise; experience and other individuals can and do persuade and convince people to change their values. But how could that be so if all individual desires and values are pure givens and therefore not subject to alteration by the inter-subjective persuasion of others? But if these desires are not givens, and they are changeable by the persuasion of moral argument, it would then appear that inter-subjective moral principles do exist that can be argued and can have an impact on others. 
Oddly enough, while utilitarianism assumes that morality, the good, is purely subjective to each individual, it assumes on the other hand that these subjective desires can be added, subtracted, and weighed across the various individuals in society. It assumes that individual subjective utilities and costs can be added, subtracted, and measured so as to arrive at a "net social utility" or social "cost," thus permitting the utilitarian to advise for or against a given social policy. Modern welfare economics is particularly adept at arriving at estimates (even allegedly precise quantitative ones) of "social cost" and "social utility." But economics does correctly inform us, not that moral principles are subjective, but that utilities and costs are indeed subjective: individual utilities are purely subjective and ordinal, and therefore it is totally illegitimate to add or weight them to arrive at any estimate for "social" utility or cost. 

B. The Unanimity and Compensation Principles. 
Utilitarian economists, even more than their philosophic confreres, are eager to make "scientific" and "value free" pronouncements on public policy. Believing, however, that ethics are purely arbitrary and subjective, how may economists then take policy positions? This chapter will explore ways in which utilitarian free-market economists presume to favor a free market while attempting to refrain from taking ethical positions. 
One important utilitarian variant is the Unanimity Principle, based on the criterion of "Pareto optimality" that a political policy is "good" if one or more people are "better off" (in terms of satisfying utilities) from that policy while no one is "worse off." A strict version of Pareto optimality implies unanimity: that every person agrees to, hence believes that he will be better off or at least no worse off, from a particular government action. In recent years, the Unanimity Principle as groundwork for a free market of voluntary and contractual agreements has been stressed by Professor James Buchanan. The Unanimity Principle has great attractions for "value-free" economists eager to make policy judgments, for far more than in the case of mere majority rule; surely the economist can safely advocate a policy if everyone in the society favors it. While the Unanimity Principle may at first appear superficially attractive to libertarians, however, there is at its heart a vital and irredeemable flaw: that the goodness of free contracts or unanimously approved changes from the existing situation depends completely on the goodness or justice of that existing situation itself. Yet neither Pareto Optimality, nor its Unanimity Principle variant, can say anything about the goodness or justice of the existing status quo, concentrating as they do solely on changes from that situation, or zero point. Not only that, but the requirement of unanimous approval of changes necessarily freezes the existing status quo. If the status quo is unjust or repressive of liberty, then the Unanimity Principle is a grave barrier to justice and liberty rather than a bulwark on its behalf. The economist who advocates the Unanimity Principle as a seemingly value-free pronouncement for liberty is instead making a massive and totally unsupported value judgment on behalf of freezing the status quo. 
The commonly accepted "Compensation Principle" variant of Pareto optimality contains all the flaws of the strict Unanimity Principle, while adding many of its own. The Compensation Principle asserts that a public policy is "good" if the gainers (in utility) from that policy can compensate the losers and still enjoy net gains. So that while there are losers in utility from this policy at the beginning, there are no such losers after the compensations take place. But the Compensation Principle assumes that it is conceptually possible to add and subtract utilities inter-personally, and thereby to measure gains and losses; it also assumes that each individual's gains and losses can be precisely estimated. But economics informs us that "utility," and hence gains and losses in utility, are purely subjective and psychic concepts, and that they cannot possibly be measured or even estimated by outside observers. Gains and losses in utility therefore cannot be added, measured, or weighted against each other, and much less can precise compensations be discovered. The usual assumption by economists is to measure psychic losses in utility by the monetary price of an asset; thus, if a railroad damages the land of a farmer by smoke, it is assumed by the compensationists that the farmer's loss can be measured by the market price of the land. But this assumption ignores the fact that the farmer may well have a psychic attachment to that land which is far greater than the market price, and that, furthermore, it is impossible to find out what the farmer's psychic attachment to the land may be. Asking the farmer is useless, since he may say, for example, that his attachment to the land is much higher than the market price, but he may well be lying. The government, or other outside observer, has no way of finding out one way or the other.  Furthermore, the existence in the society of just one militant anarchist, whose psychic grievance against government is such that he cannot be compensated for his psychic disutility from the existence or activity of government, is enough by itself to destroy the Compensation Principle case for any government action whatsoever. And surely at least one such anarchist exists.
A stark but not atypical example of the fallacies and the unjust devotion to the status quo of the Compensation Principle was the debate in the British Parliament during the early nineteenth century on the abolition of slavery. Early adherents of the Compensation Principle were there maintaining that the masters must be compensated for the loss of their investment in slaves. At which point, Benjamin Pearson, a member of the libertarian Manchester School, declared that he "had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated." Precisely! Here is a striking example of the need, in advocating public policy, to have some ethical system, some concept of justice. Those of us ethicists who hold that slavery is criminal and unjust would always oppose the idea of compensating the masters, and would rather think in terms of requiring the masters to compensate the slaves for their years of oppression. But the "value-free economist", resting on the Unanimity and Compensation Principles, is, on the contrary, implicitly placing his unsupported and arbitrary value imprimatur on the unjust status quo. 
In a fascinating exchange with a critic of the Unanimity Principle, Professor Buchanan concedes that
I am defending the status quo ...not because I like it, I do not ....But my defense of the status quo stems from my unwillingness, indeed inability, to discuss changes other than those that are contractual in nature. I can, of course, lay down my own notions. ...But, to me, this is simply wasted effort. 
Thus, tragically, Buchanan, admitting that his idea of ethics is one of purely subjective and arbitrary "notions", is yet willing to promulgate what can only be an equally subjective and arbitrary notion on his own grounds - a defense of the status quo. Buchanan concedes that his procedure: 
does allow me to take a limited step toward normative judgments or hypotheses, namely to suggest that the changes seem to be potentially agreeable to everyone. Pareto efficient changes, which must, of course, include compensations. The criterion in my scheme is agreement. 
But what is the justification for this "limited step"? What's so great about agreement on changes from a possibly unjust status quo? Isn't such a limited step also an arbitrary "notion" for Buchanan? And if willing to proceed to such an unsatisfactory limit, why not go still further to question the status quo? 
Buchanan proceeds to assert that:
[O]ur task is really ... that of trying to find, locate, invent, schemes that can command unanimous or quasi-unanimous consent and propose them. [What in the world is "quasi-unanimity?"] Since persons disagree on so much, these schemes may be a very limited set, and this may suggest to you that few changes are possible. Hence, the status quo defended indirectly. The status quo has no propriety at all save for its existence and it is all that exists. The point I always emphasize is that we start from here not from somewhere else. 
Here one longs for Lord Acton's noble dictum: "Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is." Buchanan's critic, though far from a libertarian or a free-market liberal, here properly has the last word: "I certainly do not totally object to seeking contractual solutions; but I do think that they can't be projected in a vacuum which allows the status quo power structure to go unspecified and unexamined."

C. Ludwig von Mises and "Value-Free" Laissez Faire. 
Let us now turn to the position of Ludwig von Mises on the entire matter of praxeology, value-judgments, and the advocacy of public policy. The case of Mises is particularly interesting, for he was, of all the economists in the twentieth century, at one and the same time the most un- compromising and passionate adherent of laissez faire and the most rigorous and uncompromising advocate of value-free economics and opponent of any sort of objective ethics. How then did he attempt to reconcile these two positions? 
Mises offered two separate and very different solutions to this problem. The first is a variant of the Unanimity Principle. Essentially this variant affirms that an economist per se cannot say that a given governmental policy is "good" or "bad." However, if a given policy will lead to consequences, as explained by praxeology, which every one of the supporters of the policy will agree is bad, then the value-free economist is justified in calling the policy a "bad" one. Thus, Mises writes:
An economist investigates whether a measure A can bring about the result P for the attainment of which it is recommended, and finds that A does not result in P but in G, an effect which even the supporters of the measure a consider undesirable. If the economist states the outcome of his investigation by saying that A is a bad measure, he does not pronounce a judgment of value. He merely says that from the point of view of those aiming at the goal P, the measure A is inappropriate. 
And again:
Economics does not say that ... government interference with the prices of only one commodity … is unfair, bad, or unfeasible. It says, that it makes conditions worse, not better, from the point of view of the government and those backing its interference. 
Now this is surely an ingenious attempt to allow pronouncements of "good" or "bad" by the economist without making a value judgment; for the economist is supposed to be only a praxeologist, a technician, pointing out to his readers or listeners that they will all consider a policy "bad" once he reveals its full consequences. But ingenious as it is, the attempt completely fails. For how does Mises know what the advocates of the particular policy consider desirable? How does he know what their value-scales are now or what they will be when the consequences of the measure appear? One of the great contributions of praxeologic economics is that the economist realizes that he doesn't know what anyone's value scales are except as those value preferences are demonstrated by a person's concrete action. Mises himself emphasized that: 
one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man's actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man's acting. 
Given Mises's own analysis, then, how can the economist know what the motives for advocating various policies really are, or how people will regard the consequences of these policies?
Thus, Mises, qua economist, may show that price control (to use his example) will lead to unforeseen shortages of a good to the consumers. But how does Mises know that some advocates of price control do not want shortages? They may, for example, be socialists, anxious to use the controls as a step toward full collectivism. Some may be egalitarians who prefer shortages because the rich will not be able to use their money to buy more of the product than poorer people. Some may be nihilists, eager to see shortages of goods. Others may be one of the numerous legion of contemporary intellectuals who are eternally complaining about the "excessive affluence" of our society, or about the great "waste" of energy; they may all delight in the shortages of goods. Still others may favor price control, even after learning of the shortages, because they, or their political allies, will enjoy well-paying jobs or power in the price-control bureaucracy. All sorts of such possibilities exist, and none of them is compatible with Mises asserting, as a value-free economist, that all the supporters of the price control - or of any other government intervention - must concede, after learning economics, that the measure is bad. In fact, once Mises concedes that even a single advocate of price control or any other interventionist measure may acknowledge the economic consequences and still favor it, for whatever reason, then Mises, as a praxeologist and economist, can no longer call any of these measures "bad" or "good," or even "appropriate" or "inappropriate," without inserting into his economic policy pronouncements the very value judgments that Mises himself holds to be inadmissible in a scientist of human action. For then he is no longer being a technical reporter to all advocates of a certain policy, but himself an advocate participating on one side of a value conflict. 
Moreover, there is another fundamental reason for advocates of "inappropriate" policies to refuse to change their minds even after hearing and acknowledging the praxeological chain of consequences.
For praxeology may indeed show that all types of government policies will have consequences that most people, at least, will tend to abhor; however, (and this is a vital qualification) most of these consequences take time, some a great deal of time. No economist has done more than Ludwig von Mises to elucidate the universality of time-preference in human affairs - the praxeologic law that everyone prefers to attain a given satisfaction sooner than later. And certainly, Mises, as a value-free scientist, could never presume to criticize anyone's rate of time preference, to say that A's was "too high" or B's "too low." But, in that case, what about the high time-preference people in society who may retort to the praxeologist: "perhaps this high tax and subsidy policy will lead to a decline of capital; perhaps even the price control will lead to shortages, but I don't care. Having a high time-preference, I value more highly the short-run subsidies, or the short-run enjoyment of buying the current good at cheaper prices, than the prospect of suffering the future consequences." And Mises, as a value-free scientist and opponent of any concept of objective ethics, cannot call them wrong. There is no way that he can assert the superiority of the long-run over the short-run without overriding the values of the high time-preference people; and this cannot be cogently done without abandoning his own subjectivist ethics. 
In this connection, one of Mises's basic arguments for the free market is that, on the market, there is a "harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of the market society." It is clear from his discussion that he doesn't merely mean "interests" after learning the praxeological consequences of market activity or of government intervention. He also, and in particular, means people's "long-run" interests, for, as Mises states, "For 'rightly understood' interests we may as well say interests 'in the long run.'" But what about the high- time-preference folk, who prefer to consult their short-run interests? How can the long-run be called "better" than the short-run; why must "right understanding" necessarily be the long run? We see, therefore, that Mises's attempt to advocate laissez-faire while remaining value-free, by assuming that all of the advocates of government intervention will abandon their position once they learn of its consequences, falls completely to the ground. 
There is another and very different way however, that Mises attempts to reconcile his passionate advocacy of laissez-faire with the absolute value freedom of the scientist. This is to take a position much more compatible with praxeology: by recognizing that the economist qua economist can only trace chains of cause and effect and may not engage in value judgments or advocate public policy. This route of Mises concedes that the economic scientist cannot advocate laissez-faire, but then adds that he as a citizen can do so. Mises, as a citizen, then proposes a value-system but it is a curiously scanty one. For he is here caught in a dilemma. As a praxeologist he knows that he cannot (as an economic scientist) pronounce value judgments or advocate policy; yet he cannot bring himself simply to assert and inject arbitrary value judgments. And so, as a utilitarian (for Mises, along with most economists, is indeed a utilitarian in ethics, although a Kantian in epistemology), what he does is to make only one narrow value judgment: that he desires to fulfill the goals of the majority of the public (happily, in this formulation, Mises does not presume to know the goals of everyone).
As Mises explains, in his second variant:
Liberalism [i.e. laissez-faire liberalism] is a political doctrine. ... As a political doctrine liberalism (in contrast to economic science) is not neutral with regard to values and ultimate ends sought by action. It assumes that all men or at least the majority of people are intent upon attaining certain goals. It gives them information about the means suitable to the realization of their plans. The champions of liberal doctrines are fully aware of the fact that their teachings are valid only for people who are committed to their valuational principles. While praxeology, and therefore economics too, uses the terms happiness and removal of uneasiness in a purely formal sense, liberalism attaches to them a concrete meaning. It pre-supposes that people prefer life to death, health to sickness ...abundance to poverty. It teaches men how to act in accordance with these valuations. 
In this second variant, Mises has successfully escaped the contradiction of being a value-free praxeologist advocating laissez faire. Granting in this variant that the economist may not make such advocacy, he takes his stand as a "citizen" willing to make value judgments. But he is not willing to simply assert an ad hoc value judgment; presumably he feels that a valuing intellectual must present some sort of ethical system to justify such value judgments. But, as a utilitarian, Mises's system is a curiously bloodless one; even as a valuing laissez-faire liberal, he is only willing to make the one value judgment that he joins the majority of the people in favoring their common peace, prosperity, and abundance. In this way as an opponent of objective ethics, and uncomfortable as he must be with making any value judgments even as a citizen, he makes the minimal possible degree of such judgments. True to his utilitarian position, his value judgment is the desirability of fulfilling the subjectively desired goals of the bulk of the populace. 
A few points in critique of this position may here be made. In the first place, while praxeology can indeed demonstrate that laissez faire will lead to harmony, prosperity, and abundance, whereas government intervention leads to conflict and impoverishment, and while it is probably true that most people value the former highly, it is not true that these are their only goals or values. The great analyst of ranked value scales and diminishing marginal utility should have been more aware of such competing values and goals. For example, many people, whether through envy or a misplaced theory of justice, may prefer far more equality of income than will be attained on the free market. Many people, pace the aforementioned intellectuals, may want less abundance in order to whittle down our allegedly "excessive" affluence. Others, as we have mentioned above, may prefer to loot the capital of the rich or the businessman in the short-run, while acknowledging but dismissing the long-run ill effects, because they have a high time-preference. Probably very few of these people will want to push statist measures to the point of total impoverishment and destruction - although this may well happen. But a majority coalition of the above might well opt for some reduction in wealth and prosperity on behalf of these other values. They may well decide that it is worth sacrificing a modicum of wealth and efficient production because of the high opportunity cost of not being able to enjoy an alleviation of envy, or a lust for power or submission to power, or, for example, the thrill of "national unity" which they might enjoy from a (short-lived) economic crisis.
What can Mises reply to a majority of the public who have indeed considered all the praxeological consequences, and still prefer a modicum - or, for that matter, even a drastic amount - of statism in order to achieve some of their competing goals? As a utilitarian, he cannot quarrel with the ethical nature of their chosen goals, for, as a utilitarian, he must confine himself to the one value judgment that he favors the majority achieving their chosen goals. The only reply that Mises can make within his own framework is to point out that government intervention has a cumulative effect, that eventually the economy must move either toward the free market or toward full socialism, which praxeology shows will bring chaos and drastic impoverishment, at least to an industrial society. But this, too, is not a fully satisfactory answer. While many or most programs of statist intervention - especially price controls - are indeed cumulative, others are not. Furthermore, the cumulative impact takes such a long time that the time preferences of the majority might well lead them, in full acknowledgment of the consequences, to ignore the effect. And then what? 
Mises attempted to use the cumulative argument to answer the contention that the majority of the public prefer egalitarian measures even knowingly at the expense of a portion of their own wealth. Mises's comment was that the "reserve fund" was on the point of being exhausted in Europe, and therefore that any further egalitarian measures would have to come directly out of the pockets of the masses through increased taxation. Mises assumed that once this became clear, the masses would no longer support interventionist measures. But, in the first place, this is not a strong argument against the previous egalitarian measures, nor in favor of their repeal. But secondly, while the masses might well be convinced, there is certainly no apodictic certainty involved; and the masses have certainly in the past, and presumably will in the future continue knowingly to support egalitarian and other statist measures on behalf of others of their goals, despite the knowledge that their income and wealth would be reduced. 
Thus, Dean Rappard pointed out in his thoughtful critique of Mises's position: 
Does the British voter, for instance, favor confiscatory taxation of large incomes primarily in the hope that it will redound to his material advantage, or in the certainty that it tends to reduce unwelcome and irritating social inequalities? In general, is the urge towards equality in our modern democracies not often stronger than the desire to improve one's material lot?
And, on his own country, Switzerland, Dean Rappard pointed out that the urban industrial and commercial majority of the country have repeatedly, and often at popular referenda, endorsed measures to subsidize the minority of farmers in a deliberate effort to retard industrialization and the growth of their own incomes. 
Rappard noted that the urban majority did not do so in the "absurd belief that they were thereby increasing their real income." Instead, 
quite deliberately and expressly, political parties have sacrificed the immediate material welfare of their members in order to prevent, or at least somewhat to retard, the complete industrialization of the country. A more agricultural Switzerland, though poorer, such is the dominant wish of the Swiss people today." 
The point here is that Mises, not only as a praxeologist but even as a utilitarian liberal, can have no word of criticism against these statist measures once the majority of the public have taken their praxeological consequences into account and chosen them anyway on behalf of goals other than wealth and prosperity. 
Furthermore, there are other types of statist intervention which clearly have little or no cumulative effect, and which may even have very little effect in diminishing production or prosperity. Let us for example assume again - and this assumption is not very farfetched in view of the record of human history - that the great majority of a society hate and revile redheads. Let us further assume that there are very few redheads in the society. This large majority then decides that it would like very much to murder all redheads. Here they are; the murder of redheads is high on the value-scales of the great majority of the public; there are few redheads so that there will be little loss in production on the market. How can Mises rebut this proposed policy either as a praxeologist or as a utilitarian liberal? I submit that he cannot do so.
Mises makes one further attempt to establish his position, but it is even less successful. Criticizing the arguments for state intervention on behalf of equality or other moral concerns, he dismisses them as "emotional talk." After reaffirming that "praxeology and economics ...are neutral with regard to any moral precepts," and asserting that "the fact that the immense majority of men prefer a richer supply of material goods to a less ample supply is a datum of history; it does not have any place in economic theory," he concludes by insisting that "he who disagrees with the teachings of economics ought to refute them by discursive reasoning, not by ...the appeal to arbitrary, allegedly ethical standards." 
But I submit that this will not do. For Mises must concede that no one can decide upon any policy whatever unless he makes an ultimate ethical or value judgment. But since this is so, and since according to Mises all ultimate value judgments or ethical standards are arbitrary, how then can he denounce these particular ethical judgments as "arbitrary"? Furthermore, it is hardly correct for Mises to dismiss these judgments as "emotional", since for him as a utilitarian, reason cannot establish ultimate ethical principles; which can therefore only be established by subjective emotions. It is pointless for Mises to call for his critics to use "discursive reasoning," since he himself denies that discursive reasoning can ever be used to establish ultimate ethical values. Furthermore, the man whose ultimate ethical principles would lead him to support the free market should also be dismissed by Mises as equally "arbitrary" and "emotional," even if he has taken the laws of praxeology into account before making his ultimately ethical decision. And we have seen above that the majority of the public very often has other goals which they hold, at least to a certain extent, higher than their own material well-being. 
Thus, while praxeological economic theory is extremely useful for providing data and knowledge for framing economic policy, it cannot be sufficient by itself to enable the economist to make any value pronouncements or to advocate any public policy whatsoever. More specifically, Ludwig von Mises to the contrary notwithstanding, neither praxeological economics nor Mises's utilitarian liberalism is sufficient to make the case for laissez faire and the free-market economy. To make such a case, one must go beyond economics and utilitarianism to establish an objective ethics which affirms the overriding value of liberty, and morally condemns all forms of statism, from egalitarianism to "the murder of redheads," as well as such goals as the lust for power and the satisfaction of envy. To make the full case for liberty, one cannot be a methodological slave to every goal that the majority of the public might happen to cherish. 

27. Isaiah Berlin on Negative Freedom. 
One of the best known and most influential present day treatments of liberty is that of Sir Isaiah Berlin. In his 'Two Concepts of Liberty', Berlin upheld the concept of "negative liberty" - absence of interference with a person's sphere of action - as against "positive liberty", which refers not to liberty at all but to an individual's effective power or mastery over himself or his environment. Superficially Berlin's concept of negative liberty seems similar to the thesis of the present volume: that liberty is the absence of physically coercive interference or invasion of an individual's person and property. Unfortunately, however, the vagueness of Berlin's concepts led to confusion and to the absence of a systematic and valid libertarian creed.
One of Berlin's fallacies and confusions he himself recognized in a later essay and edition of his original volume. In his 'Two Concepts of Liberty', he had written that "I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can do what he wants." Or, as Berlin later phrased it, "In the original version of Two Concepts of Liberty I speak of liberty as the absence of obstacles to the fulfillment of a man's desires." But, as he later realized, one grave problem with this formulation is that a man can be held to be "free" in proportion as his wants and desires are extinguished, for example by external conditioning. As Berlin states in his corrective essay,
If degrees of freedom were a function of the satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them; I could render men (including myself) free by conditioning them into losing the original desires which I have decided not to satisfy? 
In his later (1969) version, Berlin has expunged the offending passage, altering the first statement above to read: "Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others." But grave problems still remain with Berlin's later approach. For Berlin now explains that what he means by freedom is "the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities," obstacles, that is, put there by "alterable human practices." But this comes close, as Professor Parent observes, to confusing "freedom" with "opportunity" in short to scuttling Berlin's own concept of negative freedom and replacing it with the illegitimate concept of "positive freedom." Thus, as Parent indicates, suppose that X refuses to hire Y because Y is a redhead and X dislikes redheads; X is surely reducing Y's range of opportunity, but he can scarcely be said to be invading Y's "freedom". Indeed, Parent goes on to point out a repeated confusion in the later Berlin of freedom with opportunity; thus Berlin writes that "the freedom of which I speak is opportunity for action" (xlii), and identifies increases in liberty with the "maximization of opportunities" (xlviii). As Parent points out, "The terms 'liberty' and 'opportunity' have distinct meanings"; someone, for example, may lack the opportunity to buy a ticket to a concert for numerous reasons (e.g., he is too busy) and yet he was still in any meaningful sense "free" to buy such a ticket. 
Thus, Berlin's fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual's person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined. Failing to hit on this definition, Berlin fell into confusion, and ended by virtually abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall, willy-nilly, into the "positive liberty" camp. More than that, Berlin, stung by his critics with the charge of upholding laissez-faire, was moved into frenetic and self-contradictory assaults on laissez-faire as somehow injurious to negative liberty. For example, Berlin writes that the "evils of unrestricted laissez-faire ... led to brutal violations of 'negative' liberty ...including that of free expression or association." Since laissez faire precisely means full freedom of person and property, including of course free expression and association as a subset of private property rights, Berlin has here fallen into absurdity. And in a similar canard, Berlin writes of 
the fate of personal liberty during the reign of unfettered economic individualism - about the condition of the injured majority, principally in the towns, whose children were destroyed in mines or mills, while their parents lived in poverty, disease, and ignorance, a situation in which the enjoyment by the poor and the weak of legal rights ... became an odious mockery. 
Unsurprisingly, Berlin goes on to attack such pure and consistent laissez-faire libertarians as Cobden and Spencer on behalf of such confused and inconsistent classical liberals as Mill and de Tocqueville. 
There are several grave and basic problems with Berlin's fulminations. One is a complete ignorance of the modem historians of the Industrial Revolution, such as Ashton, Hayek, Hutt, and Hartwell, who have demonstrated that the new industry alleviated the previous poverty and starvation of the workers, including the child laborers, rather than the contrary. But on a conceptual level, there are grave problems as well. First, that it is absurd and self-contradictory to assert that laissez-faire or economic individualism could have injured personal liberty; and, second, that Berlin
is really explicitly scuttling the very concept of "negative" liberty on behalf of concepts of positive power or wealth. 
Berlin reaches the height (or depth) of this approach when he attacks negative liberty directly for having been 
used to ... arm the strong, the brutal, and the unscrupulous against the humane and the weak. ...Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. The bloodstained story of economic individualism and unrestrained capitalist competition does not. ..today need stressing. 
The crucial fallacy of Berlin here is insistently to identify freedom and the free market economy with its opposite - with coercive aggression. Note his repeated use of such terms as "arm," "brutal," "wolves and sheep," and "bloodstained," all of which are applicable only to coercive aggression such as has been universally employed by the State. Also, he then identifies such aggression with its opposite - the peaceful and voluntary processes of free exchange in the market economy. Unrestrained economic individualism led, on the contrary, to peaceful and harmonious exchange, which benefitted most precisely the "weak" and the "sheep"; it is the latter who could not survive in the statist rule of the jungle, who reap the largest share of the benefits from the freely competitive economy. Even a slight acquaintance with economic science, and particularly with the Ricardian Law of Comparative Advantage, would have set Sir Isaiah straight on this vital point." 

28. F.A. Hayek and The Concept of Coercion. 
In his monumental work The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek attempts to establish a systematic political philosophy on behalf of individual liberty. He begins very well, by defining freedom as the absence of coercion, thus upholding "negative liberty" more cogently than does Isaiah Berlin. Unfortunately, the fundamental and grievous flaw in Hayek's system appears when he proceeds to define "coercion." For instead of defining coercion as is done in the present volume, as the invasive use of physical violence or the threat thereof against someone else's person or (just) property, Hayek defines coercion far more fuzzily and inchoately: e.g., as "control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another (so) that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another"; and again: "Coercion occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will, not for his own but for the other's purpose." 
For Hayek, "coercion" of course includes the aggressive use of physical violence, but the term unfortunately also includes peaceful and non-aggressive actions as well. Thus, Hayek states that "the threat of force or violence is the most important form of coercion. But they are not synonymous with coercion, for the threat of physical force is not the only way in which coercion can be exercised." 
What, then, are the other, nonviolent "ways" in which Hayek believes coercion can be exercised? One is such purely voluntary ways of interacting as "a morose husband" or "a nagging wife", who can make someone else's "life intolerable unless their every mood is obeyed." Here Hayek concedes that it would be absurd to advocate legal outlawry of sulkiness or nagging; but he does so on the faulty grounds that such outlawry would involve "even greater coercion." But "coercion" is not really an additive quantity; how can we quantitatively compare different "degrees" of coercion, especially when they involve comparisons among different people? Is there no fundamental qualitative difference, a difference in kind, between a nagging wife and using the apparatus of physical violence to outlaw or restrict such nagging? It seems clear that the fundamental problem is Hayek's use of "coercion" as a portmanteau term to include, not only physical violence but also voluntary, non-violent, and non-invasive actions such as nagging. The point, of course, is that the wife or husband is free to leave the offending partner, and that staying together is a voluntary choice on his or her part. Nagging might be morally or aesthetically unfortunate, but it is scarcely "coercive" in any sense similar to the use of physical violence. 
Only confusion can be caused by lumping the two types of action together. 
But not only confusion but also self-contradiction, for Hayek includes in the concept of "coercion" not only invasive physical violence, i.e. a compulsory action or exchange, but also certain forms of peaceful, voluntary refusal to make exchanges. Surely, the freedom to make an exchange necessarily implies the equivalent freedom not to make an exchange. Yet, Hayek dubs certain forms of peaceful refusal to make an exchange as "coercive," thus lumping them together with compulsory exchanges. Specifically, Hayek states that
there are, undeniably, occasions when the condition of employment creates opportunity for true coercion. In periods of acute unemployment the threat of dismissal may be used to enforce actions other than those originally contracted for. And in conditions such as those in a mining town the manager may well exercise an entirely arbitrary and capricious tyranny over a man to whom he has taken a dislike. 
Yet, "dismissal" is simply a refusal by the capital-owning employer to make any further exchanges with one or more people. An employer may refuse to make such exchanges for many reasons, and there are none but subjective criteria to enable Hayek to use the term "arbitrary." Why is one reason any more "arbitrary" than another? If Hayek means to imply that any reasons other than maximizing monetary profit are "arbitrary" then he ignores the Austrian School insight that people, even in business, act to maximize their "psychic" rather than monetary profit, and that such psychic profit may include all sorts of values, none of which is more or less arbitrary than another. Furthermore, Hayek here seems to be implying that employees have some sort of "right" to continuing employment, a "right" which is in overt contradiction to the property rights of employers to their own money.  Hayek concedes that dismissal is ordinarily not "coercive"; why then, in conditions of "acute unemployment" (surely in any case, not of the employer's making), or of the mining town? Again, miners have moved voluntarily to the mining town and are free to leave whenever they like. 
Hayek commits a similar error when he deals with the refusal to exchange made by a "monopolist" (the single owner of a resource). He admits that "if ...I would very much like to be painted by a famous artist and if he refused to paint me for less than a very high fee [or at all?], it would clearly be absurd to say that I am coerced." Yet he does apply the concept of coercion to a case where a monopolist owns water in an oasis. Suppose, he says, that people had "settled there on the assumption that water would always be available at a reasonable price," that then other water sources had dried up, and that people then "had no choice but to do whatever the owner of the spring demanded of them if they were to survive: here would be a clear case of coercion," since the good or service in question is "crucial to [their] existence." Yet, since the owner of the spring did not aggressively poison the competing springs, the owner is scarcely being "coercive"; in fact, he is supplying a vital service, and should have the right either to refuse a sale or to charge whatever the customers will pay. The situation may well be unfortunate for the customers, as are many situations in life, but the supplier of a particularly scarce and vital service is hardly being "coercive" by either refusing to sell or by setting a price that the buyers are willing to pay. Both actions are within his rights as a free man and as a just property owner. The owner of the oasis is responsible only for the existence of his own actions and his own property; he is not accountable for the existence of the desert or for the fact that the other springs have dried up. 
Let us postulate another situation. Suppose that there is only one physician in a community, and an epidemic breaks out; only he can save the lives of numerous fellow-citizens - an action surely crucial to their existence. Is he "coercing" them if (a) he refuses to do anything, or leaves town; or (b) if he charges a very high price for his curative services? Certainly not. There is, for one thing, nothing wrong with a man charging the value of his services to his customers, i.e., what they are willing to pay. He further has every right to refuse to do anything. While he may perhaps be criticized morally or aesthetically, as a self-owner of his own body he has every right to refuse to cure or to do so at a high price; to say that he is being "coercive" is furthermore to imply that it is proper and not coercive for his customers or their agents to force the physician to treat them: in short, to justify his enslavement. But surely enslavement, compulsory labor, must be considered "coercive" in any sensible meaning of the term. 
All this highlights the gravely self-contradictory nature of including a forced activity or exchange in the same rubric of "coercion" with someone's peaceful refusal to make an exchange.
As I have written elsewhere: 
A well-known type of "private coercion" is the vague but ominous sounding "economic power." A favorite illustration of the wielding of such "power" is the case of a worker fired from his job. ...
Let us look at this situation closely. What exactly has the employer done? He has refused to continue to make a certain exchange which the worker preferred to continue making. Specifically, A, the employer, refuses to sell a certain sum of money in exchange for the purchase of B's labor services. B would like to make a certain exchange; A would not. The same principle may apply to all the exchanges throughout the length and breadth of the economy. ...
"Economic power," then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. Every man has this power. Every man has the same right to make a proferred exchange.
Now, it should become evident that the "middle-of-the-road" statist, who concedes the evil of violence but adds that the violence of government is sometimes necessary to counteract the "private coercion of economic power" is caught in an impossible contradiction. 'A' refuses to make an exchange with 'B'. What are we to say, or what is the government to do, if 'B' brandishes a gun and orders 'A' to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that 'B' is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that 'B' is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply "counteracting the subtle coercion" of economic power wielded by 'A'. Either the defense agency must rush to the defense of 'A', or it deliberately refuses to do so, perhaps aiding 'B' (or doing B's work for him). There is no middle ground! 
'B' is committing violence; there is no question about that. In the terms of both doctrines (the libertarian and the "economic power" arguments), this violence is either invasive and therefore unjust, or defensive and therefore just. If we adopt the "economic power" argument, we must choose the latter position; if we reject it, we must adopt the former. If we choose the "economic power" concept, we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it, we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choice. The "middle-of-the-road" statist cannot logically say that there are "many forms" of unjustified coercion. He must choose one or the other and take his stand accordingly. Either he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion - overt physical violence - or he must say that there is only one form of illegal coercion - refusal to exchange. 
And outlawing the refusal to work is, of course, a society of general slavery. Let us consider another example that Hayek quickly dismisses as non-coercive: "If a hostess will invite me to her parties only if I conform to certain standards of conduct and dress ... this is certainly not coercion." Yet, as Professor Hamowy has shown, this case may well be considered "coercion" on Hayek's own criteria. For, 
it might be that I am a very socially conscious person and that my not attending this party would greatly endanger my social standing. Further, my dinner jacket is at the cleaners and will not be ready for a week ...yet the party is tomorrow. Under these conditions could it be said that my host's action in demanding my wearing formal attire as the price of access to his home is, in fact, a coercive one, inasmuch as it clearly threatens the preservation of one of the things I most value, my social prestige? 
Furthermore, Harnowy points out that if the host should demand, as a price of invitation to the party, "that I wash all the silver and china used at the party," Hayek would even more clearly have to call such a voluntary contract "coercive" on his own criteria. 
In attempting to rebut Hamowy's trenchant critique, Hayek later added that "to constitute coercion it is also necessary that the action of the coercer should put the coerced in a position which he regards as worse than that in which he would have been without that action." But, as Hamowy points out in reply, this does not salvage Hayek's inconsistent refusal to adopt the patent absurdity of calling a conditional invitation to a party "coercive." For, the case just described seems to meet this condition as well; for while it is true that, in a sense, my would-be host has widened my range of alternatives by the invitation, the whole situation (which must include my inability to acquire formal attire and my consequent frustration) is worse from my point of view than the situation which had obtained before the invitation, certainly worse than had existed before my would-be host had decided to have a party at that particular time. 
Thus, Hayek, and the rest of us, are duty-bound to do one of two things: either to confine the concept of "coercion" strictly to the invasion of another's person or property by the use or threat of physical violence; or to scrap the term "coercion" altogether, and simply define "freedom" not as the "absence of coercion" but as the "absence of aggressive physical violence or the threat thereof." Hayek indeed concedes that "coercion can be so defined as to make it an all-pervasive and unavoidable phenomenon." 
Unfortunately, his middle-of-the-road failure to confine coercion strictly to violence pervasively flaws his entire system of political philosophy. He cannot salvage that system by attempting to distinguish, merely quantitatively between "mild" and "more severe" forms of coercion.
Another fundamental fallacy of Hayek's system is not only his defining coercion beyond the sphere of physical violence, but also in failing to distinguish between "aggressive" and "defensive" coercion or violence. There is all the world of distinction in kind between aggressive violence - assault or theft - against another, and the use of violence to defend oneself and one's property against such aggression. Aggressive violence is criminal and unjust; defensive violence is perfectly just and proper; the former invades the rights of person and property, the latter defends against such invasion. Yet Hayek again fails to make this crucial qualitative distinction. For him, there are only relative degrees, or quantities, of "coercion." Thus, Hayek states that "coercion, however, cannot be altogether avoided because the only way to prevent it is by the threat of coercion." From this, he goes on to compound the error by adding that "free society has met this problem by conferring the monopoly of coercion on the state and by attempting to limit this power of the state to instances where it is required to prevent coercion by private persons. Yet, we are not here comparing varying degrees of an undifferentiated lump we can call "coercion" (even if we define this as "physical violence"). For we can avoid aggressive violence completely by preventing it through purchasing the services of defense agencies, agencies which are empowered to use only defensive violence. We are not helpless in the throes of "coercion" if we define such coercion only as aggressive violence (or, alternatively, if we abandon the term "coercion" altogether, and keep the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence). 
Hayek's crucial second sentence in the above paragraph compounds his error many times further. In the first place, in any and all historical cases, "free society" did not "confer" any monopoly of coercion on the State; there has never been any form of voluntary "social contract." In all historical cases, the State has seized, by the use of aggressive violence and conquest, such a monopoly of violence in society. And further, what the State has is not so much a monopoly of "coercion" as of aggressive (as well as defensive) violence, and that monopoly is established and maintained by systematically employing two particular forms of aggressive violence: taxation for the acquisition of State income, and the compulsory outlawry of competing agencies of defensive violence within the State's acquired territorial area. Therefore, since liberty requires the elimination of aggressive violence in society (while maintaining defensive violence against possible invaders), the State is not, and can never be, justified as a defender of liberty. For the State lives by its very existence on the two-fold and pervasive employment of aggressive violence against the very liberty and property of individuals that it is supposed to be defending. The State is qualitatively unjustified and unjustifiable. 
Thus, Hayek's justification of the existence of the State, as well as its employment of taxation and other measures of aggressive violence, rests upon his untenable obliteration of the distinction between aggressive and defensive violence, and his lumping of all violent actions into the single rubric of varying degrees of "coercion." But this is not all. For, in the course of working out his defense of the State and State action, Hayek not only widens the concept of coercion beyond physical violence; he also unduly narrows the concept of coercion to exclude certain forms of aggressive physical violence. In order to "limit" State coercion (i.e., to justify State action within such limits), Hayek asserts that coercion is either minimized or even does not exist if the violence-supported edicts are not personal and arbitrary, but are in the form of general, universal rules, knowable to all in advance (the "rule of law"). Thus, Hayek states that 
The coercion which a government must still use ...is reduced to a minimum and made as innocuous as possible by restraining it through known general rules, so that in most instances the individual need never be coerced unless he has placed himself in a position where he knows he will be coerced. Even where coercion is not avoidable, it is deprived of its most harmful effects by being confined to limited and foreseeable duties, or at least made independent of the arbitrary will of another person. Being made impersonal and dependent upon general, abstract rules, whose effect on particular individuals cannot be foreseen at the time they are laid down, even the coercive acts of government become data on which the individual can base his own plans. 
Hayek's avoid-ability criterion for allegedly "non-coercive" though violent actions is put baldly as follows: 
Provided that I know beforehand that if I place myself in a particular position, I shall be coerced and provided that I can avoid putting myself in such a position, I need never be coerced. At least insofar as the rules providing for coercion are not aimed at me personally but are so framed as to apply equally to all people in similar circumstances, they are no different from any of the natural obstacles that affect my plans. 
But, as Professor Hamowy trenchantly points out: 
It follows from this that if Mr. X warns me that he is going to kill me if I buy anything from Mr. Y, and if the products available from Mr. Y are also available elsewhere (probably from Mr. X), such action on the part of Mr. X is non-coercive! 
For purchasing from Mr. Y is "avoidable." Hamowy continues:
Avoidability of the action is sufficient, according to this criterion, to set up a situation theoretically identical to one in which a threat does not occur at all. The threatened party is no less free than he was before the threat was made, if he can avoid the threatener's action. According to the logical structure of this argument, "threatening coercion" is not a coercive act. Thus, if I know in advance that I will be attacked by hoodlums if I enter a certain neighborhood, and if I can avoid that neighborhood, then I need never be coerced by the hoodlums. ...Hence, one could regard the hoodlum-infested neighborhood ... in the same way as a plague-infested swamp, both avoidable obstacles, neither personally aimed at me... 
- and hence, for Hayek, not "coercive." 
Thus, Hayek's avoidability criterion for non-coercion leads to a patently absurd weakening of the concept of "coercion," and the inclusion of aggressive and patently coercive actions under a benign, non-coercive rubric. And yet, Hayek is even willing to scuttle his own weak avoidability limitation on government; for he concedes that taxation and conscription, for example, are not, and are not supposed to be, "avoidable." But these too become "non-coercive" because: 
they are at least predictable and enforced irrespective of how the individual would otherwise employ his energies; this deprives them largely of the evil nature of coercion. If the known necessity of paying a certain amount in taxes becomes the basis of all my plans, if a period of military service is a foreseeable part of my career, then I can follow a general plan of life of my own making and am as independent of the will of another person as men have learned to be in society. 
The absurdity of relying on general, universal ("equally applicable"), predictable rules as a criterion, or as a defense, for individual liberty has rarely been more starkly revealed. For this means that, e.g., if there is a general governmental rule that every person shall be enslaved one year out of every three, then such universal slavery is not at all "coercive." In what sense, then, are Hayekian general rules superior or more libertarian than any conceivable case of rule by arbitrary whim? Let us postulate, for example, two possible societies. One is ruled by a vast network of Hayekian general rules, equally applicable to all, eg, such rules as: everyone is to be enslaved every third year; no one may criticize the government under penalty of death; no one may drink alcoholic beverages; everyone must bow down to Mecca three times a day at specified hours; everyone must wear a specified green uniform, etc. It is clear that such a society, though meeting all the Hayekian criteria for a non-coercive rule of law, is thoroughly despotic and totalitarian. Let us postulate, in contrast, a second society which is totally free, where every person is free to employ his person and property, make exchanges, etc. as he sees fit, except that, once a year, the monarch (who does literally nothing the rest of the year), commits one arbitrary invasive act against one individual that he selects. 
Which society is to be considered more free, more libertarian? 
Thus, we see that Hayek's Constitution of Liberty can in no sense provide the criteria or the groundwork for a system of individual liberty. In addition to the deeply flawed definitions of "coercion," a fundamental flaw in Hayek's theory of individual rights, as Hamowy points out, is
that they do not stem from a moral theory or from "some independent non-governmental social arrangement," but instead flow from government itself. For Hayek government -and its rule of law creates rights, rather than ratifies or defends them. It is no wonder that, in the course of his book, Hayek comes to endorse a long list of government actions clearly invasive of the rights and liberties of the individual citizens. 

29. Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State. 
Robert Nozick's 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia' is an "invisible hand" variant of a Lockean contractarian attempt to justify the State, or at least a minimal State confined to the functions of protection. Beginning with a free-market anarchist state of nature, Mozick portrays the State as emerging, by an invisible hand process that violates no one's rights, first as a dominant protective agency, then to an "ultra-minimal state," and then finally to a minimal state. 
Before embarking on a detailed critique of the various Nozickian stages, let us consider several grave fallacies in Nozick's conception itself, each of which would in itself be sufficient to refute his attempt to justify the State. First, despite Nozick's attempt to cover his tracks, it is highly relevant to see whether Nozick's ingenious logical construction has ever indeed occurred in historical reality: namely, whether any State, or most or all States, have in fact evolved in the Nozickian manner. It is a grave defect in itself, when discussing an institution all too well grounded in historical reality, that Nozick has failed to make a single mention or reference to the history of actual States. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that any State was founded or developed in the Nozickian manner. On the contrary, the historical evidence cuts precisely the other way: for every State where the facts are available originated by a process of violence, conquest, and exploitation: in short, in a manner which Nozick himself would have to admit violated individual rights. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, on the origin of kings and of the State:
could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manners or preeminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions. 
Note that the "contract" involved in Paine's account was of the nature of a coerced "protection racket" rather than anything recognizable to the libertarian as a voluntary agreement.
Since Nozick's justification of existing States - provided they are or become minimal - rests on their alleged immaculate conception, and since no such State exists, then none of them can be justified, even if they should later become minimal. To go further, we can say that, at best, Nozick's model can only justify a State which indeed did develop by his invisible hand method. Therefore, it is incumbent upon Nozick to join anarchists in calling for the abolition of all existing States, and then to sit back and wait for his alleged invisible hand to operate. The only minimal State, then, which Nozick at best can justify is one that will develop out of a future anarcho-capitalist society.
Secondly, even an existing State had been immaculately conceived, this would still not justify its present existence. A basic fallacy is endemic to all social-contract theories of the State, namely, that any contract based on a promise is binding and enforceable. If, then, everyone - in itself of course a heroic assumption - in a state of nature surrendered all or some of his rights to a State, the social-contract theorists consider this promise to be binding forevermore. 
A correct theory of contracts, however, termed by Williamson Evers the "title-transfer" theory, states that the only valid (and therefore binding) contract is one that surrenders what is, in fact, philosophically alienable, and that only specific titles to property are so alienable, so that their ownership can be ceded to someone else. While, on the contrary, other attributes of man -specifically, his self-ownership over his own will and body, and the rights to person and property which stem from that self-ownership -are "inalienable" and therefore cannot be surrendered in a binding contract. If no one, then, can surrender his own will, his body or his rights in an enforceable contract, a fortiori he cannot surrender the persons or the rights of his posterity. This is what the Founding Fathers meant by the concept of rights as being "inalienable," or, as George Mason expressed it in his Virginia Declaration of Rights: 
[A]ll men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.
Thus, we have seen (1) that no existing State has been immaculately conceived - quite the contrary; (2) that therefore the only minimal State that could possibly be justified is one that would emerge after a free-market anarchist world had been established; (3) that therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian invisible hand to operate afterward, and finally (4) that even if any State had been founded immaculately, the fallacies of social-contract theory would mean that no present State, even a minimal one, could be justified.
Let us now proceed to examine the Nozickian stages, particularly the alleged necessity as well as the morality of the ways in which the various stages develop out of the preceding ones. Nozick begins by assuming that each anarchist protective agency acts morally and non-aggressively, that is, "attempts in good faith to act within the limits of Locke's law of nature." 
First, Nozick assumes that each protective agency would require that each of its clients renounce the right of private retaliation against aggression, by refusing to protect them against counter-retaliation. Perhaps, perhaps not. This would be up to the various protection agencies, acting on the market, and is certainly not self-evident. It is certainly possible, if not probable, that they would be out-competed by other agencies that do not restrict their clients in that way. 
Nozick then proceeds to discuss disputes between clients of different protection agencies. He offers three scenarios on how they might proceed. But two of these scenarios (and part of the third) involve physical battles between the agencies. In the first place, these scenarios contradict Nozick's own assumption of good-faith, non-aggressive behavior by each of his agencies, since, in any combat, clearly at least one of the agencies would be committing aggression. Furthermore, economically, it would be absurd to expect the protective agencies to battle each other physically; such warfare would alienate clients and be highly expensive to boot. It is absurd to think that, on the market, protective agencies would fail to agree in advance on private appeals courts or arbitrators whom they would turn to, in order to resolve any dispute. Indeed, a vital part of the protective or judicial service which a private agency or court would offer to its clients would be that it had agreements to turn disputes over to a certain appeals court or a certain arbitrator or group of arbitrators. 
Let us turn then to Nozick's crucial scenario 3, in which he writes: 
the two agencies... agree to resolve peacefully those cases about which they reach differing judgments. They agree to set up, and abide by the decisions of, some third judge or court to which they can turn when their respective judgments differ. (Or they might establish rules determining which agency had jurisdiction under which circumstances). 
So far so good. But then there comes a giant leap: "Thus emerges a system of appeals courts and agreed upon rules ... Though different agencies operate, there is one unified federal judicial system of which they are all components." I submit that the "thus" is totally illegitimate, and that the rest is a nun sequitur. The fact that every protective agency will have agreements with every other to submit disputes to particular appeals courts or arbitrators does not imply "one unified federal judicial system." 
On the contrary, there may well be, and probably would be, hundreds, even thousands, of arbitrators or appeals judges who would be selected, and there is no need to consider them part of one "judicial system." There is no need, for example, to envision nor to establish one unified Supreme Court to decide upon disputes. Since every dispute has two and only two parties, there need be only one third party, judge or arbitrator; there are in the United States, at the present time, for example, over 23,000 professional arbitrators, and presumably there would be many thousands more if the present government court system were to be abolished. Each one of these arbitrators could serve an appeals or arbitration function.
Nozick claims that out of anarchy there would inevitably emerge, as by an invisible hand, one dominant protection agency in each territorial area, in which "almost all the persons" in that area are included. But we have seen that his major support for that conclusion is totally invalid. Nozick's other arguments for this proposition are equally invalid. He writes, for example, that "unlike other goods that are comparatively evaluated, maximal competing protective services cannot exist." Why cannot, surely a strong term? 
First, because "the nature of the service brings different agencies ... into violent conflict with each other" rather than just competing for customers. But we have seen that this conflict assumption is incorrect; first, on Nozick's own grounds of each agency acting non-aggressively and, second, on his own scenario 3, that each will enter into agreements with the others for peaceful settlement of disputes. Nozick's second argument for this contention is that "since the worth of the less-than-maximal product declines disproportionately with the number who purchase the maximal product, customers will not stably settle for the lesser good, and competing companies are caught in a declining spiral." But why? Nozick is here making statements about the economics of a protection market which are totally unsupported. Why is there such an "economy of scale" in the protection business that Nozick feels will lead inevitably to a near-natural monopoly in each geographical area? This is scarcely self-evident. 
On the contrary, all the facts - and here the empirical facts of contemporary and past history are again directly relevant - cut precisely the other way. There are, as was mentioned above, tens of thousands of professional arbitrators in the U.S.; there are also tens of thousands of lawyers and judges, and a large number of private protection agencies that supply night-watchmen, guards, etc. with no sign whatsoever of a geographical natural monopoly in any of these fields. Why then for protection agencies under anarchism? 
And, if we look at approximations to anarchist court and protective systems in history, we again see a great deal of evidence of the falsity of Nozick's contention. For hundreds of years, the fairs of Champagne were the major international trade mart in Europe. A number of courts, by merchants, nobles, the Church, etc. competed for customers. Not only did no one dominant agency ever emerge, but they did not even feel the need for appeals courts. For a thousand years, ancient Ireland, until the Cromwellian conquest, enjoyed a system of numerous jurists and schools of jurists, and numerous protection agencies, which competed within geographical areas without any one becoming dominant. After the fall of Rome, various coexisting barbarian tribes peacefully adjudicated their disputes within each area, with each tribesman coming under his own law, and with agreed-upon peaceful adjudications between these courts and laws. Furthermore, in these days of modem technology and low-cost transportation and communication, it would be even easier to compete across geographical boundaries; the "Metropolitan," "Equitable," "Prudential" protection agencies, for example, could easily maintain branch offices over a large geographical area. 
In fact, there is a far better case for insurance being a natural monopoly than protection, since a larger insurance pool would tend to reduce premiums; and yet, it is clear that there is a great deal of competition between insurance companies, and there would be more if it were not restricted by state regulation. 
The Nozick contention that a dominant agency would develop in each geographical area, then, is an example of an illegitimate a priori attempt to decide what the free market would do, and it is an attempt that flies in the face of concrete historical and institutional knowledge. Certainly a dominant protective agency could conceivably emerge in a particular geographical area, but it is not very likely. And, as Roy Childs points out in his critique of Nozick, even if it did, it would not likely be a "unified federal system." Childs also correctly points out that it is no more legitimate to lump all protective services together and call it a unified monopoly than it would be to lump all the food growers and producers on the market together and say that they have a collective "system" or "monopoly" of food production. 
Furthermore, law and the State are both conceptually and historically separable, and law would develop in an anarchistic market society without any form of State. Specifically, the concrete form of anarchist legal institutions - judges, arbitrators, procedural methods for resolving disputes, etc. - would indeed grow by a market invisible-hand process, while the basic Law Code (requiring that no one invade any one else's person and property) would have to be agreed upon by all the judicial agencies, just as all the competing judges once agreed to apply and extend the basic principles of the customary or common law. But the latter, again, would imply no unified legal system or dominant protective agency. Any agencies that transgressed the basic libertarian code would be open outlaws and aggressors, and Nozick himself concedes that, lacking legitimacy, such outlaw agencies would probably not do very well in an anarchist society. 
Let us now assume that a dominant protective agency has come into being, as unlikely as that may be. How then do we proceed, without violation of anyone's rights, to Nozick's ultra-minimal state? Nozick writes of the plight of the dominant protective agency which sees the independents, with their unreliable procedures, rashly and unreliably retaliating against its own clients. Shouldn't the dominant agency have the right to defend its clients against these rash actions? Nozick claims that the dominant agency has a right to prohibit risky procedures against its clients, and that this prohibition thereby establishes the "ultra-minimal state," in which one agency coercively prohibits all other agencies from enforcing the rights of individuals. 
There are two problems here at the very beginning. In the first place, what has happened to the peaceful resolution of disputes that marked scenario 3? Why can't the dominant agency and the independents agree to arbitrate or adjudicate their disputes, preferably in advance? Ah, but here we encounter Nozick's curious "thus" clause, which incorporated such voluntary agreements into one "unified federal judicial system." In short, if every time that the dominant agency and the independents work out their disputes in advance, Nozick then calls this "one agency" then by definition he precludes the peaceful settlement of disputes without a move onward to the compulsory monopoly of the ultra-minimal state. 
But suppose, for the sake of continuing the argument, that we grant Nozick his question -begging definition of "one agency." Would the dominant agency still be justified in outlawing competitors? Certainly not, even if it wishes to preclude fighting. For what of the many cases in which the independents are enforcing justice for their own clients, and have nothing to do with the clients of the dominant agency? By what conceivable right does the dominant agency step in to outlaw peaceful arbitration and adjudication between the independents' own clients, with no impact on its clients? The answer is no right whatsoever, so that the dominant agency, in outlawing competitors, is aggressing against their rights, and against the rights of their actual or potential customers. Furthermore, as Roy Childs emphasizes, this decision to enforce their monopoly is scarcely the action of an invisible hand; it is a conscious, highly visible decision, and must be treated accordingly. 
The dominant agency, Nozick claims, has the right to bar "risky" activities engaged in by independents. But what then of the independents? Do not they have the right to bar the risky activities of the dominant? And must not a war of all against all again ensue, in violation of scenario 3 and also necessarily engaging in some aggression against rights along the way? Where, then, are the moral activities of the state of nature assumed by Nozick all along? Furthermore, as Childs points out, what about the risk involved in having a compulsory monopoly protection agency? As Childs writes: 
What is to check its power? What happens in the event of its assuming even more powers? Since it has a monopoly, any disputes over its functions are solved and judged exclusively by itself. Since careful prosecution procedures are costly, there is every reason to assume that it will become less careful without competition and, again, only it can judge the legitimacy of its own procedures, as Nozick explicitly tells us. 
Competing agencies, whether the competition be real or potential, not only insure high-quality protection at the lowest cost, as compared to a compulsory monopoly, but they also provide the genuine checks and balances of the market against any one agency yielding to the temptations of being an "outlaw," that is, of aggressing against the persons and properties of its clients or non-clients. If one agency among many becomes outlaw, there are others around to do battle against it on behalf of the rights of their clients; but who is there to protect anyone against the State, whether ultra-minimal or minimal? If we may be permitted to return once more to the historical record, the grisly annals of the crimes and murders of the State throughout history give one very little confidence in the non-risky nature of its activities. I submit that the risks of State tyranny are far greater than the risks of worrying about one or two unreliable procedures of competing defense agencies. 
But this is scarcely all. For once it is permitted to proceed beyond defense against an overt act of actual aggression, once one can use force against someone because of his "risky" activities, the sky is then the limit, and there is virtually no limit to aggression against the rights of others. Once permit someone's "fear" of the "risky" activities of others to lead to coercive action, then any tyranny becomes justified, and Nozick's "minimal" state quickly becomes the "maximal" State. I maintain, in fact, that there is no Nozickian stopping point from his ultra-minimal state to the maximal, totalitarian state. There is no stopping point to so-called preventive restraint or detention. Surely Nozick's rather grotesque suggestion of "compensation" in the form of "resort detention centers" is scarcely sufficient to ward off the specter of totalitarianism. 
A few examples: Perhaps the largest criminal class today in the United States is teenage black males. The risk of this class committing crime is far greater than any other age, gender, or color group. Why not, then, lock up all teenage black males until they are old enough for the risk to diminish? And then I suppose we could "compensate" them by giving them healthful food, clothing, playgrounds, and teaching them a useful trade in the "resort" detention camp. If not, why not? Example: the most important argument for Prohibition was the undoubted fact that people commit significantly more crimes, more acts of negligence on the highways, when under the influence of alcohol than when cold sober. So why not prohibit alcohol, and thereby reduce risk and fear, perhaps "compensating" the unfortunate victims of the law by free, tax-financed supplies of healthful grape juice? Or the infamous Dr. Arnold Hutschneker's plan of "identifying"  allegedly future criminals in the grade schools, and then locking them away for suitable brainwashing? If not, why not? 
In each case, I submit that there is only one why not, and this should be no news to libertarians who presumably believe in inalienable individual rights: namely, that no one has the right to coerce anyone not himself directly engaged in an overt act of aggression against rights. Any loosening of this criterion, to included coercion against remote "risks," is to sanction impermissible aggression against the rights of others. Any loosening of this criterion, furthermore, is a passport to unlimited despotism. Any state founded on these principles has been conceived, not immaculately (i.e., without interfering with anyone's rights), but by a savage act of rape.
Thus, even if risk were measurable, even if Nozick could provide us with a cutoff point of when activities are "too" risky, his rite of passage from dominant agency to ultra-minimal state would still be aggressive, invasive, and illegitimate. But, furthermore, as Childs has pointed out, there is no way to measure the probability of such "risk," let alone the fear, (both of which are purely subjective). The only risk that can be measured is found in those rare situations - such as a lottery or a roulette wheel - where the individual events are random, strictly homogeneous, and repeated a very large number of times. In almost all cases of actual human action, these conditions do not apply, and so there is no measurable cut-off point of risk. 
This brings us to Williamson Evers's extremely useful concept of the "proper assumption of risk." We live in a world of ineluctable and un-measurable varieties of uncertainty and risk. In a free society, possessing full individual rights, the proper assumption of risk is by each individual over his own person and his justly owned property. No one, then, can have the right to coerce anyone else into reducing his risks; such coercive assumption is aggression and invasion to be properly stopped and punished by the legal system. Of course, in a free society, anyone may take steps to reduce risks that do not invade someone else's rights and property; for example, by taking out insurance, hedging operations, performance bonding, etc. But all of this is voluntary, and none involves either taxation or compulsory monopoly. And, as Roy Childs states, any coercive intervention in the market's provision for risk shifts the societal provision for risk away from the optimal, and hence increases risk to society. 
One example of Nozick's sanctioning aggression against property rights is his concern with the private landowner who is surrounded by enemy landholders who won't let him leave. To the libertarian reply that any rational landowner would have first purchased access rights from surrounding owners, Nozick brings up the problem of being surrounded by such a set of numerous enemies that he still would not be able to go anywhere. But the point is that this is not simply a problem of landownership. Not only in the free society, but even now, suppose that one man is so hated by the whole world that no one will trade with him or allow him on their property. Well, then, the only reply is that this is his own proper assumption of risk. Any attempt to break that voluntary boycott by physical coercion is illegitimate aggression against the boycotters' rights. This fellow had better find some friends, or at least purchase allies, as quickly as possible. 
How then does Nozick proceed from his "ultra-minimal" to his "minimal" State? He maintains that the ultra-minimal state is morally bound to "compensate" the prohibited, would-be purchasers of the services of independents by supplying them with protective services - and hence the "night-watchman" or minimal state. In the first place, this decision too is a conscious and visible one, and scarcely the process of an invisible hand. But, more importantly, Nozick's principle of compensation is in even worse philosophical shape, if that is possible, than his theory of risk. For first, compensation, in the theory of punishment, is simply a method of trying to recompense the victim of crime; it must in no sense be considered a moral sanction for crime itself. 
Nozick asks whether property rights means that people are permitted to perform invasive actions "provided that they compensate the person whose boundary has been crossed?" In contrast to Nozick, the answer must be no, in every case. As Randy Barnett states, in his critique of Nozick, "Contrary to Nozick's principle of compensation, all violations of rights should be prohibited. That's what right means." And, "while voluntarily paying a purchase price makes an exchange permissible, compensation does not make an aggression permissible or justified." Rights must not be transgressed, period, compensation being simply one method of restitution or punishment after the fact; I must not be permitted to cavalierly invade someone's home and break his furniture, simply because I am prepared to "compensate" him afterward. 
Secondly, there is no way of knowing, in any case, what the compensation is supposed to be. Nozick's theory depends on people's utility scales being constant, measurable, and knowable to outside observers, none of which is the case. Austrian subjective value theory shows us that people's utility scales are always subject to change, and that they can neither be measured nor known to any outside observer. If I buy a newspaper for 15 cents, then all that we can say about my value scale is that, at the moment of purchase, the newspaper is worth more to me than the 15cents, and that is all. That evaluation can change tomorrow, and no other part of my utility scale is knowable to others at all. (A minor point: 
Nozick's pretentious use of the "indifference curve" concept is not even necessary for his case, and it adds still further fallacies, for indifference is never by definition exhibited in action, in actual exchanges, and is therefore unknowable and objectively meaningless. Moreover, an indifference curve postulates two commodity axes - and what are the axes to Nozick's alleged curve?) But if there is no way of knowing what will make a person as well off as before any particular change, then there is no way for an outside observer, such as the minimal state, to discover how much compensation is needed. 
The Chicago School tries to resolve this problem by simply assuming that a person's utility loss is measured by the money-price of the loss; so if someone slashes my painting, and outside appraisers determine that I could have sold it for $2000, then that is my proper compensation. But first, no one really knows what the market price would have been, since tomorrow's market may well differ from yesterday's; and second and more important, my psychic attachment to the painting may be worth far more to me than the money price, and there is no way for anyone to determine what the psychic attachment might be worth; asking is invalid since there is nothing to prevent me from lying grossly in order to drive up the "compensation." 
Moreover, Nozick says nothing about the dominant agency compensating its clients for the shutting down of their opportunities in being able to shift their purchases to competing agencies. Yet their opportunities are shut off by compulsion, and furthermore, they may well perceive themselves as benefiting from the competitive check on the possible tyrannical impulses of the dominant agency. But how is the extent of such compensation to be determined? Furthermore, if compensation to the deprived clients of the dominant agency is forgotten by Nozick, what about the dedicated anarchists in the anarchistic state of nature? What about their trauma at seeing the far from immaculate emergence of the State? Are they to be compensated for their horror at seeing the State emerge? And how much are they to be paid? In fact, the existence of only one fervent anarchist who could not be compensated for the psychic trauma inflicted on him by the emergence of the State is enough by itself to scuttle Nozick's allegedly non-invasive model for the origin of the minimal state. For that absolutist anarchist, no amount of compensation would suffice to assuage his grief. This brings us to another flaw in the Nozickian scheme: the curious fact that the compensation paid by the dominant agency is paid, not in cash, but in the extension of its sometimes dubious services to the clients of other agencies. And yet, advocates of the compensation principle have demonstrated that cash - which leaves the recipients free to buy whatever they wish - is far better from their point of view than any compensation in kind. Yet, Nozick, in postulating the extension of protection as the form of compensation, never considers the cash payment alternative. In fact, for the anarchist, this form of "compensation" - the institution of the State itself - is a grisly and ironic one indeed. As Childs forcefully points out, Nozick wishes to prohibit us from turning to any of a number of competing agencies, other than the dominant protection agency. What is he willing to offer us as compensation for being so prohibited? He is generous to a fault. He will give us nothing less than the State. Let me be the first to publicly reject this admittedly generous offer. But. ..the point is, we can't reject it. It is foisted upon us whether we like it or not, whether we are willing to accept the state as compensation or not. 
Furthermore, there is no warrant whatever, even on Nozick's own terms, for the minimal state's compensating every one uniformly, as he postulates; surely, there is no likelihood of everyone's value-scales being identical. But then how are the differences to be discovered and differential compensation paid? 
Even confining ourselves to Nozick's compensated people - the former or current would-be clients of competing agencies - who are they? How can they be found? For, on Nozick's own terms, only such actual or would-be competing clients need compensation. But how does one distinguish, as proper compensation must, between those who have been deprived of their desired independent agencies and who therefore deserve compensation, and those who wouldn't have patronized the independents anyway i.e., who therefore don't need compensation? By not making such distinctions, Nozick's minimal state doesn't even engage in proper compensation on Nozick's own terms. 
Childs raises another excellent point on Nozick's own prescribed form of compensation - the dire consequences for the minimal state of the fact that the payment of such compensation will necessarily raise the costs, and therefore the prices charged, by the dominant agency. As Childs states: 
If the minimal state must protect everyone, even those who cannot pay, and if it must compensate those others for prohibiting their risky actions, then this must mean that it will charge its original customers more than it would have in the case of the ultra-minimal state. But this would, ipso facto, increase the number of those who, because of their demand curves, would have chosen non-dominant agencies ... over dominant agency-turned ultra-minimal state-turned minimal state. Must the minimal state then protect them at no charge, or compensate them for prohibiting them from turning to the other agencies? If so, then once again, it must either increase its price to its remaining customers, or decrease its services. In either case, this again produces those who, given the nature and shape of their demand curves, would have chosen the non-dominant agencies over the dominant agency. Must these then be compensated? If so, then the process leads on, to the point where no one but a few wealthy fanatics advocating a minimal state would be willing to pay for greatly reduced services. If this happened, there is reason to believe that very soon the minimal state would be thrown into the invisible dustbin of history, which it would, I suggest, richly deserve. 
A tangential but important point on compensation: adopting Locke's unfortunate "proviso," on homesteading property rights in unused land, Nozick declares that no one may appropriate unused land if the remaining population who desire access to land are "worse off." But again, how do we know if they are worse off or not? In fact, Locke's proviso may lead to the outlawry of all private ownership of land, since one can always say that the reduction of available land leaves everyone else, who could have appropriated the land, worse off. In fact, there is no way of measuring or knowing when they are worse off or not. And even if they are, I submit that this, too, is their proper assumption of risk. Everyone should have the right to appropriate as his property previously unowned land or other resources. If latecomers are worse off, well then that is their proper assumption of risk in this free and uncertain world. There is no longer a vast frontier in the United States, and there is no point in crying over the fact. In fact, we can generally achieve as much "access" as we want to these resources by paying a market price for them; but even if the owners refused to sell or rent, that should be their right in a free society. Even Locke could nod once in a while. 
We come now to another crucial point that Nozick's presumption that he can outlaw risky activities upon compensation rests on his contention that no one has the right to engage in "nonproductive" (including risky) activities or exchanges, and that therefore they can legitimately be prohibited. For Nozick concedes that if the risky activities of others were legitimate, then prohibition and compensation would not be valid, and that we would then be "required instead to negotiate or contract with them, whereby they agree not to do the risky act in question. Why wouldn't we have to offer them an incentive, or hire them, or bribe them, to refrain from doing the act?" In short, if not for Nozick's fallacious theory of illegitimate "nonproductive" activities, he would have to concede people's rights to engage in such activities, the prohibition of risk and compensation principles would fall to the ground, and neither Nozick's ultra-minimal nor his minimal state could be justified. 
And here we come to what we might call Nozick's "drop dead" principle. For his criterion of a "productive" exchange is one where each party is better off than if the other did not exist at all; whereas a "non-productive" exchange is one where one party would be better off if the other dropped dead. Thus, "if I pay you for not harming me, I gain nothing from you that I wouldn't possess if either you didn't exist at all or existed without having anything to do with me." Nozick's "principle of compensation" maintains that a "nonproductive" activity can be prohibited provided that the person is compensated by the benefit he was forced to forego from the imposition of the prohibition. 
Let us then see how Nozick applies his "nonproductive" and compensation criteria to the problem of blackmail. Nozick tries to rehabilitate the outlawry of blackmail by asserting that "non-productive" contracts should be illegal, and that a blackmail contract is non-productive because a blackmailee is worse off because of the blackmailer's very existence. In short, if blackmailer Smith dropped dead, Jones (the blackmailee) would be better off. Or, to put it another way Jones is paying not for Smith's making him better off, but for not making him worse off. But surely the latter is also a productive contract, because Jones is still better off making the exchange than he would have been if the exchange were not made. 
But this theory gets Nozick into very muddy waters indeed, some (though by no means all) of which he recognizes. He concedes, for example, that his reason for outlawing blackmail would force him also to outlaw the following contract: Brown comes to Green, his next-door neighbor, with the following proposition: I intend to build such-and-such a pink building on my property (which he knows that Green will detest). I won't build this building, however, if you pay me X amount of money. Nozick concedes that this, too, would have to be illegal in his schema, because Green would be paying Brown for not being worse off, and hence the contract would be "non-productive." In essence, Green would be better off if Brown dropped dead. 
It is difficult, however, for a libertarian to square such outlawry with any plausible theory of property rights, much less the one set forth in the present volume. In analogy with the blackmail example above, furthermore, Nozick concedes that it would be legal, in his schema, for Green, on finding out about Brown's projected pink building, to come to Brown and offer to pay him not to go ahead. But why would such an exchange be "productive" just because Green made the offer? What difference does it make who makes the offer in this situation? Wouldn't Green still be better off if Brown dropped dead? And again, following the analogy, would Nozick make it illegal for Brown to refuse Green's offer and then ask for more money? Why? Or, again, would Nozick make it illegal for Brown to subtly let Green know about the projected pink building and then let nature take its course, say, by advertising in the paper about the building and sending Green the clipping? Couldn't this be taken as an act of courtesy? And why should merely advertising something be illegal? 
Clearly, Nozick's case becomes ever more flimsy as we consider the implications. Furthermore, Nozick has not at all considered the manifold implications of his "drop dead" principle. If he is saying, as he seems to, that A is illegitimately "coercing" B if B is better off should A drop dead, then consider the following case: Brown and Green are competing at auction for the same painting which they desire. They are the last two customers left. Wouldn't Green be better off if Brown dropped dead? Isn't Brown therefore illegally coercing Green in some way, and therefore shouldn't Brown's participation in the auction be outlawed? Or, per contra, isn't Green coercing Brown in the same manner and shouldn't Green's participation in the auction be outlawed? If not, why not? Or, suppose that Brown and Green are competing for the hand of the same girl; wouldn't each be better off if the other dropped dead, and shouldn't either or both's participation in the courtship therefore be outlawed? The ramifications are virtually endless. 
Nozick, furthermore, gets himself into a deeper quagmire when he adds that a blackmail exchange is not "productive" because outlawing the exchange makes one party (the blackmailee) no worse off. But that of course is not true: as Professor Block has pointed out, outlawing a blackmail contract means that the blackmailer has no further incentive not to disseminate the unwelcome, hitherto secret information about the blackmailed party. However, after twice asserting that the victim would be "no worse off" from the outlawing of the blackmail exchange, Nozick immediately and inconsistently concedes that "people value a blackmailer's silence, and pay for it." In that case, if the blackmailer is prohibited from charging for his silence, he need not maintain it and hence the blackmail payer would indeed be worse off because of the prohibition! 
Nozick adds, without supporting the assertion, that "his being silent is not a productive activity." Why not? Apparently because "his victims would be as well off if the blackmailer did not exist at all." Back again to the "drop dead" principle. But then, reversing his field once more, Nozick adds - inconsistently with his own assertion that the blackmailer's silence is not productive - that "On the view we take here, a seller of such silence could legitimately charge only for what he forgoes by silence ...including the payments others would make to him to reveal the information." Nozick adds that while a blackmailer may charge the amount of money he would have received for revealing the information, "he may not charge the best price he could get from the purchaser of his silence." 
Thus, Nozick, waffling inconsistently between outlawing blackmail and permitting only a price that the blackmailer could have received from selling the information, has mired himself into an unsupportable concept of a "just price." Why is it only licit to charge the payment foregone? Why not charge whatever the blackmailee is willing to pay? In the first place, both transactions are voluntary, and within the purview of both parties' property rights. Secondly, no one knows, either conceptually or in practice, what price the blackmailer could have gotten for his secret on the market. No one can predict a market price in advance of the actual exchange. Thirdly, the blackmailer may not only be gaining money from the exchange; he also possibly gains psychic satisfaction - he may dislike the blackmailee, or he may enjoy selling secrets and therefore he may "earn" from the sale to a third party more than just a monetary return. Here, in fact, Nozick gives away the case by conceding that the blackmailer "who delights in selling secrets may charge differently. But, in that case, what outside legal enforcement agency will ever be able to discover to what extent the blackmailer delights in revealing secrets and therefore what price he may legally charge to the "victim"? More broadly, it is conceptually impossible ever to discover the existence or the extent of his subjective delight or of any other psychic factors that may enter into his value-scale and therefore into his exchange. 
And fourthly, suppose that we take Nozick's worst case, a blackmailer who could not find any monetary price for his secret. But, if blackmail were outlawed either totally or in Nozick's "just price" version, the thwarted blackmailer would simply disseminate the secrets for free would give away the information (Block's "gossip or blabbermouth"). In doing so, the blackmailer would simply be exercising his right to use his body, in this case his freedom of speech. There can be no "just price" for restricting this right, for it has no objectively measurable value. Its value is subjective to the blackmailer, and his right may not be justly restricted. And furthermore, the "protected" victim is, in this case, surely worse off as a result of the prohibition against blackmail. 
We must conclude, then, with modern, post-medieval economic theory that the only "just price" for any transaction is the price voluntarily agreed upon by the two parties. Furthermore and more broadly, we must also join modern economic theory in labelling all voluntary exchanges as "productive," and as making both parties better off from making the exchange. Any good or service voluntarily purchased by a user or consumer benefits him and is therefore "productive" from his point of view. Hence, all of Nozick's attempts to justify either the outlawing of blackmail or the setting of some sort of just blackmail price (as well as for any other contracts that sell someone's inaction) fall completely to the ground. But this means, too, that his attempt to justify the prohibition of any "non-productive" activities - including risk-fails as well, and hence fails, on this ground alone, Nozick's attempt to justify his ultra-minimal (as well as his minimal) state. 
In applying this theory to the risky fear-inducing "non-productive" activities of independent agencies which allegedly justify the imposition of the coercive monopoly of the ultra-minimal state, Nozick concentrates on his asserted "procedural rights" of each individual, which he states is the "right to have his guilt determined by the least dangerous of the known procedures for ascertaining guilt, that is, by the one having the lowest probability of finding an innocent party guilty." Here Nozick adds to the usual substantive natural rights - to the use of one's person and justly acquired property unimpaired by violence alleged "procedural rights," or rights to certain procedures for determining innocence or guilt. 
But one vital distinction between a genuine and a spurious "right" is that the former requires no positive action by anyone except non-interference. Hence, a right to person and property is not dependent on time, space, or the number or wealth of other people in the society; Crusoe can have such a right against Friday as can anyone in an advanced industrial society On the other hand, an asserted right "to a living wage" is a spurious one, since fulfilling it requires positive action on the part of other people, as well as the existence of enough people with a high enough wealth or income to satisfy such a claim. Hence such a "right" cannot be independent of time, place, or the number or condition of other persons in society. 
But surely a "right" to a less risky procedure requires positive action from enough people of specialized skills to fulfill such a claim; hence it is not a genuine right. Furthermore, such a right cannot be deduced from the basic right of self-ownership. On the contrary everyone has the absolute right to defend his person and property against invasion. The criminal has no right, on the other hand, to defend his ill-gotten gains. But what procedure will be adopted by any group of people to defend their rights - whether for example personal self-defense, or the use of courts or arbitration agencies - depends on the knowledge and skill of the individuals concerned. 
Presumably, a free market will tend to lead to most people choosing to defend themselves with those private institutions and protection agencies whose procedures will attract the most agreement from people in society. In short, people who will be willing to abide by their decisions as the most practical way of approximating the determination of who, in particular cases, are innocent and who are guilty. But these are matters of utilitarian discovery on the market as to the most efficient means of arriving at self-defense, and do not imply any such fallacious concepts as "procedural rights." 
Finally, in a scintillating tour de force, Roy Childs, after demonstrating that each of Nozick's stages to the State is accomplished by a visible decision rather than by an "invisible hand," stands Nozick on his head by demonstrating that the invisible hand, on Nozick's own terms, would lead straight back from his minimal State to anarchism. Childs writes: 
Assume the existence of the minimal state. An agency arises which copies the procedures of the minimal state, allows the state to sit in on its trials, proceedings, and so forth. Under this situation, it cannot be alleged that this agency is any more "risky" than the state. If it is still too risky, then we are also justified in saying that the state is too risky, and in prohibiting its activities, providing we compensate those who are disadvantaged by such prohibition. If we follow this course, the result is anarchy. 
If not, then the "dominant agency" -turned minimal state finds itself competing against an admittedly watched-over competing agency. But wait: the competing, spied upon, oppressed second agency finds that it can charge a lower price for its services, since the minimal state has to compensate those who would have patronized agencies using risky procedures. It also has to pay the costs of spying on the new agency. 
Since it is only morally bound to provide such compensation, it is likely to cease doing so under severe economic pressure. This sets two processes in motion: those formerly compensated because they would have chosen other agencies over the state, rush to subscribe to the maverick agency, thus re-asserting their old preferences. Also, another fateful step has been taken: the once proud minimal state, having ceased compensation, reverts to a lowly ultra-minimal state. 
But the process cannot be stopped. The maverick agency must and does establish a good record, to win clients away from the ultra-minimal state. It offers a greater variety of services, toys with different prices, and generally becomes a more attractive alternative, all the time letting the state spy on it, checking its processes and procedures. Other noble entrepreneurs follow suit. Soon, the once lowly ultra-minimal state becomes a mere dominant agency, finding that the other agencies have established a noteworthy record, with safe, non-risky procedures, and stops spying on them, preferring less expensive agreements instead. Its executives have, alas!, grown fat and placid without competition; their calculations of who to protect, how, by what allocation of resources to what ends ... are adversely affected by their having formerly removed themselves out of a truly competitive market price system. The dominant agency grows inefficient, when compared to the new, dynamic, improved agencies. 
Soon -lo! and behold - the mere dominant protection agency becomes simply one agency among many in a market legal network. The sinister minimal state is reduced, by a series of morally permissible steps which violate the rights of no one, to merely one agency among many. In short, the invisible hand strikes back. 
Some final brief but important points. Nozick, in common with all other limited government, laissez-faire theorists, has no theory of taxation: of how much it shall be, of who shall pay it, of what kind it should be, etc. Indeed, taxation is scarcely mentioned in Nozick's progression of stages toward his minimal state. It would seem that Nozick's minimal state could only impose taxation on the clients it would have had before it became a state, and not on the would-be clients of competing agencies. But clearly, the existing State taxes everyone, with no regard whatever for who they would have patronized, and indeed it is difficult to see how it could try to find and separate these different hypothetical groups. 
Nozick also, in common with his limited-government colleagues, treats "protection" - at least when proferred by his minimal state - as one collective lump. But how much protection shall be supplied, and at what cost of resources? And what criteria shall decide? For after all, we can conceive of almost the entire national product being devoted to supplying each person with a tank and an armed guard; or, we can conceive of only one policeman and one judge in an entire country. Who decides on the degree of protection, and on what criterion? For, in contrast, all the goods and services on the private market are produced on the basis of relative demands and cost to the consumers on the market. But there is no such criterion for protection in the minimal or any other State.
Moreover, as Childs points out, the minimal State that Nozick attempts to justify is a State owned by a private, dominant firm; there is still no explanation or justification in Nozick for the modern form of voting, democracy, checks and balances, etc. 
Finally, a grave flaw permeates the entire discussion of rights and government in the Nozick volume: that, as a Kantian intuitionist, he has no theory of rights. Rights are simply emotionally intuited, with no ground-work in natural law - in the nature of man or of the universe. At bottom, Nozick has no real argument for the existence of rights. 
To conclude: (1) no existing State has been immaculately conceived, and therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should advocate anarchism and then wait for his State to develop; (2) even if any State had been so conceived, individual rights are inalienable and therefore no existing State could be justified; (3) every step of Nozick's invisible hand process is invalid: the process is all too conscious and visible, and the risk and compensation principles are both fallacious and passports to unlimited despotism; (4) there is no warrant, even on Nozick's own grounds, for the dominant protective agency to outlaw procedures by independents that do not injure its own clients, and therefore it cannot arrive at an ultra-minimal state; (5) Nozick's theory of "non-productive" exchanges is invalid, so that the prohibition of risky activities and hence the ultra-minimal state falls on that account alone; (6) contrary to Nozick, there are no "procedural rights," and therefore no way to get from his theory of risk and non-productive exchange to the compulsory monopoly of the ultra-minimal state; (7) there is no warrant, even on Nozick's own grounds, for the minimal state to impose taxation; (8) there is no way, in Nozick's theory, to justify the voting or democratic procedures of any State; (9) Nozick's minimal state would, on his own grounds, justify a maximal State as well; and (10) the only "invisible hand" process, on Nozick's own terms, would move society from his minimal State back to anarchism. 
Thus, the most important attempt in this century to rebut anarchism and to justify the State fails totally and in each of its parts. 

PART V:
TOWARD A THEORY OF STRATEGY FOR LIBERTY

30. Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty. 
The elaboration of a systematic theory of liberty has been rare enough, but exposition of a theory of strategy for liberty has been virtually nonexistent. Indeed, not only for liberty, strategy toward reaching any sort of desired social goal has been generally held to be catch-as-catch-can, a matter of hit-or-miss experimentation, of trial and error. Yet, if philosophy can set down any theoretical guidelines for a strategy for liberty it is certainly its responsibility to search for them. But the reader should be warned that we are setting out on an uncharted sea. The responsibility of philosophy to deal with strategy - with the problem of how to move from the present (any present) mixed state of affairs to the goal of consistent liberty - is particularly important for a libertarianism grounded in natural law. For as the libertarian historian Lord Acton realized, natural law and natural rights theory provide an iron benchmark with which to judge - and to find wanting - any existing brand of statism. In contrast to legal positivism or to various brands of historicism, natural law provides a moral and political "higher law" with which to judge the edicts of the State. As we have seen above natural law, properly interpreted, is "radical" rather than conservative, an implicit questing after the reign of ideal principle. As Acton wrote, "[Classical] Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is." Hence, as Himmelfarb writes of Acton, "the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality." Further, Acton proceeded to distinguish between Whiggism and Liberalism, between, in effect, conservative adherence to the status quo and radical libertarianism: 
The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas.
How to distinguish the Whigs from the Liberal -One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy. 
Libertarianism, then, is a philosophy seeking a policy. But what else can a libertarian philosophy say about strategy, about "policy"? In the first place, surely - again in Acton's words - it must say that liberty is the "highest political end," the overriding goal of libertarian philosophy Highest political end, of course, does not mean "highest end" for man in general. Indeed, every individual has a variety of personal ends and differing hierarchies of  importance for these goals on his personal scale of values. Political philosophy is that subset of ethical philosophy which deals specifically with politics, that is, the proper role of violence in human life (and hence the explication of such concepts as crime and property). Indeed, a libertarian world would be one in which every individual would at last be free to seek and pursue his own ends - to "pursue happiness," in the felicitous Jeffersonian phrase. 
It might be thought that the libertarian, the person committed to the "natural system of liberty" (in Adam Smith's phrase), almost by definition holds the goal of liberty as his highest political end. But this is often not true; for many libertarians, the desire for self-expression, or for bearing witness to the truth of the excellence of liberty, frequently takes precedence over the goal of the triumph of liberty in the real world. Yet surely, as will be seen further below, the victory of liberty will never come to pass unless the goal of victory in the real world takes precedence over more esthetic and passive considerations. 
If liberty should be the highest political end, then what is the grounding for that goal? It should be clear from this work that, first and foremost, liberty is a moral principle, grounded in the nature of man. In particular, it is a principle of justice, of the abolition of aggressive violence in the affairs of men. Hence, to be grounded and pursued adequately, the libertarian goal must be sought in the spirit of an overriding devotion to justice. But to possess such devotion on what may well be a long and rocky road, the libertarian must be possessed of a passion for justice, an emotion derived from and channelled by his rational insight into what natural justice requires Justice, not the weak reed of mere utility, must be the motivating force if liberty is to be attained. 
If liberty is to be the highest political end, then this implies that liberty is to be pursued by the most efficacious means, i.e. those means which will most speedily and thoroughly arrive at the goal. This means that the libertarian must be an "abolitionist," i.e., he must wish to achieve the goal of liberty as rapidly as possible. If he balks at abolitionism, then he is no longer holding liberty as the highest political end. The libertarian, then, should be an abolitionist who would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of liberty. Following the classical liberal Leonard Read, who advocated immediate and total abolition of price-and-wage controls after World War II, we might refer to this as the "button-pushing" criterion. Thus, Read declared that "If there were a button on this rostrum, the pressing of which would release all wage-and-price controls instantaneously I would put my finger on it and push!" The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push a button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty - not something, by the way, that any utilitarian would ever be likely to do. 
Anti-libertarians, and anti-radicals generally, characteristically make the point that such abolitionism is "unrealistic"; by making such a charge they hopelessly confuse the desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable path toward that goal. It is essential to make a clear-cut distinction between the ultimate goal itself, and the strategic estimate of how to reach that goal; in short, the goal must be formulated before questions of strategy or "realism" enter the scene. The fact that such a magic button does not and is not Likely to exist has no relevance to the desirability of abolitionism itself. We might agree, for example, on the goal of liberty and the desirability of abolitionism in liberty's behalf. But this does not mean that we believe that abolition will in fact be attainable in the near or far future. 
The libertarian goals - including immediate abolition of invasions of liberty - are "realistic" in the sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed on them, and that, if achieved, the resulting libertarian system would be viable. The goal of immediate liberty is not unrealistic or "Utopian" because - in contrast to such goals as the "elimination of poverty" - its achievement is entirely dependent on man's will. If, for example, everyone suddenly and immediately agreed on the overriding desirability of liberty, then total liberty would be immediately achieved. The strategic estimate of how the path toward liberty is likely to be achieved is, of course, an entirely separate question. 
Thus, the libertarian abolitionist of slavery, William Lloyd Garrison, was not being "unrealistic" when, in the 1830s, he raised the standard of the goal of immediate emancipation of the slaves. His goal was the proper moral and libertarian one, and was unrelated to the "realism", or probability of its achievement. Indeed, Garrison's strategic realism was expressed by the fact that he did not expect the end of slavery to arrive immediately or at a single blow. As Garrison carefully distinguished: "Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend. "Otherwise, as Garrison trenchantly warned, "Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice." 
Gradualism in theory, in fact, totally undercuts the overriding goal of liberty itself; its import, therefore, is not simply strategic but an opposition to the end itself and hence impermissible as any part of a strategy toward liberty. The reason is that once immediate abolitionism is abandoned, then the goal is conceded to take second or third place to other, anti-libertarian considerations, for these considerations are now placed higher than liberty. Thus, suppose that the abolitionist of slavery had said: "I advocate an end to slavery - but only after five years' time." But this would imply that abolition in four or three years' time, or a fortiori immediately, would be wrong, and that therefore it is better for slavery to be continued a while longer. But this would mean that considerations of justice have been abandoned, and that the goal itself is no longer highest on the abolitionist's (or libertarian's) political value-scale. In fact, it would mean that the libertarian advocated the prolongation of crime and injustice. 
Hence, a strategy for liberty must not include any means which undercut or contradict the end itself - as gradualism-in-theory clearly does. Are we then saying that "the end justifies the means"? This is a common, but totally fallacious, charge often directed toward any group that advocates fundamental or radical social change. For what else but an end could possibly justify any means? The very concept of "means" implies that this action is merely an instrument toward arriving at an end. If someone is hungry, and eats a sandwich to alleviate his hunger, the act of eating a sandwich is merely a means to an end; its sole justification arises from its use as an end by the consumer. Why else eat the sandwich, or, further down the line, purchase it or its ingredients? Far from being a sinister doctrine, that the end justifies the means is a simple philosophic truth, implicit in the very relationship of "means" and "ends." 
What then, do the critics of the "end justifies the means" truly mean when they say that "bad means" can or will lead to "bad ends"? What they are really saying is that the means in question will violate other ends which the critics deem to be more important or more valuable than the goal of the group being criticized. Thus, suppose that Communists hold that murder is justified if it leads to a dictatorship by the vanguard party of the proletariat. The critics of such murder (or of such advocacy of murder) are really asserting, not that the "ends do not justify the means," but rather that murder violates a more valuable end (to say the least), namely, the end of "not committing murder", or non-aggression against persons. And, of course, from the libertarian point of view, the critics would be correct. 
Hence, the libertarian goal, the victory of liberty, justifies the speediest possible means towards reaching the goal, but those means cannot be such as to contradict, and thereby undercut, the goal itself. We have already seen that gradualism-in-theory is such a contradictory means. Another contradictory means would be to commit aggression (e.g., murder or theft) against persons or just property in order to reach the libertarian goal of nonaggression. But this too would be a self-defeating and impermissible means to pursue. For the employment of such aggression would directly violate the goal of nonaggression itself. 
If, then, the libertarian must call for immediate abolition of the State as an organized engine of aggression, and if gradualism in theory is contradictory to the overriding end (and therefore impermissible), what further strategic stance should a libertarian take in a world in which States continue all too starkly to exist? Must the libertarian necessarily confine himself to advocating immediate abolition? Are transitional demands, steps toward liberty in practice, therefore illegitimate? Surely not, since realistically there would then be no hope of achieving the final goal. It is therefore incumbent upon the libertarian, eager to achieve his goal as rapidly as possible, to push the polity ever further in the direction of that goal. Clearly, such a course is difficult, for the danger always exists of losing sight of, or even undercutting, the ultimate goal of liberty. But such a course, given the state of the world in the past, present, and foreseeable future, is vital if the victory of liberty is ever to be achieved. The transitional demands, then, must be framed while (a) always holding up the ultimate goal of liberty as the desired end of the transitional process; and (b) never taking steps, or using means, which explicitly or implicitly contradict that goal. 
Let us consider, for example, a transition demand set forth by various libertarians: namely, that the government budget be reduced by 10 percent each year for ten years, after which the government will have disappeared. Such a proposal might have heuristic or strategic value, provided that the proposers always make crystal clear that these are minimal demands, and that indeed there would be nothing wrong - in fact, it would be all to the good - to step up the pace to cutting the budget by 25 percent a year for four years, or, most desirably, by cutting it by 100 percent immediately. The danger arises in implying, directly or indirectly that any faster pace than 10percent would be wrong or undesirable. 
An even greater danger of a similar sort is posed by the idea of many libertarians of setting forth a comprehensive and planned program of transition to total liberty, e.g., that in Year 1 law A should be repealed, law B modified, tax C be cut by 20 percent, etc.; in Year 2 law D be repealed, tax C cut by a further 10 percent, etc. The comprehensive plan is far more misleading than the simple budget cut, because it strongly implies that, for example, law D should not be repealed until the second year of this planned program. Hence, the trap of philosophic gradualism, of gradualism-in-theory, would be fallen into on a massive scale. The would-be libertarian planners would be virtually falling into a position, or seeming to, of opposing a faster pace toward liberty.
There is, indeed, another grave flaw in the idea of a comprehensive planned program toward liberty. For the very care and studied pace, the very all-embracing nature of the program, implies that the State is not really the enemy of mankind, that it is possible and desirable to use the State in engineering a planned and measured pace toward liberty. The insight that the State is the permanent enemy of mankind, on the other hand, leads to a very different strategic outlook: namely that libertarians push for and accept with alacrity any reduction of State power or State activity on any front; any such reduction at any time is a reduction in crime and aggression, and is a reduction of the parasitic malignity with which State power rules over and confiscates social power.
For example, libertarians may well push for drastic reduction, or repeal, of the income tax; but they should never do so while at the same time advocating its replacement by a sales or other form of tax. The reduction or, better, the abolition of a tax is always a non-contradictory reduction of State power and a step toward liberty; but its replacement by a new or increased tax elsewhere does just the opposite, for it signifies a new and additional imposition of the State on some other front. The imposition of a new tax is a means that contradicts the libertarian goal itself.
Similarly, in this age of permanent federal deficits, we are all faced with the problem: should we agree to a tax cut, even though it may well mean an increase in the deficit? Conservatives, from their particular perspective of holding budget-balancing as a higher end, invariably oppose, or vote against, a tax cut which is not strictly accompanied by an equivalent or greater cut in government expenditures. But since taxation is an evil act of aggression, any failure to welcome a tax cut with alacrity undercuts and contradicts the libertarian goal. The time to oppose government expenditures is when the budget is being considered or voted upon, when the libertarian should call for drastic slashes in expenditures as well. Government activity must be reduced whenever and wherever it can; any opposition to a particular tax -or expenditure it is impermissible for it contradicts libertarian principles and the libertarian goal. 
Does this mean that the libertarian may never set priorities, may not concentrate his energy on political issues which he deems of the greatest importance? Clearly not, for since everyone's time and energy is necessarily limited, no one can devote equal time to every particular aspect of the comprehensive libertarian creed. A speaker or writer on political issues must necessarily set priorities of importance, priorities which at least partially depend on the concrete issues and circumstances of the day. Thus, while a libertarian in today's world would certainly advocate the denationalization of lighthouses, it is highly doubtful that he would place a greater priority on the lighthouse question than on conscription or the repeal of the income tax. The libertarian must use his strategic intelligence and knowledge of the issues of the day to set his priorities of political importance. On the other hand, of course, if one were living on a small, highly fog-bound island, dependent on shipping for transportation, it could very well be that the lighthouse question
would have a high priority on a libertarian political agenda. And, furthermore, if for some reason the opportunity arose for denationalizing lighthouses even in present-day America, it should certainly not be spurned by the libertarian. 
We conclude this part of the strategy question, then, by affirming that the victory of total liberty is the highest political end; that the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion for justice; that the end should be pursued by the speediest and most efficacious possible means; that the end must always be kept in sight and sought as rapidly as possible; and that the means taken must never contradict the goal -whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, or by failing to seize any opportunity to reduce State power or by ever increasing it in any area. 
The world, at least in the long run, is governed by ideas; and it seems clear that libertarianism is only likely to triumph if the ideas spread to and are adopted by a significantly large number of people. And so "education" becomes a necessary condition for the victory of liberty - all sorts of education, from the most abstract systematic theories down to attention-catching devices that will attract the interest of potential converts. Education, indeed, is the characteristic strategic theory of classical liberalism. 
But it should be stressed that ideas do not float by themselves in a vacuum; they are influential only insofar as they are adopted and put forward by people. For the idea of liberty to triumph, then, there must be an active group of dedicated libertarians, people who are knowledgeable in liberty and are willing to spread the message to others. In short, there must be an active and self-conscious libertarian movement. This may seem self-evident, but there has been a curious reluctance on the part of many libertarians to think of themselves as part of a conscious and ongoing movement, or to become involved in movement activity. Yet consider: has any discipline, or set of ideas in the past, whether it be Buddhism or modern physics, been able to advance itself and win acceptance without the existence of a dedicated "cadre" of Buddhists or physicists?
The mention of physicists points up another requirement of a successful movement: the existence of professionals, of persons making their full-time career in the movement or discipline in question. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as modern physics emerged as a new science, there were indeed scientific societies which mainly included interested amateurs, "Friends of Physics" as we might call them, who established an atmosphere of encouragement and support of the new discipline. But surely physics would not have advanced very far if there had been no professional physicists, people who made a full-time career of physics, and therefore could devote all their energies to engaging in and advancing the discipline. Physics would surely still be a mere amusement for amateurs if the profession of physics had not developed. Yet there are few libertarians, despite the spectacular growth of the ideas and of the movement in recent years, who recognize the enormous need for the development of liberty as a profession, as a central core for the advancement of both the theory and the condition of liberty in the real world. 
Every new idea and every new discipline necessarily begins with one or a few people, and diffuses outward toward a larger core of converts and adherents. Even at full tide, given the wide variety of interests and abilities among men, there is bound to be only a minority among the professional core or cadre of libertarians. There is nothing sinister or "undemocratic," then, in postulating a "vanguard" group of libertarians any more than there is in talking of a vanguard of Buddhists or of physicists. Hopefully this vanguard will help to bring about a majority or a large and influential minority of people adhering to (if not centrally devoted to) libertarian ideology. The existence of a libertarian majority among the American Revolutionaries and in nineteenth-century England demonstrates that the feat is not impossible. 
In the meanwhile, on the path to that goal, we might conceive of the adoption of libertarianism as a ladder or pyramid, with various individuals and groups on different rungs of the ladder, ranging upward from total collectivism or statism to pure liberty. If the libertarian cannot "raise people's consciousness" fully to the top rung of pure liberty, then he can achieve the lesser but still important goal of helping them advance a few rungs up the ladder. 
For this purpose, the libertarian may well find it fruitful to engage in coalitions with non-libertarians around the advancement of some single, ad hoc activity. Thus, the libertarian, depending on his priorities of importance at any given condition of society, may engage in such "united front" activities with some conservatives to repeal the income tax or with civil libertarians to repeal conscription or the outlawry of pornography or of "subversive" speech. By engaging in such united fronts on ad hoc issues, the libertarian can accomplish a twofold purpose: (a) greatly multiplying his own leverage or influence in working toward a specific libertarian goal - since many non-libertarians are mobilized to cooperate in such actions; and (b) to "raise the consciousness" of his coalition colleagues, to show them that libertarianism is a single interconnected system, and that a full pursuit of their particular goal requires the adoption of the entire libertarian schema. Thus, the libertarian can point out to the conservative that property rights or the free market can only be maximized and truly safeguarded if civil liberties are defended or restored; and he can show the opposite to the civil libertarian. Hopefully this demonstration will raise some of these ad hoe allies significantly up the libertarian ladder.
In the progress of any movement dedicated to radical social change, i.e., to transforming social reality toward an ideal system, there are bound to arise, as the Marxists have discovered, two contrasting types of "deviations" from the proper strategic line: what the Marxists have called "right opportunism" and "left sectarianism." So fundamental are these often superficially attractive deviations that we might call it a theoretical rule that one or both will arise to plague a movement at various times in its development. Which tendency will triumph in a movement cannot, however, be determined by our theory; the outcome will depend on the subjective strategic understanding of the people constituting the movement. The outcome, then, is a matter of free will and persuasion.
Right opportunism, in its pursuit of instant gains, is willing to abandon the ultimate social goal, and to immerse itself in minor and short-run gains, sometimes in actual contradiction to the ultimate goal itself. In the libertarian movement, the opportunist is willing to join the State establishment rather than to struggle against it, and is willing to deny the ultimate goal on behalf of short-run gains: e.g. to declaim that "while everyone knows we must have taxation, the state of the economy requires a 2 percent tax cut." The left sectarian, on the other hand, scents "immorality" and "betrayal of principle" in every use of strategic intelligence to pursue transitional demands on the path to liberty, even ones that uphold the ultimate goal and do not contradict it. The sectarian discovers "moral principle" and "libertarian principle" everywhere, even in purely strategic, tactical, or organizational concerns. Indeed, the sectarian is likely to attack as an abandonment of principle any attempt to go beyond mere reiteration of the ideal social goal, and to select and analyze more specifically political issues of the most urgent priority. In the Marxist movement, the Socialist Labor Party, which meets every political issue with only a reiteration of the view that "socialism and only socialism will solve the problem," is a classical example of ultra-sectarianism at work. Thus, the sectarian libertarian might decry a television speaker or a political candidate who, in the necessity to choose priority issues, stresses repeal of the income tax or abolition of the draft, while "neglecting" the goal of denationalizing lighthouses. 
In should be clear that both right opportunism and left sectarianism are equally destructive of the task of achieving the ultimate social goal: for the right opportunist abandons the goal while achieving short-run gains, and thereby renders those gains ineffectual; while the left sectarian, in wrapping himself in the mantle of "purity," defeats his own ultimate goal by denouncing any necessary strategic steps in its behalf. 
Sometimes, curiously enough, the same individual will undergo alternations from one deviation to the other, in each case scorning the correct, plumb-line path. Thus, despairing after years of futile reiteration of his purity while making no advances in the real world, the left sectarian may leap into the heady thickets of right opportunism, in the quest for some short-run advance, even at the cost of the ultimate goal. Or, the right opportunist, growing disgusted at his own or his colleagues' compromise of their intellectual integrity and their ultimate goals, may leap into left sectarianism and decry any setting of strategic priorities toward those goals. In this way, the two opposing deviations feed on and reinforce each other, and are both destructive of the major task of effectively reaching the libertarian goal. 
The Marxists have correctly perceived that two sets of conditions are necessary for the victory of any program of radical social change; what they call the "objective" and the "subjective" conditions. The subjective conditions are the existence of a self-conscious movement dedicated to the triumph of the particular social ideal - conditions which we have been discussing above. The objective conditions are the objective fact of a "crisis situation" in the existing system, a crisis stark enough to be generally perceived, and to be perceived as the fault of the system itself. For people are so constituted that they are not interested in exploring the defects of an existing system so long as it seems to be working tolerably well. And even if a few become interested, they will tend to regard the entire problem as an abstract one irrelevant to their daily lives and therefore not an imperative for action - until the perceived crisis breakdown. It is such a breakdown that stimulates a sudden search for new social alternatives - and it is then that the cadres of the alternative movement (the "subjective conditions") must be available to supply that alternative, to relate the crisis to the inherent defects of the system itself, and to point out how the alternative system would solve the existing crisis and prevent similar breakdowns in the future. Hopefully, the alternative cadre would have provided a track record of predicting and warning against the existing crisis. 
Indeed, if we examine the revolutions in the modern world, we will find that every single one of them (a) was utilized by an existing cadre of seemingly prophetic ideologists of the alternative system, and (b) was precipitated by a breakdown of the system itself. During the American Revolution, a broad cadre and mass of dedicated libertarians were prepared to resist the encroachments of Great Britain in its attempt to end the system of "salutary neglect" of the colonies and to reimpose the chains of the British Empire; in the French Revolution, libertarian philosophers had prepared the ideology with which to meet a sharp increase of absolutist burdens on the country caused by the government's fiscal crisis; in Russia, in 1917, a losing war led to the collapse of the Czarist system from within, which radical ideologists were prepared for; in post World War I Italy and Germany, post war economic crises and wartime defeats created the conditions for the triumph of the fascist and national socialist alternatives; in China, in 1949, the combination of a lengthy and crippling war and economic crisis caused by runaway inflation and price controls allowed the victory of the Communist rebels. Both Marxists and libertarians, in their very different and contrasting ways, believe that the inner contradictions of the existing system (in the former case of "capitalism," in the latter of statism and state intervention) will lead inevitably to its long-run collapse. In contrast to conservatism, which can see nothing but long-run despair attendant upon the steady decline of "Western values" from some past century Marxism and libertarianism are both therefore highly optimistic creeds, at least in the long run. The problem, of course, for any living beings, is how long they will have to wait for the long-run to arrive. The Marxists, at least in the Western world, have had to face the indefinite postponement of their hoped-for long-run. Libertarians have had to confront a twentieth century which has shifted from the quasi-libertarian system of the nineteenth century to a far more statist and collectivist one - in many ways returning to the despotic world as it existed before the classical liberal revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
There are good and sufficient reasons, however, for libertarians to be optimistic in the short-run as well as the long run, indeed for a belief that victory for liberty might be near.
But, in the first place, why should libertarians be optimistic even in the long run? After all, the annals of recorded history are a chronicle, in one civilization after another, of centuries of varying forms of despotism, stagnation, and totalitarianism. May it not be possible that the great post-seventeenth century thrust toward liberty was only a mighty flash in the pan, to be replaced by sinking back into a gray and permanent despotism? But such superficially plausible despair overlooks a crucial point: the new and irreversible conditions introduced by the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a revolution itself a consequence of the classical liberal political revolutions. For agricultural countries, in a pre-industrial era, can indeed peg along indefinitely on a subsistence level; despotic kings, nobles and states can tax the peasantry above subsistence level, and live elegantly off the surplus, while the peasants continue to toil for centuries at the bare minimum. Such a system is profoundly immoral and exploitative, but it "works" in the sense of being able to continue indefinitely (provided that the state does not get too greedy and actually kill the goose that lays the golden eggs). 
But fortunately for the cause of liberty, economic science has shown that a modem industrial economy cannot survive indefinitely under such draconian conditions. A modern industrial economy requires a vast network of free-market exchanges and a division of labor, a network that can only flourish under freedom. Given the commitment of the mass of men to an industrial economy and the modem standard of living that requires such industry, then the triumph of a free-market economy and an end to statism becomes inevitable in the long run. 
The late-nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries have seen many forms of reversion to the statism of the preindustrial era. These forms (notably socialism and various brands of "state capitalism"), in contrast to the frankly anti-industrial and reactionary Conservatism of early nineteenth-century Europe, have tried to preserve and even extend the industrial economy while scuttling the very political requirements (freedom and the free-market) which are in the long-run necessary for its survival? State planning, operation, controls, high and crippling taxation, and paper money inflation must all inevitably lead to the collapse of the statist economic system.
If then, the world is irreversibly committed to industrialism and its attendant living standards, and if industrialism requires freedom, then the libertarian must indeed be a long-run optimist, for the libertarian triumph must eventually occur. But why short-run optimism for the present day? Because it fortunately happens to be true that the various forms of statism imposed on the Western world during the first half of the twentieth century are now in process of imminent breakdown. The long-run is now at hand. For half a century, statist intervention could wreak its depredations and not cause clear and evident crises and dislocations, because the quasi-laissez-faire industrialization of the nineteenth century had created a vast cushion against such depredations. The government could impose taxes or inflation upon the system and not reap evidently bad effects. But now statism has advanced so far and been in power so long that the cushion, or fat, has been exhausted. As economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, the "reserve fund" created by laissez faire has now been "exhausted," whatever the government does now leads to an instantaneous negative feedback that is evident to the formerly indifferent and even to many of the most ardent apologists for statism. 
In the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, the Communists themselves have increasingly perceived that socialist central planning simply does not work, particularly for an industrial economy. Hence the rapid retreat, in recent years, away from central planning and toward free-market throughout Eastern Europe, especially in Yugoslavia. In the Western world, too, state capitalism is everywhere in a period of crisis, as it becomes perceived that, in the most profound way, the government has run out of money: that increasing taxes will cripple industry and incentives beyond repair, while increased printing of new money (either directly or through the government-controlled banking system) will lead to a disastrous runaway inflation. And so we hear more and more about the "necessity of lowered expectations from government" even among the State's once most ardent champions. In West Germany, the Social Democratic party has long abandoned the call for socialism. In Great Britain, suffering from a tax-crippled economy and aggravated inflation, the Tory party, for years in the hands of dedicated statists, has now been taken over by its free-market oriented faction, while even the Labor party has begun to draw back from the planned chaos of galloping statism. 
In the United States, conditions are particularly hopeful; for here, in the last few years, there has coincidentally occurred (a) a systemic breakdown of statism across the board, in economic, foreign, social, and moral policies; and (b) a great and growing rise of a libertarian movement and the diffusion of libertarian ideas throughout the population, among opinion moulders and average citizens alike. Let us examine in turn both sets of necessary conditions for a libertarian triumph.
Surprisingly enough, the systemic breakdown of statism in the United States can be given a virtually precise date: the years 1973-74. The breakdown has been particularly glaring in the economic sphere. From the fall of 1973 through 1975, America experienced an inflationary depression, in which the worst recession of the postwar world coincided with an aggravated inflation of prices. After forty years of Keynesian policies which were supposed to "fine tune" the economy so as to eliminate the boom-bust cycle of inflation and depression, the United States managed to experience both at the same time - an event that cannot be explained by orthodox economic theory. Orthodox economics has been thrown into disarray, and economists and laymen alike are increasingly ready to turn to the "Austrian," free-market alternative, both in the realms of theoretical paradigms and of political policy. The award of the Nobel prize in economics during 1974 to F.A. Hayek for his long-forgotten Austrian business-cycle theory is but one indication of the new currents coming to the surface after decades of neglect. And even though the economy recovered from the depression, the economic crisis is not ended, since inflation only accelerated still further, while unemployment remained high. Only a free-market program of abandoning monetary inflation and slashing government expenditures will solve the crisis. 
The partial financial default of the New York City government during 1975 and the victory of Proposition 13 in California in 1978 have highlighted for the entire country the fact that local and state reserve funds have been exhausted, and that government must at last begin a drastic cutback in its operations and expenditures. For higher taxes will drive businesses and middle-class citizens out of any given area, and therefore the only way to avoid default will be radical cuts in expenditure. (If default arrives, the result will be the same and more drastically, since access to bond markets in the future by state and local governments will prove impossible.) 
It is also becoming increasingly clear that the combination of decades of high and crippling taxes on income, savings, and investment, combined with inflationary distortions of business calculation, has led to an increasing scarcity of capital, and to an imminent danger of consuming America's vital stock of capital equipment. Hence, lower taxes are rapidly perceived to be an economic necessity. Lower government expenditures are also evidently necessary to avoid the "crowding out" of private loans and investments from the capital markets by wasteful federal government deficits. 
There is a particularly hopeful reason for expecting the public and the opinion-moulders to grasp at the proper libertarian solution to this grave and continuing economic crisis: the fact that everyone knows that the State has controlled and manipulated the economy for the last forty years. When government credit and interventionary policies brought about the Great Depression of the 1930s, the myth that the 1920s had been an era of laissez faire was prevalent, and so it seemed plausible to assert that "capitalism had failed," and that economic prosperity and progress required a giant leap toward statism and state control. But the current crisis comes after many decades of statism, and its nature is such that the public can now correctly perceive Big Government to be at fault.
Furthermore, all the various forms of statism have now been tried, and have failed. At the turn of the twentieth century, businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals throughout the Western world began to turn to a "new" system of mixed economy of State rule, to replace the relative laissez faire of the previous century. Such new and seemingly exciting panaceas as socialism, the corporate state, the Welfare-Warfare State, etc., have all been tried and have manifestly failed. The call for socialism or state planning is now a call for an old, tired, and failed system. What is there left to try but freedom? 
On the social front, a similar crisis has occurred in recent years. The public school system, once a sacrosanct part of the American heritage, is now under severe and accelerated criticism from people across the ideological spectrum. It is now becoming clear (a) that public schools do not properly educate their charges; (b) that they are costly, wasteful, and require high taxes; and (c) that the uniformity of the public school system creates deep and unresolvable social conflicts over vital educational issues - over such matters as integration vs. segregation, progressive vs. traditional methods, religion or secularism, sex education, and the ideological content of learning. Whatever decision the public school makes in any of these areas, either a majority or a substantial minority of parents and children are irreparably injured. Furthermore, compulsory attendance laws are being increasingly perceived as dragooning unhappy or uninterested children into a prison not of their or their parents' making. 
In the field of moral policies, there is a growing realization that the rampant Prohibitionism of government policy - not simply in the field of alcohol, but also in such matters as pornography prostitution, sexual practices between "consenting adults," drugs, and abortion - are both an immoral and unjustified invasion of the right of each individual to make his or her own moral choices, and also cannot practically be enforced. Attempts at enforcement only bring about hardship and a virtual police state. The time is approaching when prohibitionism in these areas of personal morality will be recognized to be fully as unjust and ineffective as in the case of alcohol.
In the wake of Watergate, there is also an increased awareness of the dangers to individual liberty and privacy, to the freedom to dissent from government, in habitual actions and activities of government. Here, too, we may expect public pressure to keep government from fulfilling its age-old desire to invade privacy and repress dissent. 
Perhaps the best sign of all, the most favorable indication of the breakdown of the mystique of the State, was the Watergate exposures of 1973-74. For Watergate instigated a radical shift in the attitude of everyone - regardless of their explicit ideology - toward government itself. Watergate indeed awakened the public to the invasions of personal liberty by government. More important, by bringing about the impeachment of the President, it permanently desanctified an office that had almost been considered sovereign by the American public. But most importantly government itself has been to a large extent desanctified. No one trusts any politician or government official anymore; all government is viewed with abiding hostility and distrust, thus returning to that healthy distrust of government that marked the American public and the American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. In the wake of Watergate, no one would dare today to intone that "we are the government," and therefore that anything elected officials may do is legitimate and proper. For the success of liberty, the most vital condition is the desanctification, the delegitimation of government in the eyes of the public; and that Watergate has managed to accomplish. 
Thus, the objective conditions for the triumph of liberty have now, in the past few years, begun to appear, at least in the United States. Furthermore, the nature of this systemic crisis is such that government is now perceived as the culprit; it cannot be relieved except through a sharp turn toward liberty. What is basically needed now, therefore, is the growth of the "subjective conditions," of libertarian ideas and particularly of a dedicated libertarian movement to advance those ideas in the public forum. Surely it is no coincidence that it is precisely in these years -since 1971 and particularly since 1973, that these subjective conditions have made their greatest strides in this century. For the breakdown of statism has undoubtedly spurred many more people into becoming partial or full libertarians, and hence the objective conditions help to generate the subjective. Furthermore, in the United States at least, the splendid heritage of freedom and of libertarian ideas, going back beyond revolutionary times, has never been fully lost. Present-day libertarians, therefore, have solid historical ground on which to build. 
The rapid growth in these last years of libertarian ideas and movements has pervaded many fields of scholarship, especially among younger scholars, and in the areas of journalism, the media, business, and politics. Because of the continuing objective conditions, it seems clear that this eruption of libertarianism in many new and unexpected places is not a mere media-concocted fad, but an inevitably growing response to the perceived conditions of objective reality. Given free will, no one can predict with certainty that the growing libertarian mood in America will solidify in a brief period of time, and press forward without faltering to the success of the entire libertarian program. But certainly, both theory and analysis of current historical conditions lead to the conclusion that the current prospects of liberty, even in the short-run, are highly encouraging.
