What\’s with \"the role of government must be restricted to the protection of the life, liberty, and property of its citizens\"??

That\’s crazy talk! You trust a tax-funded socialist monopoly to defend your life, liberty, and property?

Anywhoo, that’s my only gripe. Look forward to your future columns.

I look forward to reading your future contributions to the Freeman and their promotion of liberty.

Walter Bunyea, COL (Ret.)

Notice that I do not directly advocate taxation in any form. I note that welfarism’s faults are apparent and visible regardless of one’s opinions regarding the role of or justification for the state. The story’s general store owner implied consent to the accepted government-citizen paradigm when he sought help from the sheriff, but I did not address whether this consent was legitimate. This was not the argument I chose to address.

The value judgments that I make may have implications for broader political/philosophical arguments, but I do not address those arguments here.

Likewise, you can be sure that no one else signed any contract that binds me. Furthermore, I sign no contracts that bind anyone else. I owe nothing to anyone except to treat every individual with justice and charity. It is neither just nor charitable to take money from my neighbor at gunpoint, or to choose someone to do it for me.

The State was founded on the idea that a system whereby some men may take money and property from others by violence is moral. This idea is wrong. It is a contradiction of what being human is about, as refraining from initiating violence is a key aspect of what it is to be social and human. The State and its taxation are immoral. Flawed ideas. Anti-social. Everything above and beyond that fact is meaningless and wasted breath.

The only obligations that the individuals in the State have to me is to stop taking my money and to leave me alone. Period.

Now please, answer some of the questions I posed to you. Otherwise, an article such as yours is not unlike writing an article about the best way to abort a baby, yet never questioning whether babies should be aborted in the first place.

The justification for my particular private agency’s violence comes from its contractual obligation to provide that defense. This is the basis of the liberal democratic state. It is the offshoot of the private defense agency in that it is instituted for the general physical protection of its creators. Although we may differ as to the need for such an institution (we as individuals may very well be suited to protect our own lives and persons), the American Federal Government, on which my op-ed was a commentary, was created for just these ends. We can agree that regardless of the moral/philosophical merits of the institutions and principles upon which the nation was founded, the federal government’s obligation entitled the protection of the lives, rights, and properties of the nation’s citizens. Though the United States was certainly not to be a nation of absolute liberty and individualism, the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Federalist Papers enumerated a government placing more emphasis on freedom than any before it (and arguably any since). My essay aimed to show that the federal government has left behind the essentially libertarian roots of its founding, and has undertaken to assume more power over the flow of resources within the country.

Nozick’s logic was flawed. First, it is not economically beneficial to engage in constant inter-protection agency warfare. Second, what is the difference between a private company imposing a violent monopoly on its “customers,” and the State? There is one huge difference: in the case of the private company, the victims recognize the men of the private company for what they are: a bunch of thugs who have no right to do what they are doing. People embrace the State thugs, and come up with all sorts of fancy utilitarian defenses for what is nothing more than thuggish robbery.

Is establishing a system that takes money from non-aggressors at gunpoint moral, Lachlan? Is robbery moral?

-Sans Authoritas

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that when people begin taking money from others at gunpoint, they cease caring about what their victims want. These criminals don’t represent the victims, they represent the government contractors who are the recipients of the victims’ money. Government contractors who give kickbacks for contracts.

It’s the public choice theory, in action. The State grows, and voting cannot stem its growth. Avalanches start off small, too. Someone starts one, and it rolls down a hillside, using everything in its path to grow bigger, while destroying lives and property all along the way. Good luck keeping states and avalanches “small” once you choose to create them.

I don’t believe in sudden anything. And I don’t believe human nature ever changes. That’s why I oppose giving moral support to anyone who initiates violence, whether it be a common street thug, or a street thug in a pinstripe suit and an American flag lapel pin.

If you think that KBR is anything remotely resembling a “private” company, you need to step away from the Kool-Aid.

From the presence of multiple competing defense agencies, one would naturally rise above all others in its capacity to use force, and would hence attract more customers. If we recognize that it is appropriate to wield collective force against those who violate our rights, and if we institutionalize this capacity and justification for violence, the preeminent defense agency assumes responsibility for providing the physical and procedural resources of the most basic and minimal state. In preventing other defense agencies from violating the rights of its clients, the superior agency would attempt to enforce a monopoly on the means of violence. It rightly uses force to protect the rights of its clients, and is entitled, by our contractual obligation with the agency, to resources appropriate for the most basic adjudicative, punitive, and protective duties.