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Part 2 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.

If as libertarians we believe that we may live in something called ‘society’ but that ‘rights’ are something for individuals, not some corporatised community, then it pretty much follows we are going to be ambivalent at best about nation states, taking either the minarchist/classical liberal position that states should not exist to ‘do stuff’ (such as build roads, educate people, put men on the moon, restrict smoking, discourage single motherhood, prevent discordant architecture etc.) but rather should exist exclusively to guarantee individual rights and thereby reducing it to nothing more than a ‘night watchman state’… or, beyond that, a libertarian takes the anarchist position that states are completely superfluous.

What both ends of the libertarian continuum agree on however is that ‘society’ is essentially a self ordering mechanism in which order rather than chaos, results from the absence of the state’s guiding claws. Spontaneous order does not require a blithe belief in the ‘goodness of man’ or some Rousseau-esque drivel about noble savage, just the observation that order in one form or other is in fact man’s ‘natural’ state and that chaos, not order, is the inherently unstable and unsupportable state of human affairs. Chaotic societies in fact are not produced by the absence of invasive governments but by them. The implosion of the Soviet Union is a splendid example of this in action. This is of course a complex subject that could fill a library by itself.

Markets occur within the context of sets of rules that enable interaction, but throughout human history, the majority of ‘market rules’ were not imposed by the state but evolved naturally to facilitate wealth creating commerce. In much the same way, the customs of a society are not created by the state’s fiat (customs are not laws), they evolve for complex and often poorly understood reasons. Yet it is social customs, the shared meta-context of assumptions, which really enable the extended social and commercial order that is modern society. Of course societies with liberty enabling customs develop better economically and indeed socially than societies with more restrictive customs.

So then what is the role of ‘laws’ if evolved social custom is really the glue that holds everything together? Well I would say ‘law’ is legitimately the choice-less aspect of custom, which is clarified for the avoidance of misunderstanding, and backed by force. For example you have no right to take my property without my consent. You may not legitimately ‘choose’ to do that because your right to acquire my property is rationally and objectively trumped by my right to maintain my pre-existing ownership. To a minarchist like me, backing up that fact is why some sort of ‘night watchman’ state is required, but to a libertarian anarchist, protection agencies and mutated insurance companies take on that sort of role.

Coming in Part 3: So what are we to do about tyranny?

Part 1 in a series of thoughts on the nature of liberty and libertarians.

I have often pondered what principles are shared by all real libertarians, and have periodically tried to produce a set of ‘distilled axioms’ that we all share. This has always proved harder than one might think. Minarchism, Objectivism, Anarcho-Capitalism, Agorism, Dynamism, capital ‘L’ Political Party Libertarianism, Hoppeism, cultural conservative libertarianism, classical liberalism, Whigs, etc. etc. all more or less fall within the nebulous taxonomy of ‘libertarians’ whilst at the same time often vilifying each other’s ‘-isms’.

I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not the ‘non-initiation of force principle’ which is frequently offered up as the core axiom that characterises us all (I regard that as emergent default behaviour, which is to say a consequence, not an underlying axiom). What I offer up is:

You are not a libertarian unless you accept as axiomatic that, at its core, society must allow individuals to make their own choices in the pursuit of self-defined ends.

Now the reason I think this is the case is that whilst we objectively derive our rights as individuals, we nevertheless exist within a social setting. We are not isolated atomic entities living in fortified towers, we are social individuals. Misrepresenting this self-evident fact results in people thinking that ‘libertarians’ are in fact nihilists and therefore treating libertarian theories on ‘anarchy’ (the rule of no-one) as synonym for ‘disorder’. Now part of the reason for this is that libertarian revulsion for the statist force based collective in all its modern forms (socialism, the overt end of the collectivist continuum… and statist conservatism, the covert end of the continuum), makes them condemn any function of the modern state because that what is being done is currently being carried out by the state, rather than because the function is inherently antithetical to liberty: the military immediately springs to mind.

This has blinded many to the fact collectivist and collective are not the same thing at all. We can come together to create wealth (for example, getting a job and working for someone else) or band together to deal with an emergency when one or all of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come calling, i.e. act collectively without without becoming collectivists, because a collectivist does not accept that you, an individual, actually owns anything… and so how can you voluntarily elect for collective action what is not yours to loan or dispose of. To them is was never your land, your capital, your labour to begin with because several property does not exist.

And therein also lies the difference between the covert form of collectivism, statist conservativism, and actual libertarians. A conservative will accept the concept of several property, but only sort of. This also has misleading echoes of the difference between the libertarian propertarian/anarcho-capitalist view of absolute personal sovereignty over several property and the libertarian minarchist views to which folks like me subscribe to, which sees property rights as contextual: within the context of a forest fire or war, your property rights are subordinated to the reality of non-civil society, without being alienated once civil society is restored. Conservatives on the other hand will sing paeans to private property whilst supporting compulsory purchase (US: eminent domain) for ‘important’ yet non-emergency reasons, such as roads, parks, urban redevelopments or whatever seems ‘sensible’ for the ‘common good’. Yes, you can own property but not if Donald Trump really wants to build on it.

Statist conservatives generally see societies as having separate ‘rights’ too, as it they were somehow more than shorthand for an aggregated expression of individual decisions, blurring the boundary between society and state in the process and masking the reality that they really agree with the socialists that the collective trumps the individual when push comes to shove. Socialists take that a giant step further, seeing state and society as one just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau always argued, the individual as no more independent from the society-as-state than a blood cell from a human body. So a libertarian is someone who thinks rights are something only individuals have but opinions vary greatly how we actually interact socially within the context of our objectively (or naturally or divinely or even subjectively…pick one depending on your -ism) derived rights.