From The Founder's Desk
columnist: Walt Thiessen

Topic: Liberty
The Non-Aggression Principle

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This principle is the fundamental basis for libertarian thought, so it makes sense to make it the subject of my first article here on the Fauquier Forum.

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by Walt Thiessen
(Libertarian)
Friday, August 31, 2007

The Non-Aggression Principle may be stated simply:

You are free to live your life as you wish, provided you don't initiate force against others.

If human society is to attain greater success in its quest to achieve peace and prosperity for as many people as possible, we're going to have to raise the bar. That's what establishing the Non-Aggression principle does. It raises the bar. It sets a higher standard than society has so far been willing to set.

It's also a very easy standard to understand, because it is so universal. Murder is clearly initiated force and is therefore wrong. So is theft. Taking someone else's property is an act of force.

The principle dates back to the writings of John Locke who wrote in his book, The Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 2, "Of The State Of Nature":

To understand political power right and derive it from its original, we must consider what state men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the laws of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man....

...no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions....

Small Government is Non-Aggressive Government

As a libertarian, I strongly believe that small government is best, primarily because the Non-Aggression Principle tells me so. A small government is a defensive government, not an offensive government. Imperialism, interventionism, and "do good"-ism are all manifestations of governments that initiate force in order to achieve their objectives. Some people might object that government has to initiate force in order to do anything, but that's not true. For instance, when government apprehends a murderer using force, they didn't initiate that force. The murderer already had done the initiating. Government merely responds to the murderer's force with (hopefully) just enough force to subdue and bring him or her before a court of law.

Others will object, "But what about building and maintaining roads using tax dollars? Surely that's a form of initiated force! Yet, we don't consider those to be wrong!" Well yes, it is initiation of force. But it's also clear that governments don't have to be society's road builders. Many roads in America have been built through private means without tax dollars. There's no requirement, no basic principle that requires that governments must be the only road builders.

I wouldn't make private road building anywhere near my top priority when it came to shrinking government control by restricting government's use of initiated force. At this point in time, I'd place a higher priority on other forms of government initiated force that play a far more devastating role against America's best interests. The ill-named (and unnecessary) Patriot Act, the CIA's secret prisons around the world where alleged spies are "questioned" using techniques that are at best embarrassing to every decent American, and America's routine interventions into the affairs of other countries are far more important and have far greater negative consequences for Americans than road building has. I don't mean that road building isn't important. I mean that we have bigger fish to fry.

As of the date of this writing, Wikipedia.org's article on the Non-Aggression Principle states that:

The non-aggression principle faces three kinds of criticism: the first holds that the principle is immoral, the second argues that it is impossible to apply consistently in practice, while the third holds that the interpretation of the principle is too ambiguous to be useful.

Let's take a moment to examine each of these criticisms.

First Objection: The Non-Aggression Principle Is Immoral

On what grounds is the claim made that the Non-Aggression Principle is immoral? Look at the example cited in the Wikipedia article:

Suppose, for instance, that you could save a million lives by killing one man. The non-aggression principle holds that you should not kill that man. But this leads to a million deaths. Granted, such extreme situations are unlikely, but opponents of the non-aggression principle argue that milder forms of the same dilemma (for example the choice between taking away part of a wealthy man's property or allowing a poor person to starve) are very common.

I assume that the critic is talking about killing an innocent man. Clearly, there's no problem with killing a man who is threatening to blow up the world by throwing a switch.

The example cited as an objection is not just unlikely; it's impossible. I defy anyone to describe in detail a real-world scenario where the killing of one innocent man, woman, or child would clearly and unavoidably save the lives of millions of others. No one has, or can have, that level of omniscience. The argument is essentially based on a claim of god-like powers, which in itself is an inappropriate claim.

But what of the more "common" claim that taking a part of a wealthy man's property to prevent a poor person from starving would be justifiable? Again, the proposition is impossible where the man has acquired his wealth solely via free trade. Starvation never happens because of greedy property owners. When it happens, it happens because of overbearing governments often in combination with ill-conceived collectivist social standards. I've never heard of a real-world scenario that provides a contrary example to this observation.

That's why libertarians argue that the best defense against starvation is liberty. The more politically free that the poorest of people are, the less likely that they'll starve. This likelihood approaches zero as freedom is maximized.

Second Objection: It's Not Always Clear Who Initiated Force

Again, let's look at the Wikipedia article more closely:

The second type of criticism focuses on the difficulty of determining who exactly initiated force in many real-life conflicts. As a general rule, each side in a conflict claims that the other "started it".

Is this truly an objection? If so, it is without merit. It's not always clear who commited murder when a dead body is found with a bullet in its back. Does this ambiguity suggest that murder should no longer be considered wrong because we don't always know who the murderer is? Of course not. The proposition fails on the face of it.

In reality (and in most of history), it is rarely difficult to know who "started it." For instance, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that ultimately led to the hanging of Saddam Hussein in early 2007 was clearly initiated by President George Bush. There really isn't any serious counter-claim on this point. True, a few holdouts still claim that Bush invaded in response to threated use of "weapons of mass destruction" by Saddam against the USA, but the historical record has since shown that this was little more than a Bush administration fabrication, which they then blamed (wrongly, in my opinion) on the CIA's faulty intelligence.

(I say "wrongly" because the CIA's Director, George Tenet was a Bush appointee who was clearly citing "evidence" that many experienced CIA analysts at the time considered not to be credible. Curiously enough, many of these analysts soon found themselves on the outside looking in. Their reward for being right was to be relieved of duty or driven from office either by the Bush administration or by their own personal consciences that wouldn't let them continue to work for the Bush administration.)

Third Objection: The Non-Aggression Principle is Ambiguous

This objection is also ill-founded. Let's look at the way the Wikipedia article poses the problem to understand why:

Specifically, libertarians see taxes as a form of government aggression. However, unless their libertarianism is of such an absolute degree that it opposes any kind of state, some consider taxation as a "necessary evil." They may argue that because of the free-rider problem, enough funds would not be obtainable by voluntary means to protect individuals from aggression of a greater severity

First of all, regarding taxes themselves, there is a very simple solution. Anyone who doesn't want the particular service under consideration that the government offers shouldn't have to pay for it. That eliminates any need for coerced taxes.

This is where those who posit the objection cited by Wikipedia think they're being clever. They reply, "Yes, but what about the free rider problem?"

Those who argue for the "free-rider problem" haven't given much thought to it. Let's look at this purported problem more closely. From the Wikipedia article on free riders:

In economics, collective bargaining, psychology and political science, free riders are actors who consume more than their fair share of a resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. The free rider problem is the question of how to prevent free riding from taking place, or at least limit its negative effects.

This concept is very poorly conceived. At the root of it is the objection that people who don't directly pay for something shouldn't benefit from it. This is ridiculous! To take just one example, you and I probably never paid Henry Ford for a single automobile when he was building them, because most people reading this article were not alive and old enough to buy automobiles at the time. We all indirectly benefit from his enterprise, especially from his development of the concepts of division of labor and specialization of skills. Whole industries that never paid a dime to Henry Ford were built on the concepts he developed. In essence, we are all free riders on Henry Ford's back, and that's just one example out of literally millions of others (because millions, and perhaps even billions of people in have made their own contributions resulting in "free ridership" that have benefitted society in various ways over the years, although most are undocumented and unrecognized). Ford is a particularly visible and obvious example, but his work is far from being a rare example.

Free ridership isn't a bad thing. It's a great, wonderful consequence of free enterprise! The only way you can truly "consume more than your fair share of a resource" is if you actually steal that resource from its true owner. But if you indirectly benefit from someone's development and/or use of that resource, just as we all indirectly benefitted from the resources used and developed by Henry Ford, that's not theft. That's merely the benefit of living in a free society.

Free rider theory advocates are deliberately smudging and blotting out what would otherwise be a clear demarcation: direct vs indirect. Because direct theft is wrong, they want "indirect benefit without paying" to also be wrong. Fortunately, when we view the issue correctly, it quickly becomes apparent that their whole thesis falls to the ground in tattered ruins. One might ask what their motivation is for deliberately blurring this border. I would speculate that they want to manufacture arguments against the Non-Aggression Principle because they know (and fear) in their hearts that it is true and valid, which would undermine the anti-liberty aspects of their own agendas.

Many such persons are also advocates of what the Wikipedia article on the Non-Aggression Principle calls the "Social Contract" objection:

There are many who oppose the libertarian idea that taxation is a form of aggression on social contract grounds. Specifically, advocates of most social contract theories see taxes as analogous to contract fees, and tax-collecting governments as agents of an (implicit) agreement among the members of a society to share certain common burdens.

I reject the idea of a "social contract," and I commend critics who favor such a concept to read the essay, "No Treason" by Lysander Spooner, written in 1870. Here is a poignant passage from that essay:

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago....

"...We, the people of the United States, in order to form a perfect union...and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish...."

It is plain, in the first place, that this language, as an agreement, purports to be only what it at most really was, vis., a contract between the people then existing. In the second place, the language neither expresses nor implies that they had any intention or desire, nor that they imagined they had any right or power, to bind their "posterity" to live under it. It does not say that their "posterity" will, shall, or must live under it. It only says, in effect, that their hopes and motives in adopting it were that it might prove useful to their posterity, as well as to themselves, by promoting their union safety, tranquility, liberty, etc.

As Spooner makes clear, the idea of a permanent Social Contract to which we all are bound is nonsense. Therefore, the idea that taxes as initiated force are justified by a Social Contract is similarly unjustified for the same reason.

The Only Valid Objection

There is one criticism of the Non-Aggression Principle which is not cited in the WIkipedia article, but which I consider valid. That objection is that the principle has not been applied carefully in enough areas of human enterprise to know how it will work out. I agree. The solution to that problem is not to reject the principle, but rather to wrestle with it, think about it, and attempt to apply it in order to learn from it and benefit from it.

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2007 Walt Thiessen, all rights reserved.
Published: Friday, August 31, 2007
Last modified: Saturday, November 10, 2007

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