Liberty, Piracy, Police Power — or — Dogs, Wolves, and Feral Dogs
I thought this merited its own post. It is a comment in the midst of a discussion about legitimate versus illegitimate uses of force. Mr. Kinsella maintains, with admirable consistency, that only self-defense or retaliation legitimizes the use of force, and says that all states howsoever constituted must and do use force beyond this limit (as when they collect taxes), and concludes that ergo no state is legitimate. My comment is as follows:
A libertarian is someone who cannot tell the difference between a taxman and a thief, or between a pirate and a policeman.
Let me state the basics:
The difference is that one has authority and the other does not.
You are supposed to pay your taxes — you are under a moral obligation to do so.
You are supposed to resist a thief, and either in your own person, as a vigilante, or by proxy, as a citizen of a republic or subject of a prince, you are supposed to hunt down the thief imprison, maim or hang him. If you cannot join the vigilante committee yourself, your obligation to the public peace requires you support (both moral support and monetary support) the officer’s of the king’s peace or the agents of the public will who act in your stead.
The reason to pay your taxes is that to maintain the public weal costs tax money.
You cannot hang thieves if no one pays for the rope and no one pays the hangman.
To maintain the public weal also demands that thieves be punished, or otherwise men are not secure in their goods.
(1) Letting a thief take your good unpunished renders men insecure in their property and liberty.
(2) Not paying your taxes is tantamount to letting a thief take your goods, because if you do not pay the hangman, you have no one to hang the thief.
Hence even if the libertarian and me conclude, as a matter of definition, that both thieves and tax-gatherers use "aggression" to do their work, that conclusion is moot, and that definition is meaningless, on the grounds that resisting a thief aids the public weal (makes men more secure rather than less in their property) whereas resisting the tax-gatherer undermines the public weal (makes men less secure rather than more in their property — because asking the sheriff to serve without pay, and without authority, encourages the Dalton Gang.)
The "aggression" (if you insist on using this dishonest word) is the same, but the nature, morality, and result is not only not the same, it is the opposite (one keeps the peace and the other breaks the peace).
Now, if the hangman, the prince, or the republic itself start acting like thieves, then they are exceeding and abusing their authority and acting in a fashion ALIEN TO ITS NATURE and AGAINST ITS PURPOSE. At that point, your moral duty to the public weal requires you shoulder your partisan, man the barricades, and rebel against the prince or the republic until you die the death of a hero.
The difference between a policeman and a pirate is that a policeman is a good guy and a pirate is a bad guy. Pirates prey on the weak, rob ships, kill children, rape women, and say "Ar, maties!" Policemen protect the weak, stop robbers, protect children, avenge women, and say, " ‘Ere now! What’s all this? What’s all this, then?"
Your moral duty is to resist pirates, and hunt them down and kill them, either in your own person, by joining the marines, or by proxy, by paying taxes to the prince or to the republic whose duty it is to impress marines and built ships and hunt pirates.
When the policeman betrays his duty and starts acting like a pirate, your moral duty changes, and at that point you must resist the policeman, and see to it that he is hanged. This, again, requires a hangman, who requires a wage, who requires taxes to pay for him. You can replace a bad policeman with a good one, but you cannot eliminate the office — someone has to keep the peace, formally or informally, either as a matter of law, or as a matter of unwritten custom. You can replace a leader that betrays his authority with a leader who does not, and even, if the harms are systemic, innate, and deeply grievous, replace the form of government with a form better designed to keep the peace: but replacing the government with a mere gentleman’s agreement, founded on a handshake, that no one will break the peace hereafter ergo we have no more need of princes, parliaments, written laws, courts of law, policemen, hangmen, soldiers, sailors, spies, is a farrago of nonsense.
Even if we grant the libertarian that all governments are evil, the nature of reality (the scarcity of goods) and the nature of man (creatures that seek their own self interest even at the expense of others) would require that we embrace this evil in order to stave off a greater evil. Even if we agree that Alexander the Great is nothing but a pirate chief writ large, prudence suggests that if Alexander will keep the peace, it behooves us to pay our taxes, tithes, aids and tariffs. Also, serving a pirate chief we fellow pirates ("Ar!") can demote by ballot, a term limit, an impeachment, or a vote of no-confidence is a more peaceful system than serving a pirate chief who had no limit on his term or on his authority.
A constitutional and limited piracy, where pirate chiefs change every four years, is better, for merely practical reasons, than a ship where pirate chiefs act illegitimately, and betray the pirate code, and in all other ways act, well, piratical. Because then for the reasons given above, maties, it becomes your moral duty to resist a pirate chief who violates the pirate code, and you have to deliver to him the Black Spot. You and Blind Pew and Long John and Helmuth of Boskone have to find such an overbearing pirate chief with your knives and cutlasses and belaying pins on some moonless night when he is alone without his rough lads around him, and dofor him before he does for you, see? Then you can set down to enact a constitutional and limited piracy where the change of officers will not be so violent and unpredictable. Even among pirates there is a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority.
The libertarian is equating two opposite things, lawbreakers and lawkeepers, and the grounds for the equation is that both types of men, pirates and policemen, are armed and use violence to do their deeds. The libertarian is carefully and completely blind to the difference between the deeds, whether the deeds are helpful or harmful, good or bad, lawful or lawless, protect the innocent or harm the innocent, establish property rights or abolish property right, et cetera and et cetera.
A dog is domesticated, and a friend of man. A wolf is wild, and is vermin that preys on livestock, and is ergo an enemy of man. Dogs herd sheep. Wolves kill sheep. Dogs good. Wolves bad. Both dogs and wolves have teeth.
If a libertarian asks me whether I approve of teeth or not, I cannot but answer that I approve the teeth of dogs, but disapprove of the teeth of wolves.
No matter how often the libertarian will repeat the idea that dogs are wolves and wolves are dogs, I cannot make myself unsee the difference I see in them. The similarities are shallow and superficial, and the differences are deep and significant.
When a dog turns feral, you put it down. If a sheepdog starts killing and eating sheep, the shepherd must kill the dog.
Even a feral dog is still not a wolf; it is a dog that lost its domestication, and betrayed its master. So, too a tyrant is a feral prince, and a stormtrooper is a feral policeman.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
