philosophy

A few conundrums have popped in my head; but before I can explore them, I'll have to explain a little bit about my view on property rights.

John Locke derived his "life, liberty and property" are unalienable rights from a single axiom; self-ownership He saw that we must have the most legitimate claim to our person, giving us life and liberty. Objects outside our body were considered unowned, and we would appropriate them to our person with the first-occupier homestead rule, which states that the first person to homestead an object by mixing his labor with it, has the most legitimate claim to that object; giving us property.

In his view, these were natural rights awarded to men, but that we give some rights up in a "social contract" (ugh, I hate that term) to the government for protection services. 

Frederic Bastiat further expanded on this idea, and explained in his work "The Law", and explained that the government, by definition, is the initiation of force, which is only justified in order to protect justice, or defer injustice. Therefore, the government cannot protect both justice and something. If it protects justice and philanthropy or justice and morality, or education, or welfare, then, by definition, it is using force for something that is not injustice, and therefore is injustice itself. He describes this as the process of legal plunder; where the law is taken and turned on its head, and used for something contrary to the law. This is embodied in the Libertarian "non-aggresion principle/axiom".

"The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!"

This is why, in the Libertarian view, it would be immoral for the government to provide any services beyond protection, and why it has an obligation to be as small as it could possibly be. (For example, this would be why Libertarians will say it is immoral to throw sick people who use drugs in jail where over 80% are raped, brutalized, etc.)

Murray Rothbard held the view that "all rights are property rights" and that rights to free speech are not independent rights, but are an extension of the fact that you own your body. Rothbard also argued for 100% self-ownership, and viewed that this is the only justifiable rational ethic for man. From this, he viewed the state as nothing more than a "gang of robbers writ large"; an organization with the legal monopoly over the initiation of the use of force.

I'll continue this topic in a future post; regarding some implications for Christian ethics, and my attempt to show how these two viewpoints are not only not contradictory, but are logical outgrowths of each other.