Not Left, Not Right . . . Try Up (Part II)

Fleshing out the argument

In the first part of this series, I named four ideas that ground a rational political philosophy:

1. Your life is your own.

2. You have rights.

3. Only physical force can violate a right.

4. Government is force.

Together, these four ideas mandate political freedom under limited government. But each statement is only an epigram – a headline, in effect. To see clearly and concretely what kind of social system they imply, I need to say a little more about what each “headline” condenses.

1. “Your life is your own.”

You aren't owned by any person or any group. Jefferson: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.”

This is a principle from ethics – the ethics of individualism. Individualism views the individual as an autonomous being, whose free will enables him to think, judge, and act on his own, fully independently.

2. “You have rights.”

Your rights define the areas within which you must be left free to act on your own decisions. A right is a moral imperative, an imprescriptible entitlement to freedom of thought and action.

Since man lives and acts in the physical world, in order to implement the rights to life and liberty, he must have property rights. Observe the inseparable connection between life, liberty, and property.

Property and Life: If the government controls all the food, it can starve you to death – as Stalin did to millions of peasant farmers (kulaks) in the 1930s.

Property and Liberty: Taking a man’s property without his consent deprives him not only of the use and enjoyment of his product but also of the hours of his life he put into producing it. Rand: “The man who works while others dispose of his product is a slave.”

The rights of one man end where the rights of another begin. Every man is free to act on his own judgment . . . within the sphere of his own rights.

Contrary to the beliefs of both Right and Left, there can be no such thing as a conflict of rights. The very purpose of the concept of rights is to define, in principle, who may do what, who may act and who must forbear. Rights are principles designed to resolve apparent conflicts. To say “rights conflict” is a sloppy and misleading way of saying that it has not yet been determined who has the right in question. Or else it’s to fail to comprehend what rights are.

3. “Only physical force can violate a right.”

Freedom denotes an absence – the absence of coercion. Coercion — making someone do something or suffer some damage — operates by using physical force. Physical force is fundamentally different from “social pressure,” unequal “bargaining power,” or any of the other whined-about forms of “influencing” another’s behavior, where to avoid the “influence,” one can simply walk away. You cannot walk away when the mugger has a knife at your throat or when the police have you in handcuffs. Physical force is the only thing that can nullify your will and make you obey.

So, let’s be very clear about what physical force is. I define “physical force” as physical contact with another’s person or property without his consent. Or the threat thereof.

But you’ll be told “A hungry man is not free.” This tangle evades the question of the cause of the hunger. Is a man’s being hungry due to someone’s physical contact with him or his property? Was his condition imposed by fists, guns, theft, the gulag? No? Then he is indeed free. His hunger is then a nature-given fact, not a condition imposed on him by force.

And let’s name the principle operating here: the failure to give a man food is not a case of taking something away from him. Refusing to hand over your wealth to someone is not robbing him. A right is a demand for freedom, for non-interference, for being left alone. A right can’t be a demand that others work to provide you with what you need. What about their rights?

Need is not a license to loot.

Rights are a moral claim to be free from initiated physical force. Rights prescribe freedom by proscribing coercion.

Only physical force can coerce you – can make you act against your own judgment, your own values, your own life. No smile or frown, no incentive or lack of incentive can nullify your mind and make you go along. But a gun can.

4. “Government is force.”

An act of force is either retaliatory or it is not. But force that is not retaliatory is force that’s used against an innocent, peaceful person. There’s no third alternative: force is used either aggressively or in defense against aggression.

This applies par excellence to every government action. The moral issue that must be raised in regard to every government action is: does this action initiate the use of force, or is it limited to retaliating against force that another person or group started?

The only morally proper role for government is using its force to protect rights from their violation by force. Hence a proper government is limited to three basic functions: the police to counter the force initiated by criminals, the military to counter the force initiated by foreign invaders, and a court system to determine who is criminally or civilly liable, i.e., who has the right and who is forcibly violating or threatening to violate that right.

This is “limited government,” the restriction of government force to the task of protecting rights.

Part III will cash in on all the preceding, naming the radical changes in government that accepting all the foregoing would bring.