But Isn't Libertarianism Kooky?

A common objection to libertarian ideas is that they are kooky, eccentric, strange, outlandish, and irrelevant. Canada is a prosperous country and her inhabitants are free in many important respects, and, because nobody is hauled away in the middle of the night by secret police, serious concerns about government are frequently regarded as misguided and a waste of time. Most of us grumble about the latest tax hike, corruption scandal, cost overrun, policy debacle, civil liberty restriction, taser killing, wrongful imprisonment, or instance of bureaucratic ineptitude, but our lives do not seem to be adversely affected by them. Even if it is acknowledged that we are worse off as a result, most of us remain comfortable and contented with our lives.

The prospect of genuine liberty (i.e., freedom from legalized rights violations) seems risky to most people. After all, why imperil everything that has made Canadian society the envy of many others? What would replace the state? Wouldn't there be widespread lawlessness or gang rule? Perhaps the continuous violations of human rights by the various governments in Canada, which do not seem to be as flagrant as those conducted by many other current and past regimes throughout the world, are preferable to the uncertainties of a free society—where individuals would bear full and discrete responsibility for their conduct and affairs. No doubt there is popular suspicion that, without government oversight, corporations and the wealthy would exploit and enslave us, and inexpensive Third World labor would out-compete us.

Is the State Beneficial?

But even a cursory survey of recent history reveals the gross failure of the state in almost every one of its endeavors. Roads in the Toronto area, for example, inadequately handle burgeoning traffic volumes, and, aside from the 407 Express Toll Route, which opened in 1997, no new major roads have been built in decades—despite a flourishing population. Government schools are producing ill-educated, intellectually homogenous youth. Nationalized health care is a disaster: costs are skyrocketing, doctors are in short supply, and waiting times are appalling. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a crown corporation, has poor viewer ratings. Toronto's garbage "crisis" is the result of government mismanagement and interference, for there is abundant land in southern Ontario to handle our refuse. The Toronto Transit Commission is a perennial money-loser.

Despite its failures, government is getting proportionately and absolutely more expensive: Canadian households now spend more on taxes than they do on food, clothing, and shelter combined. The state is a moral hazard, which means it is largely insulated from the consequences of its behavior, and therefore lacks adequate incentives to provide effective services or minimize costs. On the contrary, government failures are frequently rewarded with expanded powers and larger budgets—extorted from productive members of society. The state has a perverse incentive to exacerbate and perpetuate the problems it attempts to solve, most of which it created in the first place. This partly explains why, in the words of libertarian commentator and self-styled "dogmatist" William Norman Grigg, "government is the only entity that grows and prospers through failure." Thus, the rising costs of government, its institutional incompetence, and its damaging effects are complementary and symbiotic. State action results in a net loss to society.

The incentives of a free economy, on the other hand, reward consumer satisfaction. Businesses that fail to satisfy customers must make adjustments or face bankruptcy; either way their capital and resources are reallocated in accordance with anticipated market demand. Thus, a successful business benefits society by pleasing consumers—and only by pleasing customers can a business succeed. Its profits are the measure of consumer satisfaction. This reciprocity is the basis of economic and material progress, for a mutually voluntary transaction (e.g., the sale of a good) benefits both parties. This is so because each party values what is received more than what is given up—no exchange would take place otherwise. In a free economy, entrepreneurs seek new opportunities to meet consumer demand. As a result, every purchase or sale makes our lives better, and the general standard of living improves. Freedom produces a net gain to society.

Is the State Necessary?

The purpose of the post-Enlightenment state is to protect the rights of its citizens. The Declaration of Independence, adopted by the American colonies in 1776, holds "these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . . ." Similarly, Article II of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, a document adopted in 1789 by the National Assembly of France, states that "[t]he aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression." A fundamental—and ironic—problem with this rationale is that the state itself is the principal violator of human rights. A right is an absolute entitlement possessed by every person, and cannot be justly infringed. Nevertheless, all acts of government, being unilateral invasions of private property backed by police power, necessarily violate rights. Ludwig von Mises observed in Human Action that "[t]he essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom." Not only does the state commit robbery through taxation, murder through warfare, and enslavement through military conscription, but its every edict curtails the rights of its subjects inasmuch as it overrules their rightful control of their own lives and property. In short, the very existence of the state constitutes a continuing, systematic assault on rights, property, and wealth. The state, which is fundamentally hostile to rights, is incompatible with liberty, and the expansion of one must shrink the other. The politicization of society, as evidenced by continuous government regulation, is precisely the encroachment of force into the lives of its members at the expense of the personal freedom to which their rights entitle them. In Canada, the naturally voluntary character of many social associations and relationships is gradually being replaced by the principle of coercion. Illogically, the state infringes rights while claiming to protect them.

Moreover, democracy enhances—not curbs—state power, which further undermines the status of rights. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms notwithstanding, the Canadian government's implied claim that, as a democracy, it embodies the will of the electorate through the rule of law actually empowers the legally based depredation of the citizenry by the state. Election results are interpreted as a mandate for rights violations, and the electorate is regarded as demanding and authorizing its own victimization. (Defenders of government never describe policy and legislation in this way.) When a democratic government carries out your bidding, men with guns acting in your name deprive others of control of their rightful property.

Although human rights are negative concepts because they are freedoms from interference, and hence are incompatible with even minimally interventionist states, the collectivists that fostered the birth of the welfare state in Germany under Bismarck in the 1880s, Britain before the First World War, and America in the 1930s slyly introduced a novel view of rights as positive concepts. The nanny-state ethos of Canada's political establishment, which is consistent with this trend, interprets the rights to life and security as positive duties binding on the state to physically protect its subjects through intervention—rather than as an injunction against intervention. This is an inversion of genuine rights theory. So-called positive rights charge the state with obligations that permit it to vastly expand its scope and power to the detriment of actual rights.

Even if one concedes that state intervention is vindicated on utilitarian grounds, there remains some doubt about whether the state can and does actually protect its citizens from foreign military invasion and domestic crime. The apparent need for state-controlled armed forces highlights the fact that the danger of military attack is posed by other states. This is not an argument for the state. Rather, it is an argument against the state as an institution, for it is the state that wages war. Note that even the Canadian state indulges in military adventurism, and its role in the subjugation and occupation of Afghanistan exposes ordinary Canadians to terrorist retaliation, which, by making us less safe, actually contradicts the purpose of the state. No reasonable adult would agree that forming or joining a street gang is an acceptable long-term solution to the problem of gangs. Defense is necessary, but it need not be provided by the state. Private defense agencies operating within a free market will be superior to any government military.

Neither is the state necessary to the maintenance of law and order. The modern police were introduced in the nineteenth century as an instrument of social control, not to combat crime. Police rarely stop crime; they typically arrive afterwards. Hence, the target of crime is usually on his own. In fact, the likelihood of aggression increases with the magnitude of the power disparity between a potential offender and his prospective victim. (It is hardly surprising that the degree of state oppression varies directly with the power disparity between the state and the subject population; efforts to disarm the citizenry and curtail its freedoms must be regarded as worrisome.) Assuming the existence of predators, victimhood correlates with helplessness. Reliance on police and the legal restriction of weapons must therefore increase the incidence of violent crime. Thus, the freedom to arm oneself must deter aggression. Weapons significantly reduce the natural force advantage enjoyed by young, aggressive men over the physically vulnerable, such as women and the elderly. In a free society, even the unarmed, who would be visibly indistinguishable from those carrying concealed weapons, would deter crime.

Furthermore, in an untaxed society benefiting from the unhampered growth of an economy devoid of state interference, private security would be relatively more affordable, and therefore more feasible for consumers. Private security agencies would be more effective than government police in reducing crime, for the profit motive combined with market competition would reduce waste and encourage the constant development of better techniques. Because such agencies would likely be modeled on insurance companies, they would seek to reduce claims by actively preventing or solving crimes—whereas police today fail to solve or even investigate many property crimes. Libertarians speculate that, like the automotive insurance industry, private security agencies would have reciprocal agreements to adjudicate disputes among their customers. Murray Rothbard argued that tort law could easily replace criminal law on the basis that all genuine crimes are actually injuries to property. Private arbitrators would have an economic incentive to be impartial; so would professional jurors, who would become experts in evidence and the other legal-scientific technicalities of which dragooned jurors are mostly ignorant (e.g., see the O.J. Simpson murder trial). Punishment would likely consist of restitution. In the present system, by contrast, crimes are regarded as offenses against the state and victims are penalized twice: once by the crime itself, and again when they are forced to fund the criminal justice system. Under a market system, aggressive individuals would be costly to insure if they are insurable at all. Reprobates would be forced to the fringes of society, and the lack of public property would ensure their physical removal from civilized precincts.

A free society would be safer in other ways, too. Just as the legal prohibition of alcohol in early twentieth century America and Canada resulted in the spectacular rise of organized crime, so the current legal prohibition of drugs like cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, methamphetamines, and heroin has enriched criminal organizations and resulted in greater crime. Likewise, anti-drug law enforcement in Canada is costly and intrusive, and threatens to follow the U.S. "war on drugs" model of summary asset forfeiture, botched militarized police raids, the endowment of federal police agencies with unconstitutional powers, the largest prison population on the planet in both absolute and per-capita terms, and unmitigated failure. If drugs can't be kept out of prisons, they cannot be stopped anywhere. There would be no prohibition in a free society—to the detriment of organized criminals and corrupt officials.

Unlike the market, the state is unable to determine the optimum number of police or security officers. This is because the precise degree of desired protection varies from person to person and is based on subjective assessments and individual factors, including the nature of the locality, the ability and desire to protect oneself or others, perceived and actual vulnerability, the value of goods to be protected, and one's available budget. The market responds to these factors through the mechanism of supply and demand; for the government, which cannot act inside the market, this is an impossible task. The same is true of all other goods and services, such as roads, taxicabs, and medical doctors.

But isn't the state necessary to prevent the pursuit of conflicting goals from erupting into violent power struggles? In fact, the state is already the victor in a previous—if mostly theoretical—power struggle. Still, let us examine the two possible types of competing political faction and whether the state is necessary to deal with them: (1) those desirous of seizing control of society by force, and (2) the citizenry.

The first factional type seeks exclusive hegemony over society, and is opposed by one or more contending factions of the same type. The resulting conflict is to determine which faction will establish or control the state. It is illogical to maintain that we need a state to prevent the formation of a state. On the other hand, it might be argued that one group's ideology (e.g., liberal democracy) is more desirable to the majority of the population than its opponent's (e.g., fascism), and that the rule of the former safeguards its subjects from rule by the latter. Yet civil war is unlikely in Canada, for no violent faction threatens to overthrow the federal or provincial governments, nor are we threatened by a foreign power. It might be supposed that such violent factions would form in the wake of the state's disappearance, subjecting us to civil war or outright subjugation. This is the contention made by Thomas Hobbes who, in his Leviathan (1651), argued that the peace imposed by the sovereign is always preferable to civil war, and that men, being reasonable, ought to surrender their liberty to permanently forestall that possibility. Unfortunately, an existing state encourages civil war precisely because of what it is: a legal apparatus designed to govern society through violent compulsion—the very prize of power-seekers and the means by which the greatest harm is inflicted on the population. Without a state to seize, however, those who pursue power must literally subdue every single inhabitant and install a state from scratch. This is a very difficult prospect considering that ordinary forms of legitimacy would be lacking. For example, no quasi-historical social contract could be invoked, and the would-be regime would be unable to justify itself on the past results of popular elections. If a deeply-entrenched state like the one operating in Canada can be dislodged, the establishment of a successor state would scarcely be possible. Furthermore, since all governments require tacit consent by their subjects, rule by force alone is not possible. Only by persuasion could a state be established, and even then, consent would not be unanimous. Attempts to subjugate the remaining territory and its inhabitants would generate a resistance movement that would be strengthened by Canada's traditions of individualism and liberty and by the unequivocal knowledge that the pretender state is engaged in a criminal program to deprive free people of their liberty. History furnishes several examples of powerful states ousted by resistance groups: the British Empire by American revolutionaries, the Soviet Union by the Afghan mujahadeen, and the United States government by the Viet Cong. It is true that these resistance movements were aided by other governments, but Hans-Hermann Hoppe, economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, maintains that, owing to market incentives, private defense organizations would be more than a match for government militaries, which suffer from the gross inefficiencies and waste characteristic of all government programs; consider, for example, that the United States government has almost bankrupted itself in its unsuccessful attempts to impose a state in Iraq. It is also noteworthy that these regimes had been established as governments before they were ejected; in the hypothetical scenario under discussion, the power-seekers have not even gotten that far.

Citizens, who constitute factions of the second type, are accommodated by the political system through an ostensibly peaceful mechanism that purports to reflect their wills. Citizens are said to be represented by elected politicians, and the ballot box is supposed to ensure that their wishes are ultimately enacted in the public sphere. The system rests on the assumption that dissatisfaction with government is the result of flawed politicians and fallible party ideologies, and therefore, that public sector problems can be resolved if the right people are voted into office. Thus, elections peacefully replace the politicians who have failed to please constituents. Indeed, this cyclic pattern has made the public accustomed to, if not tolerant of, inveterate government failure and waste, for, as noted above, government programs are predisposed to fail due to the perverse incentives built into the state's essentially coercive nature.

An additional problem of democracy is that newly-elected governments frequently refuse to revoke the legislation or policies of their predecessors even though political parties are supposed to be ideologically adversarial. Indeed, bipartisanship tends to diminish the advantages of the electoral process by ignoring the wishes of dissenting voters and reducing them to the role of a mere collective imprimatur—which actually strengthens the power of the state. For instance, the federal Goods and Services Tax was imposed by the Progressive Conservative party of Brian Mulroney in 1991 but survived the 1993-2006 Liberal reign. The same Liberal government committed troops to the occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, but the successor regime of Stephen Harper's Conservative party has maintained Canada's military presence there. Thus, bad policies continue, bad laws accumulate, the electoral-representative process is undermined, and dissent is neutralized.

As a mechanism for influencing government policy, elections are absurdly inadequate. For a given electoral office, the voter casts but a single ballot every few years. All his important concerns are supposed to be reducible to a single choice from among a tiny and narrow slate of candidates which he did not select, and his vote is diluted by being but one among a multitude. Finally, the representative nature of our democracy precludes a strict causal link between the voter's desires and the ensuing actions of his elected representative—for whom he may not even have voted, and who is disproportionately influenced by lobbyists, special interest groups, and campaign contributors. Thus, the citizen's input is infrequent, his choices limited, and his influence infinitesimal. Government cannot possibly represent him in any real sense. It is an insult and a fraud. Defenders of this arrangement point out that anyone can run for office or become a lobbyist, but this suggestion does not alter the mathematically-based unresponsiveness of the democratic system to the wishes of its constituents, nor does it address the contradiction of having to defer one's private pursuits in order to commit time, effort, and money to overcome political obstacles that stand in the way of one's private pursuits.

Furthermore, one must ask why we need political representatives at all. Why is it assumed that the goals of citizens conflict in a way that requires the intervention of state power? As long as we respect the property rights of others, which are based on the universal, primary right of self-ownership, there is no conflict. Force is only required against rights-violators—who themselves initiate force or refuse to abide by the terms of binding contracts to which they were voluntary signatories. Moreover, unlike the electoral processes of democratic states, a free economy is highly responsive to consumers, whose wills are expressed as market demand. If freedom is simply the absence of unprovoked violence, capitalism, being the economic facet of freedom, is the voluntary interaction of people according to their inclinations and desires. Every dollar spent or withheld is, in effect, a vote that reflects the actor's will in relation to society at large. Whereas political elections are sporadic, imprecise, and crudely simplistic, virtually every act of a free person communicates and advances his particular desires within the highly complex web of human interconnections in which the market economy resides. Demand and supply guide the rational allocation of resources amid rapidly changing market conditions. Prices, which inform economic decision-making by signaling scarcity or abundance in relation to demand, are themselves the outcome of millions of transactions conducted by buyers and sellers. A free economy is democracy for grownups; it addresses real needs in real life.

Cynics who maintain that libertarians are too optimistic about human nature believe that untrammeled liberty will lead to exploitation and domination. Their pessimism is misdirected, for cynicism argues in favor of liberty. A free society can marginalize corruption and deal with physical aggression precisely because offenders would be correctly perceived as criminals. As mentioned earlier, violent predation is enabled by power disparity, and power disparity is at its greatest and most systematic between the state and its citizens. Only the naïve would entrust anyone—let alone ambitious power-seekers—with the immense power of the state, an apparatus designed solely to coerce. Checks and balances like constitutions, elections, and the courts are helpful in restraining outright tyranny, but they do not adequately address the fallibility of human nature and have been unable to prevent the historical and ongoing excesses and injustices of government. Moreover, cynics are right to suspect the motives of those who seek political power. Considering that those who run for public office are, almost without exception, scoundrels with a desire to wield power over their fellow men out of a deluded belief that they know better, and whose arrogance in presuming to overrule the free will of other human beings—when even God Himself refused to do so—is breathtakingly megalomaniacal, it is astonishing that democracy is held in such esteem. The economist Frank Knight wrote that "the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation."

Is the State Inevitable?

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

—Benjamin Franklin

Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.

—Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

The state seems to be a permanent feature of humanity. Rights have been violated throughout history, and with certain limited exceptions there has always been political rule. If the state is regarded as inevitable, efforts to eradicate it might seem pointless or foolish.

Nevertheless, as a species we strive to eliminate the evils that plague us—even if the prospects for ultimate success appear hopeless. Yet if crime, for example, can only be minimized, isn't the same true of the state, and, therefore, isn't a minimal "night-watchman" state the best we can hope to achieve? The answer is no. While murder and other crimes are difficult to check because universal condemnation has made them clandestine, the state practices them openly under such labels as warfare, collateral damage, taxation, and expropriation. Because all state actions are crimes according to the common-sense view of rights, they are disguised with euphemistic language and authorized by the state through its own legislation. Outrageously, the state then criminalizes activities that do not harm people or property (e.g., illicit drug use, unlicensed handgun ownership, and tax evasion). The potential exposure of this double standard by opinion leaders imperils the state's hold.

The state exists only in our minds; it is an abstraction, an idea. In the concrete world—the real world—there are only individuals, and the state is nothing more than a group of individuals issuing commands to other individuals. Legislation, parliaments, and political offices are artificial concepts which obscure this elementary truth and make the state seem legitimate and inevitable. In fact, the state's authority rests on public acquiescence, as law student Étienne de La Boétie pointed out in the sixteenth century—although he was referring to tyrannies specifically. We grant our rulers the power to abuse us; they have no independent authority. Therefore, freedom is attainable if we simply withdraw our consent.

Unlike the arbitrary intellectual foundations of the state, human rights are grounded in nature and discoverable by reason. Discernable in the human condition itself, they exist independently of—and despite—the state. Reason tells us, indisputably, that a person owns his body, formulates goals, and acts to achieve them. As long as a person respects the rights of others, then, he is entitled to live without interference. Likewise, there is a natural right to the defense of the self and others. A right is, in other words, the treatment of a person as a human being rather than as a lump of physical matter. This account of rights explains the universal historical recognition and prohibition of genuine crimes like murder and theft. It logically follows that rights are neither granted nor revoked by human agency; they can only be upheld or violated. Slavery, for instance, contravenes human rights regardless of its status in law. By contrast, the laws that support the state were devised, written, and legislated by human beings, and therefore are fundamentally arbitrary, subject to repeal or modification, and, most significant for the purpose of this article, vulnerable to truth and alterations in public opinion.

Complacency and tacit acquiescence to political rule, then, are the links of the chain that binds us in servitude. We are trapped by the inertia of our own collective consensus. Our chief political instrument is the ineffectual electoral ballot, which, through its very egalitarianism, tends to inculcate a sense of powerlessness in its subjects. The individual's will, considered equal to everyone else's, is countered by the will of every other individual, and we are taught that the majority deserves to have its way. Not only does the prospect of prevailing against the majority appear futile and hopeless, but democratic politics operates on the false assumption that there are authentic conflicts that must be resolved by aggressive coercion. Such conflicts are contrived and artificial; no individual or minority—or majority, for that matter—ever needs to triumph over the rest of the citizenry—except in the negative sense of safeguarding rights against political power. Thus, the impotence of individuals is an illusion fostered by the democratic political system itself. In addition, the democratic nanny state institutionalizes envy, dependence, and infantilization, a strategy which promotes the erosion of faith in freedom, diminishes confidence in the ability of people to manage their own affairs, and leads to greater tolerance of legal controls. Leonard Read's classic short essay "I, Pencil" provides a concise illustration of the spontaneous, efficient, and complex cooperation of individuals acting freely. Democracy also strengthens the state's grip by narrowing the range of acceptable viewpoints. The social pressure to conform to conventional opinion, which is disseminated through government schools and reinforced by shallow mainstream media, relegates critical thinking to the realm of the kooky. Dissent is channeled into party politics, where ideological differences are superficial and fundamental questions are rarely raised. The racial, religious, sexual, and linguistic privileges bestowed by government divide us into squabbling groups and distract us from larger questions. This Stockholm Syndrome-like tolerance of the state is strengthened by the large constituency of tax-consuming parasites, who have a financial stake in the state's extortion of productive citizens, and whose numbers are increasing as the already-bloated state continues to enlarge itself.

If opinion sustains the state, what can change it? In addition to demonstrating that the state is unnecessary, destructive, and criminal, there are what I call the logical argument and the moral argument. The logical argument is that even if you consent to the state, you are necessarily placing a preeminent value on your freedom to make that choice, and, by extension, you are likewise implicitly affirming the supremacy of everyone else's freedom to choose. In opposing the libertarian position, you affirm it. This is true because you value your opinion—whatever it might be. Similarly, every person values his own opinion, a fact which contradicts the state's involuntary character and proves the libertarian case. Of course, the state—wisely, from its perspective—does not seek your formal and explicit consent, thus rendering your opinion hypothetical and meaningless. You might as well consent to the fact that you are mortal.

The moral argument against the state is that it is wrong to inflict physical violence on the innocent. An innocent person is one who respects the rights of others. The moral argument does not require the positing of extreme hypothetical scenarios, such as whether one ought to physically harm a child in order to avert a global catastrophe. One need only reflect on everyday acts of state aggression against the innocent, such as taxation or the legal requirement to obtain a government license in order to open a business. While it would seem that the collection of taxes, for instance, is not an overtly violent action, it is invariably backed by the threat of force: Failure to pay will culminate in property seizure, which, if resisted, will result in incarceration. Because of the clear implication that noncompliance will be met with force, threats of physical violence can be subsumed under the concept of physical violence itself. That submission to the demands of political authority rarely involves the actual use of physical force means only that reluctant citizens are intimidated into obedience by their estimation that refusal will ultimately lead to violence in the same way that most unarmed people would "willingly" surrender their wallets to a mugger. Compliance does not negate the violence inherent in threats, and blows need not be struck to create a degrading environment manufactured by permanently-activist legislatures in which a growing constellation of human relationships are governed by terror—defined by The American Heritage Dictionary as "Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes."

Libertarians affirm the moral argument. Everyone else must deny it. There is really no middle ground. Thus, those who defend the state must approve of bodily violence inflicted on innocent people—perhaps in the service of an alleged greater good which ostensibly justifies the treatment of innocent human beings as mere physical objects. Apologists for the status quo consider it proper to strong-arm anyone who fails to comply with the most trivial of the multitude of official directives that regulate much of life. Accordingly, they are prepared to have motorists violently hauled away if, for example, they have neglected or forgotten to carry their legally-prescribed documentation while operating a motor vehicle—a grossly disproportionate response to harmless behavior. Though defenders of the state might disagree with particular laws, they are impelled, by the logic of their stance against the moral argument, to prefer physical violence to peaceful, rights-respecting noncompliance towards the laws of which they do approve. Their position is that might makes right—i.e., that morality ought to be subordinate to physical force, and that it is proper for the strong to dictate to the weak. In fact, they must deny that there is such a thing as objective morality or that individual human beings have real worth or dignity. This may seem like a stark, unrealistic appraisal of non-libertarians, but it does follow from the rejection of the moral argument.

Is libertarianism kooky, then? It is certainly outside of the mainstream, but it appears to be gaining credibility and serious consideration thanks to the Internet and to the Republican presidential candidacy of American congressman Ron Paul. Yet it is the ideas that matter most. Is it kooky to believe that your life belongs to you? Is it kooky to want to eliminate violence against peaceful citizens? Is it kooky to notice that government perpetually fails to achieve its stated goals? Is it kooky to suggest that government agencies ought to surrender their monopolies and permit free market competition? Is it kooky to point out how much wealthier we would be without the state, whose every intervention distorts the market and hinders wealth creation? Is it kooky to acknowledge that the state does not and cannot create jobs or wealth? Is it kooky to notice that higher prices are caused by the state-controlled central bank's inflation of the money supply, and that this explains the rising price of petroleum-based fuels? Is it kooky to question the state's wars against strangers on the other side of the planet against whom you or I have no hatred? Is it kooky to want to be left alone?