An answer to

this very good question.



This phrase got cut off at the end: "...clothing my uniqueness in an air of religiosity."

Two Communisms

Since October 9 is the anniversary of Che Guevara's execution/martyrdom (the word changes depending on what you think of him), I thought now would be a good time to share my opinion of communism.

Communism is the belief that all goods and services should be produced "by each according to his abilities" and distributed "to each according to his needs." Basically, it's the idea that your lot in life shouldn't depend on what others can get from you.

Now, I'm not a communist, though I could have made a good one. I do believe that your right to be left to enjoy your own life doesn't depend on what others can get from you - but this belief is individualism, not communism per se. There is a kind of communism that can be compatible with individualism, and there's another kind which isn't compatible with it at all. But before I go into these, let me further describe what communism is by saying what it is not.

Communism is not equal work, equal pay, nor equal work with equal pay. Some people can work longer and harder than others. Some have disabilities or obligations that make them unable to work as long, fast, or productively as others. Making everyone work the same amount of time is just not equitable.

Paying everyone equally isn't equitable either. Some people have greater needs than others. Some families have more kids. Some families have disabled members who require more attention. Paying every bread winner their "fair share" is really unfair to those with special needs.

In fact, payment has no place in communism. If your lot in life shouldn't depend on what you do for others, then your comfort shouldn't have to be earned. A communist would put it this way: if you can't make a living without selling your time and energy to someone else, then that isn't much different from slavery. In communism, there is no buying or selling of labor - or much of anything else, for that matter. And so, there's no place for money.

In communism there's no room for barter, either (or at least, the ways people meet their most basic needs can't include barter). Again, your life shouldn't depend on what you do for others. What you need for you to live should be available to you without condition. If you can't get those things without doing something for somebody else - without, so to speak, running after the carrot on the stick - then you're basically owned.

"To each according to his needs," then, has a very particular meaning: those things people need for a decent life should be available to everyone without condition - without buying, selling, renting, or any other market exchange.

Those of you on my end of the political spectrum are by now bouncing in your seats to strike down any hope of such a system "working." But rather than sneer that no such system could ever stay afloat, let's try to imagine how people would strive to meet each other's needs without market exchanges. (We wouldn't be productive thinkers without some imagination.) Anyway, whether a system "can work" is nowhere near as important to me as whether it can work morally. Whether communism can work morally is what I'll look at here.

Human life requires human labor. "To each according to his needs" can never happen without the things we ned being transformed from a crude state to a useful state (that is, produced) and taken to a place where we can use them. In other words, somebody has to make the stuff we need. The communist ideal is "from each according to his abilities." But how this phrase is interpretted matters a lot, and there are two very different ways to interpret it.

One kind of communism allows and encourages people to work on the things that they themselves judge useful to the community. "From each according to his ability" here also means "from each according to his own discretion." This system can be called voluntary communism.

It can also be called a Gift Economy, since the most important transactions in it would be freewill gifts and favors. People wouldn't be working for any reward in particular - if they do work for a reward that they've grown dependent on (for example, wages), then it's hard to tell that kind of obligation to work from all-out compulsion to work.

This kind of communism celebrates voluntarism in all its forms and eschews compulsion in all its forms. People would work, not for wages, or out of compulsion, or from any kind of "have to", but simply and completely out of love for their work.

Sound far out? Well, before brushing it off as a system that necessarily would devolve into diseased, starved druggies running naked through the tall grass, just look around and see all the other things people do for the mere love of it. People develop their skills at all sorts of tasks, just for the satisfaction that those tasks bring them. To think that a man can't similarly be motivated to do a task that's useful to other people is to have a view of humanity that's not just unfair to humans, but also inaccurate given the evidence.

I gawked when I heard that a family friend charged his daughter rent for living in the house she grew up in. I think most people would gawk too (until they learn she was an adult). Most people in our society look down on a parent charging his kids for the things he provides them. And when it comes to the basics - food, clothing, and shelter - most parents provide their kids these things for free, regardless of how low the kids scored on their tests or how crabby they've been. Just about every family in America, then, is a little commune (this is overlooking, of course, the grave power disparity between parent and child).

The power of gift extends beyond the bounds of love, and into anonymous, semi-anonymous, and very distant relationships. You all know by now that I love Wikipedia. It's democracy at its best - everyone has their say, and no one gets hurt. It's also a gift economy of information. In the few years that it's existed it has exploded into a loud bazaar where contributors share information out of the mere pleasure of making something that interests them more accessible to other people who would find it useful. No one pays a penny to use Wikipedia. And the vast majority of people who contribute to it aren't paid a penny, either. And yet, it thrives. The very fact that university professors forbid their students from citing it reveals how central it has become.

It's only a very small leap of faith (shall we call it a skip of faith?) to see how gift and mutual interest can work in producing and distributing tangible goods and services. Since February I've been volunteering at a nonprofit law office. Job experience and bragging rights aside, I really do think I can say that I do this for my own stimulation and for the satisfaction of knowing that I bettered someone's life.

An economy where people grow and give food for free and build and repair each others' houses and do other favors completely for free doesn't seem that distant in the future. The farmers, mechanics, grocers, handymen, scientists, and teachers can all survive and thrive on gift, so long as they're all paying it forward.

Let's suppose, now, that not enough people are paying it forward, or that not enough is being paid forward in the things that are most needed. According to voluntary communism, people are free to organize communal networks where needs are discussed and volunteers signed up. If not enough people volunteer for harvest, or if not enough people volunteer to reinforce the levees, then everybody's just going to have to make do.

There is another kind of communism which can take care of problems like these. Involuntary communism is what most people think of when they hear the C-word used perjoratively. It's the communism that makes red-blooded Americans wet their pants.

In this other kind of communism, if not enough people volunteer for harvest or to reinforce the levees, then people will be conscripted to do the task whether they want to or not. Here, "from each according to his ability" means "from each according to what he can be made to do."

There can be a variety of negative incentives to "encourage" people to work - they can be beaten into submission, they can be assigned a menial and brain-rotting job, or they can see the priviledges they enjoy equally with the others suspended by order of the authorities - whatever the "incentive", it's an offer you can't refuse, and looks more like a threat than a mere enticement.

This is the big red line between the two communisms. One relies on voluntary, unconditional gift and voluntary, unconditional favor; the other relies on compulsory gift and compulsory favor.

If voluntary cooperation isn't enough to meet the basic needs of every individual, then involuntary cooperation is needed. For involuntary cooperation to succeed, there needs to be some kind of master-slave relationship. If the master-slave relationship is unnecessary, then every goal of communal organization can be met through completely voluntary cooperation, and central planning and political authority would be unnecessary.

If the master-slave relationship is inherently immoral, as I tend to think it is, then any kind of social organization there is - be it capitalist, mutualist, syndicalist, or communist - cannot depend on it as a mode of production and still be moral.

Of course, different people have different definitions of slavery. But surely, someone who believes capitalism to be slavery must recognize that giving people offers they can't refuse in order to get them to do things they don't want to do is - well, pretty coercive.

If the goal is to eradicate all political and economic coercion, then there's a problem here. Involuntary communism proposes to eradicate political and economic coercion through some coercive political and economic relations. Maybe the involuntary communists envision a world where the severity and frequency of coercion is significantly less than it is right now. But a little slavery is still slavery, and to use it to bring about some less evil world is violently utilitarian.

I'm not going to put words into involuntary communists' mouths and speculate that their answer would be "well, it's not really coercive if you're free to leave the country." I respect them too much to think they're that nationalist. "You have the freedom to leave the country" sounds awfully close to "you have the freedom to get another job," and if they think that corporate structures and economic conditions are coercive, then they have to accept that political structures are too. Involuntary communists accept coercion as a legitimate way to get things done. Imagining otherwise is beating around the bush.

As I said, I am not a communist. I do dabble in communist theory, and some day I might indulge in a gift economy. I am sympathetic to voluntary (that is, anarchist) communism, because it condemns forcing people into things. I find that to be fully within the spirit of individualism, and I think voluntary communist arrangements can be totally legal in a libertarian society. Anarchist communism is even refreshing in the way it interprets freedom. If you haven't yet read Bob Black's essay "The Abolition of Work" that I linked quite a few paragraphs up, you really should. Yes, I linked the same webpage twice in the same blog post, because I think it's that fun to read.

Next time someone tells you they're a communist, ask them this one question: "Would you ever force me to work?" If they answer no, then you can predict that they're anarchist, and that they advocate a gift economy. If they answer yes, then you can predict that they're Marxist-Leninists or some other kind of authoritarian who advocate a slave economy without using the word "slave". If your predictions are wrong, then either they're confused about what they believe or they're in transition.

Common Land

Problems with privatization are depicted in Cromwell, the 1970 movie starring Richard Harris and Alec Guinness. In one scene, royal henchmen drive shepherds and cattle off a field and erect fences, all to the protest of Cromwell, who bellows "This is common land!" Certain fields and forrests in England at the time had been dedicated to public use, and were used by commoners to graze and hunt. By handing over to well-connected members of the nobility land that members of the general public depended on and had the legally-recognized and customary right to use, the King excluded people from using property which was considered theirs, and - through force - transferred control of a good from one set of owners to a new, illegitimate, owner. In short, privatization of common land robbed the general public of what was rightfully theirs.

I stand by "right wing" anarchists with the view that private infrastructure can be moral and would be more efficient than the provision of roads and utilities at prices below cost (that is, private infrastructure can make congestion and water shortages a thing of the past). But the morality and efficiency of private infrastructure doesn't mean that there shouldn't or wouldn't be any public property.

Roderick Long's essays on stateless public space, here and here, were two of the best things that happened to anarchist legal theory. He notes that public property can emerge through the uncoordinated efforts of the "unorganized public", without the actions of a government.

"Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms - not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day."

According to John Locke's theory of property, which many libertarian anarchists espouse, a formerly un-owned thing becomes owned by someone when they "take it out of the state of nature" by "mixing their labor with it". By picking fruit from un-owned trees, the fruit becomes the product of your own labor, and is yours to keep, give, exchange, and defend as yours. By planting on un-owned land, the land becomes yours, and any effort by someone else to use the land without your permission is an act of theft.

Long applies the labor theory of property to the lakeside village trail. "The cleared path is the product of labor - not any individual's labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned."

(The practice of armed guards stopping travelers on dirt roads and demanding "payment" in exchange for the "service" of safe passage should be recognized as the crime we intuitively think it is - armed robbery. This differs radically from the tolls that would be charged on tollways in a free market, where the roads would actually be maintained by the ones who legitimately own them, and where maintenance would be a service that one can legitimately demand payment for.)

"Since collectives, like individuals, can mix their labor with unowned resources to make those resources more useful to their purposes, collectives, too can claim property rights by homestead." And since this is a property right, violating it constitutes theft.

Fields and forrests on private land in the Los Altos hills are criss crossed by trails which are traditionally open to the general public. Supposing that these trails were cleared by the "unorganized public" before the land was demarkated, or that the space the trails occupy was voluntarily handed over for public use, these trails belong rightfully to the public. They go through private property, but the trails themselves are common land. By closing off trails that go through their own land, landowners deprive hikers of access to a good which is rightfully theirs. (Of course, this is supposing that the trails were homesteaded before the land was, or that the trails were voluntarily handed over for public use.)

The collective homesteading principle can be taken beyond trails and be applied to fields and forrests. Now, I don't recognize animal agriculture as a legitimate mode of production, so let's set aside grazing and hunting for now, and look at gathering.

I should say first that just picking an apple from a tree doesn't make the whole tree yours. But continually picking apples from that tree, in a way that excludes another's use of that tree, makes that tree yours to pick from. You don't have to plant an orchard to own apple trees. If you continually pick apples from certain trees, to the exclusion of others' use of those trees, then you homesteaded those trees.

Trees can be homesteaded collectively, too. If a group of people continually pick apples from trees, to the exclusion of other uses of those trees, then the trees belong to the group collectively for picking. If someone comes and chops down some apple trees, without the consent of everyone else, he's excluding other people's use of their "own" resource, and essentially commits theft against the unorganized public.

Fields and forrests that people freely roam to gather mushrooms, or dig up roots, or pick flowers, or get sap, or gather sticks, or get berries, or collect any other fruit of the earth, belong collectively to the people who keep the habit of using that land.

The tragedy of the commons is a problem for common land, but it doesn't have to be such a tragedy. For one thing, the unorganized public doesn't have to be so unorganized. If a people worry about too many men chopping down too many trees, they can agree to seasonal quotas and give each other incentives to abide by them.

Also, (and you already got hints to this earlier in this post) the very nature of commonly-owned land means that any use of it which denies others' access to it is an act of theft. If the apple trees belong to everybody for picking, then cutting some of them down effectively deprives other co-owners of the ability to use a resource that they too "own". Since it's theft, then members of the public have the right to prevent each other from doing it.

This would lead to different locales developing their own rules on who can take what and what can be done if someone breaks the rules. Since membership in these groups isn't going to be purely voluntary, these groups can become state-like. But I don't think they would count as states if they act within certain restraints. If they don't assume ownership over people's very bodies, then they would be very different from conventional states. And they definitely couldn't be states if the rules are determined by the people who actually use the land, and not by a group that just assumes ownership of it.

I was moved to write this after reading the Wikipedia article on Chief Joseph. It wasn't anything about him in particular that made me think about this - it was the idea of American Indians not appropriately transferring the land out of the state of nature. According to Locke and many other white men, the "savages" hadn't really made the land their own, and so didn't really own it. If people are just following buffalo herds, and not doing anything to the ground to make it useful in a way that a white man would recognize as useful, then the land they roam is still un-owned land, and whoever fences it off and tills it first is the legitimate first user.

I find such stringent criteria for "legitimate first user" to be unlibertarian. A free society has a diversity of lifestyles. If people aren't free to keep and use land without noticeably changing it, then they aren't free. And if people aren't free to keep land collectively, then they aren't free.

Collective homesteading poses a problem for both nationalization and privatization. Whether common land is taken by an "organized" public, or by a private entity, it is wrenched out of the hands of those who homesteaded it or inherited it from homesteaders. It is stolen either way.

Long writes that the rules for privatization can be left up to common law, but one rule that seems obvious to me is that the privatization of common land should require the consent of everyone who uses it. If it's sold off or given away against the consent of someone who actually uses it, and who inherited the right of that use from predecessors, then it's taken from an owner without the owner's consent - that is, it's stolen.

Though I believe in a free market in water, it's hard for me to imagine how a river would be privatized without stealing it from members of the unorganized public. Privatization would have to start, not with the privatization of rivers, but with the private construction of cisterns to collect and store water.

The same limits on privatization would apply to dirt roads formed by the unorganized public, and to roads that were paved through the chaotic cooperation of people all acting out of their mutual self-interest without direction from above. Privatizing these roads without unanimous consent of their users would be theft for reasons explained above.

Though many government roads were not created by the unorganized public, and though government roads are built and maintained with stolen money and probably on stolen land, they too should probably be treated as non-government common roads. In this essay on privatization, Rothbard writes: "Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State's act of aggression. These people then become the 'homesteaders' of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners." In the case of government roads, these rightful owners are all the members of the general public who use the roads and didn't work for the government. Privatizing a government road without stealing from somebody would seem as difficult as privatizing a river or a non-government common road without stealing from somebody - the rightful owners are most everyone who drives on them, and selling a road against the consent of a single driver who regularly uses that road would be depriving a fellow owner of the use of his "own" property.

Since they would still be public roads after they are taken out of government hands, they would still have the same problems that plague government roads (aka, congestion) and maybe more. For instance, not enough money might be contributed for repaving. But if uncoordinated effort and mutual self-interest can maintain Wikipedia, there's no reason people can't figure out how to make it work for roads. Big corporations can adopt whole stretches of highway, repave them, and line them with advertisements. And besides, when the potholes get big enough and numerous enough, and when rush hour gets long enough, the rich ones will be willing to spend money out of their own pockets to build monorails and tollways in the air or underground.

Sanctions

I heard this afternoon that the U.S. is going to take a different approach to the militarist government of Burma. Instead of inflicting an embargo while refusing to talk to the junta, it's going to inflict an embargo while talking to the junta. Maybe the pro-democracy Burmese actually want continued sanctions on their country. I don't know. In the TV report I saw, all the U.S. foreign policy experts said that's what the pro-democracy Burmese actually want.

Let's take some arbitrary backwards country, call it Country X. It's ruled by a military general who wants to force everybody to work in agrarian communes and force every woman to abort every child after her first live birth. If no foreign government does anything about it, and if the population, life expectancy, and living standards in Country X plummet, then we could all safely say that the policies of Country X's government strangled Country X. Some people would say that it happened as a result of the U.S. government's failure to intervene, and that would be debatable. But what's clear in this case is that the ones who actually caused the fall in population, life expectancy, and living standards were the ones forcing the people onto farm communes and forcing women to get abortions.

Let's suppose, now, that the U.S. government intervenes by banning the import into the U.S. of any goods manufactured in or transported through Country X, banning the export of goods and capital from the U.S. into Country X, and threatening similar actions to neighboring countries that don't adopt a similar policy. Suppose also that the population, life expectancy, and living standards in Country X drop nonetheless. Now, who strangled Country X? The government that forced people to work in the fields and forced women to get abortions, or the government that made sure nothing could come in or out of Country X?

In the first scenario, the U.S. government is only guilty of being a bystander. In the second, the U.S. government arguably bears the guilt of depriving a whole nation of economic opportunity.

Now, what makes the second scenario different from the Burma situation is that the U.S. government does not sanction countries whose governments refuse to sanction Burma, and so - as in the Cuba situation - other countries are free to trade with the targeted country, and do trade with it. So if anyone was hurt by the sanctions, it wasn't the targeted government, but U.S. businesses who lost to competing foreign companies.

But let's overlook that for now and suppose that the U.S. government actually sanctions Country X so dreadfully that Country X's government gives in and stops forcing people to work in farm communes and stops forcing women to get abortions. Would that be a good thing? Sure, in the way that wrenching money from taxpayers by threat of force in order to fund my education is a good thing. If the sanctions actually worked, then they worked against civilians. It is civilians who feel the pain of decreased trade and investment before anyone in the government does. And if the sanctions are successful, then you can imagine how many civilians died as a result of U.S. foreign policy. If sanctions actually work to bring about the intended consequences, then they're only good in a violently utilitarian sense - in the sense that good ends justify whatever means happened to bring them about.

We could bet, though, that sanctions don't work. According to this paper, 87 percent of the sanctions imposed by the U.S. government since 1970 failed to bring about the intended consequence. It's worse than the flip of a coin. If flipping a coin gives you better chances, then that should be a good enough reason to start thinking of something else.

Maybe that's why the regime whose battle cry is "Change!" decided to continue sanctioning Burma while talking to the junta.

More on God and Morality

Many of the arguments I see about whether we need God revolve around the issues of God's existence and Creation. The question to ask, though, isn't whether we would be here without God, but whether we could be moral without God. That is in fact what drives theists - they're trying to defend the obligations they live by and want everyone else to live by.

Most theists would give at least one of two answers to the question of God's role in morality. One of the answers is that God actually determines what's right and wrong. I've already written a good bit about this, but I'll say here that this view precludes the whole idea of moral principle. If right and wrong depend completely on what God says, if - as Luther and Calvin wrote - things that are right wouldn't be right without the will of God, and things that are wrong wouldn't be wrong without the will of God, then morality depends on somebody's will and not on immutable moral principles. To say that morality is merely relative to God's will is to embrace moral relativism, which is no morality at all.

The other answer is that our imperfect human minds cannot know what is right without God pointing us in the right direction. Even if morality can exist without God, they say, our human minds always have the capacity to make an error, and everything that passes through a human mind is bound to be distorted. According to this answer, God's direction is supposed to insure us against inevitable human error. But can God's direction insure us against inevitable human error?

Even if God himself were to descend in a physical form and open the gold box of all morality and let each one of us see all morality with our own eyes, we're still seeing it with imperfect human eyes and processing it with imperfect human minds. Information would still be handled by humans, and so would still be subject to inevitable human error.

Let's leave the hypothetical now, and talk about what fundamentalists and many evangelicals actually believe. The Bible is supposed to be the word of God, and all that humans need for their present condition is to read the Bible and follow it. Or, that's what they say, until you ask them about things like slavery. Not a single Bible verse condemns slavery, and yet most every Jew and Christian considers slavery a sin.

Christians haven't always condemned it, though. Conservative Christians in America in the mid-19th century thought that since no Bible verse condemns slavery and since the Bible actually seems to condone it, slavery isn't a sin. The issue was so big that it split denominations. The Methodists split in 1844, the Baptists split in 1845 (that's why there are Southern Baptists), and the Presbyterians split in 1857. The disagreement was over how to interpret the Bible. The liberal Yankees couldn't find Biblical passages to condemn slavery, and, from the perspective of Southern conservatives, were relying on something other than the Bible for moral guidance.

Frankly, any time you use a Biblical passage to condemn slavery you're really reading the condemnation into it. Your own ideas and the norms you were raised with act like a lense to filter out the Bible verses that bother you, highlight the Bible verses you emphatically agree with, and give certain verses the meaning you want them to have. Whenever you read the Bible, you're introducing to your understanding of it various ideas that are not contained in the Bible itself.

Just look at how many disagreements fundamentalists have with each other over what the Bible really means. If all or at least most fundamentalists are saved and if they read the same word of God and listen to the same Holy Spirit, then apparently being saved and reading the Bible and listening to the Holy Spirit aren't enough to know for sure what God wants. If God is telling us all the same thing (and he would be fooling somebody if he isn't), then why do we disagree over what he's trying to tell us? The reason must be that on at least one issue each of us has a hard time telling what's coming from God and what isn't. Even though the Holy Spirit dwells in each saved Christian, the Christian still has an imperfect human mind that can be deceived by imperfect human reasoning. The indwelling of the Spirit cannot insure the Christian against his own mind.

There is a third answer to the question of God's role in morality, but I've only read it and I can't remember anyone seriously saying it to me in person. This is the idea that without God human beings would be so depraved that they wouldn't even want to be good or have any moral opinion. My interaction with unbelievers would suggest otherwise. And what about unbelievers who passionately share moral positions with conservative Christians, like the pro-life atheists and agnostics? These people seem to have a Christian morality but without God. Now, many Christians believe that God can and does work in and through unbelievers (no one would get saved if God doesn't). If God really does, then maybe obeying someone you believe to be God isn't necessary for a moral life. Of course, saying that God secretly guides unbelievers to be good is still attributing our morality to God's direction, and I addressed that in the previous 6 paragraphs.

The claim that we need God for morality seems dubious. That is, if we think of God as a person. If we think of God merely as The Good, then by definition it's impossible to be good without God. Or, as Roderick Long wrote, "The only intelligible conception of God is one that identifies God with logic and morality, or what contemporary philosophers call 'the space of reasons', which is what I think the Gospel of John was hinting at in speaking of the Logos as what is 'with' God and is what God is."

But now, by logic and morality, do we mean the human practice of doing logic and moral theory, or do we mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves? Because if we mean a human effort, then we're talking about something fallible, and if we mean the abstract forms, then we're talking about something that still requires fallible human effort to know.

I think Long uses "logic and morality" to mean the abstract "forms" of logic and morality themselves. If that's the case, then he's talking about God as something that still requires fallible human effort to know, and it seems this idea of God has the same problem that I mentioned above - that it doesn't ensure us against inevitable human error. But insurance against human error is a God criterion that the conventional theists came forward with; it's not a God criterion that Long uses, or that I use. And so, the fact of inevitable human error despite God is a problem for conventional theists, not for Long. All that Long is doing is trying to help the theist coherently say "Yes, you need God to be moral". If you define God as morality itself, as Long does, then the sentence makes sense: "Yes, you need morality to be moral."

Traffic Laws in a Free Society

Last week I made the mistake of admitting to someone at my workplace that I'm an anarchist.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.
"Sure," I said.
"Do you drive?"
"Yes."
"How do you put up with it?"
"Put up with what?"
"Stop signs. Traffic lights. Police pulling people over..."

She was one of the many who think that rejecting inherent political authority means rejecting law and order, as if there can be no such thing as law without government. But I condemn government, not because I condemn law, but because I find government to be completely incompatible with the one law that matters most - individual sovereignty.

"I have no problem with rules," I responded. "I just think people should be allowed to choose which rules to follow."

The one law (or maybe I should say one of the few laws) which isn't up for choice, but which is rightfully thrust onto everyone without their consent, is the obligation to leave others to enjoy themselves. Every other law, and every other governing body, and every other person or group of persons that wishes to exercise control over a man or his things, requires his consent, and has no authority over him without his consent.

Government laws prohibiting the manufacture, possession, use, or distribution of certain drugs are illegitimate, since they prohibit an act which harms no one and they lack the consent of the subjects. They imply that government has the right to control the bodies of its subjects.

The libertarian maxim on criminal law is "No victim, no crime." If no one is limiting another's liberty through a violent act against their body or property, or through a threat of violence against their body or property, then no one's liberty was violated, no one was victimized, and no one has a right to react forcefully.

Some libertarians have taken their rejection of victimless crimes so far that they reject laws against drunk driving. Since a crime is only committed when there is a victim, they argue, driving with an alcohol content above a specified amount should not be considered a crime. If a drunk driver drives recklessly and crashes into someone else's car and other people have to be rushed to the hospital, then the drunk driver can be prosecuted for endangering other people's lives, injuring other people, and damaging other people's property. But he should not, according to these libertarians, be prosecuted for the content of his blood. What matters is whether his actions deny someone else's sovereignty over themselves. If no one is injured, deprived, or threatened by his actions, then there is no victim, and whether he has a noticeable amount of alcohol in his body is irrelevant.

I originally wanted to respond to this line of reasoning by assaying whether drunk (or some other kind of reckless) driving poses such a threat to others that it can be treated like pulling a gun on someone. I guess I'll say very quickly that if the fear instilled by drunk drivers is so great that people actually refrain from setting foot or wheel on public roads, then yes, drunk and other reckless driving on public roads could and should be treated like any other threat that denies other people's liberty and against which people may forcefully react. But this argument only pertains to public roads, and it doesn't account for the rich diversity that would be able to exist in a free society.

Every good libertarian and classical liberal knows that we should be allowed to have private roads (and some libertarians believe that a system of private roads would be more efficient than what we have). We don't violate anyone's liberty by paving a strip of our own property and driving on it. Every good libertarian and classical liberal also knows that we should be allowed to do just about whatever we want on our own roads. If you want to ghost ride in your own driveway, parking lot, or road, that's your choice.

People already engage in activities that threaten their own lives and the lives of others, and only the most parternalist among us would call for those activities to be banned. If you want to race your own very light and very fast car on a race track, go ahead. You don't violate anyone's rights by driving that fast on that race track. So long as everyone else on the track knows that people are driving dangerously fast, and so long as the race track owners allow you to drive that fast, no one's rights are violated. If you are to be free, you should be free to take onto yourself whatever risk is necessary to pursue your own happiness. The courts are starting to disagree, but deep down inside we all know that if you want to drive like an idiot with other consenting idiots, that's your choice.

If there can be race tracks where drivers waive each other's liability and drive in a way that endangers themselves and each other without legal consequence, why shouldn't we be allowed to have private roads where drivers and passengers can do the same? From a property rights perspective, there seems to be a clear case for legally allowing private road owners to permit drunk driving on their roads.

This isn't to say, though, that all road owners have the obligation to allow drunk driving on their roads. Far be it. Road owners have the moral right to exclude drunk drivers, just as pub owners have the right to kick out belligerent drunks. To say that anyone has a moral and enforceable obligation to provide services to someone they don't want to serve is to condone slavery. And to say that anyone can be forced to allow others access to their property is to say that their property isn't really theirs to begin with. And so, from a property rights perspective, road owners have the right to keep drunk drivers and other reckless drivers off their road.

Over the past three years that I've been reading libertarian legal theory, I've noticed some anonymous fringe elements condemning police outright, and denying any right of police to pull people over or arrest anyone. Those attitudes might be libertarian in spirit, but they aren't libertarian in theory. Individual sovereignty implies that people be allowed to use proportionate and discriminate force to address threats (i.e., defensive violence is permissible), and if we should be free to hire chefs to cook for us and bus drivers to drive for us, we should also be free to hire police to protect us. And, since individual sovereignty implies each property owner's right to determine the conditions of use (that is, the rules) on his or her property, road owners have the right to employ police to pull over reckless or suspicious drivers.

Suppose I had my own house, and suppose also that I threw a party in it. One of my male guests makes some unpleasant comments about the human female, and out of consideration of my female guests I pull the guy to the side and explain to him that he can't be saying things like that at my party. If he continues, or if he goes ahead and gropes someone, I have the right to physically take hold of him and throw him out of my house. In fact, I don't have to wait for him to offend my guests, or do something that everyone acknowledges as offensive. If he so much as puts on a Che Guevara shirt, I have the right to throw him out, and to say otherwise is to say that the house I bought really doesn't belong to me. Now, I don't have the right to beat him for it, or lock him in the basement (unless he gets violent and that's the only safe place for him). I'm only entitled to use so much force as is necessary to stay sovereign over myself and what is mine, or to maintain other people's sovereignty over themselves and what is theirs.

The same goes for roads. Road owners have the right to come up with their own rules for their own roads, and they have the right to enforce those rules. Their police have the right to pull over people who don't follow those rules, to fine people who break those rules, and to drive home people who they think shouldn't be driving. Now, they wouldn't have the right to imprison people indefinitely or without cause (that's kidnapping). But they do have the right to remove from the road those drivers who break the road owner's rules, and that means they should have the right to pull people over, and chase down and set up road blocks for those who don't pull over. If I have the right to pull a guy to the side in my party, or throw him out of my house, then highway patrol should have the right to pull over people who break the road owners' rules.

Hopefully, those rules won't get too ridiculous. There's a chance that they would. Someone might strictly enforce a no bumper stickers rule, or cite people for having chrome that's too shiny. We can trust, though, that competition in roads and road security would render the most relevant and least intrusive policies, since road owners whose rules are absolutely uncalled for wouldn't see a whole lot of business and would be allowed to fail.

Now to qualify what was just said about private roads and private traffic laws. In the video I linked in the above paragraph, Walter Block suggested someone try implementing the death penalty for drunk driving. The audience laughed, and probably most of them thought he was joking. I'm quite sure he wasn't. Block thinks it's theoretically possible to voluntarily and peacefully alienate your right to live. He could and probably would argue that a driver signs away his right to live when he drives drunk on a road that is clearly marked with signs saying "Drunk drivers will be shot." Without writing a book about it, let me say that a driver doesn't alienate his right to live by driving on a road any more than a guest alienates his right to live by stepping foot in someone else's house. If he opens fire on police, or aims a gun at another driver, that's a different story. (I say more about retaliatory force in my entry on abortion.)

At any rate, even if a road owner were to have drunk drivers executed, I doubt that rule would take off. Rather than encourage drivers to not drive drunk, it would encourage drunk drivers to not get caught. Chases on those roads would be much more violent than on the other roads, and that would increase the cost of keeping that road. Also, people would want to use other roads if they know they could possibly be executed for driving funny or tired. Roads with that rule wouldn't see much business. And, if executions are so controversial, the road owners run the risk of getting boycotted.

Before closing, I'd like to underline that though road owners in a free society would be free to write and enforce their own traffic laws, they would not be free to perform disproportionate or nondiscriminate acts of violence on drivers or passengers. If it is a free society, then individual sovereignty would be the rule of law, and any act that punishes the wrong person, or punishes someone too much, would be considered illegal, and other people would have the legally-recognized right to prevent it.

Also, I should mention that private roads doesn't mean no public roads. Roderick Long has two essays, here and here, where he argues that public space is not only permitted by libertarian principles, but is also desirable, and would likely appear in a free society. Land does not need to be government-owned to be owned by and freely available to the general public. The question of who to write the traffic rules, what traffic rules to write, and how to enforce traffic rules on public roads in a free society is a question worth asking, and unfortunately a complete answer to it won't fit here. The very short answer is common law and mediation.

If you are bothered by the complexity and otherness of a system like this, just ask yourself these three questions. Should people be allowed to drive drunk on their own roads? Should people be allowed to drive drunk on roads designated for drunk driving? Should people be allowed to drive on roads where drunk driving is prohibited? If you answer "Yes" to the first, then I don't see why you shouldn't also answer "Yes" to the second. And who in their right mind wouldn't answer "Yes" to the third? If you answer "Yes" to all three of those questions (and I don't know any red-blooded American who wouldn't), then you basically want a system like the one I call for.

Dress Standards on Public Transportation, and other things

You're sitting on a public bus, and your stop is about half an hour away. The bus is gradually getting more crowded, and newcomers are standing in the aisle holding on to hand rails. A man gets on and stands right in front of you. He acts completely normally - he says "Excuse me" and "Thank you", he awkwardly smiles the way you're supposed to on a crowded city bus, etc. - but there's one thing that makes him look more than a little unusual, and which makes other people feel very uncomfortable. He's completely naked.

This is a city bus - it's supposed to be for everybody who either can't or doesn't want to ride in a car or ride a bike. And we know that, in freer societies like ours, we're supposed to be free to do with ourselves as we please. Is it okay to kick him off the bus, or to not allow him on the bus in the first place? In some cases, yes. But wouldn't that violate his sovereignty over himself? I don't think so.

You should be free to walk around your own bedroom and bathroom naked. If your curtains are drawn, you should be free to walk around your entire house completely naked. If your neighbors permit, you should be free to walk around their house completely naked. If the owner of a restaurant permits, you should be perfectly free to sit at a table and enjoy a meal completely naked. You do not, however, have the right to present yourself unclothed on the property of anyone who doesn't consent to your nudity. You have sovereignty over yourself and what is yours; you do not have sovereignty over other people and their property.

We see the signs in restaurants that say "No shoes, no shirt, no service", and we never think twice about whether excluding someone who isn't properly clothed according to that sign violates those people's rights. Restaurant owners want to maintain a certain atmosphere that caters to a particular segment of the population (those who don't want to be offended by the presence of shirtless people), and to run their business the way they want to run it (which they have a right to) they have to make clear certain rules about how they want their property used. When a shirtless man walks in, no one violates his rights by refusing to take his order. If he really wants to have a shirtless restaurant experience, he could go to a restaurant that caters to people who don't mind the presence of shirtless patrons.

So, if a naked man gets on a bus where nudity is forbidden by the owner, the driver has every right to keep him from getting on. The only problem with applying this line of reasoning to city buses is that city buses belong to "the city" and not anyone in particular. But that isn't a problem with this line of reasoning. That's a problem with the oxymoronic idea of "public" ownership. Things that are publicly owned are supposedly owned and run by everybody for everybody. But we know that "public" services are funded by one segment of society (not everybody), distributed by another segment of society (again, not everybody) for the benefit of a very select segment of society (again, not everybody).

But I think I can address the problem of dress standards on public transportation without opining that tax subsidies for public transportation violate individuals' property rights, or that the most efficient mass transit is private mass transit.

As I wrote above, the restaurant managers want to cater to a certain crowd, and to do that they have to have certain rules that express the dining preferences of that crowd. "No shoes, no shirt, no service" is a condition of use that expresses these preferences. If you want to be served, you have to be wearing shoes and a shirt.

In order to cater to a target ridership, the owners of public transportation services (whether they be public officials or private entrepreneurs) should be free to lay down conditions of use that express the riding preferences of that crowd. If a significant portion of the target ridership happen to be very socially conservative (as many working-class people are), then they might want to and should be free to take that social conservatism into account.

When I was taking summer classes at Cal, I drove to Fremont and took BART to downtown Berkeley. One day (I forgot whether it was the morning or afternoon) a woman and her 2-year-old daughter got on and sat right across from me. The girl was making a lot of noise, the mom was speaking to her in some Central or Eastern European language, and suddenly the girl was quiet. I looked up from my book, and saw that this woman was nursing her daughter (who was old enough to talk) on this train. They didn't hide it with a towel or anything.

Now, I didn't mind at all. If you want to nurse your kid right in front of me, you have my blessing. But you might not have the blessing of the other people on the bus or train. Luckily for her no one reacted with horror, and I doubt anyone would in the Bay Area. Even if people did dislike it, it would have to be a chronic "problem" and the number of people offended by it would have to be sufficiently large for any drop in business to be noticed.

If there are enough people who are offended by it, and if there are enough women who insist on nursing or pumping in transit, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating nursing cars or walled-off nursing sections in cars. Likewise, if there are enough people who are offended by nudity, and if there are enough people who insist on traveling nude, then the train or bus company can solve the problem by designating clothing-optional cars and buses. So long as people get on the proper car or bus, no one would be made a captive audience to the offending exposure.

Many urban areas in the U.S. are seeing a sharp increase in the number of conservative Muslim immigrants. Some of these women find it more appropriate to not be in any situation where their bodies are pressed against the bodies of men they aren't married to, and they would be very reluctant to get on a crowded car or bus. As of now, there aren't enough of them to make an impact, and women who prefer to not be touched by strange men just somehow make do. If transportation services in the U.S. want to cater to these women in the future, when the number of them might be drastically higher than it is now, they might want to consider designating women-and-children-only cars and buses, or women-and-children-only sections of cars and buses.

Before you spout off screaming "Segregation!", let me point out that we already have restrooms segregated by sex. Most women prefer to have a restroom experience that is free of men, and in response to this overall preference shopping malls, restaurants, train stations, and office buildings provide restrooms reserved only for women. No normal person would say that the women are discriminated against for having restrooms reserved specifically for them, or that men are discriminated against for not being allowed to use restrooms that women use.

And don't worry about this being some kind of special priviledge. It's just that in the near future there's going to be a large number of people who want a particular kind of service, just as there are large numbers of people today who want particular kinds of service, and if you can make a buck providing that kind of service then why not? So long as no one's assaulted, defrauded, burgled, or in some other way deprived of their sovereignty over themselves, the provision of special services is completely legitimate.

Another possible objection to women-only cars and buses can come from people who are bothered by social heterogeneity. If a society is to be stable, they say, then it must run on values that are shared by everyone, and allowing separate cars for women out of consideration for conservative muslim immigrants allows pockets of recent immigrants to exist as third-world peoples in an otherwise modern America. Now, whatever America's values are, social homogeneity shouldn't be one of them. We should be a people who tolerate experimentation - not just in technology, but also in ways of relating to each other. The fact that some people wear more clothes than you do, or separate themselves from the opposite gender more than you do, should be no political concern of yours. We pride ourselves in our freedom to live by the values we choose, and we even like to pretend that our nation was founded on that freedom. If other people value the segregation of sexes, then let them live according to that value. They don't violate your liberty by getting on their own train cars.

Did you ever wonder why there are a million different kinds of churches in America? It's because here we're relatively free to live according to the values we choose, so long as we allow others the same freedom. One of the main rules in "doing church" in America has been: If you don't like our rules, start your own church. And so for the past couple hundred years people have associated according to their shared ideas of what's right. We don't have an established church. No one's forced to go to any particular kind of church. We don't force everyone to adhere to the same church polity, listen to the same religious music, or keep the same dress code. If that's the freedom we're allowed in religion, why shouldn't we be allowed it in mass transit?

My radical proposal is this: allow people to choose their own rules. If they don't want naked guys on their buses, let them keep naked guys from getting on. If they want to be naked on the bus, let them have buses where they can be naked. If women want to go topless, they can get on the naked buses too. If women don't want to be touched by men they don't know, let them have women-only buses. This isn't an issue of what's appropriate in public. It's an issue of what preferences people have. And if this is to be a free country, entrepreneurs should be allowed to cater to different people's preferences.