The NAP and “Men with Guns”
There is much talk in certain libertarian circles about the so-called NAP, or “Non-Aggression Principle.” I don’t find the NAP to be of much use myself, but the basic idea is that it’s wrong, under any circumstances, to “initiate force.” What is meant by “force,” or “initiate” for that matter, is difficult to pin down, and I can’t help but think that all it really means is “anything I, a libertarian, disagree with.” A debate with a NAP-oriented libertarian has a high probability of coming to a point where “men with guns” are introduced into the conversation as the initiators of said force. A letter to the editor at The Free Liberal website provides a classic example:
… As an example: while passing by our neighbor’s house and noticing that the grass is overgrown, we may, if our own yard is properly kept, be tempted to exclaim “letting grass grow that high should be illegal.” If this issue is particularly important to us, we may lobby our local council to adopt such an ordinance.
What we have failed to fully consider is the brutality with which such an ordinance will be enforced should our neighbor persist in keeping his grass taller than we believe is fitting. If he ignores the warning letters, and fails to pay the fines, it is likely that city will eventually condemn his property. If he persists yet, his property will be sold at auction. And if he then fails to vacate his home, the government will forcefully enter and remove him, in handcuffs and at the point of a gun, in front of his family.
And should our tragic landscaping criminal attempt to defend his home and family from this forceful intrusion, it is likely that he will lose his life in the process, or at best, his liberty for the next fifty to twenty years. …
To the uninitiated, maybe an example like this has some sort of emotional impact. “Geez, how ridiculous that a guy could end up jailed or shot for not mowing his lawn!” But if you actually think about this for a minute or two, you’ll probably identify some major holes in the basic reasoning. For one, the NAP advocate almost certainly has no problem using deadly force in numerous other cases, many of them equally ridiculous.
Suppose, for example, you own a 40 acre plot of land and a homeless guy decides to start camping out on the far corner. Who’s initiating force when you call the police to kick him off (or do it yourself)? What if you send in a magazine subscription card marked “bill me later” and decide not to pay even though 4 or 5 magazines have been delivered? What if your daughter baby-sits for the neighbors and they decide not to pay the $15 when they get back from dinner? Are we really going to bring in “men with guns” and possibly kill people for a $15 babysitting bill or $6.50 in magazines?
The thing is, if the perpetrator is really going to let it go that far (and everyone else thinks it’s worth bothering with), then you have to. Otherwise you’re just saying that contracts and obligations have no meaning when the stakes are small. You simply have to allow (physical) forceful responses to non-physical rights violations. I think most NAP people realize this, which leads to some (in my opinion) tortured definitions of “initiate force.” Now they have to say “well, not just force-force, but, you know, force and fraud or something… oh, and times when you’re on my property and I don’t want you there.” Thus my quip about “whatever a libertarian disagrees with.”
But why bother trying to salvage the NAP anyway? What the point really is, is that it’s okay to use force to prevent or correct rights violations. Or more to the point, it’s proper for the government to use physical force to enforce legal rights and obligations. The NAP can’t really deal with the obligations part. People are obligated to do certain things – the least controversial being to live up to their explicit obligations in legal contracts. They are also obligated to stay off of other peoples’ private property if requested to do so. And so on.
I guess the problem is that when we simply say that it’s okay to use physical force to enforce rights and obligations, it doesn’t automatically give the “libertarian answer.” After all, these rights and obligations could be anything as opposed to only the ones that libertarians seem to be pre-programmed in favor of. The whole point, it seems, is to have a one sentence statement of principle that can be used to judge the rightness of any specific law, ordinance, etc. My contention is that this is not possible; no specific set of rules is correct under all conceivable circumstances.
Which brings us back to the guy who refused to mow his lawn. Apparently, libertarians are supposed to be against any law that constrains people with regard to the use of their property. But there has to be some limit. It’s only a matter of degree. Is it unreasonable to require person not to have a 4 story pile of rusting car parts in his yard, or a gigantic pile of bloated, reeking animal carcasses? Aside from a few extremists, nobody wants to live in a neighborhood where such things are allowed. It’s beneficial to almost everyone to have some reasonable restrictions, and better yet to have the correct level of restrictions.
As a thought experiment, consider what would probably happen if all land use restrictions were removed. Almost certainly, most new developments would spring up with restrictive covenants in place. Most home buyers would move to these developments to escape the possibility that the value of their home (and their own ability to enjoy it) would be destroyed by the activities of their neighbors. People in existing homes with no pre-existing covenants would be out of luck unless they could get new covenants established by the full agreement of everyone on a street, for example. A single holdout could ruin the whole deal.
The point is that most people do want to submit to some level of restriction in exchange for having the people around them constrained too. Having no restrictions is, generally, the wrong answer, as is having too many restrictions. There’s no need to go to the extreme either way. Even if libertarians succeeded in temporarily eliminating all restrictions, as long as freedom of contract remained, they would find their way back. Plus, people who want more or fewer restrictions (or different ones) can group together making everyone that much happier.
Figuring out which restrictions to put in place is difficult, but the principle of it is easy enough to understand. Let’s go back to the guy with the tall grass. In the example quoted, it was suggested that a local busybody simply lobbied his favorite bureaucrat to impose a new regulation. This is the wrong way to go about it. Why? Not because it’s wrong to send men with guns to enforce an obligation. It’s wrong because, as stated, the homeowner started out with the right to grow his grass as tall as he wanted and the proposition was to take away that right without compensation. Remember, the government is there to protect rights.
What could be done, in principle anyway, is to find out whether a restriction on grass height (an obligation to maintain one’s lawn) would make everyone happier on balance. If it would, then we know we want to impose it. At the same time though, it’s not right to take away the existing right to grow tall grass and make a certain minority of people worse off. To get around this, we can pay these people enough compensation such that they too are better off on balance. They will be paid enough to counteract either having to mow the grass or move to another neighborhood. If the new rule is truly a net benefit to all, the majority can pay these people off and feel like they got a good deal. Everyone wins and we are one small step closer to the optimal level of restrictions.
Coming up with a system to actually make this work is non-trivial, but definitely doable. One way is to use the indifference vote. Paul Birch has written an essay describing how that might work.
I’ll conclude by simply saying that a society based property rights, and rights in general, needs “men with guns,” on occasion, to enforce those rights. Men with guns are also needed to enforce obligations (the flipside of rights, as they say), which is where the NAP gets into some squirrelly territory. Rather than dwell on force and who initiates it, libertarians would do well to focus their attention on rights: don’t violate them (without compensation), whatever they are.