printTo the libertarian, the case of Eric Garner is as simple as it is sad. In libertarian law, Eric Garner is innocent as a newborn babe. It all boils down to the distinction between the natural and the positive law. Here again it is useful to contrast the Garner case with the case of Michael Brown (see “Don’t Conflate The Michael Brown And Eric Garner Cases”).
The good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. Michael Brown, the evidence shows, initiated aggression. He had aggressed against the store keeper and the policeman, who protected himself from this rushing mountain of flesh. In libertarian law, the individual may defends himself against initiated aggression. He does not initiate aggression against a non-aggressor.
Eric Garner, on the other hand, had aggressed against nobody. The “law” he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property (“loosies”) at will. When the enforcers of the shakedown syndicate came around to bust him, Garner raised his voice, gestured and turned to walk away from his harassers. He did not aggress against or hurt anyone of the goons.
“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or policeman], unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed.” (“Tasers ‘R’ Us.”)
Garner obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully and he attempted to walk away from a confrontation peacefully. (More evidence that goes to his character: Prior to his murder, Garner had broken up a street fight.)
The government has a monopoly over making and enforcing law— it decides what is legal and what isn’t. Thus it behooves thinking people to question the monopolist and his laws. After all, cautioned the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, “What is legally just, may not be what is naturally just.” “Statutory man-made law” is not necessarily just law.
Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law—a system of ethics—knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”
Garner was on “public” property. Had he been trespassing on private property, the proprietor would have been in his right to remove him. However, Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on the street corner and peddling his wares—that is unless the malevolent competition, which sicced the cops on him, has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t.
UPDATE (12/6): Natural law is an ancient philosophy rooted in very real, non-abstract civilizations, going back to ancient Greece, Rome; Ten Commandments, the Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Thomists, English common-law, etc. (NOT Rousseau.) It has always been a bulwark against tyranny—that of monarch and mob.