Category Archives: libertarianism

UPDATE III: Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law (Natural Law)

Justice, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Private Property, The State

“Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Not to be conflated are the cases of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, of Ferguson fame. While the evidence of police wrongdoing in Garner’s death is incontrovertible, the reverse is true in Brown versus Officer Darren Wilson.

As the evidence shows, Michael Brown 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 may not initiate aggression against a non-aggressor.

Eric Garner, on the other hand, had aggressed against nobody. Whereas Brown was stealing cigarillos; Garner was selling his own cigarettes. The “law” he violated was one that violated Garner’s individual, natural right to dispose of his own property—“loosies”—at will.

In libertarian law, Garner is thus 100 percent innocent. For the good libertarian abides by the axiom of non-aggression. When 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.

To plagiarize myself in “Tasers ‘R’ Us,” “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, even killed.”

Again: Garner had obeyed the libertarian, natural law absolutely. He was trading peacefully. In the same spirit, he turned to walk away from a confrontation. Befitting this pacific pattern, Garner had broken up a street fight prior to his murder.

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. …

Read the rest. “Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law” is the current column, now on WND.

UPDATE I: “FOX NEWS POLL: Voters agree with Brown grand jury, disagree with Garner decision.”

UPDATE II (12/12): One despairs when, on a site that is faith and freedom-oriented—and to which this writer has been contributing for so many years with articles similar to “Eric Garner: 100% innocent under libertarian law”—most readers still have no feel for the supreme law of God, if you will, and show an overriding concern with validating state oppression and unjust state laws.
One wonders how a people can ever regain true freedom when they are so beholden to the sovereign’s perverted laws and cannot tell just- from unjust law. The feel for and understanding of freedom is exactly zero unless you know that the natural law—call it the law of G-d, if you like—is incontrovertibly supreme. Any state law that violates it is unjust. (An why are individuals arguing the merits of taxes and obedience to all manner of tax, when taxes are tantamount to theft? For that is what a government-imposed tax is: private property stolen at the point of a gun.) Moreover, the natural law is not some libertarian ideal. People who habitually talk about western civilization should know that the natural law is one of its greatest philosophical expressions, beginning with the Decalogue (The Ten Commandments), the ancient Greeks, Aristotelian philosophers, the Stoics and Cicero, Scholastics and St. Thomas Aquinas through to Thomas Jefferson and Declaration of Independence.
Natural law has always been a bulwark against tyranny; that of monarch and mob alike. When the people forget that; they are as good as slaves.

UPDATE III (12/13):

Hugh Mcgarity • 2 days ago:

I think that I read somewhere that the officers involved in the Garner case were called there by a shop owner who was concerned by the presence of Garner causing loss of business. This would seem a valid concern as most small businesses struggle in the highly taxed and regulated environment of NYC. As far as the level of force, it would appear to be excessive. Ask yourself this though, if you were being assaulted by a huge man and were wanting intervention by police: would you want the officer/s to apply a little too much force or not quite enough. If not quite enough and you were further injured, what would your reaction be? I know, it’s not a perfect analogy but it does have some parallel. If Mr Garner had complied with the legitimate first request of police then he would still be selling loosies somewhere else.

ILANA MERCER replies:

The column addresses this bit of statism in the last paragraph. Please read it:

Eric Garner was not violating anyone’s rights or harming anyone by standing on a street corner and peddling his wares – that is unless the malevolent competition that sicced the cops on him has a property right in their prior profits. They don’t.”
A shopkeeper has the right to pursue profits, he does not have the right to the profits he had before the competition arrived on the scene. Not in a free-market.

Judge Napolitano’s Left-Libertarian Confusion

libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Race

Recently, on TV, Judge Andrew Napolitano sort of walked back his earlier assertion that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” and a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.”

Napolitano’s early position:

In Ferguson, the law enforcement case is far more straightforward than the racial complexities. A white cop put 10 bullets into the body of an unarmed black youth with whom he was wrestling for control of his gun … The tragedy is the result of the governmental use of race as a basis for decision-making. When cops are hired because they are white, when police suspect criminal behavior on the part of youth because the youth is black …

His is a hot mess of a column.

Napolitano’s later reversal:

Napolitano drew a stark distinction between the Garner case and that of Michael Brown, in which there was a “struggle for the gun.” Instead, he said, “This is a case of a poor, sorry individual doing nothing more than selling untaxed cigarettes and as a result of government intervention, he’s dead.”

Perhaps Napolitano has taken to reading more coherent libertarians, who can draw distinctions free of crappy postmodern, inorganic theorizing?

In any event, that’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to lefty constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege”—the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. The result: a mass of contradictions their adulating readers, in the habit of celebrity worship, fail to pick up.

UPDATED: Eric Garner: 100% Innocent In Libertarian Law (Note On Natural Law)

Free Markets, Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, Regulation, The State

To 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.)

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.

On Michael Brown, Libertarians Line-Up Like Mainstream

Crime, libertarianism, Media, Paleolibertarianism

With the exception of Professor Walter E. Block, libertarians, lite and hard-core, have lined-up like a monolith—much as mainstream media has—on the side of conspiracy and counteract, in the matter of Michael Brown’s shooting by Darren Wilson. (At least Reason.com has been willing to entertain differences of opinion.) Broad patterns of police transgression exist. However, each “cop killing” must be decided on the merits of the facts. Regrettably, this libertarian column had also expressed the opinion that Brown was the victim of “murder-by-cop.” I was wrong and have corrected myself.

Mentor and friend Walter Block did not fall in lockstep. Here’s the lovely comment received after the publication of “Ferguson: Thankful for Founding Fathers’ Legal Legacy”:

Dear Ilana:

Yet another eloquent, beautifully argued, magnificently written article, greatly informed by a libertarian sense of justice. Congratulations once again.

Best regards,

Walter

Walter E. Block, Ph.D.
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics
Joseph A. Butt, S.J. College of Business
Loyola University New Orleans