Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATE II: The Exquisite, Consistent Minimalism of Libertarian Law (Just WTF??)

Justice, Law, libertarianism, Natural Law, Paleolibertarianism

“Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law” does not meet with the approval of Jack Kerwick. He writes:

Coming soon: My article on NATURAL LAW and POSITIVE LAW and the relationship between the two. This article was inspired by Ilana Mercer’s contention that since Eric Garner was “innocent” as far as the natural law is concerned, he had no obligation whatsoever to “obey” the unjust positive law under which he was arrested. I will show that even accepting Ilana’s premise, the conclusion does NOT follow. From Cicero and Socrates to Augustine and Aquinas to William Blackstone, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, no natural lawyer, as far as I have been able to determine, has ever contended that the injustice of a SINGLE law is sufficient grounds for disobeying it. And when disobedience is called for, respect for the larger system of law of which the unjust law in question is a part demands a WILLINGNESS to be arrested. Breaking the law openly, in public, and then submitting to arrest affirms the law while drawing attention to the injustice in question. Such an act distinguishes the civil disobedient from criminals (think MLK and the “civil rights” protests of the 50’s and 60’s). Garner was a criminal.

Ilana Mercer replies:

Before publishing said article, Jack, you want to correct what appears to be a misrepresentation of my words. Where in the article do I venture that “Garner had no obligation whatsoever to ‘obey’ the unjust positive law under which he was arrested.” Nowhere! This is not the purview of libertarian law (which deals only in the axiom of non-aggression), thus I would not have dignified it. Before publishing a column, make sure it is based on my exact words, and not an inference therefrom. I do not have to reread what I wrote to know I would not have addressed compliance at all, for it is not within the ambit of libertarian law.

Jack Kerwick:

Ilana Mercer: I’m not sure, then, what the point was in claiming that Garner was “100% innocent under libertarian [natural] law.” Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. But even if he was, so what? I presumed (how could I not?) that your point was that Garner was not acting immorally–i.e. unlawfully–in illegally selling cigarettes. Thus, he never should have been stopped, much less arrested, for doing so. Now, if you think that he DID have an obligation to obey the law, even if it was unjust, then you think that HE DID ACT IMMORALLY (UNLAWFULLY) in not obeying it. I drew a legitimate inference from your claims: if he was acting both illegally and unlawfully (immorally) in selling “loosies,” then the police acted morally and justly in stopping him. I don’t mean to misrepresent anyone: I just don’t know what other conclusions can be drawn from your argument.

Ilana Mercer:

Jack Kerwick, you wrote: “Now, if you think that he DID have an obligation to obey the law, even if it was unjust, then you think that HE DID ACT IMMORALLY (UNLAWFULLY) in not obeying it. I drew a legitimate inference from your claims.”
I did not anywhere assert that Garner had an obligation to obey (or disobey) the law, and that by not so doing he had acted immorally (or morally). Thus, there is no reason whatsoever for you to impute to me, 1. a thing I had not said. 2. to draw an inference from something I had not said. Any line of reasoning built on this edifice is simply wrong and should not be pursued as a line of reasoning. I can understand that you are unclear as to what I meant by “100% innocent in libertarian law.” That sentence could be seen to constitute a bit of insider talk. That I can certainly address, my friend.

Twice does Jack pair “immoral,” in the above paragraph, with “unlawful.” But that’s the entire point of “Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law.” First, what is immoral is not necessary illegal and vice versa. It is, arguably, immoral to legislate preferences in employment for certain workers because of the concentration of melanin in their skin. Yet it is perfectly legal in some precincts around the country. Conversely, it is utterly moral to sell an item that belongs to you, as Garner did. However, it was illegal for Garner to sell said items, despite the fact that he was in his moral right to trade.

We all have ideas about what is moral and immoral. Oddly enough to some, libertarianism has nothing whatsoever to say about morality per se. When we say this or the other thing is wrong in libertarian law, we mean the following and the following only:

Unprovoked, A initiated aggression against B or his “legitimately owned” property.

That’s it! Libertarianism is, then, concerned with the ethics of the use of force.

The foundation of libertarianism is the non-aggression axiom. Walter Block explains:

The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc.

… the non-aggression axiom is a very powerful tool in the war of ideas. For most individuals believe, and fervently so, that it is wrong to invade other people or their property. Who, after all, favors theft, murder or rape? With this as an entering wedge, libertarians are free to apply this axiom to all of human action, including, radically, to unions, taxes, and even government itself.

Which is exactly the analysis applied in “Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law.”

Of course, there are many very difficult issues over which natural-rights libertarians—as opposed to Benthamite, utilitarian libertarians—will argue. Abortion, for example.

Based on the non-aggression law, some libertarians hold that abortion at whatever stage is OK, because a woman owns herself and may evict anything from her body. To punish her because of what she does to her own body, they claim, would be wrong—even if we think abortion immoral. Other natural-rights libertarians disagree with this position. They say that abortion is aggression against a living, non-aggressive being. The debate, however, while wading heavily into issues of morality, always comes back to what should be legal or illegal in libertarian law. In other words, based on the non-aggression law, should we or should we not proceed with force—for that is what the law is—against a woman for what she does to her body.

This and this alone is the ambit of libertarian law.

The same dynamic debates are conducted by libertarians with respect to immigration law.

Law is force. Like most 19th Century classical liberals, libertarians believe that force is justified under very few circumstances. Each time our overlords in DC legislate (unconstitutionally, by the way), they give their foot-soldiers permission to initiate force against a sovereign, innocent citizen. Every new law and regulation grants permission to law enforcement to proceed with unjust, unprovoked force against an innocent, sovereign individual and/or his lawful property—a citizen whose actions did not harm anyone. (And competition is not aggression. “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 has no right to the profits he had before the competition arrived on the scene. Not in a free-market.)

This is what was addressed in “Eric Garner 100% Innocent Under Libertarian Law.”

Now, the fact that libertarian law is so minimalist—skeletal, if you will—does not obviate against its complexity and subtlety. The debates we have—and are having now—are complex and hence often hard to grasp. In essence, libertarians debate the laws about the the law; the legality of law. That’s a meta-debate.

Ultimately, libertarianism’s elegant minimalism about what is legal and what’s illegal is perfectly compatible with the idea of individual sovereignty and limited, legitimate authority.

UPDATE I (12/15): Everybody is “torn” on Facebook thread. Some are starting to sound like Gloria Swanson mid-swoon (or was it Marlene Dietrich?). “I am torn, my dear, so torn. Fetch my smelling salts.” WTF is there to be “torn” about? The right of a person to stand on a street corner with a few loosies in-hand and not be killed??????????? There was no “civil disobedience.” WTF is wrong with y’all?

UPDATE II (12/17):

Hastings Ragnarsson deserves credit for his clarity, having admonished against the penchant for “dragging morality into a discussion of legality.”

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.

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.)

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.

UPDATED: Eric Garner, RIP: This is What Murder-By-Cop Looks Like (WRONG Decision)

Criminal Injustice, Law, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation, The State

I will be appalled—so should you—if a grand jury decides against indicting the NYPD officers who murdered Eric Garner. A decision is nearing in the case of the New York entrepreneur who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

The city medical examiner has ruled the death of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old father whose death in police custody sparked national outrage, a homicide, saying a chokehold killed him.
The medical examiner said compression of the neck and chest, along with Garner’s positioning on the ground while being restrained by police during the July 17 stop on Staten Island, caused his death.

William Norman Grigg documented and deconstructed the murder by cop of Mr. Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for being entrepreneurial; trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

UPDATE (12/3): WRONG Decision.

Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide: Those are the counts that ought to have been easily authorized by a jury empaneled to decide if to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death and oblivious to his helpless pleas for air.

Watch how the cops panic when they realize they’ve killed this poor, innocent (in natural law) man. Watch how they begin ordering observes to leave, so that no witnesses to the REAL crime remain. And observe the absence of any attempt to resuscitate Mr. Garner.