What is the Non-Aggression Principle?

The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) is THE core libertarian idea that says — Don’t aggress or initiate force against anyone, personally or politically.

Murray Rothbard states:

“The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the "nonaggression axiom." "Aggression" is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion” (1)

According to the NAP, violence can only be used in defense of oneself and/or others:

".... Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory." (2)

The Non-Aggression Principle originates from property rights. Stephen Kinsella states:

“The nonaggression principle is ... dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass — aggression — only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.” (3)

What it all means:

• Let each individual live as he/she wills, provided he/she permits the same to others.
• Do not use force except for defensive purposes.
• The victim of aggression is the person whose property rights are violated. And where there is no victim, there is no crime.

Libertarians want a world where force is used only defensively — no aggression!

References:

1. Rothbard, “For A New Liberty” 
2. Rothbard, “War, Peace, and the State” (1963)
3. Kinsella, “What Libertarianism Is”

Herd mentality: A Psychological Tactic in Politics

Excerpted from:
Against the State: An Interview with Lew Rockwell

By John W. Whitehead

The Rutherford Institute

September 25, 2014

QUESTION: Government is theater. Would you agree?

LEW ROCKWELL: Yeah, a bloody theater, a terrible theater, but it is a theater, and they know it. They know this is how to appease the people.

QUESTION: Two psychologists have studied the use of words by politicians in recent years. The most used word now by politicians in America is the word “we.” The use of this word actually gets people to form into a group where essentially they stop thinking. That is connected to the theater concept of controlling people, and I guarantee you that the government hires behaviorists and psychologists, and they study how to manipulate people. What do you think about that?

LEW ROCKWELL: I remember one of the critics of the Nazis saying that it is an indication of totalitarianism when politicians refer to “our children.” They are not your children. They are God’s children, and they are the parents’ children. They are not the government’s children, but the government, of course, feels they are and they want to shape them. They want to mold them and they want parents to have less and less to do with it. They want them in the public schools from 6 to 6, eating all their meals there and that sort of thing. You know they are not that kind of villain, but they are, in fact, villains. Even if they seem like nice, decent people, they are actually not.

I was once in politics myself before going straight, and I can tell you they are not good people. I encountered only one man whom I thought was thoroughly good, and I had the honor of working for him eventually, and that was Ron Paul, and also the only person in politics I have ever encountered who did not have the lust to rule, the lust to dominate. Ron Paul doesn’t have that, so he was a very odd bird in politics. For him, politics was an educational mission, but most of them want to dominate. Again, most of us are not interested in running the next door neighbor’s family. We don’t want to run the next town. We don’t want to run the next country. We have enough to do with our own families, mowing our lawn, doing our job, earning enough money, and so forth, that is what we want to do. But there are people who want to run the family next door. They want to run the next town. They want to run the world.

QUESTION: So they become government officials.

LEW ROCKWELL: They go into politics.

Freedom: Because It Works or Because It’s Right? | Robert Higgs

Robert Higgs

December 27, 2012

Libertarians divide into two broad classes: those who espouse a free society because it gives better results than an unfree society, and those who espouse a free society because they believe that it is wrong to deny or suppress a person’s right to be free (unless, of course, that person is suppressing the equal right of others to be free). “Consequentialists versus deontologists” is the oft-encountered labeling of this difference. It is unfortunate that so much energy has been devoted to infighting between these two groups.

Free Trade is Freedom | Robert Higgs

The case for free international trade is simply the case for freedom in general. Those who claim that conditions can be improved by restrictions, taxes, subsidies, and bans of international buying and selling are saying either that they know better than every other person what transactions will provide a net benefit to that person or that they have a right to override the buying and selling choices that all other individuals regard as in their best interest. In short, trade restrictionists of all stripes, including so-called protectionists, rest their case on either proposterous claims about what they know or outrageous presumptions of a right to pester and punish peaceful people for the sake of particular special interests who seek to pick their fellows' pockets.

- Robert Higgs

Love Is The Answer | Robert Higgs

Many people are wicked and violent, and these are the ones with a comparative advantage in taking control of government as we know it. Given this reality, one might expect that life everywhere would tend toward an equilibrium like the Hobbsian scenario: poor, nasty, brutish, and short, even if not solitary.

Yet historically such has not been the case always and everywhere. Over substantial areas of the world, conditions have become much better in terms of economic well-being, life expectancy, health, and even social harmony. How has this progress been possible?

The answer most economic historians now advance is that certain institutions, especially relatively secure private property rights and respect for entrepreneurship and private contracting, were put in place, prompting entrepreneurs of many sorts to devise productivity-enhancing innovations and thereby to make possible great material gains for the average person, even those outside the ruling circles.

At a deeper level, however, it is important to recognize that in nearly all societies, love keeps breaking through: love of truth, love of beauty, love of goodness and kindness toward our fellows. To these breakthroughs we owe much of what has been achieved throughout history. Wickedness produces slavery, oppression, and plunder. Love throws a benign wrench in the wheels of wickedness. Before the great institutional advances could be put in place, love had to clear a space for them.

The cliche tells us that love is the answer. However trite it may be, it is also true.

- Robert Higgs

Democracy results in Tryanny not Freedom | Robert Higgs

Can democracy give us freedom?

"Democracy, to the extent that it operates according to the principle of majority rule, must result in tyranny, because that's what most people want. Libertarians often say that most people want freedom, but my observations and study of history do not accord with this claim.

Most people want freedom for themselves, but not for others. They want personal freedom but favor government suppression of the freedoms of people they dislike or fear for whatever reason. For most people tribalism, however understood by the members of a tribe, trumps living in a free society.

Arguing that free societies are more prosperous or otherwise successful will not persuade most people. They are prepared to wreak death and destruction on their perceived enemies, foreign and domestic, even at considerable economic sacrifice."

- Robert Higgs

An Action Plan for Anarcho-Capitalists - Hoppe on peacefully opposing the state.

How to Fight the Modern State

By Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Mises.org
August 17, 2013

In this 1997 speech by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, now available as an ebook from the Mises Institute under the title What Must Be Done, Hoppe presents a plan of action for anarcho-capitalists against the modern state.

Hoppe begins by examining the nature of the state as “a monopolist of defense and the provision and enforcement of law and order.” Like all state-mandated monopolies, the monopoly of law enforcement also leads to higher prices and lower quality of services. Why is this state of affairs tolerated? The modern democratic states, much more than the monarchies and princely estates of old, are seen as moral and necessary despite ample evidence to the contrary.

In this initial analysis, we find much of what Hoppe eventually expanded into his 2001 book Democracy: The God that Failed, which systematically dismantled modern arguments in favor of the democratic state.

In the final portion of his speech, Hoppe turns to discussing how a modern partisan of liberty might act to counter the march of centralization and the destruction of property, culture, learning, and natural social hierarchies.

Argumentation Ethics Condensed - by Stephen Kinsella

Originally post:
http://www.stephankinsella.com/2013/08/argumentation-ethics-condensed/

"The mere fact that an individual argues presupposes that he owns himself and has a right to his own life and property. This provides a basis for libertarian theory radically different from both natural rights theory and utilitarianism."

"Think of it this way. You don’t care about all this if people are leaving you alone. You just go about your business. But if there is a dispute over your body—say someone wants to rape you or enslave you. Then either they are willing to try to justify it, or not. If not, then they are just criminals and you have to deal with them with force or whatever. If they try to justify then they have to do so in a peaceful context. And remember: all justification is necessarily argumentative justification. That means any conceivable justification, that is, any possible norm that could conceivably be justified, has to be compatible with the norms of argumentation. And those include: peace; the presumption that there is value to cooperation; the presumption that it is desirable that people have the ability to control their own bodies (not only to argue during the argument, but to have survived in the world to the point of making the argument, which requires (unmolested) use of scarce means; etc.

The point is that you can never justify a socialist or criminal ethic. How could you do so? You would have to make an argument, in the course of a peaceful argumentation, that peace is bad. This cannot be done. It is a contradiction. So if you want to commit aggression, you either have to just do it and give up on the idea that you can justify it; or, if you try to justify it, you have to recognize that it cannot be done. By examining the structure of this from the outside, we can recognize that no socialist ethic can ever, in practice, be argumentatively justified.

And to say you do not own yourself outside of argument, is simply to say that some form of socialism is justified. How can two supposedly civilized, mutually-rights-respecting, peace-desiring people (in an argument) ever argue that it’s okay to hit people who have done nothing wrong? If you make that argument, then you have no grounds for refusing to coerce the other guy into accepting your argument—which is contrary to the nature of argumentation which presupposes that each side has the right to disagree with the other and is not being coerced."