Inciting to riot
<p>Gary Farber asks:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Would you assert that a modest libel law, or copyright law, or<br />
incitement to riot law, inevitably lead to 1984? How about a law<br />
banning private nuclear weapons?
</p></blockquote>
<p>I would say that the risk from a modest libel law or copyright law<br />
is small, though not nonexistent; look at the way the DMCA has been<br />
used to justify schemes that would embed controlware in everyones&#8217;<br />
computers.  State power is no less real if it consists of NSA or FBI<br />
back doors built in by an acquiescent Gateway or Dell.</p>
<p>If the lawmaker/law-enforcer is a monopoly government, then a law<br />
banning private nuclear weapons would worry me a little more, basically<br />
because I don&#8217;t trust governments to have <em>any</em> control over<br />
the weaponry their citizens can keep.  History shows that that power<br />
is invariably extended by degrees and abused until the citizenry is<br />
totally disarmed; the case of Great Britain in the 20th century is a<br />
particularly telling one (and its sequel in the 21st is proving<br />
just as bloody and insane as the NRA diehards predicted, with criminal<br />
gangs machine-gunning each other in the Midlands cities while<br />
law-abiding citizens are jailed for carrying pocketknives).</p>
<p>I would prefer the risks of private nukes to the disarmament of the<br />
civilian population.  But that&#8217;s not a choice anyone will actually<br />
ever have to make, because the intersection of the set of people who<br />
want nukes and the set of people who would obey or be deterred by a<br />
law against them is nil.  A law against nukes would therefore be<br />
pointless, except as an assertion of the power and right to enforce<br />
other sorts of weapons bans that are harmful in themselves.</p>
<p>Nukes are different than handguns.  Handgun bans are bad, but<br />
they&#8217;re not utterly pointless; there is a significant class of<br />
criminals who would carry in the absence of a ban but don&#8217;t in the<br />
presence of one.  The real problem with handgun bans is that the good<br />
effects of slightly fewer bad guys carrying weapons are swamped and<br />
reversed by the bad effects of far fewer good guys carrying<br />
weapons.  It&#8217;s all in how the disincentives against crime shift.</p>
<p>An &#8220;incitement to riot&#8221; law is a huge and obvious red flag.  A<br />
political culture in which that becomes entrenched would be one headed<br />
for the &uuml;berstate fairly rapidly.</p>
<p>But much depends on who makes those laws and how they are enforced. I<br />
could live with a ban on certain sorts of heavy weapons or a Riot Act,<br />
for example, if they were a condition of my contract with my<br />
crime-insurance company, or part of the covenant of my homeowners&#8217;<br />
association.  Powers that are too dangerous to grant a monopoly<br />
government could safely be delegated to security agencies and<br />
judicial associations that have active competitors, and who do not<br />
in the nature of things have universal jurisdiction.</p>
<p>Mr. Farber may not be aware than anarchists like myself actually<br />
envision living in a society that still has police and courts and a<br />
common legal code, but one in which no one organization has a status<br />
that is uniquely privileged under the law.  There would be something<br />
that is functionally not completely unlike a &#8220;government&#8221;, but it<br />
would be a virtual entity &mdash; a contract network of courts,<br />
police, and citizens.  I would delegate my right to resist assaults on<br />
my life and property to the police agency that acts as my agents. That<br />
police agency would have reciprocity agreements with other police<br />
agencies; they, in turn, would contract with judicial associations<br />
to arbitrate disputes among their clients.  Find a copy of<br />
<cite>The Market for Liberty</cite> for the details.</p>
<p>Finally, I comment on Mr. Faber&#8217;s attempt to reduce the<br />
slippery-slope argument against statism to an absurdity by applying it<br />
to libertarians (&#8220;libertarianism, because it values the individual<br />
without regard for society, inevitably leads any individual who<br />
believes in it to become a sociopathic serial killer&#8221;).</p>
<p>There are several obvious problems with this argument.  First,<br />
sociopathy is a wiring defect only found in less than 1% of the general<br />
population (but including a large percentage of politicians,<br />
and that is no joke).  Libertarianism cannot turn people into sociopathic<br />
serial killers because <em>nothing</em> (other than some odd and rare<br />
sorts of injuries to the brain) can turn people into sociopaths.</p>
<p>The argument also ignores a glaring asymmetry in the real-world<br />
facts.  Extreme libertarians do not as a rule go on senseless killing<br />
sprees.  Governments, even &#8220;good&#8221; governments, often do.  In the U.S.,<br />
the scarifying examples of MOVE, the Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge<br />
are before us even if we agree to leave warfare out of the picture and<br />
consider only the last two decades.</p>
<p>But more importantly, the claim that libertarianism values the<br />
individual without regard for society is damagingly false. The<br />
assumption that &#8220;valuing the individual&#8221; and &#8220;valuing society&#8221; are<br />
opposed is precisely what thoughtful libertarians reject.  Our highest<br />
value is non-aggression, peacefulness &mdash; voluntary cooperation.<br />
Our message is that only when individual freedom is properly held to<br />
be the greatest good can a sane, peaceful, and truly just society<br />
flourish.</p>
