This is a theory I have been pushing forward for some time now but I rarely get support on it from libertarians despite of the fact that it is really promising and has huge positive consequences in a consistent libertarian theory.
Let me just straightaway come to the point. In a society of pure liberty, if an individual hires an assassin to kill someone, is this individual guilty of murder?
Yes we all know that the assassin is definitely guilty of murder, but the way we have grown up in the statist mindset it just sounds unjust to not punish the guy who is hiring people to murder others. Allow me to make my case on why its not consistent with the principles of individualism and liberty to hold the contractee guilty of murder.

Libertarianism is about Individualism

The fact is that Libertarian philosphy relies heavily on individual, and individual action. Numerous times this question is asked me, and this question is the single question which will determine if you are truly libertarian or not.
If you can save 100,000 individuals by killing one individual(who is not guilty of murder), is it ok to kill him to save 100K other individuals?
If you answered the above question as no, its not ok to kill one to save 100 thousand other individuals, then congratulations you are a libertarian. If not then you are possibly liberty-curious, statist, left-libertarian, Fascist-libertarian and every other possible flavor of libertarianism, but just not libertarian.
I don’t have a lot of space to explain a big answer to this question, but a short defense is, that if you truly are facing the delimma of killing one to save 100K others, you got more problems to worry about than if you should stick to libertarianism or not.
Libertarian philosophy differs from other philosophies because it is the only philosophy which values individual so highly. Every other philosophy is essentially some or the other form of collectivist ideology. This distinction is very important because almost every mainstream ideology in US can claim to be ‘libertarian’, because liberty is a very seductive word in America.
Once you establish this unique identifier about liberty, the most logical question which arises in the debate above is, if you are so much for individual responsiblity and actions, how can you not see that the person who gave the contract merely offerred a choice to the assassin. The choice was:
a) Take $100K from him and kill his wife
b) Do not take $100K and not kill his wife
Remember, a choice is a choice, not a compulsion. If contractee has compelled the assassin in some or the other way that is he left him no choice, and by that I mean if he was coerced to commit the assassination then the assassin is not guilty of murder here the guilt lies completely with the contractee. But offerring money to someone isn’t coercion. If someone offers you money for doing something wrong, no matter how much that money is, this is in no way coercion.
If the assassin wanted, he could have not accepted the money and not committed the crime. The person who offerred him the money merely made a proposition to him.

“But wouldn’t this promote a lot of contract killings?”

One may argue that if we let the people hiring assassins get off the hook wouldn’t this create a huge market for assassins and assassinations? First of all this is a utilitarian argument, so the answer must be utilitarian too. The fact is that since people who hire assassins are getting off the hook, they have absolutely no incentive to keep their mouth shut about the murder. The individuals hiring the assassins(if they don’t feer ostrecization) can now go on the television and claim who killed person X. This essentially reduces the supply of assassins to the market. They are much more in trouble now because they will be solely responsible for the murder now, where as their employer for whom this job was done walks free even blabbering about the crime.
So yeah even though there is more incentive for people to higher assassins, there is much less incentives for assassins to be assassins. Like everything else in utilitarianism we just cannot measure what will be what. Therefore we must rely on the principle, and that clearly dictates that if a person had a choice to not do that act of aggression then we expect him to not do that act of aggression.
In a society of pure liberty as an individual its your responsibility to not aggress against other individuals, and if someone convinces you otherwise then its only your fault, nobody else in the world will be responsible for actions you committed.
Someone may make a point now that although they agree that the person who commits the crime must be responsible for his actions, but why are we not holding the person who caused the crime, responsible? Isn’t his crime in this case “Creating the situation which caused the death of an individual”?? The answer is very simple, you are just describing his action into the most guilty way possible, but all this individual did, when broken down to it, was to offer a choice to another individual. That was his action, and unless providing choices to individuals is a crime in your viewpoint, this guy is not guilty of anything.

“What if I hold a gun on your head and make you commit murder?”

This is a very valid question, if someone holds guns on your head, you do not have a choice in this case, as you were coerced to do that action. Here the person who held the gun on your head is the guilty and responsible party for the murder. To solve this issue, the courts should follow something which I call as ‘weapon doctrine’, if you have no free choice then you were merely a weapon of the crime, not the criminal himself.
* If someone holds a gun on your head and make you do murder, you are weapon.
* If someone holds a gun on your wife’s head, and makes you commit murder, again its a bit difficult to determine if you are a weapon or not but the chances are you are.
* If someone mixes poison in your food and instead of giving you anti-dote asks you to commit a murder, you are a weapon.
* If you consume poison somehow, or someone gives you the poison but the person giving you the antidote and asking you to commit a murder in exchange has nothing to do with you getting poisoned then you choosing to kill, is only your responsibility, not theirs. In this case you are not the weapon.
* If your boss asks you to kill someone otherwise get fired, and you do it, then you are not the weapon.

There cannot be a state or state like entity in a society of pure liberty

The last point above opens up a pandora’s box in terms of the consequences of this principle. You killing someone because you were ordered to do so, or you were merely doing your job, is now a non-sequitor, because it doesn’t matter who gave you the order, they are just not sharing the fault here with you. The biggest concern here is, “If the person who gave the orders is not responsible in any way for the action his employee committed then that means you will let Hitler walk free?”, well the answer isn’t simple because I am sure Hitler would be guilty of a lot of actions he actually did do, but simply speaking, yes Hitler will not be held responsible for the actions his soldiers committed.
This maybe be appalling to many people(and possibly the reason why its so hard to convince libertarians on this issue), but the truth is, by establishing this level of atomic guilt, you are ensuring that Hitler will find it impossible to get soldiers to work for him who are simply rationalizing all their henious acts as ‘I was just doing my job’.
This isn’t even the last of the arguments, this simple principle guarantees that the basic structure of any private defense organization(PDO) in a free society would be such that its the individual responsibility of each employee that the orders given to him are just orders and are not aggressing against any individual.
For example: You are a PDO employee whose task is to apprehend criminals, you get an order that a guy named John Marshton has killed someone and he must be arrested for it, and if he resists then you can use deadly force because he deserves to die for that crime.
Your problem: If this guy turns out to be innocent, your boss is in no way in any problem, its you and only you who will get punished. Since your boss doesn’t share the guilt in this possible act, he may not be so careful with his decision.
Your solution: You now must personally make sure that there is enough evidence against this guy and he did commit that murder. So you do not just get ‘orders’ from your employer, but you get the full case file, you get the verdict of the trial, the whole proceedings and you find out that the guy under all definition of the word ‘guilty’, is actually guilty.
This assuring of the guilt is emulated in our current system as ‘arrest warrant’, the police officers cannot randomly start arresting people, a judge issues an arrest warrant against an individual after looking at the evidence and reasons against him and police officer then relies on it to arrest someone. Although the similarities end there. Arrest warrants can be issued for anything, and it still isn’t the same thing as the document or file detailing all the evidence against the individual. The only reason I made this parallel so that those who are worried about the lack of the ‘greatness’ of a our current legal system where there are arrest warrants and search warrants.

Anarchist Search Warrant

Here is the interesting part of the article, many people ask me the question, ‘In a free society if an individual runs and hides to a property(or his own property) where you are not allowed to enter, or any PDO is not allowed to enter, how will this guy be captured?’
Many people envision a statist kind of solution that somehow PDO’s will be allowed to enter a property, otherwise it would cause a lot of lawlessness in the society. But this solution breaks down really fast, because it isn’t really a libertarian thing. Its really a very simple question to answer, that is if you strictly adhere to the above mentioned principle of extreme atomic guilt theory(EAGT), then you will realize that no individual would want to aggress upon another indivdual merely because it was his job or he received orders from someone else.
Basically each individual who works for the PDO, for him to possibly aggress against another individual, he must ensure it himself that its not an initiation of aggression. For example, if your PDO has rendered the verdict that person X is guilty of murder and you have seen the whole proceedings and agreed with the conclusion then you can pursue the guilty individual with the use of deadly force.
The reason why any PDO would want to go through this way because if that individual turns out to be not guilty and he has been aggressed upon then the PDO employee would be held liable for all crime of initiation of aggression and (most probably) by contract PDO would be required to pay for restitution. A search warrant or an arrest warrant essentially in this case is a release document from the insurance organization claiming that all individuals involved in this act of aggression have seen through all the evidence and testimonies and concluded that the individual is guilty. Remember this overseeing of the case and trial isn’t the same thing as the trial itself(well I am hoping that this is more expeditated and faster than a trial), its merely going through the evidences and arguments and concluding that the verdict was accurate. If they do not feel it was accurate they have a right to excuse themselves.
This insurance requirement ensures that the least amount of property rights violation is done by the company, and least amount of damage payment is required.
In case of a false documents and testimonies, it will be liability of the individual who created the false documents and testimonies, for example if a person testified that he saw X enter that building, and this testimony becomes the basis for a verdict which renders X guilty, but later it turns out that he perjured, then in this case the actual individual who committed the act of aggression ended up being only the weapon of the crime and the crime was committed by the person who perjured.
Similarly if the judge took the bribe and falsifies the proceedings to alter the verdict to be guilty(or otherwise), will be the solely guilty individual for the aggression committed over the falsely convicted individual, not the PDO enforcer who looked at the records and proceedings and like any just man agreed with the judge’s conclusion.

No state or state like entities can be created

The biggest concern of people who consider Anarchy as an option is that in a free society the best private defense organization will rise and end up becoming a monopoly which is essentially a state-like entity. The truth is that a society of pure liberty, which follows this principle will realize that the formation of state or state-like private defense organizations is not possible, because we have eliminated the concept of soldiers. If you join a private defense organization which asks you to take away property of an individual because he stole it, then its your responsibility to ensure that its really stolen, and not blindly follow their orders.
Imagine this scenario, you join a Private Defense Organization which aims to act as a government, they already have 85% of the market share because they were so good at their job. Your boss, now asks you to go and raid a warehouse owned by your biggest competitor, you now must ask the question to him about why should you do such a thing. If he shows you the proof that the warehouse contains stolen property, and like any rational and just man you are unable to consider that proof to be sufficient to consider it as a stolen property then you must not follow the orders. If you do follow the orders then when the justice will be served only you will be held guilty for that action, not your boss will go free.
So think again, even if you want to joing an organization and become the state, why would you want to be the foot soldiers, nobody who is not a foot soldier or doing the actual acts of aggression in your organization will ever be punished.
The implications of this are huge, organizations who aim to become an entity like state will find it impossible to get people who would commit acts of aggression for them. Some people would still be willing to do it but their fees would be really, really high.
Just to be thorough, lets imagine an organization which is fully comprised of individuals who are willing to follow the orders about initiating aggression against others, after all its possible. What is not possible in this society is for this organization to become as big and powerful as we earlier expected the best PDO to become.
Finally, if an PDO who has a share of 85% of the market suddenly gets a change of conscience one day and realizes that they must now become the government, will soon find out that they may be the most powerful militant organization, but they do not have that 85% market share anymore, and it will be reduced massively as soon as people realize that this PDO is willing to commit aggression against them. The remaining honest private defense organizations will get an influx of new subscribers, and new money to expand their operations. In the stock market the prices of the rogue PDO will plummit, and the honest PDOs will rise.
This may still not be sufficient to completely defeat the rogue PDO but if we follow the extreme atomic guilt principle we will find that the chances of above scenario happening are really low, so low that we can even say that a society of pure liberty which follows true and pure principle of individual responsibility will find that principle acting as a deterrent against the formation of state or state like private organizations.