Our friends at Indians for Guns produced this amazing video about gun rights in India.

Guns for Peace

If you are a regular reader of RFL you’d know that this site hosts articles from a bunch of writers, each having their own understanding of what a free society could look like. Its impossible to predict how exactly things will take place in such a society, all that can be done is to use the science of human action and envision how would such a society might look like.
Last article published at RFL was an attempt by the author Sudha Amit to answer the questions asked by various people about the rapist and the rape victim in a free society. I agreed with the article overall but I would like to elaborate some of the points.
If you haven’t read that article, you can still read this one, but I recommend reading that article too.

The question generally asked is if in a free society a criminal is let free for a certain amount of money, then wouldn’t that mean rich people will keep on committing all crimes and walk free?

Proportionality of Crime

Before we proceed I must explain a very important concept of Libertarian justice system and that is “proportionality of crime and punishment”, that is any punishment must be proportional to the crime committed. It could happen that the victim wants to punish the criminal less than the proportional punishment, and that is perfectly acceptable, but if a victim punishes the criminal more than the crime committed, then the victim has now become the aggressor, and now the criminal has become the victim.
Take for example if Alice slaps Bob, and Bob breaks Alice’s leg as a punishment, then Alice has become a victim of Bob’s aggression. Similaly if someone trespasses on your property and you shoot them then you have initiated aggression against them.

Restitution Business

Another important aspect of Libertarian justice theory is that a victim first must be restituted for the harm done to him by the aggressor, and then the aggressor loses the same amount of rights as the amount of rights of the victim he violated. For example if I steal $10,000 from you, then first you need to get those $10,000 back, then I lose rights over my $10,000, so you will get $20,000 back. It is to be noted that you do not get double the money back, you just get your own $10,000 and then another $10,000 as a punishment for me.
Similarly if you poke my eye, and blind me by one eye, then you first need to pay me enough money to provide me with restitution, then you lose the right of your eye, and I will have a right to poke it out.

Rape Scenario

In the case of a rape victim and him/her rapist, first the rapist must provide restitution to the rape victim. That is to make the rape victim whole. Then the rapist loses his rights in the same manner he violated the rights of the rape victim, that is rape victim now has a right to either rape the rapist, or have him sexually violated in the same manner through someone else. The rape victim can fortfeit his right to a restitution and chance to violate the similar rigths of the rapist, but he can never force a bigger punishment than the crime done by the rapist.

By this principle if a rich man rapes a woman, the woman has a right to have the rich man pay her a restitution(the amount of will be determined by the courts), and get him raped(chances are she will pay someone to rape him). Nobody can force the woman to accept money in lieu of punishment of the rich man. If this rich man keeps on raping women, he will keep on losing his rights the same way. If a rich man kills someone then it (could be) gameover for him. If I were a rich man I wouldn’t rely on raping or killing people first and then silencing them with money.

Its possible that the rapist makes the victim an offer that she forfeits the punishment by rape of the rich man. But this offer could be a really large sum of money as there is no upper limit to it. If she demands all the money of the rapist in return of not getting him raped, and rapist really does not wanna be raped then he will have to give her all his money.

No rapist, no matter how rich can live life normally in a free society.

Prostitution and ‘Rape-restitution’

This is the most ridiculous idea that someone would suggest that there is a similarity between money exchanged for prostitution and money given as restitution of a rape victim. Its like someone is confusing stealing groceries with purchasing groceries. Prostituion involves voluntary exchange of sex and money. Rape and its subsequent restitution is not even an exchange. The money is being given as an attempt to restore the damage done to the victim, not for rendering services. Even if you rape a prostitute that is still a rape, and not an act of prostitution.

Conclusion

There are many misconceptions about how a free society will operate without the coercive apparatus of state, before any attempt is made to answer how this will happen one thing must be kept in mind by libertarians and voluntarists. If people really want some service and there is no initiation of aggression involved then the free society will have that service or facility. Once you establish that assumption, you acquire a firm ground from which other people cannot displace you by putting words in your mouth.

I would conclude by quoting a recent conversation I had with a friend who had doubts about a free society. After I explained him about the concept of private proeprty and a society of pure liberty he said: “What if your neighbor is beating his wife, then though its none of my business in your society but I wouldn’t wanna live in such a society?”, my reply was simply “What makes you think I would wanna live in such a society?”, after his shocked withered away I claimed, “Trust me in a free society I wouldn’t live in a neighborhood where people are beating their wives”.

Recently I got a chance to see the movie ‘Dark Knight’, for the first time. There is a very interesting scene in it where Joker creates a situation where he plants bombs on two boats and gives the trigger to the people of the other boat, and tells them that if one of them isn’t destroyed soon, he will blow both the boats up. This was director’s attempt to create a “trolley” problem. This does not happen to me a lot, but once in a blue moon someone will decide to question my commitment to individualism by posing the following scenario:

Imagine if there is a speeding train rushing towards 10 people who are tied down to the track. Their death is certain if the train maintains its course. You can prevent that from happening if you flip the lever and divert the train to another track, where one person is tied down to the track. Assuming you cannot release the individuals, would you let 10 people die or kill one person to save 10 people.

I am sure you must have heard many variations of this scenario. The proper libertarian/individualist answer is simple, you cannot take away the rights(in this case that right would be his life) of any individual in order to save the rights of one or more individuals(assuming its your inaction which will take away the rights of those many individuals).

The goal of posing this scenario to a libertarian in most of the cases isn’t to ponder over a difficult but hypothetical scenario, but to present them with a ‘gotcha’ moment. Most people would not hesitate to take away rights of one individual over the rights of many people, and saying otherwise is not an easy reply.

My replies to few such scenarios are as follows.

For the above given scenario, the question one must ask is, how did this situation came about to. How did 10 people ended being tied up on the railway tracks, and how come another individual was tied to the alternate railway track when the train was destined to go towards the 10 people. This seems to be a very tailored scenario where every element is designed so that above question can be posed to the libertarians.

I am not saying its an impossible scenario, its physically possible to do something like that, but the chances of scenarios like these showing up in real life are very rare. But assuming this does happen, my answer is simple, if this hypothetical example happens exactly how its proposed to me, then yes, I will not kill that one individual for the sake of 10 people. In reality, if I ever do confront this scenario, I will flip the switch so that the train heads towards the single individual, and then try to make a dash towards that guy to save him(because it would be easier for me to untie one guy then ten people). Even though I would do such a thing, it does not mean I am sacrificing the life of one guy to save the lives of many, but that I still want to save the lives of everybody in the scenario, its just flipping the switch towards the single individual gives me a better chance at it. He may still die, and my attempt to untie him could be proven completely futile, yet I have not chosen to kill him, I have chosen to save everybody.

When I give this answer it frustrates people and they decide to present me with more realistic scenarios, take for example this scenario:

Imagine if a terrorist has planted nuclear bombs in American cities(like in the plot of movie ‘Unthinkable’), would you torture him to get out the location of the bombs, or kill him if the act of killing him saves the lives of the millions of people?

Its true that this is a much more feasible scenario than the train and tracks scenario, except its a very easy scenario to answer. If an individual really has put bombs in American cities and he threatens to explode it, then he is making a realistic threat of violence, and a realistic threat of violence is the same thing as the act of violence itself, therefore this individual, according to his own confession is guilty. If an attempt is made to prevent this attack by harming him, then its an act of self-defense, not an ethical dilemma.

This reply usually makes people feel they have been tricked, so they immediately present to me with the following scenario:

Imagine if there is a deadly virus on loose which has the capability of killing millions of people very quickly, in fact lets just say everybody will die if this virus is set lose. One innocent person is infected with this virus. There is no cure for this virus, in fact its so dangerous that even studying it represents massive amount of risk. Would you kill this person, or forget killing him, would you incarcerate this person so that he may not be able to infect other people?

Finally we have landed on a decent enough version of this question. The individual is not guilty, he is not voluntarily causing the death of millions of people. Keeping the arguments about feasibility of such a scenario in a free society aside, lets just assume this just happened. What would you do in such a scenario? Would you uphold his rights or save the lives of millions of people.

This scenario is not very feasible scenario to start with, if a person has been infected with some virus which may infect everybody else, most individuals will voluntarily submit themselves for any kind of measures which may be required to keep the rest of the population safe. Even if we assume there are no such individuals or this individual has no such conscience even then he can be restricted to a piece of property without violating his rights. Everybody on the planet rescinds consent to allow him on their property since every property is private property. Insurance companies can pay him a lot of money so that he stays on a quarantined villa with all sorts of facilities until the end of his life or until he is cured, this money paid to him would just be a cost towards preventive measures against disease.

The simple answer just like the first scenario given is pretty simple, no you cannot violate the rights of an individual over the rights of many people. There are simply no exceptions to that rule, and if this is the only scenario on which the argument of the anti-libertarian relies upon to demonstrate the abject failure of individualism then so be it. The fact is the sole reason why this argument is being posed to the proponent of Individualism because all his rest of the arguments have been satisfactorily answered. When a socialist promotes his ideology, the critique of his argument does not rely upon some hypothetical scenario where the private ownership of means of production is important, but because private ownership of means of production is required everywhere.

Venus project is another attempt made by people who look at a market economy from outside, and think they see numerous vestigial elements which they think are not needed anymore, or since they fail to see their utility, consider it restrictive, and then they conclude that they can do better by removing those vestigial elements from a market economy.

Karl Marx did the same, he saw the market being divided into owners and workers, so he came up with Socialism. He saw ownership of means of production has vestigial element. Keynes did the same, he saw Stock market crash and economy not recover so he came up with his ridiculous theories about Keynesianism. He saw Gold standard as vestigial element of the market. And so on Time after time people keep on coming up with theories to fix the market because they all see how Market works from outside, and are unable to figure out why many things exist in the market.

Venus project is the latest addition in this category. They see the monetary system as a vestigial or restrictive element of the market economy. They see how beautifully the market works, and how people provided each other with their labor, but they fail to see the role of money in it, so they propose removal of money from this system.

I have seen the movie ‘Zeitgeist:Addendum’, and I have hung out in Venus Project forums long enough to see what they are proposing.

Resource-Based Economy(RBE) proponents refuse to acknowledge that there is a scarcity of resources – Remember your first Economics introduction, they teach you that economics is “.. the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” RBE proponents refuse to acknowledge that we may not have enough resources.

Why do they think so? – As given as an example on Venus Project’s homepage, they observe:

At the beginning of World War II the US had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.

Its obvious that RB Economists see that market sooner or later provides every individual what he or she wants(or they observe war time distortions), and conclude that if an individual could be provided with an iPhone in year 2010, that means we have enough resources even in the year 1776 that Benjamin Franklin could also be provided with an iPhone(its not like the world acquired alien resources in that time). That means there must be something restricting this feasibility, and their conclusion is if money did not restrict people of that time from constantly acquiring new resources, experimenting and developing new technologies then we would have a lot more progress in the world.

Resource Based Economy proponents do not understand law of diminishing returns – The RBE proponents attack diminishing returns as a faulty valuation system. Of course as Austrians we know that even in Eden Gardens where everything is abundant, a man still is going to have the scarcity of time, therefore even in society with no scarcity, a man will have value scales. Because men assign different values to different ends. The reason why I value another car much less than the first one, because I can’t drive two cars at the same time, I can drive only one, and once I have had a car, I would rather prefer to have some other ends achieved. Therefore I value another car as much less than the first one. Third car, even less than second one.

RBE believes that there is something inherently wrong with high values of Diamond, there is no reason why it should cost so much, and 1 oz of water should be of same value(or even more) than 1 oz of diamond. They believe that if we can get rid of these valuations(or they believe this’d happen on its own once we get rid of monetary system), we will not have to worry about diminishing returns anymore.

Resource Based Economy proponents consider scarcity of capital as just that, scarcity of capital – RBE has taken this page off the books of other schools of economics(Keynesian, Montarists) which do not have a Capital theory. A scarcity of capital according to them only represents scarcity of capital, not a scarcity of resources/goods/time. This is probably the biggest reason why they think they can get rid of monetary system and make things work. The fact that we have scarcity of capital because we have scarcity of time, goods, labor or all of these. We are in a recession because our goods have been misallocated and govt is preventing them from being reallocated to more fruitful production endeavors.

RBE proponents only see one timeframe, and one group of people – RBE proponents fail the one lesson of economics Henry Hazlitt taught, The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. They purposefully focus on a very small timeframe(such as war time production of First class fighting aircrats), and only one side of the picture(that the production rose to 90,000 aircrafts a year from only 600 aircrafts a year). When you remove this error, and look at all timeframes not just one, and all groups of people not just one, you realize that they can hardly promise more production in all aspects of economy without a monetary system even when you give them a very liberal leahway.

During oil crises of the 70s when world saw the power Saudi Arabia might have, they threatened to use Food as a weapon against Saudi, so the Saudi government started wheat subsidy program in order to be self-sufficient. Soon Saudi Arabia had so much wheat production that they were exporting wheat to other countries. The RBE proponents see it as a proof that even a desert country such as Saudi Arabia is capable enough to produce all the wheat it needs. But what it cannot see(and which is even more unseen with a lack of monetary system), is the high cost Saudi govt paid to achieve that. Massive resources were directed from other places to grow wheat. RBE proponents have a habit of looking at examples like these, and use them in their advantage.

RBE proponents do not understand economic calculation – Profits are demonized by RBE proponents, it doesn’t mean that they support a loss-making venturing or non-profit venturing(like a lot of leftists do), instead they just refuse to understand what are profits or need for economic calculation. This is actually the hill where their whole theory falls down to pieces, but you will never be able to have a discussion on this topic, because they refuse to acknowledge that scarcity exists. Since they don’t think scarcity exists, and technology can provide them with everything they want, they fail to see why anyone would need economic calculation. RBE proponents do not understand economic calculation because they don’t think we have scarcity of anything, and they don’t understand that we have massive scarcity and whatever we get we get because of economic calculations because they don’t understand economic calculations. So its a cyclical trap.

The list of anomalies and fallacies propagated by the Venus Project is endless. They rely too much on technological solutions and too little on human action or praxeological aspects of their idea. They fail to understand why Socialism doesn’t work(or at least they think it doesn’t work because of lack of human motivation).

As I understand more and more economics(by Economics I mean Austrian Economics, the real kind, not mathematical model of calculating how much you prefer your kids studying theory of evolution vs intelligent design and calculating National Patriotic Index), I realize more and more how easy is it to show the problems with theory of Socialism.
One of the things I realized early on was that a purely voluntary socialist worker’s union would be completely feasible in a capitalist society. If a bunch of men want to create a worker’s co-operative where profits are distributed equally among everybody, essentially it is the same thing as a company fully and equally owned by its workers. Just do not allow any individual who does not work in the company to own the capital goods(means of production).
I have eventually understood ‘capital’ to be nothing but deferred consumption. That means whenever you delay your present smaller consumption for the future larger consumption, that deferred consumption is essentially your capital. For example, if you have a bag of wheat, which you do not consume today but instead plant it a field so that a few months from now they will grow into wheat fields and you will now be able to reap a lot more wheat out of it. You in this case have deferred your present consumption 1 bag of wheat for 3 months where you hope to make 7-8 bags of wheat out of it. I have used the example of wheat because I can explain it only with the help of one actor. Generally though you defer your consumption and hand it to someone else who needs it in present more than in future. For example you may give away 100 cattle to someone today so that 5 years from now they return 200 cattle to you.

Capitalist is a deferred consumptionist

This explanation of capital as ‘deferred consumption’ opens up a plethora of new insights to things. For example, if capital is deferred consumption then capitalist must be the guy who defers his present consumption. This clearly explains to any individual who fails to see what a capitalist’s work actually involves, or why does he deserve profits from any venture.
Warren Buffet is technically the largest deferred consumptionist in US. This means he could consume so many things in present(billions and billions of dollars worth of goods) but he choses to not consume them, and instead he defers it for later consumption(which he probably will never do).

Utility of deferring your present consumption

You may now ask what utility does anyone delaying their present consumption may offer to the society as a whole, because this clearly sounds like a very selfish thing to do. The answer is really simple, almost no human action which does not directly satisfies the end we are looking for requires delaying our present consumption. For example, if you are hungry and you want to eat a pizza then the action of eating that pizza directly satisfies your want, therefore it is not deferred consumption because its an act of consumption itself.
On the other hand if you now have to make that pizza, now the series of actions to satisfy your desire are:
a) You bake the pizza
b) You eat the pizza
The first action involves deferring(albeit a really less amount considering it will take you only 20 mins to do it) your present consumption of raw pizza, or any other food, for later more satisfying consumption of cooked pizza.
You may ask now, that just because in this example I had to wait for 20 mins for pizza to be cooked doesn’t mean that I always have to defer my consumption, for example I could drive to a pizza shop and just buy the pizza without waiting for it to be cooked. My point is simple, someone at that point has already done the job of deferring the present consumption for the future consumption, someone has waited 20 minutes for you so that you can get it immediately and in return you have rewarded them with money(which is their larger future consumption). Of course lets also not forget that making a pizza requires flour, vegetables, cheese, chicken etc. So the total time taken to delay consumption for full making a pizza would be time required to grow wheat, make flour, grow vegetables, make cheese out of a cow you raised, and raising chickens. That means if you were living on an island with no civilization then to make a pizza you will require growing wheat, and vegetables for months, and capturing and raising cow and chicken for months before you are in position to make that pizza. Thankfully in any modern society someone has already done the job of deferring the present consumption so that you now can simply walk into a supermarket and buy all those things, or take even more shorter route and buy the cooked pizza from the pizzaria.
As you realize now that our society and civilization would be impossible if not for deferred consumption or capital. Essentially a capitalist society is a society where production of large operations is planned through deferred consumption of private individuals. This begs the next question.

Who defers their present consumption in Socialism?

This is now the most important question any socialist must answer. If you have read the article till now, you realize that its impossible to get rid of the capital from any society. The only capital-less society would be a highly primitive society where almost every action is aimed at direct consumption, this means the primitive men who created tools to help in hunting, actually ended up creating the first capitalist society of the world. In fact only animals do not perform indirect actions to achieve their ends. The only real world example in this case is a monkey recently in a zoo who planned to throw stones at visitors by collecting them in advance. Coming to think of it, even dogs hide bones for a later date.
The point here is that it is really impossible to eliminate capital from a society, so any claims made by the socialists of creating a new man who is not capitalist are ridiculously wrong. This generally eliminates that last claim and results in socialists making a more smarter claim, that in a socialist society, only the indirectly deferred consumption will not be allowed. For example, any individual can sow his bag of wheat to create 7 bags out of them 3 months later, but no individual is allowed to give his bag of wheat to another and hope to receive 7 bags three months later. This will completely stop a capitalist from ‘exploiting’ workers.
If a socialist makes this claim then it means he at least acknowledges why a capitalist deserves his profits. If in a shoe manufacturing factory, workers from start(homesteading the land, making bricks, concrete, sand, constructing the building, raising animals for leather), to the end(manufacturing the shoes, packaging them bringing them to the market), then they truly deserve the profits proportional to their role in the manufacturing process, but the fact is that this kind of action would be highly inefficient and ardous, and it would be much better of these workers defer their consumption in other ways(like saving money), or allow somenoe else who has delayed a lot of present consumption over time(capitalist) to invest in their venture and allow him to make profits.

This is why even the most hardworking socialist society is poor

The fact is that even in a socialist society someone must defer their present consumption, any socialist who claims that he envisions a society with no capital does not know what is he talking about. A smarter socialist might say that in his system the state will do the job of reallocating the deferring of present consumption equally among people, but that still leaves the big question about a socialist society and that is, if my deferring of present consumption does not lead in increased larger future consumption, then why should I delay my present consumption?
You may reward your workers proportional to what they have worked that day, sure people will work 18 hours a day to catch fish with their hands, but nobody will eat less fish of what they caught that day, just so that they can save enough fish to eventually build a net and be able to catch 10 times more fish than they can with merely using hands, and for a society to become prosperous deferred consumption is the single most important requirement.
If you are a socialist and you have thought of a socialist paradise, to be realistic you must not envision an advanced society, a truly realistic socialist society would be a society of primitive men who hunt animals and gather berries without using any kinds of tools.
Of course this brings us to a whole another set of issues with the so-called modern ‘capitalist’ societies such as US and UK, where the state depletes the deferred consumption of a society with the help of fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, central banks, and taxation. Not to mention the so called ‘free market magicians’, such as Milton Friedman and Chicago school who supports a Capitalist society, yet fails miserably in understanding what is really happening when a market crashes or how capital plans production, but that’s for another article.

Conclusion

My conclusion is simple, if you consider yourself as a Socialist(or any other leftist ideology where you are going to get rid of economic calculation and private ownership of wealth), you must explain me who in your system would be the deferred consumptionist. Who will reduce his present consumption for the future larger consumption. Sure socialists do talk about larger future consumption to be distributed equally among all its people, but what they fail to explain is who will be the person who will SAVE enough for the future date when nobody can work to do something else.

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.

It is probably an often thought question, but rarely answered correctly by most of the people. What makes a country like India poorer than a country like say America? I have tried to answer this question since I was a kid, then as an adult.
Lets see, most people might answer to that question as “India is poor because it lacks so and so “, the effect being something India does not have because its poor, and US has because its richer, and not a cause of Indian poverty. For example, some people might answer
“India is poor because it lacks infrastructure western countries have”, or
“India is poor because of lack of education among people”, or
“India is poor because its very corrupt, and it has politicians who manipulate people etc etc”.
The problem here is simple, almost all these answers are effects, India does not have the infrastructure of western countries because India is poor, it doesn’t need that infrastrucutre, you cannot spend Rs 500 million per year on a road which brings per user cost is Rs 5,000 per month, and the average salary of people using that road is Rs 10,000 per month. Why not? Because if you did build a luxury road like that for people this poor, you are wasting resources more than you are creating them. When India becomes richer better infrastructure will follow, even if govt is the only entity building it, they will have more money to spend on infrastructure. You cannot create prosperity by creating one effect and hoping other effect will follow.
Similarly, the stuff about Indian people being educated, well if you are going to work on a construction site for all your life(someone has to work there), there is no point in spending so much money on your education which could have gone towards creating more job opportunities for you. By trying to create this effect, by educating 100,000 workers who will be working on manufacturing all their lives, and then ending up with having jobs for only 60% of them isn’t really a better outcome.
A bit matured people who understand how things worked, they will come to the conclusion that India is poor because it has less money than America, therefore India is poor and America is richer. But then that was incorrect too when you will find out that Indian govt has the power to print any amount of money possible. Why can’t Indian govt print more money, give some to everyone and make everybody richer. Apparently its not that easy as it may sound, when money supply is increased, prices of commodities rise soon thereafter. So even if poor people are given a lot of money, that will just raise the prices of the various commodities they might buy thereby bringing them back to same level of poverty as before(more or less).
I know a lot of people who know the correct answer to the question stated in the title. India is poorer than US because it has less capital than latter, and capital isn’t the same thing as money.

What is Capital

So the question comes, what is ‘capital’ and how is it different from money? To understand it we must understand first what is money. Money is nothing but a medium of exchange, we don’t really intend to consume money, we only keep money because everybody else accepts it and then we can acquired the final resource which we really intend to consume.
Capital is essentially any commodity or goods, or even service, which is used to hold value across time. In simple words, if you do not consume a good or a commodity, but only keep it for later consumption then that good serves as capital. Because in most of the cases we keep money for the future consumption therefore money is the most common form of capital, but if you bought a car which you intended to start using only 2 years later then that car is your capital(although I don’t see any reason why you would want to do that, but that’s beside the point).
When I say India has less capital than US, what does that really mean? Does that mean Americans can defer their present consumption more than Indians can? If we look at savings rate of both the countries, Indians can definitely beat Americans savings rate hands down, so shouldn’t that mean Indians must have more capital than Americans? The truth is, America has a lot more capital buildup than India, therefore despite of not deferring a lot of their present consumption for the future one, they can still manage to create more ‘future resources’ than India.
For example an American family may only save 10% of their savings for future or invest 10% of their income for future, but because the total amount of capital they have is much more than an average Indian family which might save about 40% of their income, their capital results in more consumer goods than what an Indian family’s capital results in.
Simply put, in order to be as rich as America, India will have to accumulate as much capital as America has. Artificially achieving the same literacy rate as US by govt spending will not make India as rich as US, because people won’t have as many jobs to do. Building an infrastructure through government spending will also not make India as rich as US as it won’t be worth spending so much on infrastructure when there isn’t enough capital to put that infrastructure to proper use.
This may be a very simple thing to say, because its like saying ‘in order to be rich you need to acquire a lot of bank balance’, which sounds like common sense, but in this case its like most people seem to think that if you take thousands of dollars of loan for education, you will automatically become rich, or if you buy a bigger house, you will become automatically rich.

How do we build up more capital?

Lets first take an example of Robinson Crusoe who got stranded on an island. He catches fishes everyday from 8AM to 5PM and eats them. Since he just landed on the island, he catches these fishes by hand and he is able to catch 25 fishes everyday. Since Crusoe came from a modern society he realizes that he can build a net, and that will enable him to catch a lot more fishes. Unfortunately, he also realizes that he cannot just blink and wish a fishing net, he must build it, and making a fishing net requires 5 days of his work. The problem in front of Crusoe is that if he starts to work for 5 full days to build that net, then he won’t be able to catch any fish therefore he will starve to death.
Crusoe in this scenario faces the problem of lack of capital. He needs capital to sustain himself until he extends the structure of production(that is from using only hands to catch fish, he uses hands to build a fishing net, which he uses to catch fishes. He realizes that by building that fishin net he will be able to catch 300 fishes everyday.
So Crusoe has 2 options, he can either:
a) Consume only 20 fishes everyday, and store the 5 unconsumed fishes; Keep on doing this for 20 days, which will accumulate him 100 fishes, which are good enough for him to sustain himself for five days he won’t be able to work.
b) Catch only 20 fishes each day and spend that extra time in building the net, so he will be spreading his 5 days of work, over 20 days.
In either of the two cases Crusoe has deferred his present consumption of 5 fishes everyday so that after he builds the net he is now able to produce and consume a LOT more fishes everyday. He can either catch 300 fishes and maybe consume them all, or make more dishes out of them, etc etc, or he could continue to catch only 25 fishes everday, work less and have more leisure time, and spending the remaining time in working on art, literature, maybe music etc.
India is exactly like Crusoe without the fishing net, and America is exactly like Crusoe with a fishing net. Because its easier for America to produce a lot without giving up a lot of present goods, America has a lot of time to spend on art, literature, music, etc. This is the exact reason why American atheletes and sportsmen win so many medals in Olympics, they have the disposable income and time to train themselves for sports, whereas in India we still spend most of our time catching fishes by hand.
In order to build more capital, you require two things:
a) People should be willing to put a lot of present goods for later consumption
b) When they put their present goods for later consumption, nothing should reduce or steal away their capital from them
The first task isn’t really that difficult for India, since we already have high savings rate. The second task is actually the most difficult task in India. You may ask, why? The answer is simple because the way we understand reality, we don’t think people should be allowed to accumulate capital.
Let me elaborate what I meant by nothing should reduce or steal away the capital from people who are deferring their present consumption for future. In the above example of Crusoe, lets say Crusoe’s fishes got rotten because they weren’t stored properly, so his capital has been destroyed, now to achieve the same earlier result he will have to build his savings again.
Take another scenario, lets say Man Friday, is another cast away, who drifted to the other part of the Island, he also catches fishes by hand, but he is able to catch only 10 fishes because he is not that good with catching fishes. When Crusoe was saving 5 fishes everyday, Man Friday decried that Crusoe was being unfair and hoarding fishes, also Crusoe being more dexterous with fishing, must feed Man Friday some of his fishes. So everyday Man Friday raids Crusoe’s extra fishes and consumes them in the name of making the society more equal. In this case again Crusoe’s capital has been depleted, and he will never be able to build that fishing net, and although Man Friday and Crusoe will be a bit more equal, they will remain poor. In fact soon Crusoe will realize that he has no incentive to really starve himself by 5 fishes, so he will either consume all 25 fishes or will catch only 5 fishes each day.
So how does capital get depleted, or stolen away, or reduced from the person who is building it? The answer is simple, because the way most Indians think, and always thought, was that we cannot allow one man to have all the wealth of the society, even if he built it all. So we like Man Friday in the above example, continously rob Crusoes of the Indian society, through taxation, which ‘we’ consider perfectly ‘justified’, or through a fiat currency and fractional reserve banking system, about which most of us don’t even care, its left for economics students who were educated by the western economists who don’t even understand how capital works.
What ends up happening is that we never grow rich. It was only until 1991, when Indian economy was liberalized and a lot more capital accumulation was allowed, and since then we have seen a LOT of economic progress, but still most people do not see or understand the function of capital, for them, capital means something to do with capitalism(which is technically correct, capitalism is a system where capital reigns means of production), and under capitalism ‘rich grow richer and poor go poorer’.

A society with more capital takes care of its poor better

Lets look back at the previous example of Crusoe, had Man Friday allowed Crusoe to build his net, Crusoe would have been able to produce a lot more fishes everyday, and then Man Friday could then provide Crusoe with some other services, in exchange for his fishes. Lets just say all Man Friday is good at is dancing, and creating stories and telling them passionately, since they both are stranded on an island, Crusoe might value this entertainment service a lot, so Crusoe works all day catching 300 fishes, and gives 100 fishes to Man Friday in exchange of Man Friday’s entertainment services.
Had Man Friday stressed on equality, all the way along, Crusoe’s net wouldn’t have been built, and Crusoe would have remained relatively rich(because he caught 25 fishes everyday and consumed 20), and Man Friday would have remained poor(because he caught only 10 fishes everyday and was able to consume only 15). Please note that in the society with more capital(ie, when Crusoe built a net), Crusoe was consuming 200 fishes everday, which is almost double of what Man Friday was consuming(100 fishes), and socialists decry that rich has gotten richer in capitalism and poor poorer, but Man Friday in the society with more capital is much more well fed and richer than Man Friday in society with less capital. This is exactly what we see in America and in India, a poor in America is still richer than even the average guy of India. All this is only facilitated if we stop believing in the redistribution of wealth and start allowing building up of capital.