I receive, oh, 200-300 e mails per day. I have this compulsion that I must answer all (polite) queries. However, I cannot engage in back and forth correspondence with all knowledgeable, kind, interested, Austro-libertarian readers of LewRockwell.com. If I did, or even tried to do so, I’d never get any other writing done. So, please forgive me for not being as responsive as I would like to be. Sometimes, as in the present thread about threats, I’ll get dozens of letters about it. I’m sure you can appreciate, I can only respond to a few of them. Here’s another:

—–Original Message—–
From: KW
Sent: Thu 7/14/2016 9:45 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Random super specific libertarian questions

Dr. Block-

First I have to say that I am a huge fan of your work and a Rothbardian
anarcho-capitalist, so I enjoy your answers to what I consider very
specific questions of libertarian legality. However I know that you have
written on the subject before but I don’t see you emphasizing an important
point to me which is that many questions of libertarian legality should be
and in my mind can only be decided on a case by case basis. Maybe I’m
mistaken but to me the question of how far a threat has to be taken in
order to be actionable along with other similar questions where the
principle is clear but how it applies to a specific situation is a little
hazy are impossible to disentangle without the best possible understanding
of the complete situation. It seems like we as libertarians don’t want to
say “The situation you’ve described to me is too abstract to know how the
NAP properly applies to it.” I think that this is a powerful answer
though. One of the attractive points to me about the philosophy is the
recognition that you don’t and probably can’t have an enumerated list of
activities that would comprise the entirety of illegal activities in an
ancap world. It’s like Rothbard’s example of you coming into a situation
where A grabs B’s watch and runs. We can’t say with certainty which person
is the aggressor and which the victim until we know whose watch it is. I
guess my point is while I think that it is interesting to speculate on
various “sticky situations,” I think that it is falling into a trap where
we are trying to spin out a legal system like we currently know where there
are laws written down we have to abide by the letter of the law from the
libertarian NAP which resists such a list precisely because it is
impossible(unless you are god) to anticipate every possible outcome of
every possible action people can take before they take them. KW

Dear KW:

Thanks for raising some very important points. This one sticks out at me: “how far a threat has to be taken in order to be actionable.” My response is that libertarian theory does not give a hard and fast answer to that challenge. That is why we need courts, hopefully private ones. I don’t like taking things on a “case by case” basis; that sounds too arbitrary. I think the answer is that if there is some sort of “clear and present danger” then and only then may the threatened person take violent defensive action. At the other end of the spectrum, the comedian Milton Berle often said things like “I swear I’ll kill you.” Everyone knew that was a joke. At the other end of the spectrum, if someone is pointing a gun at you at close range and threatening to kill you, that would certainly be “actionable” as you put it.

I have written a bit about this here:

Block, Walter and William Barnett II. 2008. “Continuums” Journal Etica e Politica / Ethics & Politics, Vol. 1, pp. 151-166, June; http://www2.units.it/~etica/2008_1/BLOCKBARNETT.pdf

Best regards,

Walter

The Best of Walter E. Block