From: PW
Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2016 9:19 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: shooting children, starving or otherwise
Dear Dr. Block, Even if a person can’t see the absurdity of killing a child over a stolen zucchini, surely he would soon learn the cost to himself when all of the neighbors who surround him learn of what he has done and shun him. Once he’s locked into his own property and becomes a hermit he’ll perhaps think again about what he’s done. If he can shoot to kill a thief in his garden, his neighbors can shoot to kill a trespasser. End of problem. Also, what you perhaps have overlooked is the fact that most adults understand the limited responsibility of children for their actions. One of the things we learn while growing up is the difference between right and wrong, and, the significance of property. The two and five year old sons of one of my employees don’t understand that the building their mother works in and all of its contents belong to me. It’s my property. So they grab things that an adult wouldn’t, and occasionally do damage. I don’t hold them accountable. I can’t consider their behavior aggression, since they are not capable of intent. If a man had a stroke while driving his car and ran over your wife, killing her, would you be justified in shooting him? No. He didn’t commit aggression. It was an accident; an accident which the man could not have avoided since he was unconscious. Just as the man with the stroke is not an aggressor due to incapacity, so is the child eating your zucchini. PW
Dear PW: Before I answer your very powerful response to my last contribution to this correspondence, I want you, and all others involved, to swear a solemn oath: you won’t tell the NYTimes about this. They’ll summarize this correspondence as: “Walter Block favors starving children, and then shooting them when they try to get some food.”
Now for my substantive response to you:
Which is the basic premise of libertarianism? Shunning of the average person, or, the NAP and private property rights?
Of course our hearts go out to this particular starving child. That is precisely the reaction of all decent people, such as yourself. But, under which system will there be fewer starving children? One based on an acceptance or rejection of the NAP and private property rights? Obviously, the former, no? The real murderer of this particular starving child is not the gardener who shoots him. The real guilty parties are the ones responsible for setting up a system which rejects the NAP and private property rights, e.g., libertarianism, which causes starvation amongst children in the first place. Children, and adults too, starve, or are in dire economic circumstances in places like Africa, Venezuela, North Korea. How shall we characterize the economic systems that prevail in those places? One based upon accepting or rejecting the NAP and private property rights? To ask this is to answer it.
Perhaps you want a system based almost entirely on the NAP and private property rights. The only exception would be when people are starving. But supply curves slope in an upward direction. If you tell people that if they are starving, they can grab other people’s property with impunity, there will be more, many more, “starving” people. A lot of resources will be spent on determining who is really starving, and who is not, resources that would otherwise be used to prevent starvation. So even on a utilitarian ground, let alone the libertarian deontological one, this is a non-starter.
What we’ve got here is a quasi life boat situation. Many people throw up their hands in dismay, and have no answer to such challenges to libertarianism. Not Murray Rothbard. He would ask: “Who is the owner of the row boat? And answer: “He should determine who is saved and who not.” If no one owns the boat, then, Murray would ask “Who was the first homesteader of the boat? Ditto.” Murray focused on the NAP and private property rights as a solution to all such problems, and so do I. Zucchini, eh? Best regards, Walter. For a publication of mine on this topic go here: Block, Walter E. 2003B. “The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism,” February 17; http://archive.lewrockwell.com/block/block26.html
10:14 am on November 6, 2016
