This is addressed to all those repulsed by the political alternatives offered today, those who are seeking a rational social-political position.

Rational—reached by a process of reason. A political position should be based on a process of logical reasoning, not on running with a herd or substituting feelings for thinking.

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Rational—grounded in observed facts, not on the Bible and not on “narratives” spun out by nihilist academics.

Political theory depends upon a view of reality, of man’s nature, and of his means of knowing reality. My next post will take up these deeper topics, showing how they underlie and shape how one approaches politics.

The solution is not center-Left, center-Right or center-center. The truth is not a compromise between two errors. What is needed is a radical alternative to both Left and Right, a system that doesn’t attempt to work with the worldview of either tribe, but starts with a fresh, first-handed view of the individual vs. the state.

I have found four ethical-political ideas that together open the door to a radical, but wholly American, alternative.

Only four? You may be dubious. But watch.

1. Your life is your own.

You are not the slave of any other man, group, or entity—human or divine. “Society” does not own you; “society” is just a number of other individuals. Your life is an end in itself, not a means to the ends of others. Nor do others exist as means to your ends. Each individual’s life is his to live, free and clear.

2. You have rights.

The political expression of this is the conception of individual rights. Each individual has the right to his life, and as corollaries, the right to what living a human life requires: the right to liberty, to property, and to “the pursuit of happiness.”

As the American Founding Fathers understood, the right to life has to include the right to take the actions that life as a human being requires and consists of.

What is the source of rights? Not God, not the state, but moral philosophy. Rights are moral principles. Political rights define the morally right terms of social interaction, the terms that law exists to protect, not to violate.

Although rights are moral principles, they do not identify personal virtues or vices; they do not say, “Be honest” or “Show integrity.” Rights identify a more abstract issue: the areas within which you should be free to act as you decide.

“Rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” (Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights”)

“I have a right to do this” means “Morality demands that I be the one to make the choice between doing this and not doing it.”

In other words, rights say that you have an absolute moral claim to act independently, free of coercive interference from other individuals and from the state.

This freedom exists only within the limits set by your rights: you are not entitled to step across the line where your rights end and another’s begin. There is not and cannot be a right to violate others’ rights.

3. Only physical force can violate rights.

Physical force is physical contact with the person or property of another without his consent. Or the threat of such contact. Physical force is the use or threatened use of fists, clubs, guns, bombs—instruments of physical destruction.

The simple, absolute distinction is: physical force vs. voluntary consent.

A man’s rights are not violated when a woman refuses to sleep with him. But the woman’s rights are horribly violated if he forces himself upon her.

My rights are not violated if an employer will not hire me. Nor, if the wages he offers me are less than I deserve. He is not my slave. I don’t have any claim on his money—just as he has no claim on my services.

But my rights are violated if a mugger’s knife makes me hand over my wages.

I have every right to use force to defend myself against the mugger. There is a fundamental divide between aggression and defense against aggression—between initiated and retaliatory force.

Retaliatory force is necessary to preserve rights. Pacifism means surrender to the brute.

Political philosophy is set once we identify one more essential:

4. Government is force.

Physical force is the essence of government, the factor that distinguishes government from corporations, clubs, schools, and all other social groups. Other groups may have rules, but only government backs up its rules with physical force. A business or university has by-laws, but not its own police force or militia; it can only appeal to the government, through the courts, for protection of its rights.

The laws of a government are not suggestions. They are not requests. They are commands. The laws of a government must be obeyed—under penalty of fines, imprisonment, and, ultimately, death.

A proper government will use its physical force only in retaliation, retaliation against the force initiated by criminals or invading armies. The police will arrest the thief, the rapist, the murderer; the military will retaliate against any countries that launch attacks against the citizens.

But the peaceful man should face no threat of force from the government. Whether he is moral or immoral, whether he is atheist or religious, whether he is a billionaire or one of the “needy,” a proper government issues only one order to him: “Don’t reach for a gun.” In other words, no one may initiate the use of physical force against another.

Freedom is the absence of force. It’s the ability to act on one’s own judgment, uncoerced—which requires granting the same right to everyone else.

It has been observed that the limit of my right to swing my fist is where your nose begins.

(More precisely, the limit comes when the movement of my fist poses an objective threat of damage; the threat of force is force.)

What kind of society do these 4 points mandate? A voluntary society.

All human interactions must be voluntary, entered into by mutual consent. If agreement cannot be reached, the parties must go their separate ways. Neither can reach for a gun. Neither can force the other to subordinate his choices, his mind, his life to their demands.

Persuasion appeals to the mind. It points to facts and offers incentives. Force negates the mind. It coerces by threats of destruction. Your thoughts, your plans, your decisions become irrelevant, courtesy of the gun of the holdup man or of the Gestapo.

The basic social-political alternative is: freedom vs. force. That means: the mind-respecting vs. the mind-negating.

The name for a fully voluntary society, based on persuasion not force, is capitalism. Specifically, laissez-faire capitalism.

Both Left and Right are collectivist; neither side takes seriously the reality of an individual life and the individual’s right to live it according to his own judgment. Neither side wants laissez-faire.

It’s a gross understatement to say that neither Left nor Right would limit the government to protecting rights: neither recognizes the existence of such a thing as individual rights.

The Left wants the regulatory state or even a socialist takeover of the economy. The Right wants a populist, police-state, whose Supreme Leader can decide to round up “internal enemies,” deport “illegals,” legislate morality, and junk the Constitution.

The Left used to uphold the right of free speech. No longer. The Right used to uphold business freedom and international free trade. No longer.

What American laissez faire was, and how we lost it, will be the subject of the second post in this series.
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Part II

In the first part of this series, I named four ideas that ground a rational political philosophy:

1. Your life is your own.
2. You have rights.
3. Only physical force can violate a right.
4. Government is force.

Together, these four ideas mandate political freedom under limited government. But each statement is only an epigram – a headline, in effect. To see clearly and concretely what kind of social system they imply, I need to say a little more about what each “headline” condenses.

1. “Your life is your own.”

You aren’t owned by any person or any group. Jefferson: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.”

This is a principle from ethics—the ethics of individualism. Individualism views the individual as an autonomous being, whose free will enables him to think, judge, and act on his own, fully independently.

2. “You have rights.”

Your rights define the areas within which you must be left free to act on your own decisions. A right is a moral imperative, an imprescriptible entitlement to freedom of thought and action.

Since man lives and acts in the physical world, in order to implement the rights to life and liberty, he must have property rights. Observe the inseparable connection between life, liberty, and property.

Property and Life: If the government controls all the food, it can starve you to death—as Stalin did to millions of peasant farmers (kulaks) in the 1930s.

Property and Liberty: Taking a man’s property without his consent deprives him not only of the use and enjoyment of his product but also of the hours of his life he put into producing it. Rand: “The man who works while others dispose of his product is a slave.”

The rights of one man end where the rights of another begin. Every man is free to act on his own judgment . . . within the sphere of his own rights.

Contrary to the beliefs of both Right and Left, there can be no such thing as a conflict of rights. The very purpose of the concept of rights is to define, in principle, who may do what, who may act and who must forbear. Rights are principles designed to resolve apparent conflicts. To say “rights conflict” is a sloppy and misleading way of saying that it has not yet been determined who has the right in question. Or else it’s to fail to comprehend what rights are.

3. “Only physical force can violate a right.”

Freedom denotes an absence—the absence of coercion. Coercion—making someone do something or suffer some damage—operates by using physical force. Physical force is fundamentally different from “social pressure,” unequal “bargaining power,” or any of the other whined-about forms of “influencing” another’s behavior, where to avoid the “influence,” one can simply walk away. You cannot walk away when the mugger has a knife at your throat or when the police have you in handcuffs. Physical force is the only thing that can nullify your will and make you obey.

So, let’s be very clear about what physical force is. I define “physical force” as physical contact with another’s person or property without his consent. Or the threat thereof.

But you’ll be told “A hungry man is not free.” This tangle evades the question of the cause of the hunger. Is a man’s being hungry due to someone’s physical contact with him or his property? Was his condition imposed by fists, guns, theft, the gulag? No? Then he is indeed free. His hunger is then a nature-given fact, not a condition imposed on him by force.

And let’s name the principle operating here: The failure to give a man food is not a case of taking something away from him. Refusing to hand over your wealth to someone is not robbing him. A right is a demand for freedom, for non-interference, for being left alone. A right can’t be a demand that others work to provide you with what you need. What about their rights?

Need is not a license to loot.

Rights are a moral claim to be free from initiated physical force. Rights prescribe freedom by proscribing coercion.

Only physical force can coerce you—can make you act against your own judgment, your own values, your own life. No smile or frown, no incentive or lack of incentive can nullify your mind and make you go along. But a gun can.

4. “Government is force.”

An act of force is either retaliatory or it is not. But force that is not retaliatory is force that’s used against an innocent, peaceful person. There’s no third alternative: force is used either aggressively or in defense against aggression.

This applies par excellence to every government action. The moral issue that must be raised in regard to every government action is: does this action initiate the use of force, or is it limited to retaliating against force that another person or group started?

The only morally proper role for government is using its force to protect rights from their violation by force. Hence a proper government is limited to three basic functions: the police to counter the force initiated by criminals, the military to counter the force initiated by foreign invaders, and a court system to determine who is criminally or civilly liable, i.e., who has the right and who is forcibly violating or threatening to violate that right.

This is “limited government,” the restriction of government force to the task of protecting rights.

Part III will cash in on all the preceding, naming the radical changes in government that accepting all the foregoing would bring.

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Email the author - hb@harrybinswanger.com