LiberaLaw

The decision by a Tennessee fire agency to deny service to a family with a burning house because the family had failed to pay the agency’s subscription fee (the agency was operated by the city of Fulton but provided service to non-residents on a subscription basis) has prompted sustained discussion throughout the blogosphere, with repeated claims that the incident demonstrates inherent difficulties with the fee-based provision of fire services. Implicitly, then, statists are inclined to see the incident as supporting an argument for state provision of such services, and thus for statism more generally. The story is complicated, as such stories always are, by the facts. The incident happened, it appears, because the homeowners’ grandson started a fire too close to their home. The decision not to provide service was evidently a long-standing city-council voted policy, and the fire-fighters’ insurance apparently wouldn’t cover them if they provided service to a non-subscriber. On the o...

Of the thinkers and writers commonly identified today as market-oriented left-libertarians (that is, leftists —opposed to workplace hierarchies, cultural authoritarianism, arbitrary exclusion on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and aggressive war—who are also market-oriented libertarians —opposed to aggression against people’s bodies and justly acquired possessions), almost all are anarchists; Chris Matthew Sciabarra is perhaps the only relatively visible one who’s not. The question is: how contingent is this connection ? It is possible, for instance, that many left-libertarians have been influenced by Murray Rothbard, and that they affirm both anarchism for something like Rothbard’s reasons for doing so and left-libertarianism on the view that it’s a logical extension of Rothbard’s views. But this explanation wouldn’t cover those whose links with Rothbard are, like mine, pretty tenuous. And it would really just push the fundamental question back a step, in any ca...

I. Introduction Apart from the rare exception—someone in the mold of Robert LeFevre or Leo Tolstoy—most anarchists are not pacifists. They suppose, that is, that there are occasions when it might be appropriate to use force—most commonly, to protect oneself or someone else against unjust attack or to secure compensation for such an attack. While the anarchist seeks to realize an ideal of peaceful, voluntary cooperation, she is likely to be very much aware that it may sometimes be necessary to call the people with guns. Force may sometimes be employed to settle disputes over just control over possessions—what I will call property rights without attempt to settle the question of just when someone might be thought justly to control a given possession. However, forcibly defending property rights in a stateless society is not the moral equivalent of state aggression. In Part II, I briefly describe different sources of legal rules that might obtain in a stateless society and note the kin...

Blogging can build personal connections between a writer and her or his readers. I’d like mine to do so, and I’ve enjoyed the chance to get to know a number of people as a result of various sorts of on-line interactions. This post is designed to contextualize the aspects of my work related to politics and give the people who read it a better sense of who I am. What Made Our Home Different? Born in Glendale, California, in 1966, I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in Riverside County. I grew up in a conservative Protestant home, with parents who were both enthusiastic Republicans—Goldwater voters in ’64, among the last to give up on Richard Nixon a decade later. Despite the obvious similarities, there were at least three important differences between my home and many others that looked superficially like it. (i) My father, a World War II veteran (he served as a medical corpsman in the Pacific Theatre), had seen too much of military life to be ...