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Inchoate crime, accessories, and constructive malice in libertarian law
... No. For the case in favor of the legalization of incitement see Block, 2009A, 2011Block, 2009A, , 2012Mortellaro, 2009;O'Neill and Block, 2013;Rothbard, 1998Rothbard, [1982. Only those who actively aid and abet this evil system should be criminals. ...
Horowitz rejects reparations for African Americans. We demonstrate that their heirs are entitled to the property illegitimately obtained by the slave owners. When we operate under the libertarian homesteading principle, the land should be redistributed back to the people who worked and tilled it first. That is, the black slaves. Horowitz’s claims against reparations serve as a poor refutation towards the reparations argument. African Americans are entitled to the “40 acres and a mule” that was promised, yet never fulfilled. We rely upon libertarian theory to clearly understand the case for reparations.
... While in For a New Liberty (1973), Rothbard offers a full argument on how the Non-Aggression Principle exhausts the naturalist legal framework and how natural rights can be expressed in terms of property rights, a number of debates addressing more nuanced crime definitions have been conducted on top of his theory. An issue similar to one discussed in this paper has been raised by O'Neill and Block (2013), in which they attempt to characterize a call for aggression or an attempt of aggression without said act -so called inchoate crimes, ones incomplete in some respect. They argue incitement, a non-direct call for aggression based on emotional manipulation, cannot be recognized as crime under natural law, however, a free decentralized society respectful of property rights would otherwise limit its negative impact. ...
In the framework of the natural law, only direct aggression or call to direct aggression may be legally punishable. However, the methods of information war and ideological subversion, while non-violent in the first stages of the long-term subversion process, are intentionally engineered to end in aggression (note: “information war” is here understood as conscious manipulation of cultural perception for future political gains, not cyberwarfare).
The paper examines whether it is possible to extend the notion of aggression in the framework of the natural law to include self-defense against ideological subversion. We use the information war tactics carried out in the XX century by the KGB propaganda department (as described by Eastern bloc defectors) as the most incisive example. We show that in order to proceed with defense against such strategies, due to the subtle, stretched in time and mostly psychological nature of propaganda – we would necessarily have to break the natural law ourselves. However, we also argue that for such subversion strategies to be successful, they must be carried out in a society with an already overgrown political system where one group can exert power over another group. Therefore, to ask if we can extend the definition of aggression to information war in the framework of the natural law is meaningless, because for an information war tactic to be successful, the natural law must already be violated in the targeted society.
We also examine the Popperian paradox of tolerance in this light and claim the clear demarcation line between “the tolerant” and “the intolerant” is impossible to be drawn.
Finally, we propose maximum decentralization and mature culture of self-reliance as the only possible defense strategies against ideological subversion, which also ensure a sustainable, relatively free society. We must note though that there might exist trade-offs between defenses against an ideological and an energetic attack.
Keywords: Natural Law; Propaganda; Information war; The paradox of tolerance; Cold War.
A grabs B and uses him as a body shield. That is, A hides behind B (A renders B helpless to resist his grasp), and from that vantage point, shoots at C. According to libertarian theory, may B shoot at C, or, is it proper that C pull the trigger at B? In the view of Rothbard (1984), the former is correct: B is entitled to gun down C. In my (Block, forthcoming) view, this is incorrect. Rather, it would be lawful to C to properly kill B. (Both Rothbard and I assume that neither B nor C can end A’s reign of terror). Jakobsson (2010) supports the Rothbardian position. The present paper is at an attempt of mine to refute Jakobsson, and, thus, also, Rothbard (1984), once again.
Property and Contract The theory of property specifies how to determine which individuals own—have the right to control—particular scarce resources. By having a just, objective rule for allocating control of scarce resources
It is widely held that the proper role of criminal punishment is to ensure in a cost-efficient manner that criminal laws will be obeyed. As James Buchanan puts it,
the reason we have courts is not that we want people to be convicted of crimes but that we want people not to commit them. The whole procedure of the law is one, essentially, of threatening people with unpleasant consequences if they do things which are regarded as objectionable.
According to the deterrence theory of punishment, which I will here accept without argument in order to tease out some of its implications, legislators must be aware of opportunities to maximize the threat value of criminal prohibitions. By maximizing deterrence, we minimize the cost of crime. On the other hand, creating these threats, and carrying them out, is also costly. So we also wish to minimize the cost of avoiding crime. An efficient deterrent, therefore, will be one which minimizes the sum of the costs of crime and crime avoidance, where ‘cost’ is to be broadly construed.
keen insights, in some ways solidly predicated upon libertarianism and praxeology, and yet, and yet, much as I enthusiastically agree with goodly portions of it and am even inspired by them, I cannot