REVISITING THE NAP, AND STAMPING IT OUT WHEREVER WE CAN FIND IT.
The non-aggression principle is a fallacious distraction specifically developed in order to permit deceit. True, one must not aggress, but that statement is meaningless without stating what it is we fail to aggress against.
Under the NAP, as advocated by both Rothbard and Hoppe, and perpetuated by Block, the test of aggression is merely intersubjectively verifiable property. Under this fallacy, they argue that man SHOULD not retaliate, and must not retaliate, or he will be brought to court for his retaliation.
But this test permits parasitism, and as Block advocates, even blackmail. And man retaliates against blackmail. We cannot explain away that man retaliates against blackmail. It is praxeologically irrational that man not retaliate against blackmail.
The common law provides a means for preventing retaliation – and in large part that was solution that provided its origin: *to preserve cooperation by providing a means of retaliation, without the necessity of appeal to authority.*
The test of demand for authority is that we must not aggress against anything that humans will retaliate against. And humans will retaliate against property-en-toto, not merely intersubjectively verifiable property.
Rothbard attempted to preserve Levantine immorality. He attempted to preserve the opportunity to deceive. He attempted to preserve the ability to profit from unproductive activity. Rothbard attempted to preserve evasion of payment for the commons. Rothbard attempted to prohibit the construction of commons. Yet western high trust – the source of our universal economic advantage, the source of our science and reason, the source of rule by law and jury, is entirely dependent upon our ability to construct normative and material commons by prohibiting all human action that is parasitic, and even that which is unproductive.
Conversely, without truth-telling, the common law, the jury, the normative commons, and total prohibition on the imposition of costs, wherein all possible disputes can be resolved under the law, without an authority, then, in such a condition, demand for the authoritarian state increases with the degree of those impositions that are not satisfied by law. As such, Levantine morality (immorality), de facto, praxeologically, without exception, increases demand for the state. Ergo, NAP is a source of demand for the state, not one of elimination of it. And we see this wherever Levantine low trust ethics are practiced.
When you use the term NAP, you are invoking primitive, Levantine immorality. Instead, if you wish liberty, we must not impose costs upon one another. And our law must prohibit the imposition of costs upon one another. This eliminates demand for the state.
Only by eliminating demand for the state, can we diminish it.
The fallacious counter argument is that competition itself imposes costs upon others. But it imposes opportunity costs only. And without those opportunity costs, we cannot construct the voluntary organization of production that we unfortunately refer to as “capitalism”.
So abandon the fallacy of non-aggression as one of the formal, logical, and moral reasons for the failure of libertarianism since Rothbard seized control of it from westerners, by the same means employed by the Marxists, socialists, postmodernists and neocons: mere saturation of the subject with repeated fallacies: loading, framing and overloading.
Speak the truth. Impose no cost. Punish the wicked. Kill the evil. To do otherwise is to attempt to use deceit to purchase liberty at a discount, rather than to construct it by bearing the cost of doing so.
Cheers.
Source date (UTC): 2015-04-16 12:47:00 UTC