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ROTHBARDIAN GHETTO ETHICS : THE WALL AND THE OCEAN

We libertarians must realize the numerous logical errors in the ideological arguments that we use to support our ethics, if we are to include enough of the classical liberals with their aristocratic egalitarian ethics into our movement that we may represent anything more than an irrelevant minority.

The most common error in libertarian thought is the ghetto ethics of Rothbard. Rothbard could not solve the problem of institutions. So he invented contrivances (and weak ones) to give the appearance of legitimacy to his ethical system. Hoppe succeeded where Rothbard failed. But Rothbard’s arguments persist.

a) Rothbard’s Ghetto Ethics work only because where there is a ghetto within an existing political system, and no means by which members of the ghetto can replace the exterior political order. It’s all well and good to advocate ghetto ethics in the ghetto. It’s not good, or even rational, to suggest that those ethics could persist without the political exterior to the ghetto. The ghetto is anarchic. Sure. But it’s anarchic because the exterior power will not let a formal monopoly of property rights develop in the ghetto, and the anarch of the ghetto is perceived as a form of punishment for its inhabitants.

b) Rothbard’s Crusoe Ethics are an example of ghetto ethics. Crusoe ethics sound “all sweet and libertarian” – until you realize that the ocean that surrounds the island provides the violence that separates the island from other humans: instead of the ghetto wall, we have the ocean deeps.

The only rational model for political systems, that isn’t bent on such a logically faulty contrivance, is quite the opposite: that we are all standing on a continent shared with many other tribes, where each tribe uses slightly different measures of communal and private property. And you, alone, in your tribe, figure out that if you can institute private property, that your tribe will out-compete every other tribe. The question is, how do you create the institution of private property?

That answer is quite telling: you buy it in a voluntary exchange. That is the only answer that is consistent with the non aggression principle. If you cannot buy it, then you must use violence to implement it. And you must, of certainty, use violence to protect it once you’ve instituted it.

c) For human beings, instinctively, all property is communal, and privatization is the source of scarcity. It turns out that instinct is wrong, because it prevents the division of knowledge and labor. But we still ‘feel’ that instinct. And for the lower classes, it’s to their advantage to express, and act upon those feelings.