In the Headlines

Liberty is all in the news! Well, sort of... the featured article on Wikipedia for today is "Anarcho-capitalism" (proof here). The timing is impeccable; they must have read my startup entry on this site and decided to promote the entry (thanks go to Jesse Greenwald for this link).

On a more technical note, it's nice to see that I listed more of the important stuff mentioned in Wikipedia's synopsis. I did forget to mention Walter Block as an important author in the area. Block, however, sometimes goes too far and proposes ideas that seem like unintuitive and contrived. For example, he decomposes the abortion law question into two issues of killing versus eviction, and a middle-ground compromise is reached by following the "general libertarian" requirement that defensive force be applied in the most gentle manner possible. Example: if somebody is trespassing on your lawn, you must give them verbal notice of eviction before moving to more robust means of repulsion. The analogue would be that an expectant mother may end the pregnancy at any time (Block says that to do otherwise would be to sanction trespass) but this minimal-defensive-force injunction applies. So if the baby is viable already at moment when its removal is decided upon, then the mother is obligated to submit to a medical procedure which will deliver the baby without killing it. If, on the other hand, it's not viable, then regular termination would be the course.

I hadn't ever heard this obligation of minimal defensive force espoused as a formal requirement before. Now, I'm not quite through reading Man, Economy, and State yet, so perhaps I just didn't get there yet. But I don't remember Mises saying anything about it (this is, however, inconclusive—there are lots of things which Rothbard and Hans Hoppe said more conclusively than Mises; he was more of a trailblazer). This lacks the purity of concept (in either way) that I have come to associate with Rothbard-inspired law theory. I don't intend to weigh-in on this topic, just to point out Block's position. To be fair, Block does have his moments. For example, he gives the best refutation of the "roads-as-a-public-good" socialist position that I've ever heard. And his public speaking skills are very, very good.