{"id":151,"date":"2004-02-02T23:09:37","date_gmt":"2004-02-03T04:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=151"},"modified":"2004-02-02T23:09:37","modified_gmt":"2004-02-03T04:09:37","slug":"inciting-to-riot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Inciting to riot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gary Farber asks:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nWould you assert that a modest libel law, or copyright law, or<br \/>\nincitement to riot law, inevitably lead to 1984? How about a law<br \/>\nbanning private nuclear weapons?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I would say that the risk from a modest libel law or copyright law<br \/>\nis small, though not nonexistent; look at the way the DMCA has been<br \/>\nused to justify schemes that would embed controlware in everyones&#8217;<br \/>\ncomputers.  State power is no less real if it consists of NSA or FBI<br \/>\nback doors built in by an acquiescent Gateway or Dell.<\/p>\n<p>If the lawmaker\/law-enforcer is a monopoly government, then a law<br \/>\nbanning private nuclear weapons would worry me a little more, basically<br \/>\nbecause I don&#8217;t trust governments to have <em>any<\/em> control over<br \/>\nthe weaponry their citizens can keep.  History shows that that power<br \/>\nis invariably extended by degrees and abused until the citizenry is<br \/>\ntotally disarmed; the case of Great Britain in the 20th century is a<br \/>\nparticularly telling one (and its sequel in the 21st is proving<br \/>\njust as bloody and insane as the NRA diehards predicted, with criminal<br \/>\ngangs machine-gunning each other in the Midlands cities while<br \/>\nlaw-abiding citizens are jailed for carrying pocketknives).<\/p>\n<p>I would prefer the risks of private nukes to the disarmament of the<br \/>\ncivilian population.  But that&#8217;s not a choice anyone will actually<br \/>\never have to make, because the intersection of the set of people who<br \/>\nwant nukes and the set of people who would obey or be deterred by a<br \/>\nlaw against them is nil.  A law against nukes would therefore be<br \/>\npointless, except as an assertion of the power and right to enforce<br \/>\nother sorts of weapons bans that are harmful in themselves.<\/p>\n<p>Nukes are different than handguns.  Handgun bans are bad, but<br \/>\nthey&#8217;re not utterly pointless; there is a significant class of<br \/>\ncriminals who would carry in the absence of a ban but don&#8217;t in the<br \/>\npresence of one.  The real problem with handgun bans is that the good<br \/>\neffects of slightly fewer bad guys carrying weapons are swamped and<br \/>\nreversed by the bad effects of far fewer good guys carrying<br \/>\nweapons.  It&#8217;s all in how the disincentives against crime shift.<\/p>\n<p>An &#8220;incitement to riot&#8221; law is a huge and obvious red flag.  A<br \/>\npolitical culture in which that becomes entrenched would be one headed<br \/>\nfor the &uuml;berstate fairly rapidly.<\/p>\n<p>But much depends on who makes those laws and how they are enforced. I<br \/>\ncould live with a ban on certain sorts of heavy weapons or a Riot Act,<br \/>\nfor example, if they were a condition of my contract with my<br \/>\ncrime-insurance company, or part of the covenant of my homeowners&#8217;<br \/>\nassociation.  Powers that are too dangerous to grant a monopoly<br \/>\ngovernment could safely be delegated to security agencies and<br \/>\njudicial associations that have active competitors, and who do not<br \/>\nin the nature of things have universal jurisdiction.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Farber may not be aware than anarchists like myself actually<br \/>\nenvision living in a society that still has police and courts and a<br \/>\ncommon legal code, but one in which no one organization has a status<br \/>\nthat is uniquely privileged under the law.  There would be something<br \/>\nthat is functionally not completely unlike a &#8220;government&#8221;, but it<br \/>\nwould be a virtual entity &mdash; a contract network of courts,<br \/>\npolice, and citizens.  I would delegate my right to resist assaults on<br \/>\nmy life and property to the police agency that acts as my agents. That<br \/>\npolice agency would have reciprocity agreements with other police<br \/>\nagencies; they, in turn, would contract with judicial associations<br \/>\nto arbitrate disputes among their clients.  Find a copy of<br \/>\n<cite>The Market for Liberty<\/cite> for the details.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I comment on Mr. Faber&#8217;s attempt to reduce the<br \/>\nslippery-slope argument against statism to an absurdity by applying it<br \/>\nto libertarians (&#8220;libertarianism, because it values the individual<br \/>\nwithout regard for society, inevitably leads any individual who<br \/>\nbelieves in it to become a sociopathic serial killer&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>There are several obvious problems with this argument.  First,<br \/>\nsociopathy is a wiring defect only found in less than 1% of the general<br \/>\npopulation (but including a large percentage of politicians,<br \/>\nand that is no joke).  Libertarianism cannot turn people into sociopathic<br \/>\nserial killers because <em>nothing<\/em> (other than some odd and rare<br \/>\nsorts of injuries to the brain) can turn people into sociopaths.<\/p>\n<p>The argument also ignores a glaring asymmetry in the real-world<br \/>\nfacts.  Extreme libertarians do not as a rule go on senseless killing<br \/>\nsprees.  Governments, even &#8220;good&#8221; governments, often do.  In the U.S.,<br \/>\nthe scarifying examples of MOVE, the Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge<br \/>\nare before us even if we agree to leave warfare out of the picture and<br \/>\nconsider only the last two decades.<\/p>\n<p>But more importantly, the claim that libertarianism values the<br \/>\nindividual without regard for society is damagingly false. The<br \/>\nassumption that &#8220;valuing the individual&#8221; and &#8220;valuing society&#8221; are<br \/>\nopposed is precisely what thoughtful libertarians reject.  Our highest<br \/>\nvalue is non-aggression, peacefulness &mdash; voluntary cooperation.<br \/>\nOur message is that only when individual freedom is properly held to<br \/>\nbe the greatest good can a sane, peaceful, and truly just society<br \/>\nflourish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gary Farber asks: Would you assert that a modest libel law, or copyright law, or incitement to riot law, inevitably lead to 1984? How about a law banning private nuclear weapons? I would say that the risk from a modest libel law or copyright law is small, though not nonexistent; look at the way the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=151\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Inciting to riot<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}