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Entry: Authority Issues -- Is There Sovereignty Beyond the State? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/authority_issues_is_there_sovereignty_beyond_the_state#32806 Post contents: Somehow there is a lot of tradition missing from the argument, one very interesting one I can recommend is "Tower of Power" - which shouts liberty though rarely using the word - by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Jewish tradition holds that there are seven legal requirements given to Noah after the flood. One is to have courts instead of being your own judge, jury, and executioner. God is sovereign, but thus truth and justice is. Whatever is sovereign ought to be attempting to conform itself to the natural law which often says "Such ought not be done even if it would prevent an evil". If God himself leave so many things to the free will of men, we ought to give it the benefit of the doubt. Originally the purpose of government was to keep the peace, including having one official standard. We all accept 2+2=4, but by ounce, do you mean weight or liquid, troy or other? Contracts are paper and good will can be fleeting. And we simply need to have standards - what the defaults in contracts are when unstated, what provisions are valid, what "ownership" is and how it is recognized. You may be prepared to throw away a millennium of common law - yes precedent and custom, but customs which have been solidified so the rules are known and people can play fair and judges can act normally as referees instead of guessing - but what do you replace it with? The state's most visible form is force. Violence. But there is also a history and tradition. Often breeched but also often observed. Bush may have shredded the Magna Charta, but doesn't the anarchist do the same thing as he won't even accept those rules - unless he chooses, yet he may choose the opposite. The state is evil. So it ought to be a last resort. But some people will do violence or theft in its absence. Others will become vigilantes administering punishments without justice. Habeas Corpus can only apply in principle, so when you are wronged, unless you are in immediate peril, you must go to an authority so everything is out in the open and your actions can be seen as just - or perhaps it is vengeance or something else. Rothbard wrote a very long piece on why abortion, although it is killing an innocent being is perfectly justified. My problem with him and most libertarians is their hubris. While saying the market is so unpredictable that any attempt at socialism will fail, and forgetting what Mises said about individual humans being unpredictable, they come up with utopias or plans and explain that people will just behave in one way or another. They posit security, arbitration, and insurance agencies, but never thieve's and assassin's guilds. Human beings will use their free will to do evil on occasion. Benedict XVI noted this in his encyclical noting the socialists made this mistake. Libertarians seem to make it as often. There will be people ready to harm you or your property, or steal or defraud you. If you can act with perfect justice when it happens to you then we should simply make you king and supreme court in one as you would perfectly adjudicate decisions. If you aren't up to the task, then we need courts, trials, discovery, (compelled) witnesses, evidence, and all that theater which is the process where the audience called a jury can possibly determine what the truth is. And truth and justice are the goals. Insofar as a "state" provide them, it is good. Insofar as individuals can provie them they are good. And when either violate them they are evil. So before you would look at "the state" as evil, and perhaps it is, take caution you aren't doing the equivalent of judging the Catholic church based on the Borgia Popes, the Crusades, and the Inquisition (as legend). You recently wrote "Who Killed the Constitution?". I haven't read it yet, but are you celebrating the death of an oppressive evil liberty destroying document? Or mourning the death of an imperfect attempt at balance to control man's fallen nature? Sent at: 2008 12 02