We all remember that guy in high school.  The one who always sat in the back of the classroom, listened to Slayer during study hall, and spent class time drawing pictures of executions.  Other students frequently mocked him behind his back, but when he was present there was one thing that stopped them from picking on him.

The List.

In an age of school massacres and rampant nihilism, one could never be too safe.  No one really thought that if he put you on The List that he would engineer your painful and gruesome death, did they?  But then again, no one screwed with him either.

The example of the misfit teenager provides one method for effectively dealing with deviant behavior: the blacklist.  The teenager wished to dissuade others from having fun at his expense, so he made it clear to them that their actions would have repercussions if they did so.  These repercussions were always vague in order to make the threat credible, but the effect was to produce social pressure without actually using force.

People often have doubts that in a society free of government coercion there would be a mechanism for enforcing proper morality.  After all, wouldn't corner stores be selling crack to anyone who could reach over the counter?  What would stop prostitutes from selling and performing their services everywhere?  If enough people desired and approved of such activity, maybe there would be nothing to stop it.  But in the purely libertarian society there would also be many methods for people who wished to dissuade behavior they deem unfitting or improper.  The one mentioned above, blacklisting, already has a history of effectiveness, and without a government in place to block its use it would become a much greater force in society.

In an economy based on private property and free exchange, every person in society is interdependent.  We rely upon the division of labor in order to obtain the goods that we value so highly, and it is only through the division of labor and voluntary exchange that we can obtain these goods at all.  A powerful tool for people would then be to cease doing business with individuals they object to.  Picture a miscreant being denied sales at the checkout of every major store, and you can get the idea of what a persuasive device this can be for weeding out whatever behavior placed him on the list in the first place.  Store owners would naturally have to respond to consumers demand about which behaviors to oppose.  Lobby groups might even form to persuade the stores, and if a store made a poor entrepreneurial decision concerning who to blacklist, business would be diverted to other stores.

A great historical example of the potency of blacklists is that of factory owners excluding potential employees who were marked as trouble-makers, i.e., those whose ambition in taking the position was to unionize workers and strike.  In fact, the blacklists were so effective that those blacklisted could only turn to the government and its coercive power for recourse.  The government, in turn, subsequently banned the use of blacklists by the factory owners, and the result was the formation of quasi-government unions rackets that pilfered from the workers and owners alike to enrich a few privileged bureaucrats and organized criminals.

Blacklists are identical to boycotts, as both occur when individuals practice discrimination in order to pressure an individual or firm to change its behavior.  They are perfectly legitimate because an individual may justly do business and trade property with whoever he wishes.

However, property rights must be well defined for these forms of social persuasion to work.  It is clear that a store owner may justly throw troublemakers from his establishment, but it is not so clear how to handle undesirables who operate on the streets.  Since most of the drug-dealing and prostitution that people do not approve of occurs on government roads, land, and housing, it is challenging for some to envision that anything other than the government can rectify the situation.  Far from showing the futility of existing social pressure, this just shows that it is in these areas that the libertarian concepts of property most need to be applied.

Some writers have gone so far as to say that blacklists could be used not just as a means for rectifying conspicuous deviant behavior, but also as punishment for criminals.  Though it is reasonable to expect that individuals would blacklist the murderers and rapists they see on the evening news, it is unrealistic that most people would have the information needed to blacklist most criminals, or would even care enough to do so.  Blacklists are most effective for deterring behavior that is continuous, such as a business owner's political persuasion or an individual's business trade.  Though the use of blacklisting for petty thieves would not likely be very effective, these writers do introduce a good point that in a market free of government regulation there would appear various means to handle deviants, both social and criminal.  The role of contracts and insurance companies would likely increase in such a society, and even today we can get an idea of what forces would be at work.  A car rental company in Connecticut, for example, set its own rules for proper driving speed on highways and fined drivers who exceeded it. Predictably, the government stopped the practice.  Law and order, as everyone knows, can only be enforced by jack-booted thugs.

March 20, 2002

Jacob Halbrooks is a senior at Tufts University majoring in electrical engineering.  He has two life goals: to purchase at least one firearm per year, and to incite the Big Change.  You can read his past columns here.

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