The Law and Justice

by Paul Hein

Justice is the securing of the rights of the individual; the guarantee that what is his remains his. Of course, what is most basically his is his life. His life belongs to him by right, i.e., by his very nature, as opposed to being his conditionally, as under the terms of some agreement that can be set aside. A right to life, however, implies a right to property, as life is not self-sustaining, but requires the acquisition of food, shelter, clothing, etc., if it is to be maintained. To guarantee a person the right to his life without simultaneously guaranteeing him the right to obtain, use, and dispose of property is absurd. The right to property is inextricably linked to the right to life. And the law exists to protect such rights.

That is why Dred Scott was refused his freedom. Scott was property, and to deprive his owner of that property was an injustice that the law existed to prevent. The Scott decision, then, though shocking to us today, was quite legal at the time. The law was at work protecting property rights!

Of course, even the law realized—eventually—the injustice of regarding human beings as property; and overt slavery, as it existed prior to the war of southern secession, was abolished. (It was on the way out anyway, being non-viable economically.) It was difficult, after all, to regard slaves as anything but human beings, and if human beings, then also endowed with the right to property, including the property of their own bodies. What was seen intuitively by children became clear to the Congress and the courts after a century and a half.

The problem, however, remains. Even were government to confine itself to those legitimate activities set forth in the Constitution (has it ever?) it would still, like a living organism, need to sustain itself. It would need to acquire property, for example, and hire workers. How can it afford these things? It provides no goods or services desired by most of the public, most of the time. Legitimate government is like a watchdog protecting property; but when the property is secure, the watchdog has nothing to do. Dogs, of course, don’t worry about such things, but people do. A worker naturally wants to make himself important to his employer, and to increase his own influence and power. Workers for government are no exception to this rule. They want to build empires, too. Government “programs” are the result, and injustice invariably accompanies them.

That is because the financing of government involves the seizure of property from the citizens. This is “legal,” because the organization doing the seizing makes the laws, and thus declares its actions legitimate. It’s the Scott case all over again: profoundly unjust, but perfectly legal. If the seizure, always under threat of force, of course, were merely to sustain legitimate, small government, it could be tolerated, if not actually welcomed. But, as we have seen, it is hardly to sustain a small, Constitutional, government that you are taxed. Your property is taken, against your will (I assume), by threat of force if you are obdurate, to finance an ungodly array of programs which may be of no benefit to you whatever; indeed, you may oppose them. Never mind, just pay up or go to jail.

There you have it: Government is brought into existence to protect your right to property; government then seizes your property to maintain its existence as aggressor against your property! No one is thrifty with money obtained at gunpoint; there’s always more. So government soon, and, in my opinion, inevitably, grows like a malignancy, far beyond its original purpose. However, even if it adhered to that purpose, it would still have to violate property rights to maintain itself as a guardian of property rights! The attempt to justify it is that it is “legal.” Recall the words of Bastiat, who remarked that when men adopt plunder as a way of life, they develop a legal code that justifies it, and a moral code that glorifies it. When the mugger is the party who decides that mugging is “legal,” the situation is out of hand. But how can it be otherwise?

Unless people support government voluntarily, injustice is guaranteed. The fact that government benefits are bestowed upon an often vocal minority at the expense of a diffused and disorganized majority disguises the injustice somewhat, and for a while. As government programs grow, however, even the proverbial man on the street comes to realize that he is working more and more for other people, and less and less for himself. And he’s doing so under compulsion. His right to his own property, which is ultimately his right to his own life, is being compromised by the organization his forefathers created to protect it.

It’s little wonder, therefore, that anarchy is looking better and better to more and more people. We have all become Dred Scotts, working for others, under compulsion, because the organization that the Founders created to protect our rights cannot, by its very nature, do so.

If we establish government, we necessarily establish injustice, i.e., the seizure of private property without the consent of its owner, to maintain the government that was designed to protect that property! Justice, therefore, would seem to require the elimination of government.

May 14, 2002