Principles And Policy Reform

There are plenty of critiques out there of the non-aggression principle from libertarian political theory. And there are plenty of rejoinders to those critiques, and counter-rejoinders to the rejoinders, and all manner of interminable internecine squabbling. The kind that always attends communities of intellectual types trying to work out the implementation of abstractions as pure as the NAP. All of these expositions and exchanges are out there at the click of your mouse and the tips of your typing fingers.

(I realize that, for most folks, that’s all of your fingers, but your humble correspondent hunts and pecks with mostly just his two pointers and right thumb. His hours in sixth-grade typing class were among the huge number that he misspent in his youth. Ah well.)

Now I can make a couple paragraphs of progress into some of these walls of text before my vision gets blurry and get ill-tempered. But on others, I can’t even make it that far. This stuff’s not exactly my cup of tea. Which I confess as a kind of disclaimer: I want you to know that I’m not attempting to engage the non-aggression principle per se or trying to give it a proper, thorough treatment on its own terms. Haven’t done the necessary homework for all that. Instead, I just want to use it as an example of the kind of thinking, surprisingly widespread, that crops up in even right-leaning political circles. It’s an example of faith in the policy solution.

In other words, the thing about the NAP is that it’s not a bad principle. A little bloodless, yes. A little universalist and reductive, sure. But you can see how disallowing, or at least discouraging, interpersonal aggression is a key element in the maintenance of a civilized community life. You can’t have people stealing, extorting, beating one another up. You can’t have folks resorting regularly to violence. No cannibal biker gangs or neighborhood militias stealing women from adjacent suburbs. Even if the latter did work out just fine for Rome. The NAP is pretty common sense at the level of geopolitics, too. One only has to look at the last few decades of military interventionism in the Middle East to pine for an alternate history where our nation’s leaders tended a little more towards non-aggression. Towards violence only in self-defense. We’ve lost a lot of American men in Middle Eastern hellholes. And we’ve lost a lot of personal freedom at home in the name of security from all those hell-bent jihadists that their comrades in uniform pissed off overseas.

No, the problem with the principle of non-aggression is not the principle itself. The problem is thinking that the ratification of such a principle into national law (and all the subsequent restructuring such a principle would entail) would change anything. It’s the conviction, often sincerely held, that this is the sort of thing that’s going to get us out of our current straits. It was the policies all along! Those were what was out of whack, the sources of our aches and pains. If we could just get the Beltway back in line with common sense and economic realities, well then the rest of currently disordered bits would fall into place, too, and we’d be right back on track.

Pardon my pessimism, but we ought to have our come-to-Jesus moment about this sort of thing. Not just libertarians but any would-be political reformist, myself included. There is no national-level policy solution to our current political crises. Tweak the wording all you like. Fuss over this or that economic incentive. Stay up until the wee hours of the morning, jittery from caffeine, thought experimenting with other bright young wonks on the internet about which legislative revisions might just turn this ship around. But I don’t think much is going to come from your agonies, however nobly intentioned.

In fact, the rule-by-policy model itself is one of our problems, especially given the scale and the social complexity of the United States that we’re asking our policies to rule. Over three hundred million Americans. Not three hundred million homines economici. Not three hundred million interchangeable office drones. But three hundred million flesh and blood human beings of often mutually incompatible predilections. A country this large resists management at the national scale. Not only are the problems facing New York City different from the ones facing Nashville, but the people are different, too. They want different things, have different conceptions of the good life. California is not Mississippi. Minneapolis is not El Paso. The lifestyles that obtain in the one will necessarily seem foreign to those that obtain in the other. Why would we expect them to thrive under the same set of laws and social policies? And yet the trend, from healthcare to education to finance, is towards steadily greater centralization. And policy-style solutions abet that.

And beyond rule-by-policy, an even more fundamental issue is the rulers themselves. Washington D.C. is an abomination and a monster. Incestuous and insular. There is a growing divide—financially, philosophically, culturally—between the elites of that city and most the rest of the country that they govern.  And the political machine that they man is so massive and so unresponsive to that country, it doesn’t matter much what policies it’s officially espousing. Labyrinths of bureaucracy. Cronyism and nepotism. Bureaus and institutions and departments operating with no longer-term goals than securing funding for the next fiscal year. A millionaire’s club Congress. Richly funded lobbies. Entrenched transnational corporate and financial interests. Pet politicians.

So let’s say you really did hit on something with this whole non-aggression principle. Or any other such big idea. Let’s say it really is the slickest new way to restore sanity to American jurisprudence. You trust that wretched hive of scum and villainy to oversee the rollout?

Sound, intelligent statecraft is a necessity for any nation. Agreed. But pondering what that might look like in contemporary America is a mostly academic exercise at this point. We’re too heterogeneous, we’re too big, and we’re too hagridden by a parasitical political elite right now to make much headway on that tack. In other words, the first question isn’t, what policies would we like DC elites to stump for on the campaign trail for their next election? It’s how do we get real, meaningful autonomy back into the hands of cities and states all over the country? How do we get robust policy-making power into the hands of people who are both able and inclined to practice a governance familiar with and responsive to the people they govern?

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