TáborszkiBálint

Liberty During Emergencies

Chaotic periods and emergencies are a natural part of human life. We will never get rid of them. How human societies respond to turbulence is determined by the dominant ideology of the public opinion — more precisely, by the ideological seeds sown during the peaceful times before chaos. The peaceful period is the time of planting the ideological seeds — good and evil — in the minds of the many. In times of chaos, societies reap the fruits of all that was sown before.

Radical changes rarely occur during times of peace, almost by definition. But the chaos of emergencies breaks down hitherto impenetrable barriers for the tides of change and a new world — with its new institutions and new arrangements — may dawn on mankind so suddenly that they often fail to even notice what is happening until historians tell the tale.

Champions of liberty have been emphasizing for centuries that during emergencies „State power is pushed to its ultimate and, under the slogans of “defense” and “emergency,” it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.” Today we are given a historic opportunity to witness the mechanism by which this happens: in an emergency, the masses will beg for the State to push its power to its ultimate and impose a tyranny the likes of which would have been unthinkable in times of peace — which might mean a few months before. Why do the masses demand tyranny? The answer is not fear. One may tremble in terror and still wish to respect the property rights of their fellow men. It is because the ideological doctrine of the peaceful days was the doctrine of tyranny. Because the seeds that took root in the minds of the many were not the seeds of faith in what Albert Jay Nock termed social power, but that of faith in State power. Because the ideology of our times is not the principle of voluntary cooperation, but the principle of coercion.

When chaos arrives, everyone turns to their principles and ideas for guidance. When the future cannot be predicted by the past, we turn to our philosophical principles and follow the path derived from them.

Socialism is the watchword and the catchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit. The masses approve of it, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter ‘The Epoch of Socialism’.

These were the introductory words of the book Socialism by Ludwig von Mises. Even many self-styled libertarians are eager to embrace the socialist idea in times of emergencies and call for unprecedented aggression against private property rights for the sake of public health, common good and war against any enemy our ruling class sets its eyes upon.

In any case, the pandemic provides us a perfect opportunity to think about how The Epoch of Liberty would deal with such an emergency. So first I would like to talk about the response governments around the world have given to COVID-19, then I would like to outline how a libertarian society, that is: a stateless society would react to a similar situation, and finally I will shortly describe how government intervention into the economy during such times has a devastating effect on the ability of our civilization to cope with the challenge.

I.

Perhaps — or at least for me — the most shocking phenomenon around the coronavirus pandemic is how self-evident, how obvious and given it is in the eyes of just about everyone — from the common man to pundits and politicians — that the government has to resolve this situation.1 Indeed, nobody stopped for a minute to think about what this implies and what is the principle that governments are putting into practice based on this mindset.

In order to protect and preserve the health of their subjects, States all over the world began to exercise totalitarian power basically overnight. In some countries they forced all restaurants and pubs to close, they closed parks, squares and playgrounds, healthy people were forbidden to leave their homes, everyone was banned from working for companies not classified as „essential” by the government, evictions were suspended, rents were frozen and terminations were suspended, leaving and entering countries were forbidden, group gatherings were banned and so on through an endless list of measures that would have been „openly resisted” during peacetime.

The issue is, this is still peacetime. No war is going on. A disease began to spread around the world and governments decided that no law, no constitution, no property rights shall stop them from trying to halt the spread of the virus.

But can we see what astonishing premise the government reaction is based on? Stated simply, the State may exercise totalitarian rule to prevent deaths that are preventable.

A news article reported that:

In Scotland, quite a few pubs remained open despite an official ban, so they were closed by the police… [The Chief of Police] said some pubs wanted to stay open until they are forcibly closed, but this was an extremely irresponsible behavior that endangered lives.

So an agent of the State says that the pubs are “endangering lives”, therefore they will close them using aggressive physical violence.

I believe a most instructive mental exercise when it comes to thinking about issues of ethics and morality is to find the moral principle involved and then apply it universally to all relevant and similar cases to see if we are still happy with it. It’s not an ultimate refutation or justification of any given moral principle, but if the results are horrifying, we might want to take a step back and think through it again.

It should be clear that these fine Scottish people who were visiting these inns preferred to do so instead of reducing their health risks. It is utterly misleading to say that having your pub open is “endangering lives.” In truth, the subjective order of preferences of the patrons were simply different than what the agent of the State wanted to see and the patrons themselves preferred to potentially endanger their own lives — or at least their own health — by visiting the pubs during the pandemic over staying sober, home and alone.

It is an entirely valid preference to have. Preferences are subjective. Some prefer to put their own health and lives at risk by doing all kinds of extreme and not-so-extreme sports. Some risk their lives and limbs by trying to break world records. Some people smoke. Some drink alcohol in quantities that are obviously harmful and potentially deadly. The amount of young people dying from alcohol related liver failure is staggering; indeed, according to an article from NBC News, “alcoholic liver disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, [an expert] noted, adding that nearly 250,000 deaths were attributed to the disease in 2010” and according to the American Liver Foundation, “an estimated 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the fourth leading preventable cause of death in the United States.” Some people eat horribly unhealthy food. According to the WHO, the flu kills 290 000 to 650 000 people a year worldwide. In the United States, someone dies every 37 seconds from a highly preventable cardiovascular disease — claiming 18 million lives a year all around the world, and almost 700 thousand lives in the United States. 12 000 people die from causes directly related to air pollution every single day, and more than 3500 people die each day in road accidents.

In the last few months, about 200 000 have lost their lives to the coronavirus so far, and the numbers will undoubtedly increase in the coming months.

The government response to the coronavirus is based on the premise that it is not the individual who is responsible for their own health, but the State is responsible for the health of its subjects — and to achieve this end, it may confiscate the private property of its citizens, nationalize and control every aspect of our lives and our economy down to the smallest detail, including telling us when and why we can or can’t leave our own houses. In short, it can enslave us to save us.

However, the important point is this: the fact that COVID-19 is contagious while a cardiovascular disease2 is not does not change the formula ethically. It similarly does not matter whether it’s 650 000 people or more that die from a disease. From a moral point of view there is no objectively determinable mortality rate beyond which a totalitarian rule is justified. It is baseless, arbitrary and irrational to say that tyrannical decrees would be evil and immoral if they aim to reduce the mortality rate of X cause of death, but it’s correct and responsible leadership if applied to reduce the mortality rate of Y, only because Y could potentially cause more deaths. “More deaths”, although indeed tragic, is not a moral category that turns evil into virtue. If we “think on the margin” it is simply absurd to think that the death of a given individual — by which the number of deaths crosses the arbitrary threshold — somehow turns what we have hitherto considered tyrannical evil into responsible governance.

If we would apply the principle behind the governmental response to COVID-19 to every relevant case, our civilization would perish overnight. After all, if we add up the aforementioned number of deaths preventable by measures similar to the draconian reactions to the coronavirus, if we count the number of lives that could be saved if the State would permanently lock everyone into their own homes (ignoring, as the public opinion does, all the deaths and destruction from the lockdown itself), we would be able to save tens and probably hundreds of millions of lives each year! If we reject the idea that the individual is the one who is responsible for their own health and survival — as we did with the advent of the coronavirus — and put into practice the principle that unbound totalitarianism is to be embraced as long as the State aims to prevent deaths due to a selected cause, we come to the logical conclusion that total dictatorship is desirable, good and responsible governance.

Everybody is aware of the risks they take when they hop into their car — just as they know the risks they take when they go out and mingle with others during a pandemic. Yet people are reluctant to apply the principle used and the policies demanded in the latter case to the former, even though it could save many thousands of lives each day.

The governments have demonstrated that they are willing to shut down the economy of the entire nation to stop the coronavirus. And the statist mob cheers and demands this. They called their rulers negligent and irresponsible for not implementing mandatory quarantine for all — healthy and sick alike — and they were delighted when their governments finally announced the curfew. So is it negligent for the governments not to violate our liberties after the pandemic and not to maintain the curfew to prevent all the tens of thousands and thousands of deaths that could be prevented if the world would be turned into a gargantuan prison?

Logically, therefore, we are faced with two options: either the coercive lockdown that governments all around the world have imposed is sheer insanity, or it would be insane not to keep the lockdown until we put an end to all other causes of deaths.

The truth is that the governments’ reaction to the coronavirus is completely unjustified; the principle behind it would turn our lives into worse than hell if it would be consistently applied. What has been brilliantly dubbed as COVID-1984 is motivated by pure panic and irrational fear.

II.

We may witness how a thoroughly statist society responds to a pandemic. But what would happen in a free society?

It is common to ask “what would be the libertarian solution to problem X and Y”. But it is important to see that we cannot talk about a libertarian solution within a statist system. To borrow a word from an entirely different area, the problems are intersectional. They cannot be isolated and treated separately as long as all other government interventions remain unchanged.

So those who inquire about a libertarian solution often imply or assume that the solution would exist with a framework in which there exists a State, with its monopoly over the police force and ultimate decision making, where public property exists in the form of streets, public squares, parks and so on.

However, a free society is a society without a State. So what we are interested in here is not to discover what kind of government responses could a “libertarian government” offer to a pandemic, but rather, to explore what would happen in a purely voluntary society where streets, parks and squares are all privately owned and in which no individual or group of individuals may aggress against those who haven’t violated the property rights of anyone else.

First of all, there could indeed be a form of curfew in a stateless society. But the crucial distinction is that it wouldn’t be based on aggressive coercion but on voluntary contracts.

A society based on private property rights could take many forms. These will not be mutually exclusive; rather, they will exist alongside one another.

One arrangement could be private cities in which every street, every park, square, even every building is owned by the city’s founder or founders, and residents can rent the buildings from them and use the “public” areas according to the terms of the contract. People would choose which private city they want to live in based on which one has those kinds of rules that suits their own tastes and ideas about a good society.3

Thus, when one chooses from the selection of various private cities, they will be able to study the contractual terms that regulate the usage of the city’s streets, parks and squares in the event of various emergencies and scenarios. There would be cities where a general curfew would be included in the contract, others would only restrict access to the streets only for those who are infected.

It is important to see that the contract between the private city and the tenant is categorically different from our statist order, as the former rests on a contractual, basis, while the other is based on central coercion without any clearly and previously defined contract that both parties voluntarily enter into — or could choose not to enter into.

It is also crucial to see that in a free society, the very way people think about and enter into contracts — the culture of contracts, so to speak — would be different than that of today. People would know very well that signing a contract is an important decision. Carelessness would take on much smaller proportions when it comes to entering into contracts, as there would be no central power that would force the owners of the city (or employers or landlords) to deviate from the agreement. Thus, we should expect that such a contract would define very precisely down to the minute details what constitutes an epidemic and exactly how would that change the way residents are allowed to conduct their affairs and use urban areas.

Therefore, those who are more afraid of diseases — the elderly or those who suffer from other conditions and chronically weakened immune systems — can make sure to reduce their risks as much as possible during an epidemic by carefully choosing their place of residence beforehand. Similarly, those who prefer free movement to risk reduction, who would rather go to pubs than quarantine, will have the opportunity to do so if they choose their city with that in mind.

But private cities wouldn’t be the only arrangements of living together. In addition, there would exist smaller communities and neighborhoods in which not a single founder-owner (or group of owners) owns the properties and defines their terms of use, but the residents themselves would be not only owners of their own houses but also co-owners of parks, streets, playgrounds, squares and so on. For example, some families may come together and decide to establish their own closed neighborhood or gated community. Either they buy a larger piece of land or, in the case of unowned land that is yet to be originally appropriated by anyone else (since there is no central power in a stateless society that declares and enforces that all unowned land belongs to them), they take it into their possession through homesteading and jointly fund and build the roads and other public areas around their houses. If any of them would sell their house, they would also sell their share of ownership of the streets. In this situations, residents are able to make a much more direct decision about the use of streets and squares during an epidemic.

If another group of people would similarly build a neighborhood near them or right next to them, they would probably provide reciprocal access to each other’s streets and public places. However, in the event of an epidemic or other similar emergency, they would have the option to exclude outsiders from their streets to minimize the potential spread of the disease.

A third arrangement would be very similar to our current cities, but the streets themselves would be owned by those who live right on those very streets. Elm Street, for example, would be jointly owned by all those who own the houses on that street, while Sesame Street would be jointly owned by those who live on Sesame Street, and so forth. The transition from a statist society to a free society would involve the privatization of roads and urban areas, and I believe the most obvious and just solution — as far as the privatization of the streets is concerned — is to distribute their shares among those who actually live on that street.4 Thus, when an epidemic breaks out, residents of a given street may decide when they first hear about the news — if they haven’t done it before to prevent crime — to close their streets with gates on both ends and control who can enter their street instead of waiting for a central decision, which might arrive too late — or might be too draconian.

When inquiring about a libertarian solution to certain issues, it is often forgotten that private ownership of urban spaces is a central part of a libertarian order and plays a highly significant role in solving a surprisingly long list of problems. But as we have seen, ownership could take many forms, each of them offering specific advantages and disadvantages to certain problems.

But what is important to emphasize is that no one would be at the mercy of a central power that either makes the decision one wants to see or not. And no one would be forced against his will to reduce his health risks more than he himself would like. A free society provides an opportunity for everyone to live in a setting that best suits their own preferences, similarly to how freedom in other lines of production maximizes our opportunities to buy those kinds of foodstuffs or clothing items that best suit our preferences. Anyone who wants more protection from epidemics can have their way, and simultaneously, those who wants to take more risk can have theirs too. All the aforementioned arrangements offer an opportunity to institute — without the violation of property rights — a degree of curfew to protect the community from the spread of a disease. But they also offer an opportunity of free movement for those who prefer that over the safety of a lockdown.

Private ownership of the streets implies that the owners have the right to determine who and on what condition may or may not enter. Currently, the testing for COVID-19 is in many countries in the hands of a central authority; the state decides who is to be tested, and according to the State — at least here in Hungary — only those are to be tested who show symptoms of the coronavirus, despite the fact that many carry the disease asymptomatically. South Korea appears to have managed to keep the number of infections low by conducting an immense amount of tests on the population. If testing is indeed effective in reducing the spread of the disease, in a free society we would see that more and more smaller districts and areas would implement this solution. Owners of streets, districts or cities would only allow entry if visitors would be willing to go through testing. Testing therefore would not be at the discretion of a central authority, and no legally sanctioned criminal organization would assault those who dare to administer tests without the permits and medical qualifications they demand.

To illustrate the problem, János Bencsik, an independent member of the Hungarian parliament, submitted a legislative proposal to the Parliament on the 18th of March with the aim of allowing not only governmental but also private healthcare providers to carry out tests. As Mr. Bencsik wrote:

Due to the increasing spread of the epidemic, several local authorities have recently come up with the idea of ​​contracting private healthcare providers at their own expense to test those suspected of being infected with the novel coronavirus in their area […]. According to my information, there are towns in which the decision to contract private healthcare providers has already been made by the local Board of Representatives, but it was not signed due to the fact that according to the municipalities concerned the 2020 guidelines published by the National Public Health Center does not allow such activities to be carried out outside the public healthcare system, i.e. by private healthcare providers at the time of the epidemic.

And as a Hungarian newspaper reported on the 15th March:

The Hungarian Medical Chamber officially asked the government on Sunday to perform many more coronavirus tests. In recent days, many hospital physicians have told our paper the same thing: it has happened too many times that they were treating untested patients under normal hospital conditions because hospitals can only request screenings through a single center, László Hospital, and the screening protocol is extremely strict. In many cases, by the time the test is sent out by László Hospital, patients have already came in contact with dozens of doctors and nurses.

Behold, a prime example of suicide by statism.

III.

A free society is a free market society. The free market means that no third party may intervene in a voluntary contract between two parties by using and threatening violence and coercion. More specifically, as Murray Rothbard emphasized in his Power and Market, we may distinguish three categories of aggressive intervention:

In the first place, the intervener may command an individual subject to do or not to do certain things when these actions directly involve the individual’s person or property alone. In short, he restricts the subject’s use of his property when exchange is not involved. This may be called an autistic intervention, for any specific command directly involves only the subject himself. Secondly, the intervener may enforce a coerced exchange between the individual subject and himself, or a coerced “gift” to himself from the subject. Thirdly, the invader may either compel or prohibit an exchange between a pair of subjects. The former may be called a binary intervention, since a hegemonic relation is established between two people (the intervener and the subject); the latter may be called a triangular intervention, since a hegemonic relation is created between the invader and a pair of exchangers or would-be exchangers. The market, complex though it may be, consists of a series of exchanges between pairs of individuals. However extensive the interventions, then, they may be resolved into unit impacts on either individual subjects or pairs of individual subjects.

We have already touched upon how the absence of autistic interventions would play out in a free society during emergencies: there would be no central authority that would coercively “protect” someone against their own will from the risks they want to expose themselves to. But what effects would the absence of binary and triangular interventions have on the management of such emergencies as COVID-19 in a free society?

One of the most important examples of coercive binary intervention is taxation itself. It should be emphasized that taxation is just as much a government intervention into the economy as price control or licensing requirements. Resources confiscated with taxes are no longer used along the lines of voluntary exchanges (that is, the nexus of the free market economy) but according to a central plan. Tax victims are forced to fund things with the money they earn that they wouldn’t voluntarily fund. This is true even in cases such as healthcare or the police: it is true that people would buy health and protection services, but it is a bold step indeed to conclude from this that they would fund exactly the same service that government institutions provide.

The spread of COVID-19 was followed by a staggering level of unemployment — brought about by the compulsory lockdown. The U.S. federal government is providing a one-time $1,200 aid to just about every American adult to get through the chaotic economic times. However, it must be noted that the $1,200 is not even close to the amount confiscated from the average U.S. taxpayer over the past year. True, in a free society there would be no State that provides such assistance to people in the perilous months, but at the same time there would also be no State that confiscates immeasurably more from people in the peaceful years. (And there wouldn’t be a State that makes it necessary to bail out the masses after it shut down the economy and robbed them of their jobs either.) It would be hard to deny that it is easier for someone to financially prepare himself and his family for the hard times if more than half of his income is not confiscated by the authorities.

As for the triangular interventions, it is precisely these government interventions that make it immensely difficult for our civilization to cope with the epidemic. The list of such destructive interventions is so immeasurably long that we cannot list all of them here, so let us only go through some the most glaring ones.

When someone in Hungary decides to work from home, if they suffer any accident in their home, it is the employer who is liable for the injury. In short, it counts as a “workplace injury” and the employer is financially liable if the employee injures themselves at home. There is little need to explain what are the consequences of this “pro-labor” policy to the spread of work from home practices, and it is needless to remind the reader that — just as there are innumerable attempted and successful insurance frauds — this policy provides an abundance of opportunity for abuse.

One of the main, openly stated goals of the Hungarian government during the coronacrisis is to “keep as many people in their work as possible,” so that when order returns, they can get back to the job they had before. But we need to realize that consumer preferences change drastically during such times of emergency. Consumers want workers and entrepreneurs who have hitherto worked to produce various products and services to now switch to producing the goods that the masses suddenly and urgently need. When governments try to prevent people from losing their jobs through state control of the economy, when they try to keep companies that would otherwise go bankrupt afloat with government subsidies, they cause immeasurable harm to the consumers. Under the guidance of the profit and loss system, the unhampered market economy allocates resources quickly and efficiently to those lines of production that make the articles most urgently desired by the consumers. Thus in a free society, in times of disaster and crisis, many people may suddenly lose their jobs and many companies might indeed go bankrupt, but this is exactly how resources are freed up so they may be used to produce the essential goods and services needed to deal with the crisis.

The main role of entrepreneurs in the market economy is to correctly forecast future consumer demand and to direct production in a way that the goods and services desired by future consumers are produced in the most efficient way possible by the time they wish to purchase them. When, during times of crisis, government subsidies prevent companies from going bankrupt, entrepreneurs who would otherwise occupy themselves with figuring out how to adapt to new and sudden market conditions, who would be busy learning about and understanding the new economic situation to try and meet new, urgent consumer needs, are now locked into their old economic position by government intervention, where the consumers no longer want to see them.

All this is not to imply that unemployment and bankruptcies today during COVID-1984 are purely the result of changing consumer preferences. Of course they are mostly the results of a coercive government shutdown of the economy which shouldn’t have happened. But given the widespread popularity of such policies, it is still important to deal with the question of government intervention and its absence during such crises.

One of the biggest problems with statists is that, with the words of Frédéric Bastiat, they cannot “see the unseen”. All they see from the market phenomenon is that many people are losing their jobs. If the State prevents this by means of central planning, they are satisfied, as the seen problem is gone. But they never get to see the goods and services that were not produced because of this — goods that were much more urgently desired by the customers during the time of emergency.

Nothing could be more harmful in such times than the government preventing companies from losing their old position and hence preventing entrepreneurs to adjust their production processes to new consumer needs, to apply their skills, their creativity, their dynamism and their innovative spirit to the new conditions. The same is true of unemployment benefits in the event of a social emergency: the more government intervention discourages people from looking for a new job — if government handouts allow them to be idle for a few months — the less they will apply their productive efforts to the emergency exactly at a time when they are needed the most.

With regards to all this, let us not forget that the adaptive capabilities of the market economy are stifled and oppressed to a staggering degree by bureaucratic prohibitions and regulations. In a free society, it wouldn’t be up to government agencies, bureaucrats or permits to start new businesses and employ new labor. It would only depend on the voluntary contracts between employers and employees. No one would have to apply for a permit at the National Planning Office to manufacture certain products and provide certain services. It wouldn’t take many months to gather the official permits needed to build a new hospital, as it does today. These processes would thus happen significantly faster than in our world of government intervention.

As one might expect from a nation whose only political tradition is socialism and the worship of the state, voices in Hungary once again emerged demanding government action against price-gouging and profiteering. Everyone believes they have the right to get as cheaply as possible the products that are suddenly in dire need, for which demand has sharply risen and whose supply suddenly dried up. The law of supply and demand is seen as the machination of the devil and the entrepreneurs are apparently the earthly magistrates of Old Nick himself, standing with their unending thirst for profit between the poor, needy souls and the products they so desperately need. So the Hungarian government announced on the very first day the coronavirus news made headlines that it will swiftly and decisively strike down profiteers and all those who try to make a profit off of suffering.

However, in a free society, entrepreneurs who suddenly suffer losses and see their businesses go bankrupt would be those very people who would then turn to produce exactly those goods and services whose prices have suddenly and sharply risen. Rising prices send a signal to entrepreneurs that there are significant profits to be made in that area and they encourage businessmen to switch to producing those goods that the masses suddenly need. It is evident that as the government goes after and punishes those who increase the prices of the most urgently desired products, they also banish the market signal and indeed the incentive to engage in the production of those goods for which demand has sharply increased as a result of the emergency.

Another beneficial effect of price increases is that higher prices help to get at least a few units of those commodities into the hands of as many people as possible. People will buy fewer units if the price rises by ten times for example (as is the case of protective masks, deemed as irrationally high price increase by a government representative), so the increase in prices will help more people get at least a few pieces.

Shortages are the only things price controls can ever cause and have ever caused. However, the vast majority is too dull to comprehend the most basic law of economic theory and the very first lesson of economic history from the time of the Roman Empire, after the price controls of Emperor Commodus resulted in grain shortages, famine, and rebellion.

Footnotes

  1. Albert Jay Nock opened his most brilliant Our Enemy, The State with the explanation of the conflict between social power and State power. It is this framework that can greatly aid us in understand why the reflex of our civilization was to unquestioningly turn to the State to solve the problem. His thoughts are especially timely, given that Nock used the example of catastrophes to illustrate how the mobilization of social power — voluntary cooperation — was the means by which society dealt with „sudden crises of misfortune”, and very effectively so, until „ under Mr. Roosevelt … the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living.” Nock then writes:

    “When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigor. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained.

    If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them.”

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  2. And it is important to ask, then, if government coercion is to be used to prevent deaths, what about the body positivity movement that encourages people to become overweight and hence greatly increase their risks of cardiovascular disease and death? Aren’t these champions of fatness “spreading” the disease in the wider sense of the word? Should their right to free speech be violated? Should they be put in jail to save lives? For a libertarian the answer is obvious, but for those who demand tyranny against the coronavirus, the answer is far from obvious or evident. ↩

  3. An example for this is drug use. Some cities would allow people to be intoxicated or under the influence of other substances, others would forbid the consumption of such things on their streets. But both of them would have own customer base. ↩

  4. This would arguably happen with certain conditions based on the unique geographical details. For example they couldn’t forbid (complete) access to all and every outsider if that street is the only way by which other parts of the city may be approached. As Stephan Kinsella noted in his „Why Airwaves (Electromagnetic Spectra) Are (Arguably) Property”:

    One type of property right is an easement (servitude, in the civil law). Say people routinely walk over a path from point A (their village) to point B (watering hole). You can say they have homesteaded at least that use of the property. If someone else builds a home there, they have to let the easement continue.

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