1. Imagine a situation: a local epidemic of some infection suddenly breaks out in a hospital, and the doctors forbid you from leaving the quarantine zone. But in doing so, they are restricting your right to freedom of movement. How would such situations be resolved under ancap?
2. Consider this situation: in the summer, a child is lying/sitting in a car, crying, possibly suffocating from lack of air and heat; the parents went somewhere on business and forgot about them, and a passerby sees this and wonders what to do. Can they or the police break into the car or smash a window without permission, if the car is private property (which is inviolable under ancap)?
3. Is it permissible to cause damage to a person’s property that clearly threatens other people? Examples: a car with the handbrake on starts rolling toward another car, a tower leans due to age and is about to collapse onto neighboring buildings, etc. The nuance: there is no contact with the owner of the threatening property, or there is no time for it (the car is rolling).
I decided to combine three similar anonymous questions into one to avoid writing three similar answers.
In the first case, it turns out that exercising your right to freedom of movement could lead to significant harm to third parties, so you are asked not to insist on its exercise until it can be ensured that the threat has passed. In the second and third cases, causing damage to private property prevents harm to a third party. In all cases, you are simply presented with the fact of your rights being violated.
Where do rights come from? Rights arise from the interactions of some members of society with others. Some people agree to tolerate certain behavior of other people because they believe that those people have a right to such behavior.
Doctors believe they have the right to restrict your movement; they only need to convince others of this, and for this, they can use various methods. The most obvious and correct one: when you are admitted to a hospital, you sign a contract that outlines various boundaries, including force majeure situations like quarantine. Again, to ensure quarantine, doctors usually bring in specialists specifically for enforcement. Who will pay for this? As already mentioned in the post about epidemics, the most obvious interested party is insurance companies. They are the ones interested in ensuring the epidemic is prevented and the volume of insurance claim payouts is minimized; for this purpose, they can pay both those who enforce the quarantine and those caught in the quarantine—as compensation for the inconvenience. Or the insurance company may decide that the danger is small and will not introduce restrictions—those are its risks.
A passerby believes they have the right to encroach upon your private property to save a person; they only need to convince others of this. This is quite simple: they only need to demonstrate the rescued child to other passersby, and they will join the rescuer’s sincere indignation toward the jerk who left the child in the car, and perhaps even help in searching for the car’s owner.
General principles emerge from the generalization of private practice. They work well for typical situations and allow for the saving of mental effort. When two conflicting general principles collide in one head, a mental effort must still be made. It’s nothing terrible; the ability to think is always useful.
