…And justice for all
NAP is not a non-aggression pact, as the well-known video blogger Mikhail Svetov likes to point out. It is not a norm handed down from above, like a single commandment from a libertarian deity. It is a purely analytically derived principle. If the principle “no one has the right to initiate violence with impunity” is generally observed in a given society, it means that there is—as engineers would put it—negative feedback operating there, which dampens manifestations of violence. Society becomes free from institutionalized coercion, which always leads to an explosive growth in prosperity.
Since the non-aggression principle is not established from above, naturally, no one imposes specific boundaries on everyone—for instance, claiming that a dirty look does not violate the NAP, but stepping on a foot already does. Such specifics are derived from practice, and this boundary can certainly change as customs evolve. The only thing clearly defined in the non-aggression principle is the absence of certain privileged groups who, for some reason, have the right to initiate violence with impunity.
The feedback loop works because the use of violence against an aggressor, whoever they may be, is precisely legitimate. In general, anyone can apply such retaliatory violence; the limitations here are purely technical: first, there must be the physical capability to do so, and second, reliable information about who applied what violence to whom.
The idea of limited government is to delegate the identification of aggressors and the application of counter-violence against them to one specific organization. This relieves the majority of society from such a burdensome duty. However, first, we have no right to forbid people from exercising counter-violence directly, without delegating it to anyone. And second, we have no right to forbid people from delegating rights to counter-violence to any other organization besides the one called the government. The attempt to forbid this is itself a violation of the NAP, which should entail counter-violence against whoever attempted to impose such a ban on people using force.
Thus, the only way for a limited government not to violate the NAP is to be a market monopoly—that is, to serve its clients based on voluntary contracts, and to do so so cheaply and qualitatively that it is simply unprofitable for competitors to enter this market, and the vast majority of people prefer to entrust counter-violence to the government rather than practice it themselves. Robert Nozick advocates approximately this point of view in his book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”.
