Hello Everyone,
As a fellow libertarian and Austrian, I'm very interested in this topic. Hopefully, I can make a small contribution, for what it's worth.
Personally, I don't see a problem with conceding that the statists may be correct in suggesting that the program of legal enforcement or the systematic distribution of punishment requires a monopoly on violence. But an interesting question could be raised at this point: What do libertarians have to lose by conceding this? Why do libertarians, who presumably want a free society, need to hold dearly to the principle of legal enforcements and/or systematic distributions of punishment?
My personal understanding is that the idea of legal enforcement and systematic punishment distribution is an idea that is rooted in the principle of political monopolism. This is the essential idea that there must be one law for all the land, and that a plurality of legal arrangements are somehow inconceivable, or at the very least, not allowable. From this perspective, those acting out of accordance to this universalized legal code must be penalized somehow, for the sake of preserving cherished institutions.
This is not a libertarian idea. So why are so many libertarians embracing it? More importantly, what happens if we stop embracing it? What are the implications for libertarianism if we abandon the principle of political monopolism?
For one thing, it suddenly comes to be of no consequence to libertarians if statists make the claim that legal enforcements and systematic distributions of punishment require a monopoly on violence. There will be no problem with conceding this, once the principle of political monopolism is abandoned. But it will do something more.
It will allow libertarians to begin thinking about alternative approaches to a free society, ones that do not rely on the very principles that statists understand to be fundamental to their own political philosophy.
Only if libertarians believe that there is some role for legal enforcements in a completely free society will they not want to concede to the statists the idea that a monopoly on violence is the only way to achieve systematic distributions of punishment. But I would just as soon let the statists have these static and institution-minded concepts, as they do not help us envision a truly free society in any case.
What I would advocate, as an alternative approach, is to think about how penalties work in the market place. In that realm, penalties are very real, but are not based on the idea of imposing systematic distributions of punishment. In the market place, there are no "laws that can be broken," but instead, there are only "windows of opportunity that can be exploited." What this means is, the idea of "defense" does not have to be conceived in terms of absolute rights, but instead can be understood in terms of entrepreneurial risk. One allocates resources to defense efforts in varying proportions, according to a personal assessment of prospective benefits vs. expected costs. One may turn out to be incorrect in this assessment after the fact, and suffer the consequences. If he is victimized by another, then his defensive solution was clearly inadequate in some way. But he needn't waste valuable resources trying to make someone else sorry for exploiting this miscalculation. He can instead, to the extent that he is able, seek to correct his error, and then proceed, just as any entrepreneur does after suffering losses on the market.
This is a very rough illustration, and should not be taken as a complete theory, but rather, as an alternative grounding principle. Nevertheless, it does illustrate at least one possible way that a penalty can be conceived other than in terms of legal enforcements or systematic distributions of punishment. One cannot become a better defense entrepeneur by seeking to induce suffering in another via legal enforcements. One can only become a better defense entrepreneur by making superior investment decisions which would improve his future prospects for defensive welfare. Failure in this regard will only mean that resources were allocated inappropriately, such that the misallocation was exploited by aggressors. As such, the error can only be corrected with a reallocation of defensive resources. The more rapidly an error in resource allocation is corrected, the more rapidly the penalized entrepreneur can begin avoiding losses.
This seemingly radical vision may hold the key to an alternative approach to libertarian social theory, one that does not begin from the principle of political monopolism.
Richard D.