Definition and place in libertarianism
Walter Block, appearing on the show, framed libertarianism as a narrow philosophical perspective concerned only with what just law should be, and identified just law with the non-aggression principle. He illustrated the separation of law from personal morality with prostitution, marijuana, heroin and pornography: he said he personally considered such things not good, but that libertarianism has nothing to do with that, asking instead what the law should be. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Bob Zadek introduced the principle as, in Block’s teaching, half of the entire concept of libertarianism, and asked Block to explain the three words. Block’s formulation was that the non-aggression principle means you have to keep your mitts off of other people and their property unless you have their permission, that anything between consenting adults is legitimate and nothing but things between consenting adults is legitimate, and that you cannot force or threaten violence against anyone else or their property. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Zadek pressed the point that the “you” in the principle includes not only individuals acting alone but individuals acting collectively through government — that no entity, whether acting under color of government or as an individual, has the just or moral right to interfere with another’s enjoyment of their person or property. Block agreed that this framing describes anarcho-capitalism or very radical libertarianism, and distinguished minarchists or minimal government libertarians, who would exempt government and allow some exceptions, from the radical view he and Zadek shared, under which there are no exceptions and the “you” includes everyone, whether individuals or robber gangs or governments operating under color of government. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Property rights as the second half
Block described property rights as the other half of the doctrine, arguing that the non-aggression principle cannot be applied without a theory of who owns what: if he grabs the hat off Zadek’s head, whether he has initiated violence depends on who owns the hat. He said he adheres to the theory of John Locke and Murray Rothbard — that you own yourself, that you own any part of nature or natural resources that you homestead or mix your labor with, and that you own anything else you achieve through voluntary means such as buying and selling, gifts and gambling. His example was clearing land and growing corn while another person domesticates cows: each owns his product, and after trade each owns what he did not produce, traceable back to voluntary action and homesteading of initial resources. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Zadek summarized homesteading as the assumption of virgin land not owned by anybody, where adding labor to land or property that otherwise belongs to no one acquires ownership by dint of added value, and noted that homesteading does not get created so much anymore because land is for the most part accounted for, though the oceans have not been. Block replied that Zadek was only 99 percent correct, since there is still virgin land at the top of mountains in the middle of Wyoming or in Alaska, and certainly the moon and Mars and the oceans, so that homesteading remains mainly a theoretical construct about past justifications but still applies where unowned land remains. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Zadek closed the discussion by saying that once one signs on to the non-aggression principle and the importance of private property, almost any political question before us can be comfortably answered, and that the answers reached are ones most people would be quite comfortable with rather than bizarre. How the Free Market Will Save the Planet (2014)
Foreign policy as the principle applied outward
In the closing minutes of a later episode, Zadek applied the principle to the Ukraine crisis, framing the question as whether the United States as a matter of foreign policy cares at all about what happens to Ukraine, and by what standard. His standard was that we care about matters of foreign policy that directly affect the protection of the United States, and that if we are not directly affected we emphatically do not care. He said every country and every person should operate in furtherance of their rational self-interest, and that our rational self-interest is unaffected by what happened in Crimea and what happened in Ukraine. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014)
Zadek added that if there is a direct threat to national well-being — not some vague, amorphous threat sometime in the future — then of course we care, and that the message of our foreign policy should be that if you threaten us directly you will suffer consequences. He identified this as the non-aggression principle in libertarian dogma: if there is no aggression against us, we exert no aggression against somebody else, a foreign policy he called simple, easy to understand and easy to apply. Worst Ten Economic Mistakes of the 20th Century (2014)
Preemption, prevention and the meaning of defense
Chris Preble, a vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and author of Peace, War, and Liberty: Understanding U.S. Foreign Policy, discussed with Zadek the distinction between preemption and preventative war. Preble said that when the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense, the implication was that in order for the United States to defend itself it would have to fight more wars and be present in lots of places around the world, which it has been since the end of World War II — very different from how it had practiced for most of its history. He said we draw a distinction between actions taken to protect one’s life and liberty and those taken to deny others life and liberty, and called this a basic critical concept of the non-aggression principle, which libertarians understand very well. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble said he is not a pacifist and that there are occasions for the use of force, citing rare cases where preemptive action was necessary for security — where there is evidence of an imminent attack or imminent danger to the United States — and calling preemption in that sense a legitimate form of self-defense. Prevention, by contrast, he described as much more like aggression: espying some future danger across the room or across the world and saying that rather than risk that future danger materializing, we will take them out ahead of time, which to most independent observers would just look like aggression. He said it is important to differentiate defensive measures designed to protect us from harm from those that are more aggressive in nature and therefore likely to stimulate resistance to the United States and undermine our ability to be a model of liberty. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Asked by Zadek to show how the principle applies, Preble defended the intervention in Afghanistan as an appropriate use of force, connecting it entirely to Al Qaeda, to the events of 9/11, and to Al Qaeda’s demonstrated ability to do harm to the United States. He noted that the war against Al Qaeda effectively started in 1998 after the bombings in Africa, in Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and that after 9/11 the United States went after Afghanistan because that is where the base camps were. He said the presence of Al Qaeda camps and personnel in a physical location targetable by military force made the use of force appropriate, and that it was also appropriate to explicitly punish the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda and to send a message to other countries that might have been tempted to do the same. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble added that the use of force is usually not particularly effective against terrorist organizations because the hard part with terrorists is finding them, not killing them, and that most effective work against terrorism is done by law enforcement, intelligence and cooperation with other law enforcement agencies. He said the risk seen in Afghanistan is that the mission evolved considerably since the intervention, and that what the United States has been trying to accomplish there for the most part since November or December of 2001 is not easily defended on counterterrorism or national security grounds. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
War footing and civil liberties
Zadek raised as his greatest fear du jour what happens in the United States once it is on a war footing, which he said it has been certainly since 9/11 and certainly before, with 9/11 as a sea change: the mission of the military becomes blurred between foreign threats from foreign powers and an inward focus, the so-called war on terror, so that domestic civil rights and freedoms become threatened. He quoted Madison’s observation that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare, and said Madison and others knew that war was the way government accumulated power against its citizens. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Preble agreed that when any country is engaged in foreign conflict there is a tendency for individuals to mute their criticism and self-censor, and that measures a country employs to mobilize military power and maintain it in foreign countries would not be tolerated in peacetime. His example was World War II, when it would have seemed particularly petty to complain about rationing or gas stamps when your neighbor’s son has been killed in combat. He also described government routinely engaging in legal action against critics of war, citing the World War I prosecution of Eugene Debs, who ran for president against Wilson from a jail cell, and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, along with a general stifling of dissent in which people were sometimes arrested and prosecuted for behavior that in any other context would be normal rights and liberties of a free society. He concluded that being in a state of permanent war steadily erodes human liberty in ways not always perceptible while they are going on. On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019)
Rebranding and application
A later episode featured attorney Marc J. Victor discussing his “Live and Let Live” movement, which the episode describes as seeking to rebrand libertarian principles through a focus on non-aggression and aspirational moral values, and as distinguishing between legal requirements (non-aggression) and moral encouragements (voluntary kindness). The listed topics include taxation, gun control, natural rights, moral versus legal rules and wealth transfer. Rebranding Liberty with ‘Live and Let Live’ (2021)
In the portion of that episode on gun control, Zadek told Victor that he had applied his principle to the hard decisions society must make collectively, and that Victor had written and spoken a lot about the almost insoluble problem of what is called gun control and the Second Amendment, which Zadek said they were not going to be referring to on the show specifically. Zadek asked Victor to show how the Live and Let Live principle, called formally sometimes the non-aggression principle, helps sort out his position and how it applies in practice to gun control. The excerpt ends there. Rebranding Liberty with ‘Live and Let Live’ (2021)
Across episodes
The excerpts show the principle treated at two levels rather than developed through a single argument. In the 2014 episode with Walter Block, the non-aggression principle is defined and paired with a Lockean-Rothbardian theory of property rights, with Block and Zadek distinguishing radical libertarians who allow no exceptions from minarchists who exempt government. In the same year’s closing monologue, Zadek applies the principle to the Ukraine crisis as a standard of direct national self-interest. By 2019, Chris Preble uses the principle to distinguish preemption as legitimate self-defense from prevention as aggression, and Zadek extends the discussion to the erosion of civil liberties on a permanent war footing. The 2021 episode with Marc J. Victor returns to definition and rebranding, with the gun-control application left unfinished in the excerpt.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state a founding date for the non-aggression principle, nor do they attribute it to a single originator beyond Block’s citation of Locke and Rothbard as the sources of his property theory. They do not report what any court has held about the principle, nor which constitutional amendment any case turned on; Zadek expressly sets the Second Amendment aside in the gun-control discussion. The excerpts also do not give the outcome of the Ukraine crisis, the Afghanistan war, or the Live and Let Live movement’s reception, and the gun-control exchange breaks off before Victor answers.