Thaddeus Russell, host of the podcast Unregistered, recently had David Smith on his show to talk about all sorts of topics within the world of libertarianism. Both Smith and Russell are excellent to listen to but Slappy alerted me to this episode especially because he wanted to know my thoughts on what Russell had to say about natural law and its apparent justification for war. His position is that natural law is false, which is a topic all its own, but we feel that his application of natural law to show that it justifies war is wrong. Here is the conversation at about 1:12 of the episode
Russell: Except here’s a huge, huge problem is that your boy, Ron Paul, thankfully did not follow it to its logical conclusion, which is that we must invade other countries to make sure other people have those rights. If you believe these things are universal and absolute, sacred, and belong to everyone simply by the fact that they are human beings, aren’t you obligated to make sure that they live according to those principles from nature? I’ll just tell you really quickly and you know which is that precisely has been the justification for pretty much every single military operation in the history of the United States. Imperialism both here and in Britain was justified by that.
Smith: But well I’d look at it this way. If you’re taking a natural rights position and a Non-Aggression Principle outlook, you could say something like, okay, let’s say, you know, Assad, or someone like that is killing a bunch of his people and you would say, okay, so he’s initiating violence on them, so don’t you have the right to go defend these people? And I think the libertarian position would be yes, you do, but if you’re doing it with armed military who you’ve now taxed the population who doesn’t necessarily want to fight this war and you’re going over there and killing a bunch of innocent people, from a libertarian point of view, yeah, you wanted to volunteer to go side with the people fighting against Assad or fighting with the people fighting against ISIS for that matter ‘cause it’s not really clear that their side is any better and you were going and defending somebody or bringing someone to justice who had initiated violence, that would be okay. But I think Ron Paul just on a practical matter understood that spreading—like he’s said before that look, I’d like to spread the goodness of natural rights around the world. Just doing it with a military isn’t effective and you end up killing way more people and of course giving this military industrial complex all the power in the world that they use for evil.
Russell: Okay, so there’s this guy, I forget his name but I heard him on the Federalist podcast, who, I think he’s ex-military, and he has this group, this organization of a bunch of ex-military guys. They fly to southeast Asia on a regular basis and they conduct raids on brothels and they quote rescue the girls and women in those brothels and then hand them over to either charities who will take care of them and teach them proper occupations or sometimes to the government but I think usually to charities often run by churches. They’ll teach them how to cook and sew and clean and all that stuff. Right? And I don’t know if they’ve killed anybody but they’re literally kicking down doors with guns and making everyone line up against the wall and they take all the women out. And the women as far as I know didn’t ask for this. Maybe some of them wanted it—who knows. But that’s my point. We don’t know what they want.
They discuss prostitution and agree that this group is wrong to try to “liberate” them. And Russel continues:
Russell: And therefore, they are in effect slaves and we must free the slaves, shouldn’t we? Aren’t we obligated, Dave, to free the slaves? Well, it’s of course, and this is certainly from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson indirectly, but certainly from John Locke, that it is not natural. Right? It is against the natural order for human beings to be enslaved, to be chattel. So, I mean, it’s our duty, isn’t it, to go find those people and liberate them whether we have the government behind us or not.
There’s a lot packed into what Russell said and we go through it to show where we think Russell gets it wrong.
Link Discussed
Unregistered – Episode 43: Dave Smith
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