In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard conceptualizes “the defense of the rights of person and property” as the foundation of libertarian law. This serves as an ethical benchmark against which to ensure that the law does not stray into becoming an instrument of aggression.
Measured against that benchmark, it is clear that many laws have strayed far away from the ethical foundations of human liberty. Law enforcement agencies now manage interpersonal relations between different groups in society through the framework of equality, anti-discrimination, and civil rights. As Rothbard explains, this gives the state increasing power to control all aspects of citizens’ lives:
...the State does not merely use coercion to acquire its own revenue, to hire propagandists to advance its power, and to arrogate to itself and to enforce a compulsory monopoly of such vital services as police protection, firefighting, transportation, and postal service. For the State does many other things as well… Often it pushes its way into controlling the morality and the very daily lives of its subjects.
In the United Kingdom, the Equality Act imposes legal obligations on public bodies, including the police, to “foster good relations” between different races and sexes. This is termed the “Public sector equality duty” and provides that:
(1) A public authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to—
(a) eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct that is prohibited by or under this Act;
(b) advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it;
(c) foster good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it.
In enforcing that duty, the police often turn a blind eye to crimes perpetrated by specific races or religious groups which enjoy “a relevant protected characteristic” under equality law. After all, the police are duty bound to ensure that these protected persons are not harassed or victimized, and to “foster good relations” between them and British people who do not share their “relevant protected characteristic.” In exercise of that duty, police often decide that charging members of protected groups with crimes would not be in the public interest as it would not help to advance the “noble goal” of “fostering good relations.” Writing in The Telegraph, the former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman highlights cases of thousands of young girls whom police failed to protect for fear that arresting the criminals would undermine police efforts to maintain good community relations:
They told me how, as young girls, they had been preyed upon, trafficked and raped, mainly by Pakistani and Afghan men.…
They told me how police officers, social workers, teachers and councillors all knew about the paedophilia but turned a blind eye for fear of being called racist. They spoke angrily about how the authorities refused to believe them. The truth was covered up out of fear of inflaming racial tension.…
As the independent reports confirm, in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, the perpetrators were mainly Pakistani. This truth that dared not speak its name was a reason for the institutional silence and that’s why we need to keep talking about it now.
The “noble goal” of not inflaming racial tension here took priority over the safety of thousands of vulnerable children. Protecting persons and property gave way to a legal duty to promote good race relations. As Ron Paul explains, such laws are based on the presumption that, without police to “foster good relations” between different groups, society will collapse into oppression and tyranny. Dr. Paul explains:
Even more appalling is the presumption that wherever blacks and whites and others associate freely and to their mutual benefit…it is due solely to government laws that have forced the issue. The idea here is that if people are left to their own devices, they will always and everywhere choose homogeneity in their social associations. I can’t imagine a stranger view of the human condition. To me it demonstrates that the supporters of antidiscrimination have an extremely low view of people and their choices.
Yet, as illustrated by the child abuse cases, the truth is the opposite—it is the duty to manage race relations that caused police to leave young girls vulnerable to attack. Defenders of liberty do not claim that in a “pure liberty” society there would be no criminals; the argument is that law enforcement should be confined to protection of person and property, punishment for crimes against person and property, and not interventions to manage community race relations. In this case, the attempt by the state to manage race relations left thousands of children at the mercy of criminals. This is by now an established pattern—wherever the state intervenes in race relations, tyranny and oppression are not far behind.
A historical example may be taken from the race riots in the aftermath of the War between the States. Race riots were seen as an obvious case calling for federal intervention, overlooking the culpability of federal agents in provoking the riots in the first place. In his book Reconstruction, William Dunning explains that the authorities decided that the best way to reconstruct the South would be for those loyal to the Union, the “Loyal Unionists of the South,” to take charge. Those who had supported the Confederacy—the Rebels—were disenfranchised. This excluded the vast majority of white Southerners from participating in the reconstruction of their own states, while the federal government decreed that freed slaves must be enfranchised. This gave rise to bitterness, resentment, and apprehension, laying the foundation for the crisis in race relations that soon followed.
In the case of New Orleans, a constitutional convention meeting, described in the New York Times as a “bogus convention,” was set up in 1866 to discuss black suffrage. NYT reports that,
It was avowedly a meeting in favor of negro suffrage, and was addressed by members of the Convention, who urged upon their colored auditors the duty of preparing to sustain the Convention by force, and upholding its resolves though at the cost of bloodshed…utterances worthy of a Parisian club in the early days of Robespierre’s power. Universal suffrage was insisted upon as a right to be contended for at all hazards; one of the resolutions affirming that until this be granted “there will and can be no permanent peace.”
No voting rights for blacks, no peace. That was the new mantra, eerily presaging contemporary Black Lives Matter slogans.
NYT adds that “the negros were instructed to repair armed” to the meeting, and that “the tone of the proceedings was calculated to produce bad feeling between the blacks and the whites, and to incite the former to the course they subsequently pursued.” The procession of black men was reported to be carrying “clubs and heavy missiles,” the report highlighting the fact that it was “not the impromptu or accidental affair which it has been represented to be…the Convention had trained and armed their colored dupes.”
As Dunning explains, these events were afterwards depicted as “a deliberate massacre, perpetrated by the rebel element of New Orleans upon those who had been faithful to the Union, and for no other purpose than to punish that fidelity.” There was little interest in identifying what had given rise to the violence. Instead the focus was on fomenting a desire in the North for “the visible humiliation of those who had been conquered.” In reports of these events today, no mention is made of the context preceding the violence, or the fact that armed black men had been encouraged to mount a social justice demonstration. The National Park Service declares that it was “An Absolute Massacre” and a “Slaughter” of black people. We are left to assume that the white mob attacked them for no reason other than racial hostility, which only further government intervention could resolve.
Into this furor stepped the Reconstruction Committee, with its proposal that the solution to racial violence would be to amend the Constitution to give the federal government explicit power to manage race relations under the aegis of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is a cautionary tale of how the belief that state power is the only way to manage race relations pays little or no attention to what caused the hostilities in the first place—in this case the disenfranchising of white Southerners and the rousing of black social justice warriors by their “white ally” warmongers.
