Ep. 403 How Would a Libertarian Society Handle Human Shields?
Bob covers some loose ends on the Douglas Murray / Dave Smith debate, then analyzes how a libertarian legal system would handle the thorny problem of human shields.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- Bob’s journal article on libertarian law and military defense.
- Sam Harris interviews Douglas Murray on the JRE debate.
- Previous BMS episodes on the Murray/Smith debate (here and here).
- John Spencer’s twitter essay critiquing Dave Smith’s views on war.
- The link for Monetary-Metals.com.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
CONGRATULATIONS BOB!!! With this episode you defended the honor of the purity of the libertarianism. Stating that the killer of the strapped hostage child has to pay some consequences is the key argument. Yes, he will not be charged with the first degree murder, far from that, probably involuntary manslaughter, but still something. This is very important especially when there’s an increasing trend of very smart people that fail on this complex case, like Walter Block or Stefan Molyneux. This later has published a recent podcast #5924 called Just War Theory, (chapter 6, around 50th minute) where he argued that killing hostage children would be completely on the evil doers that strapped the children. And his defense was untypically wrong for him, he said that evil can not be allowed to win, the wars should be as short as possible and that there’s no time during the war to manage hostage operations, like in civil circumstances like in the bank. All NON arguments. A strange mix of utilitarianism and principles, that is even less excusable for the author secular ethics UPB. But it’s even worse. He then slipped even with the civil case, saying that if the owner shoots accidentally a customer bystander in the shop, after an armed robber initiates the violence is again 100% on the robber. So, he admitted that in all the cases the whole blame is only on the initiator of the violence, excluding completely the culpability of the others. May be the worst part was when he said that could be wrong, but may be, he is just a brute Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, he said the same wrong thing as Walter Block was repeating for months after he was kicked out of the Mises Institute, that it is 100% blame on the people that strap the children. I fear there are still too many persons that would defend this horrible justice theory.
A tricky subject, handled very well. Kudos.
The ratio of Japanese civilian casualties to American ones in WW2 is probably even higher than that of Gaza vs Israel. Most Americans at the time took the view that Japan launched a surprise attack on the US (even though Hawaii wasn’t a state at the time), so any resulting harm to the Japanese was on them.
You assert that a free society will have the best possible military force, but we don’t see free societies dominating the world. Instead state militaries are everywhere but international waters & Antarctica. When libertarians tried to set up “Minerva”, it just got invaded by Tonga.