As libertarianism has acquired a higher profile in American life over the past several years, the attacks on and caricatures of libertarians have grown almost as rapidly. Libertarians, we read, are antisocial, and prefer isolation over interaction with others. They are greedy, and are unmoved if the poor should starve. They are naive about our dangerous enemies, and refuse their patriotic duty to support the government's wars.

These caricatures and misconceptions can be put to rest by simply defining what libertarianism is. The libertarian idea is based on a fundamental moral principle: nonaggression. No one may initiate physical force against anyone else.

There is nothing antisocial about that. To the contrary, it is the denial of this principle that is antisocial, for it is peaceful interaction that lies at the heart of civilized society.

At first glance, hardly anyone can object to the nonaggression principle. Few people openly support acts of aggression against peaceful parties. But libertarians apply this principle across the board, to all actors, public and private. Our view goes well beyond merely suggesting that the State may not engage in gross violations of the moral law. We contend that the State may not perform any action that would be forbidden to an individual. Moral norms either exist or they do not.

Thus we cannot abide State kidnapping, just because they call it the draft. We cannot abide the incarceration of people who ingest the wrong substances, just because they call it the war on drugs. We cannot abide theft just because they call it taxation. And we cannot abide mass murder just because they call it foreign policy.

Murray Rothbard, who earned his Ph.D. from this very institution in 1956 and went on to become known as Mr. Libertarian, said that you could discover the libertarian position on any issue by imagining a criminal gang carrying out the action in question.

In other words, libertarianism takes certain moral and political insights shared by a great many people, and simply applies them consistently.

For example, people oppose monopoly because they fear the increase in prices, the decrease in product quality, and the centralization of power that accompany it.

The libertarian applies this concern for monopoly to the State itself. After all, private firms, which we are supposed to fear, can't simply charge whatever they want for their goods or services. Consumers can simply switch from one supplier to another, or from a particular product to a close substitute. Firms cannot engage in quality deterioration without likewise losing customers, who can find competitors offering better products.

But the State may, by definition, charge the public whatever it likes for the so-called services it supplies. Its subjects must accept whatever level of quality the State should deign to provide. And there can never, by definition, be any competitor to the State, since the State is defined as the territorial monopolist of compulsion and coercion.

With its wars, its genocides, and its totalitarian atrocities, the State has proven itself by far the most lethal institution in history. Its lesser crimes include the debt crises it has caused, the self-perpetuating bureaucracies that feed off the productive population, and the squandering of resources – which might otherwise have improved the general standard of living through capital formation – on arbitrary and politically motivated projects.

Yet the State, despite its failures, is consistently given a benefit of the doubt that no one would extend to actors and firms in the private sector. For instance, educational outcomes remain dismal despite vastly increased expenditures and far lower class sizes than in the past. Had the private sector presided over such a disaster, we would never hear the end of all the denunciations of the malefactors of great wealth who are keeping our children ignorant. When the government sector performs so poorly, there is silence. Silence, that is, interrupted by demands that the State be given still more resources.

Years ago, when John Chubb of the Brookings Institution tried to uncover how many bureaucrats were employed in New York City's public school system, it took six telephone calls to reach someone who knew the answer – and that person was not allowed to disclose the information. It took another half dozen calls to find someone who both knew the answer and could reveal it. The answer? Six thousand.

Chubb then called the Archdiocese of New York to find out how many bureaucrats were employed in the administration of the city's Catholic schools, which educated one-sixth as many students. When the first person he called didn't know the answer, he figured he was in for it again. But that person went on to say, "Wait, let me count." It was twenty-six.

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