If the government doesn’t make laws, how will people know what authority to obey?
Question 31 in Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded
This question is from Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded, available in paperback, PDF, and Kindle.
The fundamental principles of self-ownership and non-aggression are self-evidently true (see Questions 14–17). In other words, people intuitively know them. In fact, you’ll find that arguments against them are derived from premises which assume they’re true. How can this be? God’s creational order entails laws written into the fabric of reality. This involves physical laws (e.g., the law of gravity), but also involves normative laws (e.g., “you shall not murder,” Exod 20:13). God’s law is written on the hearts of humankind (Rom 2:15), even if they try to suppress the truth of it (Rom 1:18).
Beyond this, disputes arise as human beings come in contact and interact with one another. Along with voluntary human action comes disagreement; this is inevitable. There are two ways people would know what authority to obey if the government didn’t create new law: contracts and dispute resolutions.
First, with contracts, the rules governing parties are established at the onset of the relationship. This is useful when dealing with an exchange of services (if you do this, then I’ll give you that), where stipulations aren’t self-evident and therefore need to be defined. But contracts cannot foresee all possible outcomes and disputes arise. For these disputes, resolutions need to be made by third-party arbitration. These might be courts or private agencies. Part of any good contract you find today is an agreement to use third-party arbitration in the event a dispute arises. So our society is already acclimated to this form of governance.
If the dispute happens to be a common problem, then the resolution could become common practice where it’s effective and upholds the property rights of the parties involved. In our current system, we might refer to this as “case law.” And even case law can (and would) be challenged in a libertarian society. No doubt, there will need to be a way of keeping track of effective dispute resolutions, which means there will be a market need for impartial record keeping. Some have suggested that blockchain technology could serve this purpose. But whatever the solution, the need for contracts and resolution necessitates a market response, not a monopoly response from a state government.