You Want Justice? Don't Make Me Laugh.

Where is the justice in today's current criminal system? There is none. The United States has the world's largest prison population, overflowing with individuals who engaged in no wrong against the person and/or property of any other individual. Where is the justice in that? It is these individuals who deserve justice! As the great Lysander Spooner said, "Vices Are Not Crimes!"

A genuine criminal is one who engages in activity that directly and physically harms, or threatens to harm, another's person and/or property. It is when man A violates the rights of man B. These rights all men have. It is the right to one's own person and justly acquired property via homesteading (i.e., taking and transforming into one's own a state of nature before anyone else) and voluntary exchange (which, of course, includes gifts). The violation of rights is when A engages in a criminal action of destruction against B's person and/or property (which includes contractual property title relationships). It is therefore that violence against the non-violent is and can only be called un-ethical. This is what makes something such as the "war on drugs" entirely illegitimate. Doing violence against a narcotics user is doing violence on par with doing violence against a non-narcotics user. Hence it is only justifiable to "go after" and engage in the action of restitution and retribution when the criminal is a genuine criminal. After all, the idea of restitution and retribution can only come into real and actual being when another's rights have been violated.

But even when dealing with cases of genuine criminal activity we cannot look to today's system for justice. The victim gets little to no justice in today's statist society with our socialist police and court system. Say that A steals a large amount of money from B. A uses it up. Later the governmentally-run court system finds that A is guilty. What then? Is A himself forced to give back, to be forced to work to pay back, the amount that he has stolen from B back to B, at the very least? No. But it is worse than that because now B, along with other individuals who have done no wrong, have to pay for all of the government bills that handle and detain A. B is thus done a double wrong. Everyone else is also done a wrong in this process. This is a far cry from genuine justice. As a hero of mine said, it is justice that the libertarian is chiefly concerned with.

In Murray Rothbard's essay "Why Be Libertarian?," he said this:

It is our view that a flourishing libertarian movement, a lifelong dedication to liberty, can only be grounded on a passion for justice. Here must be the mainspring of our drive, the armor that will sustain us in all the storms ahead, not the search for a quick buck, the playing of intellectual games or cool calculation of general economic gains. And, to have a passion for justice, one must have a theory of what justice and injustice are----in short, a set of ethical principles of justice and injustice which cannot be provided by utilitarian economics.

To continue:

The genuine Libertarian, then, is in all senses of the word, an “abolitionist”; he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasion of liberty, whether it be, in the original coining of the term, slavery, of whether it be the manifold other instances of State oppression. He would, in the words of another libertarian in a similar connection, “blister my thumb pushing that button!” The libertarian must perforce be a “button-pusher” and an “abolitionist.” Powered by justice, he cannot be moved by amoral utilitarian pleas that justice not come about until the criminals are “compensated.”

In a libertarian society, then, justice would be the very first thing on one's mind. Who but the victim (besides, possibly, his family) deserves justice? Society cannot magically claim that "it" deserves or needs justice. In our above example, it is B that deserves justice. Not "society" or anyone else. In fact, operations on the actual handling of criminal aggressors use to mirror more closely libertarian principles, where the victim was the one who was brought justice and compensation.

Here is what Rothbard had to say in The Ethics of Liberty:

The idea of primacy for restitution to the victim has great precedent in law; indeed, it is an ancient principle of law which has been allowed to wither away as the State has aggrandized and monopolized the institutions of justice. In medieval Ireland, for example, a king was not the head of State but rather a crime-insurer; if someone committed a crime, the first thing that happened was that the king paid the “insurance” benefit to the victim, and then proceeded to force the criminal to pay the king in turn (restitution to the victim’s insurance company being completely derived from the idea of restitution to the victim). In many parts of colonial America, which were too poor to afford the dubious luxury of prisons, the thief was indentured out by the courts to his victim, there to be forced to work for his victim until his “debt” was paid. This does not necessarily mean that prisons would disappear in the libertarian society, but they would undoubtedly change drastically, since their major goal would be to force the criminals to provide restitution to their victims.

In fact, in the Middle Ages generally, restitution to the victim was the dominant concept of punishment; only as the State grew more powerful did the governmental authorities encroach ever more into the repayment process, increasingly confiscating a greater proportion of the criminal’s property for themselves, and leaving less and less to the unfortunate victim. Indeed, as the emphasis shifted from restitution to the victim, from compensation by the criminal to his victim, to punishment for alleged crimes committed “against the State,” the punishments exacted by the State became more and more severe.

In a libertarian society, said Rothbard, "the criminal, or invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his." The victim thus is not only entitled to get back the loot that was stolen, but the offender also loses the same proportion of rights that he took away from his victim by his act of aggression. So as Walter Block says, "two teeth for a tooth" is the going order. However, "the proportional principles," wrote Rothbard "is a maximum, rather than a mandatory." It is obviously up to the victim if he wishes to pursue his rights to the "maximum." The victim is also entitled to any other losses that resulted from being assaulted. For example, he may have lost a full day's pay of work. Thus, in a libertarian society, it is the criminal that is to be charged the bill of police and court services; not the victim (or anyone else----doing so would create more victims).

Reference: The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard, see chapter 13 in particular.