Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“An Objectivist government, as Rand imagined it, provides some services, such as national defense, which cannot be funded on the usual market basis that an individual who does not pay for it does not get it. How are such activities to be paid for? Collecting taxes would be an initiation of force and so, as Rand recognized, inconsistent with Objectivist ethics. One solution she proposed was to charge for the service of enforcing contracts. Pay to register your contract with the court system and the government will enforce it and use the profits on that to fund national defense. Using force against someone who refuses to pay back a loan or to deliver the goods he has been paid for is retaliatory force, not initiation of force, so permitted by Objectivist ethics. The problem with this is not ethical but economic.” (02/26/25)