The Bionic Mosquito on Second-Best

In a post yesterday, the Bionic Mosquito asks a fundamental and difficult question. Libertarians oppose the state and believe that people have rights. In a libertarian society, private agencies, not the state, would enforce these rights. But of course we do not now live in a libertarian society; what should we do, then, if our rights are violated? If someone assaults you, are you justified in calling the police? The Mosquito suggests that we must seek “second-best” solutions; pure libertarian theory will not dictate the answer to our queries about what to do in a less than ideal world. He applies this point to the dispute about open borders. He argues that the proper point of contention in that dispute is the rights people have, not whether enforcing these rights, in our non-libertarian world, brings in the state.

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