A recent debate on Twitter is whether libertarians should be against homeless people occupying public parks intended for children. As I understand it, there are essentially 2 views:
Public property is illegitimate. If everyone owns it, no one owns it and excluding some people and not others is arbitrary and immoral.
While there should not be public property, while it exist it is reasonable to try to approximate what a private owner would do with said property to minimize harm done by the property being private.
I think that both views have some merit, however, I side mostly with the second one. Especially if these views are taken to their logical conclusions (for example: allowing protesters into the jury deliberation room of a controversial court case since it is public property), the first doesn’t seem that appealing. But why?
It seems immoral, to put it bluntly. You are already being stolen from. Then you are given parks in return, but they are full of drug addicts and cannot be used for their intended purpose. If someone is trapped using government services, making the service worse harms them. This applies to people in cities where parks are the only place they can play, children caged in government schools, or drivers losing weeks of their lives to DMV inefficiency. And as much as I hate government police, I would rather they stopped murders than didn’t, and for most people they have no other option.
The first position has more nuance. Wouldn’t making the government more effective and efficient increase the production of “bads” rather than goods, as argued by Hoppe? Would it legitimize the government in the eyes of the public? I find both of those questions compelling, but I don’t think that they are enough to rationalize the short term harm, especially since the long term benefit is uncertain.
How about the collapsitarian argument? Much like how many socialists are against charity since they consider it the bread and circuses keeping the working class from rising up against its oppressors, some libertarians want the government to get worse so it is delegitimized faster. However, that corrupt and ineffective government causes real harm in its floundering, and it is not guaranteed that a bad government collapsing leads to a better government. It often leads to the opposite.
The collapsitarian argument reminds me of the draft no longer being used in the United States. Is the draft a horrible modern date version of slavery, taking young adults, forcing them to commit war crimes overseas, and destroying their bodies and minds? Yes, it is an obvious abomination against liberty. However, it being repealed took a lot of fire out of the antiwar movement. Students care a lot less when they are not at risk of being sent overseas. I still think it should have been repealed, but I am not sure if the people defending collapsitarianism would agree.
The final major point that turns me away from the first argument and towards the second is how we are seen in the eyes of others. Someone who wants to live under a government sees someone advocating the first argument as trying to make their lives worse, and they are kind of correct. You are making things worse in the hope that things will get better in the long run, but what if they don’t want, or care about, this long run change? You are just making things worse. The second option is far better as a message to appeal to others. If I tell someone that liberty makes their lives worse, they won’t want it, no matter how moral it is.
Though, as usual, I am open to having my mind changed. It was the violent Stonewall riots that paved the way to legalize gay marriage, not the peaceful lobbying for civil unions that was happening many years beforehand. If King George III had been more efficient and less tyrannical, the colonies would never have rebelled. Journalists should be able to film cops under all circumstances and maybe even be able to follow them into their police station. So maybe we need to break a few eggs to make an omelet?
For now, I am in camp 2. Too many eggs have been broken by ideologs convinced it will be worth it in the end for me to hop on board.
P.S. Another less important but interesting moral argument is about who pays the tax dollars. If the parks were built from their stolen money, they have the highest moral claim to them. And generally, the family has paid a lot more taxes than the homeless man doing drugs in a public park. Food for thought.