Why have rules when you can let people figure things out for themselves! Libertarians frequently chastise governments for implementing silly things like “banking regulations” to prevent the worldwide devastation of financial crises, and they are absolutely right to do so. The Free Market will decide how banks ought to be run, and if people don’t like it, they can just keep their money underneath their mattress, or start their own, ethical banking system out of their garage! Both are completely reasonable things to do in modern society that will undoubtedly topple the oligarchical banking system.

But really, why stop there? Libertarian principles can and should be applied to all aspects of life. Consider the justice system. A man rapes a woman, and in doing so, his peers would distance themselves from him, his business associates might prefer to do business with someone else, and he might have problems getting a girlfriend later on down the road. These negative indicators would push him toward a non-rape-y disposition. On the other side, if he was too kind to people, they would begin to take advantage of him. After being taken advantage of for so long, the man would become less kind. This invisible hand of the justice system would thus create a social balance without any regulations imposed upon it from any so-called “government.”

Who’s in favour? No one? Shocking.

Like all Libertarian fantasies, we really ought to have started worrying about our ideology when any consideration for the rape victim was tossed aside, but the obvious inconsistencies don’t stop there. Anyone imagining a lawless society has no issue coming to the conclusion that the mightiest would rise to the top to dictate how the world ought to be run, while the rest scrounge to survive as best they can within its rugged hellscape. Our rapist could simply find others who agree with his rape-y tendencies, and if they were strong enough, they could impose those tendencies on the population without any repercussions. He could really just end up “taking” a girlfriend, since there would be nothing ultimately stopping him from doing so. This is basically how gangs work, which are already organizations that exist outside of the law. Remember the ethical banker starting their business in their garage? We can use our imaginations again to see how things would go if this person started offering real competition against the gang leaders in a world without any rules.

This is no different from the banks, or any other big corporation that wants to abolish the rules that govern their behaviour. They want to collude with other like-minded businesses to be able to impose their tendencies on the rest of the population without any oversight, with no consideration for those of us being raped.