Was St. Thomas Aquinas an Anarchist?

Strap in for a bit of a rant…

Consider the following quote from Aquinas:

“Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.”

This message will resonate with nearly all classical liberals.

Libertarians will appreciate its requirement that proper law must be reasoned from first principles.

Religious conservatives (with a classical liberal substrate) will value St. Thomas’ reference to “the eternal” as the source of that reason.

Both will agree that in order for a human law to be just, it must be consonant with natural law.

The only debate, really, is on how far to turn the knob. How do we know when a human law has crossed the line to injustice?

There is the obvious stuff: Laws that are applied unevenly. Laws that tyrannize or enslave. Laws that forcibly extract the entirety of a nation’s wealth. Those are hardly worth discussing, because they are, well…obvious. So let’s drill down a little bit.

Laws that are applied unevenly

Progressive taxation is the uneven application of law. Does that qualify?

It would be one thing to tax everyone at 10 percent. Yes, the rich would pay more in absolute dollars, but at least the rate would be the same. But to say that a certain cohort of humans will have their property confiscated at a different rate than other cohorts is clearly the uneven application of a manmade law.

This quite literally creates multiple classes of humans—the ones who will have a greater percentage of their stuff taken from them, and the ones who will have smaller percentages confiscated.

How is that not a violation of natural law? How is it not precisely what Aquinas described as being “unjust law…no law at all, but rather a species of violence”?

Or how about the (increasingly ironically named) Department of Justice here in the United States, which has begun applying different standards of justice in a number of areas? Take, as an example, different types of protests and protesters…

Extremely violent and destructive protests are deemed “mostly peaceful” and perpetrators of billions of dollars in damage and multiple murders go unpunished. Actually mostly peaceful protests are assailed as violent “insurrections,” and domestic citizens are imprisoned in abysmal conditions without trial or habeas corpus.

Okay, so most of you understand that to be an injustice. And yet you continue to act as though this government is, in some overall sense, still legitimate. Why? Our system has either authorized this, or is powerless to prevent it. Do you not see what a problem that is?

Let’s move on…

Laws that tyrannize or enslave

Tyranny…

We all saw what happened with covid. THEY declared an “emergency” and threw everything you thought you knew about our “rights” out the window. It took five minutes for every Western country to become a partial police state. How was that not tyranny?

Again—either our systems of government authorized such activities, or they were powerless to prevent them. Either way, you continue to act as though these governments are, in some overall sense, legitimate.

Slavery…

Slavery takes the fruits of your labor against your will.
Government does that.

Slavery forces you to labor for the benefit of others.
Government does that too.

Slavery imposes an arrangement to which you did not explicitly consent.
Did you sign the “social contract”? Neither did I.

Slavery forcibly compels your actions and choices.
Government does that to perfectly peaceful people who are minding their own business.

Slavery punishes you if you try to resist.
Go ahead, resist any of this and watch what happens.

Slavery punishes you if you try to escape.
Go ahead, try to secede and watch how fast they murder you.

Oh no, I’ve used the S-word. Yes, secession—gasp!—is outside the Overton Window for today’s humans, who are even more ready to bend the knee than we were 200 years ago. I guess we don’t actually have the right to “alter or abolish” anything. Or maybe we just don’t have the b@lls.

Exactly how is government different from slavery? It shares all of its primary characteristics in common with it.

Because we get to vote is not an answer. In case you haven’t noticed, you can vote all day long and still have a million things done to you to which you did not consent. You can vote for 100 years and the system will just get bigger and bigger.

You’re not allowed to use the word ‘slavery,’ white boy, is also not an acceptable answer. Yes, I have actually encountered this ‘argument.’ As if no white people were ever enslaved on planet Earth.

Laws that forcibly extract the entirety of a nation’s wealth.

Sure, a complete kleptocracy, in which everyone is forcibly impoverished except for a tiny ‘elite,’ obviously crosses the line. But where do you draw that line, and why, and how?

How is 90 percent extraction bad, but 89 percent is okay? Or 50 or 30 or 10? What is the principle at work in determining that line?

Once again, “democracy” is not an answer. Democratic processes have brought people to power who have enslaved and murdered. Not just elsewhere, but here in our vaunted constitutional republic. Dred Scott. The Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska Act. Korematsu. Endless war.

Voting is not a principle. Voting is not a moral concept or a philosophy. Voting is just voting. You can vote for anything or anyone.

So I ask again—HOW do you draw the line between acceptable extraction and unacceptable? What makes one amount okay and the other not okay?

And while you are trying to answer that question, riddle me this: What makes ANY extraction morally acceptable?

Do. Not. Say. Voting.

I do not consent to the system. How is voting to force me to consent morally acceptable?

I do not consent to be taxed. Same question.

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Aquinas was a natural lawyer. He used his “right reason” to perceive a natural law that is universal, eternal, and rooted in a higher ethic than anything manmade.

So what are some obvious things that we know from natural law?

Leveller Richard Overton understood pretty much all of it back in 1646:

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-​propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-​propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man’s right-​-​to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety-​-​as it were writ in the table of every man’s heart, never to be obliterated-​-​even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.

How is something that a 17th century Englishman knew so clearly so opaque to so many people today?

No one is the boss of you

Ontologically (that is, as a fact of existence), no one is born to rule, nor others to be ruled. Richard Rumbold apprehended this back in 1685:

No man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the World with a Saddle on his Back, neither any Booted and Spurred to Ride him

[Note: Tomas Jefferson more famously used the booted-and-spurred metaphor in 1826, but Rumbold got there first.]

(Notice that both Overton and Rumbold wrote these messages from government prisons. That ought to tell you something.)

The absence of ontological authority is a brute fact, and ought to be understood as such. Some people might make better leaders than others, but there is no natural, automatic, birthright authority. No fixed classes of highborn and lowborn.

Thus, all authority must either be granted or imposed upon the unwilling by force. (Any attempt to refute this results in a performative contradiction. If I refuse to grant authority, then the only choice is to impose it by force, thus proving the claim correct.)

Since no one has ontological authority, this means that no one has the ontological authority to impose anything by force upon the unwilling.

Here, we have the root of a proof for the nonaggression principle. A government-imposed “social contract,” and the nonconsensual regime it imposes, violates that nonaggression principle every day, in every way.

St. Thomas, call your office.

Only YOU own YOU

Free will is a thorny concept. To what extent are our choices influenced by our biology, patterns ingrained in our upbringing, and other circumstances beyond our control? No one knows for sure.

But we do know this: to whatever extent you choose, only you can choose for you. Someone else can use force to rob you of available options, but only you can actually choose what you think and do. Your free will, whatever it is, is naturally exclusive.

This natural exclusivity confers upon you, and you alone, dispositive decision-making authority over your own life, body, and being. Dispositive decision-making authority is the primary characteristic of a property right. You own yourself.

Force violates your self-ownership

This self-ownership confers upon you a theoretically infinite range of possible actions and choices. These are your rights. The only thing that can interfere with these rights is coercive force initiated by another against you. But, as we have seen above, no one has the ontological authority to initiate said force.

Thus, you have a right to do anything you like that does not initiate force against another. And everyone else has the same rights, and the same prohibition.

Consent

You have dispostive decision-making authority over your own life, body, and being. No one has ontological authority to initiate force against you. Self-ownership, and the rights that emanate therefrom, thus constitute a just moral and ontological claim.

These are natural facts, the natural conclusion of which is that anything that violates your consent is morally impermissible.

There are numerous other principles that emanate from natural law…

We can speak, for example, of the fact that freedom is woven into the very fabric of existence—that all life forms, and even many non-living systems, cannot exist without the freedom to seek what they need in order to survive.

(Or, if you prefer—All LIFE must have the LIBERTY to PURSUE HAPPINESS.)

We can speak of the need of all humans and animals to act upon the things of the world (LABOR), and to occupy places in the world (PROPERTY) in order to survive.

But this is enough for now.

Natural law tells us that

• Any initiation of coercive force against any person who has not initiated force,

• Any violation of the consent of any unwilling person, and

• Any violation of the self-ownership (rights) of any unwilling person

are all ontologically and morally impermissible.

Natural law tells us this. “Right reason” tells us this.

And yet ALL FORMS OF INVOLUNTARY GOVERNANCE do all of these things, every day.

Not just when they have “become corrupt.”

Not just when they strayed from some mythical “original vision.”

No, they all do this when they are FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.

Aquinas knew all this back in the thirteenth century, and we who are alive today owe him a great debt for all the work he did on human rights and natural law.

He was quite clear: governance and laws that violate natural law are a “species of violence.” However, because of his time and place and historical context, there was no way he was going to be able to carry that understanding out to its logical conclusion.

But we can. And should.