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Political Principles

A being is any entity possessing life, sentience, or intelligent volition, and are the only entities that have rights. There are two classes of beings: persons and organisms. A person is any intelligent being with significant volitional control over how it affects other beings.

All persons have the right to life and liberty.
All beings have the right not to suffer torture or extinction.

Thus persons are obligated to minimize the incidence of

deaths of persons;
extinctions of species;
aggression; and
torture.

Objects of Ethics

Property is anything that an agency has the exclusive right to possess, use, and assign.

Property can be anything that is not a person and that can be created or controlled by a person.
A person has a right to access any unowned resource to which they have been exercising continuing access.
A person owns any unowned unaccessed thing over which he exerts original control.
A person owns anything he creates from his property and resources rights.
A person owns any property, property right, or resource right consensually assigned by its rightful owner.
Each property, property right, and resource right of a person, upon his death, either goes to a chosen assignee or reverts to being unowned.

A resource is any physical or logical supply or space which exists without intelligent sustenance and is easy to use in part but hard to control as a whole, such as air, land, water, pollution sinks, sunlight, wind, views, fish, game, minerals, meteorites, space, orbits, bandwidth, public namespaces, etc. Polluting or monopolizing a resource is aggression against the persons who have been exercising continuing access to it. A possessable resource is one, such as land or sunlight, of which a part may be controlled such that any outsider's use of it is easily detectable by the controller. Even privatized property interests in unpossessable resources are subject to the tragedy of the commons, because the owner cannot readily identify who is violating his interest.

Ethical Relations

Persons have no right to inflict negative externalities impacting property and resource rights, and no right to demand compensation for positive externalities.

Cooperation is the interaction among persons for mutual benefit. Cooperation is usually positive-sum even for direct and reversible exchanges, because the exchanging persons have differing needs or values. The right of association is the right of persons, except in cases of anti-competitive monopoly, to cooperate or decline to cooperate with whom they choose. Cooperation can take many forms. A contract is an explicit understanding among consenting agents to exchange with or affect each other in a specified way.

Aggression is the violation by a person of another person's rights, and consists only of: personal injury, damage to property, infringement of resource rights, coercion, fraud, anti-competitive monopoly, or inducement or deceptive incitement of third parties to any of these. Coercion is compulsion of one person by another through force or threat of aggression. Fraud is any attempt to profit by deceiving a person into making a choice intended to cause him economic harm relative to what would have been his undeceived choice. Anti-competitive monopoly is the intentional control or denial of a person's participation in an industry by the coordinated action of the person(s) controlling that industry.

Competition is the contrary efforts of persons to win the consent of some other person(s) to associate in some way. The infliction of opportunity costs through non-monopolistic competition does not by itself constitute aggression. Expression is only aggression if it involves deception that intentionally or negligently causes actual harm or serious risk thereof, for example by yelling "fire!" in a crowded (but not burning) theater. Non-deceptive incitement to aggression is not itself aggression.

Justice is the minimization, reversal and punishment of aggression. Injustice is unminimized, unreversed, or unpunished aggression. The minimization of coercion can itself justify a minimal amount of coercion. Coercion should be reversed by payment of damages or, if possible, reparation of the original property or access rights to the coerced persons. Serious coercion should be punished by loss of freedom, personal interaction, and even life.

Liberty is volition in the absence of aggression. Thus justice can also be defined as the most liberty for the most persons. Freedom is significant volition: the power of making significant decisions about an agent's own actions. The freedoms of two persons can be in complete conflict, but their liberties by definition cannot.

The State

A state is an organization of persons that has control and sovereignty over a particular region and the persons in it.

Purpose of the state

To meet their obligation to minimize death, extinction, aggression, and torture, the persons in a region join together in a social contract to create or authorize the state. The purpose of the state is to

Effect justice (the minimization, reversal, and punishment of aggression);
Provide aid and sustenance to persons in mortal danger;
Protect species in danger of extinction;
Prevent torture;
Regulate natural monopolies; and
Provide pure public goods.

Duties of the state

The specific duties of the state are therefore to

Minimize, reverse, and punish foreign aggression

Deter and defend against foreign attack
Regulate international trade
Manage annexations and secessions

Minimize, reverse, and punish domestic aggression

Minimize, reverse, and punish coercion

Prevent force and fraud
Protect property
Enforce contracts
Protect resource rights

Protect ongoing access to unowned resources
Collect rent for use (e.g. pollution) of unpossessable resources

Regulate bankruptcy
Regulate incorporation

Minimize, reverse, and punish anti-competitive monopolies

Regulate natural monopolies
Prevent anti-competitive artificial monopolies

Provide aid and sustenance to citizens and residents in mortal danger, such as

the indigent
dependent persons with no guardian

Prevent torture
Protect species and ecosystems

Powers of the state

The powers of the state necessary for carrying out its duties are to

Tax - a taking of property by a state from a class of its subjects according to rule ordained in a duly enacted law.

Establish a currency as legal tender for public debts
Collect rent for use of unpossessable resources

Tax resource consumption and pollution
Rent resource access to the highest bidders

Tax consumption, income, or trade

Take or regulate private property for fair compensation, to help to

Regulate natural monopolies
Prevent anti-competitive artificial monopolies
Prevent threats to public safety such as epidemic, flood, pestilence, and weapons of mass destruction
Protect species and ecosystems

Establish police and regulatory services to prevent domestic aggression
Establish a military to minimize, reverse, and punish foreign aggression
Establish a judiciary to try cases of fact and law
Regulate the definition of personhood for elections, citizenship, adulthood, marriage, incorporation
Manage spaces annexed or donated to the state

Restrictions on the state

In no case may the state

Commit torture
Restrict any person's non-coercive expression or belief
Establish or endorse any religion
Treat persons inequitably on the basis of ethnicity, sex, age, or belief
Deny any person equal representation
Compel labor, except through wartime military conscription
Take property without fair compensation
Confiscate or tax wealth or inheritance, as opposed to the change in wealth through consumption, income, or trade
Search or seize persons or property without a warrant of probable cause
Compel self-incrimination
Annex a space without the consent of a supermajority of the persons residing or owning property or accessing resources there
Permit the secession of a region if

a supermajority in the region does not approve, or
secession threatens the security of the state, or
the region would get a free ride from the state's exercise of its duties.

Organization of the state

The state should practice the principle of federalism, so that each governmental function is performed by the most local unit of government that can perform it. The state should have separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The citizens of the state should exercise their power through elected representatives rather than directly through plebiscites.

A natural monopoly is a continuous physical network that needs to reach almost every piece of property in a region, such as roads and distribution networks (but not sources or sinks) for water, electricity, natural gas, sewage, and wired telecommunications. Since the market cannot efficiently regulate natural monopolies, the state should do so.