Reconciling Moral Legislation and Market Freedom

This article will discuss questions along the line of, "If you are a libertarian then how can you be against abortion or gay marriage?"

There are two simplistic answers and one more complex answer. This article is focused on the latter, but I will briefly give the formers as well:

1. I am not a libertarian. Not everyone who supports the free market is a libertarian. In the first place I am a conservative and in the second place an anarcho-capitalist. I am so individualist that a libertarian might as well be a progressive when compared to me.
2. Abortion can be taken as assault in violation of the NAP. Some libertarians find that intervention to prevent such assault is not inconsistent with NAP. Not that I believe in the NAP anyway. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is a flat contradiction. Saying I am against gay marriage is like saying I am against flying penguins.

Why are both of these answers simplistic? Because the root of legitimate libertarianism is not some moral argument. It is the power of the market itself. Economics, not moral reasoning, is the reason libertarianism is so powerful.

So while we can use logical tactics to dance around certain issues, the fundamental problem remains. If you support a central government which legislates morality, or anything else, in a way that would distort the entirely free choice of the market, then you are supporting inefficiency. Moreover, if you somehow constructed a government which somehow did not distort the entirely free choices of the market, then it's existence would be meaningless and its funding or other support would still be an act of inefficiency.

This is where the idea of polycentric law and anarcho-capitalism comes into play. These are mechanisms for economically efficient law creation, law enforcement, provision of public goods such as defense and law, and more. This article is not meant to dive into that topic.

The complex way to resolve the apparent contradiction in Christian anarcho-capitalism, or the many other various forms of laissez faire and pro-moral legislation, is to say the following: As long as there is no free market of legislation, the best I can do is strive to ensure that the central legislating body legislates in a morally optimal way.

In other words, let's say that I think abortion is immoral. I still need to recognize that when the market operates efficiently those who demand abortion will transact with those who supply abortion.

My response is not, then, to say that an optimal central government would allow abortion. My response is to claim that an efficient anarcho-capitalist arrangement might allow for abortion, although even this is not clear, but as long as government is administered through a central authority I will continue to seek it banned.

Basically, I am proposing a discontinuous solution. I am proposing that the preferred form of government is not determined by efficiency but instead by its degree of morality. I maintain that given two moral institutions the more efficient one is overall better.

Moreover, this model of preference predicts another result which I also think is correct, validating the model to a limited extent. This model predicts that an immoral anarcho-capitalist society would be inferior to a moral traditional state.

We can consider the enacted value of social morality as a function of that society's collective morality and its collective efficiency. If a society is moral but inefficient, it will enact less moral actions then a society which is both moral and efficient, and so on.

The result is that a traditional state which is moral may be preferable to a traditional state which is libertarian, but an anarcho-capitalist society which is very moral is preferable to a traditional state which is moral. With respect to efficiency, the result is discontinuous, but the logic is clear.