How about Justice Party?

by Carl Milsted Jr.

Posted December 11, 2005

Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

I disagree: It’s about Justice.

The purpose of government is justice. Whether you are talking about police work, securities law, or national defense, the underlying justification is justice.

Yes, taxation is theft, but doing without government can lead to far greater injustice. Perfect justice is impossible. It is the minimization of injustice that justifies government. And it is the reduction of injustice that will lead to smaller government.

Small government is not a value in and of itself. Justice is. Peace, freedom and prosperity are also values in and of themselves. Justice leads to these.

So how about a Justice Party? The Democratic and Republican parties have names that denote processes for who should govern. The Libertarian Party has a name denoting how big the government should be. Justice Party is about what the government should be doing.

The name “Justice” has several advantages over “Libertarian.”

• It cannot be confused with libertine.
• It allows us to call for legalization of drugs without sounding like druggies. It is simply unjust to punish a pot smoker more than a shoplifter.
• Justice is a term that appeals to the religious. The call for justice can be found throughout the Bible.
• It is a term that appeals to the Left as well.
• It disassociates us from the Confederacy, which had small government but tremendous injustice.
• It gives us room to disassociate from other instances of small, but bad government.
• It provides a call to improve government where appropriate.
• It provides a debate framework for dealing with sunk cost problems like Social Security and the national debt.

If we were to rename the Libertarian Party to the Justice Party, then there should be some corresponding changes to overall theme and marketing approach. We should be less anarchistic in our message, and more up front about positive changes in government where appropriate.

Justice is both a theme for getting rid of bad government and a theme for building good government.

Justice provides answers to environmental problems. Polluters should pay damages to the victims. Where the damage is local, tort and contract law suffices. Where dispersed, legislation is appropriate. A legislature is a better representative of society than a jury in a class action lawsuit! Where pollution can cause serious chance of death, regulation and other measures are called for. For mere irritants, monetary damages are appropriate—not quotas or pollution rights.

Justice provides answers for jail and other punishments. Punishment based purely on deterrence can lead to worse injustice than anarchy. This is easy to show! Once the idea of matching the punishment to the crime is accepted, it is easy to make the case for doing little, if anything, about the milder recreational drugs. It is also fairly easy to sell the idea of restitution vs. punishment for the milder crimes.

Justice provides guidance on foreign policy. War leads to injustice! Collateral damage is vandalism and murder! However, there are dire circumstances where war is the lesser evil. Allowing extreme tyranny and/or genocide to go unchecked can result in more injustice than going to war. And allowing a communist god-emperor to have weapons of mass destruction might be grounds for military action based on the tremendous threat.

Justice provides answers on how taxes should be collected. If you collect more services from government, you should pay for them. Gas taxes to pay for roads are an excellent example. I think corporate value taxes are a good way to pay for the protection and legal framework that governments provide to corporations. Value based taxes on FCC licenses, copyrights and patents are also decent approximations of user fees.

If we incorporate some geolibertarian ideas, we could even have an answer for the injustices of the past.

The name Justice Party does have a down side: what do we call a Justice Party member?

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