No Crime Without A Victim
 

 The recent flap (as of this writing) over Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-Pa) remarks regarding anti-sodomy statutes provides us with an excellent opportunity to illustrate the dangers of enacting laws based on someone’s particular concept of morality, as well as the mistaken perception that we live in a “democratic” country, as opposed to a constitutional representative republic.
 The basic thrust of Santorum’s statement was this: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." 
 This has been referred to as the “slippery slope” argument, and I must say that I have to agree with that assessment; except that this is a slope which slides in the opposite direction.
 Consider this; if the state has the right to outlaw consensual private homosexual conduct engaged in out of public view, then the only logical conclusion is that the state has the right to outlaw ANY PRIVATE CONDUCT WHATSOEVER, with the only qualifier being that the activity is considered “immoral” by those making the laws! Islamists consider using your left hand to bathe yourself “immoral”; would anybody argue that the government has the right to outlaw that? (Wait, don’t answer that question;)
 Let me state at the outset that I personally find homosexual behavior objectionable on religious grounds, but that is not the issue. The issue is that it is simply none of my g*d damn business what happens between consenting adults in their own private residences. I also find candied yams “objectionable”; should we outlaw those, too? Just who the hell am I?
 The main idea behind these kinds of laws is that the activity they outlaw is “harmful to society”; this is also the logic from which springs our repressive anti-drug laws. The common argument is that “people who are on drugs go out and commit rapes and murders.” 
 People who make this type of argument seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that RAPE AND MURDER ARE ALREADY ILLEGAL! If most crimes occur under the influence of a substance this does not indicate that most substance users are criminals, it indicates that most criminals are substance users. Most criminals are under thirty, too; should we lock up every person under thirty because they are all potential criminals?
 Using this logic, the state could conceivably legislate how many hours of sleep you get at night, or what kind of cereal you have to eat in the morning. Well hey, such things could have an effect on your “state of mind”, right? A sleepy, malnourished person is generally more irritable.
 So, having demonstrated that such specious arguments of “public interest” cannot be the justification for legitimate laws, then just what exactly is the justification? Why do some laws conflict with the concept of “liberty” while others don’t?
 Perhaps the most fundamental principle underlying the libertarian political philosophy is this: No act can be considered criminal unless it denies an individual or group of individuals their property rights. What is meant by “denies an individual their property rights” is that somebody has to have suffered a tangible material damage to, or misuse of, their property. 
 Perhaps it would be helpful to stop right here and to clarify exactly what is meant by the term “property”. In a world which has periodically experienced every conceivable form of government, from absolute tyranny to absolute anarchy, the definition of “property” as it applies to the law has become increasingly obscured. 
 It is common these days for a person to assume that by “property” you are referring only to the material possessions that a given person has legally accumulated during their lifetime, but, when broken down to it’s most basic level, the concept of property constitutes much more than just this. A person’s property must necessarily include not only their outward material possessions, but also their physical body, their natural life, and the thoughts contained in their mind.
 It might seem slightly unusual to include someone’s thoughts in a list of their private property, but then, just what is property to begin with? Private property can be reasonably defined to be any aspect of a person’s life to which no other individual has a legitimate claim of ownership. This would certainly seem to apply to one’s thoughts and life, as neither of these can be reasonably claimed to be the property of anyone but the person naturally endowed with them; and yet neither of these things has a tangible material form. 
 A religious person might argue that, in fact, your body and your life should rightfully be considered the property of God, as he is the one who created you. However, the fact that God does not see fit to administer any immediate punishment for an individual who damages or otherwise misuses his property clearly demonstrates his willingness not to interfere with the free will of human beings, at least not in this life.
 But even if one assumes that God is the rightful owner of our lives and bodies (and, by virtue of creating the universe, everything else as well), that still does not impute to any human government a legal claim for control over the minds and lives of ordinary citizens, because no person or government can legally prove that their god has granted to them such authority. This is the fundamental mistake in mixing religion with government, as well as enacting laws based on moral principles: Only God has the authority to legislate morality! 
 When we start viewing the law in this way, we begin to see that even the most morally reprehensible crimes; those such as kidnapping, rape and murder; can be broken down into a simple matter of property law; kidnapping can be defined as the theft of another person’s body; rape is the misuse of another person’s body; and murder is the damage of another person’s body in conjunction with the theft of their life. 
 A key element must be noted in all of these instances. These acts can only be considered crimes if they take place without the express permission of the owner. No one would argue that by simply lifting a person up and carrying them to another location that you have somehow “kidnapped” them, assuming that this is done with the person’s consent; and no one would argue that any sexual contact with another person’s body is “rape”, if it is done with the express permission of that body’s owner. 
 It is here that we encounter the first major legal casualty in our examination of private property rights, for, if we are to be consistent, we cannot then go on to argue that the ending of another’s life, or, more specifically, one’s own life, can be considered a crime when it is done with the express permission of the owner. 
 So, if you are to agree with the above definition of private property, then you must logically concede that any statute barring a private citizen from either personally committing suicide, or from soliciting outside assistance in that suicide, must be viewed as an unlawful encroachment on that person’s property rights. 
 You may also have noticed that this governmental encroachment in the case of suicide meets the same criteria of a “crime” which is demonstrated in the other crimes we have defined above. It has the effect of stealing an individual’s property; in this case the life and body of the person attempting to commit suicide; by granting to the government the power to decide exactly what shall be that property’s proper use. This is where we come to the very heart of the libertarian philosophy: If the government can dictate to you what can and cannot be done with your own private property; i.e. your life, body, mind and possessions; then you are, by definition, the property of the government! 
 In fact, when viewing the world from this perspective we must now conclude that any law or statute which would presume to dictate rules and regulations concerning the private personal conduct of consenting individuals, whether that conduct be suicide, drug use, sodomy, self-mutilation, polygamy, or virtually any other private consensual act, must itself be considered unlawful.
 By dictating to you the appropriate use (or disuse) of your property, the government has, in effect, unjustly appropriated that property for itself. Once we have established this point, we can then come away with the only viable definition for the word “liberty”: Liberty is the right of an individual to use (or disuse) their private property in any way which they see fit, so long as that conduct does not materially effect the property of another. 
 The inclusion of the word “materially” here is of vital importance, as we cannot start banning private conduct simply because of how it may reflect upon the property of another. 
 If, for example, we were to prevent certain kinds of people from buying property in an upscale neighborhood simply because of how it may reflect on the perceived property value of others living in that neighborhood, then we have banned an activity which does not materially affect another person’s property. Such activity does not change any self-inherent attribute of the property itself, only the perception of that property in the minds of others. 
 An appropriate analogy would be if a private business owner were to begin marketing his own brand of an already popular product. If the popularity of this new product were to cause sales of the competitor’s product to drop, then the business owner can be said to have effectively decreased the perceived value of his competitor’s remaining unsold product. But would anybody argue that this perceived decrease in value is a material damage to the competitor’s property which should be corrected by law? (Some people really would, actually, but that’s for another article.)
 Another undesirable effect of barring an unwanted individual from buying property in a neighborhood is that at the same time we are denying the property rights of every home owner in that neighborhood by virtue of dictating to them to whom they may transfer their property. We are thus making a vicarious claim of ownership on all of these citizen’s private properties, and there is only one applicable word for that: stealing 
 If, however, these same citizens were to decide on their own that they do not want to sell their property to an unwanted individual, they would merely be exercising their property rights and, by extension, their rights of free association.
 When dealing with the subject of private property however, it must be explicitly stated that it would not be appropriate to attempt to apply these same principles to public property. Every citizen in a community has an equal claim in defining the proper use of that community’s public property.
 It is here that we find the only legitimate domain of the democratic process; every citizen gets a single vote concerning what types of laws will be applied to their shared public property, whether that vote is for an actual law or for a candidate supportive of such laws. 
 Accordingly, such laws as those pertaining to sexual conduct and the ingestion of intoxicating substances, which would be an unlawful encroachment if applied to a private residence, are perfectly legitimate when applied to the public arena. Again, to apply such laws to a private home would be to make a claim of ownership on that home, and that is something that is not within the authority of a government to do. 
 This is not to suggest, of course, that such serious acts as murder and rape are of no concern to the public when committed within the confines of a private residence. However, this is only because the nature of such acts is nonconsensual. There is a very obvious distinction between, say, ingesting an intoxicating substance while out of the view of the public, and an act of murder which deprives someone of both their body and their life, thereby denying them their property rights.
 The sole authority and purpose of any government instituted among men is to protect the individual private property rights, along with the collective public property rights, of it’s citizens; this is a government’s only mandate, and that, my friends, is the very concept of liberty on which this once great country of ours was founded. 
 But precisely how do citizens go about instituting such a government to begin with? Indeed, what authority does anybody other than the wronged party have to enforce property rights, considering that the government and police have no stake in this citizen’s property? 
 Perhaps it would be helpful to first define exactly what it is that we mean by the words “government” and “society.”

(Not Yet Completed)