The “we can’t be tyrannical, we are against government” cry of a certain type of libertarian is something I am particularly annoyed by. If you are for capitalism then you demand an incredibly complex system of regulation, property rights[1] and currency all of which must be administered by a government and enforced with violence the ‘men with guns’ as I believe the popular dictum goes.
[1] And more often than not, property rights of a very particular usus/abusus/fructus sort which isn’t naturally occurring but was invented by the Romans, largely.
In such a case the assumed simplicity of the NAP is long gone (not to mention vexed questions of externalizes and the like) and you are dealing with a compromise: you are okay with a certain amount of coercion and control. Okay. Fine. But if you demand that the people give up a certain amount of their freedom (assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that absolute freedom is the ground state of being for a human), then it is natural that they wish to negotiate terms and arrive at a compromise system where, say, the protection of very expansive property rights comes with certain obligations and certain public services.
Absolute anarchy is at least a consistent position, but the moment you admit the need for contracts and someone to oversee them and guard labor and all that, then there’s no simple deontological argument why this should be the place of compromise and not some other. Indeed, since it is a compromise, it could be said that the natural place it should occupy is the sort of averaged-out preference of everyone making the compromise.
This, I should point out, is not actually an argument against a society run against objectivist lines. This is an argument against the claim that it is possible to reason out such a society from any sort of universally accepted first principles as is customarily claimed. Instead, the defense of a society run along such lines must be made the way most actually-existing messy compromise solutions that actually exist in the sphere of practical politics are defended—through the lens of consequential meta-ethics.
Now there can be arguments that trivially manage this provided you get to pick the terminal values that concertize your ethical system, but if you are stuck at the common formulation through aggregated preference utilitarianism you get to pick between claiming that not everyone’s preferences count the same and that the Producers’ wishes count for more (the anti-egalitarian position) or that the objectivist principles will increase the general weal universally.
This last option is how you could, conceivably, convince this crowd of your position: show that the adoption of objectivist principles in policy-making improves the lot of everyone. It is not in any way evident that this is the case.
