Some islands in the immediate vicinity of the shores of Helsinki are public parks that have nude beaches. These beaches are divided into male and female sections. The rules concerning behaviour on public beaches are obviously set by some municipal bureaucrat.
As an anarcho-capitalist, I advocate the abolition of the public sector and the privatisation of each and every square metre of land on earth. But as long as there are e.g. parks in municipal ownership, I think the municipal government has a moral obligation to maintain law and order in these public spaces. This means not only that obvious crimes such as murder, rape, assault and robbery ought to be punished, but also that some steps ought to be taken to reduce the likelihood of these crimes occuring, and that the cleanliness and overall comfortableness of public spaces ought to be maintained, lest they deteriorate to an uncivilised state of Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all.
In the context of the nude beaches I mentioned, it makes sense to designate a part of the beach for women only, in order to protect naked female swimmers from rapists, voyeurists and exhibitionist masturbators. Some individual male might protest: "I'm not a rapist, I won't harass anybody even if there are one hundred naked women on the beach and I'm the only man." But the statistical probability of naked women swimmers getting raped or at least harassed obviously increases enormously if men are allowed on the beach. Libertarian babbling about victimless crimes and individual responsibility is a very naïve argument against this simple fact. In an anarcho-capitalistic world, which is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls the natural order, there would be no "right of a man to go to a beach full of naked women" because every square metre of land would be privately owned, and the owner of a beach would have the right to say who gets to enter the beach and on what conditions.
As long as public parks, streets, squares etc. exist, I think the norms of acceptable behaviour in these public spaces should reflect, as closely as possible, the norms that would be enforced by private owners if these spaces were indeed private property. It is in the legitimate interests of normal, honest people to prohibit or at least restrict the kind of behaviour that is very likely to lead to considerable negative externalities.
This means e.g. that people have a legitimate reason to want some kind of traffic rules to be enforced on public streets and roads because reckless driving such as ludicrously high speed or driving under the influence of alcohol is likely to cause traffic accidents that kill or maim not only the reckless driver himself, but also innocent people who drove safely and who can't be blamed for the accident. It can't be right to expose people to unnecessary risks that they don't want to take. It's much cheaper and easier to enforce a speed limit such as 40 km/h on the streets of residential neighbourhoods and shopping districts and 100 km/h on motorways than to allow every idiot to drive 200 km/h and kill children crossing the street on their way to kindergarten.
If all streets and roads were privately owned, honest people wouldn't buy houses in neighbourhoods where the streets didn't have speed limits. The market provides what the consumers want. The consumers of streets and roads, i.e. drivers, bikers and pedestrians, don't want to die in accidents caused by reckless drivers. There is no demand for streets and roads without speed limits, at least not in residential neighbourhoods.
If the state steals your money (this is called "taxation") and then spends it on public services, you get at least some value for your money if these services are useful to you. Ideally, you should get the same services you would have bought in the free market if your money hadn't been stolen and you could have spent it in the way you see fit. This is obviously not exactly possible, but you get the idea. If you are forced to pay taxes to maintain public streets and roads, you should at least get the kind of streets and roads that you would otherwise have paid for in the form of road tolls or maintainance fees of streets in gated communities.
As long as you pay for municipal streets anyway in the form of taxes, you have a legitimate interest to demand that the municipal police enforce sensible traffic rules such as speed limits because you don't want to die. The municipal government has no right to first make you pay for the streets and then expose you to the risk of being killed by reckless drivers.
In the same way, if the municipal government establishes a nude beach in a public park, it should somehow guarantee law and order on that beach. If the beach were privately owned, most women, or families with children, wouldn't go there unless there were separate sections on the beach for men and women. Being forced to pay for a beach that you never use is much worse than paying for some services that you actually use and enjoy.
Libertarians who say that the rules concerning behaviour in public places are obviously set by bureaucrats and therefore are not morally binding because "I never signed a contract where I agreed to those rules" are infantile rebels who don't understand the importance of civilised conduct. Just because the government is an illegitimate institution, it doesn't mean that you can behave like a barbarian in public places because there is no private owner who would have a moral right to set the rules of behaviour in those places.
This is relevant also to the civil war that has been going on in France during the last couple of weeks.
African immigrants, both Arab and black, have burned thousands of cars, smashed store windows, looted merchandise from the stores, set dozens of entire buildings (railway stations, schools, libraries, police stations, supermarkets, gyms, warehouses etc. etc.) on fire with Molotov cocktails, thrown stones at dozens of firemen who tried to extinguish the fires and shot at policemen. Over 100 policemen have been hospitalised.
Infantile, irresponsible "libertarians" rejoice at the news because they see "the state" as their enemy and are glad to see policemen injured or killed as "agents" of the state. This is obviously wrong because the killing or maiming of policemen who are trying to protect private property from looters and arsonists will not liberate anyone from the grip of "the state", but will leave honest people at the mercy of barbarian criminals. The infantile "libertarians" who cheer these rioters are objectively on the side of the robbers, rapists, arsonists and murderers and against human life, individual liberty and private property.
Some of these teenage rebel "libertarians" might point out that even if the Africans have committed crimes against innocent people and their property by setting cars and houses on fire etc., the reactions of "the state", such as curfews in the riot-plagued areas between midnight and 6 am, are "repressive" and "unnecessary". These libertarians are mistaken as well.
As I mentioned, my moral theory concerning proper conduct in public spaces is that the norms of acceptable behaviour in public parks, streets, squares etc. should reflect the norms that would be enforced by private owners if these spaces were private property. An owner of a gated community or an entire privately owned town (e.g. Celebration, Florida) could and certainly would impose a nightly curfew if there had been as severe riots in the town as there have been in Paris and over 100 other French cities during the last two weeks. Therefore I see the curfews in French cities as legitimate and necessary measures.
Saying "I didn't participate in the riots, so I should be free to hang around on the street at 3 am if I feel like it" is exactly like saying, "I'm not a rapist, so I should be allowed to go to the female section of the nude beach even though I'm a man." Just like the presence of men on the nude beach increases the probability of naked women swimmers getting raped or at least harassed, also the presence of thousands of Africans on the streets of Paris in the middle of the night increases the probability of cars and houses getting burned, shops getting looted etc. The nightly curfews during the current civil war in France make at least as much sense as speed limits on streets. They are a cheap and efficient way of preventing unnecessary risks. Normal, honest people are not opposed to this. Nobody has a legitimate interest in allowing thousands of angry Africans to roam free on the streets of Paris in the middle of the night.
Recently, the French government has decided to expel those convicted rioters who weren't French citizens. By Wednesday, November 10, almost 1,500 rioters had been arrested, of whom 229 have been sentenced to jail terms; of the convicted felons, 120 were foreign citizens who are now going to be expelled back to their respective countries of origin.
Some libertarians would say this is horrible discrimination, nationalism, statism, racism etc. etc. ad infinitum. I wouldn't. I think it's a very good idea to expel foreigners who commit serious crimes. It's not only morally acceptable, I think it's morally necessary.
In a natural order, every square metre of land would be privately owned, and the owner of a street, city block, square, park, beach, forest, farm or other area would have the right to say who gets to enter the area and on what conditions. No private real estate owner would allow rioters and other criminals to remain on his property.
Alas, currently there is a public sector that owns parks, streets, squares and other public spaces. It would be politically impossible and economically and technically very difficult to privatise all these public spaces overnight. In the short run, the public ownership of streets, squares, parks etc. is a given. The public sector has stolen your money and spent it on building a street network, among other things. It would be adding insult to injury to first force you to pay for a street network, then force you to use it (because the public street network has a de facto monopoly, thanks to zoning laws that strictly limit the construction of private streets) and THEN unleash a barbarian horde on the streets to attack you and your property. It would be like locking you in a zoo cage and then letting angry, hungry lions in. The morally proper thing for a third party to do in that situation would not be to leave you in the cage to fend for yourself, but to shoot the lions or at least drive them out of the cage in order to save you.
In the context of the current civil war in France, the right thing to do is not to leave innocent people at the mercy of the rioting scum, but to expel that scum from France.
Allowing those barbarians to remain on the streets of French cities, vandalising innocent people's property with impunity, is something that no private owner of those streets and neighbourhoods would ever do. Therefore, by allowing the scum to stay, the state would objectively be committing a crime against the legitimate interests of honest people. Forcing innocent people to constantly live in fear, surrounded by subhuman monsters, would be like forcing a raped woman to live in the same jail cell with her rapist. This forced integration of criminals and their victims must stop. Private real estate owners expel criminals from their property. One step toward the natural order of things, a.k.a. anarcho-capitalism, would be to treat public spaces like the streets of French cities as if they already were private property, and to do exactly what a private owner would do: sweep away the trash.
