Brink Lindsey’s contribution to the aforementioned “Foundations Week” at Libertarianism.org is now up. Its title is “Life’s More Complicated than the Non-Aggression Principle,” and much of the post is devoted to exemplifying that complexity.

How far below the surface should property rights in land extend? How high into the sky? To what extent can an owner of land bind future owners and restrict their ability to sell? Specifically, is fee tail an enforceable type of ownership? Is the rule against perpetuities a restriction on the rights of ownership or a protector of those rights’ integrity? Can ownership of land be lost by abandonment, or is the rule of adverse possession an impingement on property rights? If possession of land was acquired by force, how much time must pass and how many times must the land change hands before the rights of the original owners and their descendants are extinguished and the current possessors are deemed the legal owners? When do duties to indemnify the dispossessed for their losses expire?

Lindsey anticipates that many libertarians will claim that ambiguities like this can be, and historically have been, resolved by the common law. But, he says,

there’s no guarantee that the results will look anything remotely like what contemporary libertarians have in mind when they envision a free society. Perhaps much of the land will be locked up in giant feudal estates. Or maybe quiet enjoyment of one’s property is protected with sufficient vigor to make any kind of industrial activity impossible because it constitutes an enjoinable nuisance. And if nuisance law alone weren’t enough to maintain bucolic purity (or, in other words, grinding poverty), strict liability for all calculable damages resulting directly or indirectly from unintentional harms could lend its support. It’s worth recalling that the English common law, for all its impressive features, nonetheless recognized fee tail, maintained rules against buying goods and reselling them for a profit (under the common law offenses of engrossing, forestalling, and regrating), and provided for the subjugation of married women through the doctrine of coverture (a woman loses her separate legal identity upon marriage).

The fundamental problem with the NAP, according to Lindsey, is its commitment to a dream of “life without politics.”

It’s a dream of understandable appeal, given the inevitability of moral squalor and distinct possibility of outright horror that come with politics. But it is a delusion all the same, for the truth is that politics is unavoidable. There is no possibility of constructing a legal order without taking sides repeatedly in value-laden controversies: some visions of the good will win, and others will lose. And in the large and complex social orders of modernity, value pluralism is inevitable, so political disputes between groups with rival conceptions of the good are inextinguishable. Politics just is the process whereby some people impose their values on others, and there’s no getting around it. The legitimacy of a political order therefore hinges, not just on the content of the rules, but on the process whereby the inevitable value conflicts over rules are resolved. Political decision-making must be structured so that the losers will respect the results because the process was sufficiently inclusive and fair.

I liked so much about this essay that I’m tempted to block-quote the whole thing. But for the rest, including Lindsey’s own alternative foundation for libertarian belief, I’ll encourage you to read the whole thing yourself.