The prime political good is Liberty, and as such the only—only—moral function of government is to prevent a man from imposing his will on his neighbor.  That’s it.  That is the only sort of law that should exist.

“Yeah, but, what about laws like murder and stuff?  You still need those.”

I’m sorry, is a murder not the imposition of the murderer’s will upon his victim, in the most final and absolute way?  Indeed, how do we distinguish between murder, manslaughter, accidental homicide, and justifiable homicide?  Is it not, at its root, a question of to what extent the killing was performed as an act of tyranny, an act of one man at the willful expense of the other, an imposition of the killer’s will upon the victim?  Thus willful murder is regarded as the most heinous, and accidental murder, by negligence or disregard for the other, comes second, and justifiable homicide is justified because it is employed to stop a man from imposing his will on a victim, by murder, by maiming, by rape, or otherwise.

Indeed, why do we hate murder at all?  Why do we object to killing?  What is it about the death of a person which is bad?  Is it not the cessation of a person’s story, and with that the loss of all possibilities?  The loss of the chance to do, to be, to choose?  Murder is murder because it is slavery, it is a murderer taking all freedom from the victim.  And to the extent that society loses sight of the value of a human life as being rooted in the freedom of that human being, society begins to countenance killing, more and more.  From abortion, to euthanasia (here defined as euthanasia without the competent consent of the victim), to human sacrifice in the form of medical experimentation, genocide, and even the banal forms of human sacrifice such as “acceptable losses.”  (You see acceptable losses commonly in drives to implement health and safety measures.  A new vaccine comes out, and it only kills one in ten thousand, so it is pushed and proliferated.  Those deaths are “acceptable losses” in the battle to secure whatever benefit the vaccine promises.)  When the value of a human life ceases to be regarded as rooted in that person’s freedom, then the value of a human life can be assessed by the majority, and life can be taken by the majority, and “acceptable” killing proliferates until your society is like that of the Aztecs, obliterating sacrifices by the thousands.  It becomes fashionable to sacrifice the few for the hoped-for good of the many.

Looking farther, we see that all just laws are extrapolations on this premise, that the prime political good is Liberty, and therefore the only moral function of government is to secure the freedom of each of a nation’s members by preventing any man from imposing his will on his neighbor.  All just laws prohibit a man from taking from his neighbor or compelling his neighbor without that neighbor’s consent.  Murder, theft, fraud, reckless endangerment, all are just laws in a Free nation, because all are extensions of the basic prohibition on tyranny.

In this way, Freedom completes its solution to the problems of society.  A free society is a society of free people and of laws only of this form, and between the two, all pressures bend the society toward peace, order, and prosperity, without need for recourse to authoritarian organization. Any attempts to go farther, to organize society by compelling compliance and order through the force of authority, inevitably produce worse circumstances than they were implemented to prevent.  Efforts to control people always create anarchy and violence.