5 hours ago, Jon Southall said:
My view is that an Objectivist nation would intervene in any matters concerning its citizens, wherever they are and on the basis of its own standards of justice rather than the standards of other nations. I would welcome the views of other contributors.
Objectivism defines government as the entity that has the monopoly on the use or retaliatory force (or, the monopoly on the specific sphere of justice that is meant to punish crime) within a certain sphere of influence (AR actually says “geographic area”, because she considers that the only possible solution to the problem of multiple governments…they need to be separated by borders, in order to co-exist without clashing. But, for now, let’s go with sphere of influence).
So there is an obvious contradiction between that, and an Objectivist government enacting justice outside its territory: you can’t have two governments trying to enact two different brands of justice within the same sphere of influence…or clashes would be inevitable, and they would eventually lead to war. This is true not just for two democracies (or allies, like the US and some allied dictatorships), but even for two fully capitalist governments. Two Oist justice systems WOULD in fact sometimes disagree. So, if they’re reaching into each others’ sphere of influence, who gets to decide what true justice is in any given case? Whoever has the better spies and covert operatives? That wouldn’t end well. The answer (the only answer I can think of) to the problem, when it comes to common crime, is to have each government hold a monopoly on retaliatory force over its own geographic area…as well as extradition treaties that serve to solve disagreements amicably, along the following principle: if both countries’ justice systems agree that an alleged criminal should face charges, the extradition is approved, and the trial is held in the country where the crime took place; otherwise, if the country that is being asked to extradite someone disagrees, then it shouldn’t be approved. For instance, an Objectivist government would not extradite people for tax evasion, or sodomy, or adultery, or any other violation of illegitimate laws…even if there was an extradition treaty, it would be limited to real crimes.
Of course, when you have UBL living in comfort in a wealthy Islamabad neighborhood, the US should go in, kill him, and, if Pakistan wants to go to war over it, so be it. But this is not a matter of common crime, this is a matter of war. The US is at war with UBL’s Al Qaeda network. Same with Al Qaeda operatives taking refuge in any other country: let’s just say Italy (because there’s actual precedent for that). The CIA should go in (as they did), and extract those terrorists, with or without the cooperation of the country in question (in this case, there was partial cooperation from Italian intelligence services, but, after a political scandal, Italy ended up issuing arrest warrants for the CIA agents involved in the operation…they were long gone, because, of course, the arrest warrants were just a political side show, everyone in the Italian government made sure none of the CIA agents were actually in Italy by the time the warrants were issued).
However, if you instead just have Roman Polanski fleeing the US into Poland, which is refusing to extradite him over what several European judges, from three different nations, have very convincingly (imo) described as “unjust treatment by a corrupt US court back in the 70s”, then the US shouldn’t go in, and risk conflict (it probably wouldn’t be war, but US agents caught being involved with the “arrest” and repatriation of Polanski would no doubt face long prison sentences for kidnapping). Keep in mind that these are several different relatively rational justice systems, disagreeing with each other, over the treatment of a criminal (according to Europe, Polanski served his time…it’s not clear what the US position is, to be completely honest with you, but they do want him extradited for some reason).
Sometimes, it happens the other way around: in the Amanda Knox case, it was an Italian court that sought to re-arrest her, after she was found not guilty and returned to the US. Of course, it is very unlikely that the US would ever extradite her to Italy (because of the double jeopardy principle, as well as the overall corruption and incompetence she faced in Italy to begin with). And, again, Italy shouldn’t seek to send agents into the US and grab her. They should cooperate with US law enforcement (through an extradition request…it wouldn’t work in this case, but in many less controversial cases it would work).
In conclusion, multiple, relatively or entirely capitalist governments can only exist peacefully side by side if they respect each others’ territorial sovereignty when it comes to common crimes (and solve the problem of criminals escaping through a border with extradition treaties), and attempt to cooperate when faced with larger threats that require war to defeat. Their jurisdictions HAVE to be defined geographically (there’s no other solution to delimiting two jurisdictions…you can’t have jurisdictions defined over people, because the whole point of government is to govern interactions between people. (Frankly, I think that’s all that needs to be said about that. There’s a long discussion about that particular brand of anarchy, where everyone gets to shop for his own government, that I try to stay out of because it goes in circles and with anarchists constantly changing the goal posts.). If there’s a border (that’s hopefully at least to some extent controlled, then physical interactions will take place on one side or the other, and business interactions can be governed through treaties (so called “free trade agreements”, that are actually laws adopted by multiple nations to govern international trade…they’re sometimes erroneously referred to as international laws).
Without borders, the jurisdictional conflicts would become impossible to solve peacefully.