Basic Categories of Government Action

We may distinguish two basic categories of government action:

actions that preserve and enable the free market, using defensive force to prevent or discourage the initiation of force;
interventions into the market, that is, initiations of force to bring about results differing from those of the free marketplace.

To the extent that a government intervenes into the market or fails to preserve the market successfully against private aggressors, that market is by definition no longer a free market and will differ in significant ways from the free market as analyzed in previous subsections.

Both of the above kinds of forcible action can also be wielded by individuals and are perhaps easiest to understand in that context. Suppose that Crusoe, who has heretofore acted peacefully, has a stock of coconuts, acquired by the principles of ownership (pp. 4.5:13-5).

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