 Onkar Ghate (2019) and Harry Binswanger (2019) both defend this view. Ghate uses two scenarios involving individuals in a state of nature. Suppose you are by yourself on a desert island, and you domesticate a pig. Then someone from a neighboring tribe steals it. Do you have a right to retaliate by stealing some of his property, or stealing from his relatives? Again, suppose Robinson Crusoe and Friday are strangers sharing an island, and Crusoe invents a superior spear. Does Friday have a right to copy it? Ghate’s main point is that because individuals in his scenarios don’t have a government, they don’t have objectively defined laws, and because they don’t have objectively defined laws, the boundaries of their property rights are unclear. But Ghate does not explain why you, the pig owner, cannot talk to the tribe and come up with a mutually agreeable solution, or why Crusoe and Friday can’t talk things over and decide on the boundaries of their rights vis-a-vis each other (if Crusoe has any common sense, he’ll encourage Friday to copy his spear and propose that they cooperate in their future hunts). Of course the tribe and you might not be able to reach a resolution satisfactory to both of you. But that doesn’t mean that it is in principle impossible to do so. Neither Rand nor Ghate (2019) provide an explanation of why a peaceful society of people without a government cannot come up with objective laws that define the boundaries of their rights – as, in fact, they do in Rand’s Atlantis: Galt’s Gulch. Their view seems to imply that if the Founding Fathers had been shipwrecked for 5 years on a desert island, they could not have come up with a Bill of Rights that defined the limits of their liberties vis-a-vis each other, or set up a fair system of adjudication in the event of a dispute. But we don’t have to engage in hypotheticals. As many scholars have pointed out, starting in the 11th C, merchants from various countries created the body of law called the Law Merchant in order to protect foreign merchants not protected by the local laws (Benson 1989; see the entry on law merchant at libertarianism.org, linked from Other Internet Resources). The Law Merchant was uniform throughout Europe, and enforced by courts also created by merchants in European cities, without the involvement of any European government.