Libertarianism III: It's All About Me and My Needs

In the last essay I argued that libertarians have the wrong approach to advancing their cause. I could have quoted libertarian godfather Murray Rothbard: "While Marxists devote about 90 percent of their energies to thinking about strategy and only 10 percent to their basic theories, for libertarians the reverse is true." Rothbard observed that the libertarian strategy amounts to an intellectually satisfying but strategically impotent method of talking at people. "Most classical liberal or laissez-faire activists have adopted, perhaps without much thoughtful consideration, a simple strategy that we may call 'educationism.' Roughly: We have arrived at the truth, but most people are still deluded believers in error; therefore, we must educate these people -- via lectures, discussions, books, pamphlets, newspapers, or whatever -- until they become converted to the correct point of view."

Libertarians not only suffer from a lack of strategy for winning, they have little to offer in the way of maintaining authority should they some day emerge victorious. This is important to consider because American liberty (and I am largely confining this to be an American question, though many of my comments apply to libertarians in other countries) has enemies both internal and external.

Start with external enemies -- the host of armed authoritarian states that would relish an opportunity to seize American wealth and liberty. There is no gentle way of saying this: libertarians sound like absolute fools when they talk about foreign policy. I have heard libertarian thinkers much smarter than me give brilliant, sophisticated, world-wise discourses on libertarian domestic policy, only to sound like naive sophomores when the talk turns to foreign affairs.

Libertarians like to pretend, for example, that the U.S. could have avoided World War II without consequence for liberty. At best they argue from historical accident rather than principal -- the claim that Hitler would have lost by virtue of his failure in Russia, for example, or that Britain could have survived without the American Lend-Lease program.

Likewise comes the libertarian claim that American adventures in the Cold War were misguided. In this they display an ugly penchant for concerning themselves with the liberties of white Americans, which explains the view of many that the U.S. Civil War represents the earliest great infringement on liberty (as if the liberty of slaves doesn't count in the balance).

These arguments against foreign intervention derive from the libertarian principle that coercion is wrong, which is really no fixed principle at all, because nearly all libertarians admit that a military financed through taxation is a necessity for the protection of liberty. Somewhere in their calculus, however, they conclude that this coercion shouldn't extend to financing the liberation of non-Americans. Perhaps this is principled, but it is certainly not the only viable alternative for a true lover of liberty. To tell people languishing in states like China and the former Soviet bloc that our commitment to liberty prevents us from opposing their masters is the height of churlishness and foolishness.

Perhaps the worst is the libertarian position on Israel, which amounts to a replay of Joe Kennedy's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to Hitler in the 1930's. Sure, without American support every man, woman, and child among the Jews might have their throats slit by Muslim thugs, but it's not like they got that country fairly in the first place, and really, it's none of our business. That's not a caricature, by the way. At an event in Washington I heard a prominent libertarian argue that we shouldn't support Israel because what happens to them is their problem, not ours. And libertarians wonder why nobody takes their views on foreign policy seriously.

The libertarian response to this critique is to point out examples of failed U.S. intervention. Yes, the CIA sowed seeds of anti-Americanism in Iran by supporting the Shah. Admitted, we supported a tyrant in Haiti. True, we armed the mujahaddin in Afghanistan. But we also dealt the death blows to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, and accelerated the self-destruction of the Soviet Union while controlling its expansion. These are not trivial events in the history of liberty. Libertarian academics have developed a cottage industry, however, to produce counterfactual histories which amount to claiming that all of the good things would have happened anyway without American intervention, and probably would have happened faster.

Of course one can just as easily tell a story in which American isolationism leads to the emergence of totalitarian states that divide the rest of the world, restrict trade, and make all of us worse off. The point is that in the area of foreign policy libertarians are most likely to argue from principle, yet this is the area where consequentialism is most required. Nobody cares about principle if it leads to enslavement or death. When libertarians do argue from consequence, they have no experience or expertise to speak from, nor do they associate with people who do. Name the libertarian scholars with serious expertise in foreign or military affairs. Name the libertarian activists with considerable experience in foreign or military affairs. You get the point.

To be taken seriously as a philosophy of governance, libertarianism must grapple with foreign affairs, and with the possible reality that liberty depends on strong military power. Suggest this at a libertarian gathering, however, and you'll hear chuckles of derision. Perhaps they are right. The fact that they chuckle, however, but have yet to answer this question in a convincing manner, is evidence of the libertarian closemindedness on this issue.

But let's assume that most libertarians would support a military large enough to fend off foreign enemies. They would still have to confront the reality that they have no viable model of power maintenance against domestic enemies of liberty. To see what I mean, imagine that libertarians have nominated a slate of charismatic, well-funded, highly networked candidates (indulge me -- it's a Friday) who have won the Presidency and a solid majority of Congress. These revolutionaries proceed to create the libertarian wet dream -- drug legalization, plans for phasing out government schools and Social Security, isolationist foreign policy, no more ATF . . . and did I mention drug legalization?

In this fantasy the economy booms but foreign states are deterred by our minimal armed forces, people are happy, and sales of Atlas Shrugged go through the roof. It is the End of History.

Except, people get older. Memory fades. The Left remains committed to brainwashing children and co-opting public and private organizations. A child overdoses on heroin. Drugs are slowly re-criminalized. Some idiot old babyboomers (sorry for the triple redundancy) starve to death because they could never be bothered to save for old age. Others lose their savings when they invest them all in Bill Clinton Enterprises. Hello Social Security and financial regulation. The schools stay private because the Left realizes how much easier it is to peddle garbage by McDonaldizing it (i.e., by becoming the low-cost provider and pandering to human weakness).

So, in a generation or less, the revolution is slowly dismantled, and libertarians are blamed for the ills of society. They go back to holding their convention in a Motel Six in Las Vegas, and cheering when their candidate for Sonoma County Commissioner comes in a close third in a three-man race.

The Left doesn't face this problem. Deprived of principle, integrity, or honor, they are happy to snip the bottom rungs as they climb the ladder of power. You can already see this in Europe, where EU thugs are slowly transferring decision-making authority from quasi-democratic legislatures to unelected Brussels technocrats. We saw a hint of it in the U.S., when supposed children of the free-thinking sixties proved strikingly willing to use the power of the federal government to punish and stifle opposition.

But libertarians are all about individual liberty. Thus they face a quandary: How to maintain their state once it's built? This question should be especially pressing, insofar as their model implies that government tends to grow and become oppressive.

There appear to be two avenues open: the first is to adopt a variant of the Left's strategy, and eliminate unfavored options for future generations. Libertarians might, for example, replace the Constitution with a mirror document that does not contain any provision for amendment. This would leave the states open to adopt all manner of idiocy, however. Perhaps libertarians at the state level could adopt similarly permanent protections of individual rights as well. Thus libertarians could effectively ban most opposition parties, without suffering the guilt that Third World dictators endure when they do so more directly. I'm not sure if this would be acceptable in the libertarian paradigm. No matter, however, for the point is that they don't discuss it.

The second avenue for maintaining the libertarian state is culture. If children and new citizens are thoroughly educated in logic, economics, and other foundations of libertarian thinking, then perhaps they can be trusted to maintain liberty even in the face of very persuasive demagogues. But then certain topics become central: childrearing, childhood education, individual self-censorship and discipline, community norms, and reciprocal obligations. It would also require a consideration of the place religion plays in all of the aforementioned. Nearly all of these topics, however, are ignored by individualist libertarians, who furthermore routinely deride -- almost as a condition for membership -- those who call for their rigorous pursuit either as policy or personal practice.

Libertarians have less that's interesting to say about childhood education, for example, than does the Democratic Leadership Council. But childhood education is probably the linchpin of the libertarian society. How many libertarians, however, give much thought to where even their own children will go to school? Sure, they want safety and effectiveness, like any other parent, but how many give serious attention to finding or building schools that inculcate in children the ability to think critically, along with a sense of moral responsibility? Precious few.

If libertarians were serious about taking and maintaining power -- truly serious -- then they would drop the caterwauling over drug criminalization and focus every drop of energy on building schools. The latter is hard work, however, and forces consideration of messy things like moral instruction, and self-discipline, and what makes for good parenting. It's far easier to toke up in the discounted hotel room at the Libertarian Party Convention and rail against the DEA. Thus libertarianism remains less a force for change than a tool for self-expression.

This is in part a product of the natural individualistic nature of libertarianism. The solution isn't to eliminate -- or even drastically reduce -- the individualism that underlies libertarian philosophy, but it does require reconciliation with the social nature of human beings. It also requires acceptance of the fact that people are not only communal in nature, but spiritual. I will address this in my next essay.

Perhaps you should educate yourself on the word regulate.

Etymology: Middle English, from Late Latin regulatus, past participle of regulare, from Latin regula rule Date: 15th century
1 a : to govern or direct according to rule b (1) : to bring under the control of law or constituted authority
(2) : to make regulations for or concerning
2 : to bring order, method, or uniformity to
3 : to fix or adjust the time, amount, degree, or rate of

In this sense it means to "facilitate" and cannot be construed to mean "prevent" or "ban" by any stretch of the imagination.

Says who? You?

See the above definition for its etymology of the word and some of its synonyms: "govern", "direct", "control"

What you think the word means "in this sense" is irrelevant.

Congress has the power to govern, direct, and control trade with foreign powers according to the U.S. Constitution and all your Clintonian attempts at semantics won't change that fact.

The restrictions on liberty at the time of the Civil War were temporary war measures, that ended with the close of hostilities.

Duh!

So by your definition, the 12 years of Reconstruction, where the Republicans plundered the South was Liberty? God save us all from your type of Liberty.

But at a less personal and subjective level, it's clear that things would not have reached a war footing had slavery not embittered relations between sections of the country.

We know from archived records that even before his election, Lincoln wanted to implement a neo-Hamiltonian Whig-Republican economic system. It irked him that he was blocked by the Constitution and particularly, by the South, who staunchly favored states rights and free trade. Punitive taxes and tariffs had already been imposed that weakened the South's position, before Lincoln was elected. Lincoln's election signaled even more punitive legislation and spurred the legal secession of seven states. To fight this legal action of the South, Lincoln argued on several occasions, prior to hostilities, that in effect, the Union had created the states rather than the other way around and therefore, the states did not have the right to secede.

Lincoln used the whole secession issue to plunge the nation into that terrible and unnecessary war in order to centralize the U.S. government on behalf of the Whig-Republican economic system, based on protectionist tariffs and subsidies for what we today call "economic infrastructure", including a national bank and other forms of government intervention in the market. All of that is still with us today, in slightly different forms, but it can all be traced back to Lincoln and the Whig-Republicans.

Lincoln needed a war to get people to ignore the Constitution, long enough for him to implement his Federal-centric economic plan. Slavery was most definitely an afterthought, that proved a convenient excuse for Lincoln's war. Much of our problems today, stem from that breach of the Constitution.

In fact, the states did create the Union, not the other way around. The Tenth Amendment did vest all power that was not specifically granted to the Federal government, to the states. But, it was Lincoln who argued exactly the opposite in the first case, so he could get the people to ignore the Tenth Amendment in the second case. Lincoln is surpassed in his subversion of the Constitution only by Bill Klinton. At least Klinton didn't get us into a Civil War to further his anti-Constitution agenda.

The problem that you have with quoting revisionist history is that as long as the government archives all of the records of that day and age, Lincoln's speeches and documents will be available to refute your position. Maybe, if you could get the government to destroy those documents, then your arguments might work. Perhaps the US would be more successful at rewriting history than the former Soviet Union. If you had gone to school back when I did, you might have known all this. But Federal intervention in schools (partly supported by Republicans) has totally ruined our schools in the following years, with things like politically correct history.

Fortunately the Republican Party of today is not the Republican party of Lincoln's era. But, on the other hand, they are headed back in that direction at a blinding pace. Such things as the USA Patriot Act, the The Homeland Security Act and the Our Lady of Peace Act do not bode well for where the GOP is headed.

It is that Republican Party race back to even more Federal intervention and control, that now leads me to always vote for the candidate, rather than the party.

God save us all from your type of Liberty.

I would say the same for the "type of liberty" that characterized the antebellum or post-Reconstruction South.

In what sense was "a neo-Hamiltonian Whig-Republican economic system" "blocked by the Constitution"? It was constitutional in Hamilton's day. It was constitutional when later Jeffersonian Republicans like Madison and Monroe established a national bank and a protective tariff. Such policies were not the fashion in Jacksonian days and might be bad economics or politics, but in no way were they unconstitutional.

Tariff readjustment was in the cards even during the administration of Southern-oriented Democrat James Buchanan. When depression struck, the government thought it needed the money, and the tariff was the primary source of revenue. Tariff rates had been quite low for a generation.

So an upward adjustment was coming. It did not have to be so high. That was a result of the Democrats splitting, the Southerners leaving Congress and the need for financing the war. Had Southernern political leaders really cared about free trade most, any increase in the tariff would have been far more modest. But slavery and the dream of a Southern nation obsessed them to the point where they no longer cared so much about tariffs.

What arguments like Tom DiLorenzo's ignore is the centrality of slavery in the debates of the 1850s. Sure, Lincoln had been a Whig in the 1830s and 1840s and still accepted many Whig principles, but to argue that he was above all motivated by the Whig agenda is to neglect the bitter disputes of the years leading up to his election. DiLorenzo even had to lie about the Lincoln-Douglas debates to put economic questions at the center of the 1858 Senate campaign.

While the states retained powers under the 10th Amendment, secession, which contradicts the supremacy clause of the Constitution was not among those rights. Washington, Madison, Marshall, Jackson, and other prominent leaders of the Republic agreed with Lincoln about this.

I don't think that the Civil War is so relevant to discussion of today's politics. But if you want to drag it into the forefront, I'll always be ready with counter-arguments.

Libertarians have every right to play the spoiler at election time, but in the final outcome, its of no real consequence. Republicans shouldn't be whining.

However, Ronald Reagan did say:
Well, third parties have been notoriously unsuccessful; they usually wind up dividing the very people that should be united. And then we elect the wrong kind-the side we're out to defeat wins.

Now I don't consider libertarians to be the smartest people around and their voting patterns back that up conclusively. If libertarians care so much for America, they wouldn't be voting for a candidate who has no chance of winning, only in the hope of damaging the Republican candidate. That leads to liberals and Democrats getting elected and that is not the goal of Free Republic.

If slavery was not central to the Confederate cause, then why did they not emancipate and recruit black slaves ? Why was the South's price for reconciliation the blood drenched imposition of Jim Crow ?

Demidog, you maintain the ludicrous libertarian fiction that America somehow can exempt itself from world history, from patterns of force. Only a libertarian or an idiot would choose to fight without allies. Only a libertarian or an idiot could not see in 1939 that the Axis Powers would someday come after us. In fact, a Gallup Poll taken in 1939 found 60% of the American people understood that if the Axis won this war, we're next. So I should think that basic common sense should make it clear that their winning the war would be a very, very bad thing and something that basic survival self interest (funny how libertarians have this incredible sense of entitlement, as if survival were a given) should dictate against.

Libertarianism is a totally American ideology. Only a country with an ocean on either side and weak continental neighbors could be that geopolitically pampered. The rest of the world, nations which know what it is to have dangerous neighbors, cannot be so frivolous.

Oh, you mean we're supposed to "facilitate" the provision of nuclear bombs to people screaming "Death to America," not "prevent" such?

No, the federal government is given the power (first posessed by you I might add) to facilitate trade between the various states and foreign nations. The federal government is given no power that you didn't first posess. You don't have the power to prevent your neighbor from trading with anyone. Thus the government doesn't have that power either. (We hold these truths to be self-evident....That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed)

What another country develops is none of our business. Nobody has attempted to restrict us from developing our own weapons and we shouldn't be in the business of deciding what other nations do within their own borders.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.