The Police State: Recent Episodes
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The Police State shows aspects of totalitarian government, war on drugs, how it interferes in the market, daily life, legislation, attacks on liberty, TSA, NSA.
When Mises wrote that the fascists had "saved European civilization," he could have been describing Francisco Franco of Spain, who kept Spain from becoming a communist dictatorship.
Original Article: "What Mises Really Thought about Fascism"
The covid restriction machinery is being ramped up in time for fall, despite the fact that covid poses little danger.
Original Article: "The Unwelcome Return of Covid Restrictions and Lockdowns"
In a free society, political crimes like treason and "seditious libel" are few and far between. Under despotic regimes, on the other hand, political crimes multiply.
Original Article: "Why Governments Love Political "Crimes" Like Treason and Sedition"
In the Gulag, political prisoners were systematically terrorized by ordinary criminals with the encouragement of the authorities. It was hoped this would help the regime liquidate the state's ideological enemies.
Original Article: "How the Soviets Used Common Criminals to Destroy the Regime's Enemies"
The regime has increasingly been consumed with paranoia over threats to itself—propagandistically termed "threats to democracy"—while real crime against private citizens is clearly not a priority at all.
Original Article: "The State Protects Itself While Crime against Ordinary People Surges"
Murray Rothbard wrote that egalitarianism was a war against nature. Statism has become a war against reality.
Original Article: "Statism and the Unmaking of Reality"
Federal prosecutors and other law enforcement agents are turning blockchain firms into government subsidiaries. The real goal is to criminalize what really are lawful, private exchanges.
Original Article: "The Government Wants to Turn Blockchain Firms into Servants of the State"
In 1944, F.A. Hayek's best-selling book, The Road to Serfdom, warned the West that the "free" nations would lose their freedom as government expanded. He was right.
Original Article: "They Didn't Listen: The Reality of Hayek’s Bestseller"
While Americans believe the First Amendment protects their speech, the US government and mainstream media have joined together to suppress speech that does not coincide with government policies.
Original Article: "Censorship through the Centuries: Free Speech Suppression by the Government and the Mainstream Media"
Socialists and communists claim to support the rights of "indigenous" peoples. However, that support rings hollow given how the USSR abused the native peoples of Siberia, all while American socialists and communists uncritically supported the Soviet Union.
Original Article: "The Soviet Abuse of Indigenous Peoples"
Trump is essentially being prosecuted for questioning the outcome of an election, and federal paranoia about protecting its own aura of legitimacy is entering a new highly aggressive phase.
Original Article: "The United States vs. Donald J. Trump"
On this episode of Good Money, Tho is joined by Tate Fegley of Montreat College. Dr. Fegley talks about his lectures from Mises University on policing, AI, and the deep state, and the important topic of economic calculation that connects the three. In the final segment, Tho looks at the economics of college football in the aftermath of FSU's threat of secession from their conference.
Good Money listeners can order a special $5 book bundle that includes How To Think About the Economy and What Has Government Done to Our Money? with free shipping using promo code "GoodMoney" at Mises.org/Good
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Moving policing outside of the realm of economic calculation contributes to many of the problems we see.
Download lecture slides at Mises.org/MU23_PPT_22.
Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 26 July 2023.
There are now more armed civilian federal agents than there are US Marines. These well-funded armies of federal enforcers from the alphabet agencies are there to be used against US citizens at the whims of federal policymakers. Every last one of them should be disarmed.
New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug
PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off
Political leaders of the so-called liberal Western regimes are engaging in authoritarian tactics to quell legitimate dissent. But leftists who riot and burn get a free pass.
Original Article: "Rise of the Effete Authoritarians"
The trans rights movement has quickly moved into government coercion and outright violence. There is nothing libertarian about what is happening in this movement today.
Original Article: "“Trans Rights” Means Trans Entitlements and the End of Civil Society"
The drug war of the last half century has incarcerated millions and created havoc. What it hasn't done is eliminate people using drugs without government permission.
Original Article: "The Drug War: An Irrational Crusade"
The Durham report reminds us it is well past time for a more realistic assessment of the FBI for what it is: a costly, unnecessary, unconstitutional, and incompetent agency.
Original Article: "End the FBI"
In 1948, Ludwig Erhardt rescued a German economy that was in shambles simply by invoking free markets and currency reform. Our economy needs its Rothbard moment.
Original Article: "Rothbard’s Button Doesn’t Exist, but It Needs to Be Invented"
Tucker Carlson has rankled the ruling elites for many years. But was his interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. a bridge too far?
Original Article: "Did Tucker's Last Major Guest Lead to His Firing?"
Another mass shooting, another call for gun control. However, when it comes to mass killings, Washington sets the sorry example.
Original Article: "Washington Has No Moral Authority to Ban Guns"
Veteran investigative journalist James Bovard joins Ryan and Tho to talk about the Durham Report and what it tells us about the media and the FBI.
New Radio Rothbard mugs are now available at the Mises Store. Get yours at Mises.org/RothMug
PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off
Recommended Reading"Durham proves that Hillary and the FBI tried to rig the 2016 election" by Jim Bovard (New York Post): Mises.org/RR_134_A
"Democrats attack FBI whistleblowers — giving cover to the agency’s abuses" by Jim Bovard (New York Post): Mises.org/RR_134_A2
"The FBI Vetoed the 2016 Presidential Election" by Jim Bovard: Mises.org/RR_134_B
"End the FBI" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_134_C
"Yes, the FBI is America’s secret police" by Jim Bovard (The Hill): Mises.org/RR_134_D
"The FBI’s Forgotten Criminal Record" by Jim Bovard: Mises.org/RR_134_E
"Why the Worst Get on Top" by F. A. Hayek: Mises.org/RR_134_F
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
President Biden's executive order to promote transgenderism on college campuses eviscerates long-held due process protections for accused students. This will not end well.
Original Article: "Due Process or Transgender Protection on Campus?"
Federal laws with acronyms are usually bad news. (Think the USA PATRIOT Act.) The RESTRICT Act is yet another Orwellian proposal in which the federal government assumes ignorance is strength.
Original Article: "Disinformation and the State: The Aptly Named RESTRICT Act"
Washington elites and especially their media have denounced what they once praised: leaking of official documents that show the government has been lying.
Original Article: "Arbitrary Use of Power: Punishing Those Who Expose Not-So-Secret Government Secrets"
Donald Trump legally pays hush money and prosecutors try to fashion a crime from it. However, if a president lies and thousands of people die, it is called foreign policy.
Original Article: "Presidents Are Legally Immune for Their Most Dangerous Crimes"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Featuring Will Blakely, Bryan Dawson, Allen Mendenhall, and Michael Rectenwald. Recorded in Birmingham, Alabama on April 22, 2023.
From the Mises Institute's recent event in Birmingham, Alabama dedicated to the global threat of "The Great Reset".
Sen. Lindsey Graham recently called for US military intervention in Mexico to fight the drug cartels. Someone needs to remind him that Mexico is a sovereign country.
Original Article: "Invading Mexico in the Name of the Drug War Is a Really Bad Idea"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Like Bentham's panopticon, modern cancel culture is built upon fear and online bullying, making people police their own thoughts.
Original Article: "Cancel Culture: The Digital Panopticon"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Violent crime is on the rise in Canada, and its progressive democracy is helpless to stop it. Further empowerment of the state makes things worse.
Original Article: "Canada's Impotent Justice System Is the Product of Dysfunctional Canadian Democracy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Murray Rothbard was an elite economist, historian, and avowed enemy of the state. His legacy lives on nearly three decades after his untimely passing.
Original Article: "American Dissident: The Legacy of Murray Rothbard"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Three years after the covid virus hit the world, we are just starting to take a hard look at the damage caused by the covid restrictions. The "experts" not only were wrong; they were scandalously wrong.
Original Article: "Covid-19: Will the Political and Health Scandals Erupt into the Public Light?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In its unending quest for power, the state has no problem traumatizing the innocent.
Original Article: "The State Uses Trauma as a Weapon against Innocent People"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The Federal Trade Commission seeks an anti-trust judgment against Microsoft for its move to acquire Activision. Like all other anti-trust action, this one has no economic merits.
Original Article: "Again the Government Is Taking Antitrust Action against Microsoft. Again This Is Wrong."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Public health agencies tend to be treated like authoritative sacred cows. In reality, they have politicized health policies to the point where they really are a health hazard.
Original Article: "The Case for Disbanding Public Health Agencies"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The Chinese Community Party's crackdown in Christian churches reflects the perceived antiauthoritarian nature of Christianity and the party's fear of a competing alternative worldview.
Original Article: "Historical Christianity as a Liberating Force in China"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Money laundering is illegal in the USA, but like so many other federal crimes, it is difficult to identify and define. That is the perfect recipe for government abuse of innocent people.
Original Article: "Money Laundering: Another Noncrime Pursued by Criminal Authorities"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Following the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Capitol Police office has demanded a big budget increase. This is not to increase safety but rather to increase the agency's bureaucratic reach.
Original Article: "Paul Pelosi Is Attacked, So Naturally the Capitol Police Want More Money"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
During the worst days of the covid lockdowns and mandates, Americans were told that wearing masks was a matter of life and death. However, those giving the orders didn't believe what they were saying.
Original Article: "The Ongoing Covid Deceptions: How Ruling Elites Lied about Masks and Mask Mandates"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Biden wants to roll out yet another "assault" weapons ban. Supporters claim it will reduce crime, but it will do no such thing.
Original Article: "Bans on "Assault" Weapons Do Not Reduce Crime"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
All too often, people equate their nationality with a particular state. Yet, as Mises noted, nationality does not depend at all upon a formal entity tied to a government.
Original Article: "Nationality and Statelessness: The Kuwaiti Bidoon"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
While personal autonomy is a major topic of conversation, for Rothbard the most important thing is liberty, and liberty and automony are not always the same.
Original Article: "You Don’t Know What’s Good for You"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
The FBI operates as an agency whose players know they are untouchable in the current regime. Vacating FISA rulings is one way to fight back.
Original Article: "To Limit the Reach of America's Stasi, the FBI, Vacate All FISA Rulings"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. '
Vaccine mandates imposed by governments violate individual rights and further the coercive powers of the state. They also violate Kantian ethical norms, turning people into vehicles to accomplish the ends of governing elites.
Original Article: "Mandatory Vaccines vs. Logic and Kantian Ethics"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Aided by state intervention, disinformation is becoming a way of life in communications.
Original Article: "Modern Information Control: State Intervention and Mistakes to Avoid"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Both progressives and conservatives are touting so-called red-flag laws as a means to prevent mass shootings. But many shootings already have occurred in states that have these laws.
Original Article: "It Is Time to Put the Red Flag to Red-Flag Laws"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The recent raid on Donald Trump's Florida home is one more event in Democrats and Never Trumpers' never-ending attempt to have Trump arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Our political classes are unleashing something that cannot be contained.
Original Article: "The Attempt to Prosecute Donald Trump Is Unleashing More Than Our Political System Can Handle"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Global elites have a "wonderful" plan for the rest of us, even if they don't intend to live within its strictures.
Original Article: "Why the "New World Order" Is Impossible to Implement without Creating Mass Chaos"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop dive into the FBI's raid of Donald Trump. At a time when half the country already questions the legitimacy of the federal government, what may be the lasting consequences of this political escalation? What steps could Republican governors take if they want to be serious about reigning in the feds? And, was The X-Files the original QAnon? Ryan and Tho consider these questions and more.
Recommended Reading "A Stasi for America" by James Bovard: Mises.org/RR_94_A
"Abolish the FBI" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_94_B
"Trump's Potential Legacy: 50 Million+ Enemies of the State" by Tho Bishop: Mises.org/RR_94_C
"Yes, the FBI is America’s Secret Police" by James Bovard: Mises.org/RR_94_D
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
The government of the United Kingdom is using coercive means to promote its dubious goals of "diversity and inclusion." In the end, freedom recedes while state power increases.
Original Article: "How British Efforts to Enforce Equality Have Led to a Woke Totalitarianism"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Unlike a private-sector service, police do not operate under any contractual obligations to provide services in any particular way. They can choose to do nothing at all, and face no real consequences.
Original Article: "Why Police Do Nothing While Kids Are Killed"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In the wake of mass shootings, progressives claim that draconian gun laws will stop these tragic events. However, the gun control record in places like Jamaica provides contrary evidence.
Original Article: "Jamaica's Experience Shows That Even Draconian Gun Control Will Not Stop Gun Violence"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Knee-jerk support for the police helps gun control advocates by undermining the most fundamental reason for gun ownership: the government's armed enforcers won't keep us safe and are likely to abuse their power.
Original Article: "Uvalde's Biggest Mistake Was Trusting the Police to "Keep Us Safe"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Mass shootings are bad enough, but progressives have turned them into political events. They then claim that further politicizing these tragedies will reduce their number.
Original Article: "Politicizing Mass Shootings Only Guarantees There Will Be More of Them"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Thirty-nine people were killed in school shootings in 2018 (one of the worst years). In the same period, 900 children drowned, and 1,800 were murdered via child abuse.
Original Article: "Just How Common Are School Shootings?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Jeff Deist and Ryan McMaken talk police, guns, gun control, and the 2nd Amendment.
Recommended Reading "Uvalde's Biggest Mistake Was Trusting the Police to Keep Us Safe" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_84_A
"Politicizing Mass Shootings Only Guarantees There Will Be More of Them" by Bill Anderson: Mises.org/RR_84_B
"Police Botched the Uvalde Standoff. Now Gun Controllers Want to Give Police More Power." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_84_C
"Just How Common Are School Shootings?" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_84_D
"End the Incorporation Doctrine" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_84_E
"Police Have No Duty to Protect You, Federal Court Affirms Yet Again" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_84_F
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.
For many years, conservatives have held the FBI as being nearly infallible. It is time to rethink this devotion to a federal agency that pursues its own political agendas.
Original Article: "It Is Time To End the Fixation with Federal Law Enforcement"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
The quickest way to discredit an intellectual opponent is to accuse that person of being a "conspiracy theorist." But what happens when real conspiracies occur?
Original Article: "Do Conspiracies Really Exist? Murray Rothbard Thought So"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Those responsible for locking down much of the US during covid blame the pandemic itself for the economic and social havoc that followed. Perhaps they should look at the lockdowns themselves.
Original Article: "Lockdowns, Not the Pandemic, Created Havoc"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
Today, progressives govern by the law of good intentions, and when government has good intentions, the results, no matter how disastrous, don't matter.
Original Article: "Love, Fear, and the Law of Good Intentions"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
While 9/11 is mainly forgotten, a deafening trumpet announces the presence of other supposed crises, such as covid and climate change. The Leviathan is now excited and encouraged by the possibilities of new rules and new IDs.
Original Article: "The REAL ID Means a Real Leviathan"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
It wasn’t "fascism" or "Russia" that normalized lockdowns, mandates, and massive whirlwind profits to politically connected cronies in the West—it was the alleged defenders of "liberal democracy."
Original Article: 'Covid Tyranny Destroys the Myth of "Liberal Democracy"'
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
These regulations have a clear message: "You don't know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you."
Original Article: "A Penchant for Controlling Others"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
In a free society, peaceful citizens deserve the legal benefit of the doubt. In an age where government agents have endlessly intruded onto people’s land and into their emails, citizens should not be scourged for transgressing unknown or unmarked federal boundaries.
Original Article: "In a Paranoid Nation, "Treason" Is Everywhere"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Do your neighbors do things that annoy you? Just give the government a call. They're ready and willing to assist with any effort that increases their power and influence, 24/7.
Original Article: "A Nation of Ratfinks".
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
“Taking back the streets” ought to mean privatizing them and enabling property owners to defend their property. This would be the surest way to end the riots.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Original Article: "How Government-Owned Streets Prevent Effective Law Enforcement".
Although governments continue to insist "it's for the children," we should never go back to the dark ages of privacy before easy-to-use encryption. Nor should we allow a "back door" for governments to access our data.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "The Feds Want to Snoop on Your Encrypted Data. It's 'for the Children.'"
The case for the privatization of roads has much to recommend it if only in terms of how it would affect the power of the police to detain us, search us, and seize our property.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "How Government Roads Expand Police Power in America".
As 20 million Americans fall into unemployment, no crisis is so big that anyone in Washington would think of cutting military spending, including dollars spent on military gear for cops.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Who Profits from Militarizing the Police?".
The American revolutionaries created a decentralized, locally controlled polity for a reason. Abolishing federalism to achieve short-term political ends is a reckless way to go.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Keep Those Federal Troops out of American Cities".
Cryptocoins aren't entirely anonymous, and the state is hard at work gathering as much information as it can on all crypto users.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "The Government Wants Your Crypto Data. And Lots of It."
Contrary to the popular narrative that government police establish law and order, there is good reason to believe that the advent of militarized police in the 1800s led to an escalation of riots and political corruption while offering little law or order.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "American Police Forces Were Created to Fight Rioters. But Police Probably Made Things Worse."
Americans have been buying lots of guns out of fear of crime and unrest this year. This suggests that the crime-guns causality is the opposite of what gun controllers say. Rather than saying "guns cause crime," we should be saying "crime causes guns."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Americans Are Buying Guns in Record Numbers. The Washington Post Isn't Pleased."
Every law must ultimately be enforced using the police power of the state. For those who resist, this means violent arrest and imprisonment. Or worse.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "More Laws Mean More Police Brutality".
Whether or not race is a factor, the monopoly power enjoyed by police agencies (and other government agencies) creates the conditions likely to lead to more abuse of power.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "How the Monopoly Power of Police Agencies Encourages Abuse".
"Defunding" the police isn't likely to actually lessen the control the state has over our lives. But repealing countless laws that give police far too much power would certainly help.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Repealing Useless and Abusive Laws Might Do More Good Than "Defunding" the Police".
The Left believes that we need the state to force people to act in line with "social justice." This means that somebody must force compliance with state edicts, even if those people aren't called "police."
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Abolishing the Police Won't Mean Abolishing State Violence".
Bob first discusses the theory of transferring police services away from the government and to the private community. Then he interviews Whitney Davis, a Rothbardian with a history of libertarian activism, who is a Seattle resident and happens to live down the street from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
The political machines that run America's cities are likely to keep running them when these protests and riots end. Taxpayers will be worse off, but politicians will be even more powerful.
Narrated by Daniella Bassi.
Original Article: "These Protests Don't Threaten the Ruling Party in America's Big Cities".
Who has the best claim to government property?
Narrated by Daniella Bassi.
Original Article: "Seattle's CHAZ: Homesteaders or Illegal Squatters?".
Not all (or even most) police are needlessly violent. But it is rational to conclude, upon seeing a person in a police uniform, that this person can—if he wishes to—abuse his power with near impunity.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Why It's Rational to Fear Cops".
COVID lockdowns (1) threw millions out of work, (2) increased police harassment of peaceful people, (3) cut people off from key institutions that reduce social conflict. This made a volatile situation far worse.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Three Ways Lockdowns Paved the Way for These Riots".
Police are not legally obligated to provide protection from criminals. Nor are they motivated to go after hardened criminals or investigate violent crime. Self defense (or private security) is the only reliable option.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Minneapolis Riots Are a Reminder That Police Don't Protect You or Your Property"
When you hear a cop has been fired from his job for some heinous act, be sure to check back a few months later. He may have been rehired thanks to the fact that it's very easy for cops to appeal termination and win.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "Why Abusive Cops So Often Keep Their Jobs"
Americans were once harangued by government "experts" about the need to slow down on highways in order to save lives. Few listened. Today, laws demanding everyone "stay at home" may suffer a similar fate.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.
Original Article: "What the Failed 55-MPH Speed Limit Law Tells Us about COVID Lockdowns"
James Bovard reports form Maryland, where the COVID-19 lockdowns have decimated employment and the rules only apply to powerless ordinary people. Cops and politicians can do as they like.
Narrated by Daniella Bassi.
Original Article: "Politicians' COVID Mania Ravages Maryland"
Lyn Ulbricht is the mother of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road website. Contrary to the government’s assertions, Lyn argues that her son was hardly a criminal kingpin menacing society. Even taking the laws on the book at face value, Ross’ trial was a sham, and the government’s behavior was shocking.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Bob Murphy uses the media coverage of the December Inspector General (IG) report on the FBI to illustrate how the establishment is gaslighting America. Specifically, some of the FBI’s tactics when applying for permission to spy on the Trump campaign are jaw-dropping, and yet the corporate media have used the report to refute Trump’s “conspiracy theories” about an FBI plot against him.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Even The New York Times now admits there is a deep state — and that it serves its own agenda while ignoring the elected civilian government.
Original Article: It's Trump vs. the Deep State vs. the Rest of Us.
Recorded on November 9, 2019, in Lake Jackson, Texas. From the 2019 Ron Paul Symposium, "State Propaganda and the 2020 Election." See all lectures from this event.
Hannah Cox is National Manager of the organization Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. She is conservative/libertarian on standard policy issues, and is a strong advocate of the 2nd Amendment, but even so—perhaps surprisingly to some—she is also very alarmed with the State’s abuses in the criminal justice system.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
What is particularly scary is that the whole argument for the new law was not really about saving lives or reducing gun violence, but is about Brussels ordering Switzerland to modify gun laws to comply with EU gun control standards.Original Article: "Why the Swiss Voted for More Gun Control"
In 1944 Ludwig von Mises published Omnipotent Government, his historical treatment of Nazism and its origins in the collapse of German liberalism. This book expands on earlier works like Nation, State, and Economy and Liberalism, applying their analysis to the terrible events of WWII. Europe was up in flames, but Mises skillfully explains how to defeat the total state and its advocates.
Professor Matt McCaffrey joins the show to consider this vital book and its absolute relevance today. Everyone interested in peace should read it, and send a copy to a politician who needs it.
Read or listen to the book for free here, or enter code HAPOD in our bookstore for $5 off the hardcover edition.
Subscribe and listen to the Human Action Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play, Spotify, or via RSS.
Bob goes solo to explain why the common practice of “offering a plea deal” is a horrible practice, which gives us little reason to trust that those convicted are actually guilty of the crimes to which they confess.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Bob brings on Mises Institute founder Lew Rockwell to primarily discuss Lew’s article in defense of Lori Loughlin (“Free Lori Loughlin and All Political Prisoners”). Why is the FBI involved in a college admission scandal in the first place? And why is Lori Loughlin’s behavior so much worse than all the other cheating that happens systematically? Bob and Lew then discuss the chilling role of the FBI in American life, as well as various methods by which the CIA takes care of business. Bob also asks Lew questions submitted in the Bob Murphy Show Facebook group.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
The #NeverAgain movement that arose after last year’s Parkland shootings ignores how government officials cannot be trusted to behave honestly or responsibly to save student lives.Original Article: "Hysteria Over School Safety Won't Keep Us Safe".
Liberty musician Jordan Page discusses the plight of Schaeffer Cox, an Alaska liberty activist and militia leader who is being held by the federal authorities in a high-security prison. There were many irregularities in the case, with the original verdict having been vacated and the case sent to a lower court for re-sentencing. Cox’s supporters argue that he was targeted for his political views.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Antiwar hero and all-around genius Scott Horton joins Bob for a lengthy discussion covering the siege and massacre at Waco, the motivations and perverse logic of the U.S. government's interventions in the Middle East, and how Donald Trump staved off the establishment at the Republican convention and after the general election.
For more information, see BobMurphyShow.com. The Bob Murphy Show is also available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and via RSS.
Our guest is Dr. Per Bylund of Oklahoma State University, who joins Jeff Deist to dispel some of the myths surrounding artificial intelligence and mass data collection. AI is just the next evolution of smart software, Bylund argues, and should be celebrated like all technology as higher order capital goods that increase productivity and wealth. He also argues that Hayek's knowledge problem won't be overcome by computing power anytime soon, because no amount of data can fully explain subjective human wants and values. What makes AI and data mining potentially dangerous, Bylund reminds us, is their misuse by government.
See Per Bylund's article "What Makes AI Dangerous? The State".
The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Hunter Lewis. Presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 March 2018.
So far, the federal investigation into Russian collusion during the 2016 election has been a farce. Lawless and corrupt federal prosecutors—and their pet police agency, the FBI—dominate the headlines. Yet, the Constitution never provided for a federal police force, and lists very few federal crimes. So, how and why did federal prosecutors and agents become so powerful? Mises.org editor Ryan McMaken joins Jeff Deist to discuss.
For further reading, see Bill Anderson's Mises Wire article, "Federal Prosecutors Are Running Amok".
Season 1, Episode 12. Following the death and torture of a DEA agent, the War on Drugs is taken to even greater heights. In the final episode of the Historical Controversies "War on Drugs" series, Chris Calton explains the legislation and police operations that led to America having the world's largest prison population.
Season 1, Episode 10. In spite of declining drug usage, the Reagan Administration placed renewed interest in the War on Drugs. Chris Calton explains how President Reagan eliminated restrictions that prevented the US military from enforcing domestic laws, while also reducing Constitutional safeguards that prevented police from using illegally obtained evidence. The consequences? A rise in drug potency—and danger.
Season 1, Episode 7. In this episode, Chris Calton explains how the Nixon Administration kicked off the modern War on Drugs, featuring no knock raids, fictional crime stats, and the expansion of the American police state.
Season 1, Episode 5. While the phrase "War on Drugs" was coined by the Nixon Administration, it was FDR who earned the first headlines for his "Narcotic War."
In this episode, Chris Calton details the first arrest made for marijuana in the US, the military's earliest attempts to control narcotics distribution, and how the FBI used drug laws to target black Jazz musicians.
Season 1, Episode 4. Chris Calton traces the history of cocaine, showing how it went from common medicine to the target of US military action.
The US criminal justice system is hopelessly broken, riddled with bad incentives and bad actors. In the wake of recent police shootings, Dr. Ed Stringham joins Jeff Deist to help us understand how and why private security firms could create vastly better outcomes for crime victims, society, and even perpetrators. This is a fascinating discussion you won't want to miss.
Recommended reading: Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life
In this three-lecture course, Professor Mark Thornton will explain how prohibition has changed not only the market for marijuana, but also the characteristics of the drug itself. Students will learn how the "drug problem" is best addressed by market solutions.
Topics covered will include:
The Marijuana Business: A 5,000 Year Saga at the Heart of Western Economic DevelopmentReefer Madness: How A Cure Was Turned into a KillerThe Economics of Illegal Pot, Rope, and Other Illegal DrugsLong Black Road, Legalization, and Who Will Get the Richest? The live lectures were originally broadcast on 1/18, 1/25, and 2/1.
Attend this online course for free. As an enrolled student, you can watch lecture video, review and download lecture materials, take quizzes, and utilize a full list of all required readings.
Jeff joins Daniel Ameduri of FutureMoneyTrends.com for a no holds barred discussion of current events, including Trump vs. Hillary, Gary Johnson's chances, the symbolic importance of Brexit, and why the leftwing focus of groups like Black Lives Matter will make society more violent, not less.
Jeff is traveling this weekend, but in light of Thursday night's shooting of police officers in Dallas, we decided to run a talk he gave two years ago entitled, "Whatever happened to Peace Officers?"
The growth of the state, the militarization of police forces, and the increase in violence both by and against officers are interrelated—but, as libertarians we should avoid the easy emotional cliches and sound-bite answers. We should be better than the left and right, who hijack every tragedy in service of their narrative.
Rodney King famously asked, "Why can't we all just get along?" It starts with dialing back state power.
Mises defined liberalism as rooted in property. Modern progressives and social justice warriors—mislabeled as "liberals"—attack property as an impediment to their program of radical egalitarianism. In their view, all human conduct must be viewed through the filters of identity politics, privilege, and undefinable concepts of social justice. Disagree with them and you'll find your campus building or political rally attacked by angry demonstrators who view dissent as hate.
Where does libertarianism fit into this equation? Should we adopt the premises, language, and goals of progressives, but argue for achieving them through capitalist means? Should we inform our worldview using utilitarianism? Should we side with SJWs in the culture wars? Or, should we make the case for a nonpolitical world, one grounded in Misesian private property and Rothbardian natural law ethics?
Jeff Deist makes the case that the real issues confronting us are war and peace, central banking, and state power—not inequality or racism or sexism. And, he argues against adopting leftist language used to advance the libertarian message.
For further reading, see Mises's 1927 classic Liberalism and Jeff Deist's recent Notes on the LP Convention.
A heroin epidemic has been spreading across the United States, expanding enormously for the last several years. With it, the number of people dying has also increased dramatically. While politicians offer failed solutions like “securing the borders,” the real solution is to legalize drugs.
The number of drug overdoses in the US is approaching 50,000 per year. Of that number nearly 20,000 are attributed to legal pain killers, such as Oxycontin. More than 10,000 die of heroin overdoses. I believe these figures vastly underestimate the number of deaths that are related to prescription drug use.
The “face” of the heroin epidemic has changed since the 1960s when it was largely contained to urban “junkies” and Vietnam veterans. In recent years the epidemic spread to suburbia as heroin became a low-cost substitute for other drugs. In more recent times, the epidemic has spread to rural areas such as fishing villages in Maine and coal mining towns in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The problem of the epidemic rests with two causes. The first is the War on Drugs which creates profit incentives in the black market for the distribution of the most dangerous drugs. The second is the pharmaceutical-medical-FDA complex, or Big Pharma, which profits from treating pain with dangerous pharmaceutical drugs.
The Problem with Illegal OpiatesThe War on Drugs makes the business of black market drugs more risky and expensive. Hundreds of thousands are arrested every year for illegal drug violations. If drug smugglers can make their shipments of, for example, 1,000 doses or units smaller, they are better able to avoid detection, capture, and punishment. The best and most obvious way to achieve this is to smuggle more potent versions of the drug, or more potent drugs.
Marijuana growers sought to meet the demand of smugglers by offering better processed, better grown, and eventually genetically engineered products tightly packed into “bricks.” As a result, the potency of THC in marijuana increased from less than 0.5 percent when the War on Drugs began in the early 1970s, to almost 10 percent today.
Of course, the incentive from the War on Drugs does not stop there. It also encourages producers to switch to other drugs that are more compact and potent. Therefore, marijuana as a class of drug is disadvantaged compared to more potent and more dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin. This leaves a black market where one dose of marijuana is relatively more expensive than one dose of heroin.
In the black market consumers do not know how potent their purchases will be until after the product has been consumed. In the free market, the potency of a Bayer aspirin is always the same. In the black market, the potency of products can vary widely over time. Also, a consumer’s tolerance for a drug changes over time. Daily users may have to increase their dose over time, while new users or relapsed addicts may only need small doses. If any individual takes much more than the appropriate dose for them, then they will stop breathing and can die.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s overdose death helps illustrate the pitfalls created by the War on Drugs. Hoffman was a drug addict that had been off of drugs for many years. When he became overwhelmed with personal problems he relapsed and died from a combination of prescription and potent illegal drugs. There have also been numerous reports about heroin being sold that contains both heroin and a legal opiate, Fentanyl, which is often lethal.
In a free market, heroin would come in an unadulterated pharmaceutical grade form of various indentified doses. It would have warning labels and instructions. You might have to consult a medical doctor or pharmacist before purchasing heroin, or you might have to go to a clinic. The producers, distributors, and retailers would have some liability for negligence. Before it was made illegal in 1914 one of the most popular heroin products was Bayer’s Heroin.
The Problem with Legal OpiatesOne of the biggest problems with legal opiates and heroin is that the medical-pharmaceutical-FDA complex has achieved a much greater use rate in recent years. Essentially, the pharmaceutical companies bribe medical researchers, doctors, and heath bureaucrats to recommend to authorities such as the FDA to promote the use of drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, instead of less powerful and less addictive alternatives that were used in the past. Of course, the taxpayer ends up paying for most of the bill.
A couple of years ago while traveling I went to a “Doc in the Box” for a minor medical issue. I was examined by a physician’s assistant and was asked what pharmacy I used. I picked up the prescription after leaving and took one pill when I arrived at the motel. I sat in a chair and later became groggy and almost lost my balance when I stood up. As soon as I steadied myself, I went to check the prescription. To my amazement, it was Oxycontin!
The problem gets worse from there because physicians are also under pressure from the government to not overprescribe strong painkillers. They, for example, cannot continue to prescribe pain killers after a wound has obviously healed. The result is that people are addicted and then cut off from these powerful opiate prescriptions.
Their alternatives include entering an addiction treatment program which can be expensive, time consuming, and ineffective. As a result, these freshly minted addicts can turn to the black market for Oxycontin and Vicodin. The problem here is that it can cost $10–25 per pill and addicts require multiple pills per day. Also the supply of such pills can be erratic.
Their next alternative is the black market heroin which seems to be more available than ever and often at a lower price per dose. If you buy in large quantities you can obtain a dose for as little as $4.00 and possibly lower.
Legal Use Leads to Illegal UseThis explains why we have seen the heroin epidemic spread across the country. Doctors are prescribing legal opiates to people like fishermen and coal miners who sustain painful injuries on a regular basis. They become addicted and then get cut off. Eventually they cannot afford the black market prescription drugs, so they turn to the often deadly alternative, heroin.
How can the drug legalization help solve this vexing problem? First of all, in a free market you would not have Big Pharma rigging the medical practices of doctors around the country creating thousands of addicts each month. Second, drug addiction treatment programs could use the maintenance and withdrawal method which was used somewhat effectively prior to the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914.
Third, in a free market, drugs like heroin would be produced and sold on a commercial basis. It would be a standardized product(s) and companies that sold dangerous and addictive products would do so under several legal constraints, such as liability and negligence law. Fourth, cannabis would be legal and produced for several medical purposes, like it was prior to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Many of the pre-prohibition products were used to treat pain, as well as many of the symptoms associated with opiate withdrawal, such as muscle aches, anxiety, inability to sleep, nausea, and vomiting.
With drug legalization the number of overdose deaths would plummet and tens of thousands of families would not have their lives ruined every year.
Supporting free trade is simply a matter of taking no action when another person exchanges in non-violent exchange with another person. That person may be right down the street, or that person may be in another country somewhere. No “free trade agreements” or other paperwork of any kind is required.
To oppose free trade, on the other hand, is to engage in the imposition of fines, prison terms, and other sanctions on people for engaging in non-violent exchange.
The Moral ArgumentThat latter part is usually ignored by average people who support restrictions on free trade for whatever reason. They frame their opposition to trade as if it were a mere academic question, and as if the reality of restricting free trade were simply a matter of saying “don’t do that” and then everyone will agree to stop doing it.
But, of course, anyone who favors restrictions on free trade needs to go the next step and outline exactly what fines and jail sentences should be imposed on merchants and others who have committed the “crime” of purchasing goods from non-government-approved sources, or who have sold goods to non-government-approved recipients.
Shall fines be $1,000 or $100,000? Shall perpetrators serve 90 days in jail or 5 years in prison? These are the questions that any opponent of free trade must answer. And if the answer is “yes” to any of these questions, let’s then outline which taxpayer-funded government agencies shall be in charge of hunting down the lawbreakers, prosecuting them, and jailing or fining them. The (presumably well-paid and well-pensioned) government agents won’t work for free. What spy apparatus shall be employed to keep an eye on all the potential violators?
And, of course, ignorance of the law will be no excuse, so everyone who wishes to import a trinket or widget from a foreign country will need to know all the laws, regulations, and sanctions that come with such a business venture. To not know this all could mean one’s life will be ruined by federal prosecutors.
For example, if you don’t know the details of the US law known as the Lacey Act, you could be serving harsh prison sentences for violating foreign laws, or for importing fish peacefully acquired, or for engaging in a seemingly endless list of activities that any normal person’s common sense would suggest are peaceful and legal.
Similarly, when Gibson Guitar Corporation was raided by a SWAT team for running afoul of some arcane law about the importation of wood, that was just the natural outcome to be expected from restricting free trade. Those laws were in place to protect domestic lumber industries from imports. But hey, the law’s just there to protect American, workers, right? So, apparently, it’s fine if those Gibson guitar people have their livelihoods and families ruined by legal fees, fines, and jail sentences.
Opponents of free trade, like supporters of the anti-Cuban embargo, for example, like to talk a good game about supporting freedom and liberty, but when all is said and done, their policies amount to nothing more than the sordid jailing and prosecution of non-violent merchants and consumers.
The anti-trade crowd likes to tell themselves that these laws only punish cigar-chomping villains in skyscrapers, but that’s not how laws work. Since laws aren’t written to apply to specific companies, they punish certain behaviors instead. Such laws may indeed restrict big, evil corporations, but they also end up applying to small entrepreneurs and small business owners, most of whom lack an army of attorneys, and usually end up in a far worse position than any big company might. Like the owners of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, many small- and medium-sized business owners simply seek out the lowest-cost goods so they can offer goods to their customers at a lower price. Those goods are often located in foreign countries. But, without an immense legal team, most ordinary people will be caught up in the net of trade restrictions.
The Economic ArgumentSo far, this all ignores the economic arguments against restricting free trade. Those of us not engaged in the direct importation of goods will also suffer when goods are restricted. Trade restrictions on pharmaceuticals, auto parts, food, and whatever else only makes those goods more expensive. And not all those goods are consumption goods, of course. Entrepreneurs use those goods to create new goods and then must charge higher prices to his customers also. A janitor who must pay higher prices for a truck or a shop vac due to trade restrictions must pass on a portion of that cost to the customer. And, with higher prices, the janitors will have fewer customers and fewer profits. Shopkeepers in turn must then have dirtier shops because they can afford fewer janitorial services.
Yes, a tiny portion of the population that’s engaged in the domestic manufacture of shop vacs and trucks will benefit. But, it’s the janitors and their customers (the hair salon and sandwich-shop owners) who are paying the price of subsidizing the factory workers.
These issues aren’t part of an intellectual exercise. The downside of restricted trade is very real for real people.
But, we don’t need me to explain the economic problem with restricting trade. Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, and the entire line of liberal, laissez faire economists agree on this point.
The Nationalist ArgumentThe nationalist program of using protectionism to shield American workers from competition is based on the idea that trade with outsiders hurts the local economy. But many who accept this idea in the international sphere then promptly forget the idea when applied domestically.
For example, we’re told by the nationalists that it hurts California workers if Californians buy goods from neighboring Mexico, but it’s apparently A-OK for Californians to buy goods from Illinois or New York, both of which are distant economies that likely contribute far less to the economic well-being of Californians than the economy of northern Mexico.
Murray Rothbard mocked this mindset in the context of immigration when he wondered why it’s not a problem when someone moves from Massachusetts to take a job in Michigan. In that case, the response is never to complain about how people from Massachusetts are stealing the jobs of people in Michigan. No, the argument is only applied if someone crosses an international boundary to do the same.
As with trade, then, it’s bizarre to argue that goods imported from Virginia to California are perfectly tolerable — and even beneficial — while imports from neighboring Tijuana are somehow damaging.
Rothbard noted the idea becomes more absurd the more local you get. The proposed economic justification for “Buy American” is no different from the demand to “Buy North Dakotan” or “Buy 55th Street.” While there certainly are groups that promote only buying goods from one’s home states (i.e., the “ABC — Always Buy Colorado” campaign), such efforts rarely rise above being a marketing gimmick and virtually no one supports trade restrictions between states.
Thus, by their actions, the demonstrated preference of Americans is to take advantage of the benefits of buying and using goods made thousands of miles away by people they’ll never meet. That is, they clearly accept the benefits of trade with a far-away economy (as is the case of trade between San Francisco and St. Louis), but they then turn around and reject the same reality when dealing with international trade.
At the heart of this mindset is pure mysticism, of course, since it requires one to believe that a person in Brownsville, Texas, has the same economic interests as a person in Portland, Maine, but entirely different interests from a person in nearby Monterrey, Mexico. It requires a belief in some sort of metaphysical or perhaps physically objective difference between humans in Monterrey and humans in Portland.
Even the most basic powers of observation should disabuse one of such a strange notion, and yet, American discussions of trade accept the idea as a given.
Left to their own peaceful trade, of course, such ideas would evaporate quickly as people pursued mutually beneficial economic relationships across borders and barriers of every kind.
Today however, we must continue to deal with people who accept an anti-trade ideology that prefers violence to peace, and coercion to freedom. Unfortunately, governments are perfectly happy to oblige them.
The public has been successfully conditioned to view the use of cash as something suspicious. Meanwhile, thanks to growing pressure from government, private business now often considers cash to be more trouble than it's worth, writes Paul-Martin Foss.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Ben Wiegold.
The United States is notable for incarcerating a very large portion of its population compared to other countries. Surprisingly, this may increase homicide rates and lead to enclaves of ex-cons which would help explain why so many homicide victims have criminal records, writes Justin Murray.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Ben Wiegold.
The insidious nature of the war on cash derives not just from the hurdles governments place in the way of those who use cash, but also from the aura of suspicion that has begun to pervade private cash transactions. In a normal market economy, businesses would welcome taking cash. After all, what business would willingly turn down customers? But in the war on cash that has developed in the thirty years since money laundering was declared a federal crime, businesses have had to walk a fine line between serving customers and serving the government. And since only one of those two parties has the power to shut down a business and throw business owners and employees into prison, guess whose wishes the business owner is going to follow more often?
The assumption on the part of government today is that possession of large amounts of cash is indicative of involvement in illegal activity. If you’re traveling with thousands of dollars in cash and get pulled over by the police, don’t be surprised when your money gets seized as “suspicious.” And if you want your money back, prepare to get into a long, drawn-out court case requiring you to prove that you came by that money legitimately, just because the courts have decided that carrying or using large amounts of cash is reasonable suspicion that you are engaging in illegal activity. Because of that risk of confiscation, businesses want to have less and less to do with cash, as even their legitimately-earned cash is subject to seizure by the government.
Restrictions on the use of cash are just some of the many laws that pervert the actions of a market economy. Rather than serving consumers, businesses are forced to serve the government first and consumers last. Businesses act as unpaid tax agents, collecting sales taxes for state governments and paying excise taxes to the federal government, the costs of which they pass on to their customers. Businesses act as enforcers of vice laws, refusing tobacco sales to those under eighteen or alcohol to those under twenty-one. Financial institutions, which includes coin dealers, jewelers, and casinos, are required to report cash transactions above $10,000 as well as any activity the government might deem “suspicious.” Cash becomes such a hassle that it is almost radioactive, and many businesses would rather not deal with the burden. Using cash to buy a house is becoming impossible and it is probably only a matter of time before purchasing a car with cash will become incredibly difficult also.
Centuries-old legal protections have been turned on their head in the war on cash. Guilt is assumed, while the victims of the government’s depredations have to prove their innocence. Governments having far more time and money to devote to asset forfeiture cases than the citizenry, most victims of cash seizures decide to capitulate rather than attempt a Pyrrhic victory. Those fortunate enough to keep their cash away from the prying hands of government officials find it increasingly difficult to use for both business and personal purposes, as wads of cash always arouse suspicion of drug dealing or other black market activity. And so cash continues to be marginalized and pushed to the fringes. Stemming the anti-cash tide will require a societal attitudinal adjustment that views cash not as something associated with crime, but as a bastion of consumer freedom and a bulwark against overzealous governments.
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness fact that the United States imprisons a far larger percentage of its population than many other nations. Much of this is due to the fact that what we call crime in the US is often not an imprisonable offense in the EU nations.
In the US, for example, a prison term is commonly employed for small-time drug offenders. According a study done by the Vera Institute of Justice, such sentences are rarely used for drug offenses in Germany and the Netherlands.
This is even true of more serious crimes. The report notes:
In most cases — even for relatively serious crimes such as burglary, aggravated assault, or other crimes considered felonies in the United States — prosecutors divert offenders away from prosecution or judges sanction offenders with fines, suspended sentences, or community service. In both the Netherlands and Germany, fines are used extensively as a primary sanction.
This reflects a basic difference in sentencing in the US. In the US, imprisonment is the primary sanction in many cases, leading to an unusually large prison population:
Jurisdictions across the U.S. and around the world grapple with the same basic questions regarding the role of punishment in their criminal justice systems: Who should be punished? How should offenders be punished? Under what conditions? For how long? By no means are these questions answered uniformly. Within the U.S., the rate of incarceration and the proportion of offenders sentenced to prison and community supervision differ from state to state. Indeed, the rate of imprisonment in state prison in the U.S. ranges from 147 per 100,000 residents in Maine to 865 per 100,000 residents in Louisiana. The overall imprisonment rate in the United States, including the jail and federal population, is 716 per 100,000 residents. The comparison to European rates is startling: 79 per 100,000 residents in Germany and 82 per 100,000 residents in the Netherlands are in prison.
The use and sale of prohibited narcotics makes up a majority of the US’s prison population. If we include immigration offenses and the category of extortion, fraud, and bribery, the non-violent prison population is almost 68 percent of all inmates and, therefore, nearly 68 percent of all individuals with a criminal record. Further non-violent offenses are buried in the remaining categories such as “other,” which includes a broad range of imprisonable offenses such as not paying the tag tax on your automobile or getting lost in a snowstorm.
Source: Bureau of Prisons, February 2009Does the Extensive Use of Prison Increase Violence?Despite the formal sentence handed down by a judge, a prison sentence is a life sentence. The simple fact is that being branded a criminal cuts off individuals from nearly all forms of employment opportunities. Non-violent offenses average between three to five years combined with prison and supervised parole. Even if employers ignored a person’s prior prison history in hiring decisions, the length of time absent from the workforce is significant, while the lost income during incarceration is frequently insurmountable. Being a guest of the State often carries an added sentence of perpetual state-induced poverty.
Prison itself is a dehumanizing experience. Confining people in degrading conditions generates a different attitude and behavior. Because of the philosophy of isolation as a means of punishment, individuals exposed to that environment develop behavioral patterns and mentalities vastly different from those necessary to function in civil society. These individuals are then thrown back into the general public or transitioned through ineffectual halfway homes where the social network of former inmates continues to be dominated by other unemployed ex-cons.
Indeed, both inside and outside prison walls, convicted criminals who are unable to find employment often end up spending their prime years learning new criminal trades and behaviors that only perpetuate criminal behavior.
In turn, this has led to a phenomenon in which we find an enormous correlation between having a criminal past and being a victim of homicide.
Statistics in several major metropolitan areas, including Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Newark, have shown a clear connection between the two. According to USA Today:
In Milwaukee, local leaders created the homicide commission after a spike in violence led to a 39% increase in murders in 2005. The group compiled statistics on victims' criminal histories for the first time and found that 77% of homicide victims in the past two years had an average of nearly 12 arrests. … Philadelphia also has seen the number of victims with criminal pasts inch up — to 75% this year from 71% in 2005. ... In Newark ... roughly 85% of victims killed in the first six months of this year had criminal records, on par with the percentage in 2005 but up from 81% last year, police statistics show.
A Connection Between Incarceration and Homicide?So, does the cycle of imprisonment and impoverishment actually lead to more serious crime? Given the economic impacts of a prison sentence, and thus the increased likelihood that one will continue to associate with others who have criminal records, it’s plausible that extensive use of prisons for so many offenses encourages the formation of violent social enclaves outside of prison.
This in turn leads us to the fact that a disproportionate number of homicide victims have criminal records.
In fact, if we look for a connection between incarceration rates and homicide rates in US states and European countries, we find a clear correlation (x and y axes: n per 100,000):
This chart compares the homicide rate of each of the fifty US States and a number of Western and Central European nations. The incarceration rate of the US is 716 per 100,000 compared to the average of Western and Central European nations, which is 102.
Making comparisons between countries and states on homicide is very problematic, and any number of factors can be at play. It’s difficult to show clear connections between homicides and other factors, such as gun ownership. Moreover, one might be tempted to claim that incarceration rates are higher because Americans are more violent due to some other outside factors. However, given the prevalence of criminal records among homicide victims, and the American propensity to create large numbers of people who have spent time in prison, it may be worth a second look at how our immense prison population may be a contributing factor to overall violent criminal activity. It may be just another example of one of the state’s efforts to “protect” us gone wrong.
Alcohol abuse and heavy tobacco use are two of the leading causes of death in the United States. It seems rather ludicrous to advocate the outlawing of drugs and not the outlawing of alcohol and tobacco. (p. 11) Vance writes from a viewpoint that will surprise many readers. He himself does not condone the use of dangerous drugs. To the contrary, he is a Christian and a Bible scholar of considerable note and he regards their use as sinful. "As an adherent to the ethical principles of the New Testament, I regard drug abuse to be a vice, a sin, and an evil that Christians should avoid even as they avoid supporting the government's war on drugs" (p. 79).
If Vance takes this view of drug use, why is he so adamant that people have the right to consume these drugs? His answer will be of interest to all students of moral theology. He holds that Christians can with perfect consistency uphold the distinction between vices and crimes, with only the latter an appropriate area for forcible suppression.
In the wake of last month’s shooting at Umpqua University in Oregon, national debate has once again been sparked over the role of firearm controls. Gun-control laws must be passed, we are told, that target these events and reduce or eliminate their frequency. However, much like most debates in the political realm, convenience and sound bites take the center stage over understanding root causes of violence itself. The debate is further confused by improper data comparison and information gathering techniques, mainly to drive a pre-designed political agenda and not to attempt to solve the homicide problem.
Before we get into the issue of general homicide, it is important to clear a few common errors in identifying the events in Oregon.
The biggest claim, made by President Obama, is that this doesn’t happen in the same frequency in Europe. Even the linked “Fact Check” at PolitiFact uses information incorrectly. The biggest mistake is that individual nations are compared 1-to-1. A large event in a single small nation will upend the homicide rate while it is true that a smaller nation will have fewer individual events on virtue of being a smaller nation. Before a meaningful comparison can be made, the data needs to be normalized. To accomplish this, I placed every advanced, safe nation in Europe that had a kind of mass killing event into a single, unified nation for the purposes of this exercise. This normalized the population with both the US and this unified state with nearly identical population levels. The nations selected, that had these kinds of events in the past fourteen years, are The United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, Slovakia, Norway, The Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France, Finland, The Czech Republic, Belgium, and Austria.
An additional error that was made by PolitiFact is that their research ignored acts formally defined as terrorism, which means the Boston Marathon bombing in the US and the three Paris terrorist attacks in 2015 were ignored. I included all forms of mass killings since it is difficult to argue that a mass shooting is fundamentally different because of the motivation of the perpetrator. After the normalization, the chart of these events and the aftermath looks like this:
On the surface, this does appear to meet the criteria of President Obama’s claim. These events do happen more often in the United States than in the above grouping of EU nations, with forty-four distinct events in the United States and twenty-five in the EU. However, counting distinct events doesn’t tell the whole story. To get a better understanding of the risk of mass killings, we have to identify the real cause of concern — the loss of human life. When we bring the human loss into consideration, the story changes significantly.
This certainly doesn’t support the claim that the EU is safer from mass killers than the US. The main differences that, it is true, these events happen more often in the US, but the events in the EU normalized zone are more deadly (15 killed per EU event vs 7 per US event) which makes the EU events far worse. Further, the total danger from these events is greater in the EU countries, with the EU zone experiencing 933 injuries and 352 casualties to the 473 injuries and 322 casualties in the US.
Is More Government Security the Answer?We’ve previously pointed out that gun control doesn’t have any meaningful impact on homicide rates in general, but would such controls, and other controls such as improved mental health screening and background checks, resolve this issue? Unfortunately, as the EU has shown, particularly with the recent tragic events in Paris, if a full on ban on ownership doesn’t work, then it is unlikely targeting the above factors will work, either. Not to trivialize those who lose their lives in these events, here is what these events look like compared to the general homicide rate:
I didn’t label this EU or US because both are identical, a small blue sliver in a sea of orange. The total percentage is so small, that it shows up as “zero percent.”
These events are difficult to counteract because of their randomness and infrequency. The ability of the government to identify ahead of time whether or not a small group of men obtained automatic weapons against their ban is likely impossible. Moreover, other means of prevention, such as laws against restricting individuals with mental health problems from purchasing guns, are only as good as those who actively seek help. None of our nations would be willing to subject ourselves to mandatory annual mental health screenings and placing our results in central databases.
Gun bans, mental health screenings, and other government solutions to protect us from these unpredictable events fall under the classification of Security Theater. When the State is actively telling us that they’re taking care of our protection, we allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security. Further, many governments restrict or outright ban individuals from ensuring their own safety.
But State agents can’t be everywhere at all times. Security of your own self is ultimately only possible by engaging in the protection yourself. Around the world, governments have decided on our behalf that we do not have the option to secure our own bodies from violence and, in turn, generate the situations that lead to these events. Much like how most of us would own auto insurance absent government mandates, not because we fear the destruction of our vehicle but because, as the saying goes, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. A society that is given the option to protect itself is not a fearful society, it is a prudent one. The victims of Paris were never allowed the option to protect their lives, nor were they fortunate to have armed defenders present or trained combatants to stop the attack before it reached them. People need the opportunity to secure their own safety since, as the past twelve years has shown, the State will fail them.
Last Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris has forced the world’s attention away from causes such as the plight of “white privilege” on college campuses and back to the consequences of blowback in the Middle East. The political response to these atrocities have been predictable — calls for nationalism, more war, fewer civil liberties, and greater power for the government that failed to protect its citizens. Even those politicians whose rhetoric calls for greater humanitarian efforts for ISIS’s most vulnerable victims still manage to stand in the way of private individuals who wish to help their fellow man.
Of course, the true battle of the day is greater than ISIS or any other single organization.
As Mises wrote in Human Action, “To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.”
As long as the ideology of statism, militarism, and interventionism maintain its hold on the world, civilization will suffer from its consequences. The desire for power and control will eclipse concern for human life. Only those guided by an ideology of peace and prosperity can offer hope for the world.
On Mises Weekends, Louis Rouanet joins Jeff Deist to discuss the fallout from Paris. Rouanet, a former Mises Fellow who studies in the French capital, talks about how his country’s government has reacted to the attack and the willingness of his countrymen to trade liberty for the theater of security.
And in case you missed any of them, here are this week’s featured Mises Daily articles and some of our most popular articles at Mises Wire:
European Borders May be Redrawn as Europe Embraces Nationalism by Ryan McMakenBlowback: The Washington War Party's Folly Comes Home to Roost by David StockmanISIS May Be Our Ally Some Day by Ferghane AzihariWhite "Privilege" Has Nothing on State Privilege by Tho BishopOpen Borders Are an Assault on Private Property by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.Paris Attacks Are Just Part of the Game for Global "Leaders" by Greg MorinThe Long History of French Military Intervention in the Middle East and Africa by Ryan McMakenState-Provided Security and Market Incentives by Jeff DeistParis: More Bombs Will Not Solve the Problem by Ron PaulHey Big Spender: France's Robust Military Spending by Ryan McMakenA Private Solution to the Syrian Refugee Crisis by Tho BishopWhere the Left Goes Wrong on Foreign Policy by Murray RothbardWar and Strategic Socialism by Matt McCaffreyIs an Interest Rate Hike Overdue? by Randall HolcombeStudent Loans and Uncle Sam by Jonathan NewmanEssential Reading on Entrepreneurship by Matt McCaffreyBaylor University PhD in Entrepreneurship by Peter KleinGilmore and Sugrue On American History by David Gordon
Our guest this weekend is Louis Rouanet, a former summer fellow at the Mises Institute. Louis writes frequently for Mises.org, and he is currently a student at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.
Jeff gets Louis' take on the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, and finds out what the mood is among the French people. They discuss whether the French—like Americans after 9/11—will allow a crackdown on civil liberties in the name of fighting a "war on terror". Jeff and Louis also examine the role that French history (especially in the Middle East and Africa) plays on this whole mess.
If you are interested in what is happening in France from a Libertarian perspective, you will enjoy this interview.
Cultural Marxism enjoyed a victory last week when University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe resigned after members of the Missouri Tigers football team joined a student movement calling for his resignation. While I fully support the rights of these players to leverage their athletic ability to advocate a cause — as I would support their university if it decided to pull their scholarship — what is concerning is the actual list of demands shared by the cause they joined.
The top priority of the #ConcernedStudent1950 movement was not the resignation of University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe, but that he “must acknowledge his white male privilege.” While I have little sympathy for Mr. Wolfe — I agree with Lew Rockwell when he says, “Virtually all university administrators deserve what’s in store for them, especially since they’ve promoted it” — the members of #ConcernedStudent1950 would do well to understand that Mr. Wolfe’s sin was not his skin color or his gender, but his position with the state.
After all, as president of Missouri’s state university system, Tim Wolfe was complicit in the systemic fraud of modern academia. He personally profited from the tens of thousands of dollars students spend at these state institutions in exchange for increasingly worthless degrees and leftist indoctrination. The regular typos and basic grammatical mistakes by what purports to be the official Twitter account of #ConcernedStudent1950 offers amusing evidence of how poorly served students are in today’s universities.
But to explore this further, let’s first look at how the left defines the concept of “privilege.”
According to the website of the White Privilege Conference, “Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do.” By this definition, it is clear that there is no greater privilege than that afforded to the state.
Examples of this are plentiful and wide ranging. From the failure to prosecute police officers when their criminal negligence leads to a man’s death, to the immunity granted to the EPA for their pollution of the Animas River, to the US government’s role in arming terrorist groups — government officials regularly engage in behavior that would land anyone without a badge behind bars.
While it’s true that over the course of American history, white straight men have largely enjoyed the benefits of power — the power of state privilege has proven to trump any other factor. Consider that a black man is regularly responsible for the death of innocent men, women, and children and will, like his predecessor, never face punishment for his actions. Or that a powerful gay congressman managed to avoid charges for a brothel that was operating from his home. Or that Hillary Clinton is running for president.
Of course, there are perks to power that go beyond a get out of jail free card. Be it expensive (taxpayer-funded) vacations, or (taxpayer-funded) office spaces upon retirement, or simply blatant nepotism — state privilege is the easiest way to become a “garbage rich person.”
A historical argument for collectivist white guilt is also absurd. After all, the evil institution of slavery existed throughout the world, regardless of skin color. While it is unfortunately true that white Americans fought to protect slavery’s existence in America, it’s equally true that the abolitionist movement in this country was founded by white Quakers. Slavery existed for as long as it did, not out of widespread racial agreement among whites — but due to the design of those in Federal government. Yet we still have the progressive “academics” attempt to explain to decedents of Irish immigrants the privileges enjoyed by their ancestors. I can’t help but wonder if a member of #ConcernedStudent1950 thinks Michelle Obama has it worse off in today’s world than the white wife of a West Virginia coal miner?
Unfortunately, the emphasis on skin color, gender, sexuality, and other biological factors rather than government power is intentional. The interest of those who scream “white privilege” is rarely ever about social injustice and almost always about censorship and power. The progressive left knows that the best way to pursue its agenda is by demonization and division, and they have been widely successful in this regard. This is why you’ll see Thomas Jefferson dismissed in public schools as a racist slave owner, yet see FDR championed as a great man of history.
Ludwig von Mises understood that the superficial obsession with race dangerously overlooks the fundamental importance of ideas. This is why he wrote that “it is not mankind, the state, or the corporative unit that acts, but individual men and groups of men, and that their valuations and their actions are decisive, not those of abstract collectives.” The idea that the Jewish Mises would be asked to check his own “white privilege” should be obviously absurd considering he was forced to flee his home due to Aryans obsessed with an ideology that saw him as racially inferior.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the left’s successful tactics of divide and conquer is the devastating consequences it has had on the very communities progressives claim they want to help. Thomas Sowell has brilliantly documented the human toll of the progressive state. Regardless of their true intentions, those who advocate for greater state intervention in our lives actively encourage the greatest threat to societal harmony in the world today.
Now that Peter Klein has left Mizzou for Baylor University, I won't be much affected even if #ConcernedStudents1950 manage to burn the University of Missouri to the ground — but doing so won’t improve their lives.
A brighter tomorrow will only come when people realize that no matter your race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion — the state is the gravest threat to all those who don’t enjoy its privilege.
Featuring Bill Haynes (CMI Gold and Silver, Inc., CMI-Gold-Silver.com), Kathryn Muratore (Fresno, California), Jordan Ausman (Beyond Software, BeyondSW.com), Marc Victor (AttorneyforFreedom.com), Hunter Hastings (BHC Consulting, San Diego), Taylor Conant (Valueprax.WordPress.com), Don Printz, M.D. (Stone Mountain, Georgia), and Peter Kallman (Liberty.Menu). Includes introductions by Jeff Deist.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Phoenix, Arizona, on 7 November 2015. Special thanks to CMI Gold and Silver, Inc., for making this event possible.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Phoenix, Arizona, on 7 November 2015. Special thanks to CMI Gold and Silver, Inc., for making this event possible.
See also What Must Be Done by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
On Tuesday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stood up on the stage of a Democratic Party presidential debate and proudly proclaimed himself a “democratic socialist” to an adoring crowd. Spurred on by myths about the success of socialism in countries like Sweden and Norway, the horrors of a centrally planned economy have never been more popular in American politics. As Mises President Jeff Deist highlighted in Thursday’s Mises Daily:
These ideas, and the people who hold them, are not outliers in America. There are millions … who believe exactly as Bernie believes. They may prefer to vote for Hillary Clinton purely as a tactical matter because they are unsure the country is “ready” for full socialism … but average progressives and Democrats agree with Bernie Sanders across the board …
Ninety-five years after Ludwig von Mises published his indispensable essay Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, it is as critical to stand up to the tyranny of statism — on any scale — now as ever before.
The devastating consequences of government intervention into healthcare markets is the topic of this week’s episode of Mises Weekends. Charles Hugh Smith joins Jeff to discuss how Washington’s desire to eliminate markets from medicine has led to the industry being captured both by incompetent government regulators and insurance lobbyists.
In case you missed any of them, here are this week’s featured Mises Daily articles and some of our most popular articles at Mises Wire:
Charles Murray's Tepid Radicalism by David GordonWhat "Progressive" Corporate Welfare Looks Like by Andrew SyriosThe Dirty Business of Government Trash Collection by Allen MendenhallSanders and His Followers Are Not Outliers by Jeff DeistHow Modern Sweden Profits from the Success of Its Free-Market History by Yonathan AmselemGeorge Akerlof, Meet Oliver Williamson by Peter KleinAngus Deaton and Modern Economics by Peter KleinThe Mistake of Only Comparing US Murder Rates to "Developed" Countries by Ryan McMakenThe Fed’s Quadral Mandate and Impossible Balancing Act by Jonathan NewmanRothbard on Economic Ignorance by Matt McCaffreyTrue Money Supply: August Money Supply Growth Remains Way Down from 2012 Levels by Ryan McMakenDonald's Remarks on the Bubble and the Fed Are on the Money by Joseph SalernoNo way, Norway! by Carmen Elena Dorobăț
Our guest this weekend is Edward Stringham, professor of Economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of a fantastic new book called Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life. In this book, Ed looks back at the history of private legal systems, and in so doing demolishes the idea that only the state can manage and adjudicate human conflicts. Today, Ed gives some concrete, real-world examples of how private governance operates in our statist world. If you're interested in Rothbardian and Hoppean anarcho-capitalism, you'll find Ed's book a great addition to your library, and you'll enjoy hearing this interview with Edward Stringham.
[This review of Charles Murray's new book "By the People" appears in the September-October 2015 issue of The Austrian.]
Charles Murray thinks that government has become arbitrary and tyrannical. In doing so, it has betrayed the “Madisonian” heritage of America, which strictly limited the power of the government to interfere with individual liberty. “As I [Murray] got into the book, I discovered I had to find a label less cumbersome than ‘people devoted to limited government’ … my first impulse was to call us Jeffersonians, but Jefferson was well to the libertarian side of the spectrum, and I wanted to include advocates of limited government who think of themselves as conservatives. I settled on Madisonians instead.”
Murray says that “the Constitution that once sustained limited government is broken, and cannot be fixed by a Madisonian majority on the Supreme Court.” The problems are not confined to misinterpretations of the Constitution. “The American legal system increasingly functions in ways indistinguishable from lawlessness, for reasons that are authorized by judges and Congress.” Of most concern to Murray is the regulatory or administrative state, which operates “by rules that wouldn’t be permitted in civil and criminal courts, and [enforces] laws it has made upon its own.” The political system offers no relief from this “extralegal state within the state” because it is corrupt and dominated by institutions averse to change and under the control of special interest groups. “Combine the effects of institutional sclerosis with the effects of a growing percentage of Americans who depend on the benefits provided by the welfare state, and the political landscape for Madisonians is bleak and getting worse.”
In response, Murray proposes a bold strategy of civil disobedience. People should refuse to obey unjust government regulations. The government lacks the resources to enforce its mandates on a large number of violators; in addition, a defense fund would provide aid for those that the government sought to prosecute.
Murray has devoted much care to a description of our current legal woes; and, for the most part, he writes with a sure touch about legal issues. (Not always, though. It is not correct that the president must sign a constitutional amendment proposed by Congress, and it is doubtful that state laws that legalize marijuana violate the Supremacy Clause.) Further, he works out his conception of civil disobedience in a careful and imaginative way. Should we then welcome this book with enthusiasm?
I do not think that we should. Though Murray writes with insight about our present plight, he does not really want to do much about it. He opposes, for example, any disobedience to tax laws. “The tax code is exempt from systematic civil disobedience.”
Is this, though, a good reason to criticize Murray? The changes he suggests are ones he thinks will command widespread support. Much of the modern state, he suggests, cannot realistically be rolled back.
If this is Murray’s view, should we criticize him for holding it? He is a social scientist of great experience, famous for his studies of social policy. If he arrives at a pessimistic assessment of the prospects for liberty, should he be condemned for this?
But it is not for his pessimism, though I disagree with it, that I wish to challenge Murray. Rather, he is an “uncertain trumpet”; he is only in part an opponent of the Leviathan State. To be sure, he is, by his own lights, a “Madisonian,” but his commitment to limited government is not without its limits. For example, he opposes tax resistance not simply for reasons of prudence, but because taxation is “one of the legitimate functions of even a Madisonian state.”
It is not only taxation to support the night watchman state, furthermore, that our author defends. He also favors government funding of education, among other “public goods.” The latter, we learn, must not be defined strictly but include externalities as well.
Fostering public goods is also one of the legitimate functions of any government. ... Strictly defined public goods fall into two broad sets. One set consist of things that can be done only by government because of the nature of the task. … [These goods are nonexclusive and nonrivalrous.] Other public goods are those that may or may not be nonexclusive and nonrivalrous, but do entail serious externalities, meaning that a cost is borne by someone involuntarily or a benefit is provided to someone who cannot be charged for it. … It is appropriate that education be publicly funded, with people contributing to its cost whether or not they have children attending school.
It is well known that as economists define this term, practically all actions generate externalities. Murray’s statement, then, hardly fills us with confidence about his support for a genuine free market. Our unease about the extent of Murray’s support for liberty is not allayed by his remark:
The Constitution needed to change as the United States evolved from the agrarian society of the eighteenth century to the post-industrial society of today, and some of these changes would have permitted wholly new areas of government activity. … If in the 1960s, LBJ had mounted a campaign for passage of an amendment permitting the government to spend money on protecting the environment, he would have been seeking permission for the government to engage in an activity that meets all the classic tests of a public good.
One might imagine that a supporter of the free market would welcome every possible tax deduction. But Murray holds a different opinion. He says: “Consider the case of the tax deduction for mortgage interest. It is regressive. … People can argue from principle for progressive taxes or flat taxes, but no political philosophy tries to make a principled case for a regressive tax. And so it should be [politically] possible to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction. But it isn’t.” He fails to grasp that the problem with the mortgage exemption is not the deduction, but the taxation of others. His “free market” proposal is to extend taxation.
At times, he sounds like a standard welfare state liberal, albeit of a moderate sort. “Changes in the labor market have changed the moral arguments in favor of redistribution for the working population … the economic value of many blue-collar and midlevel white-collar jobs has stagnated or dropped, not because of policy or market failures but because so many jobs can be done as well, or cheaper, by machines. … It is time for conservatives to make some of their political friends mad at them and acknowledge that, in a country as rich as America, it is ridiculous that anyone lacks the means for a decent life.” “Technological unemployment” is a long-exploded fallacy, and this is not the place for an account of it. I mention it only to show, once more, how very limited indeed is our Madisonian’s commitment to the free market.
There is a glaring omission in his account of the rise of the powerful state. He says nothing about war as a means to aggrandize the state; for him, the works of John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Higgs do not exist. The little he says about foreign policy suggests that here too Murray sides with statism. Asking why the Soviet Union ceased in 1991 to exist, he says that “it is already clear that Reagan poked a shaky Soviet system in some vulnerable places — by arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles; starting a technological arms race that the Soviet leadership knew it could not match …” I would not have thought that starting an arms race is the best way to limit government.
Murray’s palliative measures, though all right in their place, respond inadequately to the realities of empire and tyranny. We need to do more than protect ourselves against overzealous factory inspectors.
Being a government means never having to say you’re sorry. And it also means you get to blame everyone else for all the problems you’ve caused.
This week at mises.org, we explored how deeply indebted governments blame the ones who lend them money, while government prosecutors blame entrepreneurs, businesses, and “white collar crime” for other problems in the economy. And surges in drug prices, we’re told, have nothing to do with government control of the drug market.
Lackluster new jobs data and continued surges in home price inflation confirm that the distortions of the Fed-induced boom continue to add up.
But even with all the bad news, the miracles of the market place point toward a brighter future. This week on Mises Weekends, Rod Martin, a co-founder of PayPal and world renown philosopher-capitalist, joins Jeff for a wide-ranging interview covering such topics as the refugee situation in Europe, unrest in the Middle East, and why some cultures are more prosperous than others. Martin contrasts the difficulties world governments have in confronting global macro-crises with the hope and resilience of technological innovation and entrepreneurship.
Indeed, Ludwig von Mises would have easily understood how market innovations outpace government innovations, since Mises, whose birthday we celebrated this week, pioneered our understanding of how government intervention cannot achieve the goals it tries to achieve. Be sure to see this never-before-published essay by Bettina Bien Greaves, and this newly-discovered recording of a Mises lecture from 1962.
In case you missed any of this week’s Mises Daily and Mises Wire articles, take a second look:
The Reality Behind the Numbers in China's Boom-Bust Economy by Yonathan AmselemDrug Shortages, Price Gouging, and Our Broken Health Care System by Michel AccadThe Coming Corporate "Crime Wave" by William L. AndersonLuwig von Mises, Genius? by Bettina Bien GreavesGovernments Turn to the UN to Avoid Paying Their Debts by Nicolás CachanoskyThe Military Gravy Train: Full Speed Ahead by Andrew SyriosThe Silent, Slow, Stubborn Revolution Carmen Elena DorobățCollege Athletics: Public Institutions Are the Real Sham By Jonathan NewmanThe Real Estate Crisis in North Dakota's Man Camps by Mark Thornton
In a recent appearance before Congress, Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates declared that the US Department of Justice is going to ratchet up its prosecution of individuals employed in corporations as part of a larger push against “white collar crime.” There is no doubt that such prosecutions will be very popular to a large section of voters, given that presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Martin O’Malley, along with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren pretty much have declared that nearly all American businesses are part of a massive criminal conspiracy that must be brought down by federal authorities.
Within the next year, we should expect to see mid-level business and finance executives doing “perp walks” in front of the news media, as federal prosecutors will charge them with various “economic crimes” in hopes that they will implicate their superiors. All of us by now know the drill and in a time of anemic economic growth complete with business failures, it won’t be hard to find scapegoats.
Everyone Is “Guilty”When famed civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate published his now-famous book, Three Felonies a Day, it caused quite a stir. Going through a number of very disturbing cases, Silverglate made clear that if federal prosecutors want to target an individual, it is very easy to fashion criminal charges against them.
To prove his point, he noted how the federal prosecutors in New York when Rudy Giuliani was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York regularly played a game in which they would see if various celebrities and others, including Mother Theresa, had broken federal criminal law. The result, unfortunately, was that for each person no matter how good his or her public character, a federal statue existed that would place them in prison.
Being that Giuliani’s prosecutors — and Giuliani himself — regularly committed felonies by selectively leaking grand jury information to favored journalists in order to damage the ability of accused people to defend themselves. He also did it to stoke the fires of the anti-business mobs, and these prosecutors were quite familiar with how to fashion the ever-malleable federal statutes to turn ordinary acts into crimes. During the 1980s, when Giuliani was at DOJ, the New York office engaged in a massive show of force against Wall Street firms and other business enterprises in large part to enhance the coming political careers of Giuliani and others who worked under him, and to appease the anti-business Democrats and Republicans who were anxious to declare to roll back what they called the “Decade of Greed.”
Is a New Wave of Crackdowns Coming?Federal prosecution of business figures tend to come in waves. During the Great Depression, prosecutors tried to claim criminal behavior by businessmen was responsible for the lengthy economic downturn. During the 1980s, Wall Street rivals of Michael Milken and others who challenged the established financial firms were the quiet-but-effective engine of prosecution, combining their political connections with Giuliani’s ambition to nearly destroy the alternative capital funding machine that was overturning the corporate status quo with new startups and shakeups of existing firms.
Because Milken had become wealthy through his financial dealings, he became the symbol of “greed” by the Democratic Left, which at that time was facing a loss of influence during the Ronald Reagan years and was desperate to regain its former status of America’s “conscience.” Going after Milken mollified both the Left and the Republican establishment on Wall Street, as the “old money” firms were happy to see Giuliani eliminate the competition.
After the spectacular failure of Enron and other firms that depended upon Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve System policies of easy money, policies that ended in the Tech Bubble meltdown in 2000 and 2001, the George W. Bush administration went after people like Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and others who had high-profile CEO jobs. In the lynch-mob atmosphere that inevitably follows the bust cycle of Fed-induced business cycles, it was not hard to convince Americans that the corporate bankruptcies and the subsequent recession were the handiwork of criminal executives.
I have written about federal criminal law and its abuses for more than a decade and have not changed my viewpoint. No matter how often writers and activists expose the consequences of expanding federal criminal law, the law expands anyway. People are elected to Congress on platforms of “being tough on crime,” and large crowds heartily approve when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren call for more business executives to be thrown into prison for unspecified “crimes.” (They demand the Beria approach. Beria, who was the head of the original KGB, famously stated: “You bring me the man, I'll find you the crime.”)
A Winning Political StrategyThe current public mood is ugly, and perhaps for good reason. Although the official rates of unemployment are relatively low, statistics clearly show that huge numbers of potentially-employable people have left the job market altogether because they know that finding meaningful employment is highly unlikely. We know that in percentage terms, labor participation in the workplace is at near-record lows. We also know that, economically speaking, the economy is stagnating and that individuals continue to be squeezed as real pay fails to keep up with creeping-but-real inflation. In short, people are angry, and they want someone to pay.
Many angry people have found a political home with candidates like Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom speak to voter frustrations and who also find perfect scapegoats for vengeful Americans. Bernie Sanders blames businesses and entrepreneurs for “greed,” while Trump blames immigrants. Economically speaking, neither Sanders nor Trump is correct, but it doesn’t matter; angry voters don’t want facts, they want scalps.
Ever since sociologist Edwin Sutherland during the 1930s came up with the term, “white collar crime,” politicians and the media have claimed that businesses often are little more than criminal enterprises. Certainly the current political climate reflects that sentiment and more. Furthermore, politicians are appealing to voters with proposals that would destroy capital formation, criminalize much of entrepreneurship, and make it much more difficult for business firms to engage in normal activities.
In a recent campaign speech, Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton declared, “We’re going to go back to enforcing labor laws. I’m going to make sure that some employers go to jail for wage theft and all the other abuses that they engage in.” Few candidates of either party are willing to stand up for businesses and entrepreneurs, and as the campaign rhetoric becomes more inflammatory, federal prosecutors are going to find it increasingly easier to charge business owners and employers for law “violations” that might be called “criminal” even if they never were intentional, according to law professor John Baker.
Selective and Politically-Motivated ProsecutionBecause there are so many business owners and executives, and because federal prosecutors cannot go after everyone, it will be a crapshoot as to whom prosecutors select for “the treatment.” For the most part, those targeted will not have political connections (such as many Wall Street executives), nor will they be people involved in “green energy” ventures, such as those businesses tied to people like Al Gore.
When people think of so-called business crimes, they think of embezzlement, firms falsifying information, tax evasion, or to engage in fraud while performing services under contract with the government. For example, say that Ajax Company is supposed to build tanks for the US Army and is paid on a cost-plus basis. The company then bills the army for a number of tanks it did not build or for phantom services, with the company CEO and his mistress putting the fraudulently-obtained money in a Swiss bank account.
This certainly would fall under anyone’s fraud statute, and if the government were to prosecute just those kinds of cases, few people would object. However, government fraud statutes are incredibly malleable and can apply to conduct that would seem to be legal. In an article I wrote for Regulation six years ago, I point out Enron’s practice of placing “non-earning assets” into “special purpose entities” was legal and also was made known to Enron stockholders, yet federal prosecutors decided to include those actions under the umbrella of “Honest Services Fraud.”
Prosecutors wanted jurors to believe that even though Enron’s activities met federal laws and regulations, nonetheless the company undertook those actions in order to present the company to stockholders and others in a false light, making the company’s financial condition seem better than it really was. Thus, it was left to the jurors to determine whether or not this action truly was a violation of the law, even though the original act did fall within the letter of federal statutes and regulations.
One can see immediately where there is a problem. Under most state laws governing crime, there often is no doubt that an actual crime was committed. The question is not whether someone broke the law, but rather who broke it, the defendant or someone else.
Federal Law Is Ambiguous Enough to Allow Prosecution of Nearly AnyoneIn the federal system, however, jurors often are asked to decide whether or not someone actually broke the law and, thus, broke federal statutes. Jurors, who usually have no legal training, then are asked to determine whether or not a highly-complex deed that they may not understand was a legal violation, and more often than not, if jurors don’t understand it, or if they deem the defendants to be less-than-savory, they will vote guilty as a default position.
Furthermore, federal prosecutors have such leeway that they are able to pile on numerous charges that might be based from a single endeavor, thus creating a situation for defendants in which they either can chance going to prison for decades (and federal prosecutors almost always win at trial) or plead guilty. (I have a well-known friend who was charged with “Honest Services Fraud,” because the US attorney believed that the fees he negotiated with his clients were higher than they should have been. The prosecutor did not allege that he had defrauded his clients per se, since he charged the clients the fees upon which both parties agreed, but that because the fees were higher than fees other lobbyists charged their clients, then they simply had to be illegal. So, according to federal prosecutors, one can negotiate fees in daylight with all parties agreeing and still be breaking the law.)
Federal prosecutors also are notorious for appealing to the prejudices of juries. When the late Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were on trial in Houston, Texas, prosecutors appealed to the fact that when Enron collapsed, a lot of people lost money. (That Skilling and Lay also lost most of their income and wealth in the same collapse apparently was irrelevant, and prosecutors claimed that any act of Lay and Skilling diversifying their own personal financial portfolios — although both men held most of their wealth in Enron stock — was an attempt to knowingly bail out of a sinking ship.) Because the trial judge also was openly hostile to the defendants, prosecutors pretty much were able to do and say what they wanted without fear of legal repercussions.
Rudy Giuliani once noted with amusement that people charged with “white-collar crime” were more likely to “roll over” than were hardened criminals. Part of the reason is that most people, and especially business owners and executives who do try to obey the law, are horrified at the prospect of being charged criminally and going to prison. Because federal prosecutors can easily fashion charges that often defy defense, it is not hard to understand why business people plead guilty.
If Barack Obama and US Attorney Loretta Lynch decide to target business people, prosecutors will find plenty of targets. Because violation of regulations can be rolled into the “fraud” and “conspiracy” statutes — even if the violations were unintentional or the “targets” were unaware of their existence — it is not hard to find subjects to prosecute. Being charged in such conditions is more like “winning” an “unlucky lottery” than engaging in actual criminal behavior.
That turning the business community into a wreckage of criminal charges will have long-term effects on the willingness of entrepreneurs to risk their own assets will be no deterrent to people like Obama and Lynch. Neither of them have a minute of business experience, and they truly believe that businesses themselves probably at best are unethical entities or at worst caverns of criminality, so they most likely believe they are doing Americans a favor by throwing more people into prison. One only can feel sympathy for people and their families who at the present time have no idea that someone from the US Department of Justice is planning to wreck their lives over at worst what might be a legal technicality.
Pope Francis made history this week when he became the first pontiff to speak before Congress. While his speech made headlines in calling for global action against the dubious problem of global warming, it became clear that Francis had not listened to the advice of Lew Rockwell or familiarized himself with the works of Tom Woods. In fact, Dr. Woods found himself attacked by Fortune magazine for his principled defense of free markets as a devout Catholic. The real question will be whether Tom’s arrival in Texas next weekend for the Dallas-Ft. Worth Mises Circle will cause fewer traffic problems than this week’s Papal visit.
Speaking of religious figures, the actions of Janet Yellen’s Federal Reserve were once again put under the microscope on a new episode of Mises Weekends. Bill Bonner of Agora Financial joined Jeff Deist to discuss what he previously called “the most anticipated move in central bank history.”
And in case you missed any of them, here are this week’s featured Mises Daily articles and some of our most popular articles at Mises Wire:
100 Years of Government's "Managed" Health Care by Dr. Michel AccadThe Economics of Hillary Clinton by William L. AndersonCollege Athletes Embrace the Division of Labor by Matthew DoarnbergerCentral Banks Don't Dictate Interest Rates by Frank ShostakYour Ideology Depends on if "Your Guy" Is in Power by Ryan McMakenDemocracy, De-Civilization, and Counterculture by Hans-Hermann HoppeVideo: Is Fed Credibility on the Line? by Ron Paul and Paul-Martin Foss
Since 2008, Marvel Studios, now owned by Disney, has been cranking out at least one big-budget new movie each year, with much success. The movies of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe — which includes the post-2007 Marvel movies about the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Avengers — have combined to gross more than 8.5 billion dollars.
The studio has been careful to loosely connect all the plotlines of these films to construct a single world in which all the films take place. Thus, viewers of the Marvel films over the past seven years have become immersed in a broad, interconnected world of superheroes, supervillains, murderous robots, and interplanetary threats from god-like creatures and seemingly indestructible extra-terrestrials.
Meanwhile, the Marvel world is protected by the shadowy organization known as S.H.I.E.L.D (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division), which also serves as coordinating body that brings all of the Avengers together to fight superhuman threats to the human race.
As one might expect, therefore, the Marvel films contain a sizable amount of politics and numerous, sometimes-conflicting messages about the central role of a technological-military-industrial complex in protecting the human race from total and utter destruction.
To their credit, the Marvel films generally avoid heavy-handedness in their moralizing, which is no doubt one reason for their success. They often remain ambiguous about the “lessons” to be learned in each film. In other words, viewers can supply for themselves what message they wish to take away from each film. Nevertheless, one can detect that on the whole, the overall political message contained within the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of suspicion toward the “official” institutions of the world’s governments which often fail in their mission, or are corrupted in the face of existential threats. Fortunately for moviegoers, the eponymous superheroes — most of whom display ambiguous motivations and loyalties — must supply the necessary heroics.
At the core of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are three superheroes: Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and Captain America, and their relationships with government institutions form the backbone of what might be an ideology behind the Marvel films.
Iron Man: Collaborator Turned VigilanteThe modern era of Marvel Studios began with the success of Iron Man in 2008 which tells the story of Tony Stark, who has inherited a successful weapons-manufacturing business from his father. Stark has become a billionaire playboy thanks to the success of his father’s weapons in killing large numbers of people. However, after Tony sees the effects of his weapons, and the moral ambiguity of the conflicts for which he has been supplying them, Stark loses faith in his arrangement with the US government and turns toward a mission of single-handedly supplying world peace through his new Iron Man superweapon.
By the time of Iron Man 2 (2010), world peace has indeed been established, and Stark is embroiled in a conflict with the United States government which wants the Iron Man suit for itself. Stark declares that the suit is “my property” and refuses to grant governments access to the technology. Eventually, however, competing weapons contractors are able to collude with an Air Force officer to produce similar weapons for nefarious purposes.
The Hulk: Betrayed by the StateJust as Stark had worked closely to supply weapons to the US government before his epiphany, Dr. Bruce Banner, a brilliant scientist in The Incredible Hulk (2008) was convinced by the US government to assist in reviving the “super soldier” program that had existed during World War II. After a botched experiment, Banner is turned into a superweapon himself, the Hulk, rendering him incapable of carrying on normal human relationships. The US government then proceeds to hunt Banner down, claiming he is their “property” while making the Hulk a fugitive who can only live on the margins of society.
Captain America: All-American Super SoldierCaptain America provides the flip side to the disillusionment and betrayal found with the Hulk and Iron Man characters. Unlike the Hulk’s failed experiment, the experiment on Steven Rogers — dramatized in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) — is extremely successful, turning Rogers into Captain America, and providing him with the super powers necessary to defeat Hydra, a secret terrorist organization seeking world domination.
Rogers maintains his idealized 1940s-style morals and innocent patriotism to the end, and we discover that the project’s success was largely due to the contributions of Tony Stark’s father. Even after Captain America is accidentally frozen in the Arctic Ocean for sixty years and revived just in time to team up with the other Avengers, Rogers continues to be a loyal agent of the American state.
The Central Lesson of the Marvel Universe: Our Own Weapons May Destroy UsAlthough our view of the scientific-military-industrial complex is made complex and interesting through these contrasting views, we are nevertheless faced with the single theme: if the human race faces such intractable foes as Thor’s brother Loki — introduced in Thor (2011) — and an aggressive alien race known as the Chitauri, the human race can’t hope to survive without the assistance of superheroes, and the amazing technical know-how of S.H.I.E.L.D.
And yet, even here, the Marvel movies cast doubt on the purity and competence of the Earth’s defenders throughout the films and especially in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), in which it is revealed that S.H.I.E.L.D has been infiltrated by Captain America’s old foe Hydra. Thus, mankind’s last best hope for defense turns out to be a fifth column, and it’s up to Captain America (now branded a traitor) to end the S.H.I.E.L.D/ Hydra threat.
This theme of best-laid-plans-gone-awry then continues into 2015’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron when Iron Man, despairing over the threat posed by far-more-powerful alien forces, creates yet another super-weapon — this time an artificial intelligence — that turns against humanity. In the end, only the good-hearted rump of the now-disbanded S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers themselves can intervene to save the day.
For cinematic purposes, this repeated return to the theme of saving the world by the skin of our teeth works extremely well. But what effect, if any, will it have on the ideologies of moviegoers? In the world of these Marvel films, each new attempt to protect the world from all danger leads to just another newer and graver threat that could not be anticipated.
Ultimately, the world’s salvation falls on a group of disparate misfits betrayed by their own attempts at a lasting peace. This is good for keeping a movie franchise going. But maybe there’s a real-life lesson in there somewhere, too.
It’s been noticed more than a few times that there aren’t many substantive differences between the Republicans and Democrats. While this is true in many ways for the parties themselves, the Left and Right certainly differ on a range of issues from welfare to abortion to gay rights.
What they have in common — at least the mainstream varieties — is a desire to use the state to shape society in whatever way they see fit. As Andrew Napolitano put it, “We have migrated from a two-party system into a one-party system, the big-government party. There’s a democratic wing that likes taxes and wealth transfers and assaults on commercial liberties and there’s a republican wing that likes war and deficits and assaults on civil liberties.” And both parties love prohibition, just of different things.
Alcohol Prohibition There aren’t many people left who believe the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s was a good idea. Interestingly enough, it was the progressives of the time that pushed for that. As historian William Leuchtenburg noted, “It was a movement that was embraced by progressives.” On the other side, in the words of historian Daniel Okrent, were the “… economic conservatives who … pushed so hard for repeal.”
Prohibition turned out to be a disaster. A report from the Cato Institute found that after Prohibition passed in 1920, homicide rates increased, corruption increased, alcohol-related deaths were unchanged and after a short dip in 1921, alcohol consumption returned to what it had been before the law was passed. Furthermore, in the midst of this chaos, Al Capone and organized crime came to power. Indeed, black markets and prohibition go together like peas and carrots.
Drug Prohibition In the past, it was usually the progressives who wanted to use the state to tell people what they could and could not put in their own bodies. However, something must have changed among conservatives as the Right has generally been at the vanguard of the War on Drugs (although, with plenty of help from many on the Left). In 1971, Richard Nixon decided to try prohibition all over again, but this time with cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.
And of course, it has failed in every way imaginable.
According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, “Illicit drug use in America has been increasing.” In 2012, “9.2 percent of the population” had used illicit drugs in the last month “… up from 8.3 percent in 2002.” So drug use has actually gone up despite spending over a trillion dollars on this massive boondoggle.
Meanwhile, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Despite having only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 25 percent of the world’s prison population. A large percentage of these prisonere are in prison for nothing more than non-violent drug charges.
Some think this is counterproductive and immoral. Others, like Michael Gerson, believe that those who want to legalize drugs have “second-rate values.” First-rate values include locking drug addicts in cages. So in accordance with Gerson’s first-rate values, instead of trying to help these poor addicts rebuild their lives, the government declared war on the substances, and thereby, the addicts themselves.
And to wage this war has required a massively invasive police state. “Victimless” crimes don’t leave many witnesses (or at least not many who want to talk about it). So the government must use more bellicose means. According to the ACLU, there are an estimated 45,000 SWAT raids every year and only about 7 percent are for hostage situations. The vast majority are for drugs. These raids sometimes end tragically. For example, David Hooks was shot twice while face down on the ground in one raid and a baby was put into a coma when a flash bang was dropped in another.
The evidence also shows that legalization works. Glenn Greenwald notes that “Since Portugal enacted its decriminalization scheme in 2001, drug usage in many categories has actually decreased when measured in absolute terms” and Forbes points out that “drug abuse is down by half.”
And despite some haranguing from conservatives, Colorado has done just fine since decriminalizing marijuana in 2014.
Gun Prohibition While conservatives have taken some notes from the progressives of old, progressives certainly haven’t given up on the idea of molding society through prohibition. Fortunately, in the United States, most of the debate about guns has to do with regulation and not prohibition. This is not the case in many other countries. And it has also not been the case in several US cities, until Supreme Court decisions overturned the gun bans in Washington, DC and Chicago. Still, many US cities have extremely arduous gun laws on the books.
John Lott did an extensive study and noted that,
The odds that a typical state experiences a drop in murder or rape after a right-to-carry law is passed merely due to randomness is far less than 0.1 percent. … The average murder rate dropped in 89 percent of the states after the right-to-carry law was passed. … There was a similar decline in rape rates.
Further, to make sure he controlled for every variable imaginable (or didn’t control for variables that would incorrectly skew the data) he ran “20,480 regressions” using every imaginable arrangement of possible criteria and concluded,
… all the violent-crime regressions show the same direction of impact from the concealed-handgun law. The results for murder demonstrated that passing right-to-carry laws caused drops in the crime ranging from 5 to 7.5 percent.
John Lott found twenty-six peer reviewed studies on concealed-carry laws, sixteen showed a reduction in crime and ten were inconclusive. Not one showed that crime rates increased.
We can all mourn tragic events such as the recent mass shooting in Charleston. But what is obviously problematic about restricting civilian gun use is that only law-abiding citizens will comply, criminals will not. (Like many other such massacres, the Charleston shooting took place in a “gun free” zone.) Indeed, criminals will likely have no harder a time getting guns then they do getting drugs, which means that restricting guns just disarms potential victims. A survey by Gary Kleck made him conclude that there were approximately 2.5 million incidents of defensive gun use each year. Although that number is almost certainly way too high, defensive gun use is still relatively common. For example, during a school shooting in Oklahoma, Mikael Gross and Tracey Bridges retrieved the guns from their vehicles and stopped the shooter before he could kill anyone else.
As stated above, while there are some in the United States who call for extreme restrictions on guns, or bans altogether, for the most part, outright prohibition is only an issue in other countries. Many will point to the higher murder rates in the United States than Britain as proof that gun prohibition stops murder (interestingly they don’t point to the property crime statistics as they are actually higher in Britain than the US).
But there are major problems with this simplistic analysis. For example, gun ownership has been increasing rapidly in the United States while gun crime has been falling. In addition, most guns are owned by people in rural areas, then suburban, then urban. Crime rates are exactly the opposite. Further, as Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society,
Russia and Brazil have tougher gun control laws than the united States and much higher murder rates. Gun ownership rates in Mexico are a fraction of what they are in the United States, but Mexico’s murder rate is more than double that in the United States. Handguns are banned in Luxembourg but not in Belgium, France or Germany; yet the murder rate in Luxembourg is several times the murder rate in Belgium, France or Germany.
And what about that lower murder rate for Britain? Well, Thomas Sowell again, “London had a much lower murder rate than New York during the years after New York State's 1911 Sullivan Law imposed very strict gun control, while anyone could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked in the 1950s.” What matters are the trends, not simplistic and vulgar comparisons. Instead, an international study done at Harvard noted,
To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world.
Finally, when it comes to gun bans, the results are predictably terrible. John Lott again, “Every place around the world that has banned guns appears to have experienced an increase in murder and violent crime rates.” This includes Washington, DC, Chicago, Britain, Ireland, and Jamaica. One British newspaper ran the darkly humorous article “Gun Crime Soaring Despite Ban.” Change the “Despite” to “Because” and you have an accurate article.
Conclusion Penn Jillette has half-joked, “If you can convince the gun nuts that the potheads are ok and the potheads that the gun nuts are ok, then everyone's a libertarian.” Arguments about whether these things should be regulated and how much so would be the subject for a different article. But it’s hard to understand why many liberals think that prohibiting drugs creates black markets with drugs, but that it wouldn’t happen with guns. Does one really think that drug cartels couldn’t add guns to their list of products to push? And the same goes for conservatives in the reverse.
It’s really quite simple; prohibition doesn’t work. Freedom does.
In April it was announced that Greece was imposing a surcharge for all cash withdrawals from bank accounts to deter citizens from clearing out their accounts. So now the Greeks will have to pay one euro per 1,000 euros that they withdraw, which is one-tenth of a percent. It doesn’t seem very big, but the principle at work is extremely big because what they’re in effect doing is breaking the exchange rate between a unit of bank deposits and a unit of currency.
Why would they do this? Why would they want to do this? Well, it’s one of the anti-cash policies that mainstream economists have vigorously been promoting.
PAVING THE WAY FOR NEGATIVE INTERESTTo make the calculations easier, and to illustrate the effect, let’s say that the Greek “surcharge” is ten dollars for every 100 dollars withdrawn. Now, instead of being able to convert one euro in your checking account into one euro in cash, on demand, you will only be able to buy one euro in cash by spending 1.10 euros in your bank accounts. That’s a negative 10-percent rate in some sense. That is to say that you can only take out one euro from the bank if you’re willing to pay 1.10 euros. So, you would only really get ninety cents for every dollar that you wanted to withdraw and that’s very significant because this means it will be more expensive to buy an item with cash than with bank deposits.
At the same time, the Greek government made it very clear that if you deposit the cash in the banks, you don’t get 1.10 euros of bank money for every euro you deposit.
So the system is now structured to lock the money in the banks. Now, what does that allow them to do? If you lose 10 percent every time you withdraw one euro in cash, they can lower the interest rate that you get on bank deposits to negative 5 percent, or negative 6 percent. You still wouldn’t withdraw your cash from the banks even if the interest rate went negative.
What we are witnessing is a war on cash in which governments make it either illegal or inconvenient to use cash. This, in turn, allows governments the ability to spy on and regulate financial transactions more completely, while also allowing governments more leeway in manipulating the money supply.
THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR ON CASHIt all started really with the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, passed in the US, which requires financial institutions in the United States to assist US government agencies in detecting and preventing money laundering. That was the rationale. Specifically, the act requires financial institutions to keep records of cash payments and file reports of cash purchases or negotiable instruments of more than $10,000 as a daily aggregate amount. Of course, this is all sold as a way of tracking criminals.
The US government employs other means of making war on cash also. Up until 1945, there were 500 dollar bills, 1,000 dollar bills, and 10,000 dollar bills in circulation. There was even a 100,000 dollar bill in the 1930s with which banks made clearings between one another. The US government stopped issuing these bills in 1945 and by 1969 had withdrawn all from circulation. So, in the guise of fighting organized crime and money laundering, what’s actually occurred is that they made it very inconvenient to use cash. A one hundred dollar bill today has $15.50 worth of purchasing power in 1969 dollars, when they removed the last big bills.
THE PROBLEM IS INTERNATIONALThe war on cash in Sweden has gone probably the furthest and Scandinavian governments in general are notable for their opposition to cash. In Swedish cities, tickets for public buses no longer can be purchased for cash; they must be purchased in advance by a cell phone or text message — in other words, via bank accounts.
The deputy governor of the Swedish Central Bank gloated, before his retirement a few years back, that cash will survive “like the crocodile,” even though it may be forced to see its habitat gradually cut back.
The analogy is apt since three of the four major Swedish banks combined have more than two-thirds of their offices no longer accepting or paying out cash. These three banks want to phase out the manual handling of cash at their offices at a very rapid pace and have been doing that since 2012.
In France, opponents of cash tried to pass a law in 2012 which would restrict the use of cash from a maximum of 3,000 euros per exchange to 1,000. The law failed, but then there was the attack on Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket, so immediately the state used this as a reason for getting the 1,000 maximum limit. They got their maximum limit. Why? Well, proponents claim that these attacks were partially financed by cash.
The terrorists used cash to purchase some of the stuff they needed. No doubt, these murderers also wore shoes and clothing and used cell phones and cars during the planning and execution of their mayhem. Why not ban these things? A naked barefoot terrorist without communications is surely less effective than the fully clothed and equipped one.
Finally, Switzerland, formerly a great bastion of economic liberty and financial privacy, has succumbed under the bare-knuckle tactics of the US government. The Swiss government has banned all cash payments of more than 100,000 francs (about $106,000), including transactions involving watches, real estate, precious metals, and cars. This was done under the threat of blacklisting by the Organization of Economic Development, with the US no doubt pushing behind the scenes. Transactions above 100,000 francs will now have to be processed through the banking system. The reason is to prevent the catch-all crime, of course, of money laundering.
Chase Bank has also recently joined the war on cash. It’s the largest bank in the US, a subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase and Co., and according to Forbes, the world’s third largest public company. It also received $25 billion in bailout loans from the US Treasury. As of March, Chase began restricting the use of cash in selected markets. The new policy restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans.
Chase even goes as far as to prohibit the storage of cash in its safe deposit boxes. In a letter to its customers, dated April 1, 2015, pertaining to its “updated safe deposit box lease agreement,” one of the high-lighted items reads, “You agree not to store any cash or coins other than those found to have a collectible value.” Whether or not this pertains to gold and silver coins with no collectible value is not explained, but of course it does. As one observer warned, “This policy is unusual, but since Chase is the nation’s largest bank, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing more of this in this era of sensitivity about funding terrorists and other illegal causes.” So, get your money out of those safe deposit boxes, your currency and probably your gold and silver.
ONLY (SUPERVISED) SPENDING IS ALLOWEDGregory Mankiw, a prominent macroeconomist, came up with a scheme in 2009: the Fed would announce that a year from the date of the announcement, it intended to pick a numeral from 0 to 9 out of a hat. All currency with a serial number ending in that numeral, would instantly lose status as legal tender, causing the expected return on holding currency to plummet to -10 percent. This would allow the Fed to reduce interest rates below zero for a year or even more because people would happily loan money for say, -2 percent or -4 percent because that would stop them from losing 10 percent.
Now the reason given by our rulers for suppressing cash is to keep society safe from terrorists, tax evaders, money launderers, drug cartels, and other villains real or imagined. The actual aim of the flood of laws restricting or even prohibiting the use of cash is to force the public to make payments through the financial system. This enables governments to expand their ability to spy on and keep track of their citizens’ most private financial dealings, in order to milk their citizens of every last dollar of tax payments that they claim are due.
Other reasons for suppressing cash are (1) to prop up the unstable fractional reserve banking system, which is in a state of collapse all over the world, and (2) to give central banks the power to impose negative nominal interest rates. That is, to make you spend money by subtracting money from your bank account for every day you leave it in the bank account and don’t spend it.
Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from a talk delivered at the New York Area Mises Circle in Stamford, Connecticut.
Most often the state compels you to do things, not because these things are supposed to be good for you, but because they fulfill the state’s purposes. The state doesn’t take your money to help you. Sometimes, though, the state does pass laws that claim to restrict people for their own good, e.g., laws that forbid use of certain drugs that are supposed to be bad for your health. Laws of this kind are called paternalistic.
Libertarians of course oppose paternalism, but it is not only libertarians who reject it. It is at odds with the entire heritage of classical liberalism. John Stuart Mill famously opposed paternalism in On Liberty; and it is Cass Sunstein’s principal aim in Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism to cast doubt on Mill’s canonical statement of anti-paternalism, the Harm Principle. This principle is the following: “[T]he only purpose for which power may be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant.” (Sunstein here is quoting Mill’s On Liberty.)
Sunstein challenges what he considers the two main arguments that support the Harm Principle. The first of these, which he considers the more important of the two, is the Epistemic Argument: “Because individuals know their tastes and situations better than officials do, they are in the best position to identify their own ends and the best means of obtaining them. ... In my view, it [the Epistemic Argument] provides the strongest support that the Harm Principle can find.”
One way to challenge the Epistemic Argument would be to claim that certain things are good or bad for people, regardless of their own ends and desires. Smoking is bad for you and you shouldn’t do it, proponents of this position would say, even if after careful consideration you want to smoke. But Sunstein does not follow this path. He could hardly claim to be a “libertarian” paternalist if he did. Rather, he points to cognitive mistakes that people make. He is not trying to impose his view of what people should do on others: he is saying to them that paternalistic interventions can add to people’s well-being by helping them to act more rationally.
Even if this is what Sunstein aims to do, though, isn’t it still odd for him to claim to be a libertarian paternalist? Sunstein attempts to reduce the tension between adjective and noun by appealing to “nudges.” “In light of the pervasive risk of government error and the inescapable fact of human diversity, it is usually best to use the mildest and most choice-preserving forms of intervention. These forms include ‘nudges,’ understood as initiatives that maintain freedom of choice while also steering people’s decisions in the right direction (as judged by people themselves).” The nudges, as here explained, invade people’s freedom less than other paternalistic measures; but this hardly suffices to make them libertarian. By similar reasoning, one could call a robber who refrained from murdering his victims a “libertarian” aggressor.
Let us return to cognitive mistakes. Sunstein is a leading figure in behavioral economics, and he writes about these mistakes with especial authority. Following the psychologist (and Nobel Prize-winner) Daniel Kahneman, he distinguishes between two “cognitive systems” in the mind. “System 1 works fast. It is often on automatic pilot. Driven by habit, it can be emotional and intuitive.” By contrast, System 2 is “deliberative and reflective.” When we operate, as we often do, with System 1, we are subject to various sets of mistakes, which count as “behavioral market failures.” With the details of these mistakes, we are not here concerned, but the errors include “present bias and time inconsistencies,” “ignoring shrouded (but important) attributes,” “unrealistic optimism,” and “problems with probability.” What for our purposes is important is the conclusion Sunstein draws: “With respect to paternalism, the unified theme is that insofar as people are making the relevant errors, their choices will fail to promote their own ends. It follows that a successful effort to correct these errors would generally substitute an official judgment for that of choosers only with respect to means, not ends.”
Suppose, for the moment, that we accept Sunstein’s claim that these cognitive mistakes impede people from getting what they want. Does this give one reason to reject the Epistemic Argument? I do not think so. According to the Epistemic Argument, each person is in a better position than government officials to choose the appropriate means to satisfy his ends. This is entirely consistent with people’s making cognitive mistakes. The point of the Epistemic Argument is that people can better judge their situation than officials can, not that their judgment is without error.
Mises fully realized this point, and Sunstein would have profited from a reading of Mises’s comment in his essay “Laissez-Faire or Dictatorship” on J.E. Cairnes’s objection to laissez-faire: “Let us for the sake of argument accept the way in which Cairnes presents the problem and in which he argues. Human beings are fallible and therefore sometimes fail to learn what their true interests would require them to do. … It is very unfortunate that reality is such. But, we must ask, is there any means available to prevent mankind from being hurt by people’s bad judgment and malice? Is it not a non sequitur to assume that one could avoid the disastrous consequences of these human weaknesses by substituting the government’s discretion for that of the individual citizens?”
The objection I here have in mind differs from one that Sunstein does consider. Sunstein knows full well that government officials are also subject to cognitive mistakes and have their own agendas. Incredibly, his response is that technocrats are more likely than the public to be influenced by rational, System 2 thinking. “A large virtue of technocrats in government — specialists in science, economics, and law — is that they can help overcome some of the errors that might otherwise influence public or private judgments.” He does generously allow, though, that biases of the government officials require further study.
My objection, though, is not that the officials are biased and self-interested, though they are indeed that. It is rather that “nudging” people to act in ways they would not otherwise have chosen disregards the fact, to which the Epistemic Argument calls attention, that they are the best judges of how to deal with their individual situations. Only if their cognitive defects were so severe that they outweighed the force of the Epistemic Argument would Sunstein have a good argument for paternalism. To reiterate, the problem I have in mind is not whether the government officials are more likely than the public to suffer from cognitive defects. It is that the existence of cognitive mistakes does not by itself refute the Epistemic Argument.
There is a further problem with Sunstein’s use of cognitive mistakes to justify paternalistic interventions. He offers no evidence that people who act in ways he wants to modify have fallen victim to cognitive mistakes. Do people who smoke, or consume sodas in large quantities, or fail to buy fuel-efficient cars, suffer from cognitive mistakes? Perhaps they do, but the fact that people are susceptible to these mistakes does not show, for any particular choice, that it stems from a mistake.
Sunstein criticizes another argument for the Harm Principle. This argument appeals to autonomy: “We might insist that people have a right to choose and that government cannot legitimately intrude on that right even when it does in fact know best. ... On this view, people should not be regarded as children; they should be treated with respect. They should be seen as ends, not means.”
This is of course the second formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative and is today widely accepted as a principle of morality, even by philosophers not in orientation Kantian. Unfortunately, Sunstein is tone deaf to its force. He thinks preference for freedom of choice is at best a component of welfare. If it is taken to be more than this, it stems from System 1 thinking: it is a “rapid, intuitive judgment about welfare.” Besides, many people do not want what they consider an overabundance of choices. (But aren’t such people free to seek situations where they would confront fewer alternatives?) I fear that Sunstein, like all-too-many economists, is so committed to welfare as the objective of morality that he is unable to understand respect for persons. This phenomenon is itself a cognitive defect, albeit one that has yet to attract the attention of behavioral economists. I do not recommend government intervention, even the mildest nudge, to correct it.
Legal recreational marijuana use in the state of Washington is now two-and-a-half-years old and retail sales of marijuana have been legal for one year. What are the results of this experiment? Who was wrong and who was right on legalization?
A new study has been released by the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that openly promotes “harm reduction policies” such as drug legalization, drug decriminalization, legal medical marijuana, and needle exchange programs. The study tracks several of the key social statistics connected with drug use.
Less Government SpendingThe most obvious result, and one that everyone agreed on, was that arrests and convictions for marijuana violations would decrease. The number of arrests in 2012, the year prior to legalization, was 6,196, while in 2014 the number of arrests was 2,316, a decrease of 63 percent. Most of those arrests were for possession of more than one ounce of marijuana. Convictions for marijuana violations have also declined by 81 percent.
The report notes that as a result of fewer arrests and convictions there have been millions of dollars saved in terms of police, prosecutors, courts, and jails. Just as important is that legalization has allowed people to save in terms of money, transaction costs, and stress. The most important result of all is that legalization has already saved thousands of law-abiding citizens from having a criminal arrest record.
Washington has received $83 million in marijuana tax revenues which was in the general range of expectations. Most of this tax revenue is used by the marijuana tax bureaucracy and to finance drug treatment and education programs, so that there is no net revenue gain for the state. There are also revenues from licenses and fees, but these are user fees so that there is no net revenue gain in this case, either.
The fact that marijuana legalization reduced the burden on the criminal justice system and funded drug deterrence programs was not in doubt. Nobody really questioned whether these results would be achieved. However, one area of disagreement was on the issue of crime. Opponents of legalization claimed that crime would increase. For example, law enforcement opposed legalization because of the potential impact on crime, in particular that it would increase organized crime. Proponents of legalization said that crime would decrease or be unaffected by legalization.
A Decrease in CrimeIn terms of crime in Washington State, violent crime decreased by about 10 percent while property crime was about the same between 2012 and 2014. However, crime in both these categories has been falling steadily in recent years, so that the 10 percent decrease in violent crime could be because police were available to deter and solve violent crimes, or it could be other factors. The point is that there has been no spike in any type of crime since legalization began. The predictions of prohibitionists were clearly wrong.
Law enforcement agencies in Washington also opposed legalization because they thought it would cause an increase in highway accidents and fatalities. With so little data available the Drug Policy Alliance report described the “crash risk” as “stable,” meaning little change from 2012 to 2014. However, I believe the available data clearly supports that legalization leads to safer streets.
In 2008, the number of fatalities involving a drug or alcohol impaired driver was 255. By 2012 that number had dropped to 212 with the five year rolling average of 232. The goal for 2013 was set at 247, but the actual number was 182, beating all previous years and smashing the goal by a wide margin of 26 percent. In 2012 there were 501 serious injuries involving a drug or alcohol impaired driver, with a moving average of 509. In 2013 there were only 411 such serious injuries, easily beating all other years in the report and the previous year by 18 percent. Law enforcement position was clearly wrong when it comes to crash risk.
Use Among Youths Not IncreasingLegalizing marijuana can be expected to make marijuana more available and subject to “diversion” to those twenty-one years of age or younger. That in itself is not a damning conclusion for legalization if young people are substituting marijuana for more dangerous drugs and alcohol. Relative to heroin, cocaine, synthetic narcotics, and pharmaceutical drugs, as well as possibly alcohol and tobacco, marijuana is safer and less addictive. However, according to the Drug Policy Alliance report marijuana use has not increased among the youth:
Between 2012 and 2014 usage rates for 8th and 10th graders decreased slightly and similar rates for 12th and 6th graders remained unchanged.
Marijuana use in this group is high at roughly twice the rate of cigarette-use, but this is largely due to government policies that have made alcohol and tobacco relatively difficult to obtain. Unable to obtain alcohol and tobacco at a reasonable price, these children turned to marijuana and found it to be relatively safe. Secretary of Health, John Wiesman seems to be clueless about this simple economic fact. According to him:
We’ve got to ring the alarm bell because teens are telling us in their own terms that they don’t consider marijuana use to be risky. ... We’ve got to take the lessons learned about tactics that helped curb tobacco and alcohol use and put them to good use educating our kids about risks of using other substances.
Wiesman fails to realize that the government’s own policies encouraged minors to switch from alcohol and tobacco to marijuana. Once they tried marijuana they realized that the government’s propaganda was highly misleading.
In contrast to the prohibitionist propaganda messages, legalization has resulted in fewer arrests, convictions, and criminal records. More resources were made available for enforcing property and violent crime. The number of fatalities and serious injuries attributed to alcohol and drugs declined noticeably. As the statistics are clearly proving, the prohibitionist propagandists were wrong and the advocates of legalization were correct.
Includes an introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 20 July 2015.
Tate Fegley and Jeff Deist discuss what crime and punishment might look like in a libertarian society, and how to convince skeptical libertarians that private police can do a better job of dealing with violence, theft, and fraud.
Private, competing defense agencies would operate with completely different incentives than state police: unlike government cops, private cops get fired when crime goes up. Private police have a direct financial interest in avoiding escalation of conflicts, avoiding legal liability for death or injuries, and avoiding damage to their agency's reputation. And under a Hoppean insurance model, both insurance companies and property owners have a direct incentive to prevent, rather than merely respond, to crime.
Finally, they discuss how direct restitution, rather than lengthy taxpayer-funded incarceration, would be a more economically efficient and more humane approach to helping crime victims.
This month, Portugal celebrates fourteen years of drug decriminalization. The grand experiment is now considered a happy success considering it was adopted out of desperation and in the face of dire warnings from proponents of the global drug war.
What Led to DecriminalizationDuring the mid-twentieth century, Portugal experienced fifty years of military dictatorship, and when leftist democratic control was reestablished in 1974, many expatriate Portuguese returned to Portugal from its colonies. Of course, many of these people were dissidents, outsiders, and outcasts, and many of them used illegal drugs.
Over the next twenty-five years, there was a surge in drug use, drug abuse, addiction, overdoses, and eventually a very substantial prevalence of HIV/AIDS and other dirty-needle-related diseases. At the peak of this drug epidemic the rate of drug addiction and HIV/AIDS infection was “considerably higher” than the rest of Europe according to Dr. João Goulão, the longtime drug czar of Portugal.
Goulão was on the eleven member anti-drug commission that formulated law 30/2000 which decriminalized all drugs starting July 1, 2001.
The “grand experiment” seems to be the result of two factors. The first is that Portugal is a relatively poor European country and was unable to fight the war on drugs on every front.
The second factor is that the commission was relatively non-partisan and simply adopted the common sense notion that drug abuse and addiction are not criminal problems for the police to solve. Drug abuse and addiction are medical and psychological problems that are better solved by the individual with the help of professionals and social pressures.
Baby Steps Away from the Drug WarDecriminalization is just one baby step away from the war on drugs, and drug smugglers and dealers are still sought out and punished. Individuals are only permitted to possess very small amounts of illegal drugs without being punished as a dealer. Under current laws, you can still be arrested and sent to counselors, but you do not face imprisonment unless you are an uncooperative multiple offender.
While certainly not ideal, decriminalization has straightforward benefits over complete prohibition. First, otherwise law-abiding citizens will not be criminalized for possessing illegal drugs. Second, drug addicts will be more likely to seek professional help when government treats addiction as a medical rather than criminal problem. Third, the police will have more resources to address real crimes and possibly to provide subsidies for drug treatment programs. Fourth, drug addicts will turn away from dangerous synthetic drug substitutes and turn more to the natural illegal drugs like marijuana and cocaine. Fifth, if needles are legal too, then you should see fewer cases of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. Sixth, junkie ghettos will shrink in size and visibility. In sum, decriminalization should result in fewer people dying and being sent to prison and more people living “normal” lives.
Of course, the biggest concern prior to decriminalization was the quantity of illegal drugs consumed. That concern is even more dominant when discussing outright legalization of drugs. Back when Portugal was considering decriminalization, I was interviewed by the "Time Magazine of Portugal,” and the reporter stressed that this was the prime concern in Portugal at the time. I responded that you cannot know the answer to that question in advance, that you will never know the answer to that question, and that the question was unimportant.
Too many factors impact the markets for illegal drugs to be able to say definitively that drug consumption will increase or decrease after decriminalization. Factually, statistics on drug consumption are necessarily imprecise. This is true for statistics prior to and after decriminalization. The existing statistics are based either on things like surveys and educated guesswork with the actual facts mired in the secretive world of the black market. Consumption aside, the real question is whether prohibition does more harm than decriminalization and the answer is yes.
When I was pressed by the reporter for a guess, I responded that overall consumption would not change much; it might increase some in the short run and would decrease in the long run, unless the drugs were legalized in the future for medical or recreational uses. However, I stressed that there are undeniable benefits (listed above) and there is no reason that consumption would explode due to decriminalization.
Many Still Refuse to See the SuccessIt is hard to blame the Portuguese for their concerns at that time. Decriminalization was considered a dangerous experiment and a dodge of the United Nations’ rules of the global war on drugs. However, mainstream drug policy experts remained “skeptical” of the Portuguese experiment even after nearly eight years of experience.
Mark Kleiman, director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA, claims that Portugal was an unrealistic model. Peter Reuter, another leading drug policy expert, claimed that despite achieving its central goal (decreased consumption) it could be explained by the fact that Portugal was a small country and that drug abuse is cyclical in nature.
Remarkably, Dr. Goulão, who helped design and oversee the new law seems uninformed and perplexed at the positive outcomes even to this very day. He was recently quoted as saying: “it’s very difficult to identify a causal link between decriminalization by itself and the positive tendencies we have seen.”
One picture that sums up the Portuguese success story shows that Portugal has the second lowest death rate from illegal drugs in all of Europe after experiencing one of the worst rates with prohibition.
It is also interesting to note that the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) is headquartered in Lisbon. One analyst who works at EMCDDA, Frank Zobel, calls Portugal’s policy "the greatest innovation in this field" and “that the policy is working. Drug consumption has not increased severely. There is no mass chaos. For me as an evaluator, that's a very good outcome."
It is a happy anniversary for the Portuguese, but a scary one for all the drug warriors around the world whose incomes and power depend on continued ignorance about the effects of prohibition.
In Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan created one of the best shows in television history. He has followed it with a prequel, Better Call Saul!, which traces how the ethically-challenged lawyer featured in the earlier show — Saul Goodman — developed out of a perennial loser named Jimmy McGill. Breaking Bad fans are overjoyed that Gilligan has struck gold twice, and Better Call Saul! looks to become another television classic. And, although the show is not overtly libertarian, libertarians can learn from it.
With only its first season completed, I’m sure the show has many surprises in store. But one thing is already clear: Gilligan continues to be the champion of the little guy against the establishment, and the poet of the shabbiness of ordinary existence in twenty-first-century America. He captures all the frustration, humiliation, and despair of living in the administered world of the modern state.
Jimmy McGill is a bottom feeder in the swamp of government regulation that now covers the American landscape. As a rookie lawyer, Jimmy becomes a creature of the court system, trying to exploit it even as it exploits him. As the series opens, Jimmy is working as a public defender. In a heavily credentialed society, he is at a huge disadvantage — his law degree is from the University of American Samoa.
Forced to beg for cases from an officious clerk, Jimmy is a parasite on society. If it weren’t for a myriad of government rules and regulations and a multitude of misfits who violate them, Jimmy would be out of work. Scratch beneath the surface of his world, and it’s government regulation all the way down.
In only ten episodes, Jimmy has already run the whole gamut of modern bureaucracy. While struggling with the court system, he is also constantly interacting — and fighting — with a large, high-powered law firm that epitomizes the impersonality and coldness of modern office life. Jimmy has also run up against an uncaring hospital bureaucracy, which tries to commit his brother against his will to psychiatric treatment.
As a named partner in the big law firm, Jimmy’s older brother Chuck might seem to represent the establishment himself. But he has developed a psychosomatic ailment, and thus joins the ranks of all the loners in Better Call Saul! who do not fit into society’s categories and thus incur its bureaucratic wrath.
Another loner who runs afoul of the law in Better Call Saul! is Mike Ehrmantraut, Saul Goodman’s fixer and cleaner in Breaking Bad. When we learn his backstory in episode 6, we discover that he is a basically good man, who has turned to crime only because of his involvement with a corrupt police precinct in Philadelphia.
In the final plot arc of the season, Jimmy develops a specialty in elder law, which takes him into the figurative bowels (and the literal dumpster) of an assisted living facility. In his efforts to help the old folks, Jimmy runs up against a new pack of lawyers, who swamp him with demands for paper work. The mounting cartons of case files Jimmy is continually dragging around symbolize the insane demands for documentation that bureaucracy imposes.
Jimmy is fighting back against these bureaucratic forces, but only by turning his class action lawsuit into a RICO case, which will triple the damage award. Legal eagle Jimmy would have no talons without a federal statute originally intended to combat organized crime, but now routinely applied to white collar crime. In the end, the paperwork demands of the case force Jimmy to turn it over to the large law firm he despises. With all its complex rules, the state makes it impossible for a little guy like Jimmy to do business on his own.
Libertarians tend to concentrate on the classic forms of government intervention: taxation, the monetary system, economic regulations. Better Call Saul! reminds us that government tyranny is actually more insidious and pervasive than might at first appear. When he was working on The X-Files, Gilligan had already explored the modern state’s panoptical regime, as analyzed by French philosopher Michel Foucault — a world rife with institutions, like schools, clinics, and prisons, that are not, strictly speaking, part of the government but nevertheless keep tabs on us and monitor our lives for the government’s purposes.
A theme that unites Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul! (inherited from The X- Files) is that we live in a surveillance state and our government records can mark us for life. Jimmy is haunted by a single trumped-up sex crime charge.
In order to regulate every aspect of our lives, the government cannot go it alone — it works through a web of intermediaries. Many of these institutions purport to take care of us, but in the process they chip away at our freedom. Better Call Saul! brilliantly portrays the interlocking directorate of modern government, quasi-governmental institutions, and all their satellites. The courts, the law firms, the police, the corporations, the hospitals, the assisted living facilities — they all work together to constrain our freedom — and they all operate within the state’s regulatory apparatus.
Jimmy McGill is a contemporary Everyman, crushed by the soft tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for the United States in his Democracy in America. No wonder Jimmy is already embracing his dark, con-man side, and we can see him morphing into Saul Goodman.
Earlier this year, Lithuania reinstituted the military draft, which the Lithuanian state claimed was in response to threats from Russia. Ukraine has also recently reinstituted the draft, with mixed political results, and for similarly stated reasons.
Regardless of how one gauges the magnitude of Russian aggression, the problem faced by small states like Lithuania is an important one.
How can a small state with a small population — and thus a small military — ever hope to defend itself against a much larger state?
This is an important question for libertarians especially, since, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, if we must have states, a system of small, independent states (i.e., Monaco, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, and arguably Switzerland) is much more ideal than a system of medium-sized or large states.
As illustrated here and here, we find that small states are less able to impose strong coercive state monopolies since small states face greater competition from surrounding states, and the more abusive states (if small) are at greater risk of losing their most productive citizens to emigration. Thus, small states have an incentive to pursue more laissez-faire policies.
The natural implication of this is that libertarians and other proponents of laissez-faire should seek a world of small states through secession, or through radical decentralization which leads to de facto local autonomy.
In response to this, opponents of secession and decentralization claim that only large and strong states can provide adequate military defense in the face of illiberal and large foreign regimes. “We can reduce the Americas and Europe to regions of small, weak states,” they may say, “but that would leave them defenseless against domination by some future equivalent of China, or Russia, or the United States.”
But are small states really defenseless?
Wealth — Not Size — Buys DefenseWar-making is an expensive and capital-intensive endeavor. Ironically, some of the most warlike states often have their genesis in relatively laissez-faire economies (e.g., those of the American and Imperial British economies) because those economies are able to provide more tax revenue.
The other side of coin, however, is the fact that wealthier societies have a greater ability to defend themselves from aggressors. Wealthier societies can afford important and expensive armaments such as anti-aircraft defenses and related defensive technologies. They can afford to pay for specialized highly-trained troops instead of resorting to a 100-percent conscription tax on people with no particular skill for soldiering. Wealthier societies can also more easily obtain nuclear weapons technology which has clearly been shown to deter war-making by large aggressive states.
Also, wealthier societies can buy defense from neighbors in a variety of other ways. They can employ foreign mercenaries, and they can simply bribe unfriendly foreign regimes. Potential foreign aggressors will also be reluctant to bomb wealthy foreign cities that are sources of lucrative trade and investment.
And finally, in a wealthier society, residents at an individual and small organizational level, are more capable — if the state permits it — of arming themselves, which has the effect of adding another layer of resistance to foreign aggression.
The Advantages of DecentralizationThis latter advantage of economic wealth brings us to the tactical advantages of political and military decentralization. Hoppe writes:
As a monopolist of ultimate decision-making, the state decides for everyone bindingly whether to resist or not; if to resist, whether in the form of civil disobedience, armed resistance or some combination thereof; and if armed resistance, of what form. If it decides to put up no resistance, this may be a well-meaning decision or it may be the result of bribes or personal threats by the invading state — but in any case, it will certainly be contrary to the preferences of many people who would have liked to put up some resistance and who are thus put in double jeopardy because as resisters they disobey now their own state as well as the invader.
On the other hand, if the state decides to resist, this again may be a well-meaning decision or it may be the result of pride or fear — but in any case, it too will be contrary to the preferences of many citizens who would have liked to put up no resistance or to resist by different means and who are entangled now as accomplices in the state’s schemes and subjected to the same collateral fallout and victor’s-justice as everyone else.
The reaction of a free territory is distinctly different. There is no government which makes one decision. Instead, there are numerous institutions and individuals who choose their own defense strategy, either independent of or in cooperation with others, each in accordance with one’s own risk assessment. Consequently, the aggressor has far more difficulties gathering information and conquering the territory. It is no longer sufficient to “know” the government, to win one decisive battle or to gain control of government headquarters from where to transmit orders to the native population. Even if one opponent is “known,” one battle is won or one defense agency defeated, this has no bearing on others.
Moreover, the multitude of command structures and strategies as well as the contractual character of a free society affect the conduct of both armed and unarmed resistance. As for the former, in state-territories the civilian population is typically unarmed and heavy reliance exists on regular, tax-and-draft-funded armies and conventional warfare. Hence, the defense forces create enemies even among its own citizenry, which the aggressor state can use to its own advantage, and in any case there is little to fear for the aggressor once the regular army is defeated. In contrast, the population of free territories is likely heavily armed and the fighting done by irregular militias led by defense professionals and in the form of guerilla or partisan warfare. All fighters are volunteers and all of their support: food, shelter, logistical help, etc. is voluntary. Hence, guerrillas must be extremely friendly to their own population. But precisely this: their entirely defensive character and near-unanimous support in public opinion can render them nearly invincible, even by numerically far superior invading armies. History provides numerous examples: Napoleon’s defeat in Spain, France’s defeat in Algeria, the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, Israel’s defeat in South Lebanon.
Collective Defense, Guerilla Warfare, and Private ArmsRothbard explored these same themes in his work on the American Revolution, in which he noted the essential role of guerilla warfare in that conflict. Simultaneously during the war, the “United States” functioned as a group of independent states that had come together for the purposes of collective defense. The coalition was successful against the most powerful state of the era, and the Americans states remained de facto independent small entities, even if they functioned internationally under a single diplomatic banner.
Consequently, we find that effective military defense does not necessitate a centralized state or political unity. There is no compelling reason to believe that had there been twenty or thirty colonies instead of thirteen, that the outcome or conduct of the war on the side of the Americans would have been any different.
These facts remain relevant even today since other regions of the world could take advantage of the same dynamics, were they able to overcome their commitments to nationalism and authoritarianism. For example, if Lithuania were serious about military defense, it might look to the fact that the former states of the Soviet Bloc, from Estonia to Bulgaria (not including the former SSRs, such as Ukraine), have a combined population of over 100 million people and populations spread out over a large area. In other words, the region has the potential to mount a credible and effective military defense to foreign invaders through decentralized, collective defense.
Defensive military capability would also be greatly enhanced by a commitment to economic growth through deregulation and laissez-faire. Not surprisingly, though, most of the states of the region are unwilling to free their economies from government intervention. At the same time, those same states are committed to disarming the local populations and centralizing military capability while palming off their defense costs on the American taxpayer via NATO. That is, they remain committed to old models of state defense that have failed them spectacularly in the past.
The region (like most of the world) remains mired in the idea that a centralized state and a defenseless private sector are the best option for defense. The number of privately owned-firearms in Bulgaria, for example, is six guns per 100 people. In Poland, the number is 1.3 private guns per 100 people. There are even fewer private guns in Lithuania (0.7 per 100), which has decided that enslaving young men via conscription is better than letting citizens have guns. When we compare these numbers to gun ownership in Switzerland, which has a rate of forty-five guns per 100 people (the rate is eighty-eight per 100 in the United States), it becomes abundantly clear that the regimes of eastern Europe are not serious about any type of military defense that does not prioritize protecting the state’s monopoly of coercion over its own citizens.
Ideology MattersEconomics, size, and the quality of war materiel all matter, but none of these factors can overcome the power of ideology. Hoppe writes:
[H]ow is one to explain, for instance, that France has not long ago conquered Monaco, or Germany Luxemburg, or Switzerland Liechtenstein, or Italy Vatican City, or the U.S. Costa Rica? Or how is one to explain that the U.S. does not “finish the job” in Iraq by simply killing all Iraqis. Surely, in terms of population, technology and geography such are manageable tasks.
The reason for these omissions is not that French, German, Swiss, Italian or U.S. state rulers have principled moral scruples against conquest, occupation, expropriation, confiscation, enslavement and the imprisonment or killing of innocents — they do these things on a daily basis to their “own” population. ... [W]hat constrains the conduct of state rulers and explains their reluctance to do things that appear feasible from a “technical” point of view is public opinion, domestically, but also abroad.
As La Boétie, Hume, Mises, Rothbard have explained, government power ultimately rests on opinion, not brute force. Bush does not himself kill or put a gun to the head of those he orders to kill. Generals and soldiers follow his orders on their own. Nor can Bush “force” anyone to continue providing him with the funds needed for his aggression. The citizenry must do so on its own, because it believes that, by and large, it is the right thing to do. On the other hand, if the majority of generals, soldiers and citizens stop believing in the legitimacy of Bush’s commands, his commands turn into nothing more than hot air.
Ultimately, no governmental structure can prevent war if the prevailing ideology is one that prefers violence to peace and nationalism to international laissez-faire. Likewise, Sweden and Norway (for example) no longer come to blows, not because peace is imposed on them by NATO or the US, but because the people of the region view war as an untenable option. There is peace (for now) throughout most of the West because few of the productive taxpaying citizens of the West are inclined to make war on other citizens of the West. This is an ideological triumph, not a military one.
Last Friday came the unpleasant news that Ross Ulbricht, the 31-year-old former operator of the Silk Road site, has been sentenced by a federal court to life in prison without parole. This follows his conviction in February for typically dubious (nowhere in the Constitution) federal crimes including conspiracy, money laundering, and the circular “engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.”
His sentence, which appears unduly sadistic even by today’s standards, was handed down with a lecture from Judge Katherine B. Forrest:
“[What] is clear is that you were captain of the ship as Dread Pirate Roberts and you made your own law. It was your opus, and you wanted it to be your legacy.” “What you did was unprecedented,” she told Ulbricht, “and in breaking that ground as the first person he had to be punished accordingly.”
"You are no better a person than any other drug dealer."
Too bad he wasn’t sentenced like any other drug dealer.
The central issue in the Ulbricht case, as always, is an evil and unbridled federal government. No human being should be locked away for engaging in (or facilitating) peaceful, voluntary commerce among willing participants. Dark sites like Silk Road, and the cyber payment systems they employ, exist because of state prohibitions on voluntary human conduct. They are natural market reactions to government interference. This cannot be overstated.
But is Ulbricht a commendable libertarian martyr by definition, simply by virtue of falling into the crosshairs of an immoral federal government waging an unjust drug war? Does lamenting his indefensible sentence mean celebrating him and his actions?
The libertarian blogosphere certainly seems to think so. Social media buzzed all weekend with praise for Ulbricht as a brave soul who created a safer alternative to buying drugs off the street. For many libertarians, he is worthy of praise for taking agorism to the next level via technology — for challenging the state head on, and paying the price.
Ulbricht himself is no longer so sure. He exhibits deep regret not only for throwing his young life away, but also for dragging his family through hell. And he apparently no longer shares the same view of maximum freedom that his libertarian champions hold:
“Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness,” he said. “I learned from Silk Road that when you give people freedom, you don’t know what they’ll do with it.”
Who can blame him for changing his tune in the end, whether to curry favor with the judge or not? After all, it won’t be his Facebook fans spending the next five or six decades in a supermax federal cell.
Furthermore, there are allegations by federal prosecutors that Ulbricht sought to have several people killed for threatening to disrupt the operation of Silk Road. Now of course we must rush to Ulbricht’s defense here: prosecutors are notorious liars, and undoubtedly they floated the solicitation of murder charge both to discredit him publicly and to deny him bail pending trial. Furthermore, even the most specious allegations often scare the daylights out of suspects and thus help secure plea agreements. So we shouldn’t put much faith into this, especially since the solicitation charges were not merely dropped by prosecutors — they were never brought at all (despite the sentencing judge’s contention that Ulbricht’s unambiguous journal entries prove he paid hit men — his mother thinks the entries are bogus).
It’s tempting to dismiss the simplistic power of the state’s narrative about Ulbricht. But hit men aside, do libertarians really want to create a cause célèbre out of a young man who used his intelligence and talents to sell drugs online? Even without thoroughly understanding his background and personality?
Agorism and its implications, however much they resonate with libertarians, have always been a losing proposition with the general public. The public might rally behind a medical doctor who supplies marijuana illegally to help a sick cancer patient, or an individual suffering with MS who uses a foreign online pharmacy to obtain prescription drugs not approved by the FDA.
But trafficking in “illicit” drugs — drugs used recreationally or by addicts rather than medical patients — is something different altogether. And while attitudes toward marijuana have changed considerably, organs like the DEA remain effective at portraying traffickers as ruthless and sinister criminals.
Unfortunately the Silk Road prosecution will only strengthen dark connections in the public hive mind between internet markets, privacy, cryptocurrencies, and real (i.e. not victimless) criminality. That these connections are mostly unfounded misses the point: the conflation of voluntaryist agorism with libertarianism is not likely to push the public in our direction.
Ulbricht is reputed to have read Rothbard. But Rothbard wrote the definitive contra agorism article way back in 1980, when online markets existed only in sci-fi novels. Engaging in a friendly joust with agorist figurehead Samuel Konkin, Rothbard demonstrated a decidedly negative view of agorism’s value to the libertarian movement:
It is no accident ... that the entire spectrum of the black market movement, from tax rebels to agoric theoreticians, are almost exclusively self-employed. ... Black marketeers might well benefit themselves in the micro sense, but they have no relevance to the “macro” struggle for liberty and against the State. Indeed, in a kind of reverse invisible hand, they might even be counterproductive. It is possible that the Soviet black market, for example, is so productive that it keeps the entire monstrous Soviet regime afloat, and that without it the Soviet system would collapse. This does not mean, of course, that I scorn or oppose black market activities in Russia; it is just to reveal some of the unpleasant features of the real world.
Much as I love the market, I refuse to believe that when I engage in a regular market transaction (e.g., buying a sandwich) or a black-market activity (e.g., driving at 60 miles per hour) I advance one iota nearer the libertarian revolution. The black market is not going to be the path to liberty, and libertarian theoreticians and activists have no function in that market.
In other words, black market entrepreneurs (like all entrepreneurs) will sink or swim without the assistance of libertarian theorists.
Clearly Mr. Ulbricht is the victim of shocking injustice. But his story serves as a cautionary tale about the priorities of those who seek a freer society. We should celebrate men and women of good character who wake up every day and provide us with value — whether economic, familial, social, civil, or religious. These are true libertarian heroes, individuals who go around, under, over, or through the state and its clutches in their everyday lives. It is not always the swashbuckling anti-hero, but often the quiet, sober, staid, bourgeois businessman who deserves praise for sustaining us.
Jeff Deist and Peter G. Klein discuss the "Net Neutrality" scam, the debunked monopoly and antitrust arguments, and how the internet would work in a world of truly unregulated entrepreneurship.
Readers of Judge Napolitano’s outstanding book will at once be struck by its unusual title. What is the “suicide pact” referred to there? The phrase occurs in a famous dissenting opinion by Justice Robert Jackson. In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), the Supreme Court held that the city of Chicago had wrongly restricted the free speech of an incendiary speaker. The claim that doing so was needed to preserve public order did not suffice, the Court maintained. Jackson disagreed, warning that “there is a danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
It is precisely this thesis that Judge Napolitano takes as his principal task in this book to oppose. He strongly supports natural law. On this view, human beings have rights that the state cannot infringe. “The core concept of Natural Law is the idea of self-ownership and limitless personal liberty ... rights, specifically natural rights, are intangible and enforceable legal choices that are inalienable and exist a priori to any political or economic system, and for the exercise of which one does not need government approval.”
From this bedrock point, the Judge constructs a remarkable argument. He distinguishes between rights, which cannot be given away or exchanged, and goods, which can be. Security falls into the latter class; and, as such, it cannot be traded against a right. “How can one balance a derivative against an a priori right? One cannot. In order to create a social arrangement that validly enacts laws or defines man’s relationship to other persons and their property, the underlying premise of self-ownership and natural rights both precedes and acts as precedent to the lawful acquisition of any good ... security, like that provided by the government, is a good, which cannot be freely exchanged between persons or entities, like states, without first recognizing a priori natural rights. Therefore, in considering the good of security and the right of free speech, no balancing act is possible or even conceivable.”
From this standpoint, Judge Napolitano reviews security policy throughout the course of American history. Unfortunately, the natural rights approach has rarely guided American policy. To the contrary, “it has largely been ignored by every American government since George Washington. Those governments have all reflected the inevitable growth of the power of government and the shrinkage of personal freedoms.”
Why has this been so? The chief culprit has been war and the threat of war. Wars vastly increase the power of the government; and, contrary to natural law, “national security” all too often tramples liberty afoot. Napolitano aptly quotes Randolph Bourne: “War is the health of the state.” Elaborating on Bourne’s claim, Napolitano remarks: “A galvanized people [is] fearful of dissent and willing to accept suppression of their and others’ natural rights to free speech based on the seemingly xenophilic content of a viewpoint alone ... individual liberty suffers incomparably during war.”
We see this pattern from the beginning of America’s government under the Constitution. Tense relations with France fueled the Federalists’ endeavor in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, contrary to the First Amendment, to suppress criticism of the government. Fortunately, these measures aroused great popular resistance, culminating in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In this connection, Napolitano says of nullification: “In large part, the doctrine of nullification follows logically from the idea of the consent of the governed. ... The states, by act of state legislature or convention, ratified the Constitution; the people did not do so as individuals. ... Nullification then seems to follow very logically.”
No history of how the government destroys rights during wartime can ignore Abraham Lincoln. All constitutional rights depend on the right to the writ of habeas corpus. Without it, the government is free to violate whatever rights it wishes. There is no recourse against arbitrary imprisonment. Lincoln, flouting the Constitution, suspended the writ. Chief Justice Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, declared the president’s actions illegal, but “Lincoln, revealing his antipathy for the Constitution, personal liberty, and the rule of law, rebuked the chief justice and refused to obey the order.” Napolitano sums up Lincoln’s views in this way: “The president ... was essentially advocating for dictator-like control of the government. Lincoln would have the Court declare the president a Caesar in times of war instead of having a federal government with checks and balances.”
In his account of Woodrow Wilson, Napolitano makes an important contribution to political theory. Concerning the oceans of misleading propaganda circulated by George Creel's Committee on Public Information, he says: "In a social compact, the power of the government to act in any manner derives from the people's acquiescence en masse to the ability of the government to act only as they have agreed to in the compact that it may. Parties to a contract have a duty not to misinform the other party or parties to the contract in a material manner. The people have ceded the power to make war to the government in this compact, but their representatives cannot do so under false pretenses and through falsehoods and remain faithful to the compact — that is fraud of the highest caliber. Wilson’s misinformation justifying war with Germany and social conditioning of the people represent an unconscionable violation of the social compact.”
Suffice it to say that matters did not improve under Franklin Roosevelt. During World War II, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were interned in concentration camps; and the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case upheld this measure. Napolitano’s verdict is scathing: “Thus, in the face of difficult and trying times, actions that were not justifiable under necessity, but were manifestations of racism, hysteria and the ‘herd’ mentality lamented in the [Randolph] Bourne essay, were made legal and constitutional. The counter-majoritarian branch, the Court, charged with halting the majority encroachment on the civil and natural liberty of personal movement and use of property, had failed miserably in its delegated task.” Justice Frank Murphy issued a “vigorous dissent [which] would destroy his personal friendship with FDR.” No history of how the government destroys rights during wartime can ignore Abraham Lincoln. In his account of Woodrow Wilson, Napolitano makes an important contribution to political theory. Concerning the oceans of misleading propaganda circulated by George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, he says: “In a social compact, the power of the government to act in any manner derives from the people’s acquiescence en masse to the ability of the government to act only as they have agreed to in the compact that it may. Parties to a contract have a duty not to misinform the other party or parties to the contract in a material manner. The people have ceded the power to make war to the government in this compact, but their representatives cannot do so under false pretenses and through falsehoods and remain faithful to the compact — that is fraud of the highest caliber. Wilson’s misinformation justifying war with Germany and social conditioning of the people represent an unconscionable violation of the social compact.”
Suffice it to say that matters did not improve under Franklin Roosevelt. During World War II, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were interned in concentration camps; and the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case upheld this measure. Napolitano’s verdict is scathing: “Thus, in the face of difficult and trying times, actions that were not justifiable under necessity, but were manifestations of racism, hysteria and the ‘herd’ mentality lamented in the [Randolph] Bourne essay, were made legal and constitutional. The counter-majoritarian branch, the Court, charged with halting the majority encroachment on the civil and natural liberty of personal movement and use of property, had failed miserably in its delegated task.” Justice Frank Murphy issued a “vigorous dissent [which] would destroy his personal friendship with FDR.” Napolitano’s aims in the book go beyond historical inquiry. He wishes to combat the gross violations of liberty which have accompanied the “war on terror”; and he devotes nearly half of the book to this endeavor. After the 9/11 attacks, “the executive branch, through the use of the noble lie and the organs of state powers, would abjure liberties in the guise of fighting a War on Terror, starting with our ostensible enemy, then moving on to personal vendetta and perpetual, aimless war.”
Napolitano justifies to the hilt this severe indictment. The NSA’s program of electronic eavesdropping, promulgated by George W. Bush, “was the broadest known expansion of presidential spying powers in history.” In its ceaseless efforts to gather information useful to it, the Bush administration did not shrink from torture. “Detainee treatment at Abu Ghraib [in Iraq] became public in 2004 . . . causing immeasurable global damage to the credibility of the United States as a defender of natural and civil liberty. According to the initial Abu Ghraib investigator, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the prison’s MP engaged in . . . ‘torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.’” Napolitano concludes that “even under the broadest reading of the Constitution, war powers do not permit the president and his military agents knowingly or even negligently to permit torture. The president and his senior officials enormously expanded war powers to effect inhumane and shameful treatment upon U.S. prisoners ... while concentrating power in the hands of a few depraved individuals who carried out this systematic regime of torture under an ideological, imperial, unitary presidency.”
Many hoped that the presidency of Barack Obama would change matters for the better; but unfortunately he continued and extended the policies of his predecessor. “The president has claimed a new and awesome power. President Obama claimed the unnatural and unconstitutional right to decide unilaterally which American shall die. . . . Using his fleet of drones, Obama killed four U.S. citizens between 2011 and 2013.” So far as programs that invade privacy are concerned, Napolitano mordantly inquires: “Does a president who murders care about privacy?”
Faced with this melancholy record, we must ask, is the cause of liberty hopeless? Napolitano does not think so. “Jefferson himself predicted that in the long march of history, power and order would become concentrated in the government, and the personal liberty of individuals would be diminished. In this book, I have attempted to demonstrate not the inevitability of Jefferson’s prediction, but the need for eternal vigilance — another warning he gave us.”
Judge Napolitano has given us a comprehensive survey of the dangers to liberty we face today. He is a jurist of great distinction and provides an expert account of the legal issues in a vast number of key cases. I especially recommend his analysis of Judge Learned Hand’s reformulation of the “‘clear and present danger’ rule to adopt a balancing test for First Amendment constitutionality.” Suicide Pact is an indispensable weapon in the battle for liberty.
Legal recreational cannabis/marijuana/pot is almost one year old in Colorado. The Denver Business Journal recently published a retrospective containing several articles reviewing the experience. The general conclusion is that it has been a big success, not the tragedy some had predicted or claimed. The remarkable thing is that the report claims the biggest remaining problem for the industry is caused by the Federal Reserve!
Some of the big concerns prior to legalization have turned out to be trivial or failed to materialize at all. Expectations of overdose deaths, delinquency, and crime did not materialize to the extent that the newspaper barely reported on those issues. Crime in Denver actually declined in early reports.
Earlier this year, I examined the experience in Colorado and found that most reports were favorable to legalization. For example, the Business Insider reported that “Legalizing Weed in Colorado Is A Huge Success,” although they did report a “down side” as well. Jacob Sullum reported that such things as underage consumption and traffic fatalities declined, but not significantly within an already declining trend.
There was one early report that strongly called into question the legalization of marijuana in Colorado. It was put out by an outfit called the “Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” program. It turns out that the program is part of the White House Office on Drug Policy, but that fact is not advertised in the report. Their lengthy report, “The Legalization of Marijuana in Colorado: The Impact,” appears to be very scientific and evidence based. However, I found it has more logical holes than a wheel of Swiss cheese gone wrong.
There certainly has been an increase in consumption and some diversion to minors. Colorado has historically been a high use and high abuse state, ranking above the national average in many categories. However, Colorado is close to the national average in the important category, the rate of drug overdose deaths, and the majority of deaths are the result of prescription painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin.
It is also true that there is anecdotal evidence of problems with legal weed in Colorado. There was the young man who consumed several times the recommended number of marijuana-infused cookies and jumped from a hotel to his death. There was a story of a dog that died after eating cookies left on the kitchen table. And there were several stories of children stealing cookies from their homes or their grandmothers and sharing them with their friends at school.
However, these events are still just newsworthy anecdotes, not trends or statewide calamities. They are also predictable. In transitioning from prohibition to legalization there are going to be such problems, but competition has its many ways of weeding out such problems over time. The marijuana dispensary industry has already been implementing new procedures and new ways of packaging edibles to improve their safe use.
Federal Regulations Prevent Financial Freedom in the IndustryThe one remaining problem is that people in the growing and retail businesses have been denied access to the banking system. Without bank accounts, and being a largely cash business, the firms are more at risk of robbery. Without bank accounts it is more difficult to pay vendors and employees, and paying fees and taxes to local governments has created headaches for all. Everyone agrees that the simple solution would be to allow the use of credit cards and bank accounts.
Local banking officials seem to be cooperating. The Colorado Division of Financial Services issued a charter for a credit union designed to serve the industry. However, efforts are being blocked by a holdup on obtaining deposit insurance and by none other than the Federal Reserve nixing efforts for the credit union to obtain a “master account” from the Federal Reserve.
A master account provides banks and financial services companies with a primary nine-digit routing number, which is the nine digit number on the bottom left of your bank checks. Without the routing number a bank cannot participate in the Fed’s check clearing system and this would make the use of checking accounts prohibitively inconvenient.
Trouble in the Federal Courts?An additional new hurdle for legal pot recently emerged when the states of Nebraska and Oklahoma sued Colorado over its legalization law in the US Supreme Court. Those states argued that Colorado's licensing of marijuana dispensary stores violates the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause. This clause says that when there is a conflict between federal and state law, the federal law trumps state law.
I am not a legal scholar, but it seems to me that Nebraska and Oklahoma have little or no “standing” in bringing such a lawsuit. I also believe that this Supreme Court can see the “writing on the wall” when it comes to things like legalizing pot and gay marriage. The writing on the wall comes from the people, and a large and growing majority of the people support medical and recreational marijuana legalization. Demographically, these majorities can be expected to grow into supermajorities in a fairly short time frame.
Colorado is only the cutting edge. Recreational marijuana has also passed in Washington, Alaska, Washington, DC, and in some local jurisdictions. More states are on their way to recreational marijuana and there are twenty states with legalized medical marijuana.
Including states that have decriminalized marijuana, the majority of Americans now cannot be put in jail for consuming small amounts of marijuana. Government officials have attempted to portray legalization as reckless and chaotic, but those who favor the limits on government should not attempt to derail these legalization efforts. Such efforts will only serve to enhance the cause of human liberty at the expense of political power in the long run.
Where police fail, as at Ferguson and in Detroit, private firms and volunteers have stepped in. And yet the state continues to claim that its employed enforcers are a thin blue line between order and chaos, writes Julian Adorney.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Dianna Keiler.
In Ferguson, Missouri, when police and national guard failed to protect businesses from rioting protestors, a private organization called Oath Keepers stepped up to fill the gap.
The presence of Oath Keepers, keeping the peace where police officers failed, helps answer a larger question: how necessary are police?
The heart of the state’s justification has always been that it can provide essential services that the market cannot, chief among them security. While admitting that police abuses were problematic, Miguel Guadalupe of the Huffington Post asserted that, “one thing is certain — [sic] a strong body of law enforcement, and one that is held in respect and prestige, is critical to the stability of a society.” Even minarchist scholars such as Locke and Hazlitt have assumed that, while markets may surpass government in a variety of activities, the state must always exist to provide a framework of security.
Anarchist scholars have critiqued this claim. But, as convincing as theories on private protection are, there are no large-scale society-wide examples of private self-defense in recent decades. There are no countries that lack monopolist state organizations: even supposedly 'anarchist' countries like Somalia remain ruled by central governments.
Small-scale examples have become more widespread, however, and I propose that we’re seeing a test of the feasibility of private protection services right here in the United States. It’s not a test of anarchy as a whole — I don’t see Oath Keepers packaging private law for the market, for instance — but it’s a test of one of the state’s key claims to legitimacy.
As police forces fail some communities, private organizations are stepping up. Oath Keepers stationed volunteers on the rooftops of businesses in Ferguson, protecting them from looters. Local business owners said they felt safer knowing the private entity was looking out for them.
The Threat Management Center provided similar protection when Detroit collapsed. The organization provided “Lamborghini-quality” security services to upscale neighborhoods, and the profit margins from these contracts enabled them to provide free services to poorer communities that rarely saw aid from police.
Peacekeeper is a free app that takes private protection in another direction. Rather than rely on a third party security service, Peacekeeper enables users to build networks of friends, family, and neighbors that they can rely on in a crisis. These people can often respond to an emergency in minutes or faster, because they’re coming from across the street instead of across town. Additionally, relying on people you know removes the danger of calling 911 and having a bad cop show up.f
These organizations, and others like them, represent a test of state security — and, by extension, of the state itself. Police find themselves unable to protect Detroit, Ferguson, and poor and minority communities. There are conflicting arguments for why this is: critics may allege racism in police forces, while defenders will argue that police simply don’t have the manpower to be everywhere. But in this case, the reason isn’t important.
When people living in these places cannot rely on police, they look for an alternative to fill that gap in protection. On a community and neighborhood level, they are looking for the framework of security that government claims only it can provide. If they seek our private frameworks and find themselves less well served than they currently are by police, it will suggest — though not prove — that the minarchists of the world are right to believe that government-provided security is important to society
On the other hand, if residents of these neighborhoods reach out to private organizations and find themselves safer and more secure than they used to be, it will further undermine the state’s case for itself. The state monopoly on security will be seen to be no more necessary — or wise — than a state monopoly on food production.
Image source: Wikimedia
When I went to the Oxford Union debates this past summer I was told by a veteran of the debates that I must have a joke in order to win over the audience. My attempt to win over the British audience was a success, but unfortunately my opening remarks are too close to the truth and in retrospect, are really not that funny:
Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for the opportunity to debate the War on Drugs in this forum. Mr. Chairman, as you probably know, the War on Drugs was not a response to calls from experts, it was not in response to recommendations from the medical community, or even the law enforcement community. Mr. Chairman, the War on Drugs was started by the agitation of racists, bigots, religious fanatics, believers in eugenics, extremist politicians, and power hungry diplomats. In other words, Mr. Chairman, the average ordinary American.
The War on Drugs was initiated by legislation that was passed not to help drug addicts and protect the innocent, but rather was designed to control and marginalize minority groups and to push the United States into a leadership role in world diplomatic affairs.
The War on Drugs is 100 years old today. It kills thousands of people, destroys untold number of lives, and wastes hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Plus it prevents us from using three of the most miraculous plants on the planet, even for their “legitimate” uses.
The Harrison Narcotics ActAs written, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 was legislation that established a tax and registration requirement on narcotics and cocaine. Politicians and journalists openly targeted Chinese immigrants, Southern blacks, and Mexicans with outrageous propaganda. The real priority of the legislation, however, was to comply with the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention of 1912.
As implemented, the legislation quickly evolved into an outright prohibition. Enforcement bureaucrats argued that doctors prescribing narcotics for drug addiction was an illegitimate medical practice. The courts ruled in their favor and addict-maintenance medical practices and addiction clinics were forced to close.
Marijuana prohibition went national with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It too quickly changed from a measure to tax and regulate into an outright prohibition. Even hemp, the non-intoxicating form of cannabis was banned! When propaganda claiming that marijuana was deadly and caused insanity, violence, and criminal behavior was debunked (aka Reefer Madness), the “gateway theory” was born to fill the void. The gateway theory posits that while marijuana might not be addictive or dangerous, it would lead the user to try the hard drugs, such as heroin. This theory became the prevailing view in the second half of the twentieth century.
Prohibition Encourages Drug AbuseIn my dissertation, I showed that the gateway theory did not explain the movement toward harder drugs. This research was subsequently published in The Economics of Prohibition. I showed that it was actually prohibition enforcement itself that created incentives for suppliers to make drugs more potent e.g., more potent marijuana, and to switch to more potent drug types e.g., smuggling cocaine instead of marijuana.
It was the case that the markets for narcotics, cocaine, and marijuana had problems and concerns, but as Mises Institute Summer Fellow Audrey Redford has shown, it was also the case that these markets were already impacted by numerous state and local regulations and prohibitions, by heavy tariffs, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and by a host of state and local alcohol prohibitions and restrictions.
What history does reveal is that the initial legislation that became the War of Drugs was clearly the result of bigotry and the desire to suppress minorities, and the desire to become a big player in world diplomatic affairs, not a desire to help drug addicts.
What has the War on Drugs accomplished? It has not reduced access to illegal drugs. It has not reduced illegal drug use or abuse. It has not reduced the rate of addiction. If anything, the rates of use, abuse, and addiction have increased over the past century. Prison population statistics clearly indicate that it has been used to suppress minorities.
It has also greatly increased the powers of law enforcement and the legal system and reduced the legal rights and protections of citizens under the tradition of the rule of law. It has greatly increased the militarization of the police and the use of the military in police work. It has also led to a significant increase in US political and military intervention in foreign nations, particularly in the drug supply nations of Central and South America.
The direct problems caused by the War on Drugs are too numerous to list, but they include crime, corruption, and violence of the black market. Indeed it is the number one cause of crime, corruption, and violence in the United States, as well as many of countries of Central and South America.
Scaling Back the War on DrugsHowever, as we pass this miserable milestone, there is great cause for optimism. There is a rising ideological tide against the War on Drugs. Medical marijuana legalization has been passed in twenty states, recreational marijuana has been passed in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and the District of Columbia, several states and cities have decriminalized marijuana so that the majority of Americans can no longer be put in prison for marijuana consumption.
Demographically, this rising tide is even stronger because only the Silent Generation (ages 69 to 86) strongly supports marijuana prohibition and they are dying off. More generally the “social mood” continues to move in the favorable direction from “government is the solution” to “government is the problem.” This positive change in ideology also seems to be improving in Central and South America, Europe, and elsewhere.
The fact that more people see the solution for the drug addict as not illegal markets, high prices, and the threat of imprisonment, but in education, medical treatment, counseling, and social pressures means that it is possible that we could see the entire War on Drugs ended in our lifetimes.
Image source: image - Image from Reefer Madness (1936).
Writing on the Ferguson protests and riots, Darlena Cunha claimed in Time Magazine that the Tea Party “gets its name from a riot, The Boston Tea Party.” Cunha went on to then claim that the Ferguson riots are in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party, which celebrates its 241st anniversary this week.
In response, a number of conservative commentators denied Cunha’s claim (and many similar claims) that the two events are comparable.
Dan McLaughlin opined at The Federalist that the Ferguson Riots are “nothing like” the Boston Tea Party and noted that the Boston Tea Party’s violence — and violence it was — was directed at very specific targets while the Ferguson rioters seemed to employ indiscriminate violence.
Fair enough. Tactically, the Ferguson riots have virtually nothing in common with the Boston Tea Party. In contrast to the Boston mob’s destruction of the tea, the Ferguson riots were ineffective and had no clear target. The Ferguson rioters didn’t even target the Ferguson government, which is clearly an operation of questionable legitimacy that appears to exist primarily to extract money from the “citizens,” while the police do little to actually protect private property.
The “Patriots” Initiated Real Violence — Against Innocents So while the Ferguson riots will be remembered as pointless eruptions of misdirected violence, initiated against innocent parties, let’s not pretend that the perpetrators of many protest actions during the revolutionary period did not do the same.
From the perspective of those who defend the Tea Party and condemn the Ferguson rioters, it’s wise to stick to defending the Tea Party specifically, because the Sons of Liberty, a loosely knit group of protestors involved in the Tea Party, and often led by Samuel Adams, were notorious for mob violence, albeit violence that was more politically effective and better-focused than most.
The Tea Party is perhaps remembered so fondly because it was among the least violent of the major protest actions perpetrated by the Sons of Liberty. The destruction of the tea, which was financially damaging to many private citizens other than the corporatist East India Company, was nevertheless relatively harmless to the private sector of Boston overall.
But when we consider the many other protest actions by the Sons of Liberty in the lead up to the beginning of the revolution, many of them could easily be described as acts of non-defensive violence, intimidation, and wanton destruction. Many tax collectors resigned their offices in fear. Others, including citizens merely suspected of supporting the British, were tarred and feathered (i.e, tortured) by the protestors.
Known loyalists were routinely threatened with physical harm to themselves, their families, and their property. Many loyalists fled the colonies in fear for their lives, and after the closure of Boston Harbor, many fled to inner Boston seeking protection form the mobs. Loyalist homes were burned, theft among Sons of Liberty was routine (hundreds of pounds were stolen from Governor Hutchinson’s private home after it was ransacked by a mob of poor and working class Bostonians). Caught up in all of this, it should be remembered, were children and spouses of the guilty parties who in many cases were just low-level bureaucrats.
So, while there are many differences between the Ferguson protests and those in 1770s Massachusetts, it cannot be said that one should be condemned because it is violent, and the other group can be praised because it was non-violent.
And given the nature of the American Revolution, it should not surprise us at all that non-defensive violence was routinely employed by the patriots. The American Revolution was, after all, an armed rebellion. School children are taught a highly-sanitized version of the conflict in which revolutionaries target no one but armed soldiers and local disagreements are defined by spirited non-violent debate. But for many people involved in the conflict, this was far from the reality.
In the southern theater of the war, for example, the British Army armed loyalist militias who engaged in a scorched earth campaign against the rebels. They burned private homes to the ground, cut up and murdered pregnant women, displayed the severed heads of their victims, and employed other tactics of terrorism.
The rebels responded in kind, attacking many who had no role in the attacks on patriot homes, including women, and torturing suspected Tories with beloved torture methods such as “spigoting” in which the victims are spun around and around on upward-pointing nails until the victim is well impaled.
Moreover, such tactics were part of a larger radicalization of the population that occurred throughout the colonies in response to the British occupation and the abuses of the loyalist militias. (Murray Rothbard covers the true radicalism of the revolution in chapter 80 of Conceived in Liberty.)
Indeed, the fate of the loyalists during the Revolution tells us all we need to know about the allegedly “non-violent” actions of the patriots. Throughout the colonies, perhaps as many as 60,000 loyalists fled the colonies. Some were likely driven by a nationalistic attachment to the British, but many thousands (most of whom were private citizens) fled because they feared for their lives or they had been made destitute by the actions of the patriots.
The State Relies on Initiating Violence Of course, we live with political violence every day. The state employs violence constantly against peaceful people. The state arrests, terrorizes, robs, and destroys on a regular basis. It targets innocents guilty of nothing but made up “crimes” such as violating the regulatory minutiae of the state, or owning the wrong plant, or selling the wrong milk. If we are going to condemn the non-defensive violence of the Ferguson rioters, we ought also to condemn all similarly unwarranted violence, including all violence employed by the state against those who have not initiated violence themselves. If one wishes to retain any moral consistency whatsoever, it is impossible to decry the violence of the Ferguson looters while simultaneously supporting the violence of anti-drug enforcement, the thievery of tax collectors, federal raids to enforce gun laws — or in the case of the revolutionaries — violence against the children of tax collectors, or farmers suspected of supporting the British.
Violence employed against anyone other than those who first initiate violence is always illegitimate, whether you’re a Ferguson looter or a white guy in a three-cornered hat.
Image source: iStockphoto.
Recent events surrounding Ferguson, Missouri and the choking death of Eric Garner have brought police misconduct to the forefront. Libertarians rightfully point out that police (unlike private actors) are largely immune from criminal prosecution, civil liability, or even losing their jobs. And because police forces obviously are not subject to market discipline, the incentives are all wrong: the worse crime gets, the more their budgets grow. But the mainstream media fail to understand that police are merely the visible business end of the state: it’s the state itself that’s out of control, and abusive police are but one symptom of this larger problem.
Since neither Left nor Right have a serious answer to police malfeasance, we asked the inimitable Bob Murphy to join us and make sense of how private defense agencies might work in an anarcho-capitalist society.
What do Rothbard and Hoppe have to say about this? How would an insurance model compare to the state’s growth model? And how do we overcome common objections by those who insist that government must have a monopoly over the use of force?
Lew Rockwell articulates some important points for today's growing anarcho-capitalist movement. Recorded at the Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, 8 November 2014.
Featuring Ron Paul, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Lew Rockwell, Jeff Deist, and David Gordon.
The speakers answer audience questions on topics of a stateless society, such as private defense, privately produced money, the role of markets, and how stateless legal systems would work.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, 8 November 2014.
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, by Radley Balko, PublicAffairs, 2013
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice." —Charles de Montesquieu
If there was any silver lining to the horrifying events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri which riled the month of August, it has finally brought the issue of police militarization to the forefront. As outrageous as the police shooting death of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown was, the brutal law enforcement response in the form of running roughshod over the First Amendment and resorting to quasi-martial law to mostly peaceful protests by local residents and activists was worse. To many observers, what took place in a Midwest suburb was indistinguishable from scenes out of occupied Iraq.
How did this happen? For an answer, the writings of investigative journalist Radley Balko are an invaluable resource. Perhaps more than any other person, Balko has reported substantially on police militarization and injustice across the country for years.
The full details can be found in his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces . This important book, which was recently released in its paperback edition, could not have arrived at a better time. Despite going into an intellectually rigorous analysis of law, politics, and history, Balko has a gift for storytelling, which highlights many heartbreaking stories and makes Rise of the Warrior Cop an accessible and gripping read.
In the introduction, Balko begins with the provocative question:
How did we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed, standing government forces — a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary — to a country where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night — not to apprehend violent fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activities?
In the first chapter, Balko traces classical history and its lessons on America’s Founders as well their own experiences under British rule. As students of the Enlightenment, they were familiar with how the Roman Republic was overthrown by ambitious military leaders and how the Praetorian Guard in the Empire era, which not only acted as bodyguards for the emperor but also took on many policing roles as well, was responsible for much political intrigue and instability. In the lead-up to the American Revolution, British authorities used the hated writs of assistance to enforce tax laws and to crackdown on contraband in the colonies. This type of general warrant allowed for authorities to “search broad groups of people, for evidence of any number of crimes, sometimes over long stretches of time.” As bad as they were, Balko noted that in contrast to what police can do today, the writs of assistance could not be exercised at night and they required a knock-and-announcement before entry into a private home. Finally, it was the deployment of British soldiers to enforce the law that brought long-simmering tensions to a boil. After the Revolutionary War, with these abuses still fresh on their minds, the Founders framed and ratified a Constitution with a Bill of Rights.
The Fourth Amendment, in particular, was written explicitly to prohibit general warrants and to reinforce the Castle Doctrine, an even older principle carried over from the British common law that can be traced back to antiquity. The Castle Doctrine simply reinforces the timeless idea that "a man’s home is his castle." As explained by Balko:
Implicit in the sentiment is not only the right to repel criminal intruders but also the idea that the state is permitted to violate the home's sanctity only under limited circumstances, only as a last resort, and only under conditions that protect the threshold from unnecessary violence. Thus, before entering without permission, government agents must knock, announce and identify themselves, state their purpose, and give the occupants the opportunity to let them in peacefully. … The announcement requirement under English law was not a formality, as it has become in police raids today. It was elemental. Its purpose was to give the homeowner the opportunity to avoid violence, distress, and the destruction of his property.
Balko also goes into interesting detail regarding the Third Amendment, the "runt piglet of the Bill of Rights," which contains the seemingly antiquated provision that prohibits the quartering of soldiers in private homes. The case law pertaining to the amendment is scant but Balko asks us to consider why the Founders placed such an importance on it. Read in light of the Castle Doctrine, it makes sense that those who revere the principle that "a man’s home is his castle" would not tolerate their homes being occupied by soldiers. But most importantly, "the amendment was a placeholder for the broader aversion to a standing army. … It represented a long-standing, deeply ingrained resistance to armies patrolling American streets and policing American communities."
Until the Civil War and Reconstruction, active duty troops were rarely if ever used for domestic law enforcement. In the early American republic, law enforcement was left mostly in private hands. Close-knit communities with shared values relied mostly on social stigma and shaming to maintain order. Professional full-time prosecutors didn’t exist, and it fell upon crime victims themselves to initiate the charges before a grand jury, a panel of private citizens who had the power to indict. The citizen militia was called out for only the worst cases that required force. But as urbanization advanced and an increasingly diverse population grew, it brought the need for changes.
One particularly interesting historical fact noted by Balko is that after the fall of Rome, centralized metropolitan police forces were not to be formed for almost another two millennia. In places that developed strong civil liberties traditions such as England and the American republic, people remained suspicious of standing armies, martial law, and powerful executives. In the United States, the New York Police Department (NYPD) was not formed until 1845. Modeled after London’s famous "bobbies," political leaders had to wage major public relations campaigns to win over the trust of citizens. Major efforts were taken to distinguish the police from soldiers, and to ensure they were responsive to elected officials and the public. But in many jurisdictions, the police became a little too responsive to politicians, acted as corrupt henchmen for anyone who won office, and oppressed minorities and outsiders. The issue of police corruption was serious enough that it became a plank in the progressive movement by the early twentieth century. Reformers introduced the concept of professionalism which "transformed the job of police officer from a perk of patronage to a formal profession with its own standards, specialized knowledge, and higher personnel standards and entry requirements." Although it helped address the problem of corruption, this new policy began to subtly separate the police from the communities they supposedly served and protected.
The meat of Balko’s story focusing on police militarization began in the 1960s. During this time, the civil rights, antiwar, and counterculture movements became very active while the overall crime rates soared. As the liberal Warren Court expanded the rights of the accused in a number of notable rulings, the law-and-order types became greatly alarmed that society was falling apart. As his critics on the right continued their attacks that he was "soft" on crime, President Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the creation of two government institutions to fight crime that would have huge future ramifications:
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which eventually would become the modern Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the leading government agency fighting the War on Drugs.the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), to "stream the federal funding, equipment, and technology to state and local law enforcement agencies."This would go on to set a large precedent for future programs like Byrne grants and the Pentagon’s 1033 program as "Johnson’s successors would quickly discover that introducing a funding spigot like LEAA, then threatening to pull it away, was an effective way to persuade local police agencies to adopt their preferred polices."
The modern War on Drugs would officially begin under President Richard Nixon after winning on a law-and-order campaign and appealing to the “Silent Majority.” The focus of the Nixon’s administration’s anticrime effort would be on drugs, which they thought was the common denominator among racial minorities, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement that alienated “ignored America.” The Nixonites pushed for massive funding for the BNDD and LEAA, demanded no-knock warrants for federal drug agents, and even temporarily shutdown the U.S-Mexican border in Operation Intercept. In 1969, the first SWAT raid was carried out in Los Angeles against the Black Panthers. Despite the raid being a disaster "practically, logistically, and tactically," it was a major success in public relations and SWAT teams would spread to nearly every city in America in the following decades. Despite being originally designed for emergency situations where violence was needed to end violence such as bank robberies and hostage scenarios, mission creep was unavoidable and SWAT teams would go on to be used for everything from breaking up neighborhood poker games, enforcing underage drinking laws, and performing regulatory inspections, as meticulously documented by Balko. Fast forward to modern day, it is now estimated that SWAT raids occur up to 40,000 times per year across the United States.
This can be traced back to the Reagan administration when SWAT tactics began to be increasingly used in fighting the drug war. Hardliners in his administration saw a "biblical struggle between good and evil, and in the process turn[ed] the country’s drug cops into holy soldiers." Noting the inconsistent reverence supposed limited government conservatives have for Reagan, Balko had this to say:
Conservatives had always held the somewhat contradictory position that government can’t be trusted in any area of society except when it comes to the power to arrest, detain, imprison, and execute people. But Reagan didn't dance around the contradiction, he embraced it. He blamed crime on big government — and in the same breath demanded that the government be given significantly more power to fight it.
Under Reagan, the FBI was brought into enforcing drug laws, health professionals who favored treatment for drug abusers were purged from the bureaucracy, and sweeping new policies such as civil asset forfeiture (the legal theory that property itself can be guilty of a crime and be seized without the owner even being charged) were embraced. Perhaps the most radical action was that Reagan sought to amend the Posse Comitatus Act and bring the military into the Drug War.
Balko notes that:
By the end of the 1980s, joint task forces brought together police officers and soldiers for drug interdiction. National Guard helicopters and U-2 spy planes flew the California skies in search of marijuana plants. When suspects were identified, battle-clad troops from the National Guard, the DEA and other federal and local law enforcement agencies would swoop in to eradicate the plants and capture the people growing them.
After Reagan was succeeded by Vice President George H.W. Bush, the same course continued. Bush Sr. appointed hardliner Bill Bennnet (who once called for beheading drug dealers on Larry King live and even "urged children to turn in their friends who used drugs to the police") as drug czar and ramped up rhetoric that the drug war was a moral crusade between good and evil. Drug treatment programs were stripped of funding, while additional cash flowed into law enforcement and new prison construction. Perhaps the most significant were the Byrne grants that were created in a 1988 crime bill which would send billions in federal cash to police departments over the next twenty-five years and allow "the White House another way to impose its crime policy on local law enforcement." But in Balko’s view, the program's most harmful legacy was the "creation of hundreds of regional and multijurisdictional narcotics task forces" that were often unaccountable and financially rewarded for making many busts in the following decades.
Reformers and activists hoped the election of Bill Clinton would bring changes to the War on Drugs but sadly, that would not be the case. Instead, Clinton "encouraged paramilitary raids against low-level offenders — even users" and cracked down hard on medical marijuana facilities in order to send a political message despite legalization in a number of states. In addition, the Bryne grants picked up steam as they incentivized "police departments across the country to prioritize drug crimes over other investigations." Perversely, the funds were awarded based on the "number of overall arrests, the number of warrants served, or the number of drug seizures." As a result, actually reducing crime was not favored and instead, grants were given to police departments that were making lots of seizures regardless of size and easy arrests (e.g., low level drug offenders).
During this time, the Supreme Court continued to whittle away the Fourth Amendment and further militarization was promoted through the creation of infamous 1033 program as relationships between the federal government and local police departments deepened. High-profile tragedies in the 1990s involving heavily militarized law enforcement such as Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege served mostly as partisan fodder as the right temporarily became critics only to fall silent when George W. Bush became President.
Bush Jr. followed the moral crusade script and continued the paramilitary raids against medical marijuana facilities and patients despite some initial lip service to federalism. After the September 11th terrorist attacks, drug warriors did not fail to waste a good crisis and used the opportunity to attempt to link the new fear of terrorism to drug use. In addition, the new War on Terror created another "ratchet effect" that ballooned an already-growing National Security State and furthered militarized the police. Thanks to generous anti-terrorism grants from the Department of Homeland Security which dwarfed even the 1033 program, police departments across the country upgraded their arsenals with automatic weapons, drones, armored vehicles, and other military equipment. But since terrorist attacks are incredibly rare, police used their new gear for drug raids instead. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continued its siege on the Castle Doctrine and the Fourth Amendment with its decisions in United States v. Banks and Hudson v. Michigan.
Many people desiring "hope and change" put their faith in Barack Obama for a drug war détente and an overall repudiation of the Bush policies, but as with what happened with Clinton, they were in for a very bitter disappointment. Obama expanded the trend of police militarization by pouring a record $2 billion into the Byrne grants. This was part of his 2009 economic stimulus package, overseeing "more federal raids on marijuana dispensaries in four years than George W. Bush had presided in over eight," promoting greater forfeiture takings by the Justice Department, and continuing to give away hundreds of millions in federal surplus military equipment to local and state police departments.
Near the end of the book, Balko offers a number of proposed reforms to rollback police militarization and restore the workings of a free society. These ideas include the practical as well as politically unattainable, but at very least, provide a working road map:
Scaling back and ending the War on Drugs.Halting SWAT mission creep such as prohibiting their use by regulatory agencies.Increasing transparency such as detailed warrant tracking and requiring the use of body cameras on raids where the videos could then be made public upon request.Embracing authentic community policing by “taking cops out of patrol cars to walk beats and become a part of the communities they serve” to rebuild trust among the people they serve.Changing police culture by moving away from “us versus them” combat mindset and toward emphasizing counseling and dispute resolutions for resolving conflict in routine problems.Increasing accountability and ensuring police are not above the law by imposing stronger liability on officers who make egregious errors (this proposal would most likely be fought tooth-and-nail by police unions).Even as more people awaken to the realities of a growing police state, the challenges to restoring a free society are vast and likely to be resisted every inch of the way by entrenched interests. As Abigail Hall and Christopher Coyne pointed out in their political-economic analysis of police militarization in the Spring 2013 issue of The Independent Review:
Government agencies’ inherent tendency is to expand beyond their designers’ initial aims and goals. Special-interest groups exacerbate this problem by seeking to expand their power and influence. The onset of crises — whether real or manufactured — begins a long, far-reaching process that erodes the already imperfect constraints on the government’s power … citizens must become skeptical of the possibility of establishing permanent constraints on government power. This skepticism ultimately requires recognition and appreciation of the realities of government power and a rejection of government action as a solution to the perceived crises.
After reading through Rise of the Warrior Cop, if there be a single lesson we should grasp, it is that police militarization and the War on Drugs are intimately tied. The former cannot be reversed unless the latter is ended. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the Castle Doctrine crumbled, the United States ended up with the largest incarcerated population in world history, and the Officer Friendlies of yesteryear have been replaced by a de-facto standing army clothed like Darth Vader.
There is a wide range of opinions among commentators today on what extent the United States is becoming/is a police state. In Balko’s conclusion, "it would be foolish to wait until it becomes one to get concerned." If you were at all disturbed by the events in Ferguson or wondering why your local police department has an armored vehicle with a belt-fed, turreted .50 caliber machine gun, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Image source: wikicommons: Hostage rescue
In this Mises View, Mark Thornton explains some unintended consequences of bulk NSA spying. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute.
This interview was originally published by the Rutherford Institute.
John W. Whitehead: There is no end to discussion of John Locke’s impact on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence lists our inalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and the Constitution creates a relatively strong central government limited nonetheless by our fundamental freedoms. And so, Americans generally accept that our government is designed to protect our freedoms and natural rights. Llewellyn Harrison “Lew” Rockwell, Jr. challenges that assumption. An avowed anarcho-capitalist, he rejects statism entirely, believing that society would be better able to protect our freedoms if there were no government at all.
The founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian organization in Auburn, Alabama, Lew Rockwell is also a prolific author and editor who regularly publishes articles denouncing government intervention in markets, war, American imperialism, and the police state. His new book, Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto, he proclaims that the state need not always have the powers it presently retains. He was also Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, is Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, and runs a libertarian website, LewRockwell.com. Mr. Rockwell took some time from his busy schedule to speak to constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and OldSpeak about his new book, his views on government, and his advice for Americans who want to know what they can do to rein in their runaway government.
JW: What is Anarcho-Capitalism?
Lew Rockwell: Anarcho-Capitalism is a term coined by the late Murray N. Rothbard. Murray coined that term to talk about an anarchism that would be free market and capitalist. So what is anarchism? The dictionary definition means without a government, without rulers. The secondary meaning in the dictionary is chaos and terrible trouble.
Now are we supposed to believe that after the horrendous crimes of government in the 20th century — after the mind-blowingly evil and monstrous crimes of the Communists, the Nazis, the Fascists, the British and the Americans and lots of other people too, and the wars.
JW: Not to mention the carnage and the death. Imperialism is what you are talking about.
LR: Yes. Now are we supposed to believe that the real danger, the real horror, would be to have no government? I mean just look: 100 million people were killed [in the 20th century], not counting the wars. If you count the wars the government caused and participated in, it is more than 200 million innocents killed. That does not even include the soldiers killed. It is quite an astounding record. We are supposed to believe that the real danger, the real horror, would be to have no government?
Anarcho-capitalists would argue that people don’t need a ruling class. Most of us in our private lives are not interested in sticking a gun in our next door neighbor’s ribs and demanding his wallet. Even if the cops would all but disappear, we wouldn’t do that.
The vast majority of us and the vast majority of our encounters — commercial, familial, whatever — everything is done voluntarily. There is no violence or threat of violence. That, of course, is government. Government is violence and the threat of violence.
Anarcho-capitalists would say it is never morally justified to initiate violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. When people hear this, they think well, of course. But they don’t actually believe it because that would mean that you can’t have one group of people calling themselves the government, telling all the other people, “We are going to take this percent of your income this year, and if you don’t agree to it, we are going to put you in jail. If you resist sufficiently, we are going to kill you. In fact, if you resist sufficiently paying a parking ticket, we reserve the right to kill you. If you sufficiently resist paying your library fine, we reserve the right to kill you.”
JW: Actually, a man was just killed recently — shot and paralyzed — for overdue parking tickets. The police shot him backing out of his driveway.
LR: They would deny they did anything wrong.
JW: The officer said he felt a threat to his own life. The guy was not armed, by the way.
LR: It is easy to think through these things if you deny to the government the idea that they are above the moral law.
JW: What do you mean by “moral law”?
LR: Well, I would say the natural law, all the things that God, in my view, writes on our hearts and we know without being told. You don’t have to be told that murder is wrong. You don’t have to be told that thievery is wrong to get the Ten Commandments. You know that certain things are wrong, so that is what I mean about the moral law.
If murder is wrong for you and me, and obviously it is, putting somebody in a government suit and sending him over to kill people in Afghanistan doesn’t make that not murder. That is still murder.
Can you use defensive force, can you use defensive violence? Yes. If somebody is invading your country, if somebody is invading your home, can you use violence in an attempt to repel them? Of course you can, but you can’t initiate violence. You can’t go into somebody else’s house. You can’t go into somebody else’s country.
JW: Because it is their property.
LR: You can’t take other people’s money. You have to have people’s consent. Again, it is never morally justified to use violence or the threat of violence against the innocent. As you point out so eloquently in your work in terms of the American police state, it goes throughout all of government. It is true of town, city, state, and federal governments, and world government if they eventually get that.
JW: I think that is the direction they are headed, that is, world government.
LR: Sure, and actually the U.S. wants to be the world government — believes itself to be the world government — thinks its laws should apply everywhere and should apply not to itself but to us. The legislative law, the edict — which is not the natural law — does not apply to the government but is used by the government against the rest of us. So the cop can speed; you can’t speed. Go down the list of all the things. They can kidnap — they call it conscription, they call it the draft — but if we do it, it is kidnapping. It is rightly condemned and punished. So again, the government is not above the moral law. It is not above the natural law. The natural law applies to people in government just as much as it applies to the rest of us, and if we want a moral society, also of course a prosperous society, that requires a free market, and the free market can actually provide everything that we think of as necessarily government. It is possible to have private protection, private defense and so on. There is nothing the government does that could not be a legitimate market service that can’t be provided better, cheaper, more efficiently, and without injustice by the free market.
JW: Is there any such thing as limited government?
LR: Well, it is something that we would all like to have. We would like to see limited government. Once you have an organization that is a monopoly and is able to decide when to use force and violence or when not to, and is able to decide how much of your money they are going to take in order to do the things they want to do, you are off to the races. It has taken us a long time in American history to get to the present point, and obviously, the trend is very bad.
We did have more limited government. Take, for example, the Articles of Confederation. The revolutionary government until the close of the American Revolution was probably the most libertarian government ever. But they soon got rid of that, and they adopted the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution marked a big step up in centralization and in government power. It has been off to the races since that, especially with wars. All the various wars have resulted in massive increases in government income, power, propaganda, lies… You can go down the list.
JW: Isn’t that the purpose of war: to increase the power of control and internal government?
LR: Yes, but I think there is also something else going on. Friedrich Hayek has a chapter called “Why the Worst Rise to the Top,” and he is talking government. In private life, generally, the most monstrous people don’t rise to the top, whereas in the government, the liars, the demigods, the manipulators, the schemers, the scammers — those are the people who rise to the top. That’s one of the reasons that government is not limited, but they are constantly scheming and they like it. The people who are in government — we see it as today’s police — actually like hurting people. They get a kick out of stomping on somebody’s head because they are allegedly rude to them.
JW: Studies show that by the way. In some of the Nazi concentration camps, the guards got sexually excited by beating up inmates.
LR: There are also people who like to kill, who enjoy sending young people off to kill and be killed. They actually get a charge out of it. That is definitely the kind of person you don’t want running things. Unfortunately, due to the nature of government, that is the kind of person who is running things. Is a “less big” government better than a “more big” government? Yes, of course. Is a somewhat limited government better than an unlimited government? Yes. But is there any way to have a limited government that stays that way? Jefferson thought not. That was why he thought there would have to be a revolution every once in a while.
JW: Every 20 years he said. The American Constitution did create a more centralized government. That is why we have the Bill of Rights. When some of the so-called Founders saw the Constitution, they said, “Uh oh, this looks a bit like a monarchy. We need a Bill of Rights.” So the original Constitution we got is very much a centralized government. What would you say to that?
LR: There is some interesting recent scholarship on Madison where he was explaining to a fellow centralizer (which he was at that point) that he picked the least damaging 10 items to send out as the Bill of Rights. There had been much more restrictive stuff that had been proposed, but he blocked it. Of course, the Bill of Rights is in the process of being negated — to the extent it still exists. It is under attack in every way.
Gary North argues that the major effect of the adoption of the Constitution was the tripling of taxes on Americans versus what it had been under the King. Tripling. This is government. In my book, Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto, I want people to know it doesn’t have to be this way. They don’t have to agree to this sort of life. I want people to read more, try to understand more about the real nature of government, the nature of the state, and not just salute and hand over your wallet, hand over your children to these people who do not exactly have your best interests at heart. Even though they tell us they do. They do not have their own special interests. They are just concerned with the national good, the common defense, and the public good. The government, of course, has its own special interest, and it is not the public interest — it is always opposed to the public interest. That is why the typical government employee at all levels makes double what the typical taxpayer makes.
JW: Not to mention the pensions, and all the other benefits.
LR: So many public school teachers, cops and firemen can now retire like millionaires with pensions and all that special stuff.
JW: Some of them get special flying privileges — perks we don’t get — but we pay for it. In your book, you say, “We are in the stage of late fascism.” It’s a good statement, and one I agree with. America has moved into a kind of a fascist regime.
Let’s say we have an anarcho-capitalistic society. How do we prevent turning into a society where business interests join together to manipulate and control the system? How do you prevent them from railroading over the “little guy” who really just wants to grow potatoes, for example?
LR: Just look at our own country’s history. You always have business interests that want that sort of thing. Look at J. P. Morgan and his allies in the steel industry, and other industries in the 19th century: they always wanted to get together and form a cartel where they would all agree to raise their prices and stick it to the customer. Well, you know what, they couldn’t get away with it because competitors came in and undercut them, undersold them. That is why they promoted government regulation, as is still the case today with a lot of entrenched business interests. They established the interests. For example, they wanted the railroads to be able to charge more. They couldn’t do it, because there was so much competition, so they set up the Interstate Commerce Commission allegedly for the public good. The very first act of the Interstate Commerce Commission was to say that you can’t cut your prices. If you were a railroad, you couldn’t cut your prices and try to undercut the other guy. That is what government regulation does.
Has this battle between power and market, as Rothbard put it, been in existence for all of human history? It has. There have been times when things have been better, and we are living in a time right now when things are getting worse, but all is not lost. I deal a lot with young people, and I see huge changes among young people, not only in this country but in other countries as well. They are not buying the government lies anymore. Part of it has to do with their worries about their own economic future — worries about student debt and all the horrible things that the federal government has done to them — but they are not buying the lies. They are looking for another way.
There are some very important things you can read, especially by Rothbard and others. It is possible not to give your consent. Government actually does depend on the consent of the governed. Government is a minority. They need us in order for them to live it up. If anybody has been to Washington D.C. recently — the imperial capital — everybody has a limo, fancy restaurants, mansions, and they are doing very well.
It is possible not to have that kind of a system. It is possible to have competition, market capitalism, not crony capitalism, and it is all a package. We don’t have to give consent, and indeed, if we withdraw our consent once in a while, you will see it when government is trying to do something. They can’t get away with it because people don’t consent to it. So there is a clue as to what is actually possible: it is possible to do something about government tyranny. It is possible to make ourselves freer, more prosperous, have a situation where parents are actually in control of the raising of their children — not the government.
JW: And the education process?
LR: This is why government set up public schools: to make people more stupid, or at least not think independently, not think critically. Horace Mann, the founder of American public schools, made this very specific: that you would be a good little worker, a good little citizen for the government and the businesses that the government approved of.
JW: To paraphrase Hitler, he said, “You say that I cannot have your children. I already do. They are in our schools.”
LR: That’s because Germany, even today with the Hitler-era laws, has one of the most vicious anti-home-schooling governments in the world. Homeschooling is one of the best thing parents can do for, not only for their own families and their own children, but for society at large.
JW: I won the first home schooling case in the United States in 1979. It was the Peter and Ruth Noble case. The father got arrested in the middle of the night by the police. He called me and woke me up out of bed. I asked, “What were you arrested for?” And he said, “Teaching my kids at home.”
Let me ask you this: what is it in human nature that seems to seek out an authority figure or a governing figure? I see people standing in large droves before a politician cheering. What is it in human nature that wants that? Or am I wrong about that? I think this would impede somewhat a libertarian society.
LR: You are very much right. The State would like to be God. The State hates God and is envious of God, politicians, and so forth. They don’t want people being loyal to anything above them. The State attempts to be a quasi-religious organization. They must look back on the days of the pharaohs as the glory days when the government actually was the God. That is probably their ideal.
I think it is always important to remember that everything for good — or for ill, for that matter — is done by a motivated minority. The majority of the people, God bless them, tend not to be relevant. This means we have to be a motivated minority. We have to educate ourselves and understand the fight we are in. What is the best way to save the world? All one can do is present the world with one improved unit. Learn these things yourself, and understand history, understand economics, understand politics. What is the real politics? Not electoral politics which, I would argue, is a scam and a trick to make you think we would be saved if we had Romney instead of Obama.
JW: Government is theater. Would you agree?
LR: Yeah, a bloody theater, a terrible theater, but it is a theater, and they know it. They know this is how to appease the people.
JW: Two psychologists have studied the use of words by politicians in recent years. The most used word now by politicians in America is the word “we.” The use of this word actually gets people to form into a group where essentially they stop thinking. That is connected to the theater concept of controlling people, and I guarantee you that the government hires behaviorists and psychologists, and they study how to manipulate people. What do you think about that?
LR: I remember one of the critics of the Nazis saying that it is an indication of totalitarianism when politicians refer to “our children.” They are not your children. They are God’s children, and they are the parents’ children. They are not the government’s children, but the government, of course, feels they are and they want to shape them. They want to mold them and they want parents to have less and less to do with it. They want them in the public schools from 6 to 6, eating all their meals there and that sort of thing. You know they are not that kind of villain, but they are, in fact, villains. Even if they seem like nice, decent people, they are actually not.
I was once in politics myself before going straight, and I can tell you they are not good people. I encountered only one man whom I thought was thoroughly good, and I had the honor of working for him eventually, and that was Ron Paul, and also the only person in politics I have ever encountered who did not have the lust to rule, the lust to dominate. Ron Paul doesn’t have that, so he was a very odd bird in politics. For him, politics was an educational mission, but most of them want to dominate. Again, most of us are not interested in running the next door neighbor’s family. We don’t want to run the next town. We don’t want to run the next country. We have enough to do with our own families, mowing our lawn, doing our job, earning enough money, and so forth, that is what we want to do. But there are people who want to run the family next door. They want to run the next town. They want to run the world.
JW: So they become government officials.
LR: They go into politics.
JW: Does technology change the ground rules a bit? With emerging technologies, there is the ability for certain nefarious individuals, such as the National Security Agency, to listen, watch everything we are doing, download files, etc. I have talked to NSA agents, former ones, who tell me everything we do is watched. You have the emergence of drones—the slogan now is becoming “He who owns a drone, rules.” Is this going to make it a bit more difficult to move into a society where we have more freedom because the implements of power are now so awesome?
LR: Well, I would argue that this has always been true. Technology, given the state, is always a double-edged sword. The invention of the steam engine was a fantastic thing for the growth of human prosperity, but it also could be used by governments to power war ships. It is true of modern day technology. The internet obviously has been magnificent for commerce, magnificent in many ways for liberty, but also is bent by the government to its own devices and has been essential to the growth of the National Security Agency, which is just one of many, many spy agencies. Just like there are many, many killer CIA type organizations, death squads, and so forth available at the behest of the President and the military and so on.
JW: You hit a key point. The President can murder and kill, but if I do it, I am in prison. Either they will kill me with capital punishment or put me in prison forever.
LR: Does the president okay drone attacks over his scrambled eggs in the morning at the White House? He is sending these drones off to kill people he knows nothing about. Many times, wedding parties are blown up. The famous case in Afghanistan of a bunch of kids out getting firewood, picking up firewood, and they were bombed by a drone. It is murder.
I remember when George W. Bush started his war in Iraq, the first thing he did was bomb a restaurant in Baghdad because he had been told by the intelligence people that Saddam Hussein and his kids were eating in that restaurant. Even if they had been there, it is not moral to have murdered those other people. They happened not to be in there, so he destroyed this restaurant, he killed the owner, the chef, the waiters, the customers, and so forth. That was an act of murder. Of course, Bush didn’t think it was murder. Nobody thought of it as murder. This is just war or bringing freedom to the Iraqis or whatever lies they say.
Again, just because somebody is in the government doesn’t mean he is above the law. The scales fall from your eyes and you see the government in a very, very different way. I’ll mention Murray Rothbard’s great essay, “The Anatomy of the State.” You can find it on www.lewrockwell.com.
The government is not above the natural law. When they see themselves as above the natural law, when they violate the natural law, they are criminals. It doesn’t matter that they have fancy suits and beautiful homes, or that they are wearing all kinds of medals on their chest. They are really no better than Murder Incorporated and the Mafia.
JW: How do you envision an ideal societal transition from our current state of affairs, which again you have described as late fascism, to an anarcho-capitalist system? What are the actual physical steps you think would usher in a system where we would have more freedom and would do away with government?
LR: Well, it would mean people refusing to go along. If people would stop and think, “The U.S. is sending drones to kill people in Yemen. That is not a good thing to do. It is not a good thing to take all our money. Who are these people to say you can’t have 40% of your income that you otherwise would spend on your family, for savings, on your business or whatever? We know better and we are not going to take it.”
The way the police state acts — tasering people, and the police with automatic weapons and tanks — if people don’t go along, the government can’t actually do this to us. Thus, I think the ideal course would be a nonviolent transition, maybe something like what happened in the Soviet Union and has happened elsewhere too. People just refused to go along, and when that happens, even though the government seems like an extremely impressive, extremely impregnable operation of huge walls surrounding a city of power, everything can come down.
I don’t care whether it is the secret police or the military, the spy agencies, the regular police, the tax collectors, the Environmental Protection Agency… However many federal agencies there are running our lives, working for the crony capitalists, hurting the regular person… This actually can come to an end, because government depends on the consent of the governed, and if people withdraw their consent, if they refuse to be part of the gang, if they do not approve of what the government is doing — whether it’s to people in other countries or people in this country — they do not approve of acts of injustice. They do not assume that when the police kill you, that was a good thing, and you know, you really deserved to die, or when the U.S. Army kills you, you deserved to die. So people need to question. They need to educate themselves. It is possible to have the government retreat. I think that is what we all want.
JW: Do we need mass non-violent militant resistance?
LR: I think if civil disobedience would take place, it has to be nonviolent, and it has to be the kind of situation where the government’s own people lose confidence in the government and no longer believe in the government. This happened in the Soviet Union. If soldiers, were called upon to shoot Americans, grab their guns or whatever, we may find that the government’s own agents come to oppose it. They will have come to understand that this is something immoral they are being asked to do, and they are just not going to do it. This has happened in the past, and this is what we have to hope for. I think we see some indications of that already. There are whistleblowers. There are people within the state who oppose it. We want much more of that. Again, this is a struggle. It is always going to be a struggle. But it is a struggle we have to be engaged in if we care anything about the future. We care about our children, our grandchildren and our descendants. If we care about other people, if we care about the people the U.S. Military is killing all over the world, if we care about the tyranny that is being exerted here at home, we have to do something about it. You can’t just sit back.
JW: Here’s the problem, though. The government is preparing for that. The Department of Defense is doing studies on how to put down social civil unrest. They are preparing for what they see as people getting fed up with government. You saw the Bundy Ranch situation, you saw what happened down near the border. They are preparing for this. They are armed to the teeth. They have drones and tanks. They are going to shoot and kill people. Unfortunately, most people seem clueless, because they get most of their news from television. You are not going to get the real news there. The so-called corporate media works in conjunction with the government, hiding the facts. How are we going to get people organized?
LR: Well, you touch on one very important thing. Don’t watch TV news. It is nothing but lies. I have a friend that thinks that watching FOX actually makes you stupider. I don’t know about that.
JW: I think watching TV actually makes you stupider.
LR: I don’t actually watch regular television, and I think it is very, very important to get your news elsewhere. It is possible still on the internet. That is why I have my site, www.lewrockwell.com. It is possible to get the actual facts of the situation. It is not easy, but it is possible.
It is essential not to be dumbed down by the constant government lies and propaganda. I have a friend, Yuri Maltsev, who was one of the last defectors from the Soviet Union. He said that in the Soviet Union, “we assumed that if the government said it was going to rain tomorrow, it was going to be sunny. I mean, we didn’t believe anything the government said.” One of the things that astounded him when he came to the United States was that “most people believe what the government says.” I think this is true, but more and more people don’t believe it. More and more people are withdrawing their consent. More and more people see these people in government as purveyors of lies and distortions and violence. They claim that you and your family, your salary, whatever your savings are, all belong to them if they want to take them. They would claim that there is nothing holding them back from doing whatever they want if they decide it is “good” for us.
JW: There are a lot of folks I have worked with who are starting to mistrust the government. They think it is wacky. They want to change things. They are ready to move forward. They are ready to get involved. Some of them have read your bookAgainst the State. That is a good place to start. If they asked, “What should we do next?” what would be your advice?
LR: I wish I had a 12-step program to give them. I would simply say the first thing, the essential thing, the foundational thing is to know the enemy and know the principles of freedom. You have to educate yourself. There is no substitute for reading books, whether they are e-books or physical books or whatever, because the government doesn’t want anybody learning anything in a real sense. They just want you paying attention to Bill O’Reilly or MSNBC people and so forth. You need to reject all that. You need to educate yourself. In my book I have some suggested readings. If anybody emails me at lew@lewrockwell.com, I am glad to send them a suggested reading list.
That is actually the first step to making yourself a better person, making yourself well equipped intellectually, morally to engage in this fight. It is THE fight. I would argue there is actually no escaping because of what’s happening to the government. We have to take part.
The first thing is you have to learn. Once you have learned some economics, once you have learned some history, once you have learned about the nature of politics, you can’t be fooled and other people will come to you for leadership. They will look to you for advice, and that is the way a movement is built. There are many other things going on and that will go on in the future, we hope and pray. But the first thing is you have to make yourself a better person. You have to read, you have to know, you have to be able to analyze, and inform your conscience. Reading is very, very basic to all of these good things.
Image source: http://commons.wikimedia
The following is the transcript from a talk delivered at the 2014 Houston Mises Circle. Video of the talk is available here.
I’d like to speak with you today not about the NSA or any of the vast federal spying apparatus that has so eroded our personal and financial privacy; nor about the federal healthcare bureaucracy that undermines our medical privacy; nor about TSA demanding access to our physical bodies at the airport; nor about the countless drug laws, smoking laws, helmet laws, ID laws,and Big Gulp laws that come together to make up our soft police state, or nanny state if you prefer. Now I say “soft” police state because while we know America is heading down a very dangerous path, we should respect those who suffered in the very real, not-soft police states of the twentieth century. There is no comparison, and we shouldn’t use the term lightly. But if we don’t see the growing parallels between totalitarian societies in history and modern day America we have only ourselves to blame.
What I would like to discuss today is the business end of the police state, which is to say the police themselves. Not federal agents necessarily, but garden variety local cops and sheriffs. For many people, police represent their only real, tangible contact with the state. Sure, they pay their taxes and comply with a million petty government rules and regulations, but in their day-to-day lives — in their homes, at work, driving around, walking around — they don’t necessarily feel or see the heavy hand of government. So for the average, law-abiding American, who is not likely to come in contact with Mr. Obama, the local congressman, or even the local mayor, police officers serve as the most visible reminder of the state. And hopefully most of us don’t interact with police much at all, beyond maybe the occasional speeding ticket or fender bender. But for those Americans who do find themselves interacting with police today, the actions, attitudes, and mindset of those police officers is likely to have changed quite a bit from, say, thirty years ago, and changed dramatically for the worse.
The Peace Officer ArchetypeSo whatever happened to “peace officers”?
Today when we use the term peace officer, it sounds antiquated and outdated. I’m sure most people in the room under forty have never heard the term actually used by anyone; we might as well be talking about buggy whips or floppy disks. But in the 1800s, and really through the 1960s, the term was used widely in America to refer generally to lawmen, whether sheriffs, constables, troopers, or marshals. Today the old moniker of peace officer has been almost eliminated in popular usage, replaced by police officer or the more in vogue “law enforcement officer.”
The terminology has certain legal differences in different settings; in some places peace officers and police officers are indeed different individuals with different functions, jurisdictions, or powers to execute warrants. But nobody says peace officer anymore, and it’s not just a coincidence. The evolution of language, particularly when driven by the political class and media, can have powerful implications for all of us. And I submit that the morphing of peace officers into police officers is much more than just linguistic.
Now the archetype of a peace officer is mostly fictitious — sheriffs in westerns often come to mind, stern lawman carrying Colt revolvers called “peacemakers.” But the Wyatt Earps of western myth weren’t always so peaceful, and often — at least in movies — used their peacemakers to shoot up the place. And while Americans today can’t really relate to the Old West, we do have enough institutional memory — that’s a polite way of saying old people — to paint a pretty accurate picture of the trusted peace officer of Norman Rockwell’s America in the first half of the twentieth century. Fictitious or not, whole generations of Americans grew up with an apple pie view of the peace officer as a friend, not an agent of the state to be feared.
Sheriff Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show is perhaps the best and most facile example of what it once meant, at least in the American psyche, to be a peace officer. As a peace officer, Sheriff Taylor exhibits four key traits that profoundly distinguish him from most modern police officers.
First, he is part of the community. He does not see himself — nor do others see him — as somehow apart from the residents of Mayberry. He does not exhibit an “us vs. them” mentality that seems so prevalent in many police officers today. He does not see himself first and foremost as a government employee or union member. He does not resent the people he protects, but instead considers himself a fellow citizen. In other words, Sheriff Taylor is a true civilian.
Second, he truly seeks to maintain peace within Mayberry, and sees his job as keeping the town safe, quiet, happy — peaceful. He is a peacekeeper, not an enforcer. In fact, he seldom uses force. He does not want a crime wave in Mayberry to justify an increase in his pay or budget; on the contrary, he would view an increase in local crime as a personal failure. He is apt to downplay, rather than exaggerate, the importance of his job. His focus is on creating an environment that discourages crime in the first place.
Third, in every instance Sheriff Taylor attempts to smooth over and defuse problems, rather than escalate them. He invariably looks for simple, common sense, polite answers to conflicts, rather than using his legal authority to threaten or arrest. He rarely concerns himself with technical application of the law; but rather uses his judgment to solve problems and make them go away with the least fuss possible. He never makes a bad situation worse.
For example, in one memorable scene Andy and his deputy Barney Fife have been summoned to the dilapidated home of an angry man who is causing a disturbance. Upon seeing the two officers, the man promptly begins firing his old rifle at them from a second story window. Barney reacts as you might expect, pulling out his own rifle, calling in reinforcements, and barricading himself behind the squad car for a shootout. Andy, by contrast, knows the man to be somewhat cranky and believes he can be talked out of it. So he crouches over, zig-zags his way to the front door, enters the house, and then emerges in short order with the suspect, who is now much calmer. The sheriff has, as usual, talked him out of it. No arrest is made, if you can imagine that.
Fourth, Andy genuinely cares about and tries to help the people of Mayberry, having their best interests at heart. See, for example, his gentle treatment of Otis, the town drunk. As a result, he has the trust, admiration, and respect of the townspeople.
Now of course as I mentioned, The Andy Griffith Show was fictional. And there’s no doubt that many, many small town sheriffs in America over the decades have been anything but peace officers. Yet it’s fascinating that just a few decades ago Americans could identify with the character of Sheriff Taylor as a recognizable ideal.
Contrast with TodayFast forward to 2014, and clearly Norman Rockwell’s America is mostly gone. Obviously the situation today is very different, and we all know how far things have fallen. Police have suffered a very serious decline over the last several decades, both in terms of their public image and the degree to which average citizens now often fear police officers rather than trust them. As an aside, poor and minority communities have long been less trusting, or perhaps less naïve, about the real nature of police. But today that jaundiced view has found its way into middle class consciousness.
Now the subject of police misconduct and the growing militarization and lawlessness of police departments could fill many hours, so we won’t try to cover such a broad topic today. And several libertarian writers are doing a great job of documenting police malfeasance; in my opinion William Norman Grigg is the best out there on the subject.
But allow me to mention a few particularly egregious recent examples of police escalating and harming, rather than protecting and serving.
Now depending on one’s point of view, these officers may be seen as nothing more than vicious gang members guilty of murder, or they may be seen (by an exceedingly charitable supporter of “law and order”) simply as overzealous cops involved in an unfortunate situation that got out of hand. But in no universe can they be seen as peace officers.
Another troubling development that demonstrates how far we’ve strayed from the peace officer ideal can be seen in the increasing militarization of local police departments. The Florida city of Ft. Pierce (population 42,000) recently acquired an MRAP vehicle, which stands for “mine response ambush protection” for the bargain price of $2,000. The US military is unloading hundreds of armored tank-like vehicles as Operation Enduring Freedom winds down — and it’s also unloading thousands of Afghanistan and Iraq combat vets into the ranks of local police and sheriffs. The Ft. Pierce police chief states, “The military was pretty much handing them out. ... You know, it is overkill, until we need it.”
A similar type of vehicle known as a BATT, or “ballistic armored tactical transport,” has found a home just down the road in Lake Jackson, Texas, hometown to Dr. Paul. This BATT employs thermal imaging cameras and holds up to a dozen officers, which is puzzling since Lake Jackson has a population of only 27,000 and a crime rate, both for violent and property crimes, of less than half the national average. Now Ron and Carol undoubtedly think of their town as a bucolic place where they raised their five children, but apparently it is ripe for a full-scale riot necessitating an armored response.
Of course these are merely anecdotes, but we should not be surprised when military hardware, former military personnel, and a military mindset find their way into our local police departments. And increased federal funding of otherwise cash-strapped local police departments only weakens the connection between police officers and the citizens they ostensibly serve.
The Austrian PerspectiveSo how did we go from “peace” officers to “police” officers to “law enforcement” officers anyway? How did we go from “protect and serve” to “escalate and harm”? And what is behind the militarization of police departments and the rise of the warrior cop, as one writer terms it?
Well, as Austrians and libertarians we should hardly be surprised, and we certainly don’t need a sociological study to understand what’s happening. The deterioration in police conduct, and the militarization of local police forces, quite simply and quite predictably mirrors the rise of the total state itself.
We know that state monopolies invariably provide worse and worse services for more and more money. Police services are no exception. When it comes to your local police, there is no shopping around, there is no customer service, and there is no choice. Without market competition, market price signals, and market discipline, government has no ability or incentive to provide what people really want, which is peaceful and effective security for themselves, their families, their homes, and their property. As with everything government purports to provide, the public wants Andy Griffith but ends up with the Terminator.
There is no lack of Austrian scholarship in this area, the intersection between security services, state monopolies, public goods, and private alternatives. But if you’re interested in the topic, I would initially direct you toward two excellent primary sources to learn more about how markets could provide security services that not only produce less crime at a lower cost, but also provide those services in a peaceful manner.
My first recommendation is Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market, which opens with a chapter entitled “Defense Services on the Free Market.” Right off the bat Rothbard points out the inherent contradiction between property rights and the argument that state-provided police services are a necessary precondition to securing such property rights:
Economists have almost invariably and paradoxically assumed that the market must be kept free by the use of invasive and unfree actions — in short, by governmental institutions outside the market nexus.
In other words, we’re told that state provided police serves a necessary precondition to market activity. But Rothbard points out that many goods and services are indispensable to functioning markets, such as land, food, clothing, and shelter for market participants. Rothbard asks, “must all these goods and services therefore be supplied by the State and the State only?”
No, he answers:
A supply of defense services on the free market would mean maintaining the axiom of a free society, namely, that there be no use of physical force except in defense against those using force to invade person or property. This would imply the complete absence of a State apparatus or government. ... Defense in the free society (including police protection) would therefore have to be supplied by people or firms who (a) gained their revenue voluntarily rather than by coercion and (b) did not — as the State does — arrogate to themselves a compulsory monopoly of police or judicial protection.
Another excellent starting point is Hans Hoppe’s essay The Private Production of Defense. Here Dr. Hoppe makes the case that our long-held belief in collective security is nothing more than a myth, and that in fact state protection of private property — our system of police, courts, and jails — is incompatible with property rights and economic reality.
Speaking at the Mises Institute Brazil in 2011, Dr. Hoppe summarized the fundamental problem with state police services:
The state is ... a monopolist of taxation, i.e., it can unilaterally, without the consent of everyone affected, determine the price that its subjects must pay for the state’s provision of (perverted) law. However, a tax-funded life-and-property protection agency is a contradiction in terms: an expropriating property protector. (emphasis added) Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but equipped with the unique power to tax, state agents will invariably strive to maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work for it, the better off one will be.
Both Rothbard and Hoppe discuss an “insurance” model for preventing crime and aggression, which makes sense from a market perspective. Rothbard posits that private police services likely would be provided by insurance companies which already insure lives and property, for the commonsense reason that “... it would be to their direct advantage to reduce the amount of crime as much as possible.”
Hoppe takes the insurance concept further, arguing that:
The better the protection of insured property, the lower are the damage claims and hence an insurer’s loss. Thus, to provide efficient protection appears to be in every insurer’s own financial interest. ... Obviously, anyone offering protection services must appear able to deliver on his promises in order to find clients. That is, he must possess the economic means — the manpower as well as the physical resources — necessary to accomplish the task of dealing with the dangers, actual or imagined, of the real world. On this count insurance agencies appear to be perfect candidates.
Compare this to the “growth” model of most local police departments, which continuously lobby their city councils for more money and more officers!
Now admittedly the private provision of police and security services is a complex and controversial subject, and we’re only touching on it today. But rest assured that if you read further, both Rothbard and Hoppe address the many common objections raised when discussing private police: attendant issues like political borders; differing legal systems; physical jurisdiction and violence among competing firms; the actuarial problems behind insuring against physical aggression; free riders; and so forth.
Certainly Rothbard and Hoppe’s prescription is radical, and perhaps hard to embrace for the average person who has always conflated security with government.
But, increasingly society is moving in the direction of private security regardless: consider for example, complex insurance networks and indemnification arrangements across borders; private arbitration of disputes; the rise of gated communities and neighborhoods utilizing private security agencies; and fraud prevention mechanisms provided by private businesses like eBay and PayPal.
These trends can only intensify as governments, whether federal, state, or local, increasingly must spend more and more of their budgets to service entitlement, pension, and debt promises.
ConclusionIn conclusion, I’ll simply say that market activity is peaceful activity, while state action always implicitly or expressly involves force. If we want our police to act more like Sheriff Andy Taylor and less like militarized aggressors, we must look to private models — models where our interests are aligned with security providers. Only then can we bring back true“peace” officers, private security providers focused on preventing crime and defusing conflicts in cost effective and peaceful ways.
If we don’t, we may find the line between cops and criminals blurring more and more every day — like the scene with Harvey Keitel in the forgettable 1997 movie City of Industry (which, incidentally, borrows this line from a much better 1942 movie entitled This Gun for Hire, with Alan Ladd playing the Harvey Keitel character).
Looking for a man who killed his brother, Keitel breaks into the house of the man’s girlfriend and holds her at gunpoint, demanding the whereabouts of the killer. She claims ignorance, and asks Keitel why he doesn’t go to the police. After a dramatic pause, where Keitel almost leers at the camera, he responds like Bogart: “I’m my own police.”
Image source: iStockphoto
The recent civil disobedience, rioting, and police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri reminds us of what happens when police states and bad economics are mixed together.
Devastated by decades of ruinous economic policies, the economies of many inner cities continue to languish as the self-ownership of local residents is treated with contempt by the police and any attempt at building a small business-based or wage-based economy is hobbled by government regulation.
The result is a local economy with chronically-unemployed wage earners coupled with entrepreneurs who lack the capital necessary to deal with government regulations. The social consequences of such a situation are dire and lead to a population that lives in the area, but is not invested in it.
Some conservatives have taken to asking why some of the residents are destroying their own neighborhoods through looting and other forms of violence. But of course, even if we make the obvious distinction between looters (a minority of the population) and the non-violent population, these are not “their” neighborhoods in any meaningful sense: the residents have not been allowed to attempt to build local capital or even have control over their own bodies.
Policing and Self-OwnershipThe killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by Ferguson police is just one of countless stories we see daily in which police use overwhelming force against unarmed citizens. The police, in the aftermath, only receive raises and huge pensions. Indeed, year after year, the cost and scope of police forces grow higher and higher while the quality of service (the percentage of murders solved has dropped from 91 percent to 61 percent since 1963) continues to go down.
This is exactly what we should expect from an organization that enjoys a total monopoly within its jurisdiction and simultaneously is the last word in whether or not it will be held accountable for the cost or quality of its work. The same organization that controls the police, controls the courts, and also has the power to tax. Consequently, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has noted, the state at all levels is an “agency that unilaterally fixes the price that private citizens must pay for the state’s service as ultimate judge and enforcer of law and order.”
Murray Rothbard has explored the nature of non-monopolist policing, and how it would much more effectively protect private property. But in today’s world, the average citizen, and especially the low-income average citizen, has virtually no influence over policing decisions and, in cases of abuse, he has little hope of assistance from those who control the police.
All citizens of modern nation-states are subject to police forces of this sort, but the aggressiveness of police in American inner cities has been shown to be far greater and with much higher likelihood of arrest of citizens for minor non-violent offenses ranging from smoking a joint to jaywalking.
The expansion of police prerorgatives has accelerated in recent decades, first with the “War on Drugs,” and then with the “War on Terrorism,” both of which have resulted in what we see today in the form of heavily militarized police forces, asset forfeiture, and an endless list of federal laws that bring long jail sentences, even when no criminal intent is proven.
As the prerogatives and wealth of the police expand, the personal freedoms and self-ownership of citizens continues to shrink, but nowhere is this felt more keenly than in low-income areas.
The War on Drugs has likely been the greatest catalyst for this, since as Ludwig von Mises explained, once it is established that the state can regulate what one puts into one’s body, there are no grounds left on which to oppose other intrusions of the state.
Thanks largely to the War on Drugs, the police, in addition to enjoying a total legal monopoly on force, have become essentially unrestrained in questioning and detaining citizens. Once upon a time, the idea of it being a crime to merely possess a non-weapon like marijuana or cocaine would have been considered ludicrous. But today, any citizen at any time can be suspected of carrying an illegal substance, and subject to being questioned and detained.
This ever-present justification for disrupting the daily lives of peaceful private citizens perhaps does more to foster an environment of violence and suspicion than anything else. Not surprisingly, no-knock raids, aggressive questioning, frisking, and pointless arrests provide ample (and totally unnecessary) opportunities for interactions between police and citizens to turn violent.
The Destruction of Inner-City EconomiesNaturally, the effects of such a state of affairs on the local economy are not good. Citizens who are constantly in danger of losing wages due to arrest or fines, or who may have their assets seized (without any due process) can hardly be expected to acquire much capital or develop a low time preference in the same way as people who are relatively free of repeated police harassment. Certainly, citizens who develop a criminal record for petty non-violent offenses will see economic opportunities severely limited, and act accordingly.
But even if one manages to escape the frequent harassment of street police, the constraints placed on average citizens by an ever-expanding regime of economic regulations hobble economies everywhere, and are especially damaging in places that already lack capital such as Ferguson.
The narrative among conservatives is that welfare, by distorting the incentive structure, has ruined the economies of the inner cities. This is true to an extent, but the problem is far more fundamental than this. This is not simply a matter of people choosing not to work (although that is often the case), this is a matter of people being excluded — by law — from participation in the economic system.
The most notable aspects of this are the minimum wage and the high cost of entry for small business into the economy.
For many residents of inner cities, entering the economy as an entrepreneur or wage earner is out-and-out illegal. In a place like Ferguson, a young person is prevented from working full time during much of his youth thanks to mandatory school attendance laws. If he misses school, he and his parents are harassed by police, and possibly arrested and left to face economic ruin. Upon graduating, the young person, thanks to the public schools, then faces the world with few marketable skills.
He is employable at some level, but as a low-productivity worker, the only entry-level wage he can command is at a level below the minimum wage. In this situation, federal law dictates that he shall remain unemployed indefinitely. Consequently, unemployment among black teenagers is over 20 percent. Common sense tells us that the best way a new public-school grad can attain any marketable skills is by working at a job. And yet, these jobs are all closed to him by law.
If our public-school grad then attempts to turn to legal self-employment, he will find himself similarly out of luck because the cost of entry into the economy as a small business owner has been raised to a largely-unattainable level by government regulation. Licensing, and compliance with OSHA, EEOC, forced “tolerance,” and a bevy of other regulations render the small business avenue closed for someone in such a community. Even if such a person manages to somehow acquire an automobile in spite of all the licenses, taxes, and certifications required, he can’t even rent out the car or drive customers for money without special permission from the government. Certainly some people are able to come from within the community and succeed under these conditions, but if your economy requires near-heroic levels of perseverance and luck just to open a burger stand, there is something deeply wrong with your economy.
How can we be the least surprised, then, when people in these communities simply give up or turn to black markets (i.e., illegal entrepreneurship such as drug dealing) to make a living?
Further complicating the situation is the fact that wage earners and entrepreneurs face a community stripped of capital in recent decades by damaging federal laws. During the 1970s and 1980s, federal “anti-segregation” mandates such as forced bussing meant that the middle classes fled the cities, and took their capital with them, leaving workers behind, but not capital. Both racial and economic segregation became worse, and worker productivity plummeted. The government’s solution of course, was not to deregulate, but to distribute welfare funds in amounts too low to provide a decent standard of living, but just high enough to prevent widespread revolt against the political system.
ConclusionNaturally, this economic gutting of the inner cities, fostered by federal, state, and local laws, led to crime. But what has the response of both national policy makers and local “leaders” been? It most certainly has not been to call for the legalization of low-skill labor (lowering the minimum wage) or the empowerment of local entrepreneurs (by lowering taxes and eliminating regulations). No, the answer is always more police, more government, more regulation, and more welfare. Michael Brown and many like him have paid the price for this dead-end strategy. Freeing inner cities from militarized police forces is a good start, but government is destroying these communities in many ways, and police brutality is just one of them.
Image source: iStockphoto
Editor’s note: this is a transcript of this interview, courtesy of The Tom Woods Show.
TOM WOODS: This book Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto is getting plaudits from everybody. Charles Goyette likes it, Ron Paul likes it, I like it. Everybody who reads it seems to be thrilled with it. It’s readable in the sense that it’s got interesting, compelling, punchy prose. It’s packed with information, and it’s short enough that the length of it is not daunting. It doesn’t put people off. By the way, length of books does not always put people off. It amazes me how many people read The Creature from Jekyll Island. It amazes G. Edward Griffin how many people read that book. But all the more will read a book of this length. I am really pleased about it.
So I want to continue our conversation because we peeled away only a few layers of the onion last time, and I want to start off with a concept that we talked about on this program just a couple of weeks ago in connection with Teddy Roosevelt. We had the author of a little book called American Fascist talking about Teddy Roosevelt, and I wanted to give him a chance to show that his use of the word fascism was not just hyperbole. That even though we’re not necessarily talking about Hitler himself, there are ideas in fascism that are present to a greater or lesser extent in various regimes. What are you talking about when you say American fascism? What do you have in mind?
LEW ROCKWELL: Well, of course, as you and your interviewee pointed out, fascism comes from the Progressive Era. It’s not a coincidence that Teddy Roosevelt came to power in that time, and this is when Mussolini developed his ideas. This is before Hitler. So fascism antedates Hitler, and it’s not just an epithet. It is an actual, maybe not a very systematic, but it’s definitely an ideological system, a political system, and an economic system. Mussolini himself said really it’s better described as corporatism than fascism because they represented the melding of state power and corporate power, of course, under the politicians and applied against everybody else in society. So what is fascism? And I think the American system, certainly Teddy Roosevelt had his fascist impulses.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was entirely fascist. It really was ripped off from Mussolini, and it benefited the big companies that were in cahoots with the federal government—hurt all the companies and the consumers and everybody else who was not in cahoots, and it set out to change American capitalism, and they didn’t do it. So now I would say there have been many, many advances in fascism. The fact that we don’t have death camps is not a refutation that the American political and economic system is not fascist. So it’s the corporate state. It’s a combination of the welfare state, of massive regulation of business, of hatred of the other—in our case maybe it’s Muslims, Islamists and so forth who allegedly justify total surveillance and total control of the American population. It’s government that—in Mussolini’s case it was the labor unions, big business, and government in a combine. Thank goodness in our own country the labor unions are not a significant force anymore and are becoming less and less. But nevertheless, we have big corporations and big government cooperating together against the rest of us. It also involves militarism. Unfortunately most people accept as just the norm, the worship of the police and the military and the so-called first responders. That’s entirely a fascist impulse. The idea that we’re supposed to think that these are higher-level beings, they are far better and more significant people than just regular, what Will Grigg calls “the mundanes.” That it should be—and it’s perfectly plausible and really moral that it’s a far more serious crime to, say, touch your elbow to a cop who’s arresting you, and therefore you’re resisting arrest, than it would ever be to touch a regular person with your elbow by mistake. It’s the glorification. It’s the constant warfare system, the constant wars going on everywhere—Mussolini, Hitler, Teddy Roosevelt all believed that war was in some sense the highest result of civilization, that not only was the flowering of civilization—war—but that it advanced civilization. Well, it advances something, not of course civilization. So the constant wars, the constant militarism, military worship, and planning by the government and the big corporations of all of economic life, and then we have the total surveillance state, and we have unfortunately what is still, as compared to some other regimes, a soft fascism, but it’s becoming increasingly hard, and it’s more than slightly alarming.
On the other hand, I think there’s more and more, especially young people are becoming awakened to what the American system is, what it’s become, how their own lives are being stunted by it, their own economic possibilities in the future—and Ron Paul, of course, is the major factor in this.
All the ideas of the great libertarians and Austrians, Murray Rothbard and everybody else, they are, of course, the foundation for all of this. But Ron by all of his work has awakened the young people not only in this country but all around the world as to the importance of freedom, how it’s being attacked, and why we don’t want a corporate state, a fascist state. Why it goes against every value of decency, and religion, and the Golden Rule, and it just is an attack on, of course, private property, which is the real basis of civilization, of course, not war. You don’t actually have, for the most part, government ownership of the means of production, that is, you have the TVA. You have the VA single payer socialized medical system.
There are some aspects of the American economy that are classically socialist, but mostly private ownership remains in the hands of the private sector. Control is increasingly in the hands of the government, so that whatever government agency we look at, whether it’s the EPA, or the IRS, or OSHA, or the Treasury Department, the Interior Department, all of them, are massively increasing in power, and business people today have to worry first and foremost not what their customers are thinking and might want, but what is the government thinking and what might the government do to them. So they spend vast resources, vast amounts of time that should go into new products and services to attract the consumer and satisfy consumer wants, go into worrying about the government. Hans Hoppe met recently with, I won’t name him, but an important billionaire who’s interested in Hans’s ideas, and he had a lot of the businessmen associated with him, and Hans said all of them were terrified of the government. They were very, very concerned about what might happen to them. For example, if they spoke out, and I think this is what’s—this is the kind of country that we’ve developed. It is a fascist system. On the other hand, it’s sort of theglorification of falsehood so that there’s—and we do have the truth on our side, so that’s, of course, extremely important, and I actually think the future can be bright just because of young people resisting this system. They don’t like the surveillance. They don’t like the wars. Paulianism is spreading. Also, the ideas of anarcho-capitalism are spreading. There have been more attacks on private-property anarchism, libertarian anarchism, or as Murray Rothbard called it, anarcho-capitalism, than I think has ever, certainly in my lifetime, I have ever seen.
The media, whether it’s the New York Times down to Salon or up from Salon, or whatever, many of them, the New Republic, many of these publications and intellectuals, public intellectuals, are attacking our ideas. If they didn’t worry about us, of course, they wouldn’t bother to attack. They are worried about it. They are worried about its appeal to young people. They are worried about the fact that young people and Ron Paul made it possible for conservatives to be antiwar. Everybody had been brainwashed from the time of Bill Buckley that if you weren’t pro-war, you were pro-communist. You were just the worst kind of bad guy. We had to be at war everywhere all the time, and that’s the right way. Of course, it’s not the right way. It’s obviously not the right way. War is, I would argue, nothing but mass murder, and it’s not a good idea. Thank goodness most of us are not equipped to go kill people. It’s why veterans don’t ever want to talk about whatever happened to them. They don’t want to talk about what they were forced to do—what they saw. It’s so horrifying, and it affects them badly for the rest of their lives. It’s why we see so many suicides among veterans, suicides among troops. And then, of course, there’s all the people who are being killed. We’re only supposed to worry about American casualties. For example, I saw something on Drudgethe other day talking about, you know, was Iraq worth it, sorry I don’t have the figures exactly, but something like 4,800 Americans killed—68,000 wounded. But, of course, there probably have been a million people killed in Iraq. The British medical journal Lancet had a very, very good study of this. This is some years ago. It’s certainly hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocents, people with their arms and legs blown off among the ones who are still surviving. People’s homes destroyed, businesses destroyed, and now, of course, in Iraq we see the alleged al Qaeda taking over and hilariously the Iraqi army just taking their uniforms off and getting out. They don’t want to kill. They don’t want to be killed.
So many, many interesting things happening in the world. The state is actually having trouble. They believe, of course, that everything can be solved by the gun at the head. So all of that takes care of everything. If they have the power to put a gun to your head, that will just solve everything. But of course, it doesn’t solve everything, even for the state. They require people’s active consent, or at least passive consent for what they are doing. That consent, I would argue, is evaporating, especially among young people. They are worried about the ideas of freedom. So I think, as Murray points out, all throughout human history there’s been the struggle between power and market. This is nothing new. It’s a struggle that will never be won this side of heaven, I’m afraid. But certainly we can make progress. We can reduce the amount of evil in the world, and the state, I would argue, is mankind’s greatest earthly enemy. There are spiritual enemies that are more important, but from the standpoint of human enemies, it’s the state, and so I think there’s every reason to look forward to the future because of young people—and also some of us older people are waking up, too, to what’s been done.
Fred Reed did a wonderful column the other day about how many veterans are waking up to the fact that they were used. They weren’t actually serving the country, protecting freedom, and all the rest of the lies that are told. They were misused, and they were misused for terrible and evil things. So I think people are waking up. The Internet continues to be very important as much as the government is trying to restrict it, and people are reading, people are learning. I think libertarianism is spreading, and I think it worries the bad guys, and that’s a good thing, because they should be worried.
WOODS: Lew, I had Bob Higgs on some months ago on the program, and he’s an example of somebody whose thought really did evolve over the years. He was always a limited-government libertarian, but I asked him: you’ve obviously really radicalized over the past five to ten years; what happened? And he said that it finally hit him — and I might add parenthetically, it’s very, very rare for an academic to really have second thoughts about anything. You just double down for your whole career. But he said that as he was doing scholarly work in the field of economics and sometimes economic history, he was describing the state in ways that he realized had no connection to reality at all. He was going along with the standard academic approach to the state, and he realized that this is not how the state is. These are not the state’s motivations. The state is not composed of the sorts of people that the theorists assume that it is. So he’s just abandoned it completely, and he’s entirely a Rockwellian at this point, entirely a Rothbardian in his outlook. And his Facebook updates are some of the best parts of my day, sometimes, even though they can be depressing.
On the military issue, sometimes you and I feel like we’re making a lot of progress, and we certainly are. But one thing that deflates me is the ubiquity of the military worship. It is everywhere. It’s in every sector of society. The military people get discounts on coffee. They get discounts on sandwiches. They get special consideration when they board a plane, and even the progressives, the ones who are supposed to be antiwar, will lamely clap for them on the airplane. And look, I’m sorry: I am just not clapping. And the conservatives, by the way, the conservatives will be against some regulatory agencies, and this regulatory agency is a bunch of thugs, and we don’t like these government employees, but this other branch of government employees can do no wrong. You’ve got to stand up and salute. You’ve got to applaud. They are sacrificing for our freedoms. These pieties are repeated even by people who ostensibly oppose the wars. Thanks for your service. What are you talking about? Am I living in an Orwell novel? What can we do about this?
ROCKWELL: You know, as Joe Sobran pointed out, conservatives are against government programs unless they involve killing people.
WOODS: Yeah. (laughs)
ROCKWELL: So this is what the state specializes in. In fact, I think people who are killers or who enjoy sending others to kill are attracted to the state. Maybe they become hit men for the mafia, but mostly they become politicians, and they actually enjoy starting wars. They enjoy having people killed. They are some people who feel that people like FDR or Bob Dole, who are themselves disabled, sometimes have an impulse. They don’t mind sending strong, young guys off to be mutilated. That they actually like it. So it’s very, very unfortunate. The military worship is, yes, I have never seen anything like it in my life. America’s always been a very militaristic country. It’s not true, for example, that veterans were spit upon when they came back from Vietnam. That’s all just a lie. I can tell you. I was there. The idea that hippies were being nasty to veterans who could beat them up—just, believe me, it didn’t happen. Even then the veterans were exempt, and the troops were exempt from people who always wanted to blame the government. Although, if we listen to Ron Paul’s favorite antiwar song, “The Universal Soldier,”it couldn’t happen without the soldiers. If the soldiers refuse to kill, the whole war operation comes to a halt. It doesn’t matter how big Lockheed-Martin or the rest of these munitions manufacturers are. It doesn’t matter how many people at the Pentagon. They need the soldiers.
So good for Bowe Bergdahl — the guy who apparently sought to change his job, or as they put it in militaryspeak, desert. And he didn’t want to kill anymore, and he didn’t want to be part of the killing, and of course, he didn’t want to be killed, either. They term that cowardice. Although it seems to me a perfectly healthy and normal reaction. So there’s a tremendous amount of propagandizing that goes on. The military training, in fact, as Fred Reed pointed out, consists largely in attempting to suppress the conscience. That’s the job of the chaplains in the military: to suppress the conscience. If we can think of the basic libertarian insight about government, it’s allowed to do everything that we know among ourselves in the private world are crimes. Say an escaped criminal is hiding in somebody’s apartment building. You can’t just bomb the apartment building to get the guy. The state calls it collateral damage. You can’t commit murder. Murder is a crime even if you’re wearing a government uniform. So maybe we have a hope of at least some of these soldiers realizing that they’re being sent out to commit crimes. And of course, they come back with all of these horrible mental problems, and obviously physical problems a lot of times, too. Then we see the government promoting the hiring of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan as police because they will have the right attitude towards the people—which is, of course, not to protect and serve but to control. This is why they have the militarization, the uniforms, the military vehicles that they have, the military weapons—all designed against the people. So the state always fears its own people most. It doesn’t actually fear the Russkies or whoever is the enemy of the moment. It always fears the people, which is why all the propaganda is aimed at us, and of course, as in this military worship, it’s successful. But America, I am sorry to say, has always been a hotbed of military worship. It’s one of the faults of our country.
WOODS: Well Lew, in our society you don’t win any popularity contests by saying that maybe, just maybe, the troops might bear some moral responsibility here. I do understand that there is so much propaganda that it’s possible that somebody could really not know, not understand the moral significance of what he is doing. But that can go only so far. If you’re going to sign up for a job that you know involves killing people, you’ve got at least crack open a book. You’ve got to look at the history of the area that you’re going to bomb, have some remote sense of what’s going on there. I have distant relatives who have been in the military who have not got the first clue about anything in the world other than the U.S. is great and rah, rah, rah.
You mentioned “The Universal Soldier.” I am sure you will recall at Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic in 2008 he had Aimee Allen sing that song because he has always appreciated that song. Then in his own remarks—I was really moved by this—he said that he sometimes looked back on his own time as a flight surgeon in the military and asked himself, “Was I the universal soldier?” That in my own small way, I enabled this. Maybe I should have just said no to the whole thing. And again, how unusual is it for somebody in his ’70s to look back and say, in public no less, maybe I did something that was seriously wrong, and I looked back on it, and I wish I had it to do over again.
ROCKWELL: And this, by the way, is a man who became a physician so he would never be called upon to kill people for the government. Ron was interested in many—he might have become another kind of scientist. He might have done many other things. He might have become a businessman, a successful businessman, too, but that’s why he became a doctor. So that was his—of course, this comes about through introspection. I don’t think you—of course, obviously I am for reading books—your book, my book, many of Rothbard’s. It’s essential. But can we also know from introspection? Isn’t this the Catholic doctrine of the natural law? Certain things are written on the human heart by God. One of them is, it’s not a good thing to kill people. Murder is a problem. It’s why these kids get brainwashed. A lot of times, because of the Fed and other government economic policies, they don’t have any kind of economic future in the private economy, or that’s what they feel, and so they joined for that reason. If something is in your economic interest, of course, it’s very easy to think it’s okay, and everybody is trained to believe that anybody who is resisting the U.S. is an untermensch who deserves to be killed, deserves to have his throat slit, and that’s true of his wife and children and his grandparents and so forth, too. They made the mistake of Leonard Peikoff, the horrible guy who is Ayn Rand’s successor as the head of the Ayn Rand Institute, who said you can kill everybody. He was for nuking all Arabs, and I guess he still is, but he was arguing for this. And he was asked the question about non-combatants. He said they are living in that country; therefore, they are responsible.
WOODS: Yeah, so he takes the leftist view that just by standing somewhere, you’ve consented to the regime. That’s the most totalitarian view of all, and also, from some of these official Randians — I don’t want to get complaints from ordinary Objectivists; I’m talking about the official mouthpieces of various Objectivist organizations — we hear repeatedly the use of the term “terrorist countries.” Now, these are the same people who call themselves individualists, and yet they speak in this horrifying collective about “terrorist countries.” And then, as you say, repeatedly you see Objectivist scholars saying we should not worry for a moment about collateral damage. And this is the school that portrays itself as the philosophy of reason. Heaven help us!
ROCKWELL: (laughs) No, of course, it’s true. And if we’re going to start to talk about terrorist countries, I don’t think you’re talking about the country, but terrorist regimes — why isn’t the U.S. right at the top of the list? If we think of the U.S.’s official definition of terrorism — and by the way, it has to be non-state. They start right off by saying it’s a non-state thing, terrorism. And it’s the use of violence or the threat of violence against civilian populations and civilian targets to attempt to bring about political change. Well, what’s the U.S. doing in all its wars? I mean, ordering all the drones and so forth, and when they bomb a wedding party, they feel that they can just give the surviving families a couple thousand dollars, and that’s fine. And everybody is trained to think it doesn’t matter. They are gooks. They are not really human. So it’s a horrendous—the National Socialists didn’t invent this sort of attitude. Maybe it’s always been present in the human heart, along with some other bad things.
WOODS: It’s intensified by the state.
ROCKWELL: Well, the state, of course, lives off it. This is the source of the state’s power. That and the drive towards egalitarianism is another one. But war, yes, it’s famously said war is the health of the state. War is sort of the foundation of the state. War is the essence of the state. I always find it interesting that there’s so many troops in Washington, D.C., that they are only allowed—they are ordered, in fact—that you must, of course, wear your uniform on Tuesday, but not the other days of the week, because if all the soldiers and Marines, and Navy guys, and Air Force guys wore their uniforms every day, the place would look like an armed camp. And of course it is an armed camp, and it’s engaged in what Jack Douglas calls the annihilation of nations. Look what they’ve done to Iraq and Afghanistan. We even hear rumors about a possible first strike using atomic weapons against Russia to eliminate them once and for all as one of the few countries that’s actually challenging the U.S. desire to rule the globe through global domination. Certainly, many, many political leaders and dictators have been accused of wanting to rule the globe, and maybe they all do, but very few of them have had the wherewithal. The U.S. government actually has the wherewithal and has pretty much achieved it, world domination and world rule, and I guess they want to rule the solar system and the universe, too. But the two countries that are giving them trouble and not obeying are China and Russia. So there are people who in the evil Herman Kahn’s neocon view think the unthinkable. That is this sort of routine use of atomic weapons against civilian populations as a way to control opposition in other countries.
Bob Higgs has said in a tremendous talk to the Mises University last summer at the Mises Institute —and you can see it online at Mises.org — he thought the U.S. state was actually capable of exterminating life on Earth. They were actually so crazy as well as evil with all their—just to take one aspect: in Fort Dietrich, Maryland there’s this vast government enterprise, and there are others in other parts of the country, too, that exist only to create deadly diseases. And there’s a bunch of government scientists right now who are engaging in attempting to restore the Spanish flu virus that came about as a result of World War I and that killed 50 million people. That’s sort of erased from history and from people’s memories because the whole thing was so unbelievably horrendous in this country, too, by the way. I had people from my family in those days died from this, too, and I think this was true of almost every American family. So these scientists funded by the government are attempting to bring this virus back. Only the government would do that. You can’t imagine a private company doing that. This is the government. So they produce biological weapons. They produce chemical weapons. There have even been efforts to bring about diseases and bacteria that would attack different ethnic groups like Arabs or whatever. So Dr. Evil doesn’t quite describe these people.
WOODS: Lew, early on, before they launched the war in Afghanistan, we know that there was a slide show that was shown to Condi Rice and Rumsfeld, and it was called “Thinking Outside the Box: Poison the Food Supply.” This was just considered a possible policy option that they might consider. As we’ve been talking it’s occurred to me that very often we hear people say, I believe in the free market, but the one issue where I just had trouble coming on board with you guys was foreign policy, was war. That was the last hurdle for me, and then when I finally saw it, then I joined with you guys. Isn’t it funny? And that was true for me, too, by the way. But isn’t it funny that it should be that way? That we’ve been so bamboozled by the state that the worst thing that it does is the thing we have the most difficulty letting go of. Why shouldn’t war be the first thing that we see as wrong? And then the minimum wage be the last one? Isn’t it funny that it goes the other way?
ROCKWELL: Yeah, it is funny, and I can remember one of the first acts of the Bush regime when it attacked Iraq was to bomb and destroy every single waste treatment facility in the country.
WOODS: Right.
ROCKWELL: In order to cause disease, in order to make sure that the water couldn’t be pure. It’s why, of course, long before there was a military attack, baby food, medicine, all kinds of things were banned from being exported to Iraq. So this is the fabled sanctions, which are also evil, which also violate the moral law. Another way to think of anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism is the state and its employees are not above the moral law. The moral law applies to them just as much as it does to the rest of us. This is very difficult for people to accept. Even clergymen have a difficult time. In fact, some of the worst defenders of the war system are some of the clergy.
WOODS: Oh, yeah. And that’s been true for a long time. Even the progressive Social Gospel clergy were so in favor of World War I, the rhetoric would shock you.
ROCKWELL: No, it’s true. Of course, they were all in favor of it, and they actually thought it would build the Kingdom of God on Earth. Rothbard writes a lot about this in his history of thought and otherwise. But they thought that building the Kingdom of God on Earth can be done by the state, and the most important and best thing the state did was to kill people. So that would bring the reign of God. Well, not quite. So it’s the reign of the devil or something that they’re actually promoting.
Image source: iStockphoto
“Every man,” argued the philosopher William Godwin, “has a certain sphere of discretion, which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.” Market anarchists agree with Godwin and thus oppose the state simply as one specific example of invasion or aggression against peaceful individuals. After all, by definition, governments must aggress against innocents just to exist. As soon as we subject government to the same moral rules and standards to which we subject every other individual or group, we see at once that government is the foremost lawbreaker and evildoer acting in society. As Murray Rothbard argued in his classic libertarian manifesto For a New Liberty, since we “make no exceptions” to general morality for the state, we must “simply think of the State as a criminal band,” an organization of plunder seizing tribute from peaceful, productive society. The state presents us with no good or compelling reason why it ought to enjoy the prerogative of killing, stealing, and doling out special privileges to its courtiers at the expense of legitimate free market actors. Presented with a nation blighted by the sequelæ of past state misdeeds, our overlords nevertheless assure us that the only way forward is to entrust the political elite with more power still.
The glaringly contradictory logic of such a course of action was percipiently noted by the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay when he wrote, “The calamities arising from the collection of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists are to be remedied by collecting it in the hands of one great capitalist, who has no conceivable motive to use it better than other capitalists, the all-devouring state.” Macaulay, anticipating the public choice theory of politics, understood that the state is a human institution, that the individuals who make it up and brandish its enormous power are motivated by all the same impulses and incentives that drive the rest of us. If, for good reason, we generally distrust the concentrated power wielded by coercive monopolies, we ought to avoid at all costs placing more power in the state, the ultimate embodiment of monopoly — indeed the source of all monopoly power. When statists of all stripes — progressives, socialists, “liberals,” etc., — propose to empower the state further, clamoring for more laws and regulations, they aggravate the problem that they propose to remedy, short-circuiting more and more of the competitive pressures that are in point of fact the only effective safeguard against the abuse and concentration of power. Anarchists instead propose an economic system of pure voluntary exchange, a real free market within which the one and only way to amass any economic power is to serve consumers consistently and responsively. Contrast such a system to the American fascism which governs the United States today. In his new book, Against the State, Lew Rockwell writes, “Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.” There is no denying that the foregoing definition of fascism provides an accurate description of conditions now prevalent in the United States.
The anarchist, having established that the state is a war on and the principal obstacle to a free and peaceful society, suggests the “utopian” notion of simply not permitting a glorified mafia to prey on the innocent. Anarchism, therefore, is hardly a provocative, pie in the sky notion, and is hardly the straw man put up by its statist opponents. Neither is it advocacy for chaos and lawlessness, which much better describe a system in which justice is meted out arbitrarily and unevenly, in which American citizens can be murdered without due process, and constitutional protections reveal themselves as the impotent parchment guarantees they are. Because it undermines the fascist, Washington, DC-instituted status quo, the free-market anarchism that we espouse will be fighting an uphill battle for as far as the eye can see. As Rothbard wrote, “[S]pecial interests and ruling elites will not surrender their ill-gotten gains so readily. They will fight like hell to keep it. Libertarianism is not a message of treacle and Camelot: it is a message of struggle.” Lacking the money, power, or connections of the ruling power elite, anarchists must be content to approach that struggle with the strength of our ideas — propitiously, when it comes to those, we have the upper hand.
Image source: iStockphoto.
When it comes to your local police, there is no shopping around, there is no customer service, and there is no choice, writes Jeff Deist. This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Allan Davis.
This audio Mises Daily is the transcript from a talk delivered at the 2014 Houston Mises Circle.
Jeff Deist and Marc J. Victor discuss what's happening in Ferguson, our disappearing legal rights, and how having Butler Shaffer as a law professor radicalized him and shaped his libertarian views.
Volume 17, no. 2 (Summer)Book ReviewGun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State”Stephen P. HalbrookOakland: The Independent Institute, 2013, 248 pgs.
How did Hitler do it? There is no shortage of theories or writings related to the rise of the Third Reich and the subsequent Holocaust. Halbrook, however, offers a compelling and important account of the role of gun control in aiding Hitler’s goals of exterminating the Jews and other “enemies of the state.” While much of the early gun prohibition was created with supposedly good intent, Halbrook carefully and meticulously details how a change in political regime was all it took for some well-intentioned gun registration laws and other prohibitions to be used in ways never intended. The Third Reich was able to further its agenda due to available gun prohibition, and continued to expand such prohibition to aid in achieving its desired goals.Audrey D. Kline (audrey.kline@louisville.edu) is associate professor of economics, University of Louisville College of Business is associate professor of economics, University of Louisville College of Business
Students of this period of history as well as Second Amendment (and other) gun rights enthusiasts, will find this a fascinating book, and will find parallels between gun prohibition in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany and attempts to prohibit types of gun ownership and implement other forms of gun control in the United States today. For example, Connecticut began requiring registration of certain firearms and magazines by January 1, 2014. Those who had not registered were told to surrender, get rid of, or make their firearms inoperable, or run the risk of facing felony charges. It remains to be seen how this will play out in Connecticut or in other states following this path. While gun control advocates have over time consistently minimized the role of gun control in the Nazi regime, even the United States Congress must have recognized its role given its explicit wording that forbade the registration of firearms by individuals when it passed the Property Requisition Act in 1941 (p. xvii).
While Halbrook is careful to point out that a combination of factors led to the events of the Holocaust, there is no denying that many of the pre-war activities—activities that are being discussed and implemented in some states and nationally in the United States today—contributed to Hitler’s ability to disarm targeted groups, facilitating his campaign against the Jews. Of course, many purport that the Holocaust arose out of a unique series of events that could never be repeated. Others are less certain. Halbrook steers clear of the debate, other than to note its existence and the folly of ignoring history. Instead, Halbrook lays out a well-documented analysis of four distinct periods leading up to and including the rise of the Third Reich, and the gun control laws that accompanied these periods in history. It is an astonishingly fresh and important look at this historical period, if for no other reason than to raise the question as to why no other research on the Third Reich and the Holocaust has addressed the role of gun control in the tragedies that occurred. The rapid pace with which Hitler disarmed the populace in Germany is astonishing. Halbrook’s account is gripping, thorough, and full of legal documentation, leading the reader through the sometimes-daily changes in gun prohibitions that furthered Hitler’s agenda.
Halbrook breaks the book into four distinct historical periods. First, Part I spans from the start of the Weimar Republic (1918–1938) to its decline and the imminent rise of the Nazi party. This is the period when Germany first introduced gun control, requiring registration of firearms. At the close of this time span, confiscation of firearms was made law. Part II, reviewing circumstances in 1933, details the rise of Hitler and the use of Nazi power to confiscate firearms from political adversaries and the Jews. Part III examines the following five years of repression, which included instituting more gun control laws, such as outlawing issuance of gun permits to Jews and other “enemies of the state.” Finally, Part IV reviews how existing gun control facilitated the disarming of Germany’s Jews. Ultimately, the prohibitions enacted by the Nazi regime led to monopoly control of firearms by the Nazis and eliminated the ability of many groups in society to defend themselves. Halbrook offers further episodes of gun control in the conclusion, detailing how two decades of gun control unfolded during World War II.
In the opening Part I of the book, a chaotic post WW I Germany is the backdrop, a time in which there were no established policies or laws pertaining to firearm ownership. Concern about firearms not being turned in after the war and conflict between extremist groups and the government led to the implementation of initially well-intentioned gun control laws. It was never envisioned that the laws aimed at controlling extremists would ultimately contribute to the citizenry most likely to defend democracy being disarmed and unable to defend itself. However, well-meaning clauses in the laws were subsequently used to provide the government with complete control over gun ownership, creating registries of gun and ammunition ownership, which ultimately fell into the hands of the Nazis. These lists were methodically used to disarm any citizens who were deemed enemies of the state, particularly the Jews. Through the first three chapters of the book, Halbrook does a masterful job of detailing the ever-changing gun control policies, ranging from the most extreme (execution on the spot) to the postured “relaxation” of gun control laws that allowed possession of very expensive long arms that would not be affordable for the majority of the population.
Part II of the book opens with the naming of Hitler as chancellor of Germany at the end of January 1933, and the immediate utilization of the Weimar gun control policies to begin the Nazi campaign to seize arms and eradicate the so-called “enemies of the state” (all of whom were tagged as Communists). All political parties were under attack by the Nazis, culminating in a manufactured report that Communists planned to attack the Nazis (pp. 51–52). Enemies of the state included Jews and gypsies, as well. As a result, less than a month later, Hitler and Göring convinced President Hindenburg that an emergency decree was needed, which ultimately gave the Nazis the ability to suspend the
constitutional guarantees of personal liberty, free expression of opinion, freedom of the press, and the rights to assemble and form associations. Secrecy of postal and telephonic communication was suspended, and the government was authorized to conduct search and seizure operations of homes. (p. 52)
This carte blanche for search and seizure essentially became the modus operandi of the Third Reich. By the end of March, Hitler had succeeded in passing the “Enabling Law” which gave him the ability to create laws as he wished, with no requirement for consultation (p. 60). Following this, the confiscation of weapons escalated, with continued fabrication of “confessions” by enemies of the state. Municipal governments were informed that all military weapons and ammunition had to be surrendered by the end of March. The Jews were targeted next, with a large raid in East Berlin on April 4, 1933. Jews were not forbidden to own firearms until 1938, but the raid led to confiscations and arrests (pp. 64–65). Halbrook relates one account after another about the methodical declarations of requirements to turn over weapons to any group or class that was deemed a potential threat, including some of Germany’s own veterans of World War I. The 1928 Firearms Law was utilized to identify the so-called enemies of the state, locate them, interview them, and subsequently confiscate their weapons. Enemies of the state ultimately included anyone in disagreement with the new regime (p. 84). Numerous examples are provided of the ever-increasing efforts to brand large portions of the population “enemies of the state,” thereby increasing Nazi control and eliminating private ownership of firearms from the majority of society.
Part III of the book details episodes of enforcement and expansion of gun prohibition by Hitler’s regime. To mark the one-year anniversary of Hitler’s power, the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich was passed in January 1934. This served to centralize control over all police, and ultimately led to the replacement of the SA with the SS. Upon the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler assumed the presidency as well, allowing him the ability to rule by decree (p. 101). Thus, Hitler could declare law without any process and there was no right of appeal for those arrested. The military pledged allegiance to Hitler and the citizenry was instructed to follow Hitler’s decrees.
Confiscated firearms were redistributed to the police and concentration camp guards. The number of searches and arrests continued to escalate, and with the adoption of the Nürnberg Laws in September 1935, Germans or those with “kindred blood” were decreed as citizens, leaving the Jews without citizenship and consequently, without civil rights (p. 106). A new weapons law was drafted in November that would also forbid Jews from operating in the firearms industry. Though not yet enacted, the draft opened the door for the theft of the gun manufacturing company, Simson & Co., by Hitler, who claimed that the Jewish owners were guilty of fraud. Additional accounts are given of exploitation of various incidents to further the Nazi campaign against the Jews. This usually included misrepresenting facts when Nazi party members were killed to drum up support for the anti-Jewish sentiment expressed by the Nazis, including the instigation of the Kristallnacht (p. 118).
The Nazis’ control of the use and ownership of firearms was quickly implemented and was far-reaching, with refinements to the Weapons Law continuing over the next few years. Eventually, in April 1938, Jews were required to register their personal assets (if over 5,000 marks). Just a few months later, Jews were required to register at local police stations to receive identification cards. Jews began to flee Berlin and other parts of Germany, as they were able.
In the concluding section of the book, Reichskristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) is detailed. Jews had been systematically disarmed, and their identity and locations now on file with local police. It was simply a matter of time before the full shift into deportation and extermination of the Jews would begin. Records indicate that a campaign to arrest legally registered Jewish owners of firearms was now underway, along with the push by the Nazis to pressure Jews to flee Germany. German (Jew) Alfred Flatlow, an Olympic gold medalist for Germany, appears to have been arrested in 1938 while standing in line (with others) at the police station to surrender firearms as had been ordered. His arrest record indicates the incident as political, which gave him no right to appeal and allowed the Gestapo to hold him indefinitely. Another Jew, likely standing next in line, was similarly arrested. Flatlow was deported to a concentration camp in October 1942, where he died two months later of starvation (p. 149).
The complete confiscation of weapons held by Jews at this point was sparked by the November 7, 1938 assassination attempt on a German diplomat, supposedly by a Polish Jewish teenager at the embassy in Paris. The Night of Broken Glass came in the following few days. All Jewish weapons (including such things as letter openers) were confiscated, and all Jewish organizations were deemed illegal. With the Jews disarmed, Hitler’s plans could proceed with a defenseless populace. The majority of the non-Jewish German population was stunned by what had transpired but was too afraid to protest. As has been well documented, Jews were methodically attacked, their homes, businesses, and synagogues ransacked and burned. Upwards of 30,000 Jews were arrested. Halbrook does document some successful cases of defiance by individual Jews and their families, but most were too afraid to protest when the men showed up on their doorstep. Any Jews resisting arrest were ordered shot on the spot. Attacks on the Jews were to be carried out by the SA, with no interference by police. Jews arrested were to be sent to concentration camps for up to 20 years. The pogrom was so thorough that nearly all Jewish adult males in Stuttgart had been arrested. This was fairly common throughout Germany that night. With the population afraid and disarmed, Hitler could proceed with little worry about resistance. The Court reinforced the Nazi view that there was no judicial review needed for activities of the Gestapo (p. 203).
With the onset of World War II, Hitler expanded his policies and gun prohibitions to other countries he conquered. Subsequently, even within Germany, all firearms were required to be registered. Isolated cases of resistance remained, and Germans were instructed to avoid associating with Jews. When deportations commenced in October 1941, the possessions of the Jews were searched by the Gestapo for anything of value, and this completed the disarming of the Jews. Still, isolated cases of resistance remained, despite the threat of the death penalty if caught with firearms or weapons (p. 212). The now well-known case of Oskar Schindler was one example of resistance.
Halbrook concludes by noting that less government regulation and a tradition of rejecting tyranny could have led to a different outcome in Germany. Instead, systematic creation and manipulation of firearms registration and regulations, coupled with the decimation of individual citizen’s rights, enabled Hitler’s dictatorship and the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews and citizens of Nazi-occupied countries, as well as tens of thousands of Germans. It remains for all of us to wonder what might have been had people refused to register their firearms. Indeed, we should all take note and bear in mind, Never Again.
Unlike the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs is a real and bloody war by the United States against a minority group known as drug buyers and sellers, writes Randall Holcombe. This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Allan Davis.
Jeff Deist and Yuri Maltsev discuss not only his defection from the former USSR, but also his defection from the Marxist economic mindset, the crime of reading Hayek, why so many westerners still have a naïve, uninformed, and romantic view of socialism, how the Ruble was nothing more than a fiat rationing coupon, and why people with contempt for consumerism never visited a Soviet grocery store.
Jeff Deist and Will Grigg discuss "police state Keynesianism," how the once embryonic American police state became overt, how military equipment, personnel, and mindsets increasingly find their way into local law enforcement agencies, and why there are more than 100 SWAT deployments every day in the U.S.
Interviewed by host Paul Molloy, Mark Thornton discusses gun control and freedom, and also the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine.
The purpose of this course is to illustrate how Austrian monetary economics is used to analyze historical and current events and policies. The course will also cover controversies between Austrian and mainstream monetary theorists in interpreting the causes, consequences, and remedies for important episodes of monetary disorder. Topics will include:
Rothbard Versus Friedman: Were the 1920s Inflationary? Were the 1930s Deflationary?Deflation: Good or Bad?The War on CashWho or What Caused the Financial Crisis and Great Recession?Beware of False Gold Standards: From Bretton Woods to the Dollar Bill StandardWorld Currency Wars: Who Will Win and Who Will Lose?LecturesLectures will be Tuesdays at 5:30 p.m. Eastern time. They will be recorded and made available for enrolled students to download.
ReadingAll readings will be free and online. A fully hyper-linked syllabus with readings for each weekly topic will be available for all students.
Grades and CertificatesThe final grade will depend on quizzes. Taking the course for a grade is optional. This course is worth 3 credits in Mises Academy. Feel free to ask your school to accept Mises Academy credits. You will receive a digital Certificate of Completion for this course if you take it for a grade, and a Certificate of Participation if you take it on a paid-audit basis.
Refund PolicyIf you drop the course during its first week (7 calendar days), you will receive a half refund. No refunds will be granted following the first week.
The Lou Church Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Lou Church Foundation. Recorded at the 2014 Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn, Alabama, on 20 March 2014.
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This article is part of a series. See Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Courts, FISA, the NSA, and America’s Secret Court System, and How the NSA Made Your Legal Defense Illegal.
We now look at the system of secret law that was developed behind a barrier of secrecy to give a legal veneer to the system of mass surveillance that has been created.
The legal story here revolves around a legal doctrine known as the “third-party doctrine,” which arose in a 1976 case called United States v Miller and a 1979 case called Smith v Maryland. Miller involved warrantless access by police to a suspect’s bank records and Smith involved a warrantless tap of a suspect’s phone using a device known as a “pen register.” In both cases the police had information leading them to have probable cause for suspicion that the suspects had committed a crime. Rather than seeking a warrant from a court they sought private records from a third-party provider. In Miller the police obtained bank records from the suspect’s bank and in Smith the police obtained a pen register on the suspect’s phone with the assistance of the phone company.
These became important Fourth Amendment cases, testing the scope of the protection provided by the US Constitution in matters where third party providers hold private records for a person. Miller and Smith both sought to exclude evidence obtained from these sources at their trials, arguing that the police use of their records involved an unreasonable search, in view of the fact that they had not obtained a warrant for obtaining the relevant material. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding in both cases that the suspects did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their records. Explaining their decision the court set out the relevant principle as follows:
This Court has held repeatedly that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.[1]
These opinions gave rise to a doctrine known as the “third-party doctrine,” essentially allowing that any information communicated to a third party could be obtained by the government without a warrant, without any objection in respect of the Fourth Amendment.
The third-party doctrine is quite a bizarre doctrine, and one which is clearly erroneous. The doctrine asserts that a person can only have a reasonable expectation of privacy in records if those records are not revealed to any third parties, and this purportedly applies regardless of the limited purposes or confidentiality expectations that apply in the relationship with the third party. Clearly this cannot be reconciled with many other contexts, such as where people communicate confidentially with lawyers, doctors, and other fiduciaries. Indeed, it is a quite bizarre logical implication of the third-party doctrine that there is supposedly no reasonable expectation of privacy in sensitive legal or medical information on the basis that it is sometimes disclosed to one’s own lawyer or doctor.
Unsurprisingly, this doctrine has been heavily criticized since its inception.[2] One legal scholar notes that, “[w]hile Smith and the Third Party Doctrine were heavily criticized even before the Internet age, the drumbeat of criticism has intensified.”[3] Some have argued that the doctrine should only extend to cases where the third party is a genuine recipient of information, and not merely a conduit for the transfer of information (as in the case of a phone company).[4] However, even here this would not accord with other contexts where there are clear and reasonable privacy expectations (e.g., dealings with lawyers, doctors, etc.). The more appropriate result would be for the doctrine to be overturned entirely. While communication of information with third parties is certainly a valid factor in determining whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, it certainly should not be a disqualifying feature — context is everything.
Despite the absurdity of the third-party doctrine, its existence has not been a major issue for courts until recently, since its application has generally been confined to small instances of police searches, involving cases where there is probable cause for suspicion of a crime. From the 1960s to the 1980s the doctrine was applied in several police cases, but later on the lower courts tended to distinguish the facts from the early cases in ways that would allow them to avoid application of this doctrine. The Supreme Court has not made any further ruling on the doctrine since these original cases, but there were remarks in one of its recent cases suggesting that the doctrine might be reconsidered in the future.[5]
In the past decade, with the advent of broader surveillance methods by the US government, the doctrine has become more far-reaching, and in the case of the NSA, it has spawned an entire system of secret law, purportedly justifying mass warrantless surveillance of the population. Behind the veil of secrecy of a system of secret courts the NSA and the FISA court have gradually developed a string of legal precedents extending the Miller and Smith cases and purporting to give a legal justification to the mass collection of all metadata derived from telecommunications. All of this has taken root on the flimsy basis of these two legal decisions, which were concerned with single instances of police searches of known suspects. From this slippery slope the NSA has successfully argued its case for mass surveillance to the FISA court, without any other parties present.
According to the NSA view, if police can legally install a pen register on a phone without a warrant in a particular case, then surely they ought to be able to hoover up all metadata running through the phone lines, and store it in massive data repositories, ready for access when needed. After all, this is similar in effect to the application of lots and lots of pen registers, all individually lawful, according to the third-party doctrine. If it is lawful to collect the metadata of one man without a warrant, then why not two, or three, or seven billion?
Beyond its reliance on the third-party doctrine as a brace against constitutional prohibition, the NSA has also relied on legislative provisions allowing it to use a special kind of warrant for its surveillance activities. Though we have already noted this in our previous discussion of the secret court system, it is worth highlighting that this forms a crucial part of the system of “secret law” that pervades the NSA operations. Whereas regular warrants issued to police involve the search of a particular specified place pertaining to a specified suspect, the NSA has established the practice of applying to the FISA court for general “procedure-based warrants” allowing the agency to conduct surveillance according to certain procedures, and subject to “minimization procedures.” Unlike individual warrants, these general warrants are not limited to any particular suspect or group of suspects. Instead the warrant allows the NSA full discretion to engage in surveillance on any target it desires, so long as the procedures in the warrant are followed. (Of course, the procedures may also specify the type of target, or a requirement for justification for a particular target.) While the legislative system for these warrants is public knowledge, the warrants themselves have been kept secret from the public.
This situation has prevailed without public knowledge until the leaks by Edward Snowden brought many of these secret judicial rulings into the public domain. At that time it became clear that the NSA had established a system of “secret law” which it used to give a legal veneer to its actions. Obviously this alleged legal justification is a large extension of the surveillance in Miller and Smith, and many scholars have argued that the extension to mass surveillance is not justified by those cases.[6] In the Klayman case Judge Leon found that Smith v Maryland was unhelpful in assessing the mass surveillance program of the NSA, due to changes in the nature of telecommunications and surveillance occurring in the 34 years since the case. In ACLU v Clapper Judge Pauley found that the case established a precedent that allowed the NSA to conduct mass metadata collection. While some have argued that the third-party doctrine provides constitutional cover for the NSA metadata programs, it would be more accurate to say that those programs provide the reductio ad absurdum showing the error of the doctrine, and perhaps also the initial decisions concerning its application.
In the recent cases where the NSA has been challenged on its activities, the agency has repeatedly argued that practical considerations in respect of its surveillance programs should be considered as a reason not to remove people from its databases. (Of course, such arguments have always been made while simultaneously refusing to admit that any particular person is even on their database!) The NSA has argued that its system of mass data retention would be threatened by any orders from courts for them to remove a particular person’s records, since this would create complicated exceptions to its general procedures and systems. This argument effectively invokes the NSA’s view that its activities are sufficiently complex that it should not be burdened by the Rule of Law — that the law should mould itself to NSA activities, rather than the other way around.
The Klayman case has now given judicial weight to the absurdity of the third-party doctrine, and the fact that this doctrine entirely subverts the protection of people against unreasonable searches by their government. According to Judge Leon:
The Fourth Amendment typically requires “a neutral and detached authority be interposed between the police and the public,” and it is offended by “general warrants” and laws that allow searches to be conducted “indiscriminately and without regard to their connection with [a] crime under investigation.” ... I cannot imagine a more “indiscriminate” and “arbitrary invasion” than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analysing it without prior judicial approval.
In the coming years the third-party doctrine, and its application in mass surveillance, may well be retested in the US Supreme Court. This will do much to determine the degree to which the court will act as a legitimizing mechanism for the NSA. However, it will not change the fact that the court has been fully complicit in this system of secret law throughout the period prior to the Snowden leaks.
Although we have been referring to this prevailing regime as a system of “secret law,” it is important to note that it is, in truth, a program of secret lawlessness. Indeed, the very notion of “secret law” is oxymoronic, suggesting that people may legitimately be ruled by principles of law established behind closed-doors and kept hidden from them. The operations of the secretive FISA court has allowed the NSA to cloak its lawless activities in the mantle of judicial oversight, even as judges within the secret court gave secret rulings complaining of the misrepresentations and malpractice of the agency. The Supreme Court has aided and abetted this process, by preventing any challenge to the constitutional legitimacy of the programs.
From a libertarian perspective, it might be regarded as tiresome and irrelevant to analyze doctrines of “positive law” put forward by the government’s own legal instruments. Of what interest are constitutions and legislation written by the State to assert its own power? After all, such “positive law” is merely a system of commands of the sovereign government, prone to expand and justify its powers.[7] But even here, the positive law is of interest, since it is alleged to constraint the actions of governments, and is used to justify the power of government. It is part of the government’s claim to legitimacy that it operates according to the Rule of Law.
In view of this, it is interesting and instructive to see that, even by its own legal standards, created by its own institutions, governments still act in a lawless fashion. As with other governments, the US government exists in a precarious balancing act — attempting to expand its own power without constraint, while at the same time play-acting that it is subject to the Rule of Law. This has been particularly evident in the operations of the NSA, which has gradually implemented a regime of mass surveillance behind a wall of secret courts, secret evidence, and secret law.
Note: The views expressed in Daily Articles on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
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Notes
[1] United States v Miller (1976) 425 US 435, per Powell (for the Court) at 443.
[2] For discussion of various criticisms see Stephenson, S.E. (2011) “The Timely Demise of the Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine.” Iowa Law Review 96.
[3] Tolson, M. (2011) “Automation and the Fourth Amendment.” Iowa Law Review 96, p. 585. Italicization of case name added.
[4] Henderson, S.E. (2005) “Nothing new under the sun? A technologically rational doctrine of Fourth Amendment protection.” Mercer Law Review 56, pp. 507, 524-528.
[5] United States v Jones (2012) 565 US, per Sotomayer, p. 5.
[6] Harper, J. (2013)
“If you think that Smith v Maryland permits mass surveillance, you haven’t read Smith v Maryland”. CATO at Liberty, 20 August 2013.
[7] For discussion of “positive law” as a command system, see O’Neill, B. (2012) “Natural law and the liberal (libertarian) society.” Journal of Peace, Freedom and Prosperity 1, pp. 29-50.
[This article is part of a series. See “Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Courts” and “FISA, the NSA, and America’s Secret Court System.”]
We have seen how the NSA’s phony court system has acted as a substitute for genuine judicial review, allowing the NSA to build up precedents purporting to assist its constitutional claims. We have also seen that the NSA is able to obtain surveillance authorization through misrepresentations to the court, without any genuine consequence to the agency, even when discovered. In this Part, we now examine how the NSA shields its activities from review by the public court system, through the control of secret information that could be used as evidence against them.
By virtue of having its system of secret courts, the NSA has been eager to prevent any of its activities coming under scrutiny in the wider public court system. It has accomplished this goal by appealing to the public courts to dismiss claims against them prior to any assessment of the merits of the claim. This has been done by claiming that litigants who seek to challenge its programs lack standing to sue, and that the matters involve “state secrets” which cannot be raised in public courts. The former technique has been particularly successful for the NSA — it has engaged in mass surveillance while simultaneously relying on the fact that no individual litigant can prove that they are affected by the surveillance!
Before turning to the exact details of this argumentative technique, we first consider the general rules of disclosure occurring in litigation. In most legal cases, there are general principles which require the parties to give full disclosure of relevant documentary evidence to the other parties and the courts, in order to make sure that the legal matters are able to be discussed adequately. Of course, one would expect that in matters of security and surveillance there would certainly be some expectation of secrecy, and these general rules would be subject to some competing considerations. However, even in cases where there are legitimate expectations of secrecy, such that parties are not required to give full disclosure of all this evidence, there is still a general principle of litigation that the party in control of a relevant piece of evidence is the one that is expected to put forward that evidence, or suffer an adverse inference from the court if they refrain from doing so.There are some notable exceptions to this principle, such as the right of the defendant to avoid testifying (without any adverse inference) in criminal proceedings. Courts have generally required that when a party refrains from putting forward relevant evidence under their own control, and without good reason, it is advisable for the court to draw an adverse inference from this — i.e., if they don’t want us to see it, it must not do them any good.
Legal scholar Stephen Odgers has noted that, “[u]nder the common law, adverse inferences may be drawn from the failure of a party to give or call particular evidence, where such evidence would reasonably have been expected.”Odgers, S. (1998) Uniform Evidence Law (Third Edition). LBC Information Services: Sydney, p. 55. This legal text applies specifically to Australian evidence law, but similar principles can be found expressed in cases in other common law jurisdictions. This principle is manifested in several rules of evidence that have prevailed under common law. This includes the “Jones v. Dunkel rule” applicable in civil proceedings, saying that if one of the parties to a case is in control of some piece of evidence relevant to a disputed matter, then their failure to put forward that evidence may lead to an inference that this evidence would not have assisted their case.See Jones v Dunkel (1959) 101 CLR 298. This rule was expressed in an Australian High Court case, but sets forth a similar principle to that expressed in various English cases. This rule is most often used when a party to a civil case fails to call a witness who could have testified as to a particular disputed matter. In such a case the failure to call the witness may be taken as implying that the testimony of the witness would not have assisted the party’s case.
While some expectation of secrecy is legitimate in surveillance matters, in cases involving the NSA this principle has generally not been applied at all, and the NSA have been free to use their own undisclosed knowledge of the operations of their surveillance programs as a means to lock out critics from proving, or even arguing against the constitutional legitimacy of their surveillance programs. This has been most apparent in the many successful attempts by the NSA to preclude plaintiffs from challenging the constitutionality of their surveillance programs, by arguing that the challengers lack “legal standing” to sue. Briefly, courts require that a person cannot bring a legal case against a party without showing that they are somehow affected by the actions of that party — even if they can prove that the actions are unlawful, they must first show that they have “standing” to sue, in the sense of having been affected by the wrongful actions.
Until the recent whistleblowing against the NSA by Edward Snowden, the agency had created a wonderful legal Catch-22 around this doctrine, aided and abetted by delinquent US courts. In order for a plaintiff to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA’s illegal surveillance programs, the person first had to prove having been subjected to surveillance, in order to show that they have “standing” to bring the case. But of course, the very nature of the program is that it is kept secret, and all evidence which would prove that the plaintiff lies within the scope of the program is “classified.” To obtain this evidence, a plaintiff would have to access classified information, which would then lead them to legal dangers of another kind. Hence, a wonderfully absurd situation has prevailed. Every citizen in the US (and many outside the US) are subjected to this unlawful mass surveillance, but none, until Klayman, have been considered by the courts to have any standing to sue. Moreover, the reason that Klayman was successful in obtaining standing was because he was able to rely on documents leaked by Edward Snowden — leaks which the US government still regards as criminal espionage, punishable by death.
What this has meant, is that the public courts in the US have effectively ruled that to prove that secret mass-surveillance is unconstitutional, it first has to not be secret. This Kafkaesque legal approach has sunk several legal challenges to the NSA surveillance programs, including the high profile case of Clapper v Amnesty International.See Clapper v Amnesty International (2013) 568 US. See also Goodman, A. and González, J. (2013) ACLU blasts Supreme Court rejection of challenge to warrantless spying without proof of surveillance . Democracy Now, 27 February 2013. In that case the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA programs, based on the allegedly speculative nature of their claim to have been targets of the surveillance. (Of course, it has since become indisputable that all plaintiffs were indeed within the scope of the surveillance programs.) The attorney for the ACLU described the disturbing trend of judgments that had led to the ruling:
They are supposed to be ensuring that the government’s national security policies are consistent with the Constitution. Instead what’s happening is many of these challenges are being thrown out at the threshold. Different — there are different reasons. Sometimes it’s standing. Sometimes it’s state secrets. Sometimes it’s immunity. But the common thread is that all of these cases are being thrown out even before the courts reach the merits. And that is a disturbing thing that ought to be of concern to everybody.Ibid, Goodman and González (2013), remarks of Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the ACLU
In the Amnesty International case the majority of the Supreme Court relied on an assurance by the US government that NSA surveillance would be disclosed by prosecutors to criminal defendants, allowing them standing to challenge the program at a later time. Later prosecutions showed this to be false, and this effectively meant that the programs have been immune from judicial scrutiny.Liptak, A. (2013) A secret surveillance program proves challengeable in theory only New York Times, 15 July 2013.
In the many cases that have fallen before this doctrine, the NSA has claimed to the court that the claims by the opposing litigants to be within the scope of NSA surveillance are “speculative,” all the while perfectly aware that such claims are in fact true. It has not even been necessary for any NSA witnesses to deny that surveillance of the plaintiff has occurred, which would at least have meant that they would face a choice between disclosure and perjury. Instead, the NSA has simply argued that plaintiffs cannot prove that they are being subjected to surveillance, and therefore they cannot challenge the legality of the actions of the NSA in court. In light of the Snowden leaks this has been a particularly salutary lesson — a demonstration of how the government is able to shield its unlawful actions from judicial review simply by cloaking its operations in secrecy.
Of course, if one were to apply the general common law (and common sense) principles of evidence to this kind of situation, the solution to this impasse would have been quite simple. Since the NSA is the agency with full control of the programs and full knowledge of their scope and operations, they are the ones who should be expected to testify that a plaintiff does not, in fact, fall within the scope of any of its programs. If they fail to do this then the court should draw an appropriate inference. To assert that the plaintiff lacks standing, while hiding the evidence that would disprove this, and criminalizing its disclosure, flies in the face of this evidentiary rule.
In addition to this undermining of the normal rules for putting forward evidence, the NSA and its partners in the “Five Eyes” have further compounded the destruction of traditional legal principles by spying on privileged attorney-client communications. During trade talks involving the US government, Australian intelligence agencies (partnered with the NSA under the “Five Eyes” program) spied on confidential communications between the Indonesian government and its US attorneys, and communicated this information to the NSA.Hattam, J. (2014) Bar Association Protests NSA Spying. The Hill, 24 February 2014. This led to protests from the US Bar Association, in view of the erosion of attorney-client confidentiality.
Now that the activities of the NSA have come to light, constitutional scrutiny of the NSA programs is at last winding its way through the public court system. By virtue of the accommodating rulings of the US Supreme Court, the mass surveillance programs have enjoyed a decade-long vacation from constitutional scrutiny, under the de facto immunity imposed by the court. The Klayman case, which is the first to break through this wall, differed from the Amnesty International case in one key respect — the former was decided early in 2012, prior to the Snowden leaks, while the latter had a recent preliminary judgment which came after the Snowden leaks, and was able to rely on that material. This material showed unequivocally that the NSA does indeed engage in mass-surveillance, and that two of the plaintiffs fell within the scope of one of the metadata collection programs. Contrary to the Supreme Court’s suggestions in Clapper v Amnesty International, it was not any government disclosure that allowed standing — it was a disclosure made against the wishes of the government, and treated by them as an act of criminal espionage.
We begin our analysis of the legal machinations of the NSA by looking at the secret court system which supposedly practices judicial oversight over the agency. This Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA CourtFISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 1978 (US) which established the court. or FISC) was created in 1978 as a result of recommendations of the Church Committee, composed after a series of intelligence scandals in the 1970s.Formally, this was the ‘US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities’. It is known informally as the ‘Church Committee’ since it was chaired by Senator Frank Church. The committee was formed in response to the Watergate scandal and other intelligence scandals, where the NSA, CIA and FBI had undertaken various unlawful activities.The court was purportedly created as an additional safeguard against unlawful activity by US intelligence agencies, which had been found to have committed various kinds of unlawful surveillance activities.
The goal of the FISA court, as originally conceived, was to place judicial oversight on the surveillance activities of the NSA, by requiring the agency to obtain warrants from the court before intercepting communications. This was to place the NSA under the same kind of legal constraints as regular police, with requirements for evidence being put before a court in order to obtain a warrant for search. However, unlike the court system for regular police warrants, the judicial system for the NSA is far more secretive. In order to give judicial scrutiny to preserve the secrecy of NSA activities, the FISA court meets in secret with only government representatives present at its proceedings. The hearings are closed to the public and the rulings of the judges are classified, and rarely released after the fact. (Some rulings have been partly declassified, but are still heavily redacted.) The judges in the FISA court hear applications from a representative of the NSA, and ask questions, allowing the agency to amend their applications to meet any shortcomings. Adversarial argument from other parties is absent, since there are no other parties at the hearing.
Some of this is similar to the operation of public courts for regular police warrants, but there is a great deal more secrecy, and a great deal more power granted to the government. One distinction between the FISA Court, and regular public courts issuing warrants for police searches, is the type of warrant system that is practiced under the FISA Court. For police searches it is generally the case that the police will apply for a warrant to surveil a particular person, or a small group or people, and give some evidence of “probable cause” for a search, i.e., the police must convince the court that there is reasonable suspicion for surveillance on a case-by-case basis. Under the FISA Court the warrants for the NSA are much wider in scope. Many of the warrants authorize the collection of communications data on a particular phone carrier, capturing the communications of millions of people over sustained periods of time. Other warrants are “procedure-based” warrants which authorize a proposed data-collection process, subject to various “minimization procedures” designed to confine the querying of data. These generally allow mass data-collection on a population, with application of the minimization procedures left to the NSA.
As with other law enforcement authorities, the record of the NSA in obtaining warrants from the FISA court is imposing. In the 33,949 applications that were resolved from 1979-2012, only 11 were rejected (0.0324%). See FISA Court Orders 1979-2012. Epic.org. The court has defended itself from this statistic by noting that many applications were withdrawn or amended by the NSA prior to final hearing; see e.g., Walton, R.B. (2013) Letter to Patrick Leahy (The rejection rate for other wiretap applications in state and federal courts is similarly low. See US Courts (2012) Wiretap Report 2012, Table 7.Though originally designed merely to issue secret warrants for surveillance, the powers of the FISA Court have expanded over time, with a large expansion of power occurring in 2008, when the Bush administration retroactively immunized any “electronic communication service provider” from any liability for their complicity in unlawful NSA surveillance.This was accomplished by the FISA Amendments Act 2008 (US) which provided a release from liability for any “electronic communication service provider” for providing information in accordance with an order/ request/directive from the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence. Notably, the section does not refer to a lawful request or order, but just any request or order. This was understood to mean that there would be immunity even for complicity with unlawful actions by the NSA.
In order to deal with a large number of warrant applications, the powers of the FISA Court have expanded to the point that it has undertaken quasi-constitutional proceedings, allegedly validating the surveillance programs as being within the constitutional powers of the US government. Even in this latter function, the hearings have been closed to the public and have been conducted with only the government giving arguments to the court. Hence, the government has had free rein to be the only party represented at hearings which have purported to determine its own legal powers under the US Constitution. For this reason, one commentator has noted that, “[i]n truth, the FISC has basically become a parallel Supreme Court, but one which operates in almost total secrecy.” Whitehead, J.W. (2013) Kafka’s America: secret courts, secret laws, and total surveillance . Antiwar.com, 24 July 2013.
The effect of this secret court system has been to allow the NSA to build up 34 years of judicial precedents in favor of its expansive powers, with a large body of purported constitutional findings validating its own power. All of this has been conducted behind closed doors, without the inconvenience of opposing argument from other parties. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this secret court system has opened up opportunities for judicial capture for the NSA. As noted by legal scholar Elizabeth Goitein, “[l]ike any other group that meets in secret behind closed doors with only one constituency appearing before them, they’re subject to capture and bias.” Klein, E. (2013) Did you know John Roberts is also Chief Justice of the NSA’s surveillance state? The Washington Post, Wonkblog, 5 July 2013.
For former FISA court judge James Robertson, these remarks have rung true to such an extent that he has publicly complained about the ex parte nature of the FISA court proceedings. Roberts, D. (2013) US must fix secret FISA courts, says top judge who granted surveillance orders . The Guardian, 10 July 2013. According to this former member of the court, “[w]hat FISA does is not adjudication, but approval. This works just fine when it deals with individual applications for warrants, but the 2008 amendment has turned the FISA court into an administrative agency making rules for others to follow.”Ibid.
To the extent that judicial capture has been resisted by the court, it has nonetheless functioned as a compliant entity to the NSA, through the fact that any criticisms against the unlawful actions of the NSA have been kept secret, and have been without any serious legal consequence to the agency. When the Chief Judge of the FISA court was alerted to a mass of systematic misrepresentations to the court by the NSA, the consequence was a “stern rebuke” in a classified memorandum that was not available to the public until years later. Nakashima, E., Tate, J. and Leonnig, C. (2013) Declassified court documents highlight NSA violations in data collection for surveillance . The Washington Post, 10 September 2013. (In fact, the opinion was only declassified due to public pressure as a result of the Snowden leaks. If not for these leaks it is likely that the opinion would still remain classified today.) In March 2009, following breaches of the courts orders, the Chief Judge found that the testimony of General Keith Alexander setting out the NSA interpretation of the court’s orders “strained credulity” by interpreting a part of the orders as effectively being optional. FISA Court (2009) Order - In Re Production of tangible things from [Redacted] . Docket BR 08-13, p. 5. He also found that “[t]he minimization procedures proposed by the government in each successive application and approved and adopted as binding by the orders of the [FISA Court] have been so frequently and systematically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall [metadata] regime has never functioned effectively.”Ibid, p. 11.Despite lacking confidence that the NSA would comply with future orders, the Chief Judge allowed the mass collection of metadata to continue, and allowed the government to continue to apply for access to this data on a case-by-case basis, or for imminent threats, until such time as they completed a review of their procedures. The NSA completed their review and the regular operation of the mass-surveillance program was restored shortly afterward.
Some commentators have taken this judicial rebuke by the FISA court as proof of the “toughness” of the court on the NSA, but in fact, it is proof of their subservience to the agency. Despite finding that there had been systematic misrepresentations to the court by the NSA, no action was taken against officials who had given false statements to the court. There was no disciplinary action of any kind against personnel of the agency, and the “rebuke” of the court remained a private classified document, only available to the agency being criticized. NSA officials who had systematically misled the court were free to read this rebuke knowing that no consequence would follow from it, since no member of the public could read about their actions. When the matter was later exposed to the public (as a result of the Snowden leaks) the Chief Judge complained that his court “... is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court.” See Leonnig, C. (2013) Court: Ability to police U.S. spying program limited . The Washington Post, 16 August 2013. The surveillance programs of the NSA continued, with ongoing approval by the court, after a short period of technical review conducted by the NSA. Such “toughness” as this is what passes for “checks and balances” within the system of secret courts.
The dubious nature of the FISA court is well-understood within the wider judicial system, a fact which was clear in the Klayman preliminary judgment. The stark distinction between the secretive FISA court and the public court system was recognized by Judge Leon when he observed that, “... no court has ever recognized a special need sufficient to justify continuous, daily searches of virtually every American citizen without any particularized suspicion. In effect, the government urges me to be the first non-FISC judge to sanction such a dragnet.”Ibid, Klayman, emphasis added.It is notable here that Judge Leon felt that it was significant that he was the first non-FISC judge to consider the matter, a tacit recognition that the judgments of the FISC cannot be regarded as true constitutional scrutiny.
Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued that surveillance programs by a secret court violates the requirement for “due process of law.” According to Barnett, “[s]ecret judicial proceedings adjudicating the rights of private parties, without any ability to participate or even read the legal opinions of the judges, is the antithesis of the due process of law.” Ibid, Barnett (2013).Though we refer to such an institution as a “court” system in the positive-law sense, in truth, such a “court” lacks many of the characteristics of a proper court. It is in fact more akin to bodies such as the English Star Chamber, which conducted judicial hearings in secret, issuing secret rulings affecting parties who were not represented in its hearings.
[This article is part of a series. See Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Courts.]
Many commentators following the NSA scandals have been eagerly awaiting the recommendations of the US government task force on the matter, and the proposed reforms to be implemented by President Obama to bring the spy agency under control. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you can watch the president’s recent speech and nod your head approvingly when he talks about the “tradition of limited government” in the United States, and the constitutional limits his government is at pains to respect. Oh, and just for good measure, while you’re listening to this magnificent oration being replayed to you on YouTube, the NSA will be recording your internet browser history, or possibly even hacking your computer. This occurs under various programs, mostly for persons outside the US, but also for some people within the US. For further details, see e.g., B. Gellman and L. Poitras (2013), US, British intelligence mining data from nine US internet companies in broad secret program, The Washington Post, 7 June 2013; see G. Greenwald (2013), XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’, The Guardian, 31 July 2013; D.B. Donaldson (2013), NSA reportedly hacks Americans via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Liberty Voice, 29 December 2013. If you decide to click on the “like” or “dislike” buttons at the bottom of the video, that little nugget of political information can be added to their “metadata” archives, along with the rest of your internet activities. In fact, in the 42 minutes it will take you to watch the president’s speech, the NSA will have hoovered up around 40 million records of internet browsing from around the world.Calculation based on information about the collection capacity of the XKeyscore program; see Greenwald (2013), ibid. According to this source, “[i]n 2012, there were at least 41 billion total records collected and stored in XKeyscore for a single 30-day period.” This is equivalent to 39.86 million records every 42 minutes. Perhaps yours will be among them.
It is instructive to note that all of this will be done by the same government that operates under an explicit constitutional directive purportedly protecting people from “unreasonable searches and seizures” and specifying that “... no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause ... and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”US Constitution, Amendment IV. Indeed, one of the most instructive aspects of the NSA scandal is the way the agency has succeeded, for an extensive period of time, in warding off legal challenges to the constitutionality of its surveillance programs. This is instructive from the point of view of libertarian theory, since it illustrates the degree to which the much-vaunted “checks and balances” within the State apparatus, highlighted in the recent Obama speech, are really illusory. In practice, the judicial and executive branches of government tend to act as a legitimizing mechanism for the actions of government agencies, with rare “checks and balances” and “reforms” coming only when the legitimacy of the system is under potent attack from some outside source.
The NSA has taken great advantage of the symbiosis between the executive and judicial branches of the State, having implemented long-running programs of lawless surveillance and phony judicial review. The modus operandi of the agency in these matters has been to hide behind various secrecy requirements which have been used to hamstring attempts at open judicial review, ensuring that scrutiny of its programs and their legal basis is kept away from the prying eyes of the public. This has included the use of secret courts, where other parties are not represented and are not privy to proceedings. It has also included the use of secrecy requirements in evidence controlled by the NSA, which prevents people from showing that they have standing to challenge the agency’s programs in court, or mandates that such matters are “state secrets,” beyond the scope of judicial review. And of course, it has also included an extensive regime of secret judicial rulings and secret “law,” with proceedings conducted behind a legal wall chiseled with those two ominous words: top secret!
In fact, the Obama speech on NSA reform is but a sideshow to the real cracks that are starting to appear in the NSA’s legal fortifications. More important is the recent preliminary ruling in the case of Klayman v Obama which has opened the actions of the NSA up to some long-overdue judicial scrutiny in the public courts. In the preliminary ruling in December, the US District Court for the District of Columbia found that the NSA’s mass collection of metadata, as shown in its own leaked documents, “most likely” violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. (Since this was a preliminary hearing, the judge was unable to make a more definite ruling at that time. For those readers who are unfamiliar with proceedings for preliminary injunctions, the judge is not allowed to make a final determination on the matter, but must determine whether the applicant’s case has enough merit to proceed to trial, and to warrant a preliminary injunction. The judge does not make a final determination, but can give strong “hints” to the parties, as to how the case is likely to proceed at trial. When a judge in a preliminary hearing of this kind says that a particular program is “most likely” unconstitutional, and delivers the kind of judgment that was given, this can be a cautious way of saying that the program clearly is unconstitutional, but without wanting to make a final determination of the matter. In response to a preliminary application by plaintiffs seeking an injunction to stop the NSA from collection their metadata, Judge Richard Leon issued a scathing judgment against the NSA, dismissing several of its arguments as lacking common sense, and describing its mass surveillance technology as “almost-Orwellian.” See Klayman v Obama, per Leon at 49. The Klayman case was followed up almost immediately by a contrary ruling in ACLU v Clapper, where Judge William Pauley examined the same legal precedents and arguments and found that there is no constitutional protection against the mass collection of metadata by the NSA. The ruling relied heavily and uncritically on government reports on terrorist threats to the United States, and claimed that the NSA surveillance is crucial in combating terrorism. For discussion, see J. Harper (2013), Ratifying NSA spying, a court calls FISA ‘courts’ into question. CATO at Liberty, 27 December 2013. Harper notes that Judge Pauley falsely claims that NSA data collection could have foiled the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
So there you have it, the system is now in action! Obama is promising reforms! The courts have stepped in! The judges are restless! All hail the finely constructed checks and balances! If all goes well, the plaintiffs in Klayman v Obama and ACLU v Clapper will have their final hearing in court, and the NSA will have their actions assessed against the strictures of the US Constitution. Obama is promising more judicial oversight, and a “public advocate” for the NSA court system. Hurrah!
But still, one is left with an uneasy feeling. After all, this is far from the first case in which plaintiffs have sought to challenge the legal basis of the NSA programs, and it is long since the time Obama first took command of the national security apparatus. So what has changed? Why are there now promises of new reforms? Why has there been a breakthrough in this case, but not in previous cases of the same kind? For seven years the NSA’s PRISM program was under the oversight of the same judiciary, and subject to the same “checks and balances” as now. For most of those years it was under the direction of the current president. Why is it that the program now ruled to be “most likely unconstitutional” in one case has been proceeding unimpeded for so long — under the very same system of “oversight” and “checks and balances”— and challenges from previous litigants have been shot down in flames in case after case?
Well, we all know what has happened to make such a difference — Edward Snowden happened! The one antidote for the previously-operating regime of secret “law” has been the leaking of classified documents from within the NSA, revealed to the public by this whistleblower and “lawbreaker.” For discussion of why Snowden should not be considered a lawbreaker, see B. O’Neill (2013), The ethics of whistleblowing. Mises Daily, 8 July 2013. Concerned that the NSA was acting contrary to the US Constitution, Snowden released a treasure trove of documents to the media, setting out the unlawful activities of the NSA, all verified in its own words. The Klayman case represents the first post-Snowden case against the NSA, a situation where the judiciary now has to come to terms with a hostile public, which is well aware of what is hidden behind the legal walls erected around the NSA. The recent Obama speech also represents the first major reaction of the US government to the prospect that it may receive an adverse constitutional ruling discrediting its pretensions to legal observance.
The Klayman case is quite a breakthrough. Many have rightly regarded the case as representing a major breakthrough in judicial oversight of the NSA, but to put it more accurately, it represents the beginning of judicial oversight. In previous cases of this kind the NSA has managed to ward off constitutional challenges to its surveillance programs by arguing that all would-be plaintiffs lack “standing” to sue, and by appealing to the classified status of its secret programs, and the privilege of “state secrets.” It has hidden behind a regime of secret judicial orders and rulings, all inaccessible to the public. The Klayman case and the ACLU v Clapper case are notable and important because they are the first of their kind where the plaintiffs have been allowed to proceed with their arguments against the NSA activities, and the examination of the legal status of these activities has been allowed to proceed. This has been possible only because the leaks from Snowden allowed the plaintiffs to show that they had personally been subject to surveillance, something that has been impossible in previous cases brought against the NSA.
There is certainly cause to be cheerful about the recent court ruling in Klayman, as it is the first instance where the NSA programs have been subjected to constitutional scrutiny in a public court. In view of the facts of the case, the preliminary findings of Judge Leon are extremely sensible, and indeed, ought to be inescapable There are some competing opinions on this matter, especially with respect to the question of whether Judge Leon was correct to draw a distinction with the previous case of Smith v Maryland (1979) 442 US 735. Some have argued against the decision; see e.g., O. Kerr (2013), Preliminary thoughts on Judge Leon’s opinion, The Volokh Conspiracy, 16 December 2013. One legal scholar has instead argued that the constitutional question may actually recede if the program is found to have breached the statutory framework; see S. Vladeck (2013), Why the constitutional holding in Klayman wasn’t necessary. Just Security, 17 December 2013. Prior to the judgement, legal scholar Randy Barnett argued that the surveillance program is unconstitutional along similar lines; see e.g., R. Barnett (2013), The NSA’s surveillance is unconstitutional. The Wall Street Journal, 11 July 2013. The view of the present author is that theSmith v Maryland case is manifestly unsuitable to assist with scrutiny of theKlayman case, for the reasons set out by Leon. However, the case is far from over, with appeals expected to higher courts, a final ruling on the matter, and then probably more appeals. One legal commentator has suggested that the trial judge’s ruling in the Klayman case is “... best understood as a kind of [“friend of the court”] brief to the Supreme Court ...” B. Wittes (2013), Thoughts on Judge Leon’s section 215 opinion, Lawfare, 17 December 2013.
In view of this likely path of appeal, it is instructive to understand the complicity of the US Supreme Court in the previous regime of secrecy that has been perpetrated by the NSA. The ultimate arbiter of constitutionality in the US legal system has shown itself, in past cases, to be highly protective of the government in these matters, and has previously assented to some quite absurd doctrines and arguments to prevent any meaningful judicial review. The court has repeatedly taken assurances from the US government that the opportunity for constitutional review would arise in the future, but has consistently sided with their assertions that it cannot arise for this particular plaintiff, or this one, or this one. This has meant that while the illusion of judicial control has been maintained, the court has taken a policy of de facto immunity from constitutional scrutiny. As Larry Klayman put it, “most judges are just ‘yes men’ who rubber-stamp the federal government’s agenda.”See B. Logiurato (2013), Meet the “birther” conservative activist behind the NSA lawsuit that liberals love. Business Insider Australia, 18 December 2013.
Whether the challenge in Klayman v Obama ultimately succeeds or fails, the fact that it is heard at all is an initial cracking of the legal barriers that have been erected by the US government to cover its own lawlessness. While there is some cause for buoyancy, there is just as much reason to be disgusted that scrutiny of the illegal programs of the NSA has taken so long to get a genuine hearing before the public court system, and that the man responsible for allowing this to occur continues to be branded as a criminal and a traitor by the US government whose crimes he has exposed, and threatened with imprisonment or death.
All social theory can be reduced to two categories: those that conceive of society as the result of peace, and those for which the indispensable ingredient is violence. This is the fundamental distinction between liberalism and fascism, a point I discuss further in a book I released earlier this year called Fascism vs. Capitalism.
There is some confusion surrounding terms here. When Ludwig von Mises published his book Liberalism in English translation, he changed the title to The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth. He did so because by the latter half of the twentieth century, the word “liberal” no longer carried the meaning it once had. It had come to mean centralization, the welfare state, and a substantial government presence in economic and social life.
The liberalism I have in mind, of course, is not the modern liberalism of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but the classical liberalism of Thomas Jefferson and Frédéric Bastiat. Classical liberalism, by contrast, believed in free markets, free trade, toleration, and civil liberties.
It represented a movement toward a theory of society in which human cooperation emerged spontaneously and without coercion, by means of the natural processes of the market economy. It recognized that society seemed to manage itself without the involvement of extraneous forces like kings, aristocracies, or parliaments, and that the intervention of those forces was more likely aimed at the enrichment of a favored group or of the state itself than of at the well-being of society at large.
The price system, a spontaneous product of the free-market economy, helped entrepreneurs arrange the factors of production in such a way as to produce those outputs most highly valued by society, and to produce them in a way that was least costly in terms of opportunities foregone. Individuals specialized in those areas in which they had the greatest skill or knowledge, and the resulting division of labor meant a vastly greater output of consumer goods for everyone to enjoy. None of this required the intervention of the state.
For the classical liberal, the state was almost an afterthought. Some would have it provide a few basic services, while others conceived of it as nothing more than a night watchman. Beginning with Gustave de Molinari, the classical-liberal tradition even groped toward the possibility that the state was a dangerous, parasitical, and ultimately unnecessary monopoly.
And, of course, it was against a backdrop of peace that the classical liberal described the progress of mankind.
Fascists looked at society and the state quite differently. The prosaic bourgeois virtues of commerce, of producing, trading, and earning profit, are viewed with contempt next to the code of the warrior, which is what the fascist truly respects. Greatness comes not through the ordinary pursuits of the market or the obedience to the duties of one’s state in life, but through struggle.
It is Benito Mussolini’s famous remark — “Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state” — that truly sums up the essence of fascism. The good of the Nation, as defined by the fascist leader, surpasses all other concerns and allegiances. The fascist speaks of the Nation with a religious reverence. An Italian fascist youth movement in the 1920s composed the following creed:
I believe in Rome the Eternal, the mother of my country, and in Italy her eldest Daughter, who was born in her virginal bosom by the grace of God; who suffered through the barbarian invasions, was crucified and buried; who descended to the grave and was raised from the dead in the nineteenth century; who ascended into Heaven in her glory in 1918 and 1922; who is seated on the right hand of her mother Rome; and who for this reason shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the genius of Mussolini, in our Holy Father Fascism, in the communion of its martyrs, in the conversion of Italians, and in the resurrection of the Empire.
This devotion to the Nation is concentrated in allegiance to the charismatic leader. The untrammeled exercise of the leader’s will is a central ingredient in the realization of the Nation’s destiny. Moreover, the leader’s will must trump the array of activities that comprise the free market. The various companies, professions, unions, and government must work together with a conscious plan to ensure the best outcome for the Nation. This is why it is so preposterous to hear opponents of the market economy describe libertarians as “fascists.” No one could be more anti-fascist than a libertarian.
Political centralization was also central to fascism, for if the Nation is the embodiment of the people, and if it is through the Nation that every individual realizes his destiny, we cannot tolerate resistance by lesser jurisdictions within the Nation.
To say that there are fascist trends and features in the United States of today is not to say that this country is just like interwar Italy or Germany. There are some features of fascism as traditionally understood that can be found only faintly in American society today, and others than can be found not at all.
But it would be foolish to pretend that America is the very opposite of the fascist dystopias. Whether it’s the emphasis on centralization, the glorification of the police and the military, the yearning for a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, the elevation of “public service” above the services we freely provide one another on the market, the creepy and incessant references to “my president” or “our president,” or the depiction of the state as a quasi-divine instrument, the commonalities are neither trivial nor few.
Americans no doubt recoil from or laugh at that passage from the Italian fascists I shared with you a few moments ago. But few Americans are in a position to render such a judgment. Most have absorbed the idea that their government, far from a merely utilitarian contrivance established to provide them with some basic services, as many early Americans doubtless conceived of it, is a redemptive force in the world.
John Winthrop appropriated a biblical image of the church when he spoke of his settlement of Puritans as resembling a “city on a hill.” By the time Ronald Reagan made that phrase a rhetorical commonplace in American politics, it had been fully secularized. Not the church but the American state would transform mankind as God’s instrument.
Americans, even (or perhaps especially) American Christians, are for that reason not scandalized at politicians’ appropriation of religious language to describe their government. It bothers them not at all to learn that the iconic Abraham Lincoln said “the gates of hell shall not prevail against” American government ideals, or that when George W. Bush said “the light shined in darkness and the darkness did not overcome it,” by “light” he meant American government ideals.
In US history, presidents who avoided war, or who viewed the presidential office modestly and without messianic overtones, are neglected or even denounced by our official historians. You can guess at the views and activities of the presidents favored by the opinion molders. “Beware any politician who is ‘beloved,’” historian Ralph Raico once warned.
The cult of personality surrounding the US president has only grown over the past century, culminating in the creepy videos of schoolchildren pledging allegiance to Barack Obama and the YouTube videos of Hollywood actors promising their eternal loyalty. But some of those who ridiculed these ridiculous displays had themselves been part of the cult of George W. Bush. During the Bush years, Christian neocons made a video about the president set to the tune of Johnny Cash’s classic “When the Man Comes Around.” That song had been written about Jesus Christ. Here are some of the words they set to a video about George W. Bush:
There’s a man goin’ ‘round takin’ names. An’ he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won’t be treated all the same. There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down. When the man comes around.
Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom. Then the father hen will call his chickens home. The wise men will bow down before the throne. And at his feet they’ll cast their golden crown. When the man comes around.
That man, remember, was George W. Bush.
Americans are taught that they owe their freedoms to their government’s military. Whether it’s a country music concert, a sporting event, or even a restaurant chain, Americans are subjected to a ceaseless stream of reminders of what they allegedly owe to this particular class of government employees. (Let’s not forget the popular bumper sticker: “Only two defining forces have ever died for you: Jesus the Christ and the American soldier.”) How exactly their freedoms were threatened in any of the military conflicts in question is one of those impertinent questions one does not ask in polite society.
The propaganda has worked, to some extent at least. When Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which their government was spying on and lying to them, many listeners of right-wing radio demanded not that these activities cease, but that the leaker himself be silenced. The man who had embarrassed their rulers should be tried for treason and executed. I have heard this phenomenon described as a case of society-wide Stockholm Syndrome, and I don’t think that’s far from the mark.
If some of the superstitions of fascism have made their way into American life, it could be because both fascism and whatever it is that America has become share a superstition in common — namely, the state itself. The state has been cloaked in all manner of flattering but obfuscating rhetoric. The state looks after the general welfare, provides economic stability, protects us from the bad guys, prevents inequality, and binds us together in a common cause greater than ourselves.
It’s time we viewed the state for what it really is: a mechanism by which rulers enrich themselves at the expense of the ruled. Everything else is a smokescreen.
Editor’s Note: The following is a selection from a speech by Mises Institute Founder and CEO Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at the Southwest Regional Mises Circle in Houston, “The Police State: Know It When You See It,” on January 18, 2014.
Recorded at the Mises Circle Southwest Regional in Houston, 18 January 2014. Featuring Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, and Jeff Deist.
In the modern United States, federal laws are now so numerous and written so broadly and vaguely, that it is nearly impossible to make it through the day without breaking at least one of them. And through it all, an enormous government apparatus of prisons, prosecutors, police, and bureaucrats remains well-funded, powerful, and nearly impossible to oppose in court.
Recorded at the Mises Circle Southwest Regional in Houston, 18 January 2014. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
In the modern United States, federal laws are now so numerous and written so broadly and vaguely, that it is nearly impossible to make it through the day without breaking at least one of them. And through it all, an enormous government apparatus of prisons, prosecutors, police, and bureaucrats remains well-funded, powerful, and nearly impossible to oppose in court. Recorded at the Mises Circle Southwest Regional in Houston, 18 January 2014. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
Editor’s Note: The following is a selection from a speech by Mises Institute President Jeff Deist at the Southwest Regional Mises Circle in Houston, “The Police State: Know It When You See It,” on January 18, 2014.
Today when we use the term peace officer, it sounds antiquated and outdated. I’m sure most people in the room under 40 have never heard the term actually used by anyone; we might as well be talking about buggy whips or floppy disks. But in the 1800s and really through the 1960s, the term was used widely in America to refer generally to lawmen, whether sheriffs, constables, troopers, or marshals. Today the old moniker of peace officer has been almost eliminated in popular usage, replaced by “police officer” or the more in vogue “law enforcement officer.”
The terminology has certain legal differences in different settings; in some places peace officers and police officers are indeed different individuals with different functions, jurisdictions, or powers to execute warrants. But nobody says peace officer anymore, and it’s not just a coincidence.
The archetype of a peace officer is mostly fictitious — sheriffs in westerns often come to mind, stern lawmen carrying Colt revolvers called “Peacemakers.” But the Wyatt Earps of western myth weren’t always so peaceful, and often, at least in movies, used their Peacemakers to shoot up the place.
Outside the Old West archetype, Sheriff Andy Taylor of the Andy Griffith Show is perhaps the best and most facile example of what it once meant, at least in the American psyche, to be a peace officer. Now of course the Andy Griffith show was fictional. And there’s no doubt that many, many small town sheriffs in America over the decades have been anything but peace officers. Yet it’s fascinating that just a few decades ago Americans could identify with the character of Sheriff Taylor as a recognizable ideal.
Obviously the situation today is very different, and we all know how far things have fallen. Police have suffered a very serious decline over the last several decades, both in terms of their public image and the degree to which average citizens now often fear police officers rather than trust them. We can note also that poor and minority communities have long been less trusting, or perhaps less naïve, about the real nature of police. But today that jaundiced view has found its way into middle-class consciousness.
Now the subject of police misconduct and the growing militarization and lawlessness of police departments could fill many hours, and several libertarian writers are doing a great job of documenting police malfeasance, as in the excellent work of investigative journalist William Norman Grigg.
But allow me to mention some particularly egregious recent examples of police action escalating and harming, rather than protecting and serving.
As just one example, we can point to the case in which a 90-pound, mentally-ill young man very recently was killed by three so-called law enforcement officers from three different agencies in Southport, North Carolina. He was apparently having a schizophrenic episode and brandishing a screwdriver when police arrived in answer to his family’s 911 call asking for “help.” The first two officers managed to calm the young man down, but the third escalated the situation, demanding that the other officers use a taser to subdue him. Once his body hit the ground the young man was brutally shot at close range by the third officer, for reasons that remain unclear.
As another example, we could note the beating death of Kelly Thomas by police in Fullerton, California. The beating was seen as so brutal and unjustified by many members of the community that it led to the recall of three members of the Fullerton City Council who defended the police department in the wake of the beating.
So here we see modern police at work. Escalation. Aggression. A lack of common sense, making a bad situation worse. Overriding concern for the safety of police officers, regardless of the consequences for those being “protected.” These are not the hallmarks of peace officers, to put it mildly.
Another troubling development that demonstrates how far we’ve strayed from the peace officer ideal can be seen in the increasing militarization of local police departments. The Florida city of Ft. Pierce (population 42,000) recently acquired an MRAP vehicle, which stands for “mine response ambush protection” for the bargain price of $2,000. The U.S. military is unloading hundreds of armored tank-like vehicles as Operation Enduring Freedom winds down — and it’s also unloading thousands of Afghanistan and Iraq combat vets into the ranks of local police and sheriffs. The Ft. Pierce police chief states, “The military was pretty much handing them out. ... You know, it is overkill, until we need it.”
So how did we go from “peace” officers to “police” officers to “law enforcement” officers anyway? How did we go from “protect and serve” to “escalate and harm”? And what is behind the militarization of police departments and the rise of the warrior cop, as one writer terms it?
Well, as Austrians and libertarians we should hardly be surprised, and we certainly don’t need a sociological study to understand what’s happening. The deterioration in police conduct, and the militarization of local police forces, quite simply and quite predictably mirrors the rise of the total state itself.We know that state monopolies invariably provide worse and worse services for more and more money. Police services are no exception. When it comes to your local police, there is no shopping around, there is no customer service, and there is no choice. Without market competition, market price signals, and market discipline, government has no ability or incentive to provide what people really want, which is peaceful and effective security for themselves, their families, their homes, and their property. As with everything government purports to provide, the public wants Andy Griffith but ends up with the Terminator.
There is no lack of Austrian scholarship in this area, the intersection between security services, state monopolies, public goods, and private alternatives. I would initially direct you toward two excellent primary sources to learn more about how markets could provide security services that no only produce less crime at a lower cost, but also provide those services in a peaceful manner.
My first recommendation is Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market, which opens with a chapter entitled “Defense Services on the Free Market.” Right off the bat Rothbard points out the inherent contradiction between property rights and the argument that state-provided police services are a necessary precondition to securing such property rights:
Economists have almost invariably and paradoxically assumed that the market must be kept free by the use of invasive and unfree actions — in short, by governmental institutions outside the market nexus.
In other words, we’re told that state-provided police are a necessary precondition to market activity. But Rothbard points out that many goods and services are indispensable to functioning markets, such as land, food, clothing, and shelter for market participants. Rothbard asks, “… must all these goods and services therefore be supplied by the State and the State only?”No, he answers:
Defense in the free society (including police protection) would therefore have to be supplied by people or firms who (a) gained their revenue voluntarily rather than by coercion and (b) did not — as the State does — arrogate to themselves a compulsory monopoly of police or judicial protection.
Another excellent starting point is Hans Hoppe’s The Private Production of Defense. Hoppe makes the case that our long-held belief in collective security is nothing more than a myth, and that in fact state protection of private property — our system of police, courts, and jails — is incompatible with property rights and economic reality.
Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but equipped with the unique power to tax, state agents will invariably strive to maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work for it, the better off one will be.
Both Rothbard and Hoppe discuss an “insurance” model for preventing crime and aggression, which makes sense from a market perspective. Rothbard posits that private police services likely would be provided by insurance companies which already insure lives and property, for the commonsense reason that “... it would be to their direct advantage to reduce the amount of crime as much as possible.”
Hoppe takes the insurance concept further, arguing that:
The better the protection of insured property, the lower are the damage claims and hence an insurer’s loss. Thus, to provide efficient protection appears to be in every insurer’s own financial interest. ... Obviously, anyone offering protection services must appear able to deliver on his promises in order to find clients.
Compare this to the “growth” model of most local police departments, which continuously lobby their city councils for more money and more officers!
Now admittedly the private provision of police and security services is a complex and controversial subject, and we’re only touching on it today. But rest assured that if you read further, both Rothbard and Hoppe address many common objections raised when discussing private police: attendant issues like political borders; differing legal systems; physical jurisdiction and violence among competing firms; the actuarial problems behind insuring against physical aggression; free riders; and so forth.
But increasingly society is moving in the direction of private security regardless: consider for example, complex insurance networks and indemnification arrangements across borders; private arbitration of disputes; the rise of gated communities and neighborhoods utilizing private security agencies; and fraud prevention mechanisms provided by private businesses like eBay and Paypal.
These trends can only intensify as governments, whether federal, state, or local, increasingly must spend more and more of their budgets to service entitlement, pension, and debt promises.
If we want our police to act more like Sheriff Andy Taylor and less like militarized aggressors, we must look to private models — models where our interests are aligned with security providers. Only then can we bring back true “peace” officers, private security providers focused on preventing crime and defusing conflicts in cost effective and peaceful ways.
Today when we use the term peace officer, it sounds antiquated and outdated. I’m sure most people under 40 have never heard the term actually used by anyone; we might as well be talking about buggy whips or floppy disks. But in the 1800s—and really through the 1960s—the term was used widely in America to refer generally to lawmen, whether sheriffs, constables, troopers, or marshals. Today the old moniker of peace officer has been almost eliminated in popular usage, replaced by “police officer” or the more in vogue “law enforcement officer.”
Recorded at the Mises Circle Southwest Regional in Houston, 18 January 2014. Includes an introduction by Lew Rockwell.
When government police fail to provide adequate protection, people turn to private security. Yet, when private security becomes inconvenient for the monopoly security force (i.e., the state), purchasers of private security are punished.
Recently, public police departments in the Des Moines, Iowa area have been charging businesses and private homeowners for responding to false alarms — that is, alarms generated by business or home security systems that were not the result of apparent criminal activity. For example, an alarm may be activated when debris blows by a motion sensor, and the local police department is then notified and it responds.
According to The Des Moines Register, this has been occurring a lot recently. Des Moines police responded to 3,806 alarms last year, more than 90 percent of which were false; West Des Moines police responded similarly with a 95 percent false alarm rate; and Urbandale (part of the greater Des Moines metropolitan area) police encountered a 91 percent false alarm rate.
Perhaps not surprisingly, local police departments are not pleased with this development.
“It’s something we try to manage because alarms are good in theory and they do catch burglars and robbers and we get notified quicker. But on the other side we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels going to false alarm trips,” Urbandale Police Lt. Rob Johansen said. “It’s kind of a catch-22 for us.”
As a result, fines are now issued for false alarms. In Des Moines, for example, the first false alarm gets a fine of up to $500, and $750 for each false alarm after that. This has netted the city about $700,000 since 2008 when fines were first issued. Other local cities pass out lower fines for false alarms, but the idea is the same — false alarms will cost you!
For the casual observer, this seems to make sense — why should law enforcement officers waste their time with these false alarms? The typical false alarm requires 20 to 40 minutes of an officer’s time. This is time lost from performing standard patrols, or responding to crime elsewhere.
Public law enforcement, which we all are forced to support via taxation, is a service that garners wide-ranging support from most people and political backgrounds. In one poll, 83 percent of the American public supported giving the police more power to stop and search people who looked like terrorists. After the Boston Marathon bombing, 91 percent of Massachusetts residents favored the police shutting down parts of the city to look for the second bombing suspect, whom they arrested after being notified of the suspects location by a private citizen.
What all of this support indicates is the basic human need for security. Like food and shelter, people require security. Society requires the protection of property, which can be complemented by professional security forces. Nowadays, these are almost always public law enforcement departments who respond to reports of lawbreaking. However, it’s interesting to note recent situations where people have sought private security due to inadequate public security systems. (See here,here,here,here, here.)
This indicates a couple of things: first, alternatives to publicly-funded police departments exist, including private security monitoring systems for businesses and homes, human patrols who alert public law enforcement agencies, and security agencies hired to watch over employees and property. The Pinkertons are perhaps the most well-known example of this. Second, at least in some areas, public law enforcement is deemed inadequate by the local population; that is, people feel the need to purchase extra security services in addition to those that they are forced to pay for through taxation, and yet, when these private services come in conflict with the state’s security forces, private citizens find themselves paying even more.
This begs the question of why should people pay for the same thing twice. In a particular area, if policing is not maintaining order, why shouldn’t the people there be allowed to choose whatever service protects them to the extent that they are willing to pay?
It seems that some Des-Moines-area businesses were not getting the security they needed from public police departments, and they sought extra security. To make matters worse, false alarms will now cost the businesses more via fines, at $1,000 per hour or more. Business owners are being taxed twice. Surely, at such a high price, totally private security systems would be a much more attractive option.
Here we find the unfortunate outcome of mixing private security with the state’s mandatory and monopolistic security force. Citizens are forced to pay for services that are not sufficient in this case, and are then penalized further when their private security systems bother the public security service provider.
When given the choice, private security systems would vary widely from region to region based on the needs of the customers. In some places, no formal security may be required, while in others, something resembling a public police department would be created (for large cities and businesses, perhaps). But, upon failure of the current system in any particular place, the situation could be changed relatively quickly by withholding funding or resources paid to the private security service provider.
There is nothing magical about the protection of persons and property. The fact that public law enforcement departments use a one-size-fits-all model and resemble each other wherever you go, regardless of the local realities, is the result of state monopolies on security services and the public’s unfortunate support for government police even where they fail to protect or serve.
One of the core principles of good governance in society is the idea that the authority of law ought to prevail over the brute power of people — i.e., that society should operate under the rule of law, not the rule of men. Aristotle wrote that “[t]he law ought to be supreme over all ...” and argued that ... where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up.” The principle has many important ramifications for society, but the most important is the view that government agents and agencies must be bound by the same law as their subjects.
This principle is of great relevance in the present NSA scandals, especially in light of recent NSA admissions of “compliance problems” with the legal constraints that are supposed to operate on the agency. For ordinary citizens, “compliance problems” with the law are better known as “crimes” (or possibly civil wrongs) and these lead to judgment debts, fines, and possibly even jail time, depending on the severity of the lack-of-compliance. But for government officials such notions are irrelevant — legal compliance problems are just something you file a report about, and send to another bureaucrat higher up in the government chain, so that he can bury it on his desk.
Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. The notion of the rule of law is the wellspring of an endless stream of hypocrisy in the modern social-democratic welfare-warfare state. It is difficult to find anyone who does not speak highly of the principle when it is presented in abstract form, yet it is simultaneously rare to find people who really take the idea seriously when applied to concrete situations involving government wrongdoing. In the case of the NSA, the principle of rule of law has been jettisoned entirely, and the agency operates without any effective legal constraints.
Data collection, storage and access by the NSAPresent limitations on the surveillance activities of the NSA are almost entirely technological or logistical. The agency focuses mostly on gathering “metadata” from phone and internet communications, but its capacity to record the content of these communications is also increasing rapidly. According to media reports, the agency has collected over one-trillion metadata records, and has new technology that will allow it to record the voice content of one-billion mobile phone conversations per day. Internet data is continuously collected and recorded by the agency, and the volume of content recorded is so large that it can presently only be stored for only a few days, while internet metadata is stored for thirty days. This allows the NSA to obtain access to the internet activities of a user, including his or her browsing history, as well as the contents of emails and online chats and posts. Data of interest to the agency is stored in a separate database that holds records for up to five years.
Throughout the NSA scandal, the US Government has sought to convince the public that its surveillance activities are targeted exclusively at suspected terrorists and their associates, and that data collection is used exclusively for the purposes of combating terrorism, with strict legal constraints and oversight operating to prevent mass surveillance. However, despite initial protests to the contrary, it is now evident that the NSA does indeed indiscriminately collect and store metadata and communication content under its surveillance programs.
The collection of metadata and communication content occurs without any probable cause to believe that that the people targeted are a threat to anyone. It also occurs in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the already very broad requirements of the Patriot Act, which requires applications for access to records to have “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the [records] sought are relevant to an authorized investigation.” In a recently declassified (but still heavily redacted) opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Judge James Bates wrote that “[t]his court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.” In an earlier ruling the court had found that legal requirements for data queries had been “frequently and systematically violated.”
The NSA has taken a two-pronged approach to its legal defense of its surveillance activities. It has claimed that it may collect any and all information it wishes without any warrant or restriction, and that this does not constitute real “collection” of data unless the database is later queried. In other words, collection of data is not really collection of data, so long as the data sits idle and is not accessed. It has then claimed that querying of its databases is only ever done under warrant and only under circumstances where there are specific facts to yield a reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity. This is clearly false in view of the broad searches and indiscriminate data mapping that shows up in NSA documentation.
NSA operations and their “compliance problems”After a long period of fervent denials, the NSA has now acknowledged that its analysts have often exceeded their legal limits even under the widest interpretations of the Patriot Act by the NSA itself. An internal audit of the agency found that in a single year there were 2,776 “incidents” of unauthorised collection, storage, access or distribution of communications of US citizens, with many individual incidents covering large numbers of communications. This included violation of court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Rather than referring to these as instances of lawbreaking as what they are, the Director of National Intelligence has instead referred to these legal violations as “compliance problems” with the programs. He has made a point to stress that these kinds of problems are monitored and assessed regularly by the agency and are to be expected in such a complex program. One consequence of this view is that there is no actual sanction for unlawful activity by the NSA. If “compliance problems” are just an expected part of government operations then there is no sense in having any sanction for these legal breaches. The agency then operates above the law, in the sense that its agents are pre-emptively acquitted of lawbreaking, on the grounds that some degree of non-compliance with the law is expected.
Even for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, tasked with supposed judicial oversight of the agency, attempting to hold the NSA to the rule of law has been a farce. Chief Judge Reggie Walton explained to the press that, “[t]he FISC is forced to rely upon the accuracy of the information that is provided to the Court. ... The FISC does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance, and in that respect the FISC is in the same position as any other court when it comes to enforcing [government] compliance with its orders.”
The NSA has “compliance problems” in its surveillance programs in the same way that a serial killer has “compliance problems” with the law against murder — neither of them are willing to follow the rules. In a society which respects the rule of law this matters. And as the demagogues spring up to defend the actions of the agency, it is useful to bear in mind what these “compliance problems” really mean for the rule of law.
As the song says, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
State power, i.e., power derived from the “political means” of acquiring wealth through force, is nothing more than a pestilence sapping the peace and prosperity of all humankind, and has been manifest in many cruel and unique forms. Whether it be the whip on the back, the sword on the throat, the gun in the face, or grand global hostage taking via the threat of nuclear destruction, it is clear that state power is nothing more than immoral aggression — logically posterior, parasitic, and subservient to economic power, i.e., power derived from the “economic means” of acquiring wealth through production and voluntary trade. Whereas economic power creates wealth and shares this fruit, state power steals wealth and squanders its spoils.
Yet, despite these self-evident truths about the rapacious nature of state powersome people consider state power to be the “boss” of economic power. Even the most ardent believer in that old chestnut, “we are the government,” cannot seriously suggest we are literally the government. Even those who see the government as a “social club,” a “social contract,” or some mystic representation of “the people,” must admit the club needs an executive committee, the contract needs drafters and enforcers, and the people need enlightened leaders (hence in each case a ruling caste).
At the root of the matter all such euphemisms are merely an insidious form of apologia — a means to obfuscate whilst upholding the idea that state power is the “boss” of economic power. It is a trick of language used by wolves and sheep alike, giving the wolves an excuse for their predation and the sheep a reason for their fleecing. Put differently, it is a way for the rabble to render their own chains, and with gilded hope and love, give “themselves” the reins. Such egalitarian doublespeak is a crucial tool used by the modern nation state to apologize for state power’s predation upon economic power, allowing the state’s agents to act as tyrants while calling themselves “servants.”
What a perversion of the truth and the law! I contend, if we wish to stop this predation and the perversion, an initial step should be for libertarians to have our opponents at least speak plainly about the state power they seek to wield!
Contrary to (or maybe owing to) immoral gimmicks with language, the modern nation-state is afforded a status separate and above the rest of civil society: above not only positive law but natural law. Put simply, a coercive ruling caste exists over the rest of society by virtue of its opaque coercive powers. This fact is evident when one looks at the vast modern bureaucracy commissioned to carry out the Sisyphean task of planning and regulating the lives of the nation’s citizens. Whether it is the IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, EPA, or some other benign sounding state agency, the modern bureaucracy is drowning the liberty of the American people and their Constitution in a man-made sea of alphabet soup, and it is a slow boil, indeed.
Those agencies tasked with “keeping the homeland safe”re especially prone to a special status above the law through their clandestine budgets and operations as well as their severe treatment of whistleblowers. Operating in the shadows, the U.S. intelligence community seeks to be the boss of the world’s information in the name of “security.” Due to the heroic action of whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, the public has now confirmed what they long suspected to be true: the NSA, under the purview of the secret FISA court, has built an “architecture of oppression” which is being used for the transnational collection of free communications of innately free peoples. Contrary to statist claims, the internet as we know it is a creation of free-market entrepreneurship, production, and competition though it is still plagued by governmentinterventions that limit and pervert the potential development of the technology.
For the state to now be preying upon this free development of economic power in the name of “keeping the people safe” or “fighting the war on terror” is not surprising. As said above, state power has been manifest in many cruel and unique forms, and this particular type of state predation upon the free development of communications has been seen before in the history of the American colonies. Let us turn to the words of Murray Rothbard from his expansive history of colonial America, Conceived in Liberty, as we meet the old boss, same as the new boss:
Postal service began in the early American colonies as freely competitive private enterprises of varying forms and types. Letters between neighboring villages were sent by special messengers, who were often Indians. For longer journeys, letters were carried by travelers or regular merchants. Letters to or from England were carried by private ship captains, who often hung a bag in the local coffeehouse to receive letters for shipment. The price was generally a penny for a single letter and two pence for a double letter or parcel.
Unfortunately, English precedent held out little hope for the unhampered development of a freely competitive postal service. In 1591 the Crown had issued a proclamation granting itself the monopoly of all foreign mail, and in 1609 the Crown’s proclamation extended its own monopoly to all mail foreign or domestic. The purpose of this postal monopoly was quite simple: to enable governmental officials to read the letters of private citizens in order to discover and suppress “treason” and “sedition.”
This is a vivid display of how the state slowly assumes power and wealth from freely developed economic power for the sake of aggrandizing its own interest: state power. In this particular case, a monopoly on all meaningful communications is blatantly for the protection and security of the Crown's interest and not the colonists sending letters in the Americas and abroad. The purpose of the intervention was explicitly to discover crimes against the state: treason and sedition. At least the state officials at the time were honest with their reasons!
Rothbard continues his discussion of the Crown’s thinking at the time:
Thus, when the Privy Council decided in 1627 to allow merchants to operate an independent foreign post, the king’s principal secretary of state wrote sternly: “Your lordship best knoweth what account we shall be able to give in our places of that which passeth by letters in or out of the land, if every man may convey letters under the course of merchants to whom and what place he pleaseth ... how unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man to write and send what he list ...” And in 1657 when the Commonwealth Parliament continued the English governmental postal monopoly, the preamble of the act stated a major objective: “to discover and prevent many dangerous and bigoted designs, which have been and are daily contrived against the peace and welfare of this Commonwealth, the intelligence whereof cannot well be communicated, but by letter of script.”Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 2, pp. 639–640.
“How unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man?” What refreshing honesty from the king’s man! Ask yourself, is this the type of honesty we hear from our current “public servants”?
In a word: no.
In light of the revelations about the NSA’s massive spying programs in which the U.S. government is literally collecting our mail and communications just as the British Crown read the colonists’, the response has become cartoonish cliché. In regard to the liberties protected by the 4th Amendment, the government responds with supposed moderation, “We must work to strike a balance between liberty and security,” or extends a statement to elicit fear, “This information being released has made the country less safe. Maybe, a treasonous act.” In regard to the leaker, Edward Snowden, the government responds, “He’s a traitor,” or more diplomatically, “No one is above the law.”
It does not take much to see all of these responses as retreads of the classic egalitarian doublespeak “we are the government” and as said before, I contend it should be a libertarian project to get our statist opponents to speak plainly about how they wish to use state power. Lovers of liberty cannot allow those who wish to wield state power to hide behind “the people” when the people are the very one's being victimized and led into serfdom by the domineering use of state aggression. Thus, let us take to these phrases one by one:
(1) “Edward Snowden is a traitor and no one is above the law.”
A traitor to whom and why? Is not the Constitution the supreme law of the land? And if so, who acted above the supreme law of the land, Snowden or the government? Also, by having the power to make law and use arbitrary discretion in the law’s enforcement is not the federal government always “above the law” including the natural, objective law instilled in the 4th Amendment, the right to be left alone?
(2) “This information being released has made the country less safe. Maybe, a treasonous act.”
How in particular has the country been made less safe? Those who often claim this rarely provide evidence, as it would require them to reveal more government secrets. As for safety, how does offending the natural born rights of the global community keep us safe? As for treason, I turn to Cato’s Letters and say, “... I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason ...”
(3) “We must work to strike a balance between liberty and security.”
This bargain has never worked, especially since there is not any actual balance or bargain involved. I wish you would just come out and say what you really mean: “How unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man!” Your goal is not to strike a balance but to sap the liberty of the global community. Your goal is not to have a debate about some vague balance but to muzzle those who actually wish to debate the violation of the rights of millions of human beings. Tell the truth just as the Crown’s man did a few centuries ago, “How unfit a time this is to give liberty to every man!”
Seeing the law perverted and the truth turned on its head, it is time for us to set things right. Let us return economic power to its true place above state power. Let us return to the only true security ever discovered by human beings: a system of positive law based upon the principles of liberty and the ratiocination of natural law. Let our security be tasked with the just defense of the objective rights of all humankind where no one — not even the government — is above the law. Let us do so in peaceful resistance through independent study, industry, and debate.
And as the song also says, let each us say “... I’ll get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again!”
Liberty in our time depends on it.
Since the details of the NSA programs became publicly known a short time ago, already there are signs of market pressures being brought to bear to curtail the actions of the agency and its partner companies. There are early signs of emerging boycotts of US-based internet and telecommunications companies, and customer migration to firms operating outside the United States. See, e.g., M. Ricknas (2013), NSA surveillance hikes interest in non-US cloud providers. PC World, 14 June 2013. One observer has even suggested that the next desirable IT feature will be for host companies operating outside the US to advertise that they are “not subject to US law” and this suggestion is gaining traction among IT commentators. According to one commentator, “The biggest concern right now is that if US firms lose their credibility, people in other countries might look to take their business elsewhere. Government officials have been desperately trying to cover their tracks at home, insisting that PRISM is about spying on foreigners and not US citizens, but how does the rest of the world feel about this?”M. Wheatley (2013), US tech firms will pay the price for NSA spying. SiliconANGLE, 10 June 2013.
This illustrates one of the outstanding features of decentralization in the political sphere, and the ability of decentralized structures to combat government despotism. By engaging in mass surveillance of foreigners through US companies, the US government has now put the entire telecommunications and computing industry of the US economy at a competitive disadvantage against any other country willing to impose stronger privacy standards on its own security agencies. Moreover, the emerging losses to the credibility and customer base in the US telecommunications and computing industry will have a flow-on effect in all other countries—it signals the negative economic consequences that come from using this industry for the purposes of mass surveillance of the public. Competition between different governments creates disincentives for unwarranted surveillance by punishing the industries of countries which do not adequately satisfy the privacy requirements of consumers.
Note that the positive effects of political decentralization do not hinge on the existence of any other country acting as a bastion of freedom against the tyranny of outside governments. The foregoing competitive principles apply even when all governments are repressive in nature, since a decentralized structure still imposes incentives to be less repressive than the other guy — to compete for the same customers. Hence, the foregoing observations should not be taken to require that privacy and property rights are any better respected by governments outside the United States. In fact, many foreign governments are far worse than the US government in terms of their privacy laws, though their lesser technical capabilities deprive them of the capacity to be as intrusive. Other governments have the same contempt for privacy evident in the functioning of the US government, and many allied powers have actively cooperated with the activities of the NSA, making them partly responsible for the mass surveillance operations in question.This cooperation among Western powers is readily explained by the power of the US government over international affairs. Economist Hans Hoppe has argued that the Western world can presently be regarded as colonial parts of the “hegemonic imperial power” of the US government; see H. Hoppe, (2013) The paradox of Imperialism Mises.org, 4 June 2013. Hoppe refers to this situation in the course of arguing against the “democratic peace theorists.” Specifically, he notes that the US government has acted as a hegemonic imperial power at least since the advent of World War II.
The present consumer trend away from the US telecommunications market should give us hope that market forces can provide a constraint on the power of governments. In view of this valuable market pressure it is imperative that people resist attempts by their governments to centralize control of the internet, either in their own hands, or in the hands of multinational bodies such as the United Nations. Even taking account of the external influence of the US government, and taking account of the mischievous dealings of other governments around the world, the presence of any degree of competitive decentralization — even among different countries operating in an unofficial US empire — imposes incentives for constraints on political power that are absent within the confines of a single political polity. If US telecommunication and internet companies lose business to rivals in Europe as a result of the recent surveillance revelations then this will send a message to political powers around the world, telling them that greater respect for privacy leads to a greater share of the telecommunications market.
Decentralization of political control of the internet is a valuable pursuit, but it is not enough on its own. Wherever governments exist they will see the communications occurring in their territory as a valuable source of information to pursue their political goals and entrench their power over their subjects. As a part of this effort governments will also seek to prohibit technologies and practices that could stifle their attempts to surveil the public.
There are many possible technical and legal avenues that could protect privacy on the internet from the predations of governments. Greater use of personal encryption could protect the content of messages and phone calls, so long as people are not punished for the use of this technology. Technologies or practices to scramble or delete information on the path of communications in the telecommunications network could also assist to protect the public against collection of its “metadata.” Consumer patronage of telecommunications companies operating outside the United States could make it more difficult for any single government agency to “own the internet.” And most importantly, a vigilant public, aware of the dangers of creeping statism, could demand that governments act according to the rules of a civilized society, where searches and seizures of information requires probable cause.
As is often the case in political affairs, we have here a situation where governments reach their tentacles into the lives of the people under their control, and it is market forces from citizens and consumers which oppose and constrain this process. The market imposes a civilizing process on society and the State imposes a de-civilizing process. In regards to the relationship between privacy and civilization, Ayn Rand put things best:
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
What is the purpose of telecommunication and internet surveillance?
The NSA presents its surveillance operations as being directed toward security issues, claiming that the programs are needed to counter terrorist attacks. Bald assertions of plots foiled are intended to bolster this claim.Mathes, M. (2013) At least 50 spy programs foiled by terror plots: NSA . The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 2013. However, secret NSA documents reveal that their surveillance is used to gather intelligence to achieve political goals for the US government. Agency documents show extensive surveillance of communications from allied governments, including the targeting of embassies and missions.MacAskill, E. (2013) New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies . The Guardian, 1 June 2013. Reports from an NSA whistleblower also allege that the agency has targeted and intercepted communications from a range of high-level political and judicial officials, anti-war groups, US banking firms and other major companies and non-government organizations.Burghardt, T. (2013) "NSA spying and intelligence collection: a giant blackmail machine and “warrantless wiretapping program.” Global Research , 24 June 2013. Reports are from NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, who is a former intelligence analyst at the NSA. This suggests that the goal of surveillance is the further political empowerment of the NSA and the US government.
Ostensibly, the goal of the NSA surveillance is to prevent terrorist acts that would harm or kill people in the United States. But in reality, the primary goal is to enable greater control of that population (and others) by the US government. When questioned about this issue, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was unequivocal about the goal of the NSA: “to own the internet and find out what everybody is doing.”Wolverton, J. (2012) Classified drips and leaks. The New American, 6 August 2012. Emphasis added. Capitalization of “Internet” removed.
“To own the internet” — Public-private partnerships in mass surveillanceThe internet is, by its very nature, a decentralized arrangement, created by the interaction of many private and government servers operating on telecommunications networks throughout the world. This has always been a major bugbear of advocates for government control, who have denigrated this decentralized arrangement as being “lawless.” Since it began to expand as a tool of mass communication for ordinary people, advocates for greater government power have fought a long battle to bring the internet “under control” — i.e., under their control.
The goal of government “ownership of the internet” entails accessing the facilities that route traffic through the network. This is gradually being done through government control of the network infrastructure and the gradual domination of the primary telecommunications and internet companies that provide the facilities for routing traffic through the network. Indeed, one noteworthy aspect of the mass surveillance system of the NSA is that it has allegedly involved extensive cooperation with many “private” firms operating under US law. This has allegedly included major security, telecommunications and internet companies, as well as producers of network software and hardware.
Examples of such “public-private partnerships” are set out in leaked documents of the NSA. An unnamed US telecommunications company is reported to provide the NSA with mass surveillance data on the communications of non-US people under its FAIRVIEW program.Greenwald, G. (2013) The NSA’s mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians . The Guardian, 7 July 2013. Several major computing and internet companies have also been explicitly named in top secret internal NSA material as being current providers for the agency under its PRISM program.Gelman, B. and Poitras, L. (2013) US, British intelligence mining data from nine US internet companies in broad secret program . The Washington Post, 7 June 2013. See also NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collecting program . The Washington Post, 6 June 2013. Several of these companies have issued denials disavowing any participation in, or prior knowledge of the program, but this has been met with some scepticism.McGarry, C. (2013) Page and Zuckerberg say NSA surveillance program is news to them . TechHive, 7 June 2013. (Indeed, given that the NSA did not anticipate public release of its own internal training material, it is unlikely that the agency would have any cause to lie about the companies they work with in this material. This suggests that the material may be accurate.)
Many of these companies have supplied the NSA with data from their own customers, or created systems which allow the agency access to the information flowing through telecommunications networks. They have done so without disclosure to their own customers of the surveillance that has occurred, by using the blanket advisement that they “comply with lawful requests for information.” By virtue of being subject to the jurisdiction of US statutes, all of these companies have been legally prohibited from discussing any of their dealings with the NSA and they have been well placed for retaliatory action by the many regulatory agencies of the US government if they do not cooperate. In any case, it appears from present reports that many companies have been active partners of the agency, assisting the NSA with illegal surveillance activities by supplying data under programs with no legitimate legal basis.
This has been a common historical pattern in the rise of totalitarian States, which have often sought to incorporate large business concerns into their network of power. Indeed, the very notion of “public-private partnerships” in this sector readily brings to mind the worst aspects of fascist economic systems that have historically existed. The actions of US companies that have cooperated in the NSA’s mass surveillance operations calls into question the “private” status of these companies. In many ways these companies have acted as an extension of the US government, providing information illegally, in exchange for privileges and intelligence. According to media reports, “Such cooperation is an extremely delicate issue for the companies involved. Many have promised their customers data confidentiality in their terms and conditions. Furthermore, they are obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which they do business. As such, their cooperation deals with the NSA are top secret. Even in internal NSA documents, they are only referred to by the use of code names.”Ibid Poitras, p. 3.
We began this discussion by asking the purpose of telecommunication and internet surveillance. The answer lies in the uses to which those surveillance powers are being put, and will inevitably be put, as the capacity of the NSA expands. The true purpose of the NSA is not to keep us safe. Its goal is to own the internet, to own our communications, to own our private thoughts — to own us.
[This is the second of a two-part analysis of ethical and legal questions pertaining to whistleblowers who expose government wrongdoing. The first part, “The Ethics of Whistleblowing” is available here. This second part goes beyond contractual considerations to look at government ownership of information and government oversight mechanisms.]
Government secrets and the “ownership” of secret government documentsThe foregoing principles discussed in Part I of our analysis vitiate any allegation of criminal conduct by Edward Snowden resting on his alleged contractual duties to the NSA. His disclosures of NSA documents were certainly “unauthorized disclosures” as has been charged, but there is no reason that any government authorization should be required. Indeed, it is quite absurd to suggest that government permission should be required to disclose evidence of government criminality. But what of the remaining property-based claim that Snowden’s actions involve the “theft” of government property?
This question can be dealt with in a similar manner, by consideration of the ordinary rules pertaining to the use of property in criminal dealings. When a private firm commits a crime using its own property as an instrument of wrongdoing it loses the right to claim ownership as a safeguard against investigation. If an investigator confiscates digging equipment and barrels of toxic waste from a private firm accused of dumping these on the property of others it is no bar to this action if the firm presents a receipt showing that the equipment belongs to them. (Indeed, this would be taken as further evidence linking them to the alleged crime.) The same applies to documentary evidence of a crime — it may legitimately be taken by an investigator as a means of proving criminal wrongdoing, notwithstanding the normal ownership claim that would apply to the item.Of course, if the crime is not proven then the property must be returned. It may also be the case that the firm would then have a legitimate legal action against the investigator for having confiscated their property without good cause. In such a case the legitimacy of the original confiscation rests on whether or not the firm really is engaged in criminal action.
Government claims to ownership have no special status in this regard, and do not override these ordinary principles of property rights. In fact, the situation for government claims of ownership is even weaker than for a private enterprise, since the latter will generally have acquired the tools of its criminal dealings with its own money. If a private firm unlawfully dumps toxic waste on the property of others, it is likely that it has at least legitimately purchased its own barrels and digging equipment without having also stolen these. On the contrary, government agencies are built on a system of coercion, where the resources for their operations are extracted through forcible payment from the public, i.e., through taxation. Unlike in a private firm, this gives rise to a situation in which the “shareholders” of government are forced to contribute the instruments of further criminal activity, whether they wish to participate or not. Government claims to ownership of the property in its possession are extremely dubious, and this is made more so when the claim to ownership is made in order to shield knowledge of its own operations from those very shareholders. When the claim to ownership is made to prevent the disclosure of documents detailing further criminal actions by the government, the appeal to property rights is thrice-damned!
In the case of private crimes it would be unusual that the accused wrongdoer would present a claim to ownership of documents linking himself to a serious crime. Most would want to do everything possible to avoid corroborating ownership of items proving their criminal guilt, and even if this were to be a fruitless endeavor, it would be regarded as the height of chutzpah to claim the protection of property rights to evidence of criminal wrongdoing! But government is altogether unashamed of such absurdities. Faced with clear publicized documentary evidence of extensive lawbreaking by its own agencies, the government screams across the news media “Those are our secret documents! How dare they be stolen from us!”
The necessity to operate outside the institution of governmentNotwithstanding the legitimacy of Snowden’s disclosures of classified NSA material, one objection that has been raised against his actions is the fact that he went outside the official government-sanctioned channels for oversight of its agencies. According to this view, the reporting of government misconduct and criminality must be reported within the rules calculated by that same institution, by reporting to government oversight agencies or Congressional committees. If agencies of the US government engage in secret acts of despotism, an aspiring whistleblower must meekly turn to other agents of the government and ask, “Please Sir, tell me which forms to fill out. How might I go about filing a complaint that suits your requirements?”
Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin naïvely argues that “... our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air — and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it.”
Ah yes. All of those wonderful “legal options” offered to whistleblowers against the NSA. Let’s ask some former NSA whistleblowers about those wonderful options. In 2000 mathematician William Binney and senior NSA analyst J. Kirk Weibe raised concerns about the illegality and waste involved in a surveillance program at the NSA. After repeatedly raising internal concerns within the NSA they reported their concerns to a Congressional committee. As a result of this action both men were accused of having betrayed the agency by the Director of the NSA, General Michael Hayden. Hayden sent an internal memo to staff at the NSA saying that “Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform NSA and I cannot tolerate them.”See NSA whistleblowers William (Bill) Binney and J Kirk Wiebe at the Government Accountability Project. Both men suffered retaliatory action in their careers as part of their efforts to report wrongdoing, and both ultimately left the agency.
Binney left the NSA in 2001 after voicing complaints that the agency was “purposefully violating the constitution.”Binney later made a sworn declaration to the court in the case of Jewel v. NSA. At the time of publication of this article, the case is still ongoing. In 2005 he was investigated by the FBI over suspicions of providing information to the New York Times. Despite being cleared of any wrongdoing the FBI later raided his home and confiscated his personal and business records, keeping a gun on him while he stood naked, towelling off from a shower. As a result of his whistleblowing he lost his security clearance and had to close his business. As Binney put it, “After a raid like that, you’re always sitting here wondering if they’re coming back. This did not feel like the America we grew up in.”E. Bronner, C. Savage, and S. Shane (2013) Leak inquiries show how wide a net US cast. The New York Times, 25 May 2013.
Thomas Drake, another NSA whistleblower, raised internal complaints within the NSA about illegality and waste of public money in a data project known as “Trailblazer.” After approximately five years of efforts to draw attention to the problem through government-mandated channels Drake finally went to the media to report NSA wrongdoing. According to media reports on his actions, “He first tried the sanctioned methods — going to his superiors, inspectors general, Congress. Finally, in frustration, he turned to the ‘nuclear option’: leaking to the media.”E. Nakashima (2010) Former NSA executive Thomas A. Drake may pay high price for media leak. . The Washington Post, 14 July 2010. Notwithstanding any federal whistle-blower laws, Drake was prosecuted on a large number of charges relating to “unauthorized retention” of NSA data, and these charges were used as leverage to try to extort his assistance with the prosecution of other whistleblowers. He held out against this and eventually the government prosecution collapsed. As Drake put it, “I will never plea-bargain with the truth.”Ibid.
If one expects government oversight mechanisms to exist for the purposes of actual oversight, then this all seems perverse. But if one understands the actual purpose of these mechanisms, it all makes perfect sense. The actual purpose of Congressional oversight committees and other government bodies of this kind is to create a channel to divert would-be whistleblowers, so as to trap them in a system designed to identify them for retaliation and neutralize their dissent. Moreover, in a case in which the agency under scrutiny operates an extensive surveillance network, there is a pervasive danger that this very system can be used as a weapon against its alleged overseers. Indeed, previous allegations from NSA whistleblowers suggest that the agency has surveilled the very people that sit on oversight committees and courts prescribed with overseeing its operations. Some of the most vocal and zealous defenders of the surveillance system are the same people who have been alleged to have been previously surveilled by the NSA, leading to concerns that they now defend the agency under the threat of blackmail.For example, Tice alleges that the NSA has previously targeted Senator Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator John McCain, former presidential candidate. Feinstein and McCain are now two of the most important defenders of the program, giving respective support to the program from both major political parties in the US; see, e.g., E. Heil. (2013) Feinstein, NSA’s top Congressional defender, has built respect over decades of service. The Washington Post, 26 June 2013; G. J. Cosker (2013) John McCain defends the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. Examiner.com, 10 June 2013. In both cases there have been concerns expressed by some commentators as to whether the defense of the NSA has been motivated by blackmail pertaining to past intelligence gathered on these public figures.
In light of these considerations, it is perverse to imagine that reporting of government crimes must be done through a system mandated by the very same government that commits these crimes. It never occurs to critics of government whistleblowers that the institution of government is itself coercive and corrupting in nature, and its agents do not have the requisite incentives to offer an effective mechanism for the public exposure of its own wrongdoing. This is why Snowden must flee the United States in fear of his freedom, and perhaps even his life, while the head of the NSA can lie blatantly to the Congress, and then go straight back to collecting his government paycheck.
Snowden is the fifth major whistleblower to give information about the surveillance operations of the NSA. Unlike his predecessors he did not use the government-mandated channels of “oversight” to make complaints. Instead he systematically gathered documentary evidence of the NSA surveillance system and leaked this directly to the media, so as to give information to the public. This is precisely the reason that he has succeeded where previous whistleblowers failed. The claims of Russ Tice are still uncorroborated, but the claims from Binney, Weibe, and Drake have now clearly been vindicated by documentary evidence leaked by Snowden. Despite the previous alerts to the public, it has only been the release of clear documentary evidence from Snowden that has allowed the public to confirm the details of the NSA’s surveillance activities through its own documentation. All three of these previous whistleblowers have been interviewed about the Snowden leaks and all agree that he was correct to take his information directly to the public — that he had succeeded where they had failed.P. Eisler and S. Page. (2013) 3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: we told you so. USA Today, 16 June 2013.
Investigating the crimes of government: is this a crime?We have already noted that the doctrine of unlawful agreements operates to give a philosophical basis for the legal protection of whistleblowers. Similar considerations apply with respect to property claims over documents and other items that incriminate a person in criminal wrongdoing. In fact, the general principles of unlawful agreements also operates beyond this, to a range of activities pertaining to the investigation of unlawful activities. The same philosophical principle is at work when government agents investigate the actions of private criminal organizations, such as when an undercover police officer infiltrates an unlawful criminal syndicate. In such cases, it is perfectly sensible that the investigator would give assurances of secrecy to his target, and it is entirely sensible that this also be viewed as legally and ethically non-binding.
When FBI agent Joseph Pistone (a.k.a. Donnie Brasco) infiltrated the Bonnano crime family in New York, he spent six years as a low-level associate to members of the mafia, no doubt giving various assurances of secrecy under the mafia code-of-silence.S. Lovgren. (2005) FBI agent “Donnie Brasco” recalls life in the mafia. National Geographic News, 10 June 2005. Obviously this was no bar to the legitimacy of his revelations about the actions of this criminal organization — any assurance of secrecy he had made to his mafia associates was legally and ethically non-binding.
So here we have a rather hypocritical situation. The US government claims the prerogative to have its agents infiltrate any private criminal syndicate and make phony assurances of confidentiality to their members, in order to gather evidence of criminal wrongdoing. They rightly regard the code-of-silence of the mafia as being legally unenforceable, even when their own undercover agents give assurances of silence. But faced with the same action being taken against its own agencies the US government asserts that the person gathering evidence of wrongdoing is the criminal! Here it is the code-of-silence of the US government that must prevail, in the face of documented confirmation of its own wrongdoing.
If one takes a principled approach to questions of law, as opposed to slavish adherence to the commands of government legislation, it is appropriate to regard all such instances of confidentiality as being non-binding. Whistleblowers like Snowden operate in essentially the same way as other criminal investigators, using subterfuge to gather evidence of wrongdoing and exposing this to the scrutiny of the public eye. If this freedom of speech is a problem for the operations of the NSA, and makes it difficult for the agency to operate in the way it would like, then perhaps it is the operations of the NSA that are the real problem. Here it is worth reminding ourselves of the rationale for judicial non-enforcement of unlawful agreements:
To refuse to grant either party to an illegal contract judicial aid ... tends strongly towards reducing the number of such transactions to a minimum. The more plainly parties understand that when they enter into contracts of this nature they place themselves outside the protection of the law, so far as that protection consists in aiding them to enforce such contracts, the less inclined will they be to enter into them. In that way the public secures the benefit of a rigid adherence to the law.McMullen v. Hoffman (1899) 174 US 639, per Peckham J at 670.
Concluding remarksI hasten to remind the reader that the legal principles we have been discussing are of the normative jurisprudential variety, and so you should not expect to see such an argument run in any US court on the present matter. These institutions have long since abandoned any pretense of holding the US government to the rule of law. Nevertheless, for those who remain interested in speaking about “theft” and other similar concepts in respect to what is actually validly owned, the correct principles of contract and property will be of interest.
For Snowden, the matter is still up in the air. He has exposed the wrongdoing of men and agencies that are not subject to the rule of law, and are adept at monitoring and destroying the lives of those that displease them. While Snowden is on the run from the agencies of the US government, men like NSA Director James Clapper will remain in the circles of power, collecting their government paychecks and having their hands on the levers of the most massive apparatus of surveillance and coercion in human history.
In the face of revelations of the present magnitude it is important to keep focus on the actions of government, and not to become too consumed with contemplation of the actions of a solitary whistleblower. But there is good reason why the fate of the latter is important. If Snowden survives the onslaught of smears and legal action against him it will serve as a message to other would-be whistleblowers that could serve the public. If he is imprisoned and destroyed it will also serve as a message. This is a matter that is important to anyone who wishes to hold government to account:
In a democratic free enterprise system, a commitment to whistleblowing represents a fundamental confidence in the ability of individuals to make a difference. Society can never eradicate wrongdoing, but it can shield from retaliation those citizens who, urged on by their integrity and social responsibility, speak out to protect its well-being.Winters v. Houston Chronicle Publishing Co. (1990) 795 S.W.2d 723, per Doggett J at 730.
[This is Part I of a two-part analysis of ethical and legal questions pertaining to whistleblowers who expose government wrongdoing. The second part of the analysis is here. In this first part of our analysis we look at the principles of contract and confidentiality as applied to whistleblowers who expose government wrongdoing.]
Recent revelations about the extent and details of the massive NSA surveillance program have been made possible mostly by the actions of a single whistleblower, Edward Snowden, presently in hiding from the wrath of the US government, whose shameful and frightening secrets he has now made public knowledge. Despite repeated denials by its officials, it is now evident that the NSA runs a data-collection and spying network which collects masses of data on the private communications of non-US citizens, and some private communications on US citizens. It does so without requirement for any individual warrants for its targets, and without requirement for any probable cause with respect to any of the individuals whose communications are collected. Instead, the entire program operates under a broad procedure-based warrant system, whereby a special clandestine court hears submissions from the government in secret and then dutifully approves general procedures for mass surveillance, without any adversarial argument being raised by any other party. The warrants allow mass surveillance and storage of data at the discretion of NSA analysts, and these warrants are clearly at odds with the principle of eschewing unreasonable searches.If such a thing matters anymore, the Fourth amendment of the US Constitution requires that “... no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The latter part of this requirement is clearly violated by the FISA warrant system, which gives broad authorization to general spying procedures, but does not require specification of the particular people to be targeted, or any probably cause for targeting them. Indeed, the warrants even allow for the collection and use of data obtained “inadvertently” in cases where the people are beyond the scope of the warrant authority.
Proving the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished, Snowden is presently facing charges from the US government for theft of government property and unauthorized disclosure of defense and intelligence material.Snowden has been charged under Title 18 of the US Code for charges of theft of government property (18 USC 641), unauthorized communication of national defense material (18 USC 793(d)), and communication of intelligence material (18 USC 798(a)(3)). The second and third charges arise under the Espionage Act 1917, enacted during World War I and used since then to prosecute whistleblowers. For more on the charges see Finn, P. and Horowitz, S. (2013) US Charges Snowden with Espionage. The Washington Post, 22 June 2013. He is also subject to widespread vilification in the establishment media, where he has been branded as a “traitor” and a “cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood.” See Welch, M. (2013) The Demonization machine cranks up against Edward Snowden Reason.com, Hit and Run Blog, 11 June 2013. Glenn Greenwald, the main journalist responsible for publication of the leaked material, is also in the crosshairs of the media, and has been accused of committing a felony for publishing the leaked material.See Kurtz, J. (2013) Alan Dershowitz on Glenn Greenwald: “He did this because he hates America.” CNN, 24 June 2013. He has also been questioned by establishment media figures as to whether he should be charged with a crime for having “aided and abetted” Snowden.NBC anchor David Gregory accused journalist Greenwald of having “aided and abetted” Snowden in his actions and his attempts to evade the US government, and asked him “... why shouldn’t you ... be charged with a crime?” See Nimmo, K. (2013) War on journalism: Establishment media accuses Greenwald of treason for reporting on Snowden. . Prison Planet, 24 June 2013.This, of course, is preferable to a sack over the head and a bullet to the brain, but it is a far cry from creating an environment for openness and transparency in government conduct.
For supporters of the massive power apparatus of the US government, Snowden is a criminal, deserving of scorn and imprisonment (or for some, just plain murder). To others such as myself he is an intrepid investigator who succeeded in exposing government wrongdoing where others had failed. But even to some of his supporters Snowden is a hero of the “law-breaking” variety — a man who “stole” government documents to expose the activities of its most corrupt and secretive agencies. Such a circumstance gives cause to stop and examine the basic assumptions of government claims to ownership of the secret information it collects. Implicit in the charge that documents have been “stolen” and that there has been “unauthorized disclosure” is the requirement that the documents and information in question are legitimately owned by the government, and that communication of their contents legitimately requires government authorization.
Consideration of the prevailing positive law on this question can appeal to US government statutes for resolution, and it is hardly surprising that these statutes contain onerous prohibitions on actions that undermine the authority of the US government.For discussion of the distinction between positive and natural law, in the context of criminal matters, see O’Neill, B. (2012) Natural law and the liberal (libertarian) society. . Journal of Peace, Freedom and Prosperity 1(1), pp. 29-50.Provisions of the Espionage Act are now being brought to bear against Snowden to try to put him in prison. But what is more interesting than consideration of the provisions of an Act of the US Congress is to appeal to the science of jurisprudence to determine the normative question of when whistleblowing should and should not be regarded as a criminal action. This is an important jurisprudential question, since it is common for people to assent to the view that whistleblowing should be a protected activity, even when it “breaks the law” in the sense of violating contractual obligations or secrecy legislation.
Whistleblowers and confidentiality obligationsWhistleblowing involves the revelation of misconduct or illegality occurring in an organization. This necessarily involves disclosing secret information beyond the bounds intended by those trying to keep it secret, and often this involves publication and disclosure to the general public. By virtue of the fact that whistleblowers exist within the organizations they are exposing, they are almost always under some contractual or statutory requirement not to disclose the information they are disclosing. If one takes these obligations at face value then it would appear that whistleblowing must always be regarded as a breach of law, and possibly also a breach of ethics, at least insofar as it involves a breach of contract with the organization where the whistleblower is employed. Under such a view, whistleblowing can never be legally justified, and it is only through an ethical imperative to break the law that it could be justified ethically.
Confidentiality contracts are a legitimate part of the management of many kinds of organizations, and in many cases they are indispensible to the successful operation of the organization. This is true in most legitimate professions, and of course, all illegitimate ones. It is certainly true that people and organizations can enter into confidentiality contracts of this kind, and in the ordinary course of business these contracts create justifiable legal and ethical obligations for the parties involved. If a person agrees to confidentiality in dealings with an employer or client, and agrees to keep sensitive material a secret, then ordinarily this would be a legitimate and binding contract that would bind the person to make good on their promise. Failure to do so would be a breach of contract, and might also involve breaches of other legal duties (e.g., fiduciary duties).
However, one exception to this ordinary contractual case is crucial: confidentiality contracts are not legitimate and should not be regarded to be ethically or legally operative when the confidentiality is designed to protect secret unlawful actions that are being taken by one of the parties.See e.g., Corbin, A. (1962) Contracts § 1518. Note that other legal duties may still apply, particularly where there is a fiduciary relationship. For example, a lawyer is still under obligations of confidentiality with respect to disclosures of lawbreaking by a client. This follows from the unique nature of the professional obligation to act as a fiduciary precisely in the provision of advice and defence against allegations of crime. In such a case it is unlikely that the confidentiality agreement would be regarded as an unlawful contract even if it involved disclosure of criminal activities. This is part of a wider objection in law to what are sometimes called “unlawful agreements”These are sometimes referred to as “unlawful contracts” but that terminology has received criticism on the basis that it is contradictory — and “unlawful contract” is not recognized as a valid species of contract. . Broadly speaking, contracts cannot be regarded as legitimate if they involve agreement to perform an unlawful action, or an action designed to further an unlawful purpose. This is the basis on which one can regard whistleblowing as a lawful activity, notwithstanding that it often proceeds in breach of an agreement of confidentiality. In cases of unlawful action occurring in an organization, the action of keeping information confidential will not usually be illegal in its own right, since people are rarely under a positive legal obligation to report breaches of law (with some exceptions). Regardless, this is no bar to the invalidity of a contract obliging a party to do this. A contract can be considered unlawful even if the acts agreed to be taken are perfectly legal, “... by reason of the wrongful purpose of one or both parties in making it.” Corbin, A. (1962) Contracts § 1518 at 744.Hence, a confidentiality contract which protects an underlying unlawful activity is not generally legitimate.
The doctrine of unlawful contracts has a long and robust standing in jurisprudence and common law. Its proper philosophical basis arises from the fact that contracts are conditional transfers of property rights, and this restricts the scope of contracts to actions that are consistent with these rights.Kinsella, N.S. (2003) A libertarian theory of contract: title transfer, binding promises, and inalienability. Journal of Libertarian Studies 17(2), pp. 11-37. The doctrine can also be viewed as a desirable “public policy” arising from the desire to eschew granting legal assistance to lawbreakers.This idea of refusing to grant legal assistance to lawbreakers is related to the doctrine of “estoppels” in law, which is also put forward as a proper basis for rights in libertarian legal theory. See e.g., Kinsella, N.S. (1992) Estoppel: a new justification for individual rights. Reason Papers 17, pp. 61-74.Legal scholar George Strong summarizes the doctrine by saying that, “... an illegal contract is one that is unenforceable as a matter of policy because enforcement would be injurious to the best interest of the public.”Strong, G.A. (1960) "The enforceability of illegal contracts." Hastings Law Journal 12, p. 347. Unlawful contracts are usually regarded to be void at common law, though there are detailed rules for this, based partly on an assessment of which party to the contract is most blameworthy for the unlawful aspects of the matter.For discussion of this matter, see Kostritsky, J.P. (1988) Illegal contracts and efficient deterrence: a study in modern contract theory. Iowa Law Review 74, pp. 115-163. This study suggests a policy of this kind on the grounds of economic efficiency of cost-sharing between parties to unlawful contracts.
When assessing whistleblowing activities that involve the publication of documents or information relating to illegal activity, this means that there is an adequate philosophical basis for the view that disclosure does not involve law-breaking. This is so even when the disclosure is made in violation of confidentiality agreements or other legal duties that would usually be operable. In such cases, the whistleblower is not a “noble law-breaker” — he is no law-breaker at all.
The principle of non-enforcement of unlawful agreements is assaulted by the statist notion that the government may deem information on any aspect of its activities to be “classified,” and this simple declaratory act overrides the right to disclose the unlawful activities of government. According to this view, no matter the nature of the wrongdoing or despotism of any government agency, its officials may simply decide that such-and-such information is “classified” and thereby bind those around them to keep their law-breaking a secret from the general public. This view of government power is epitomized in a recent article by Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, saying that Snowden “… is most certainly a criminal who deserved serious punishment.”Stone, G. (2013) Edward Snowden: “hero or traitor”? The Huffington Post, 10 June 2013. Stone argues that “[t]he government cannot always attach conditions to employment. For example, it cannot constitutionally require its employees to agree never to criticize the president or never to get an abortion or never to invoke their rights under the Fourth Amendment. But it is well-settled that the government can require its employees to agree to some conditions, and one of them is not to disclose classified information.”Ibid.
Stone’s emphasis on “classified” information may seem to limit the power of government only to the protection of some small category of legitimate restrictions. But this is an alleged exception that swallows the rule. After all, it is the agents of government that determine what information is “classified,” and this status means nothing more than the fact that it has been commanded that this information must be kept secret. Hence, to say that the government may legitimately require its employees not to disclose “classified” information, literally means that it may require its employees not to disclose any information that the government deems should not be disclosed. Under this view the government has full discretion to prevent any disclosure of any information it does not want publicly known, regardless of the nature of that information.
One of the primary problems of special legal treatment of “classified” information is that it counts out some of the most important areas of government from the dictates of law. The status of “classified” information is commonly accorded to documents pertaining to intelligence gathering and military affairs. Yet these are some of the most consequential and dangerous areas of the State. To accept “classified” status as determinative of the rights of disclosure is to cut off some of the most important actions of the government from any investigative action. It does not take much knowledge of history to understand that this notion would be very useful to many despotic regimes that have murdered and enslaved their citizens on the “lawful” basis of their own legislative acts. In light of these considerations, no special status can be accorded to a document based purely on the assertion of special privilege by the very entity under scrutiny.
Snowden and the NSA scandalIn the case of the NSA scandal, Edward Snowden infiltrated the NSA in much the same way that an undercover police officer infiltrates a private criminal syndicate. Snowden applied for a position at a consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, who do extensive technical work for the NSA. He obtained the documents now released through his work as a contractor for the agency, and it was in this capacity that he was capable of obtaining access to secret government documents that would otherwise have been beyond his reach. In fact, Snowden has since confirmed that he took the position at Booz Allen Hamilton with the intention of gathering evidence of the NSA surveillance programs. As with any good undercover investigator, Snowden infiltrated his target with assurances of confidentiality that he knew were phony.Snowden worked as a technical professional dealing with NSA systems and it is likely that he operated under a contract with that organization, as well as with Booz Allen Hamilton. No doubt those contracts would have required him not to leak information on NSA programs. It is possible that the NSA would also have relied on statutory prohibitions. In any case, both parties would have been aware of the expectation of confidentiality in the relationship. And as with any undercover investigator, he did not thereby lose the right to disclose details of the criminal actions that he discovered.
Notwithstanding the ordinary contractual duties that Snowden’s work would impose, it is clear that the information disclosed by Snowden points to a massive instance of misconduct and illegality by an agency of the US government, on a scale that gives rise to legitimate fears of despotic control. The surveillance system detailed in the leaks is of a magnitude that is unprecedented in history, dwarfing the surveillance operations of even the most totalitarian states of the past.Comparisons between the NSA surveillance programs and the operations of the Stasi in communist East Germany have been forthcoming since the leaks. In truth, the STASI had nothing like the capabilities of the present NSA. According to recent claims from another whistleblower, former NSA intelligence analyst Russ Tice, the agency has used its surveillance network to gain information on high-ranking political and legal targets that can affect its own operations.Burghardt, T. (2013) NSA spying and intelligence collection: a giant blackmail machine and “warrantless wiretapping program.” Global Research, 24 June 2013.This has allegedly included surveillance of members of Congress, especially on intelligence, judicial and armed services committees, officials at the State Department, members of the Executive service at the White House, and even the current president of the United States (alleged to have been surveilled when he was a senator). It has also allegedly included lawyers, law firms and judges, including judges on the US Supreme Court and two FISA Court judges — the latter being the very people who are charged with judicial oversight of the NSA surveillance system. Other alleged targets have included high-ranking military officers, anti-war groups, US banking firms and other major companies and non-government organizations.
There are, of course, legions of defenders of the NSA surveillance program who maintain that it is all perfectly lawful, and constrained by rigorous judicial and congressional oversight. Such claims are belied by the demonstrated failures of any of these alleged safeguards, and the overt lies told by public officials in covering up these programs. Prior to the Snowden leaks the Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper, lied directly to the US Congress about the agency’s collection of data on US citizens, falsely claiming that the agency did not wittingly collect data on US citizens. Khanna, D. (2013) Should the Director of National Intelligence be impeached for lying to Congress about PRISM? Politix, 10 June 2013. Important court rulings on the program have been kept secret, including a FISA Court opinion that allegedly ruled some actions in the surveillance programs to be in violation of the relevant statutory framework and also in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.Corn, D. (2013) Justice Department fights release of secret court opinion finding unconstitutional surveillance. Mother Jones, 7 June 2013. More recently, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, lied to the public about her knowledge of abuses of power by the agency, despite having access to these secret court rulings, as well as other reports of abuse.Feinstein alleged that she does not know of any instances of abuse of powers at the NSA. This is despite the existence of various published media reports of abuses of powers, and despite the existence of an unpublished FISA Court ruling that the NSA surveillance programs are in violation of the relevant statutory framework and also in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution; see NSA reporter Greenwald to Democracy Now: Senator Feinstein ‘outright lying’ on snooping. LinkTV, 24 June 2013. All of this amounts to a clear instance in which an agency of the US government operates beyond the rule of law, conducting a secret program of mass surveillance beyond its legal and constitutional powers. The programs are justified on the basis of “secret law” that is not made public for scrutiny, nor communicated to congressional oversight bodies.Roberts, D. (2013) Senators accuse government of using ‘secret law’ to collect Americans’ data. The Guardian, 29 June 2013.
For those who believe in non-aggression and adherence to standards of natural law, the suggestion that government action is legitimated by democratic oversight is not acceptable. But even if one were to accept the democratic justification for coercive government power, under the oversight of the alleged “representatives” of the people, there is no viable theory of democracy that can justify the operation of a secret surveillance program of this kind, with overt lying to and by those same “representatives” about the program. By any rational standard, the surveillance programs of the NSA involve acts of misconduct and law-breaking that must rightly be revealed to the general public.
In view of this fact, it is not correct to regard the ordinary operation of confidentiality rules as being either ethically or legally binding. Whatever contractual or legislative restrictions would ordinarily operate on Snowden’s employment, they cannot be regarded to be legitimate if they require him to keep secret his knowledge about government misconduct and law-breaking.
Interviewed by host Coy Barefoot, Mark Thornton talks about the NSA spying on Americans, and more.
[From the Beacon blog of the Independent Institute (2010).]
On July 19, 2010, the Washington Post published the first of three large reports by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the dimensions of the gigantic US apparatus of "intelligence" activities being undertaken to combat terrorist acts against the United States, such as the 9/11 attacks. To say that this activity amounts to mobilizing every police officer in the country to stop street fights in Camden only begins to suggest its almost-unbelievable disproportion to the alleged threat.
Among Priest and Arkin's findings from a two-year study are the following:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 "the attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing." I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already-enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.
As Priest and Arkin report, "The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on September 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counter-terrorism programs." Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that "the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending." To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it's not as if they were spending their own money.
Why would these hundreds of organizations and contracting companies be willing to take gigantic amounts of the taxpayers' money when everyone agrees that the money cannot be spent sensibly and that the system already in place cannot function effectively or efficiently to attain its ostensible purpose? The question answers itself. It's loot for the taking, and there has been no shortage of takers. Indeed, these stationary bandits continue to demand more money each year.
And for what? The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one.
It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade — after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI "captures" the unfortunate victims of the government's entrapment.)
So the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small — not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent.
Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can't be done won't be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.
The sheer idiocy of paying legions of twenty-something grads of Harvard and Yale — youngsters who cannot speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, or any of the other languages of the areas they purport to be analyzing and who know practically nothing of the history, customs, folkways, and traditions of these places — indicates that no one seriously expects the promised payoff in intelligence to emerge from the effort. The whole business is akin to sending a blind person to find a needle inside a maze buried somewhere in a hillside.
That the massive effort is utterly uncoordinated and scarcely able to communicate one part's "findings" to another only strengthens the conclusion that the goal is not stopping terrorism, but getting the taxpayers' money and putting it into privileged pockets. Even if the expected damage from acts of terrorism against the United States were $10 billion per year, which seems much too high a guess, it makes no sense to spend more than $75 billion every year to prevent it — and it certainly makes no sense to spend any money only pretending to prevent it.
What we see here is not really an "intelligence" or counterterrorism operation at all. It's a rip-off, plain and simple, fed by irrational fear and continually stoked by the government plunderers who are exercising the power and raking in the booty to "fight terrorism."
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who respect coercive authority and consider it legitimate, and those who do not. The former group is likewise split into two factions: a relatively small group that, for whatever reason, essentially worships power, and a much larger one whose members merely tolerate authoritarianism, either as a matter of expedience or habit. In the wake of the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon and subsequent military-style manhunt, it seems clear that the great majority of Americans may be categorized as either power-worshiping or power-tolerant.
To be sure, the police came in for a fair share of vehement criticism from a number of established commentators. Ron Paul, for example, stated flatly that the people of Boston had been given “a taste of martial law” and likened the situation to “a military coup in a far off banana republic,” while at the other end of the spectrum, the World Socialist Website denounced the tactics of the police as having “no precedent in American history,” compared Boston to “a city under occupation or in civil war,” and claimed that the news media had “fomented fear and hysteria, spread ungrounded rumors and justified the police state measures of the Obama administration.”My own cursory perusal of mainstream media reports suggests that they tended primarily to trivialize rather than glorify the use of force as such, while portraying the officers personally as heroes. Time Magazine, for example, describes SWAT teams as innocuously going “block by block, knocking on doors and asking people if they had seen anything suspicious,” whereas this video shot from the window of a private home clearly shows police with weapons drawn, forcing the occupants of a neighboring house to come out with their hands in the air while officers search the premises. This article from the New York Times sports a picture showing local celebrities (Boston Red Sox players) lined up and applauding as uniformed police offers walk past them, in an image that clearly calls to mind the patriotic fervor of a military parade.
Yet to the great majority of Americans, as well as to most Bostonians, the authoritarianism of the police was fully justified by the extraordinary circumstances. The aim of the “lockdown”Boston officials have denied the imposition of a “lockdown,” claiming that it was rather a request to “shelter in place.” It is not my intention to settle this question here. Those interested can find more here. was to protect the public from a fugitive and presumably armed terrorist. Any means to achieve this goal were therefore a priori acceptable, the fact that US citizens are about eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist notwithstanding.
Can the two parties of this debate both be satisfied? Can the Ron Pauls of the world be free of tyranny and the “Boston Proud” set feel safe at the same time? Yes, but not so long as the provision of security services remains monopolized.
Market Law vs. Martial LawIn law enforcement as in any other hampered or fully centralized market sector, the real problem is never the visible, concrete symptom, but rather the underlying condition that has brought it about. Whatever the particular type of problem may be in any given case, the catalyzing condition, almost invariably, is monopoly.
Being the sole legal provider of any service allows for greater flexibility in customer relations (to put it politely) than would otherwise be practicable, and when the service involves sending men with guns to people’s homes, this is not a trivial consideration. Over time, monopoly policing will tend to become increasingly autocratic, even in circumstances far less extreme than a full-scale manhunt.
We need look no further for evidence of this than Boston, which in a very real sense was already under quasi-lockdown even before the marathon began. In this video released by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Police a few days before the event, the Authority made clear the types of conduct by citizens that it would tolerate. Residents were lectured on the need to be “respectful to one another,” warned that any public drinking or “rowdy behavior” would be met with “zero tolerance,” and were even expressly prohibited from gathering on their own rooftops and porches.
Yet all this, it seems, raised nary a Bostonian eyebrow. Is it any wonder they acquiesced so readily in the manhunt as well?
We may protest the unconstitutional invasiveness of these things all we like, but they are merely effects that, without some form of monopoly protection, could never arise. Under free competition, any private security firm that resorted to draconian tactics would be swiftly abandoned by its subscribers in favor of its less intrusive competitors, thus marginalizing or driving it out of business altogether.
This is another way of saying that in the market law society it is the citizens who would tell the police which types of conduct would be tolerated, and the latter could not place the former under anything resembling “lockdown.” Nor would this situation be in any way analogous to a political system of direct democracy in which the majority could use the police as a tool for imposing its own arbitrary behavioral standards on the minority. For a private firm with multiple competitors, the alienation of any segment of its customer base, however minute relative to the whole, could easily mean bankruptcy. A private police company in a free security market could no more subjugate its own customers than a restaurant can force-feed its patrons. And tyrannizing non-subscribers would bring it into violent conflictFor a detailed discussion of why private police companies would not and really could not attempt to dominate each other or settle inter-agency disputes by violence, see Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, pages 224-26. with its competitors and society as a whole — something no private business could afford.
All this has been pointed out many times. However, a competitive law enforcement market offers other less apparent but equally valuable mechanisms for the avoidance of conflict and the promotion of efficiency, goodwill, and cooperation between the police and public.
Consider a high-priority manhunt along the lines of the one in Boston. Under state monopoly policing, the government dispatches SWAT teams riding in “armored personnel carriers,” which, coincidentally, happen to look a lot like tanks. Upon reaching their target neighborhoods the officers disembark, fan out across the area and show up unannounced on people's doorsteps, armed to the teeth and looking like the Imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars. Confusion ensues. Babies cry, children gawk, cats scurry up trees, and millennialists think it’s the Second Coming. Residents are told to come out with their hands up and wait outside while strangers with assault rifles search their homes. Enough marijuana gets flushed into the municipal sewage system to stone the city’s entire rat population.
Market-based policing could not be conducted in this way. However odd it may sound at first, in a private law society, individual firms might differ significantly in the sorts of “manhunt services” they offered. Depending on consumer preferences, they might even offer individualized contracts. Much as insurers can customize policies to suit individual needs, and medical patients can sign a “do not resuscitate” order in the event of catastrophic illness or accident, clients of private police companies could stipulate in advance the sorts of invasive actions they would accept and under what circumstances.
Some might be perfectly comfortable letting officers enter their homes without notice and for almost any reason; others might insist on prior notification and/or third-party verification of emergency conditions or probable cause. Modern data management and communications technologies would make it a simple matter for officers in the field to know instantly which houses could be searched right away, while an automated phone system could call hundreds or even thousands of other homeowners simultaneously, inform them of the situation using a digital voice recording, and allow them to instantly grant or refuse permission to enter simply by pushing a button or saying the words “yes” or “no.”
This idea is easy to ridicule (just imagine picking up the phone and getting a recorded message that said “To allow officers to search your home for a deranged fugitive terrorist, please press 3.”). But hyperbole aside, something along these lines would easily be feasible, as would many other possibilities as yet undreamed of. It would certainly represent an immense improvement in any case over the present system of tax-funded monopoly policing in which officers may enter anyone’s home at the discretion of their superiors, and even order residents off their own porches and roofs.
Many people will reflexively dismiss these unfamiliar ideas as “utopian,” and may raise numerous objections to them. They may counter, for example, that any system of pre-existing contractual arrangements would allow armed and dangerous criminals to evade capture simply by taking refuge on property where police are bound by “no search” clauses. Moreover, a small group of, say, terrorist bombers could even purchase their own house in advance, insist on a strict “no search” provision in their security contract, and then simply go home after committing their crimes and enjoy full immunity from prosecution!
Such objections are, however, plainly groundless. The first fails because it overlooks the obvious fact that the terms of contracts between security firms and their subscribers would be strictly confidential; criminals would have no way of knowing which houses were “safe” and which were not.
The second objection is untenable because, absurdly, it transforms the “no search” provision into de facto immunity from prosecution — an entirely different thing and an arrangement to which no police company could possibly consent.The modern state does offer a few select individuals what amounts to a "no arrest" clause. It's called "diplomatic immunity."
A “no search” clause in a police contract would and could be valid only for cases involving more or less random searches. If the police, whether public or private, had strong reasonThe question might reasonably arise as to who gets to decide what is and is not "strong reason." Different societies might answer this question in different ways, of course, but there seems to be no reason why procedures very similar to the state's currently-existing bench warrant system could not be used, with the difference that instead of a government employee (judge) issuing a search warrant, each police company would turn for authorization to a committee of private citizens, all of whom would be subscribers to the company's services. to believe that a wanted criminal was hiding on X’s property, X would then have to allow his property to be searched because a refusal to do so would be tantamount to an assertion that his right to privacy superseded the rights, not only of the criminal’s victims to justice, but also of the community at large to protection from a known victimizer.
If we furthermore assume that the suspect really has taken refuge on X’s property, then by refusing a search request, X would also be precariously close to aiding and abetting, which is a crime in itself and cannot be protected by any sort of legal contract whatever.
Finally, some people may fear that giving homeowners such a large measure of control over access to their property would result in almost everyone opting for “no search” contracts. Although it is not immediately clear why this should be considered problematic, the conclusion itself, at least, seems prima facie defensible. However, it suffers from two problems. First, even under the present system, citizens supposedly already have a “no search clause” in their “contract” with the government. It’s called the Fourth Amendment. The only difference is that the state, being a monopoly service provider, can breach the contract with virtual impunity.
More importantly, however, this final objection overlooks what may be the single greatest virtue of market law. In simplest terms, coercion provokes conflict. In fact, coercion is conflict. In all coercive relationships one party — the coercer — must necessarily assume a superior role vis-à-vis the other.
Such relationships therefore naturally foster antagonism, defiance, and a sense of victimhood that makes peaceful cooperation impossible. Voluntary association, on the other hand, simply by respecting individual preferences, communicates genuine respect for the person as an autonomous individual, thereby promoting trust and goodwill between and among contracting parties.
It follows that if law enforcement were to be governed by this principle, fear and/or resentment of the police would be much less intense and far less common, leading property owners to be more amenable to on-the-spot searches. Indeed, many otherwise recalcitrant people might well abandon all reluctance and cooperate fully with the police, simply because the latter had the common courtesy to ask for permission in advance. And since officers, as representatives of their companies, would be fully constrained in their behavior by the freedom of each and every citizen to take his business elsewhere, no one would need to fear that they were letting bulls into a china shop.
Since the catastrophe in Boston, a few other advantageous aspects of market law have been obliquely touched on in the media as well. These include the fact that despite what was surely one of the most intensive manhunts in US history, it was not the police, but a private citizen who discovered the suspect hiding in his back yard and notified the authorities; that the sequestration of people in their homes, whether voluntary or not, probably prevented the suspect from being discovered sooner; and that it was a private and not a municipal security camera that allowed him and his fraternal accomplice to be identified in the first place.
To this list we might add the perverse misallocation of police manpower before the bombing, as officers were focused on deterring such “crimes” as the quaffing of a few beers on the sidewalk, “rowdy” celebrations, and unlawful socializing on porches.
In a private law society, security officers would be freed from the ludicrous burden of fun-prevention so they could concentrate on spotting real criminals before they commit their crimes. There would also be much greater incentives for prevention, since all public events (i.e., private events open to the public) would be taking place on someone’s property, giving the owners of such property a very compelling reason to carry liability insurance to compensate the victims of any crimes that might occur there.
This means that even those with no individual insurance of their own would be indemnified against any injuries caused by the actions of others at public events, even if the perpetrators could not be located. Looking to minimize payouts, the insurance companies would in turn offer incentives to owners to invest heavily in preventive measures, such as the installation of security cameras, better lighting, controlled entrance, the use of bomb-sniffing dogs, or simply the hiring of lay personnel to walk around with walkie-talkies and serve as “extra eyes.”
Final Thoughts: The Structure of Social RevolutionsBy now I have had enough conversations with assorted statists on both the “left” and the “right” to know that most people with an established, mainstream view of society and the law will not be persuaded by what is written here, nor probably by any other criticisms, however valid, or visions, however vivid.
All attempts at conversion of the entrenched are likely to fail, and almost everyone these days appears entrenched to some degree. At times it may seem futile even to begin the discussion. Yet, I believe there is reason to be hopeful.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn famously showed how new paradigms in science become accepted. Truly revolutionary ideas, he said, do not suddenly triumph when the scientific establishment becomes convinced of their superiority over existing doctrine, but rather take root slowly as the old guard retires and the torch is passed to the new generation of scientists. “Almost always,” Kuhn wrote, “the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigms they change.” He also offered an explanation as to what it is that induces the emerging generation to embrace fundamental cognitive shift: “The usual prelude to changes of this sort is … the awareness of anomaly, of an occurrence or set of occurrences that does not fit the existing ways of ordering phenomena.”
We live in anomalous times, and not just with regard to science. Today’s young people know this. They recognize all too clearly that something about the society they live in doesn’t fit the standard explanations their elders have accepted so uncritically for so long, and they are willing to approach the essential questions with an open mind and tremendous energy. In keeping with Kuhn’s thesis, it is they who must come to appreciate the full potential of the market law society, since they are the only ones who can bring it about anytime soon. It is therefore this group to whom we need to speak.
Like the good people of Boston, we libertarians — especially those of us in the anarchist tradition — have our own marathon to run. Thomas Kuhn has supplied us with a map of the territory, and Ron Paul has given us a far more auspicious start than we had any reason to hope for. It’s up to us to keep running, no matter how many bombs go off before we reach the finish line.
Mises Review 18, No. 3 (Fall 2012)THE WAR ON DRUGS IS A WAR ON FREEDOMLaurence M. VanceVance Publications, 2012, xvi + 103 pgs.
The efforts, spurred by Mayor Bloomberg, to ban large cans of drinks deemed too sugary have been much in the news lately; and a peculiar point in the mayor's defense of this measure is highly relevant to Laurence Vance's excellent book. What struck me as odd in the mayor's comments was that he confined his defense to pointing out the dangers to health posed by the drinks he wished to ban, along with the attendant monetary costs that illnesses that resulted from consuming these drinks might impose.
It never seemed to occur to Mayor Bloomberg that whether an individual decides to consume a harmful substance ought not to come under governmental supervision. The decision is the person's alone to make. What was odd about the mayor's comments was not so much that he rejected this view, but rather that he did not deem it worthy of mention. State paternalism for him required no defense.
As Vance reminds us, it is not only libertarians who reject paternalism. To the contrary, the view that the state can address only acts directed against others, not ones that affect immediately just an individual himself, is integral to the classical-liberal tradition. It received its canonical statement from John Stuart Mill:
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it. Each is the guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. (p. 13, quoting Mill)
Mises applied Mill's principle to the subject of Vance's book, drug regulation, in characteristically incisive fashion. To allow regulation of dangerous drugs opens the door to attacks on freedom of speech and of the press:
Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. … And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? (p. 24, quoting Mises)
For Vance, the fundamental issue in drug regulation is individual rights. He does not at all deny that these drugs can cause great harm; but the issue of regulation is not to be settled by balancing the benefits and harms of open access to drugs against the benefits and harms of their regulation or prohibition.
Practical and utilitarian arguments against the drug war are important, but not as important as the moral argument for the freedom to use or abuse drugs for freedom's sake. The moral case for drug freedom is simply the case for freedom. Freedom to use one's property as one sees fit. Freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labor in whatever way one deems appropriate. Freedom to use one's body in the manner of one's choosing. Freedom to follow one's own moral code. Freedom from being taxed to fund government tyranny. Freedom from government intrusion into one's personal life. Freedom to be left alone. (pp. 12–13)
This passage illustrates Vance's force and eloquence, often based, as here, on the repetition of a key phrase.
If consequences are for Vance not the most important consideration in morality, they nevertheless matter. (By the way, it's a common misconception that supporters of a rights-based morality ignore consequences and that for them these carry no moral weight. To the contrary, almost all supporters of moral rights think that consequences are also morally important. I think that Vance ought not to have contrasted "moral" with "practical and utilitarian" considerations. Both rights and consequences are parts of morality.) Much of the book consists of a concise yet comprehensive account of the bad effects of drug regulation. The war on drugs has led to the highest prison population of any country in the world.
The United States leads the world in the incarceration rate and in the total prison population.… Almost twenty percent of the state prison population are incarcerated because of drug charges. Almost half of the federal prison population are incarcerated because of drug charges. There are almost 350,000 Americans in state or federal prison at this moment [November 2011] because of drug charges. (p. 71)
The drug war has had manifold invidious effects on civil liberties.
The war on drugs has destroyed financial privacy. Deposit more than $10,000 in a bank account and you are a suspected drug trafficker. … The war on drugs has provided the rationale for militarizing local police departments. … The war on drugs has resulted in outrageous behavior by police in their quest to arrest drug dealers. … The war on drugs has eviscerated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. (pp. 57–8)
In its deleterious effects on freedom, the drug war recalls the worst excesses of Prohibition. For these, the short contemporary account of the revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Prohibition Versus Civilization: Analyzing the Dry Psychosis (Viking Press, 1932) is well worth seeking out and reading.
These immense costs have not brought with them extensive good results. To the contrary, the drug war has been a manifest failure. "In spite of decades of prohibition laws, threats of fines and/or imprisonments, and massive propaganda campaigns, drugs are available and affordable" (p. 26).
Vance, it is apparent, has launched a remarkable war of his own, conducted with superb generalship, against the drug war; and one of the arguments in his campaign strikes me as an especially effective one. The harms of tobacco and alcohol vastly exceed the ill effects of dangerous drugs, yet there is no call to ban them. Prohibition is recognized by nearly everyone as a failure, not to be repeated. If this is so, how can one justify banning less dangerous substances?
Alcohol abuse and heavy tobacco use are two of the leading causes of death in the United States. It seems rather ludicrous to advocate the outlawing of drugs and not the outlawing of alcohol and tobacco. (p. 11)
Vance writes from a viewpoint that will surprise many readers. He himself does not condone the use of dangerous drugs. To the contrary, he is a Christian and a Bible scholar of considerable note and he regards their use as sinful. "As an adherent to the ethical principles of the New Testament, I regard drug abuse to be a vice, a sin, and an evil that Christians should avoid even as they avoid supporting the government's war on drugs" (p. 79).
If Vance takes this view of drug use, why is he so adamant that people have the right to consume these drugs? His answer will be of interest to all students of moral theology. He holds that Christians can with perfect consistency uphold the distinction between vices and crimes, with only the latter an appropriate area for forcible suppression.
No Christian would be in favor of criminalizing all sins. Not when the Bible says that "the thought of foolishness is sin" (Proverbs 24:9). Why, then, are some Christians so quick to applaud making some sins criminal just because the state happens to select them and not others? (p. 84)
Vance's admirable remarks on this topic will I suspect be of great interest even to those who do not share his faith.
The War on Drugs Is a War on Freedom is an outstanding contribution to the contemporary battle for liberty. It has the potential to do great good, and Vance deserves high praise for his magnificent work.
The recent mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and then in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, have led to renewed demands for "gun control" aimed ultimately at depriving the individual citizen of his constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It is believed that if the individual were deprived of this right, such shootings would not take place, because of the sheer lack of available weaponry.
Let me say immediately that I too believe in gun control. However, I do so in the light of the knowledge that by far the largest number and the most powerful guns and other weapons are in the possession of the government. First and foremost, of course, the federal government, which has atomic and hydrogen bombs, as well as ballistic missiles with which to deliver them, fleets of warships, and thousands upon thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, machine guns, and lesser weapons. State and local governments also possess considerable weaponry, though less than the federal government. But just the revolvers, rifles, shot guns, clubs, tear gas, and tasers in their possession are capable of causing serious injury and death, and frequently do so.
Moreover, the threat of deadly force is implicitly present in every law, regulation, ruling, or decree that emanates from any government office, at any level. The threat of such force is what compels obedience on the part of the citizens. Even such an innocuous offense as a parking violation is capable of resulting in death if a person persists in not paying the fine imposed and, when ultimately confronted with arrest, resists by physically defending himself.
Literally everything the government does is ultimately a threat to point a gun at someone and use it if necessary. If this were not the case, the law, regulation, ruling, or whatever, would be without force or effect. People would be free to ignore it if they wished. Because of the government's implicit threat to use deadly force to uphold its decisions, any meaningful program of gun control must above all focus on strictly controlling and regulating the activities of the government.
The government possesses overwhelming power to respond to the use of force by common criminals. That is its basic domestic function. The very existence of laws against such crimes as murder, robbery, and rape serves as a control on the use of force, including the use of guns, by the potential perpetrators of such acts, because it constitutes a deterrent to them. The more efficient the government is in apprehending the perpetrators of such acts and the more certain is their appropriate punishment, the greater is the deterrent, and thus the more effective is the implicit gun control.
Our entire Constitution and Bill of Rights are essential measures of gun control — this time, gun control directed against the government. For example, the First Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedoms of speech or press. The Second Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedom of the citizen to keep and bear arms. Indirectly, the Second Amendment also operates to limit the government's use of its guns to abridge freedom in general. This is because, in our system of checks and balances, an armed citizenry constitutes a check on the possibility of the government becoming tyrannical and attempting to use its power to threaten the citizens' lives and property. It should be understood as protecting a balance between the power remaining in the hands of the people and the power they have delegated to their government. Indeed, the language of the Second Amendment — "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" — should be understood in this way.
The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears that instead of regarding government with apprehension, he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent, concerned only with protecting and helping him. Evil, he believes, can come only from uncontrolled private individuals, notably greedy businessmen and capitalists and, now and then, psychopaths such as the murderers in Aurora and Oak Creek. And in these cases, of course, the solution is believed to be still more government power — power to tax, regulate, and control the businessmen and capitalists to the point of extinction and power ultimately to deprive private individuals of the right to own guns.
It simply doesn't occur to many people nowadays that government could be the source not only of massive economic ills but of human deaths on a scale dwarfing the deaths caused by the worst individual psychopaths. The number of murders attributable to governments around the world in the 20th century, including those resulting from government-caused famines in places such as the Ukraine and Communist China, is estimated to exceed 260 million. Of this total, Communist China is responsible for more than 76 million, the Soviet Union for almost 62 million, and Nazi Germany for almost 21 million (R.J. Rummel, Death By Government [New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994], note 1). Of particular note, approximately 2 million of the murders committed by Nazi Germany were in the form of mass shootings, similar in nature to those in Aurora and Oak Creek, but performed on a scale commensurate with the size of military units.
These were the dreaded SS Einsatzgruppen, sent into Soviet Russia behind the advancing German armies for the express purpose of murdering as many Jews as they could find. Organized into units ranging in size from platoons to battalions, approximately 3,000 government-employed psychopathic killers were set to work in a program of systematic mass murder. Unlike the recent horrors committed by the two American psychopaths, the horrors committed by these government-employed psychopaths were not limited to one time in just one day before they came to an end. No. They were repeated many times in a day, day after day, for months on end.
Again and again, hundreds and thousands of defenseless people, including women and children, were shot down, often machine-gunned in front of trenches they had been made to dig and into which they fell dead, in mass graves. Such murders came to an end only when replaced by the more efficient method of mass murder represented by gas chambers, which accounted for 4 million more murders of Jews added to the 2 million carried out by mass shootings.
If only the victims had been armed! If the 6 million murdered Jews had been armed, and ready to fight for their lives when the Nazis came for them, they might have been able to make at least one Nazi pay with his life for each Jewish family taken away. That would have worked out to roughly a million Nazis. The anticipation of such an outcome might well have been enough to prevent or at least abort the Nazi's policy of mass extermination. It would have been an enormous illustration of the principle that guns in the hands of victims serve as a control on guns in the hands of murderers or would-be murderers, or aggressors of any kind. In Aurora, in the movie theater where the murders took place, if members of the audience had been permitted to have guns in their possession, the number of victims would almost certainly have been far less. Anyone sitting near the killer and in possession of a gun, would have been able quickly to stop him.
The last thing the United States needs is "gun control" in the sense of depriving its citizens of their right to own guns. What it does need is control over the use of guns by its government.
The people of the United States and their elected representatives have literally lost much of their control over their government and its use of its weapons. Since 1945, the United States has been engaged in four wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — not declared by Congress, despite the fact that the Constitution clearly provides that Congress shall have the power to declare war. The same process of growing government power, concentrated in the executive branch, that has eliminated the need for Congress to declare war, has removed judicial protection for economic freedom and thus practically all restraint on the power of Congress to interfere in economic activity.
This has resulted in Congress possessing far more power than it is directly capable of exercising, with the further result that it has had to delegate most of its additional lawmaking powers to dozens of independent regulatory agencies. As of December, 2010, these agencies, located in the executive branch, had written a total of 75,000 pages of regulations, each carrying the force of law. The regulatory agencies, moreover, exercise legislative, executive, and judicial power. They act as prosecutor, judge, and jury. Thus, we now have dozens of unelected, unaccountable bodies writing the equivalent of laws and authorizing the use of guns to enforce them. Gun control requires the abolition of such agencies.
The government and its use of its weapons are falling increasingly out of the control of the American people and their elected representatives. A government whose activities are beyond the capability of an intelligent, conscientious representative or senator to understand, is a government that is out control. Those in charge of it do not, and cannot, know what they are doing, despite the fact that they are doing it with guns. Most of them do not even read and carefully study, let alone fully understand, most of the bills they are called to vote upon. Routinely, they enact laws whose consequences they do not know, and whose essential terms they cannot even define. To put it mildly, this is an extremely dangerous state of affairs.
Genuine gun control, not the variety urged by the leftist dominated media, requires a radical rollback in government activity. The rollback must proceed to the point of the government having the authority to use its weapons only against those who have committed acts of aggression, i.e., the initiation of physical force, against the person or property of others. This, of course, includes the use of defensive and retaliatory force against foreign governments that have committed acts of aggression against the United States and its citizens.
Failure to stop and reverse the advance of government power and our and other governments' increasingly uncontrolled threat to use their guns is capable of resulting in a number of people murdered by their governments later in this century far exceeding even the total recorded for the 20th century. The more than a quarter of a billion people murdered by their governments in the last century may well be exceeded by billions of people being murdered by their governments in this century.
Who might want to murder billions of people? Who are the waiting mega-Communists and mega-Nazis of this century that would put such plans into effect if they should ever come to power? They are the people who share such sentiments as those expressed by Britain's Prince Philip when he wrote, "I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist.… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus."
The murder of billions of people is implied in the thinking of anyone who holds the belief that there are "too many" billions of people. The billions who constitute the "too many" — the allegedly "surplus," "unnecessary," "environmentally destructive" billions — they are the potential targets of a future mega-holocaust.
"Guns in the hands of victims serve as a control on guns in the hands of murderers or would-be murderers."True, such a holocaust is not inescapably implied. Population might fall simply as the result of a voluntary fall in the birth rate. Indeed, this has actually taken place in many of the world's advanced economies. And if population does not fall as the cumulative result of voluntary individual choices, or fall "sufficiently" to satisfy the likes of Prince Philip, moral abominations short of mass murder, might also achieve the goal of mass depopulation. Compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, such as practiced in Communist China, come readily to mind. But add a strong enough dose of psychopathic hatred for mankind, plus uncontrolled government power in the hands of the haters, and murder on the scale of billions becomes a definite possibility.
This is the year 2012. How many people in 1912 could have foreseen that in just two years, the world would be plunged into generations of mass killing and mass murder, inspired for the far greater part by the collectivist ideologies of nationalism and socialism? Is it impossible that the world of the years ahead will similarly be marked by the rise of environmentalist dictatorships dedicated to the eradication of the billions, native or foreign, whose existence they perceive as destroying the "environment" or as standing in the way of the living standards of those who will be allowed to remain?
Have the antihuman ideologies already at the fore in the early 20th century been replaced by an ideology of individual rights and economic freedom? Is the world moving away from collectivism and socialism and toward laissez-faire capitalism, or, to the contrary, is even the slightest trace of economic freedom described as laissez-faire and blamed for the existence of the present economic crisis, thereby impelling the world toward still more government control and still less economic freedom?
There is clearly a potential threat to human life and well-being looming on the horizon that is of unprecedented proportions. It is present in the openly expressed hate-filled, murderous ideas of many people. Sooner or later, in response to this or that crisis or series of crises, these ideas will be translated into physical action if not overcome by other, prohuman ideas. The likelihood of a catastrophic outcome is steadily increased by the continuing increase in government power and corresponding reduction in individual freedom. With each passing decade, the United States resembles less and less the country of its founders and more and more a country such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. If the trend of the last several generations continues, it is only a question of time before the United States will become indistinguishable from a totalitarian dictatorship.
To be secure against the threat of a totalitarian regime with a policy of mass murder, or the threat of tyranny of any kind, the American people must retain their right to keep and bear arms and restore it wherever it has been abridged. They must reestablish control over their government. Congress must regain its exclusive right to declare war and its exclusive right to legislate. The courts must be required to uphold economic freedom. The government must be reduced in size and scope to the point that conscientious legislators can understand its operations in detail and be in a position intelligently to enact laws designed to control them. That is what is required to establish genuine, meaningful gun control.
The American people must not allow themselves to be misled into giving up their right to own guns by the occasional, and almost always avoidable, tragedies that accompany gun ownership, such as a small child finding its way to a loaded gun and pulling the trigger. On the basis of such a standard, people would also have to give up driving cars, to avoid the tragedies that often accompany automobile accidents, and also even using horses and buggies, in order to avoid the tragic accidents that can result in connection with them. What must always be kept in mind is the incomparably greater potential danger of untold numbers of children losing their parents and their own lives to government-employed murderers unleashed on a disarmed population.
To impose gun control on their government, the American people need in addition to arm themselves in a way that is more fundamental than merely possessing physical weapons. They need to arm themselves intellectually and morally as well, by reading and studying the works of the great modern defenders of freedom, above all, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. This will enable them to counter and overcome the vicious ideas that underlie the misuse of government power and its continuing growth. An armament of physical weapons combined with knowledge and moral conviction will ensure that the American people will never find themselves in the position of helpless, terrified people being led as sheep to the slaughter. They will never allow themselves to be either the victims or the perpetrators of a holocaust, for they will have regained control over their government and its use of its weapons. They will have achieved the kind of gun control that secures their lives and property and threatens the lives and property of no one else.
Mises Review 18, No. 2 (Summer 2012)ORGANIZED CRIME: THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH ABOUT GOVERNMENTThomas J. DiLorenzoMises Institute, 2012, xi + 219 pages
Thomas DiLorenzo is probably best known to the public for his revisionist studies of Lincoln, but he has a wide range of economic and historical interests.See, for example, his The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, and my reviews of these in The Mises Review, Summer 2002 and Summer 2007, respectively. Organized Crime, a collection of 52 short articles by him, shows again and again his keen eye for the striking historical detail that exactly illustrates the point he wants to make.
It will come as no surprise to readers of the Mises Daily that price control does not work. But DiLorenzo still manages to come up with an unexpected point about this familiar topic. The Nazi leader Hermann Goering warned the American occupation authorities that they stood in danger of repeating the mistakes of his own recently fallen regime. Speaking to the American correspondent (and, by the way, later American Ambassador to Switzerland) Henry Taylor, Goering said,
Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control peoples' wages and prices — peoples' work. If you do that you must control peoples' lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried and it failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here. (p. 5)
Unfortunately the American government has not managed to equal the level of insight here displayed by the late and unlamented Reichsmarschall. The Obama administration brought suit against
a proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile USA. According to the New York Times on August 31, 2011, stopping the merger would supposedly "help save jobs of American workers." (p. 24)
To this contention, DiLorenzo offers a brilliant riposte. Just as the mercantilists wrongly thought that the way to national wealth was to amass gold and silver, so do the modern opponents of economic progress falsely believe that full employment requires that existing jobs be conserved: "The Obama mercantilists apparently believed that existing jobs, not gold, must be hoarded" (p. 25).
DiLorenzo readily refutes the fallacy:
They [the Obama administration] failed to recognize that the economy is dynamic, with jobs constantly being created and destroyed as new-and-improved industries and business practices replace the older and less efficient ones (efficient in serving consumers, that is). (p. 25)
DiLorenzo supports the Austrian analysis of the business cycle over the monetarist view of Milton Friedman, but this fact does not prevent him from making use of Friedman's apt insights on other topics. Thus, writing about the current healthcare crisis, he calls attention to an important study Friedman published in 1992:
Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned as for-profit enterprises in 1910. … It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over nearly the entire hospital industry. … Friedman's key contention was that, as with all bureaucratic systems, government-owned or government-controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs" such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "output" in terms of the quantity and quality of medical care. … This kind of result is present in all government-run bureaucracies because of the absence there of any kind of market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense in government, there is no reliable mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance. (pp. 26–7, emphasis in original)
DiLorenzo also notes Friedman's comment that
if the average tariff rate in America were a few percentage points lower than it would otherwise be thanks to influence of academic economists, that would more than justify all of their salaries and then some because of the wealth-enhancing effects of freer trade. (p. ix)
In order fully to benefit from free trade, peaceful relations among nations are obviously desirable if not outright essential. There have been cases of warring nations that continued to engage in trade; but, obviously, states engaged in war are concerned with other things than social cooperation through the free market. If a nation wishes to gain as much as possible from trade, then, it seems well-advised for it to pursue a foreign policy of peace.
So much seems simple commonsense; but those who advocate such a policy are often smeared as "isolationists." DiLorenzo quite properly points out that this name entirely reverses the truth. It is the supposed isolationists who favor the greatest attainable commerce with other nations, and it is their interventionist opponents who disrupt trade by involving us in unnecessary wars. He suggests calling such people "instigationists":
War leads to isolationism. People interact peacefully and beneficially in the free market; they kill each other when they are at war. … The real "isolationists" who seek to destroy the peaceful cooperation among the people of the world are a group of people who might be called "instigationists." They are the egomaniacs and rent seekers … who instigate wars with their lying, conniving, and manipulating behavior. They typically have never participated in a war, or even the peace-time military, themselves, and are deservedly labeled as "chickenhawks" by many commentators. (pp. 45–47)There were, though, some noninterventionists who opposed international free trade, such as Charles Beard.
Readers of the book who expect DiLorenzo to say something about Lincoln and his war policy will not be disappointed. In pursuit of his policy of imposing the American System of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay on the recalcitrant Confederacy, Lincoln ruthlessly suppressed opposition. In such stifling of dissent, he was joined by the Radical Republicans in Congress.
In telling the story "of how the Republican Party engaged in a Stalinist spasm of political repression" (p. 91), DiLorenzo makes apt use of a book by the Lincoln scholar William Marvel, Lincoln's Darkest Year: The War in 1862. In one respect, I fear, he has been misled by his source. The Republican-controlled Senate in 1862 expelled one of its most senior members, the Democrat Jesse Bright of Indiana. Following Marvel, he says,
Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright "had known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi," the Republican Party accused Senator Bright … of "retroactive treason" and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote. (p. 91, quoting Marvel)
There was rather more to it than that. An arms dealer had been apprehended who had on his person a letter of introduction to Davis, written by Bright. This was the principal charge that led to the expulsion.
Nevertheless, Marvel and DiLorenzo are on firm ground in their general condemnation of the Republican policy of repression.
Even Democrats running for Congress were imprisoned before election day. … Republican Party thugs were not above beatings and murder of Northern civilians who dissented from the "Grand Ole Party" line. (p. 92, emphasis in original)
Unfortunately, matters only worsened as the war continued.
DiLorenzo views with shrewd skepticism attempts by his fellow economists to provide theoretical justifications for interference with the free market. The much-ballyhooed area of "happiness research" has proved a fertile source of such justifications, and DiLorenzo rejects them all.
Regardless of the success of the free market in generating an ever-increasing abundance of material goods, happiness researchers such as the Swiss economist Bruno Frey complain that increases in wealth do not always carry with them increases in happiness. Instead of exclusive concentration on raising production, policymakers should endeavor more directly to address the sources of unhappiness. For example, even if poor people get more money, they may find upsetting the still-greater wealth of the rich. Do we not have here a reason for remedial action by the state? The negative externalities that result from disparities in wealth should not be ignored.
DiLorenzo responds that the
assertions about the supposed ability of happiness researchers to finally measure utility simply ignore all the reasons that have been accepted for decades by the economics profession as to why utility is "ordinal" instead of cardinal and not measurable. (p. 186)
Happiness researchers often make use of public-opinion surveys in their attempts to determine levels of happiness, and against them DiLorenzo invokes the weighty authority of Murray Rothbard:
Not only will a person's valuation differ when talking about them [choices] from when he is actually choosing, but there is also no guarantee that he is telling the truth. (p. 187, quoting Rothbard)
As to the supposed negative external effects on the poor imposed by the wealthy, DiLorenzo makes a penetrating observation:
The supposed "negative external effect" is the envy by poorer people. But it has always been true that intellectuals, not the poor, have been the chief advocates of egalitarianism. Most poor people want to become richer. It is the intellectual class that is so often obsessed with envy and hatred of people who are more financially successful than they are. That they can manipulate survey questions that are used to make it appear that this view comes from "the poor" and not themselves does not make this statement untrue. (p. 189)
Organized Crime is an outstanding presentation of the main themes of DiLorenzo's career as a scholar. Anyone who values a historically informed and well-written defense of freedom will gain a great deal from reading the book and absorbing its lessons.
The Free Market 29, no. 7 (Fall 2011)Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.
This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed any more.
If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering state on the free market that drains its capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the fascist state has been called the vampire economy. It sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once-thriving economy.
Let me just provide a recent example.
The first sets of data from the 2010 US Census are in. The headline story concerned largest increase in poverty in 20 years, and now up to 15 percent. Buried in the report is another fact that has much more profound significance for most people. It concerns median household income in real terms.
What the data have revealed is devastating. Since 1999, median household income has fallen 7.1 percent. Since 1989, median family income is largely flat. And since 1973 and the end of the gold standard, it has hardly risen at all. The great wealth-generating machine that was once America is failing—and falling more since the statistical recession is said to be ended than during it.
No longer can one generation expect to live a better life than the previous one. The fascist economic model has killed what was once called the American dream. And the truth is, of course, even worse than the statistic reveals. You have to consider how many incomes exist within a single household to make up the total income. After World War II, the single-income family became the norm. Then the money was destroyed and American savings were wiped out and the capital base of the economy was devastated.
It was at this point that households began to struggle to stay above water. The year 1985 was the turning point. This was the year that it became more common than not for a household to have two incomes rather than one. Mothers entered the workforce to keep family income floating.
The intellectuals cheered this trend, as if it represented liberation, shouting hosannas that all women everywhere are now added to the tax rolls as valuable contributors to the state’s coffers. The real cause is the rise of fiat money that depreciated the currency, robbed savings, and shoved people into the workforce as taxpayers.
This huge demographic shift essentially bought the American household another 20 years of seeming prosperity, though it is hard to call it that since there was no longer any choice about the matter. If you wanted to keep living the dream, the household could no longer get by on a single income.
Today median family income is only slightly above where it was when Nixon wrecked the dollar, put on price and wage controls, created the EPA, and the whole apparatus of the parasitic welfare-warfare state came to be entrenched and made universal.
The talk in Washington about reform, whether from Democrats or Republicans, is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes, small cuts, commissions they will establish, curbs they will make in ten years. It is all white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even close.
The problem is more fundamental. It is the quality of the money. It is the very existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is the whole assumption that you have to pay the state for the privilege to work. It is the presumption that the government must manage every aspect of the capitalist economic order. In short, it is the total state that is the problem, and the suffering and decline will continue so long as the total state exists.
The Origins of FascismTo be sure, the last time people worried about fascism was during the Second World War. There can be no question of its origins. It is tied up with the history of post–World War I Italian politics. In 1922, Benito Mussolini won a democratic election and established fascism as his philosophy. Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party.
All the biggest and most important players within the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to join the fascists en masse.
This is also why Mussolini himself enjoyed such good press for more than ten years after his rule began. He was celebrated by the New York Times in article after article. He was heralded in scholarly collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we needed in the age of the planned society. Puff pieces on this blowhard were very common in US journalism all through the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.
In Italy, the Left realized that their anticapitalistic agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the authoritarian, planning state. Of course our friend John Maynard Keynes played a critical role in providing a pseudoscientific rationale for joining opposition to old-world laissez faire to a new appreciation of the planned society. Recall that Keynes was not a socialist of the old school. As he himself said in his introduction to the Nazi edition of his General Theory, National Socialism was far more hospitable to his ideas than a market economy.
Flynn Tells the TruthThe most definitive study on fascism written in these years was As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. It was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought FDR every step of the way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a leader of the America First movement that saw FDR’s drive to war as nothing but an extension of the New Deal, which it certainly was.
As We Go Marching came out in 1944, just at the tail end of the war, and right in the midst of wartime economic controls the world over. It is a wonder that it ever got past the censors. It is a full-scale study of fascist theory and practice, and Flynn saw precisely where fascism ends: in militarism and war as the fulfillment of the stimulus spending agenda. When you run out of everything else to spend money on, you can always depend on nationalist fervor to back more military spending.
The Eight Marks of Fascist PolicyFlynn, like other members of the Old Right, was disgusted by the irony that what he saw, almost everyone else chose to ignore. After reviewing this long history, Flynn proceeds to sum up with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the fascist state.
As I present them, I will also offer comments on the modern American central state.
Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint on its powers.
If you become directly ensnared in the state’s web, you will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to what the state can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in your hometown, or having your business run afoul of some government agency. In the end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way, no matter how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but one step away from Guantanamo.
No aspect of life is untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of healthcare is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private relationships. Mussolini himself put his principle this way: “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation, conceived in liberty, has been kidnapped by the fascist state.
Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle.
I wouldn’t say that we truly have a dictatorship of one man in this country, but we do have a form of dictatorship of one sector of government over the entire country. The executive branch has spread so dramatically over the last century that it has become a joke to speak of checks and balances.
The executive state is the state as we know it, all flowing from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of the executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the executive. This executive is not really about the person who seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the elections are only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on the institution. In reality, the nation-state lives and thrives outside any “democratic mandate.” Here we find the power to regulate all aspects of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this executive rule.
Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy.
The reality of bureaucratic administration has been with us at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning bureaucracy that lived in World War I. The planned economy— whether in Mussolini’s time or ours— requires bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the heart, lungs, and veins of the planning state. And yet to regulate an economy as thoroughly as this one is today is to kill prosperity with a billion tiny cuts.
So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives.
It is as Bastiat said: the real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.
Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism.
Syndicalist is not usually how we think of our current economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.
In the case of the United States, in the last three years, we’ve seen giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies, Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies enjoying vast privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the state in living a parasitical existence at our expense.
Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.
Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self determination of the nation-state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.
Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony. It is the reason for the North American Union.
Point 6. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.
This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer hidden. In the latest round, and with a prime-time speech, Obama mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.
Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the state. That’s why they are falling apart. And the reason that people don’t have jobs is because the state has made it too expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.
As for the rest of this speech, Obama promised yet another long list of spending projects. But no government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as much fake money as the United States, all thanks to the power of the Fed to create money at will. If the United States doesn’t qualify as a fascist state in this sense, no government ever has.
Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.
Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never seriously discussed in policy debates? The United States spends more than most of the rest of the world combined. And yet to hear our leaders talk, the United States is just a tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the world. Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is essential for the US way of life that the United States be the most deadly country on the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey.
Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.
We’ve had one war after another, wars waged by the United States against noncompliant countries, and the creation of even more client states and colonies. US military strength has led not to peace but the opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the United States as a threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.
Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so, but his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare state just as vicious as any in history. The difference this time is that the Left is no longer criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing ever to happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.
The FutureI can think of no greater priority today than a serious and effective antifascist alliance. In many ways, one is already forming. It is not a formal alliance. It is made up of those who protest the Fed, those who refuse to go along with mainstream fascist politics, those who seek decentralization, those who demand lower taxes and free trade, those who seek the right to associate with anyone they want and buy and sell on terms of their own choosing, those who insist they can educate their children on their own, the investors and savers who make economic growth possible, those who do not want to be felt up at airports, and those who have become expatriates.
It is also made of the millions of independent entrepreneurs who are discovering that the number one threat to their ability to serve others through the commercial marketplace is the institution that claims to be our biggest benefactor: the government.
How many people fall into this category? It is more than we know. The movement is intellectual. It is political. It is cultural. It is technological. They come from all classes, races, countries, and professions. This is no longer a national movement. It is truly global.
And what does this movement want? Nothing more or less than sweet liberty. It does not ask that the liberty be granted or given. It only asks for the liberty that is promised by life itself and would otherwise exist were it not for the Leviathan state that robs us, badgers us, jails us, kills us.
This movement is not departing. We are daily surrounded by evidence that it is right and true. Every day, it is more and more obvious that the state contributes absolutely nothing to our wellbeing; it massively subtracts from it.
Back in the 1930s, and even up through the 1980s, the partisans of the state were overflowing with ideas. This is no longer true. Fascism has no new ideas, no big projects—and not even its partisans really believe it can accomplish what it sets out to do. The world created by the private sector is so much more useful and beautiful than anything the state has done that the fascists have themselves become demoralized and aware that their agenda has no real intellectual foundation.
It is ever more widely known that statism does not and cannot work. Statism is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact opposite of its promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has given us fear, poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that we have to build ourselves. The fascist state will not give it to us. On the contrary, it stands in the way.
In the end, this is the choice we face: the total state or total freedom. Which will we choose? If we choose the state, we will continue to sink further and further and eventually lose all that we treasure as a civilization. If we choose freedom, we can harness that remarkable power of human cooperation that will enable us to continue to make a better world.
In the fight against fascism, there is no reason to be despairing. We must continue to fight with every bit of confidence that the future belongs to us and not them.
Their world is falling apart. Ours is just being built.Their world is based on bankrupt ideologies. Ours is rooted in the truth about freedom and reality. Their world can only look back to the glory days. Ours looks forward to the future we are building for ourselves.
Their world is rooted in the corpse of the nation-state. Our world draws on the energies and creativity of all peoples in the world, united in the great and noble project of creating a prospering civilization through peaceful human cooperation. We possess the only weapon that is truly immortal: the right idea. It is this that will lead to victory.
[Originally published September, 2011.]
Several years ago, the police entered the office of a young professor at a reputable university and arrested him for an online crime. They took the professor away, booked him, and then offered him a deal: admit guilt and get off easy.
The professor said to the few people to whom he was permitted to speak that this was crazy because he was innocent.
His lawyer warned him: fight this and you could get life; admit guilt and you will get a suspended sentence. He took the deal. It was a trick. Now he languishes in jail, his life wrecked as far into the future as he can see.
This doesn't happen in America, does it? Yes, it does. Not only that, it is increasingly the norm. Those raised on a steady diet of courtroom television shows believe that they are true to the way justice is meted out. This is completely naive. Trials in federal criminal cases are rare. Nine in ten cases are settled in pleas like the above case. Only 3 percent of the cases go to trial. Among those that go to trial, the defendant wins once in every 212 times.
What this means is that there is no way out for the accused. The prosecutors have all the power. Not even the judge has discretion, because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime. This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001. For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein.
It was not "liberals" or "conservatives" who did this. It was both parties acting with the massive support of the American public, as tyrants in the public sector licked their chops. This was a result of security-minded madness, and even now hardly anyone cares.
Today, every single citizen, no matter how free he or she may feel in daily life, is in reality a sitting duck. You can be made to disappear. There is essentially no way you can escape once the feds sweep you into their net. There is no justice. The total states of the past used to pretend to have trial-based convictions. The total state of the present doesn't even bother. It just puts a sack over your head and takes you away.
What happens then? Your loved ones cry. They try to move close by to where you are holed up, typically several states away. They are bankrupted and ruined. And what of your coworkers, your friends, your social set? They might want to help. They might feel bad for you. But the fact is that you pleaded guilty, and you have not even a chance to tell your side of the story. For all anyone knows, you got exactly what you deserved. So they do the only thing they can do: they forget about you.
And there you languish until the system decides you are taking up too much room. Perhaps it is ten years. Maybe twenty. At some point, the doors open again and you are free. But you are ruined: bitter, talentless, emotionally changed, physically debilitated, and — if you are young and slim — gang raped. There is no point in contacting the friends that abandoned you. Members of your family have moved on; they have lives, too, and had to live them out. In terms of employment, you are a washed up ex-con.
The United States has the largest prison population in the world — 2.3 million people. That's almost 1 in 100 people. That's more than the population of Latvia or Slovenia. That's nearly the entire population of Nevada. That's Wyoming, DC, North Dakota, and Vermont combined. If the prison population had congressional representatives, they would have four seats.
These people are politically, socially, culturally, and economically invisible. How many are actually guilty? We can't know. How many could be let out today to make a wonderful contribution to building a productive society? We don't know. How many are completely nonviolent, not even guilty by any normal standard of law but only guilty according to the letter of the current dictatorship? Probably a majority. Perhaps a large majority. In the New Testament, visiting prisoners is equated, as a good deed, to visiting the sick. And we do not think of the sick as guilty.
Yet the rise and entrenchment of the American police state are rarely questioned. Public opinion is mostly happy with the whole thing. There can never be too much prosecutorial power, never too many police, never too many prisons, never sentences that are too long. No one says, "We should not be so tough." The entire ethos is the opposite. A rare story such as the one in the New York Times recently is too little to wake anyone up.
How could this have happened in America? Well, looking back, it seems that it all stems from a single flaw: the belief that the most essential institution in society is the state that protects us from criminality and must maintain a monopoly over justice. Some of the greatest defenders of freedom otherwise have been happy to make this one concession to the state. And this one concession is now a major source of our undoing as a free people.
There are reforms that we can make. No more plea bargains in federal cases. Restore basic human rights. Give judges and juries back their discretion to evaluate each case, and permit them to rule on the merit of the law, too, in the common-law tradition. A push back to grant basic constitutional protections would be a good first step.
However, in the end, what is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of the notion that the state rather than private markets must monopolize the provision of justice and security. This is the fatal conceit. No power granted to the state goes unabused. This power, among all possible powers, might be the most important one to take away from the state.
Last month, an international rights tribunal slapped America across the face through a showcase ruling that has no legal force. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that Jessica Lenahan could sue the Castle Rock, Colorado, police department for its refusal in 1999 to enforce a restraining order against her estranged husband. The American courts had dismissed her case.
The tribunal's finding has reignited the discussion of a decades-old tragedy. But the issue is being cast as an expose of America's domestic-violence policies. It is more accurately an example of the extreme disconnect between the public and the police when it comes to preventing violence. The public cries, "That's your job!" The police reply, "Tell it to the judge." And American judges have consistently ruled that the police have no obligation to protect you.
The tribunal's ruling reveals a common confusion about the purpose of law enforcement in America. Lenahan claims that the police have a legal obligation to protect her from violence and so, they were delinquent in their duty. In reality, protecting people is not the mission of law enforcement. Their purpose is to enforce the law, to administer the will of the state.
Where did this near-schizophrenic view of law enforcement come from? The Lenahan case offers some insight.
Back Story on the Case On June 22, 1999, estranged husband and father Simon Gonzales kidnapped his three young daughters despite an active restraining order against him. Frantic, his wife Jessica (then-Gonzales) phoned the police seven times and visited the police station, pleading with them for help. Even though a restraining order was in place and had been violated, the police refused to pay more than token attention to her, believing Simon to be nonviolent. Within 24 hours, the corpses of the three girls were found in the back of his pick-up truck and Simon was killed in a shootout with police.
Jessica filed a $30 million lawsuit against the city of Castle Rock, accusing the police of violating her 14th Amendment right to due process. The Due Process clause of the Amendment reads, in part,
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In essence, Jessica argued that the police department's refusal to enforce a restraining order violated a Constitutional entitlement to protection.
The case wended its way up to the US Supreme Court. On June 27, 2005, the Supreme Court dismissed Castle Rock v. Gonzales on the grounds that there was no constitutional right to police protection.
By Colorado law, the police are required to "use every reasonable means to enforce a protection order." Nevertheless, the Supreme Court ruled against state law. The majority held that
Colorado law has not created a personal entitlement to enforcement of restraining orders. It does not appear that state law truly made such enforcement mandatory. A well-established tradition of police discretion has long coexisted with apparently mandatory arrest statutes.
Thus, the heart of Castle Rock v. Gonzales is a police v. the people dispute. Do the police exist to protect you? The clear answer is no. From the 1856 US Supreme Court ruling on South v. Maryland through to Castle Rock, the courts have ruled that "there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen" (Bowers v. DeVito, 1982).
What, Then, Is the Purpose of the Police? The American legal system is rooted in English common law, and the modern American policeman harkens back to English sheriffs, who were paid by and accountable to the government, not to the community. The main purpose of the sheriff was to enforcement what were called "government decisions." Maintaining public order was also a concern, but "order" was defined by the government.
Late 18th-century England is the specific period of history in which the modern American police force is rooted. England was then developing into a modern nation-state and many of the institutions we recognize today were being launched. One of the first "police bills" was suggested in 1785 by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. It would have established a tax-funded police force with jurisdiction over London; the bill was defeated. But in 1786, the English instituted a centralized municipally funded police force in Dublin, Ireland, with the explicit purpose of quashing "disorder." In the wake of the 1799 rebellion in Ireland, the police force was further centralized and strengthened.
In this as in other social measures, Ireland acted as a testing ground for what would later become policy in England. For example, the English imposed state-supported hospitals in Ireland long before they existed in Britain. The establishment of the modern police force in Ireland was completed in 1814 under Robert Peel, chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who established the Peace Preservation Police. Peel explained that the police were a "paramilitary force" — that is, it was military in both organization and training. True to their name, the purpose of the police was to preserve the peace against disruptive elements — that is, against rebellious native Irishmen.
In his essay "'Call the COPS' — But Not the Police: Voluntaryism and Protective Agencies in Historical Perspective," libertarian Carl Watner described England as becoming "more receptive" to the idea of modern police force
so that by 1829, Peel — now Home Secretary for England — was able to persuade Parliament to accept his proposal for a single government-controlled police for London; the new Metropolitan Police [was] … a tamer, anglicized version of the police he had established earlier in Ireland.
What had changed since 1785? At least two factors weighed heavily. In his book Police and Protest in England and Ireland 1780–1850 (1988), Stanley H. Palmer described one of them:
[T]he experience of organizing and recruiting the Irish police undoubtedly informed a central English political elite of the feasibility of police, their usefulness in times of disorder, the advantages of disciplined professionalism. (p. 376)
In their book Criminal justice: an introduction to philosophies, theories and practice (2004), Ian Marsh, John Cochrane, and Gaynor Melville described a second factor:
Why did the modern police force emerge at this time — at the beginning of the 19th century? Until then the threat to individual liberty had been used as an argument against organized policing. However, the coming of industrial capitalism led to large numbers of impoverished workers — unemployed or poorly employed — moving to the expanding urban centers. This, along with the general population growth, led to a fear … of the "dangerous classes." (p.135)
In short, the roots of the modern police force in England, as in Ireland, came from a perceived need for social control.
As in England, so too in America. Peel's model was largely adopted by American cities during the 19th century. As Carl Watner pointed out,
One of the dominant themes in the history of police in the United States has been the struggle over which political faction would control the police. Under the U.S. Constitution, police power was not a federal responsibility, but rather an obligation of either the state, county, or local governments. Since control over the police was a local responsibility, it had to vacillate "between city or state elective authorities. Thus, nowhere was the embrace of police and politics tighter than in the United States."
Thus, the United States Supreme Court decision in Castle Rock should have surprised no one. If the court had found that restraining orders were constitutional entitlements to protection, then the fundamental purpose of American law enforcement would have shifted away from service to law toward service to individuals. Moreover, such a court precedent would have released a paralyzing flood of lawsuits against police departments. This, too, might have changed the "job description" of law enforcement in America.
A Competing View That Is Uniquely American Why do Americans persist in believing that policemen are there to protect them?
One reason: Unlike most nations, America has historical precedent for the belief. It is called the Old West. As Terry L. Anderson and P.J. Hill explained in their essay "An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West," the image of the Western town sheriff that is epitomized by Marshal Dillon is one of a private police force that did protect people and property. They wrote,
The West during this time is often perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life. Our research indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected, and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved.
These agencies often did not qualify as governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on "keeping order." They soon discovered that "warfare" was a costly way of resolving disputes and lower-cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts, etc.) resulted. In summary, this paper argues that a characterization of the American West as chaotic would appear to be incorrect.
Anderson and Hill provide a compelling revisionist view of "the Wild West" that accords with how it is portrayed in Zane Grey novels. They write,
Recently, however, more careful examinations of the conditions that existed cause one to doubt the accuracy of this perception. In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, W. Eugene Hollon stated that he believed "that the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today."[12] The legend of the "wild, wild West" lives on despite Robert Dykstra's finding that in five of the major cattle towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported — an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season.[13]
In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, "nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings."[14]
At one time, a significant portion of what is now America was protected by private policemen who were paid by — and, so, responsible to — the community where they served. The Western sheriffs did protect people and property; they did rescue schoolmarms and punish cattle rustlers. Their mission was to keep the peace by preventing violence.
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Modern policemen still bask in the glow of that legacy even as they betray it by taking state salaries and institutionalizing an indifference for the person and property of those they purport to serve. The modern policeman is, in fact, the antithesis of Marshal Dillon and an expression of the stereotypical British sheriff — a civil servant responsible only to government and governmental policy.
Conclusion And so, the real message of the Gonzales tragedy is this: Protect yourself, because the police are not paid to care.
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[Talk delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, November 20, 2000.]
I want to take a very basic look at one of the traditions that underlies modern libertarianism — namely, 19th-century individualist anarchism in America.
Before doing so, however, I want to define what I mean by modern libertarianism. Namely, the body of political thought that emerged from and continues to develop through the synthesis of the best theory from four schools of thought. The synthesis was accomplished when Murray Rothbard took the radical antistatism of the individualist anarchists and wed it with Austrian economics, the foreign policy of the Old Right (isolationism), and the natural-law tradition.
Of these threads that were woven together, the least appreciated or understood is individualist anarchism. And I think one reason for this "oversight" is that, at first glance, individualist anarchism doesn't seem to share a key characteristic common to the others: that is, it doesn't seem to argue for the free market.
If there is any validity to a distinction you sometimes hear drawn between civil liberties and economic liberties — and I don't believe there is validity — then individualist anarchism seems to fall into the category of civil liberties, which sometimes becomes an afterthought attached to free-market analysis. Individualist anarchism doesn't seem to be a good fit with the other building blocks of libertarianism for the simple reason that its proponents — like most 19th-century radicals — embraced a labor theory of value and rejected capitalism.
By this, I don't mean merely that they stood against state capitalism — the alliance between government and business. They rejected actual capitalism, the making of profit through capital in practices such as charging interest on loans. And, yet, one of the points I want to drive home today is that individualist anarchism was profoundly free market and that its anticapitalism is the not the ideological barrier it is usually considered to be.
Before moving on to that point, however, I want to expand on just one reason why I believe it is very important that modern libertarianism doesn't stumble over the anticapitalism of figures such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and, thus, lose the value they have to offer.
My view of history — the analytical approach I use in order to make sense of events — is ideological. Murray Rothbard viewed history as an ongoing struggle between liberty and power, between what Rand would have termed "the individual" and "the collective." These days it is popular to state that people are not motivated by ideology but by utilitarian concerns. (For example, they don't vote on the grounds of right and wrong but on the grounds of self-interest.)
"I think one of the saddest aspects of modern libertarianism is that it has surrendered or ignored its own history."I've always been baffled by this argument because merely looking at the world around us would seem to refute it. Two of the most powerful forces that have shaped the reality and the history of everyone in this room are profoundly ideological — Christianity and Marxism. From these two examples alone, it seems impossible to deny the power of ideology as a force in human history.
But in viewing history as a struggle between ideologies, a lamentable thing has become clear to me: The Left is better at claiming the past than libertarians are. Much better. If you look through standard textbooks or do a brute numerical count on historical treatments or biographies, you reach the inescapable conclusion that socialism was the radical force speaking for working people against the alliance of business and government in 19th-century America. And socialism has reaped great benefits from this image — "radical prestige" and credibility being only two of them.
The problem here is that the image is false. Nineteenth-century libertarians have as much claim to be champions of the working people — and, in many cases, a far better claim — than socialists do. Consider only one figure: Moses Harman, one of my favorite figures in libertarian history. It is delivered wisdom that the socialistic Margaret Sanger was the heroine responsible for opening up birth control for women in America. (And birth control in the 19th century was considered to be a "working-class" issue for a number of reasons.) Yet Sanger herself acknowledged that her work would not have been possible without the decades of groundwork laid by Moses Harman. The socialist anarchist Emma Goldman — often credited with being a precursor to Sanger on birth control — also paid homage to Harman.
Moreover, his reputation was not confined to America. In 1907, when the playwright George Bernard Shaw was questioned about why he never visited America, he replied, and was quoted in the periodical London Opinion as saying, "The reason I do not go to America is that I am afraid of being arrested … and imprisoned like Mr. Moses Harman." Shaw went on to explain that the harsh prison sentence imposed upon a man of Harman's "advanced age" amounted to a death sentence — a death sentence imposed for expressing the same views that Shaw had aired in his play Man and Superman.
The imprisonment to which Shaw referred was part of an ongoing government persecution of Harman under the Comstock obscenity laws. The persecution lasted for decades with Harman's last imprisonment occurring when he was 75 years old. (He served hard time, breaking rocks at Joliet.) Among the "crimes" for which he was imprisoned — over and over again — was defending women's reproductive freedom on explicitly libertarian grounds: namely, that women (and men) were self-owners with a moral and natural right to control their own persons and property. In short, he was an explicit libertarian.
If you contrast the treatment of Sanger as a historical figure with that of Harman, you'll get a sense of why I believe that socialists are much better at mining the richness of history to their advantage. There are dozens of books about Sanger, her own work is still available; New York University has what is called the Margaret Sanger Papers Project; she is in halls of fame; buildings are named after her; she herself was named by Time as one of the top 100 people of the century.
Meanwhile, there is not so much as a single biography of Moses Harman. As a result, it is the Left — and not libertarians — who have acquired the invaluable cachet of being the ideology that stands for the freedom of the average man, the working man, then and now. I think the opposite is true. I think one of the saddest aspects of modern libertarianism is that it has surrendered or ignored its own history and thus surrendered its rightful claim to being the true ideology of the working class — a claim that would go a long way toward dispelling an accusation commonly hurled at libertarianism: namely, that it represents only the interests of business. There is no way to look at 19th-century individualist anarchism and sustain that accusation.
What is the 19th-century tradition known as individualist anarchism? The fundamental principle upon which it is based is what the abolitionist — the radical antislavery advocate — William Lloyd Garrison called self-ownership. (This was circa 1830.) Self-ownership refers to the moral jurisdiction that every human being, simply by being human, has over his or her own body.
Garrison argued that all secondary human characteristics — such as race — were irrelevant to the rights and duties that accrued to every human being as a result of the primary characteristic of a shared humanity. I begin with Garrison because when you mention libertarianism around the 1830s, he is the figure most people have heard of and to whom individualist anarchism is often traced. But I think a far more appropriate fountainhead for the tradition is Josiah Warren, whom the historian James J. Martin believes was the first person to adopt the label anarchist.
Josiah Warren began his radical career as a follower of the socialist and communitarian Robert Owen. Warren was one of the original participants in the famous New Harmony community that began in 1826, and he saw firsthand what was wrong with the organizing principle of socialist communities. After decades and decades of discussion by utopian planners — both in England and America — New Harmony put their theories to the test. Warren saw how quickly a practical test made their schemes deteriorate into folly. It took less than a year and a half for New Harmony to dissolve. Warren blamed the community's failure on its denial of personal-property rights, on the demand for communal property that stifled all individual initiative.
But the problems he perceived with community property went far beyond economic motivation. Warren wrote in his publication Periodical Letter,
it seemed that the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity.… It appeared that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us … our 'united interests' were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.
From Josiah Warren's disillusionment with collectivism — from his conviction that social harmony required radical individualism — the essential groundwork for an individualist-anarchist society emerged. First and foremost, it was founded on a concept captured by the phrase "sovereignty of the individual." By this, Warren meant much the same thing as Garrison did by the term self-ownership. In his work Practical Details, Warren explained his meaning:
Society must be so converted as to preserve the sovereignty of every individual inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate, without involving the persons or interests of others.
But Warren contributed more than merely a rephrased statement of self-ownership. For example — and as just one example — Warren sketched out a fundamental approach to society that could be termed "methodological individualism" — a term usually associated with Ludwig von Mises. In Human Action, Mises described what he meant by the term:
First we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals. … If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals we must necessarily learn everything about the actions of the collective whole. For a social collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual members' actions.
Warren's approach to society echoed upward through decades so that you find his protégés, like Benjamin Tucker, dismissing in Liberty, in 1888, Henry George's theory of community land ownership with words that sound Misesian:
That there is an entity known as the community which is the rightful owner of all land, Anarchists deny. I … maintain that 'the community' is a non-entity, that it has no existence, and is simply a combination of individuals having no prerogatives beyond those of the individuals themselves.
As well as developing a version of methodological individualism, Warren infused individualist anarchism with a passion for the practical. If one passion ruled Warren's political life, it was to test social theories by translating them into reality. Remember, he had seen elaborate plans that were wonderful on paper turn into nightmares when translated into reality. Warren needed to know if his theories worked. This passion for the practical was adopted by the generation that followed. To use Tucker again, he once commented,
Reform communities will … be recruited from the salt of the earth, and then their successes will not be taken as conclusive, because it will be said that their principles are applicable only among men and women well-nigh perfect. … It has no interest for me. … I care nothing for any reform that cannot be effected right here in Boston among the every day people whom I meet in the streets.
I should remind you here — or, perhaps, tell you for the first time — that this quote came at the same moment as Edward Bellamy's hugely successful Utopian novel Looking Backward. The novel captured the popular vision with which radicals viewed the future: If only their ideology could prevail, it would bring the millennium. Man's nature itself would be transformed by social factors, lambs would lie down with lions. This was a constant theme of late-19th-century radicalism. Socialists, women suffragists, temperance zealots, pietists — everyone claimed that a bright and brave new world would miraculously alter the face of the earth. This was particularly prevalent in 19th-century socialism, which formed the seed of the New Soviet Man championed by the Bolsheviks when they swept 20th-century Russia.
"Individualist anarchists gave primacy to the free market and the right of contract — this is what made them libertarians rather than socialists."Meanwhile you have this remarkable statement coming out of individualist anarchism: First, that individuals shouldn't conform to society because, for one thing, society doesn't exist; only individuals do. Second, that in exploring how individuals could peacefully work in combination, all theories must withstand the test of reality. And third, that the goal was not utopia, but practical justice.
Consider the words of Victor Yarros who, for a period, coedited Liberty. He wrote,
The anarchists … work not for a perfect social state, but for a perfect political system. A perfect social state is … totally free from sin or crime or folly; a perfect political system is merely a system in which justice is observed, in which nothing is punished but crime and nobody coerced but the invader.
The key to achieving this perfect political system lay in establishing institutions that promoted justice. Which brings me to the subject of "institutional analysis," the analysis of how institutions — such as the state, the family, the free market — function. What are their purposes, their rules, their actual impacts?
And here you have the next contribution of individualist anarchism — an incredibly sophisticated and extensive institutional analysis that attempted to answer two questions: first, which institutions impede justice, and how; and second, which institutions promote justice, and how? It will surprise no one that their answer to the first question is "the state." The state is the institution that blocks justice. And it does so basically through the threat and use of force or by persuading the people of its legitimacy, persuading them that it has a right to interfere in their lives.
I'm not going to spend any time on the individualist-anarchism analysis of the state as an institution because — to the extent that people here are familiar with the tradition — the familiarity is on this point. To the extent that people have read one book in this area, it is probably Spooner's No Treason.
I'm going to focus instead on the second question: "which institutions promote justice, and how?" To this question, individualist anarchists made an astonishing response. They claimed that the institution necessary to secure justice was already present in the institution of the free market. Radicals to every side of them were saying that something new under the sun was required — the sort of institution or societal arrangement that no one had ever seen before. For example, mankind needed the anarchosyndicalist vision of industrial relations. We needed a brave new world.
In this milieu, individualist anarchists claimed instead, "No, you don't need an entirely new blueprint. What you need is to get rid of the state and to allow the free market (that already exists) to function." And the mechanism through which it would function was "the contract." Indeed, they believed so strongly in the power of contract that they called their ideal society "society by contract." And they immediately started to plan out in very concrete detail how the free-contract society would work.
The free market could satisfy not only economic goals but social ones, such as justice. For example, they provided the best discussion I've ever seen of how a private court system could arbitrate conflicts. And the discussion incorporated a large degree of economic analysis, and analysis of efficiency rather than merely appeals to common law or morality. For example, in the subissue of "trial by jury," the discussion started with the right of a man to try his own case and proceeded directly into an efficiency and cost analysis of relative methods of adjudication.
Nor did the individualist anarchists confine themselves to discussion, to theory. They wanted to test their theories out in the practical world. For instance, they established private unemployment-insurance cooperatives; these were agencies into which all members would put "x" percentage of their weekly earnings and from which members who became unemployed could draw "y" number of dollars until they regained employment. So, having sketched the political contributions of individualist anarchism — especially in their locating social justice in the free market and the use of contract — I want to move on to the reason their contributions have been largely ignored — namely, that they championed the labor theory of value.
Earlier, I mentioned that the main theme underlying individualist anarchism was the sovereignty of the individual, to use Josiah Warren's term. Warren used another term to describe the second theme or principle of individualist anarchism, which he thought derived directly from sovereignty of the individual: namely, "cost is the limit of price." And this is where the labor theory of value begins to play a prominent role in individualist anarchism.
To give you a sense of the specific approach to the labor theory of value adopted by Warren, I want to describe an experiment he conducted to test his solution to what was called "the money monopoly." That is, the state's monopoly on the issuance of currency. He tried to test his solution to state-controlled banking: namely, private currency, the right of every individual to issue his or her own money to anyone who was willing to take it. He believed that the issuance of private currency would destroy the perceived injustice of "interest."
To test this theory, Warren opened a retail store called the Time Store, from which he issued "labor dollars." In 1827, the store opened with $300 worth of groceries and dry goods that were offered at 7 percent markup from his cost in order to cover "contingent expenses." Where he made his profit was in selling his labor to customers by requiring them to pay for the time it took him to effect the transfer of goods — that time consisted of the initial purchasing of the good and then its sale. Remember, this was before groceries were prepackaged and preweighed and at a time when it was customary to bargain with the shopkeeper rather than merely to pay a posted price.
In fact, one of Warren's innovations was to post prices for goods. The customer would then pay the price of the goods in traditional money and then compensate Warren for his time with a labor note that promised to give back to him an equivalent amount of time in the buyer's occupation. If the buyer were a plumber, for example, the labor note committed him to render his services to Warren for "x" time units of plumbing work.
Warren's goal was to divorce the price of the goods from the compensation he received — in other words, to establish an economy in which his profit was based on the exchange of time and labor. And, to some degree, he succeeded. A thriving barter community arose and spread outside the radical community, with regular people coming from a hundred miles away to avail themselves of Warren's low prices. Having succeeded, however, he closed the store, because its entire purpose had been to test the theory.
Warren was far from alone — even at that early date — in stressing the need for private currency. In 1843 — which is roughly the same period — Lysander Spooner wrote a tract entitled Constitutional Law Relative to Credit, Currency and Banking. He stated, "To issue bills of credit, that is promissory notes, is a natural right. … The right of banking … is as much a natural right as that of manufacturing cotton."
It is undeniably true that the individualist anarchists accepted a labor theory of value. This meant that they rejected profit from capital in three forms in particular: interest on money, rent, and profit in exchange, all of which was called "usury." If their main political goal can be stated as "the abolition of the state," then it is no exaggeration to say that their main economic goal was "the abolition of the money monopoly." And by this term — "money monopoly" — they referred to three different but interrelated forms of monopoly: banking, interest, and the issuance of currency.
I want to focus entirely (as I have been) on the issuance of currency, which I think provides a good sense of how individualist anarchist approached all issues of "usury." Some individualist anarchists, like Benjamin Tucker, considered the right to issue private currency to be so important that he believed it alone could bring about the destruction of the state. The money monopoly was considered to be the means by which the banks sustained themselves and robbed the average man of economic opportunities. Through the act of incorporating, bankers became immune from personal obligations: they acquired the legal advantage of being able to contract while avoiding the responsibility for doing so. This was not only a money-raking scam that bankers ran on the public, it also denied credit to the working people by setting up prohibitive interest rates or criteria for acquiring credit.
The alternative banking system that Tucker embraced was what William B. Greene called "mutual money," what Spooner referred to — in his tract A New System of Paper Currency — as "the invested dollar" and what the French socialist anarchist Pierre Proudhon called "the Bank of the People." By these terms, they all referred to a currency that ordinary people could issue which would be secured by their own property. For consistency, I'll call it "mutual money." Spooner described it as follows: "The currency here proposed is not in the nature of a credit currency … it constitutes simply of bona fide certificates of Stock, which the owners have the same right to sell that they have to sell any other Stocks."
To rephrase this: When Spooner spoke of an "invested dollar" or "mutual money" rather than a "specie dollar," he meant currency that was backed by "property of a fixed and permanent nature," such as a house, rather than currency that was backed by gold or silver. He meant money that was based on a form of debt that functioned like a mortgage.
And this mutual money was crucial to the empowerment of the worker. In Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure, Spooner argued that men deserve the full fruits of their labor and the most likely way this would happen was for each man to become a self-employer. But to become a self-employer, most people needed access to credit on their own capital, on anything they were able to mortgage — they needed credit that banks routinely denied through monopoly.
The key question at that point becomes, what if the issuer of private currency decides to charge interest on its use? Would that practice be forcibly prohibited? The answer to this question is what separated advocates of the labor theory of value who were socialists from those who were libertarian. The socialists would have banned such practices. The individualist anarchists answered, "If a lender can find someone foolish enough to voluntarily enter into such a contract, then the contracting parties must be left to their folly." The right of contract — "society by contract" — was the higher law. The only remedies individualist anarchists would have pursued against those who charged or paid interest were education and the establishment of parallel banks and currencies that offered what they believed to be a better deal. Individualist anarchists gave primacy to the free market and the right of contract — this is what made them libertarians rather than socialists.
One of the most tragic events in libertarian history was the destruction of Tucker's offices through fire, which led to the demise of Liberty in 1908. And an important dimension of the tragedy was that debate on economics was just beginning to reopen in the pages of Liberty between the American anarchists and a group known as the British individualists.
The British individualists were the English counterparts to the Tucker circle in America, and they were — generally speaking — worse on political theory but better on economics. Among the best voices on economics — in my opinion — was J. Greevz Fisher. In a debate that erupted in 1891, he pointed out that a mutual banking system existed already to some degree in that people with were free to issue promissory notes to deliver commodities such as cotton or wheat, yet the Bank of England (the country from which he argued) had not collapsed. Moreover, he stated,
Schemes to bring about the abolition of interest, especially when the authors promulgate this as a necessary consequence of free trade in banking are pernicious.… What is called free trade in banking actually means only unlimited liberty to create debt. It is the erroneous labeling of debt as money which begets most of the fallacies of the currency faddists.
In a second debate that occurred in 1893, Fisher neatly summed up the problem with the individualist anarchist position,
Mr. Bilgram [the person against whom he was arguing] appears to take no notice of the argument that the rate of interest upon loans … [would still exist] under a system of barter…. Interest is the hire of commodities separated from their owner and entrusted to another person. The time of separation is a privation to one party … and a benefit to the other party.
If the discussions were to have continued, it is likely that the American anarchists would have moved more toward an Austrian view of interest and capital, just as the British individualists moved toward anarchism. With such a synthesis, modern libertarianism might have emerged decades before it did. In conclusion, as far as I can see, whatever economic differences exist between the 19th-century tradition and the current one are differences without practical consequences.
Again, with reference to the money monopoly, I'll leave it to Murray Rothbard to explain what I mean:
Suppose, for example, that I decided to print paper tickets called "two Rothbards," "ten Rothbards," etc., and then tried to use these tickets as money. In the libertarian society I would have the perfect right and freedom to do so. But the question is: who would take the tickets as "money"? Money depends on general acceptance, and general acceptance of a medium of exchange can begin only with commodities, such as gold and silver.
Rothbard summed up what he believed would be the impact of mutual money, "the anarchist society would … lead to much 'harder' money than we have now. Without the State to create the conditions and coercions for continued inflation, attempts at inflation and credit expansion could not succeed on the free market."
As long as the default position of individualist anarchism was the primacy of contracts — and it always was — then the free market would have inexorably established interest and hard currency. And that is what I mean by saying their theories were a difference with no practical significance.
To restate this: First, individualist anarchists would have allowed such practices as interests to occur between consenting parties. Second, without imposed restrictions, such practices would have occurred; indeed, they would have flourished. Third, and more speculatively, the practical bent of individualist anarchists that made them test their social theories would have led them ultimately to question and perhaps reject "the labor theory of value" when they were confronted with realities that disproved it — or when confronted a few more times by indignant British individualists who out argued them on economics. But this latter point is mere speculation.
So what is my final word on the importance of individualist anarchism? To quote Murray again,
by the mid-nineteenth century, the libertarian individualist doctrine had reached the point where its most advanced thinkers in their varying ways had begun to realize that the State was incompatible with liberty or morality. But they went only so far as to assert the right of the lone individual to opt out of the State's network. … Spooner and Tucker advanced libertarian individualism from a protest against existing evils to pointing the way to an ideal society toward which we can move.
American individualist anarchism went beyond a personal ideology or one that merely protested the state; it provided a blueprint for social freedom.
This talk was delivered at the library of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, November 20, 2000.
"Vigilante is a good word that has 'gone bad,' largely because the authorities fear its virtues."
What will you do if rioting sweeps US cities as it did British ones last week?
Vigilantism is defined as "Taking the law into one's own hands and attempting to effect justice according to one's own understanding of right and wrong." Typically, it occurs when traditional law enforcement is absent, ineffective, or corrupt. When exercised in defense of person and property, vigilantism is the direct expression of an individual's right to protect himself or innocent others against aggression. It is also defined as "action taken by a voluntary association of persons who organize themselves for the purpose of protecting a common interest."
If an individual has this right, then, so too does a group acting in tandem. When such a group acts over time, it not only protects people and property but also tends to stabilize an entire community. Indeed, in his thesis "Pax Vigilanticus: Vigilantism, Order, and Law in the Nineteenth Century American West," Jared Kelley wrote, "I believe that vigilantism represents more than simply a reaction to crime and corruption, but an instinctual, psychological push to restore the status quo of a society disrupted by some crisis or exigency."
Vigilantism has deep roots in American history and culture. From tales of the Wild West to the caped-crusading Batman, the act of standing up to thugs is part of the national ethos. And the assumption of personal responsibility for self-defense is what drives the uniquely American pro-gun movement. But will the increasingly despotic police force allow citizens to arm and organize in self-defense against a marauding horde?
The UK's response to last week's riots may offer insight.
The Precedent of Britain When plundering mobs descended on several British neighborhoods, they were met by residents who had formed protective barriers around their businesses and homes. They were met by vigilantes.
Officials in the UK, as everywhere, pronounce the word vigilante with intonations of horror and disgust. To them, a vigilante represents "society gone askew" every bit as much as the looter who smashes open windows, because both men constitute a basic denial of the officials' authority. No wonder the police are eager to portray those who protect their own persons and property as "lynch mobs" or otherwise threats to civil society. If a trend toward self-defense were encouraged, after all, then the police might be out of a job; the authorities might be out of power. And so, vigilante is a good word that has "gone bad," largely because the authorities fear its virtues.
Both the antagonism and fear of authorities were evident in Britain last week. In the wake of riots, the police attacked not merely the rioters but also those who patrolled their own neighborhoods and averted violence. But they did so surreptitiously.
Clearly, the police were upset with the vigilantes. While their official impotence was displayed on TV screens around the world, average people banded together to perform the work the police could not. According to the UK Telegraph, "as many as 1,500 Sikhs, some in their eighties," patrolled West London neighborhoods and chased off rioters. In East London, "Turkish shopkeepers" armed with baseball bats and pool cues fended off looters; "Turkish and Kurdish men lined the key street of Kingsland High to seal off their community. As one shopkeeper stated, "There were no police so we came out to defend ourselves. I don't know if it's breaking the law but what can we do?"
"The police attacked not merely the rioters but also those who patrolled their own neighborhoods and averted violence." But the police need to walk a fine line in criticizing vigilantes. Many of the scofflaws are heroes within their own communities — and even beyond. The Independent noted, "In the more affluent neighbourhood of Stoke Newington further north — an area filled with boutique shops and independent retailers — there was widespread praise for Turkish people who stopped rioters." Meanwhile, those same communities are united in disapproval of the police performance.
While decrying vigilantism in general, therefore, the authorities have focused their ire upon one group in particular: the English Defence League (EDL) with whom the public is less likely to have sympathy. The EDL is a far-right-wing group known for violent street protests against Sharia Law and Islamic extremism. Clive Efford, the MP for Eltham, where rioting was severe, stated, "A group of the English Defence League turned up in the high street and have been drinking all day, and although they say they're here to assist the police, they [the police] have now diverted all these resources here."
Accounts from those who patrolled the streets deny that the EDL were prevalent. Whichever account is true, however, the authorities and the press clearly wish to paint these unsympathetic drunkards as the vigilantes. For example, the Morning Star stated, "In Enfield a mob of white men, again believed to have included members of the EDL, swarmed through the streets chanting 'England.'"
Meanwhile, the authorities are treating the respectable vigilantes with kid gloves. On the one hand, the police are expressing concern about their safety. CNN reported, "the Metropolitan Police has warned against vigilantism, calling on members of the public not to put themselves in harm's way."
On the other hand, the police are diverting people from vigilantism into other tasks that make them feel valuable. A borough commander of an embattled neighborhood announced, "I urge the public to remain vigilant and report any information you have to police"; potential vigilantes have been asked to work instead on identifying the looters for future prosecution.
Authorities have flipped the "default" switch on self-defense: namely, leave it to the police. As the International Business Times stated, "Contrary to everyday people, the police have been trained to handle difficult situations, and the powers that have been given to them by the government should not be conferred to the rest of the population."
A Concept in Need of Redemption This is an amazing statement: the right to defend against violence is a "power" that is given to the police "by government" and "should not be conferred to the rest of the population." The two main reasons for denying the right to self-defense seem to be
without government training, people will get hurt; and people who rise in self-defense will turn into a lynch mob.
Regarding the first reason, when the police cannot or do not offer protection, people and property will be damaged. The best chance of preventing that damage is precisely for people to defend themselves. Moreover, denying the right of self-defense to a person because he might get hurt is like denying freedom of speech because he might misspeak or denying freedom of religion because he could join the wrong church. The denial is not an act of concern or protection; it is the imposition of social control.
"Vigilantism is the opposite of a lynch mob." Regarding the second reason: by invoking the image of drunken racist throngs, the British authorities are trying to make vigilantism into a synonym for lynch mobs. After rousing public fear and disgust, the government can "come to the rescue" and declare a monopoly on the use of defensive force. Because of images like that of a lynch mob, people reflexively turn away from the possibility of a private police force and private defense.
Return to the definition of vigilantism: "Taking the law into one's own hands … " The very definition draws a clear line between vigilantes and a lynch mob; the former takes the law into their own hands while the latter has nothing to do with the law except for breaking it. Indeed, as the London riots show, vigilantes are usually a defense against mobs, whether the ongoing thugs are looters or lynchers. Things can go badly wrong whenever there is a need for self-defense, but mistakes and missteps are aberrations that do not negate the essential nature of vigilantism. It is the opposite of a lynch mob.
The American Roots of Vigilantism The first American "vigilance committee" of note was organized in San Francisco in 1851 to control the hooliganism that accompanied the gold rush. The population of the city had exploded from 812 in 1848 to approximately 25,000 in 1849, with more than half of the newcomers being foreigners. Crime surged along ethnic lines; for example, organized outlaws named the "Hounds" raped and brutalized the Mexican residents with impunity. Approximately 230 citizens formed the original committee, but it quickly grew to 700 members. An executive provided oversight and subcommittees policed the city.
Jared Kelley described the outcome:
The vigilantes incarcerated seventeen of "The Hounds" in the brig of a ship anchored in San Francisco's harbor … and drove the rest from town before the captured bandits were delivered to a legitimate court and the Committee of 1851 dispersed.
The vigilantism with which I am most familiar occurred during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. In the wake of the savage police beating of a black man named Rodney King, the city experienced the worst civil unrest in its history. Although I had relocated a few years before, I kept in close touch with a friend who lived in a "threatened" neighborhood. At one point she reported that her Korean neighbors were standing on rooftops with automatic rifles. The Koreatown area of Los Angeles was heavily targeted by looters and arsonists. By the second day, police and firemen did not even bother to show up. In a flash, the Koreans organized and armed themselves to protect their community both from physical attack and from the flames. After seeing news footage of a gunfight in Koreatown, I called my friend and urged her to leave the area. She convinced me it was safe by recounting how the Koreans had expanded their protective perimeter to include the public library.
$32 $25
"A vigilante is an average person who refuses to surrender to violence or authority."
A Concept Whose Time Has Come The American police would probably react more quickly and violently against both rioters and vigilante groups in the United States. And yet if riots did occur in American streets, neighborhood committees would almost certainly be organized as they were in Koreatown. People will not stand passively by while their homes and businesses are looted. People will not wait for an absentee police force and fire department. They will shield their families from danger.
If riots come, it will not be the rich who suffer; they will be watching the violence on TV in their gated or high-rise communities. It will not be the media pundits who comment on "how terrible and senseless it is for them to destroy their own communities" while, at the same time, they excoriate anyone who picks up a gun to defend that community. It will be lower- and middle-class people who pick up a gun or a baseball bat, because, at its foundation, vigilantism is also a grassroots phenomenon. A vigilante is an average person who refuses to surrender to violence or authority. It is little wonder the elite look upon him and see a lynch mob.
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The violence perpetuated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway unleashed the usual torrent of blaming anyone who might have influenced the murderer's thought. He was first described as a right-wing Christian — a description designed to put a certain community on notice. As more evidence rolled in, he has been more accurately described as an anti-Islamic nationalist, but the tendency to pin this violence on any nonleftist is still there.
There were footnotes in his 1,500-page manifesto to many dozens of books and articles — including a few published by the Mises Institute. Looking at the balance of his citations, however, it's clear that his main influence had nothing to do with libertarianism. His inspiration was a point of view reminiscent of American neoconservatism. He cited articles in this tradition — particularly on the fear and hate of Islam — far more often than any other.
So, does this violence discredit neoconservatism, as when then-president Clinton tried to blame libertarians and the "militia" movement for the Oklahoma bombing in 1995? The point of this game is to silence the opposition, shut down debate, and fundamentally discredit the body of ideas on which the violence can be blamed.
It's pretty much been this way since the ancient world. Governments can perpetuate violence in war and against the civilian population every day, but when a private person does the same for political reasons, a struggle ensues to see which line of thinking will pay what price.
The truth is that every political point of view can be twisted into a rationale for violence. If you think that the rich should be expropriated, there are generally two ways to bring this about: you and your friends can steal from the rich directly — maybe killing some fat cats in the process — or you can lobby Congress to do it for you.
The second method is preferred in a democratic society. When violence against person and property operates under the cover of the law, it is rarely called out for what it truly is. It is only when the legal cover is removed that the violence shocks and alarms us. But what about the morality of it all, whether we are speaking about private violence, the redistributionist state, or the war-making imperial state? In moral substance, they amount to the same thing.
One of the least reported biographical details of Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma bombing that killed so many innocent people, is that his own disregard for life was cultivated during his time as an American soldier from 1988 to 1992. He was awarded the bronze star for service in the first war on Iraq, where he killed civilians and teenage conscripts under the cover of law. It was here that he learned how to suppress the whisperings of his conscience, and to harden his heart. As he said, "If there is a hell, then I'll be in good company with a lot of fighter pilots who also had to bomb innocents to win the war."
Let's try a thought experiment that is not entirely implausible. Let's say that in the future, some psycho kills innocent people and blows up buildings. But this time, he is directly influenced by libertarianism, and was driven to desperate measures in the interest of overthrowing the state.
This could happen. It hasn't happened, but it could. The question is whether this person's intellectual influences would discredit the libertarian tradition. That would certainly be the attempt of the mainstream media. Even after 9/11, the pundits were screaming that this event alone was enough to discredit libertarianism, that the destruction and the aftermath offered positive proof that we need a gigantic state. So, yes, I think we can be confident that if some violent person had libertarian influences, libertarianism would catch the blame.
"Libertarianism posits a belief that is not widely held today, but is nonetheless true: namely, that society can organize itself without violence."In the event of such a thing, what should be the response of libertarians? It wouldn't be that hard. Libertarianism is the one political theory extant that consistently preaches nonviolence in every way, condemning all aggression against person and property, whether it is done by a private party or under the cover of law.
Libertarianism posits a belief that is not widely held today, but is nonetheless true: namely, that society can organize itself without violence (no theft, no murder), but only using that blessed institution of mutual cooperation among individuals. The use of violence in any form is not only contradictory to libertarian theory; libertarianism stands alone as the only political outlook that makes nonviolence its core tenet.
Of course, this implies an antigovernment stance, because government is the organized, consistent, relentless, large-scale center of violence on earth. It enacts this violence for a huge range of reasons: to bolster economic growth, to protect us from invasion, to prevent the population from being exploited by business, to keep the culture pure from alien influences, to protect us from our own bad decisions, to grant us health and income security from birth to death, and much more.
But in doing all these things, it has only one lever to pull: aggression against our lives and property. This is because government cannot do anything on its own; it exists entirely in a parasitical relationship to society.
What if a person who sees this point is driven to desperation and acts in a way that is contrary to the fundamental ethics of libertarianism? In other words, what happens if a person influenced by an antigovernment theory undertakes actions that are more of the character of what governments do every day? That would not and could not damage the credibility or integrity of the libertarian idea.
Keep in mind that we are alive in an unprecedented moment. The state in all countries in the developed world is working its mischief as never before in world history. It taxes more, regulates more, manipulates more than ever. The state has never been more pompous, arrogant, and ambitious than it is today.
The police state has visited the developed world in a manner none of us have seen in our lifetimes. The local police reflect that ethos. They disregard their heritage of wearing a civil mask and now bully people openly in a way contrary to freedom. The United States in particular has erected a giant prison state that exists outside the observable sphere of social life. The state has cut off employment opportunities for an entire generation, looted the savings of older people, and even made it nearly impossible for people to provide for their own savings.
Public opinion is increasingly aware of the problem and the source of the problem, and so the public anger at the political and bureaucratic elite is intensifying, especially as the economic depression deepens. The nation-state is growing ever more fierce even as it becomes more decrepit in the digital age. It would hardly be a surprise to see this anger turn violent in the coming years.
There is a very easy answer to the problems that afflict us today. The nation-state needs to civilize itself and bow to the realities of our times. It needs to dismantle its apparatus of control, call off the dogs of war, rein in its police and armed bureaucrats, and permit society to develop and flourish on its own. It's not complicated. Why won't the state take this path? Because it thrives off violence, domestic and international.
These are fundamental truths, and they are becoming more obvious by the day. No amount of propaganda can wish them away. The only real means of achieving peace is to reject violence as a means of social control or political activism. We must withdraw our consent to violence, the consent that is the basis of all government. What the great theorist Etienne de la Boetie wrote in the 16th century remains true today:
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
I'll never forget my last visit to lovely Hinesville, Georgia. For it was there that I learned a valuable lesson, one I shall never forget: in a police state, we're all criminals.
Think about it — how many laws have you broken today? This week? This month? Have you changed lanes without a turn signal? Exceeded the posted speed limit? Hired a neighborhood kid to cut your grass and then paid him under the table? Engaged in commerce with someone who is in the country illegally? Bought lemonade from an unlicensed "dealer" in the form of an innocent child?
In Hinesville, I was accosted for "animal cruelty." We were traveling to visit family in the southwestern part of the state. In the car were my wife, my two young daughters, and our two dogs, Methuselah and Garibaldi.
The older of my two daughters had a rash, so we stopped at Walmart to get her some antihistamine cream. We emerged from the store, just under 20 minutes later, to be greeted by an animal-control officer and the stereotypical police officer, complete with a Napoleon complex and cheesy mustache.
You see, we left the dogs in the car, with the windows down and a dish of water to drink. A noble citizen watched us emerge from the car and promptly called animal control. An agent was dispatched to rescue our persecuted beasts.
I was informed that I was being charged with criminal animal cruelty, subject to appear in court at a later date. Apparently, the fact that my dogs were panting was proof positive that they were at death's door. Never mind that they always pant, even in an air-conditioned house.
The officer informed me that I was going to have to take the dogs to the vet to be checked out before we were allowed to continue on our way. I am reasonably sure that such a request is outside of their official authority, but I agreed to comply upon the premise that they would drop all charges when the dogs were given a clean bill of health. As I suspected, they balked at this idea.
I tried another tactic. I calmly explained to the animal-control officer that we were not from the area, and asked if he could simply levy some kind of fine, rather than require a court appearance. This is when things got fun. "Animal cruelty is a warrant offense," I was told. It requires a court appearance and carries the threat of jail time. Then I made a crucial mistake; I asked a logical question to a law-enforcement officer.
"At what point," I asked, "was I in violation of the law?" "When I left the car? Five minutes later? Ten minutes?" I wanted a specific definition for the cruelty in which I was supposedly engaged.
He couldn't answer, but the heroic policeman — let's just call him "Vic Maldonado" — sprang into action. This innocent question left him no choice but to pull out both his baton and Taser and charge toward me. When I raised my hands as if to say, "I am unarmed, and that is an unnecessary show of force," I was ordered to turn around and place my hands on the police cruiser. I asked why; no answer was given, except to radio for backup and claim that an officer had been "assaulted."
To this day, I am glad that he didn't take the additional step of searching my car, wherein were two legal, loaded pistols. I shudder to think what might have happened.
I was cuffed and escorted to the back of the squad car. I sat in the car for half an hour, while my wife and children sat and watched. When the backup arrived, I watched and listened through the open front window as "Maldonado" reenacted the confrontation. I was particularly interested in the part where I physically slammed the officer against the car and he somehow found the restraint to not shoot or taser me.
Eventually, I was let out of the car and cited for disorderly conduct. The animal-control officer apologized for harassing me and promised to see to it that the judge dropped all animal-cruelty charges. He was clearly shell-shocked by the escalation he had witnessed. The fine for my "disorderly conduct" was $300, and the court date was set for 7:15 a.m.
This made it reasonably certain that, even if I chose to fight the charge, it would require an overnight stay, the hiring of a lawyer, and the incurrence of expenses far exceeding the cost of the fine. I think this was not a coincidence but rather a calculated way of raising funds.
I intended to pay the fine in legal-tender pennies, but was dissuaded by my father-in-law, who informed me that a Georgia judge had held someone in contempt of court, subject to another fine, for just such an offense.
Melodramatic prison movies always use corny lines like "prison has a way of changing a man." I didn't experience a prison visit, but my brush with the law certainly changed me. The last shred of the veil of naïveté was lifted; the myth of "Officer Friendly" was banished forever. What was once merely a vague sense of distrust has given way to a much stronger feeling: I hate the state.
The irony in all this? My family and dogs sat in a hot car for over an hour while the police harassed me. Apparently, animal cruelty can only be perpetrated by citizens, not the soldiers of the crown.
Don't leave the job of criminal investigation to the politicized state, writes William L. Anderson.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Colin Hussey.
A shocking news report recently documented how Tennessee police were stopping drivers on the interstate and confiscating large amounts of cash, even if the drivers were accused of no crime. The report was particularly shocking because the special unit was operating far outside of its jurisdiction in exchange for giving a cut of the seized cash to the local government in question.This episode is outrageous enough that any regular American can see the problem. Yet most people who see the report will probably conclude that the government "went too far" in this instance, and some reforms are needed. The real lesson here is that the War on Drugs — just like every other war waged by our politicians — doesn't solve the ostensible problem, and in fact strips away other liberties.
More generally, the report is a perfect vindication of the Rothbardian point that, in a very real sense, government is a gang of thieves writ large. Such a radical viewpoint sounds crazy to most Americans in the abstract, but when they watch the video, it's hard to deny.
The Bitter Fruits of the Drug WarFrom a standard libertarian perspective, the government has no business interfering in capitalist acts between consenting adults (to use Robert Nozick's felicitous phrase). This includes situations where one person wants to grow a plant, for example, and sell it to somebody else who intends to use it to induce a feeling of euphoria.
To be sure, private organizations can lay down whatever regulations they want "regulating" drug use. Airlines can still subject pilots to randomized drug tests, and schools can expel students caught smoking in the bathroom if they so choose. After all, private schools can tell students what clothes they can wear on school property, so they obviously have the right to prohibit the use of particular drugs.
Yet even if we put aside such principled opposition, it should be crystal clear by now that the War on Drugs has shredded traditional liberties. The scandal on the Tennessee interstate shown in the video above is just one example. Precisely because the War on Drugs has fostered an immense black market, the authorities can now seize large amounts of cash from anyone simply on the suspicion that the person "must be" a drug dealer (or a terrorist financier).
This is a very troubling trend. Beyond the obvious inconvenience for people who don't trust banks and want to keep a large amount of cash on hand, it also takes away one of the last escape routes from the tightening vise of financial regulations and controls. As the government's interventions in the banking system and stock market become ever more intrusive, more and more individuals will want to "opt out" by conducting their operations in cash. But now that strategy entails a huge risk, because their holdings can be seized without any formal charges if they happen to get pulled over.Another major landmark along the road to serfdom is the huge prison infrastructure in the United States. Many Americans don't realize that the United States has the largest prison population in the world, both in absolute terms and per capita (with the possible exception of China, because their government's official figures could be bogus).
If a truly nightmarish scenario ever does develop in what was once a relatively free country, the ruling elite at that time won't have to come up with a pretext for building prisons able to house millions of dissidents. No, that option is already available, courtesy of the Drug War. Most Americans have no problem funding such construction, because they are confident that they would never be locked up.
A Rothbardian Analysis of the StateAlthough his views are understandably perceived as radical, in essence all Murray Rothbard stated was that politicians and other government officials should be subject to the same legal and moral rules as everybody else. If it's a crime for, say, Bill Gates to take my money at gunpoint while giving me the latest version of Windows, then why is it acceptable for Barack Obama to take my money at gunpoint while giving me the latest Predator drone attack in Pakistan?
The other "radical" aspect of Rothbardian thought is that he opposed monopolies in police and judicial services. Everybody knows that in normal settings, a monopoly (enforced through the threat of violence) restricts output, reduces quality, and raises prices for the customer. Most people would see the danger and folly of giving a monopoly to, say, a particular car company, or to a single manufacturer of men's suits. Yet people think it's perfectly normal to give a monopoly to the group that has all the guns and can decide to throw people in cages for life.
A Beautiful Vision — But Is It Practical?Some political theorists and economists defend the legitimacy of the state head-on. However, most "regular" people are not so abstract and ideological. They will usually admit that "in a perfect world," nobody would be forced to pay taxes for government services he didn't want. But alas, so the argument goes, all the wonderful benefits of open competition that work so well in computers and ice cream would not work when it comes to police and courts.
I would encourage such readers to keep an open mind and at least read some of the voluminous literature on the topic. Two baby steps are my essay on private legal systems and my pamphlet on military defense. For a deeper treatment, Hans Hoppe's essay on national defense is excellent. Finally, for those who have been intrigued and want to see a book-length description of the truly free society, I recommend Rothbard's For a New Liberty.
ConclusionMurray Rothbard was a great technical economist who made many contributions to pure theory. However, many thinkers still reject his political views as being too radical and utopian. But when we come across stories such as the Tennessee police's confiscation of motorists' cash, we realize that it is faith in our present system of government that is naïve.
Does America now qualify as a police state? And, if so, where do you — or will you — personally draw a hard line and say, "No! That is a law or a police order I refuse to obey"?
As an anarchist, I view all states as police states, because every law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a scofflaw, however peaceful he may be. I see only a difference of degree, not of kind. But even small differences in the degree of repression can be matters of life or death, and so they should not be trivialized.
A police state is more commonly described as a totalitarian government that exerts extreme social, political, and economic control. It maintains this control by a pervasive surveillance of its own citizenry, by draconian law enforcement, and by granting or withholding "privileges" such the ability to travel. Typically, there is a special police force, such as a Stasi, that operates with no transparency and few restraints. Unlike traditional policemen, who respond to crime, the purpose of such state police is to monitor and control society.
Let me restate my opening question: does America now embody this common description of a police state?
Clearly it does. The American government exerts extreme control over society, down to dictating which foods you may eat. Its economic control borders on the absolute. It politicizes and presides over even the traditional bastion of privacy — the family. Camera and other surveillance of daily life has soared, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the "right" of police to perform warrantless searches. Enforcement is so draconian that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other nation; and over the last few years, the police have been self-consciously militarizing their procedures and attitudes. Travel, formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim. Several huge and tyrannical law-enforcement agencies monitor peaceful behavior rather than respond to crime. These agencies operate largely outside the restrictions of the Constitution; for example, the TSA conducts arbitrary searches in violation of Fourth Amendment guarantees.
The Internet would run out of electrons before I could complete a list of the specifics that constitute an emerging Police America. The extent to which you are personally oppressed by the state, however, can be estimated by answering several more abstract questions:
How many peaceful activities would make you a criminal if you chose to do them?
How much of your life is spent working to pay taxes and other government fees?
How freely can you relocate your assets and person outside state jurisdiction?
How freely can you use your assets and person within state jurisdiction?
Few people aside from the state apparatchiks can answer in a way that makes them feel anything but economically enslaved and physically trapped.
No one should have to chose between family and the state, nor their wealth and the law. When confronted by such choices, there is no easy or correct answer. An increasing number of Americans are becoming expatriates for their own safety and that of their families. But the great majority of people are rooted in place by extended family, friends, work, inertia, emotional attachments, or other compelling reasons.
Those who recognize the emergence of Police America and yet feel a need to stay should ask themselves a question: where is the limit at which you withdraw your cooperation and say "no!" to a state law or a state agent's order? Would you inform on a neighbor, as the authorities already urge you to do? Would you assist a friend or family member even if it made you criminally an accessory; if so, whom? Would you steal from or harm an innocent person on command? If ordered, would you assist a police officer to do so, or would you interfere and, so, become vulnerable to a charge of "obstructing justice"?
There are several reasons for asking yourself such questions now. They include:
The consequences of your act may depend not merely on where you draw a line but also on how you do so. Planning can help you draw your line in a prudent way.
You may be reluctant to draw the lines you wish because you fear endangering your loved ones, your wealth, or something else valuable to you. If possible, secure these in advance. Prepare.
If you don't know where the lines are, then you are far more likely to act against your own principles or interests when suddenly confronted by a distressing, demanding situation like an officer barking commands.
Knowing where your limits are makes it more possible to avoid situations that trigger them.
Harry Browne advised people to pay a price as soon as possible because it costs less overall; this applies to psychological prices as well as to financial ones. It will never be easier for you to consider this question than right now, in privacy and comfort.
There are no correct answers. The purpose of the exercise is merely to become more aware of how you, personally, could live under a police state while retaining your safety and your self-respect.
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It is time to take prisons seriously. The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world today and throughout history. The financial costs are tremendous and rising. One in every one hundred Americans is jailed within this so-called land of the free. Many have committed no violent crimes. Not a few are in for supposed political crimes. Some are wholly innocent of both yet languish in captivity. What are the sociological, political, economic, cultural, and historical consequences of incarceration?
The prison is a unique technology of enforcement. One could say it is the ultimate embodiment of institutionalized coercion. Its essential architectural features — individualized cells and controlled living environments — minimize the opportunities for social interaction among inmates and maximize their perception of total observation and control by guards. Both features were designed and implemented to accomplish particular purposes.
Since the 1970s, the American system has been said to operate according to a retributive paradigm of criminal justice, wherein criminals are thought to deserve punishment. Prisons are believed to be an efficient retributive technique and deterrence is their convenient consequence.
Originally, penitentiaries were designed and built with grander intentions: to induce penitence at the individual level and to make for a better community at the societal level. Prisons were both a micro and macro tool of social engineering. Jeremy Bentham (1782) explicitly stated the broader ambitions of incarceration,
Morals reformed — health preserved — industry invigorated — instruction diffused — public burthens lightened — Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock — the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied — all by a simple idea in Architecture! (italics in original)
In their first applications — the early United States and a few major British cities — penitentiaries were perceived as a success. Their architectural designs were replicated around the world within decades. Johnston (2000) lists 37 countries that mimicked the penitentiary methods of isolation and observation by the end of the 19th century. Yet such nations neither significantly resolved their domestic social maladies nor improved their economies in result.
No direct causal link theoretically or empirically can be proven to connect prisons with social peace and prosperity. But prisons undoubtedly promote and expand the powers of government. Taxes, regulations, prohibitions, and conscriptions are all made easier by threat of imprisonment. Thus, prisons and their presumed efficacy persist, grow, and multiply.
In my upcoming Mises Academy course, The American Prison State, I will use readings and lectures to outline the long and varied history of incarceration and criminal law in the United States. All the readings for this course will be free and online. The online video lectures will use Webex, the industry standard for web conferencing. Lectures will be Tuesday evenings, 7:00–8:30 EDT, and they will be recorded and available for enrolled students to download. The first class will be on June 7.
Through the theoretical frameworks of the Austrian School of economics, public-choice economics, new institutional economics, and constitutional political economy, I attempt to forge a consistent theoretical framework to comprehend the stylized facts of criminal punishment. Studying the technologies and histories of physical force in this way concludes by strengthening an appreciation for liberty.
Criminal punishment by incarceration is not a black box. More prisons do not directly cause reduced crime, let alone a better society. Presuming so ignores the real and tangible costs of the prison-industrial complex. Though the deterrent effects of incarceration are evident, so too should be the costs of inefficiently severe punishment. Economically, politically, culturally, and morally, society suffers from misaligned incarceration resources. The usage of physical punishments to protect and enforce individual rights to person and property has taken a backseat to the centralized social controls of prohibition, taxation, and regulation.
After nine months observing life and society in the United States (1831–32), Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America (1835). His insight therein is now well respected throughout the fields of political science and social theory — human cooperation is a delicate art form. America's early and rapid rate of economic development and its functioning social order resulted from a life spring of vibrant civil society. Families, clubs, churches, and various community groups provided early Americans with diverse opportunities to practice the art of association. They learned to get along with one another by learning more about one another by continuously interacting with one another.
But few are familiar with why exactly Tocqueville came to visit the United States. He did not travel intending to investigate civil society. He was assigned by the French government to investigate and report upon America's newly designed and applied penitentiaries.
Along with his friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville coauthored On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (1833) — before he drafted Democracy in America. Tocqueville and Beaumont's report describes the rationale and institutional arrangements used in various townships of early America to enforce criminal law. They summarize the various types and magnitudes of criminal punishments used throughout the nation. And, in perhaps their most unique contribution, they describe the conditions and social processes underway within the prison facilities that Tocqueville spent most of his time in America touring.
It was not by coincidence that Tocqueville then decided to write about civil society. His two texts are complementary responses to the same research question: What is the source of America's exceptionally early and rapid rate of economic and social development?
The title of Tocqueville and Beaumont's report itself alludes to their government's intention to make use of American penal practices to improve society. Indeed, they were not the only foreign officials sent to study America's innovative facilities (Whitman 2007). England, France, Prussia, Spain, Brazil, Peru, and Canada all sent researchers (Johnston 2000). America's economic and social outcomes, the American criminal-legal system (the first and only to be publicly administered at its inception [Friedman 1993]), and individuated incarceration all seemed new, unique, and correlated.
Major American cities (and a few locations in England) were the first places to calculate and administer criminal punishments by means of incarceration. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the Cherry Hill unit in New Jersey, and the Auburn prison in New York were among the first buildings to parallel the intentions and designs explained in Bentham's Panopticon (1782). Identical cells circled around heightened observation towers and/or halls of cellblocks spoked out from central control offices. Inmates perceived that they were constantly observed, silence was imposed, and complete discipline by regimentation was achieved.
In 18th century England, "the usual complaint about prisons was that occupants passed their time in games, gambling, and drunkenness." But by 1865, "prisoners were confined to identical cells and subjected to a similar diet. Their lives were carefully regulated" (McGowen 1995, p. 71). By isolating criminal violators under continual observation, deterrence of crime and behavioral control was thought to be refined and precise — a science of social control.
But Tocqueville had a different take upon the relationship between prisons and social order. His appreciation for American imprisonment was limited to their infrequent use, the shortness of criminal sentences, and the extent to which prisons replicated ordinary society (not very). But the facilities themselves were silent, corporally violent, unclean, and unpleasant. Penitentiaries were literally walled-in pockets of social discord.
Upon returning to France and after drafting his assigned report with Beaumont, Tocqueville secluded himself to write Democracy in America. The power of civil society, as Tocqueville came to describe it in this book, is social learning. People learn to do by doing and learn to associate by associating. Trade, barter, and communication fuel such processes.
Tocqueville did not presume what Bentham suggests: that the threat of prison penalties induced social cooperation relative to the role of civil society or other alternative responses to criminal behavior. Instead, he saw that prisons enforce removal from society and isolation from others. Penitentiaries seem to be the antithesis of civil-society craftsmanship. America thrived, not because of the threat of imprisonment, but because American citizens had the freedom to form groups and experiment with social arrangements to suit their varied purposes.
Even measures of the number of crimes deterred by penitentiaries do not imply nor guarantee that punishment by imprisonment yields the highest marginal returns of social order. What kinds of peaceful civil-society associations are also deterred for fear of incarceration? What sorts of punitive and sanctioning processes could accomplish the goals of imprisonment at lower financial and social costs? Such answers remain unknown so long as criminal-justice processes are monopolized by state authority.
This pioneering class will cover all of these seemingly untouchable subjects from the perspective of a realistic, libertarian analysis of the state.
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References Beaumont, Gustave de, and Alexis de Tocqueville. 1833 [1979]. On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1787 [2001]. "Panopticon; or The Inspection-House: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, in Which Persons of Any Description Are to Be Kept under Inspection." In The Panopticon Writings, edited by Miran Bozovic. London: Verso.
Friedman, Lawrence M. 1993. Crime and Punishment in American History. New York: Basic Books.
Johnston, Norman. 2000. Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
McGowen, Randall. 1995. "The Well-Ordered Prison: England 1780-1865." In The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, edited by Morris and Rothman. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1835 [2003]. Democracy in America. New York: Penguin Classics.
Whitman, James. 2007. "What Happened to Tocqueville's America." Social Research 74(2): pp. 251–67.
One of the myriad benefits of knowing the late, great Murray Rothbard is being able to view political developments in economic terms. Thus, his model of power versus market came to mind when a friend vented to me over the phone a while back, and specifically I thought of how the state is increasing transaction costs of normal life choices.
My American friend used to cross the Canadian-US border northward with ease in order to visit our farm and his family members in Toronto. However, new procedures came into force a few years back by which police and court records on American citizens are freely and easily accessed by Canadian customs agents, and vice versa. And so, two years ago, my friend experienced a problem: an old DUI, for which he was denied entry. It didn't matter how old the DUI was, nor that it was a one-time offense. He was summarily turned away.
A DUI is now one of the infractions that can cause a de facto iron curtain to fall across the Canadian-US border, separating friends and family members; other infractions include possession of marijuana (perhaps in the '70s), possession of a medical-marijuana card, shoplifting, and an arrest for attending a peace rally.
Correction: I wrote, "A DUI is now one of the minor infractions …" Actually, it has been a barrier to border crossing for about 20 years, but only now do border agents possess the technology and information to enforce the restriction. The offending tool is called The Smart Border Declaration and Action Plan, by which Canadian intelligence and US Homeland Security information are comingled and available to both governments.
What recourse does my friend have? Will he simply be cut off from family members — some of whom are too elderly to travel into the United States to get to him? Will he never again help to put in my garden?
Basically, he has two options.
First, the DUI is supposed to drop off his record in ten years' time; he could wait, trusting the benevolence of the customs officials and the competence of their computers. But a custom's officer can turn him away for any reason at any time, and I am skeptical about the prospect of government agents voluntarily erasing any criminal data on individuals.
Second, according to the Canadian Embassy, if the single offense happened outside of Canada, if it did not cause property or personal damage, and if five years have elapsed since the end of any sentence imposed, then my friend may apply for the ominous and Orwellian "Approval of Rehabilitation." The Approval will permanently remove the inadmissibility caused by his DUI conviction. Or he could apply on the spot for a "deemed rehabilitation" when he drives up to a point of entry.
My friend is one of the lucky scofflaws. He qualifies for what is called a "Streamlined Rehabilitation Application," which allows him to clear his "name" at the border in advance, without having to wait ten years. So what does this lucky man have to do to visit my farm once more? He must submit an application at a designated center in the States or at a Canadian port of entry. (Of course, a submission does not guarantee approval.) The submission must include
A United States passport or birth certificate (with photo identification)
a copy of court documents for the conviction, and proof that any sentence was completed
a recent FBI identification record
recent police certificate from the state where the conviction occurred, and from any state in which he has lived for six (6) months or longer in the last 10 years
and then, of course, a fee equivalent to $200.00 Canadian.
He must jump through a series of intricate, time-consuming bureaucratic hoops — and then pay for the privilege of having done so. Meanwhile, attorneys are advising similar scofflaw clients of possible "processing problems." The minimum processing time is supposed to be six months. My friend has been waiting for a year and a half.
As I wrote earlier, upon hearing of my friend's dilemma, the phrase that came to my mind was "transaction costs." A fairly standard definition of this term is: "a transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange." Consider buying an apple from a grocery store. The cost of doing so will be, not only the price tag on the apple, but also the time and gas it takes to travel from your house and back, as well as the time you spent waiting in line. These costs — the ones over and above the price tag on the apple — are the transaction costs of your purchase. Such costs can become more expensive than the apple itself. For example, if the nearest grocery store is ten miles away, the cost of gas may be far more significant that the price of fruit.
For years, I have been complaining to my husband that the transaction costs of being alive were soaring — and almost always because of increased governmental requirements and ensuing governmental inefficiency. Here's one example: a few years ago, it took me eight months to get a replacement birth certificate that I needed for no other reason than to meet the requirements of another government form. I needed to fill out the other government form in order to legally engage in an activity the license for which had previously required only the production of a driver's license.
To perform a single act that should never have been licensed at all, I had to wait eight months and fill out two additional forms. For the privilege of going through this infuriating process, I paid two fees. And then insult was added to injury: the whole process was just a prelude to filling out yet another government form and paying yet another fee. The transaction costs of life are soaring.
I have never been arrested (as an anarchist, I have no excuse). The most legal attention I've gleaned has been a parking ticket. I am white, middle-class, and innocuous in appearance. A clean slate and an unimposing persona puts me in the enviable position: I will probably never be denied entrance at any border crossing in the world.
$30 $27
Nevertheless, my freedom of travel is being denied, and that denial comes in the form of transaction costs. Government regulations are making the exercise of my rights so expensive in terms of additional fees, time, inconvenience, and sheer unpleasantness that these considerations are beginning to outweigh the actual cost of exercising my rights.
When my friend weighs the transaction costs of venturing once more across the Canadian border, I believe his friends and family will win the contest. He will swallow his pride and his anger in order to maintain close contact with those for whom he cares.
But I cannot help believing that the true winners will be government fee-mongers and heartless bureaucrats who cherish social control. They seem determined to burden the exercise of rights with transaction costs so heavy that the knees of the "free" will buckle under them.
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When the Egyptian protests first broke out, most Americans celebrated. Though Mubarak's military must still be circumvented or overthrown, the revolt has spread, like a cleansing fire, to Bahrain, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Jordan, and beyond.What is all this all about? Thanks to Western rule since WWI, this is a region of dictators and domination. Regardless of the spark, that is the issue. This might just be an old story and exactly what it appears to be: a struggle between the liberty of the people and the criminal power of the state.
Somehow, however, this is not obvious to many conservatives. Never mind that the people are denouncing the dictators, the jails, the political persecutions, the torturing and brutality, the disappearances and murders, and demanding the freedom to speak, publish, and live. Surely there must be some nefarious plot behind it all.
The liberty theme was clear enough in Egypt. Here we had multitudes of educated, young, tech-savvy, profreedom activists taking a brave stand against a national-socialist dictator of 30 years — and the bad guy lost, thereby giving hope to all peoples in the world who struggle against tyranny. The role of the military in the future of the country is still up in the air, and who doubts that another government will have to be overthrown again in the future? Still, victory is victory.
The parallels with 1989 and with 1776 were impossible to miss. Anyone who loves Jefferson, Bastiat, and Rothbard had to feel a mighty rush, a sense that the flame of freedom will never, ever be extinguished. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere, including in Washington, DC.
A Pew Research study confirmed intense American public interest in this Egyptian story. It was the biggest foreign-policy story in four years — bigger than any natural disaster or any US war. The story even overwhelmed domestic news. From an American popular perspective, there is nothing quite as thrilling as seeing a people stand up to a brutal dictator — and having it end (though there is much more to do) the right way.
This story is embedded deep within our own civic culture, with our own revolt against empire. The themes of the revolt — liberty, human rights, justice — are our themes, beautiful evidence of the way the American experience has been a light to the world, despite 20th-century deviations. And if you were watching the live coverage, especially Al Jazeera, it was clear that freedom, in exactly the way we understand that term, was the theme. The Declaration of Independence was quoted in placards. Speakers mentioned Patrick Henry. This was the memory of the American revolution revived in the old world.
Just as commentators and intellectuals have trouble understanding liberty as a theme in domestic politics, some people just can't get it in foreign policy. I noticed a strange lack of celebration on many conservative blogs and sites. There is far more handwringing about "instability" than cheers for the people.
If the Egyptian case is any indication, we can look forward to more fretting and puzzling and even opposition from the American Right. The angst-filled view on Egypt began with Glenn Beck, the most influential voice on the tea-party Right, a man who last year celebrated Hayek's Road to Serfdom and put it on the bestseller list.
In a YouTube video, he warned that these revolts were not what they seemed. They are really the working out of a conspiracy of Muslim fanatics insufficiently appreciative of the US-installed and maintained dictator. It was shockingly clear: he supported the regime over the people, the US empire over self-determination. From his account, one would think that a protest for liberty was terrorism. Which may give us some indication of what terrorism means to him and others like him.
Following Beck, there was a rising ethos on the American Right that looked down on the protests, regretting them and even hoping for a full-scale and murderous crackdown. At the CPAC convention on the very weekend that Mubarak fell, Ron Paul was the only major speaker to even address the subject, much less celebrate the freedom movement.
At the bottom of the heap was Ann Coulter at CPAC, who expressed no love for the Egyptian people. She was specifically asked about the reality that the Mubarak regime was jailing journalists. Her response: "I think there should be more jailed journalists." The audience cheered.
Michael Barone of National Review put it bluntly: "Most of us would probably prefer to have seen a victory of people power in Tehran or Pyongyang than in Cairo. Mubarak's Egypt was an ally of the United States."
In holding these opinions, the conservatives are echoing the same absence of joy found in the regimes of Algeria, Libya, and Morocco — other governments that are wholly owned by the CIA and worry about what a freedom uprising would mean for them.
For many people on the Right, Islam is the new communism — the bugaboo that we must fear above all else. They see its wickedness everywhere. It's gone so far that many people cannot recognize the just aspirations of an Islamic people to be free of dictatorship. The message of Beck, Coulter, and others seems to be that the best thing for these people is US-imposed totalitarianism.
It is true that freedom is not certain to bloom in the postprotest world. Sometimes freedom comes in stages. Sometimes a worse regime can replace a bad one. But it is always an occasion to celebrate when the tyrant is overthrown. It is always a blow for liberty — no matter that the brutal state in question is officially supported by the US government.
For some 60 years, there has been a deep fissure in what is called the American Right. There are those who believe in liberty. And there are those who believe in the American imperial state. They are not the same. Indeed, they are in opposition. These events underscore the serious difference, to the point that many spokesmen among the conservative movement can't even recognize the legitimate aspirations of a people not to be ruled by a dictator in power for decades. The reality highlights the lie that these people believe in liberty as versus government power.
The same fissure on a more philosophical level is summed up as the debate between liberty and order. The Right has gone back and forth on this subject for many decades. But the discussion becomes less abstract in a case where millions suffer under despotism. To favor order over liberty here meant to crack skulls and massacre people to keep an illegitimate regime in power for the Pentagon.
In a world in which the last superpower is losing control — and the sooner the better — American conservatives will have to make a choice. Do they favor freedom? Or do they favor the global military state? Fess up, fellows. You have to make the choice.
There's an old joke about a man who, as he enters a psychiatrist's office, stops, extends his arms forward, and claps three times. He then turns to the right, repeats the clapping, and continues to the right until he has come all the way around.
The psychiatrist asks him, "What are you doing?"
He replies, "This will keep elephants away."
The psychiatrist tells him that they are in the middle of the city and on the 20th floor and that he can assure him that there are no elephants within at least 10 miles.
The man responds, "Effective, isn't it?"
Now another one. A man and his family go through an airport TSA checkpoint and are directed to the image scanner. The father says that he is not willing to subject himself and his family to the screening because of the possible danger of radiation and the very clear naked pictures it takes. He and his family are directed to an agent who is preparing to do a full-body pat down.
The father says to the agent, "How can you justify subjecting so many people to this kind of humiliation? You will be touching my wife, my children, and me in places that my wife and I have considered inappropriate to touch our children since they were toilet trained. Especially," he adds, "when there is a far greater chance of dying from a bathtub fall than from a terrorist attack."
The agent responds, "Effective, isn't it?"
Is the situation really this insane? Is forcing millions of people to take off their shoes and throw away their creams, water, and nail clippers just a futile gesture like clapping your hands to keep elephants away?
Let's look at another analysis of the terrorist threat. If a bank robber found that security at banks had been tightened up to the point where it had become too risky to keep robbing them, would he abandon his criminal ways and apply for an honest job, or would he just switch to home invasions or robbing stores? Because getting on a plane is tougher these days, don't you think that a terrorist would just try something else? Are there terrorist bombs, fires, and shootings going on around the country on a daily basis?
The constant exaggeration of the dangers is like having a hypnotist converting a mild fear in someone into a full-blown phobia. Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. Hyperbole and imminent, lurking threats are such effective tools to get people to do what you want that we are all hard pressed not to use them. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.
Repeating these stories is effective for the same reason the "big lie" works now just as well as it did when Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels refined it. It is because of the way our minds are constructed. These techniques work because we humans are all story-making machines. When we are given a conclusion convincingly enough or authoritatively enough (and throw in a little fear of the unknown), we look for a narrative that makes it true. We grab strands of information that may be true, false, or made up of other narratives and construct a storyline that justifies the conclusions given to us. Just watch how small kids come up with explanations for things they don't understand.
As the brilliant physicist Thomas Kuhn discovered, scientists are just as likely to fall under the spell of their own narratives as anyone else. So much so that once they believe in a particular theory they will notice the most miniscule piece of evidence that confirms it, yet they will not see — or barely notice — huge contradictions right in front of them.
When forced to confront contradictions, we humans can come up with some of the most creative, roundabout stories to explain them away. So, as you see, all that is needed is a believable conclusion, and our minds do the rest.
This is why we obediently put up with actions that are patently ridiculous, like subjecting ourselves to fondling by the TSA. We accept the conclusion that it is for our own protection and work backward by filling in the justifications.
A more accurate narrative is that any terrorist with the most basic intelligence will know the security procedures and find a way to circumvent or avoid them. More importantly, total security is an illusion: it would require ever-increasing intrusions into our private affairs by people who could become, in real terms, much more of a threat than terrorists.
Is this just hyperbole on my part? No. We have very precise and enumerated rights, as defined by the constitution, written to preserve our liberty, and the only way to advance security is to chip away more and more of these rights.
"More importantly, total security is an illusion: it would require ever-increasing intrusions into our private affairs by people who could become much more of a threat than terrorists."The current uproar about the procedures is helping to drive a wedge in the current narrative, but unless a more principled one is presented, we will still have the we-need-to-be-protected-from-the-bogeymen account running the show. We can influence the dialogue by bringing up words like freedom, rights, and courage to counteract protection and terror, but they are loaded words that create different narratives for each person.
So, what do we do with these overly creative minds of ours? Ludwig von Mises had the right idea. You start with very basic, irrefutable, a prioriFor those of you who come from the positivistic scientific method and have trouble with a priori anything, just consider them as statements that have yet to be falsified. These statements are self-evident enough that a small adjustment in your interpretation of them would, in all likelihood, add to and reduce very little from their conclusions. If you follow the arguments, you may find that what does get falsified are your own positivistic beliefs. statements and create your stories from there, making sure they can always be justified by your initial, already-determined-to-be-undeniable base. Just as with mathematical axioms and proofs, you build your understanding of bigger concepts from the base up. That, to me, is the only way you can be immune from the ever-changing winds of public opinion and faddish notions.
Mises did this by starting with a very simple statement: humans act — they take action. From there he proceeded to write a very rigorous, 881-page magnum opus, Human Action, that expanded, ever more, the concept until it became a full-blown and as close to bulletproof model of economics as has ever been presented. He expanded it into a philosophy of freedom and an understanding of human nature, free commerce, and government influence. The beauty of what he wrote is that the main foundational structures on which it all rested are just a few, and they are quite easy to understand and confirm.
Over the years, those who have studied Mises and espoused his philosophy have been watching, aghast, the incredibly unsupportable narratives that have been going in and out of fashion. Yet it has been hard to pierce the bubbles of these overinflated and unsustainable stories. Eventually they burst from their own weight only to be replaced by other equally flawed ones. And so it goes in the world of mental illusions. There is hope though.
It is said that soon after his enlightenment the Buddha passed a man on the road who was struck by the Buddha's extraordinary radiance and peaceful presence. The man stopped and asked, "My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?"
"No," said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
Again the Buddha answered, "No."
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, my friend, then what are you?"
The Buddha replied, "I am awake."From The Teachings of Buddha (edited by Jack Kornfield), p. viii, and adapted from The Dhammapada, translated by Thomas Byrom.
I know very little about Buddha but I do believe that Mises was as close to awake as you can be with regard to a clear, unvarnished understanding of his subject.
This determination to wake up from the fog of your own misconceptions (believed to be truisms) is what I consider one of the highest callings there is. Have a solid philosophy that you can hone and clearly defend, and it will become one of your main legacies, one that will live on in your family and the people you touch. Imbue yourself with the noble goal of searching for truth and waking up. You'll be amazed at how differently from others you will understand the world around you — and how comfortable a solid understanding feels.
Start with something simple and proceed from there. I started by exploring the idea that we own our bodies and our minds, but it wasn't until I found Mises's line of thinking that I was able to make much headway. Also, the resources I found at Mises.org were indispensable.
Start from any point you want but just start. You will never look back.
It may seem odd to associate an invasive, property-denying measure like frisking with the principles of the free market. There's little room for individual sovereignty when it comes to national security — at least that's how the government thinks and acts: we are guilty until proven innocent; individuals aren't rational enough to make decisions about their well-being, so government officials have to step in. This is how the United States has acted since the 9/11 attacks.
Is there an alternative to this Big Brother approach to managing homeland security? I think there is: private defense agencies offering competitive services on an open market.
Recently, an airport in Orlando, Florida, has announced that it is considering ditching the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), reviving the debate about whether or not it is appropriate to have a private company instead of the TSA screen passengers.
Should customers and markets dictate who attends to national-security needs? If you look at sensitive public-interest industries like transportation, quality security service can only be provided by those who are under market pressure and depend on a wide customer base for their survival.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, governments all over the world increased airport security. The US Congress, in a hasty overreaction to that tragic day, gave the job of screening passengers and luggage to a new federal agency, the TSA. This has led to a massive bureaucracy that has bloated the system and created more problems. The American taxpayers now pay for more than 50,000 airport security screeners. The TSA has also requested nearly $8 billion in funding for 2011. In spite of all these expenses, the quality of airport screening has declined, as the underwear-bomber incident has shown.
The TSA has a severe conflict of interest because it serves as both the aviation-security regulator and the provider of key security. Who's watching the watchmen? When it comes to baggage and passenger screening, the TSA is regulating itself. This is the same recipe for disaster found in every state monopoly: unaccountability and inflexibility. And as with any bureaucracy, the TSA's natural incentive is to hide errors and make itself look good.
Having federal screeners also fragments airport security: airport perimeters are managed by airports and not the TSA. This leads to security gaps that allow incidents like the Christmas bomber. In Europe, most airports have hired certified, private security firms to do their screening, making each airport responsible for every aspect of its own security.
Having the federal government in charge of security screening in airports also means that the taxpayers are stuck with much of the cost. A market-orientated strategy would have played out much better, with security fees on tickets and airline charges covering the complete cost of airport safety. This would mean that the service providers are paid by consumers and accountable to them alone. When this sort of accountability is no longer part of the equation, customer complaints skyrocket — as does the risk of dangerous mistakes.
The recent pat-down controversy echoes such general discontent with TSA employees. Public opinion considers private screening companies to be far more responsive. If an individual is truly performing under par, a private company is able to react more swiftly than the federal government. With a private company, if something happens — say a weapon gets through — that employee is gone the next day. If you don't perform, you're out. It's not a job for life, as federal jobs sometimes seem to be.
So, how will private contractors improve security and keep the airport customer happy? First, private defense will decentralize security, which means letting each airport implement its own procedures, fitting its own needs, under loose government supervision. As Larry Dale, president of the Sanford Airport Authority in Orlando, told CNN, "Airports are unique … one size doesn't fit all."
Second, the cost of airport security should be paid by those who use airports — airlines and passengers. Like any other private and competitive enterprise, private screening companies are wired to consumer needs and demands. For example, in order to avoid overcrowding, private screeners can have more flexible staffing levels to meet an airport's varying needs. Unlike the federal government, they could expand their ranks when passenger loads triple during the summer and contract when fewer people are traveling in the winter. It's obvious that the ability to adjust the number of screeners quickly leads to more efficient screening and shorter waits, which translates into satisfied customers and safer flights.
In reaction to the growing public anger at the TSA and its "freedom fondles," some pundits are rushing to the bureaucracy's defense. An illustrative example is Marc Thiessen's call for Americans to give thanks to the "men and women of the TSA who give up time with their families during the holidays to keep us safe from terror."
As we'll see, Thiessen's defense of the TSA is internally contradictory. Moreover, his endorsement of a government monopoly (on the design of air security) ignores all of the economic arguments against such an arrangement. As I pointed out in an earlier column, the only way to strike a proper balance between the (possibly competing) goals of customer privacy and safety is to allow competition among airlines in a truly free market.
Thiessen Tries to Have It Both WaysIn order to justify the invasive scans and provocative pat downs, Thiessen naturally brings up the specter of terrorism:
If a passenger who is supposed to be seated near us on our next flight has a bomb in his underwear, I suspect most of us would prefer that the explosive be uncovered when he tries to get through airport security — not when a Dutch tourist sees the passenger in the row ahead of him try to set it off and dives across the plane to stop him, as happened on a flight to Detroit last Christmas.
Now, before we continue, let's note just what an odd defense of the TSA this is. Remember, the TSA was established in November 2001. So Thiessen is justifying its current procedures — which many Americans find repugnant — by reminding us that the TSA totally failed to prevent the "underwear bomber" from getting into position on a plane above Detroit. According to Thiessen's own story, even though the TSA had been in place for eight years at that point, it took a vigilant member of the private sector, i.e., the Dutch tourist, to avert catastrophe.
As this example so clearly illustrates, Thiessen makes the mistake common to all proponents of government power: he assumes that if the government arrogates to itself the power to do good thing X, then the government will actually accomplish good thing X. Throughout his column, Thiessen recoils at "the Left," so he should recognize the pattern. We could just as easily tell Americans to thank the people who work in Housing and Urban Development for keeping our country safe from inner-city poverty.
This is a crucial point, so let me elaborate: It's not as if TSA officials had said all along, since 2001, that they needed full-body scanners in order to do their jobs properly. Had they said that in the beginning, then the public probably would've protested enough such that the "small-government" George Bush wouldn't have nationalized airport security.
On the contrary, the public was led to believe that the establishment of the TSA, and the new procedures it implemented, were necessary to "keep us safe" in the wake of 9/11. Nobody thought there was a caveat declaring, "Unless of course someone smuggles a bomb in his underpants."
By the same token, these new procedures will not actually keep us safe if terrorists are so inclined. Just as the government's security protocols did not stop the underwear bomber, so too will these new procedures fail in their ostensible purpose. And when the next incident occurs, I am confident that Thiessen and others will applaud the next invasive step on the slippery slope toward a police and surveillance state.
Ironically, Thiessen himself — in the very next paragraph of his article — demonstrates that these new procedures have nothing to do with preventing the next underwear bomber:
In the last two weeks, I have been through TSA screening eight times — and not once was I asked to go through the millimeter-wave machine, or undergo an enhanced pat-down. Odds are that most of the 2.2 million passengers who will go through airport security each day during this holiday weekend will have a similar experience. On the last leg of my trip, I finally asked to go through both procedures to see what all the fuss was about. No one touched my junk.
So which is it, Mr. Thiessen? Are these new procedures necessary to weed out underwear bombers? If so, then doesn't it concern you that "most of the 2.2 million passengers" who go through security each day won't be subjected to the techniques? That's a rather porous net, isn't it?
We see the same pattern in the informal reports of Thanksgiving travelers who claimed that the reason the "Opt Out Day" fizzled (as the media told us) was that the TSA completely backed down. In other words, rather than face the surly travelers head-on and force (a small fraction of) them through either the scanners or pat downs, the TSA simply waved everyone through the conventional metal detectors and avoided confrontation.
If these reports are accurate, it means that the TSA acknowledges what the critics have been saying: namely, that forcing people to endure the humiliating new procedures doesn't really enhance air security — or, at least, that the marginal benefit in weeding out potential terrorists does not justify the huge inconveniences imposed on travelers.
The Economics of Air SecurityIn my earlier article, I made an analogy between car crashes and terrorist attacks on airplanes. Let me expand that analogy here.
To the average person, the "optimal" number of car crashes is zero. That makes sense, obviously, because it is undeniably bad when people get injured and property gets damaged.
But economically speaking, in our current world, the "optimal" number of car crashes is much higher than zero. In other words, the only way to achieve the undeniable benefit of zero car crashes would be to suffer unacceptably high costs. Very low speed limits — of 25 miles per hour, say — would need to be enforced with draconian severity. Furthermore, the requirements for getting a driver's license would be much stricter, and the much-smaller pool of eligible drivers would need to go through renewal procedures very frequently.
The important point is that, although it might be technologically possible to drive the number of car crashes per year down significantly, very few people would want to live in such a society. Beyond the inconvenience of having to drive very slowly (or switch to bicycle) to get around in one's personal life, people would see huge increases in prices, especially for perishable items such as food.
Even though it takes a cold-blooded economist to say it explicitly, such a world would be inferior to one with more car crashes. The obvious drawbacks in terms of vehicle damage and injuries would be more than compensated by the benefits of relaxing the restrictions on driving.
A similar analysis applies to air security. It is far too crude to think of airline procedures as "safe" versus "unsafe." Rather, there is a whole spectrum of various techniques that could make flying more or less safe, and safety itself is but one dimension among many.Steve Horwitz also makes the important point that if the TSA's onerous procedures drive more people to highway travel, then statistically there will be more deaths because driving is more dangerous than flying. Other things being equal, people would prefer flights to be safer in terms of conventional crashes and of course terrorist attacks. And indeed, as humans become richer, airline travel tends to become safer: from 1960 to 2009, the number of fatalities per 100 million aircraft miles dropped from 44.2 to 0.7.Even this statistic understates the gains in safety, because there are far more passengers per aircraft-mile in 2009 than in 1960. Although people complain about "flying like sardines," this is how competition and low fares have driven the industry. The proper benchmark of airline safety would look at fatalities per (100 million) passenger miles flown, but unfortunately the BTS tables do not show this figure.
The Role of InsuranceWhen it comes to defending against terrorism, the problem is how to adequately quantify the threats, and to do so in an economically meaningful way. Because it is a government monopoly, the TSA cannot possibly find the economically efficient balance between customer privacy and security. Even if the TSA somehow stumbled upon the ideal mixture through dumb luck, its bureaucrats wouldn't recognize it as the solution. They would then fail to change policies as the underlying fundamentals moved or they would change the policies and deviate from the still-optimal arrangement.
On the other hand, if airports were privately owned, and airlines were allowed to compete in a truly free market, then we would have an institutional structure that at least would tend toward the efficient set of procedures. In practice, of course, humans make mistakes, and private-sector CEOs are not exempt from this malady. But the constant feedback of market prices — something the TSA lacks completely — would steer them to their destination.
In a truly free market in air travel, insurance companies would probably play a much larger role. For example, suppose that the legal system held airlines strictly accountable for the damages their planes imposed on others in the event of a hijacking or explosion. In order to gain permission to fly over populated areas, the airlines would need to demonstrate their ability to pay such huge damages, and to this end they could take out massive insurance policies.
Insurance actuaries — supplemented by experts in terrorism, of course — are the ideal profession to evaluate the benefits of various security procedures. Right now, an actuary can calculate the premium on, say, a $1 million life-insurance policy for a smoker of a certain age and other characteristics. The actuary can also calculate how much the premium could be lowered if the potential customer decided to quit smoking. In principle, an actuary could tell an airline the expected amount of damages (resulting from a terrorist incident) that would be avoided per passenger if some new security screening measure is implemented.
For example, the actuary could tell the airline, "Using only conventional metal detectors and X-ray machines on luggage, you should expect 10 terrorist incidents, each costing on average $300 million in legal damages, for every 100 million passengers who fly on your airline." The airline would then need to charge at least $30 per passenger per ticket in order to fund the premium for its terrorism-insurance policies.
Further suppose that the actuary reported, "However, if you required your passengers to completely strip down and submit to a full-body cavity search, then you should expect only 1 terrorist incident for every 100 million passengers." The airline in that case would only need to charge passengers $3 per ticket in order to fund the insurance policies.
Should the airline implement the new strip-search policy? It depends on its customers. Would the airline sell more or fewer tickets if it charged $27 less but required its passengers to be randomly subjected to such an invasive procedure? The answer in the current United States is probably "fewer," meaning that it would be unprofitable for the airline to ramp up its security measures.
But the important point is that this is a quantitative matter: depending on how much damage the measure would likely avoid, and depending on how little a (poor) segment of the population objected to such searches, the new approach could very well be profitable for at least one airline to implement.
ConclusionTerrorists and cancer are different foes, to be sure. In particular, terrorists could adapt to a new security environment, whereas lung cancer won't change its relation to smoking just because of insurer policies.
Even so, it is easy to see that a truly free market in air travel would bring the innovation of capitalist entrepreneurship — as well as the crucial feedback of profit and loss — to bear on this complex problem. Though the monopoly TSA promises us privacy and safety, it will deliver neither.
The national furor over the TSA's new procedures — culminating in yesterday's "Opt Out Day" — has elicited the typical response from the bureaucracy and its apologists. Why, these invasive scans and "enhanced pat-downs" are only for your good, in order to ensure safe flying. You don't want another attack, do you?
This is a false tradeoff. Especially in the long run, there is no tension between freedom and safety. If airport security were truly returned to the private sector, air travelers would achieve a much better balance of privacy and legitimate security measures.
The Calculation ProblemWhenever considering government versus market provision of a good or service, we should recall Ludwig von Mises's famous critique of socialism. Specifically, Mises argued that even if the central planners were angels, intending only the best for their subjects, and even if these angels were fully informed of the latest technical knowledge, nonetheless they would be groping in the dark when they tried to design a blueprint for the entire economy.
The socialist central planners would suffer from a calculation problem, meaning that they couldn't evaluate whether a given enterprise — such as a car factory or a farm — was making efficient use of society's scarce resources. Sure, the car factory might be cranking out vehicles that the comrades enjoyed driving. But that alone is not enough to prove that the car factory is economically efficient. For all the planners know, the resources (steel, rubber, labor hours) going into the production of the cars could be diverted into other lines, increasing the production of items that the comrades enjoy even more than the cars.
The market economy solves this problem effortlessly through market prices and the profit-and-loss test. If a car factory is using up resources that consumers would prefer go into alternate sectors, this fact manifests itself objectively when the accountant announces that the car factory is "losing money." After all, to be unprofitable simply means that the car factory cannot earn enough revenues from its customers in order to pay the prices for resources that other entrepreneurs are able to afford. That is the sense in which consumers are "voting" (through their spending decisions) that the car factory either reform or shut down.
In Mises's view, the fundamental superiority of the market economy over socialism was not that entrepreneurs happened to be bold innovators, while government bureaucrats were dull yes-men. No, the problem was an institutional one. In the market economy, the factors of production are privately owned, which allows the generation of market prices for every unit of every resource. Thus people in the private sector get immediate and constant feedback on the success or failure of their operations. There is nothing analogous in government, because its "customers" cannot withhold their purchases if they don't like the "services."
The Calculation Problem and the TSAWhen it comes to the apparent tradeoff between privacy and security, the TSA suffers from the same calculation problem that plagues all socialist agencies. The proper balance of the various considerations cannot be discovered through some "objective" procedure if it doesn't involve private property and market prices.
Consider: Even if there are no further terrorist incidents on planes, that won't prove that the new patdowns and scans were the right thing to do. For one thing, it's possible that there are other security procedures, which do not humiliate large numbers of customers, that would yield the same success of zero incidents. In that case, the current TSA procedures would be inappropriate because they cause needless suffering with no offsetting benefit.
"In the long run, there is no tradeoff between freedom and security."But more importantly, it's possible that the "efficient" number of terrorist incidents — for the rest of US history — is not zero. In fact, no matter what procedures are implemented, it's always possible that wily terrorists will still manage to beat the system. In real life, we can never guarantee safety. This is why so many pundits' discussions of airline travel miss the mark completely: they assume that there is some objective answer of "the right" amount of security, when this is a complex economic question.
To see this last point, we should switch from terrorism to something far less emotional: car crashes. If the government completely nationalized automobile production (something that may happen eventually), and insisted on making a uniform model for every driver in America, we would hear the pundits discuss various issues in the abstract.
For example, Rachel Maddow might argue that the government-issued cars should have three sets of seat belts, air bags for every passenger, and a top speed of 55 miles per hour in order to contain healthcare costs (which would also have been completely nationalized by this point). On the other hand, Sean Hannity might go ballistic over the nanny-state regulations, and point out that the Founding Fathers didn't even have mirrors on their stagecoaches.
The Market Is the Only SolutionYet such hypothetical arguments over "the correct" amount of vehicle safety would be absurd if they conceded the premise that the government should set the standard and apply it uniformly to everyone (except for the politicians, who would get to drive vintage Ferraris). The only way to solve the conflict would be to privatize car production and allow consumers to spend their money, focusing on whatever attributes they cared about the most.
The same conclusion holds for air travel. Only in a truly free market — where different airlines are free to try different approaches to safety — could we approach a sensible solution to these difficult questions. Passengers who don't mind invasive scanning or sensitive inspections could patronize airlines offering these (cheap) techniques — assuming they were really necessary to achieve adequate safety. On the other hand, passengers who objected to these techniques could pay higher ticket prices in order to fly on airlines that hired teams of bomb-sniffing dogs, or set up very secure prescreening procedures (perhaps with retinal IDing in order to board a flight), or implemented some as-yet-undreamt-of method to keep their flights safe, without resorting to methods that their customers found humiliating.
The Role of InsuranceMost people who are sympathetic to the free market would endorse the above sentiments, but with one nagging concern: How does the airline take into account the huge damages imposed on others if one of its planes is hijacked?
One possibility is that the legal system would hold airlines strictly accountable for such property damage, and that the airlines would need to purchase massive insurance policies before obtaining permission to send giant steel containers full of jet fuel hurtling over skyscrapers and shopping malls.
I spell out the mechanics of such a system here. For our purposes, let me deal with one possible objection: Someone might say, "But what happens if an airline has lax security, and terrorists use it to cause an enormous amount of damage, wiping out their insurers? That's why we ultimately need the government in charge of security."
Yet I could pose the same question: What happens if the TSA screws up, and a major terrorist incident occurs? Will John Pistole and his immediate staff be fired? Will the TSA itself have its budget gutted? And who is to say that even the US federal government could "afford" such a catastrophe?
Once we consider the incentives (and lack of consumer feedback) plaguing the TSA, we realize that not only will it err on the "invasive" side of the spectrum, but that it will do so ineffectively.
Here's one obvious example that numerous people have pointed out: What's to stop a terrorist from placing a plastic explosive in an area where it would not be detected by even an "enhanced patdown"? Therefore it is not even true that these scandalous new procedures "at least keep us safe."
ConclusionAs Murray Rothbard pointed out, most of the vexing "social problems" of the day would fade away if we lived in a voluntary society based on private property. This result holds in the specific application of airport security.
In the long run, there is no tradeoff between freedom and security. To paraphrase Franklin, those who would consent to temporary groping in order to avoid terrorism will end up with both.
If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness and dedication of the police; thus, police are our "heroes." So we were told, and so we believed, writes Stephen Mauzy.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Steven Ng.
[An audio version of this article, read by Steven Ng, is available as a free MP3 download.]
Unquestioning reverence for the police is one of the more unfortunate inculcations in our formative years. If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness and dedication of the police; thus, police are our "heroes." So we were told, and so we believed.
A similar syllogism positions the police as heroes, and heroes are worthy of worship. That explains the elegiac melancholy that imbues media coverage whenever a police officer is martyred in the line of duty: to kill a cop is one of the most heinous acts one can imagine.
But is the death of a police officer really more tragic than the death of anyone else unknown to us? We can read the obituaries; we can peruse every entry, and not one will evoke a scintilla of sentiment. But if a police officer dies, an involuntary pathos percolates to the surface. The reaction is not unlike Pavlov's dog involuntarily salivating upon hearing the bell.
If we were to peer over the manufactured ethos, we would see a hard-boiled reality that differs significantly from the callow perception. Personal contacts with the police, if not confrontational, are at least disagreeable. The following scenario is familiar because it is universal: We are driving ten miles an hour over the posted interstate speed limit; weather, traffic, time preference, and common sense dictate our actions to be reasonable and nonintrusive. Suddenly, our tranquil, solitary world is shattered by a blast of swirling blue and red light emanating from a Crown Victoria drafting a few feet off our rear bumper.
The speed limit is the law, we are told. And because the law is the law, the diligent police officer is as inflexible as the law he is commissioned to enforce. All explanations — rational or otherwise — fall on the same deaf ears. The policeman remains unmoved, because he can ill afford to be moved. His municipality, and therefore his salary, depends on the additional lucre.
So we meekly sit on our hands. We were in the wrong, after all; we are a nation of laws and good government. Commonsense be damned, even when we realize that this revenue-through-punishment business model motivates an adjunct behavior: infringement enhancement. Not only are we fined for speeding; the police officer snoops around for ancillary digressions — a burned-out license-plate bulb, a cracked windshield, an unbuckled seatbelt, and, God forbid, the whiff of alcohol. The tally quickly rises into the hundreds of dollars. The police officer extends the full-fare ticket. We quietly sign off, not wanting to provoke further investigation. As we pull away, we find ourselves unsettled by a fog of ambivalence. This is the law?
Actually, there is no fog. The more right we are in our argument and the more logically we think, particularly when our actions involve no trespass against person or property, the more we bristle at submitting to impertinence and intrusion. We also resent the unsaid truth: regardless of the level of amenity the police officer effuses from the outset, he would have injured or even killed us had we not acquiesced to his demands. Though government sloganeers insist the police are there "to protect and to serve," protecting and serving are only an intemperate remark away from "to coerce and to intimidate."
The apprehension is only marginally less severe when we voluntarily contact the police to report a personal trespass. The police officer's same questioning tactic — impertinent, curt, or accusing — does little to quell our anxiety, nor does it quell the nagging thought that our property or conduct violates the letter of the law, thus inviting unintended scrutiny.
The chummy moralizing only adds to the ambivalence. The public-service announcement (featuring a crisply uniformed, avuncular B-actor sort) always favors the proliferation of laws. The law, the police officer explains in even tones, ensures a more secure and civil society. Of course, the police officer underplays the requisite fines and arrests needed to enforce the laws. The strong arm stops us from ejecting ourselves from moving vehicles, distracting ourselves while driving, idling our cars on a cold day. The fact that our infractions not only add to the municipality's revenue stream but add to the ability to further violate our person and property is an afterthought.
And as for the Brobdingnagian display of zealotry in enforcing these laws? Sure, it is off-putting to refined sensibilities, but it is merely an affectation employed to punctuate the police's dedication to maintaining order. For that reason, an alleged drug dealer's abode must be violated violently: the front door must be kicked in; the house must be entered by officers fully armored, armed, and angry; the occupants must be thrown into chaos. The alleged perpetrator, if not killed, must be wrestled to the ground and shackled, and made to endure the added humiliation of spittle and screaming invective. Afterward, the lead gendarme must pronounce to the cameras, "We are all safer now that one more criminal has been taken off the street."
Because illegal drugs are the bogeyman of middle-class morality, most applaud this aggressive imposition of the law. In fact, they wouldn't mind seeing a little more of it — hence, the overwhelming support when more police officers are promised to be added to the city payrolls. President Clinton promised to provide "funding" for 100,000 new cops and the voting majority applauded. Few stop to note that more police means more laws and stricter enforcement of the current laws. More police open the door to more coercion and more violence — from the police. But so what? It is always the other guy who is the lawbreaker — until it is you.
Government-funded education, along with, unfortunately, sophistic parental tutelage, has blinded generations of Americans to the truth: the police do nothing to ensure civility. Civility is a byproduct of respect for property. If there is no respect for property, there is no civility.
Consider the United States, where the citizens, for the most part, respect property. Respect for property instills an empathy and desirable ethos: most of us want to own property, and we want others to respect the property we own. In turn, we respect our neighbor's property. Contrast this behavior to parts of the world where respect for property is wanting. Mexico is an easy exemplar: the country is conspicuously marked by a superfluity of graffiti-desecrated buildings, metal-grill window coverings, class segregation, and violence and discord. Mexico also suffers from more intrusive laws (and more capricious enforcement of those laws) than the United States.
The level of police power also correlates negatively with the police's respect for property rights. There is the obvious: kicking in doors, rummaging through personal items, wrecking automobiles. But police also violate property rights more discreetly and more insidiously: trespassing on private property, gleaning freebies from business owners, repelling customers with their very presence.
If we want to maximize social harmony, the power of the police must be minimized, while the importance of property rights must be maximized. When that occurs, any ambivalence we feel about the police will dissipate, because there will no longer be any reason to feel ambivalent.
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Anarchism and Terrorism."]
As Alex Butterworth tells the tale, it was "in the early years of the twenty-first century," when
a British Home Secretary recommended that those wishing to understand what at that time was still termed the "War on Terror" should look back to the 1890s. Parallels were widely drawn with the wave of bombings and assassinations that had swept Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century, perpetrated by anarchists and nihilists for whom London and Switzerland had provided refuge. Then, as now, it was remarked, disaffected young men from swollen immigrant communities had been radicalized by preachers of an extremist ideology and lured into violence.
Young Butterworth was intrigued. Could it be that history really was repeating itself in this way? He began looking into the 1890s, with particular reference to that "wave of bombings and assassinations … perpetrated by anarchists." What he discovered he has now reported in a book called The World that Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists & Secret Agents, published on this side of the Atlantic four months ago (in June 2010) by Pantheon Books. And what, precisely, did he discover? I doubt I could do better in one paragraph than this passage, which I quote from the publicity for a lecture Butterworth gave in London this past spring:
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the popular imagination was filled with fantasies of militant Anarchism: of airborne attack and viral plagues. International terrorism made its first, furious appearance. Anarchist cells carried out a wave of bombings and assassinations across Europe and in America — or so, at least, the governments of France, Britain and especially Russia liked their populations to believe. The truth, however, was far murkier. Infiltration and surveillance comprised one part of the armory of the security services, but equally important was the use of agents provocateurs and black propaganda.
In other words, not to put too fine a point upon it, but what Alex Butterworth learned from his research on the 1890s was that the wave of bombings and assassinations perpetrated by anarchists during this period was largely a fiction. To some extent, it was frankly invented by sensation-mongering writers for newspapers. In other cases, unscrupulous newspaper writers who did stop short of outright fictioneering failed nevertheless to display much discernment or professional judgment when it came time to decide whether to pass along rumors and unverified police reports as established fact. Together, these newspapermen had a sizable fraction of the literate public convinced of what Butterworth calls "the fanciful notion of an internationally coordinated anarchist revolution of which the isolated attacks with bombs, knives and revolvers marked the first skirmishes."
Frank Harris discovered, when he researched the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago for The Bomb, the 1909 novel he wrote about the incident, that, with the connivance of most, though not all, the important newspapers,
the whole American population was scared out of its wits by the Haymarket bomb. Every day the Chicago police found a new bomb. I thought they had started a special manufactory for them, till I read in the Leader of New York that the same piece of gas-piping had already served as a new bomb on seven different occasions.
Harris learned that a similar hysteria had prevailed after one of the men falsely convicted of the Haymarket bombing, Louis Lingg, blew himself up in his jail cell the night before his scheduled execution.
The news of the explosion quickly spread beyond the prison walls, and a crowd collected, demanding information — a crowd which was soon swollen by reporters from every paper in the city. The news got out in driblets, and was published in a dozen prints. The city seemed to go mad; from one end of the town to the other men began to arm themselves, and the wildest tales were current. There were bombs everywhere. The nervous strain upon the public had become intolerable. The stories circulated and believed that afternoon and night seem now, as one observer said, to belong to the literature of Bedlam. The truth was, that the bombs found in Lingg's cell and his desperate self-murder had frightened the good Chicagoans out of their wits. One report had it that there were twenty thousand armed and desperate anarchists in Chicago who had planned an assault upon the jail for the following morning. The newspaper offices, the banks, the Board of Trade building, the Town Hall, were guarded night and day. Every citizen carried weapons openly. One paper published the fact that at ten o'clock on that Thursday night a gun store was still open in Madison Street, and crowded with men buying revolvers. The spectacle did not strike any one as in the least strange, but natural, laudable. The dread of some catastrophe was not only in the air, but in men's talk, in their faces.
Of course, not all the violence attributed to anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s was merely made up or uncritically publicized by the mass media of the time. Some of it was quite real, but it was perpetrated, not by anarchists at all, but by people who falsely called themselves by that name or were falsely called anarchists by the authorities, by the newspapers, or by both.
There were plenty of young men in the 1890s who longed to call attention to themselves, make a name for themselves, and show everyone how "daring" they were; they weren't much for reading or political philosophy, these young men: to them, an "anarchist" was somebody who dressed all in black and liked to break things. There are still such young men. In more recent years, they've been breaking shop windows and vandalizing parked cars in cities where meetings of the World Trade Organization are being held.
Other young men, more intellectual in their tastes, call themselves anarchists for reasons that seem obscure at best. The Haymarket martyr Louis Lingg, for example, called himself an anarchist; Butterworth says he was accused of the Haymarket bombing, though there was no evidence he was even there in Haymarket Square that evening, because he was one of "the city's leading anarchist speakers and journalists." Yet, according to Frank Harris, Lingg supported "a minimum wage established by the State." Excuse me? A minimum wage "established by the State"? An anarchist is supposed to be working to abolish the state, not give it new regulations to enforce. This would seem elementary — though, again, we see this same phenomenon today: self-professed "anarchists" who work to grow, rather than shrink, the state.
Then there were the terrorists and assassins of the 1880s and '90s who were passed off as "anarchists" by the authorities and the newspapers, even when their connection to the anarchist movement was pretty tenuous. Consider, as Alex Butterworth does, the case of Leon Czolgosz, the "anarchist" who assassinated US president William McKinley in 1901. The members of the Chicago anarchist group whose meetings he did attend a few times earlier that year had found, on getting to know him a bit, that "he had read little anarchist literature."
Little wonder, then, that, according to Butterworth's account, "by late August, his colleagues had begun to suspect him as a police provocateur" and had arranged for his description to be published in the local anarchist press along with the information that he was probably a police spy. Other criminals were described by local police as "anarchists" merely because they were armed and swarthy and spoke like immigrants. And the word of the local police in such matters was invariably and unquestioningly accepted by both the newspapers and higher ranking government officials. Also, of course, the more widespread the popular belief became that anarchists were advocates and perpetrators of violence, the more young people with a taste for violence flocked to join the movement.
There was violence committed by police officers, too — police officers working undercover and posing as anarchists. Butterworth writes, for example, about the
belief, common among the working men of Chicago [just after the Haymarket bombing], that the true guilt for the bomb-throwing lay with a police agent. Subsequent investigations never settled the matter, though the corruption in the Chicago police and judiciary at the time was eventually laid bare and officially acknowledged. Foreign powers also had a hand in manipulating the aftermath of the Haymarket Affair, however, and the possibility of their prior involvement in provoking the bombing cannot be discounted; certainly the most vociferous calls for vengeance came from a certain Heinrich Danmeyere, a deep-cover agent of the Imperial German Police.
A decade later, in the mid-'90s, a bomb went off outside the Greenwich Observatory, killing the young man who was carrying it: he was, the police and the newspapers assured everyone, an "anarchist." He had, however, been recruited for the job and supplied with his explosives by an undercover police officer. The basic details of this story are retold, with the names changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty, in Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, which was published about a decade after the events it describes. Indeed, Butterworth writes that The Secret Agent, at the same time that it presents "a rather schematic cross section of the anarchist world of the period," also "may come closer to illuminating the truth [about the Greenwich bombing] than documentary sources that are so often partial and distorting."
As Butterworth notes, the period around the turn of the 20th century was one in which "radical politics and cultural bohemia frequently rubbed shoulders" and "the art and literature of the period are uncommonly revealing about both the life of that milieu, and the ideas that informed it." Yet he makes surprisingly little use of the fiction of the period, beyond his comments on Conrad's "well-informed storytelling" in The Secret Agent.
He includes only a single passing reference, for example, to Henry James's 1886 novel The Princess Casamassima, in which a young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, becomes involved in radical politics and agrees to perpetrate an act of terrorist violence, only to discover that he hasn't the stomach for it. He had been drawn to anarchism in the first place because it seemed to offer a means of ameliorating the human suffering he saw all around him. And now he is to create more suffering in the name of anarchism? Robinson turns the revolver he has been given on himself.
It is odd that Butterworth should pass over this novel so lightly, since one of his own favorite themes — one he dwells upon at length in his book and returns to over and over — is the idealism of the anarchists of a century ago and their devotion to a world of peace and harmony. He repeatedly stresses that anarchism "was premised on an optimistic view of human nature" and a belief in "mankind's inherent perfectibility." He repeatedly frets that the majority of people in Europe and North America in the last years of the 19th century "failed to differentiate between the political ideals [anarchists like Peter Kropotkin] espoused and the simpler impulse to destruction which so many younger colleagues in the movement were eager to indulge."
There is not a single reference in Butterworth's book to Frank Harris or to The Bomb, Harris's 1909 novel about the Haymarket incident. Nor is there a single reference to G. K. Chesterton's 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. And this is particularly extraordinary, since The Man Who Was Thursday comes closer to encapsulating in its central symbolism the main point of Butterworth's study than any other work of fiction of the period. The Man Who Was Thursday is the story of a London undercover police detective named Gabriel Syme, who infiltrates an anarchist group and gets himself elected as the English representative to the European anarchist council.
There are seven members of this council, each code-named for a day of the week. Syme, by winning the election, has become the man who was Thursday. He travels to the continent to meet with the other members of the council, only to discover that all the other members are also, like himself, undercover police detectives who have "infiltrated" the organization.
Nonetheless, flaws and all, Alex Butterworth's book, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists & Secret Agents, is a welcome and readable reminder of why we need revisionist history — to fight the state's never-ending efforts to promote an alternative version of history that makes it look good.
This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Anarchism and Terrorism in the '90s."
[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "The Milgram Experiment."]
It was about 1550, according to the standard accounts — about 14 years before the birth of Shakespeare, about 80 years before the birth of John Locke, about 135 years before the birth of Bach — that a young Frenchman named Etienne de La Boetie, a young man of what we, today, would call college age, about 20 years old, posed what Murray Rothbard would later describe as "the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society?"
La Boetie saw, Rothbard wrote, that
every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.
This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement?
Rothbard wrote this passage as part of a lengthy and extremely interesting introduction to a then-new edition of Etienne de La Boetie's youthful essay on political philosophy. This new edition (which presented a modern American translation originally brought out in the 1940s) was published in 1975 under the title The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. That very same year, 1975, a rival edition of La Boetie's little book was issued by another small scholarly publisher, this one presenting an 18th-century British translation with the 16th-century French text on facing pages. This rival edition was published under the title The Will to Bondage and featured a not so lengthy but extremely interesting preface by the libertarian historian and editor James J. Martin.
Martin thought he knew the answer to the question that had so perplexed La Boetie and now perplexed Rothbard: Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, acquiesce in their own subjection, consent to their own enslavement? Martin's answer was that they're born that way. We should ask ourselves, he wrote, whether "at bottom all political, ethical and philosophic convictions" might not be "due to personal temperament and incapable of being accounted for by reason." This hypothesis, he maintained, "is of critical importance to a detached view of this business of tyranny, its persistence, and its opponents." For
temperament brings up the matter of genetics, not propaganda, education, psychic persuasion or intimidation, and a whole schedule of related phenomena. It remains to be proven whether there has ever been a genuine case of a person temperamentally congenial to tyranny who has ever been "converted" to the opposite tendency, or vice versa, by any device known to the arts of persuasion.
At the time he wrote this, Martin had spent more than 20 years teaching at the high-school and college levels. And his considered opinion was that schools, in particular, persuaded nobody of anything. "They largely succeed," he wrote, "in entrenching sentiments already there in the people they process, though they may develop adversaries by awakening contradictory reactions among those temperamentally hostile to what they are exposed to." This is why "the members of libertarian persuasions remain at just about the same levels year after year relative to the total community, despite the most wondrous attempts via literature, communication and action to swell them." The plain fact is, Martin insisted, that those "who crave the comforts and security of subordination outnumber the 'free souls,' and there is no credible evidence that this relationship is likely to change in any appreciable degree now or at any calculable time in the future."
That was James J. Martin's take on the origins of the politics of obedience, the will to bondage, the will to voluntary servitude. There were other takes, however. As the simultaneous appearance in 1975 of competing translations of Etienne de La Boetie's essay in political philosophy suggests, the '70s was a time when such ideas were "in the air," a time when many people were drawn to consider and discuss such ideas.
Consider the case of Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist at the City University of New York whose book Obedience to Authority was published in 1974. The book was Milgram's summary of and reflections upon a series of experiments he had begun conducting back in 1961, when he was a newly minted Harvard PhD in the second year of his first teaching assignment, as an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. Milgram advertised for volunteers who would be willing to participate in a psychological experiment in return for a small payment — "four dollars for one hour of your time," according to the ad reproduced in Milgram's 1974 book. When the volunteers reached Milgram's laboratory, they were told they would be participating in a study of how memory and learning were affected by punishment.
They were told that in the experiment each of them would play the part of a "teacher." Each of them was then paired with another volunteer, who was playing the part of a "learner." The rules were simple. The learner was strapped into a chair by a white-coated "experimenter" and connected to electrodes. In an adjoining room, with a window through which the teacher and the experimenter could see and make eye contact with the learner, the teacher read a list of words arranged in pairs aloud into a microphone. The teacher's voice was audible to the learner through speakers on the walls of the adjoining room. In similar fashion, the learner's voice was audible to the teacher and the experimenter through speakers mounted on the walls on their side of the glass.
If the learner repeated the word pairs in correct sequence, the experiment would go on. If the learner made an error, the teacher would administer an electric shock to the learner by remote control, pressing a button on a control console. Each electric shock administered would be stronger than the one before.
At some point in the proceedings, the volunteer "teachers" discovered, the volunteer "learners" began to show discomfort, then increasing evidence of feeling serious pain, when the shocks were administered. It wasn't long before the learners began demanding, then begging, to be released from the experiment. It wasn't long before they began struggling to escape from the chairs into which they had been strapped by the experimenter. It wasn't long before the learners began pleading with the teachers to help them get themselves free.
And, as the severity of the shocks the experimenters ordered the teachers to administer grew greater and greater, the console from which the teachers administered these shocks began to display warnings that the selected voltages were dangerously high. Still, any teachers who protested to the experimenters or even raised questions about whether the experiment should proceed were sternly ordered by the experimenters to continue. They were told by the experimenters that everything was all right.
And, in fact, everything was all right. The learners were not really volunteers, but actors. They were not really receiving any shocks at all. But the teachers did not know this. They believed themselves to be inflicting excruciating and possibly life-threatening pain on the learners. And most of them went right on doing so, despite the struggles and protests of their victims. Only one of Milgram's first 40 volunteers refused to inflict any more shocks beyond what his console told him was 300 volts. But by that time, according to Milgram, the learner's "response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all."
Yet all but one of Milgram's first 40 volunteers went right on administering shocks. Two-thirds of them went on administering shocks right up to what their consoles told them was 450 volts, the highest voltage the equipment could produce, even though by that time, the learners were totally unresponsive and apparently either unconscious or dead.
Milgram's experiment really had nothing to do with memory, learning, and punishment, of course. It was rather, as he described it in 1974,
a simple experiment … to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
Yet, at any point in the proceedings, all any of the teachers had to do was refuse to continue. All any of them had to do was stand up and walk out of the laboratory. It is rather like the situation Etienne de La Boetie describes in his essay on the politics of obedience. Because the ruled always outnumber the ruler, La Boetie wrote, the ruled can free themselves at any time "merely by willing to be free."
It was really that simple, La Boetie wrote. In his words,
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
Would the experimenter in Stanley Milgram's lab have fallen of his own weight and broken in pieces if the teachers had walked out on him? As Milgram himself put it,
a reader's initial reaction to the experiment may be to wonder why anyone in his right mind would … not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory? But the fact is that no one ever does. Since the subject has come to the laboratory to aid the experimenter, he is quite willing to start off with the procedure. There is nothing very extraordinary in this, particularly since the person who is to receive the shocks seems initially cooperative, if somewhat apprehensive. What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter's instructions. Indeed, the results of the experiment are both surprising and dismaying.…
Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out. This was seen time and again in our studies and has been observed in several universities where the experiment was repeated. It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Milgram believed there were two explanations for his results. I call them the psychological explanation and the sociological explanation. The psychological explanation is that under certain circumstances the ordinary individual is both able and willing to "view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes," so that "he therefore no longer considers himself responsible for his actions." The sociological explanation is that under certain circumstances most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply conform to what they feel is expected of them — what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they have grown up and now live.
So what was the solution to this problem of authority, as one might call it? To his credit, Milgram considered libertarianism as a possibility. But he rejected it. "It would seem," he wrote, "that the anarchist argument for universal dismantling of political institutions is a powerful solution to the problem of authority. But the problems of anarchism are equally insoluble." For
while the existence of authority sometimes leads to the commission of ruthless and immoral acts, the absence of authority renders one a victim to such acts on the part of others who are better organized. Were the United States to abandon all forms of political authority, the outcome would be entirely clear. We would soon become the victims of our own disorganization, because better organized societies would immediately perceive and act on the opportunities that weakness creates.
Moreover, it would be an oversimplification to present the picture of the noble individual in a continuous struggle against malevolent authority. The obvious truth is that … for every individual who carries out harsh action because of authority, there is another individual who is restrained from doing so.
The libertarian social psychologist Sharon Presley studied for her PhD under Milgram at the City University of New York in the '70s; she says, politically, Milgram was not a libertarian, but "a liberal Democrat who was in favor of civil liberties."
Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de La Boetie's key insight about the politics of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by devising an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition.
This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "The Milgram Experiment."
One of the fatal flaws in the concept of "limited" government is the judiciary. Endowed with the compulsory monopoly of the vital power of deciding disputes, of ultimately deciding who can wield force and how much can be wielded, the government judiciary sits as an unchecked and unlimited tyrant.
Pledged to preside over the rule of law, law that is supposed to apply to everyman, the judges themselves are yet above the law and free from its sanctions and limitations. When clothed in the robes of his office, the judge can do no legal wrong and is therefore immune from the law itself.
There is a crucial catch-22 in this grisly situation. For if anyone would like to argue against this arrangement, he can do so — in our archist system — only before judges who themselves are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is up to government judges to rule on whether government judges are immune from the law. How do you think they would decide? Well, how do you think a group of economists would decide on the question of whether economists should be immune? Or any other group or profession?
Not surprisingly, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in 1872, that judges were immune from any damage suits for any "judicial acts" that they had performed — regardless of how wrong, evil, or unconstitutional those acts may have been. When clothed in judicial authority, judges can do no wrong. Period. Recently a case of an errant judge has come up again — because his action as a judge was considered generally to be monstrous and illegal. In 1971, Mrs. Ora Spitler McFarlin petitioned Judge Harold D. Stump of the DeKalb County, Indiana, Circuit Court to engage in a covert, compulsory sterilization of her 15-year-old daughter, Linda Kay Spitler. Although Linda was promoted each year with her class, Mrs. McFarlin opined that she was "somewhat retarded" and had begun to stay out overnight with older youths. And we all know what that can lead to.
Judge Stump quickly signed the order, and the judge and mamma hustled Linda into a hospital, telling her it was for an appendicitis operation. Linda was then sterilized without her knowledge. Two years later, Linda married a Leo Sparkman and discovered that she had been sterilized without her knowledge. The Sparkmans proceeded to sue mamma, mamma's attorney, the doctors, the hospital, and Judge Stump, alleging a half-dozen constitutional violations.
All of these people, in truth, had grossly violated Linda's rights and aggressed against her. All should have been made to pay, and pay dearly, for their monstrous offense. But the federal district court ruled otherwise. First, it ruled that mamma, her lawyer, and the various members of the "healing professions" were all immune because everything they did had received the sanction of a certified judge. And second, Judge Stump was also absolutely immune, because he had acted in his capacity as a judge, even though, the district court acknowledged, he had had "an erroneous view of the law." So, not only is a judge immune, but he can confer his immunity in a king-like fashion even onto lowly civilians who surround him.
The US Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, unaccountably didn't understand the program, and so it reversed the district court, claiming that Judge Stump had forfeited his immunity "because of his failure to comply with elementary principles of due process," and had therefore in a sense "not acted within his jurisdiction." To allow Stump's action to stand, said the appeals court, would be to sanction "tyranny from the bench."Now this was pretty flimsy stuff, and besides it opened an entertaining wedge toward holding judges accountable to the law and to the protection of rights like everyone else. But this would have shaken the foundations of our monopoly archist legal system. And so the US Supreme Court, on March 28, set the matter straight. In a 5-3 decision in this illuminating case of Stump v. Sparkman, Justice Byron R. ("Whizzer") White, speaking for the majority, sternly reminded the appellate court of the meaning of the 1872 ruling:
A judge will not be deprived of immunity because the action he took was in error, was done maliciously or was in excess of his authority. Rather, he will be subject to liability only when he has acted in the "clear absence of all jurisdiction."
Justice White conceded that no state law or court ruling anywhere could be said to have authorized Judge Stump's action; but the important point, he went on, is that there was no statute or ruling which prohibited such an action by the judge. Therefore, even though Stump had approved the sterilization order without legal authorization, without holding a hearing, without notice to the child, or without her being represented by a lawyer or guardian, it was still a "judicial act" and therefore beyond the law. Backing Justice White were Justices Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist, and John Stevens.
For the minority, Justice Potter Stewart, joined by Lewis Powell and Thurgood Marshall, argued that the judge's unauthorized action was "beyond the pale of anything that could sensibly be called a judicial act." He pointed out that Stump's action
was in no way an act "normally performed by a judge." Indeed there is no reason to believe that such an act has ever been performed by any other Indiana judge, before or since.
In a ringing statement, Stewart concluded, "A judge is not free, like a loose cannon, to inflict indiscriminate damage whenever he announces that he is acting in his judicial capacity."
Ahh, Justice Stewart, but apparently and unfortunately he is so free.
Stump himself will be free for some time to come. Apparently the masses of DeKalb County were not concerned about Linda's rights, for they reelected him last year to another six-year term as circuit-court judge. Bruce Ennis, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, charged that the White decision meant that "judges can violate citizens' constitutional rights and get away with it" and "can ignore the law with impunity." Ennis said that the ACLU would ask for legislation from Congress reversing this "outrageous" decision.
Outrage, yes; but why the shock and surprise?
White and his allies were simply being thick as judges, guildsmen defending their guild privileges; and were defending the very cornerstone of our archist system: the immunity from the law of the ultimate decision makers.
Removing such immunity strikes at the very heart of that system, and paves the way for a truly free America in which rights would be protected fully, in which no man or group of men would be above the law, or would have a compulsory monopoly of judicial services. We hail Mr. Ennis and the minority judges; but do they know the full implications when we pit citizens' rights against the "loose cannon" of judges and the "tyranny of the bench"?
This article was originally published as "The Plumb Line: So What Else is New?" in the Libertarian Review, April 1978, p. 9.
In the mid-19th century, a new political movement arose: socialism. Germany was its epicenter. The German Karl Marx was its leading thinker, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany its leading organization. The socialists denounced capitalist inequality and argued that the obvious solution was government ownership of the means of production.From the outset, many questioned the practicality of the socialists' solution. After you equalize incomes, who will take out the garbage? Yet almost no one questioned the socialists' idealism. By 1961, however, the descendents of the radical wing of the Social Democratic Party had built the Berlin Wall — and were shooting anyone who tried to flee their "Workers' Paradise." A movement founded to liberate the worker turned its guns on the very people it vowed to save.
Who could have foreseen such a mythic transformation? Out of all the critics of socialism, one stands out as uniquely prescient: Eugen Richter (1838–1906). For excellent discussions of Richter's life, thought, and influence, see Ralph Raico, Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1990): pp. 3–25, and Ralph Raico Mises Daily (2005). During the last decades of the 19th century, he was the leading libertarian in the German Reichstag, as well as the chief editor of the Freisinnige Zeitung. Seventy years before the Wall, Richter's dystopian novel, Pictures of the Socialistic Future, boldly predicted that victorious German socialism would inspire a mass exodus — and that the socialists would respond by banning emigration, and punishing violators with deadly force.
The mass exodus:
[U]seful people, and people who had really learnt something, went away in ever-increasing numbers to Switzerland, to England, to America, in which countries Socialism has not succeeded in getting itself established. Architects, engineers, chemists, doctors, teachers, managers of works and mills, and all kinds of skilled workmen, emigrated in shoals. The main cause of this would appear to be a certain exaltation of mind which is greatly to be regretted. These people imagine themselves to be something better, and they cannot bear the thought of getting only the same guerdon as the simple honest day laborer. (p. 59)
The emigration ban:
[A] decree has been issued against all emigration without the permission of the authorities.… Old persons who are beyond work, and infants, are at liberty to go away, but the right to emigrate cannot be conceded to robust people who are under obligations to the State for their education and culture, so long as they are of working age. (p. 57)
The deadly force:
Under these circumstances the Government is to be commended for stringently carrying out its measures to prevent emigration. In order to do so all the more effectually, it has been deemed expedient to send strong bodies of troops to the frontiers, and to the seaport towns. The frontiers towards Switzerland have received especial attention from the authorities. It is announced that the standing army will be increased by many battalions of infantry and squadrons of cavalry. The frontier patrols have strict instructions to unceremoniously shoot down all fugitives. (p. 59)
Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular explanations for the crimes of actually existing socialism. While Acton never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly illustrate his aphorism that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton-Creighton Correspondence, Letter 1 For all their idealism, even socialists will do bad things if left unchecked. Hayek, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: under socialism, "the worst get on top." F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 148–67. On this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by brutal cynics as their movement's power increased.
Richter's novel advances a very different explanation for socialism's "moral decay": the movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed "idealists," their ideal was totalitarianism. Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves — depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on malcontents — so be it.
Richer admittedly presents some of the socialists' uglier policies — increased work hours, stringent rationing, massive military spending, corporal punishment — as slippery-slope responses to deteriorating conditions. But many of their worst offenses happen early in the novel, and Mr. Schmidt, the book's socialist narrator, happily supports them. In chapter 6, workers lose the freedom to choose their line of work. Schmidt's reaction:
[W]hat has the Government to do in order to bring their scheme for organizing production and consumption into some sort of harmony with the entries made by the people? Should Government attempt a settlement by fixing a lower rate of wages for those branches which showed any over-crowding, and a higher rate for those labors which were not so coveted? This would be a subversion of the fundamental principles of Socialism. (p. 24)
In chapter 7, the government imposes internal passports to prevent farmers from moving to the greater comfort of the city. Schmidt's reaction:
It would unquestionably have been better if those regulations which have only just been issued had been issued at the very first. According to these regulations no one can now temporarily leave his place of residence without first providing himself with a leave-of-absence ticket; and no one can make a permanent removal without receiving such directions from higher quarters. (p. 29)
In chapter 15, long before conditions become desperate, socialist Germany bans emigration — and threatens fugitives with death. Schmidt's reaction:
Socialism is founded upon the principle that it is the duty of all persons alike to labor, just as under the old regime the duty to become a soldier was a universally recognized one. And just as in the old days young men who were ripe for military service were never allowed to emigrate without authority, so can our Government similarly not permit the emigration from our shores of such persons as are of the right age to labor. (p. 57)
What inspired Richter to make these grim — yet uncannily accurate — predictions about the "socialistic future"? The most plausible hypothesis is that Richter personally knew the leading socialists from the German Reichstag, and saw them for what they were. Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) made life difficult for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but never imposed an outright ban. The party bottomed out at 9 seats in the Reichstag in 1878 — and jumped up to 35 in 1890 when the Anti-Socialist Laws lapsed. See Wikipedia: German Elections, 1871–1945 I submit that he repeatedly peppered the socialists with unpleasant hypotheticals, from "Under socialism, who will take out the garbage?" to "What will you do if skilled workers flee the country?" When socialist politicians responded with hysteria and evasion, Richter drew the natural inference: "If this is how these 'idealists' deal with critical questions before they have power, just imagine how they'll deal with critical actions after they have power!" As Richter's proxy explains in the novel's climactic speech,
In endeavoring to get rid of the disadvantages of the socialistic method of manufacture, you place such restrictions on the freedom of the person, and of commerce, that you turn Germany into one gigantic prison.… To those in jail there was, at least, the possibility of an act of pardon, which might some day open a path to liberty, even to those who had been condemned to life-long imprisonment. But those who are handed over to your socialistic prison are sentenced for life without hope of escape; the only escape thence is suicide. (pp. 121–22)
Despite their intuitive appeal, the Actonian "power corrupts" and Hayekian "worst get on top" theories of socialist moral decay seem inferior to Richter's "born bad" account. Power does indeed lead politicians to betray their ideals, but from the standpoint of 19th-century socialism, the real "sellouts" were the moderate Social Democrats who gradually made peace with the capitalist system. The worst do indeed get on top in totalitarian regimes. But if the early socialists had not intellectually justified extreme brutality, their movement probably wouldn't have attracted the many sadists and sociopaths who came to run it. Only the Richterian theory can readily explain why the most devoted surviving child of German socialism grew up to be the prison state of East Germany: self-righteous brutality was the purists' plan all along.
Decades before the socialists gained power, Eugen Richter saw the writing on the wall. The great tragedy of the 20th century is that the world had to learn about totalitarian socialism from bitter experience, instead of Richter's inspired novel. Many failed to see the truth until the Berlin Wall went up. By then, alas, it was too late.
[This article is excerpted from Society Without Coercion.]
Today there is the commonly accepted, but completely fallacious idea that somehow police protection, access to courts, and even legal counsel is a "right" of citizenship in the United States. However, there is no more justification for such services being provided "free" (i.e., through taxation) than there is for color TV sets to be provided for each and every person in America at "public expense." Either a person has a right to his own life, liberty, and property, or he does not. If he does, nothing can justify forcing him to subsidize another person for any purpose, including for the purpose of police protection.
Either a person has the responsibility of maintaining his own life, or he does not. If he does, then he must earn the necessary funds himself to pay for the necessities and luxuries of his own existence.
In a free society, police protection, like every other service, would be available on a contractual basis, only to those who were willing and able to pay for it. There are four main ways in which an anarchocapitalist police force could be financed:
through service contracts (similar to insurance);through specific investigatory fees;through special contracts; andthrough fines.We will now discuss each in turn.
Service contracts would be the major source of revenue for a laissez-faire police department. A service contract would simply consist of a contractual agreement between a police department and an individual, whereby the police department would agree to provide the individual with certain services (e.g., investigation, physical defense of his property, etc.), should he need them, in exchange for a yearly premium.
These policies would work essentially like insurance. Virtually everyone in a given society would subscribe and pay the yearly premium in order to be assured that, should the need arise, police protection would be available. Nonetheless, during any given year, only a small fraction of the total number of policyholders would actually need major police services. Therefore, the cost of police protection would be effectively spread over a large number of subscribers.
Let us take a concrete example. Suppose the cost of an average police investigation in Brandenberg was $5,000. If an individual needing police protection had to pay this cost all at once, he probably could not afford it. However, instead of paying such a large "specific investigatory fee," the individual will almost certainly be a subscriber to police protection, as will millions of others. Say there are one thousand subscribers in Brandenberg paying $100 a year each, making the total income for this small, local police department $100,000 per year.
During the course of any given year, it is unlikely that more than four or five persons out of this thousand will need police protection. If their investigations cost $5,000 each, this makes a total investigatory cost of $25,000 per year, leaving $75,000 for other police functions. Since the individual only pays $100 a year, he has in fact received $5,000 worth of benefits (so to speak) for his comparatively nominal fee. This is exactly how insurance works: on the principle that only a fraction of policy holders will ever collect at a given time, while many more are paying premiums.
The second form of police income is even simpler to explain. In the rare case that an individual needed police protection, but had not entered into, and did not now want to enter into, a long-term contract, or in the case of an individual requesting special services (such as, perhaps hunting for a missing person), there would be specific investigatory fees. Again, these fees would be rather high, compared to the normal contractual agreement, but in some cases persons would find them worth paying.
The third form of police income would be special contracts. Thus, for example, a company owning a major turnpike would probably contract with a private police force to patrol their highway, since it is to their rational self-interest to prevent reckless driving and other acts that would discourage use of their road and thus decrease their profits.Roads in a free society would, like everything else, be privately owned. For a description of the financing, construction and maintenance of roads without taxation or eminent domain, see my article "'Public Services' Under Laissez Faire, parts VI and VII — the Roads," which appear in the July and August 1969 issues of The Rational Individualist. Or similarly, a private factory might hire police to guard their facilities.
Finally, police forces in a free society could be financed through receipts from fines. As a contractual condition of procuring police protection, individuals could empower police departments to collect fines for misdemeanors committed. This would also save costly court expenses for both the justice company and for the private individual.
Let us now consider how anarchocapitalist police forces might operate. There are two basic operational types of crimes: those reported (or discovered by police) after the fact, and those reported (or discovered by police) during the fact.
In the former case, police procedure would be quite clear. A family, upon returning from an outing, who discovered that their house had been robbed, would call the police and report the fact, as they would today.
Then (unlike today) the police would first check to see if the family was signed up with them and entitled to this form of assistance by their contract. This could be done virtually instantaneously through electronic information-retrieval systems. If the family was signed up and entitled to this type of assistance, a policeman would be dispatched and would proceed with his investigation. If the family was not signed up, or not entitled to this type of protection by their contract, a police-force salesman would probably be sent out along with an investigator.
The salesman would explain to the family, which has now become a high risk, how they could extend their contract to cover this situation if they were already signed up, or he could explain to them the forms of contract now available to them if they were not signed up, or he could simply tell them the cost of the specific investigation that they were requesting if that is all they wished to pay for. Naturally, if they had not already contracted for the type of police service they were now requesting, they would have to pay more for it at this time than they would have had to pay if they had been covered by a service contract; just as a person must pay more for auto insurance after he has had an accident than before. However, the important point is that in after the fact cases it is clearly possible to verify whether or not a family had signed up with the police, and if not, to assess the appropriate fees.
Crimes discovered during the fact by police present a somewhat different situation. If a policeman comes upon a person being assaulted by a mugger, he does not, of course, have time to verify whether or not the person attacked is signed up for police protection, even if this would only take a few minutes. If the person were signed up, he would probably be somewhat annoyed that the policeman stood around checking his identity while he was sustaining mortal injuries. If he were not signed up, the police force might be losing a good prospect. For these reasons, among others, a policeman encountering such a situation would as a matter of course immediately come to the apparent victim's aid.
"The fact that a person may be an innocent victim does not alter his obligation of providing for his own life."Of course, the person being attacked does not have any "right" to demand that he be protected, any more than he has a right to demand that he be fed when he is hungry. Both police protection and food are commodities one has to purchase in a free market. The fact that a person may be an innocent victim does not alter his obligation of providing for his own life.
There are, however, a number of reasons why a policeman would automatically come to a person's aid in such a situation. First, as mentioned above, the victim might be a present client. Second, the victim would be a good potential client. Third, it is to the policeman's self-interest to see that criminals are countered, since this increases the profits of the police department, or more directly might increase his own salary. (Conceivably raises and promotions would be based on how well a policeman performed his function of protecting men from criminals.)
Now what happens if the victim is not in fact a client of this or of any other police department? Again, there are two possibilities. First, the person might have called "Help, police!" If he did so, he has then in fact made a verbal contract for police assistance, just as you make an implicit contract to pay the check when you walk into a restaurant and order a meal. In this case, the policeman would send the victim a bill and expect him to pay.
In the second case, the person does not call "Help, police!" but is simply lying there, bleeding while the mugger is beating on him. In this case no verbal contract exists. However, for the reasons mentioned above, the policeman would come to the person's aid.
Being rational, the police force would also send this person a bill, which he would be requested but not obligated to pay. Since the police have just saved his life, there is a good chance that he would pay. Or, if the police force was smart, they would send out a salesman and attempt to sign him up. Since he had just benefited from their services, it would seem quite likely that he would at least take the "special budget protection package." If he did not, the small expense of saving his life could be easily financed out of general police receipts, and surely no one in Brandenberg would complain about the policeman spending a few minutes of his time to save an innocent victim's life.
There is, finally, at least one other way in which police protection might be financed. Since the investigation of crimes, the protection of property, and other such activities are actions necessitated by criminals, it would seem logical to make them pay at least part of the cost of such operations. Thus, one of the debts of the criminal to "society" in a free community might be to pay back the cost of the investigation he necessitated.
In this manner, police protection for the poor might be financed.A second obvious method of financing police protection for the deserving poor would be through charity — either from private agencies, or from the police department itself. It will be interesting to see, if we ever create a free society, just which method of financing — service fees or criminal payment — would work out best.
I will consider one more issue connected with police departments: arrests. Some libertarians assert that arrest is inherently immoral because it is in fact the initiation of force against persons whose guilt has not been proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt." There is, however, a very simple epistemological justification for arrest in a free society. It is as follows:
Necessarily, man acts on the basis of his knowledge. At best man can be epistemologically certain, that is, certain in a given context of knowledge. Man can seldom, if ever, be metaphysically certain, that is, certain that there exists no alternative in the universe to his judgment. To be metaphysically certain, in most cases, requires omniscience, which man clearly does not possess. Man can generally only be certain that he has examined all relevant facts available to him, and integrated them without contradiction; what is relevant is again dictated by his state of knowledge.
Knowledge of the truth of propositions is not an either-or condition, a dichotomous function. Knowledge is a continuous function, varying from, at one end, complete ignorance to, at the other end, complete (epistemological) certainty.
In assessing the guilt or innocence of a man accused of committing a crime there exists, accordingly, an epistemological evidential continuum, varying from possibility of such guilt, to certainty of such guilt. At different levels on the evidential continuum, different actions are appropriate.
Thus, when one suspects that a man might possibly be guilty of a crime, it is proper to question him. When one has evidence that a man is probably guilty of a crime, it is proper to arrest him. And when one is convinced that a man is certainly guilty of a crime, it is proper to punish him. In general, the appropriate action with respect to suspected criminals depends upon the amount of evidence one has. Arrest is then justified when guilt is probable.
Now this does not of course mean that the morality of one's actions finally depends upon the contextual validity of one's judgment. Whether one was right or wrong in questioning, arresting, or imprisoning a man depends upon whether he had in fact committed a crime. If in a free society the police arrest or the courts convict a person who later turns out to be innocent, they would be required to make restitution for their errors equal to the damages and inconvenience they caused him (unless the person had contractually freed them of this obligation).
There are two ways in which an anarchocapitalist justice system could deal with police and judicial error. Either the police force of a free society could have its clients contractually agree to be subject to arrest when the police (or a magistrate) judged the evidence to be sufficient (thus freeing them from the obligation of making restitution if they arrested a person who later turned out to be innocent); or they would agree to make restitution if they made a mistake.
Of the two possibilities, I prefer the latter. If the police or courts make a mistake, they should pay for it. In a free market of justice, police making many errors would thus quickly be eliminated by bankruptcy.
This article is excerpted from chapter 3 of Society Without Coercion: A New Concept of Social Organization (Society for Rational Individualism, 1969).
[Part I of The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie, written 1552–53.]
I see no good in having several lords:
Let one alone be master, let one alone be king.
These words Homer puts in the mouth of Ulysses,Iliad, Book II, Lines 204–205. — HK as he addresses the people. If he had said nothing further than "I see no good in having several lords," it would have been well spoken. For the sake of logic he should have maintained that the rule of several could not be good since the power of one man alone, as soon as he acquires the title of master, becomes abusive and unreasonable.
Instead he declared what seems preposterous: "Let one alone be master, let one alone be king." We must not be critical of Ulysses, who at the moment was perhaps obliged to speak these words in order to quell a mutiny in the army, for this reason, in my opinion, choosing language to meet the emergency rather than the truth. Yet, in the light of reason, it is a great misfortune to be at the beck and call of one master, for it is impossible to be sure that he is going to be kind, since it is always in his power to be cruel whenever he pleases.
As for having several masters, according to the number one has, it amounts to being that many times unfortunate. Although I do not wish at this time to discuss this much-debated question, namely, whether other types of government are preferable to monarchy,Government by a single ruler. From the Greek monos (single) and arkhein (to command). — HK still I should like to know, before casting doubt on the place that monarchy should occupy among commonwealths, whether or not it belongs to such a group, since it is hard to believe that there is anything of common wealth in a country where everything belongs to one master. This question, however, can remain for another time and would really require a separate treatment involving by its very nature all sorts of political discussion.
For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!
Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them.
A weakness characteristic of human kind is that we often have to obey force; we have to make concessions; we ourselves cannot always be the stronger. Therefore, when a nation is constrained by the fortune of war to serve a single clique, as happened when the city of Athens served the 30 Tyrants,An autocratic council of thirty magistrates that governed Athens for eight months in 404 BC. They exhibited such monstrous despotism that the city rose in anger and drove them forth. — HK one should not be amazed that the nation obeys but simply be grieved by the situation — or rather, instead of being amazed or saddened, consider patiently the evil and look forward hopefully toward a happier future. Our nature is such that the common duties of human relationship occupy a great part of the course of our life.
"If the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an … and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that ……they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil."It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem good deeds, to be grateful for good from whatever source we may receive it, and, often, to give up some of our comfort in order to increase the honor and advantage of some man whom we love and who deserves it. Therefore, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solicitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that such a procedure is not prudent, inasmuch as they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil. Certainly while he continues to manifest good will, one need fear no harm from a man who seems to be generally well disposed.
But O, good Lord! What strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give it? What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or, rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility? Not ruled, but tyrannized over? These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own.
They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man — not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man. Too frequently this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of the tournament — not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to bed with a common woman!
Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve him are cowardly and fainthearted? If two, if three, if four do not defend themselves from the one, we might call that circumstance surprising but nevertheless conceivable. In such a case one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage. But if a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice?
When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? Of course there is in every vice inevitably some limit beyond which one cannot go. Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but when a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?
Place on one side fifty thousand armed men, and on the other the same number. Let them join in battle, one side fighting to retain its liberty, the other to take it away; to which would you, at a guess, promise victory? Which men do you think would march more gallantly to combat — those who anticipate as a reward for their suffering the maintenance of their freedom or those who cannot expect any other prize for the blows exchanged than the enslavement of others?
"A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke."One side will have before its eyes the blessings of the past and the hope of similar joy in the future; their thoughts will dwell less on the comparatively brief pain of battle than on what they may have to endure forever — they, their children, and all their posterity. The other side has nothing to inspire it with courage except the weak urge of greed, which fades before danger and which can never be so keen, it seems to me, that it will not be dismayed by the least drop of blood from wounds.
Consider the justly famous battles of Miltiades,Athenian general, died 489 BC. Some of his battles — expedition against Scythians; Lemnos; Imbros; Marathon, where Darius the Pemian was defeated. — HK Leonidas,King of Sparta, died at Thermopolae in 480 BC, defending the pass with three hundred loyal Spartans against Xerxes. — HK Themistocles,Athenian statesman and general, died 460 B.C. Some of his battles — expedition against Aegean Isles; victory over Persians under Xerxes at Salamis. — HK still fresh today in recorded history and in the minds of men as if they had occurred but yesterday, battles fought in Greece for the welfare of the Greeks and as an example to the world. What power do you think gave to such a mere handful of men not the strength but the courage to withstand the attack of a fleet so vast that even the seas were burdened, and to defeat the armies of so many nations, armies so immense that their officers alone outnumbered the entire Greek force? What was it but the fact that in those glorious days this struggle represented not so much a fight of Greeks against Persians as a victory of liberty over domination, of freedom over greed?
It amazes us to hear accounts of the valor that liberty arouses in the hearts of those who defend it; but who could believe reports of what goes on every day among the inhabitants of some countries? Who could really believe that one man alone may mistreat a hundred thousand and deprive them of their liberty? Who would credit such a report if he merely heard it, without being present to witness the event? And if this condition occurred only in distant lands and were reported to us, which one among us would not assume the tale to be imagined or invented, and not really true?
Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.
A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom, I should not urge action to this end, although there is nothing a human should hold more dear than the restoration of his own natural right, to change himself from a beast of burden back to a man, so to speak. I do not demand of him so much boldness; let him prefer the doubtful security of living wretchedly to the uncertain hope of living as he pleases.
What then? If in order to have liberty nothing more is needed than to long for it, if only a simple act of the will is necessary, is there any nation in the world that considers a single wish too high a price to pay in order to recover rights which it ought to be ready to redeem at the cost of its blood, rights such that their loss must bring all men of honor to the point of feeling life to be unendurable and death itself a deliverance?
"Liberty, a blessing so great and so desirable that when it is lost all evils follow thereafter, and even the blessings that remain lose taste and savor because of their corruption by servitude."Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy — the more one yields to them, and obeys them — by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.
To achieve the good that they desire, the bold do not fear danger; the intelligent do not refuse to undergo suffering. It is the stupid and cowardly who are neither able to endure hardship nor to vindicate their rights; they stop at merely longing for them and lose through timidity the valor roused by the effort to claim their rights, although the desire to enjoy them still remains as part of their nature. A longing common to both the wise and the foolish, to brave men and to cowards, is this longing for all those things which, when acquired, would make them happy and contented.
Yet one element appears to be lacking. I do not know how it happens that nature fails to place within the hearts of men a burning desire for liberty, a blessing so great and so desirable that when it is lost all evils follow thereafter, and even the blessings that remain lose taste and savor because of their corruption by servitude. Liberty is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist; for surely if they really wanted it, they would receive it. Apparently they refuse this wonderful privilege because it is so easily acquired.
Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives.
All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you.
Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had not cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?
You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them; you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.
[Continue reading.]
[This article is excerpted from The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie, written 1552–53.
This translation by Harry Kurz is based on the manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which may well have originally belonged to Montaigne.
[Chapter 1 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953]
The First World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and of the world. Those who can remember "the good old days" before 1914 inevitably look back to those times with a very definite and justifiable feeling of nostalgia. There was no income tax before 1913, and that levied in the early days after the amendment was adopted was little more than nominal. All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt of around a billion dollars, which could have been paid off in a year without causing even a ripple in national finance. The total federal budget in 1913 was $724,512,000, just about 1 percent of the present astronomical budget.
Ours was a libertarian country in which there was little or no witch-hunting and few of the symptoms and operations of the police state which have been developing here so drastically during the last decade. Not until our intervention in the First World War had there been sufficient invasions of individual liberties to call forth the formation of special groups and organizations to protect our civil rights. The Supreme Court could still be relied on to uphold the Constitution and safeguard the civil liberties of individual citizens.
Libertarianism was also dominant in Western Europe. The Liberal Party governed England from 1905 to 1914. France had risen above the reactionary coup of the Dreyfus affair, had separated church and state, and had seemingly established the Third Republic with reasonable permanence on a democratic and liberal basis. Even Hohenzollern Germany enjoyed the usual civil liberties, had strong constitutional restraints on executive tyranny, and had established a workable system of parliamentary government. Experts on the history of Austria-Hungary have recently been proclaiming that life in the Dual Monarchy after the turn of the century marked the happiest period in the experience of the peoples encompassed therein.
Enlightened citizens of the Western world were then filled with buoyant hope for a bright future for humanity. It was believed that the theory of progress had been thoroughly vindicated by historical events. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, was the prophetic bible of that era.New edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941. People were confident that the amazing developments in technology would soon produce abundance, security, and leisure for the multitude.
In this optimism in regard to the future no item was more evident and potent than the assumption that war was an outmoded nightmare. Not only did idealism and humanity repudiate war but Norman Angell and others were assuring us that war could not be justified, even on the basis of the most sordid material interest.
In our own country, the traditional American foreign policy of benign neutrality and the wise exhortations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay to avoid entangling alliances and to shun foreign quarrels were still accorded respect in the highest councils of state.
Unfortunately, there are relatively few persons today who can recall those happy times. In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded that type of society.New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1949. See especially pp. 86–93.
A significant and illuminating report on this situation came to me recently in a letter from one of the most distinguished social scientists in the country, a resolute revisionist. He wrote,
I am devoting my seminar this quarter to the subject of American foreign policy since 1933. The effect upon a Roosevelt-bred generation is startling, indeed. Even able and mature students react to the elementary facts like children who have just been told that there is (or was) no Santa Claus.
While the First World War headed the United States and the world toward international disaster, the Second World War was an even more calamitous turning point in the history of mankind. It may, indeed, have brought us — and the whole world — into the terminal episode of human experience.
It certainly marked the transition from social optimism and technological rationalism into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of life, in which aggressive international policies and war scares have become the guiding factor, not only in world affairs but also in the domestic, political, and economic strategy of every leading country of the world. The police state has emerged as the dominant political pattern of our times, and military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism.
The manner and extent to which American culture has been impaired and our well-being undermined by our entry into two world wars has been brilliantly and succinctly stated by Professor Mario A. Pei, of Columbia University, in an article on "The America We Lost" in the Saturday Evening Post, May 3, 1952, and has been developed more at length by Caret Garrett in his trenchant book, The People's Pottage.
Perhaps, by the mid-century, all this is now water under the bridge and little can be done about it. But we can surely learn how we got into this unhappy condition of life and society — at least until the police-state system continues its current rapid development sufficiently to obliterate all that remains of integrity and accuracy in historical writing and political reporting.
The readjustment of historical writing to historical facts relative to the background and causes of the First World War — what is popularly known in the historical craft as "revisionism" — was the most important development in historiography during the decade of the 1920s. While those historians at all receptive to the facts admitted that revisionism readily won out in the conflict with the previously accepted wartime lore, many of the traditionalists in the profession remained true to the mythology of the war decade. In any event, the revisionist controversy was the outstanding intellectual adventure in the historical field in the 20th century down to Pearl Harbor.
Revisionism, when applied to the First World War, showed that the actual causes and merits of that conflict were very close to the reverse of the picture presented in the political propaganda and historical writings of the war decade. Revisionism would also produce similar results with respect to the Second World War if it were allowed to develop unimpeded. But a determined effort is being made to stifle or silence revelations which would establish the truth with regard to the causes and issues of the late world conflict.
While the wartime mythology endured for years after 1918, nevertheless leading editors and publishers soon began to crave contributions which set forth the facts with respect to the responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, our entry into the war, and the basic issues involved in this great conflict.
Sidney B. Fay began to publish his revolutionary articles on the background of the First World War in the American Historical Review in July, 1920. My own efforts along the same line began in the New Republic, the Nation, the New York Times Current History Magazine, and the Christian Century in 1924 and 1925. Without exception, the requests for my contributions came from the editors of these periodicals, and these requests were ardent and urgent. I had no difficulty whatever in securing the publication of my Genesis of the World War in 1926, and the publisher thereof subsequently brought forth a veritable library of illuminating revisionist literature.
By 1928, when Fay's Origins of the World WarNew York: The Macmillan Company, 1928. was published, almost everyone except the die-hards and bitter-enders in the historical profession had come to accept revisionism, and even the general public had begun to think straight in the premises.
Quite a different situation faces the rise of any substantial revisionism after the Second World War. The question of war responsibility in relation to 1939 and 1941 is taken for granted as completely and forever settled. It is widely held that there can be no controversy this time. Since it is admitted by all reasonable persons that Hitler was a dangerous neurotic, who, with supreme folly, launched a war when he had everything to gain by peace, it is assumed that this takes care of the European aspects of the war-guilt controversy. With respect to the Far East, this is supposed to be settled with equal finality by asking the question, "Japan attacked us, didn't she?"
About as frequent as either of these ways of settling war responsibility for 1939 or 1941 is the vague but highly dogmatic statement that "we had to fight." This judgment is usually rendered as a sort of ineffable categorical imperative which requires no further explanation. But some who are pressed for an explanation will allege that we had to fight to save the world from domination by Hitler, forgetting General George C. Marshall's report that Hitler, far from having any plan for world domination, did not even have any well-worked-out plan for collaborating with his Axis allies in limited wars, to say nothing of the gigantic task of conquering Russia. Surely, after June 22, 1941, nearly six months before Pearl Harbor, there was no further need to fear any world conquest by Hitler.
The mythology which followed the outbreak of war in 1914 helped to produce the Treaty of Versailles and the Second World War. If world policy today cannot be divorced from the mythology of the 1940s, a third world war is inevitable, and its impact will be many times more horrible and devastating than that of the second. The lessons learned from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials have made it certain that the third world war will be waged with unprecedented savagery.
Vigorous as was the resistance of many, including powerful vested historical interests, to the revisionism of the 1920s, it was as nothing compared to that which has been organized to frustrate and smother the truth relative to the Second World War. History has been the chief intellectual casualty of the Second World War and the cold war which followed.
It may be said, with great restraint, that never since the Middle Ages have there been so many powerful forces organized and alerted against the assertion and acceptance of historical truth as are active today to prevent the facts about the responsibility for the Second World War and its results from being made generally accessible to the American public.
Even the great Rockefeller Foundation frankly admits the subsidizing of historians to anticipate and frustrate the development of any neorevisionism in our time.Annual Report, 1946, pp. 188–89. And the only difference between this foundation and several others is that it has been more candid and forthright about its policies. The Sloan Foundation later supplemented this Rockefeller grant. Charles Austin Beard summarized the implications of such efforts with characteristic vigor:
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations … intend to prevent, if they can, a repetition of what they call in the vernacular "the debunking journalistic campaign following World War I." Translated into precise English, this means that the Foundation and the Council do not want journalists or any other persons to examine too closely and criticize too freely the official propaganda and official statements relative to "our basic aims and activities" during World War II. In short, they hope that, among other things, the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt will escape in the coming years the critical analysis, evaluation and exposition that befell the policies and measures of Woodrow Wilson and the Entente Allies after World War I.Saturday Evening Post, October 4, 1947, p. 172.
As is the case with nearly all book publishers and periodicals, the resources of the great majority of the foundations are available only to scholars and writers who seek to perpetuate wartime legends and oppose revisionism. A good illustration is afforded by my experience with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which helped to subsidize the book by Professors Langer and Gleason. I mentioned this fact in the first edition of my brochure on The Court Historians versus Revisionism. Thereupon I received a courteous letter from Mr. Alfred J. Zurcher, director of the Sloan Foundation, assuring me that the Sloan Foundation wished to be absolutely impartial and to support historical scholarship on both sides of the issue. He wrote in part
About the last thing we wish to do is to check and frustrate any sort of historical scholarship since we believe that the more points of view brought to bear by disciplined scholars upon the war or any other historical event is in the public interest and should be encouraged.In the light of this statement, I decided to take Mr. Zurcher at his word. I had projected and encouraged a study of the foreign policy of President Hoover, which appeared to me a very important and much needed enterprise, since it was during his administration that our foreign policy had last been conducted in behalf of peace and in the true public interest of the United States rather than in behalf of some political party, foreign government, or dubious ideology. One of the most competent of American specialists in diplomatic history had consented to undertake the project, and he was a man not previously identified in any way with revisionist writing.
My request was for exactly one thirtieth of the grant allotted for the Langer-Gleason book. The application was turned down by Mr. Zurcher with this summary statement: "I regret that we are unable to supply the funds which you requested for Professor ——'s study." He even discouraged my suggestion that he discuss the idea in a brief conference with the professor in question.A state of abject terror and intimidation exists among the majority of professional American historians whose views accord with the facts on the question of responsibility for the Second World War. Several leading historians and publicists who have read my brochure on The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout have written me stating that, on the basis of their own personal experience, it is an understatement of the facts. Yet the majority of those historians to whom it has been sent privately have feared even to acknowledge that they have received it or possess it. Only a handful have dared to express approval and encouragement.
Moreover, the gullibility of many "educated" Americans has been as notable as the mendacity of the "educators." In Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, as well as in Fascist Italy, and in China, the tyrannical rulers found it necessary to suppress all opposition thought in order to induce the majority of the people to accept the material fed them by official propaganda. But, in the United States, with almost complete freedom of the press, speech, and information down to the end of 1941, great numbers of Americans followed the official propaganda line with no compulsion whatever.
In many essential features, the United States has moved along into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of intellectual life. But there is one important and depressing difference. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Orwell shows that historians in that regime have to be hired by the government and forced to falsify facts. In this country today, and it is also true of most other nations, many professional historians gladly falsify history quite voluntarily.
This article is excerpted from chapter 1 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 1953.
[This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Conspiracy Theories, History, and the State."]
If you spend much time on the Internet, you probably already know who Cass Sunstein is: he's a former professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago, where, during the 1990s, he met and became close friends with a fellow member of the law-school faculty named Barack Obama. Currently, Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard, but he's taking a leave of absence from that position so he can "serve" as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, according to Wikipedia, "develops and oversees the implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information technology, information policy, privacy, and statistical policy."
If you spend much time on the Internet, you probably also know why Sunstein has been receiving a lot of attention from the blogosphere lately: it's because of a research paper he coauthored with Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule for publication in January 2008. The paper is on "Conspiracy Theories." A "conspiracy theory," according to Sunstein and Vermeule, is "an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."
They give a few examples:
the view that the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; that doctors deliberately manufactured the AIDS virus; that the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800 was caused by a U.S. military missile; that the theory of global warming is a deliberate fraud; that the Trilateral Commission is responsible for important movements of the international economy; that Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by federal agents; that the plane crash that killed Democrat Paul Wellstone was engineered by Republican politicians; that the moon landing was staged and never actually occurred.
According to Sunstein and Vermeule, some conspiracy theories are harmless. They write, for example, that we should "consider the false conspiracy theory, held by many of the younger members of our society, that a secret group of elves, working in a remote location under the leadership of the mysterious 'Santa Claus,' make and distribute presents on Christmas Eve." They suggest that we should "consider too the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy." The thing is, they point out, that "if children believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, there is no problem for government to solve; and the belief that the government covered up the landing of space aliens in Roswell does not seem to be causing discernible harm [either], with the possible exception of bad television shows."
But not all conspiracy theories are harmless, say Sunstein and Vermeule. Some conspiracy theories do great harm. They create a "problem for government to solve." For example, a conspiracy theory that portrayed the federal government of the United States as a "morally repellent organization" could have such "pernicious effects" as "inducing unjustifiably widespread public skepticism about the government's assertions, or … dampening public mobilization and participation in government-led efforts, or both."
According to Sunstein and Vermeule, there are conspiracy theories that not only "undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they create or fuel violence." In brief, "some conspiracy theories create serious risks.… If government can dispel such theories, it should do so."
What specifically do Sunstein and Vermeule believe government should do? It should begin, they say, by recognizing that "those who hold conspiracy theories do so because of what they read and hear." And they read and hear talk about conspiracy theories because there are people out there promoting such theories. Sunstein and Vermeule write that many conspiracy theories "are initiated and spread, quite intentionally, by conspiracy entrepreneurs who profit directly or indirectly from propagating their theories."
The specific motives of these "conspiracy entrepreneurs" vary somewhat, according to Sunstein and Vermeule. "Some conspiracy entrepreneurs are entirely sincere," they write. "Others are interested in money or power, or in achieving some general social goal." In any case, they argue, it is these "conspiracy entrepreneurs" that need to be targeted, undermined, and, if necessary, silenced.
There are more than a few problems here, already, from a libertarian perspective. But one of them especially stuck out to me at this point in Sunstein and Vermeule's argument. Aren't at least some so-called "conspiracy theories" the simple historical truth?
$15 $12
"Aren't at least some so-called 'conspiracy theories' the simple historical truth?"Sunstein and Vermeule acknowledge that. They write that "some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true." But, they assert reassuringly, "our focus throughout is on false conspiracy theories, not true ones. Our ultimate goal is to explore how public officials might undermine such theories, and as a general rule, true accounts should not be undermined."
"As a general rule, true accounts should not be undermined." But that's only as a general rule.
There are probably some cases in which true accounts should be undermined. Like, maybe when they begin "inducing … widespread public skepticism about the government's assertions, or … dampening public mobilization and participation in government-led efforts, or both." Whenever they begin causing problems for the powers that be. Even if we do as Sunstein and Vermeule say they do, and "assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so," this is a troubling thought.
You see, we don't know going in which conspiracy theories are true and which aren't. In many cases, we can't know; we simply don't have enough information.
Ordinarily, we find out that a particular conspiracy theory is true because historians — whether the historians in a hurry whom we usually call journalists or the more painstaking historians who write books and teach at colleges and universities — have come along and combed over the ground and the documents and considered the testimony of all the witnesses they could find and reached the relevant conclusions. Whether a conspiracy theory is true is usually a matter for history to decide.
Government officials are not, by and large, happy with this state of affairs, because history is the natural enemy of the state. Sustained reflection after the fact on exactly what the state did and why inevitably has the tendency to undermine any confidence one might have had in the state's good motives and desire to promote "social welfare." It tends, inevitably, to "induce widespread public skepticism about the government's assertions" and to "dampen public mobilization and participation in government-led efforts, or both."
The state benefits from the shortage of information that the speed of events imposes on people. It can't avoid history entirely, of course — people will read and write about such stuff, no matter what the state says or does — but the state can do what it can to see to it that whatever history does get written tells the story the state wants told.
Albert Jay Nock argued that studying the classics as an undergraduate was far and away the best educational program a young person could adopt, because
the literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity; every department, I think, except one — music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage-point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit's operations.
Something similar can be said about studying the classics of the libertarian tradition, though the overwhelming majority of the works in that tradition are no more than a few hundred years old. Nonetheless, the mind that has attentively canvassed the record of libertarian and protolibertarian writing during those few hundred years will be equipped by that experience to view any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of a long and thoughtful perspective. The mind familiar with the classics of the libertarian tradition is the mind best prepared to comprehend any contemporary political development.
In thinking about the Sunstein affair, for example, we would do well to reflect on what Murray Rothbard told us in one of the great libertarian classics to come from his pen: his great essay "The Anatomy of the State," first published in 1965 in Robert LeFevre's Rampart Journal.
"Once a State has been established," Rothbard wrote,
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"The mind familiar with the classics of the libertarian tradition is the mind best prepared to comprehend any contemporary political development."the problem of the ruling group or "caste" is how to maintain their rule. While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State — the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) — must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.
Rothbard continues, "Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests." However,
this … secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for [the] age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.
One particularly "venerable" example of this alliance between the state and the intellectuals is the existence of what Rothbard calls "official or 'court' historian[s], dedicated to purveying the rulers' views of their own and their predecessors' actions."
It is important, Rothbard reminds us,
for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any "conspiracy theory of history"; for a search for "conspiracies" means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane "social forces," or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ("We Are All Murderers," proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on "conspiracy theories" means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the "general welfare" reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda.
Now and then, of course, a state fails to take adequate precautions, fails to plan far enough in advance — fails to conspire effectively enough. This happened in the United States after World War I. The American state had its court historians in place. It had had them in place for several years already, but it failed to anticipate a revisionist movement that took hold in the 1920s among some of the most informed and articulate American historians, most notably Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Beard.
As Barnes recalled the events of those years thirty years later, in the early 1950s, "The readjustment of historical writing to historical facts relative to the background and causes of the first World War — what is popularly known in the historical craft as 'Revisionism' — was the most important development in historiography during the decade of the 1920s." In fact, Barnes wrote, "the revisionist controversy was the outstanding intellectual adventure in the historical field in the twentieth century down to Pearl Harbor."
According to Barnes, "revisionism, when applied to the first World War, showed that the actual causes and merits of that conflict were very close to the reverse of the picture presented in the political propaganda and historical writings of the war decade." And by sometime in the 1930s, "those historians at all receptive to the facts admitted that Revisionism readily won out in the conflict with the previously accepted wartime lore."
In fact, according to Barnes, "by 1928 … almost everyone except the die-hards and bitter-enders in the historical profession had come to accept Revisionism, and even the general public had begun to think straight in the premises." In fact, the revisionists won over so sizable a segment of the general public to its point of view on the war that the Roosevelt administration had to resort to desperate measures to win popular approval for its plans to enter World War II on the side of the Allies.
But once that approval was won and the war was fought and over with, the American state turned out to have learned something from its intellectual adventures of the 1920s and '30s. As Barnes wrote in 1953, "Revisionism would … produce similar results with respect to the second World War if it were allowed to develop unimpeded. But a determined effort is being made to stifle or silence revelations which would establish the truth with regard to the causes and issues of the late world conflict."
This "determined effort," according to Barnes, included systematic denial of access to official documents about the war. "There is a determined effort," he wrote, "to block those suspected of seeking the truth from having access to official documents, other than those which have become public property.… Many of these important sources are … completely sealed off from any historian who is suspected of desiring to ascertain the full and unbiased truth with respect to American foreign policy since 1933."
Yet, Barnes argued, "if the complete official documents would support the generally accepted views with respect to the causes and issues of the war, there would seem to be no reasonable objection to allowing any reputable historian to have free and unimpeded access to such materials."
"The state benefits from the shortage of information that the speed of events imposes on people."To learn more about revisionism, see my book Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism, available as a free download in pdf format, or for sale as a paperback book, on this website.[1]
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule would beg to differ with Barnes, I'm sure, about making official documents available to revisionist historians. After all, revisionist accounts of the war — conspiracy theories about the US role in the war — might portray the federal government of the United States as a "morally repellent organization." Such theories might have such "pernicious effects" as "inducing widespread public skepticism about the government's assertions, or … dampening public mobilization and participation in government-led efforts, or both."
Such theories might "undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they [might] create or fuel violence." What would Sunstein and Vermeule have the federal government do? Well, they write, "the most direct response to a dangerous conspiracy theory is censorship.… We could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable. [However,] censorship of speech is notoriously difficult."
It's good that it is so difficult. If it weren't, it might be resorted to more frequently by men like Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — men who don't seem to mind violating their fellow human beings' natural rights when such an important issue as public skepticism about the government is at stake.
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This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Conspiracy Theories, History, and the State."
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Notes[1] A Kindle Edition is also available at Amazon.com. – Ed
[This article is excerpted from Society Without Coercion.]
The belief that government is necessary to ensure social order is a pure superstition, based upon a psycho-epistemological process different in no important respect from the belief in goblins and witches....
At the outset, let it be made clear that government is nothing but men acting in concert. The morality and value of government, like any other association of men, will be no greater and no less than the morality and value of the men comprising it. Since government is nothing but men, its inherent authority to act is in no way greater or different than the authority to act of individuals in isolation.
If it is moral for government policemen to arrest suspect criminals, it is also moral for "private policemen" to do so. If it is moral for government to try and imprison men, then it is also moral for nongovernmental corporations to do so. Government has no magic powers or authority not possessed by private individuals. Let he who asserts that government may do that which the individual may not assume the onus of proof and demonstrate his contention.
The basic reason why a social order could, and would, arise in the absence of governments (as they are known today) is the fact that man has an objective need for social order and protection from initiatory force. This objective need would create human associations producing order in society. The morality and permanence of these associations will be determined by the morality and rationality of the men creating and working in them, as is the case for any social institution.
Perhaps the strongest attack on "anarchism" — certainly the most vitriolic — was made by Ayn Rand. In her article on "The Nature of Government," she states the following:
A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called "competing governments." Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists — who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business — the proponents of "competing governments" take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to "shop" and to patronize whatever government he chooses.
Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.
One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms "competition" and "government." Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.
Once one gets past Miss Rand's typically vitriolic rhetoric (which only indicates that Miss Rand is quite hostile to what she mislabels as "competing governments") one finds that she has essentially one argument. Miss Rand asserts that what is properly designated as "competing agencies of retaliatory force" or a free market of justice would not work, because the competing agencies would end up protecting criminals and shooting it out with each other. One can only term this a straw man argument.
The situation which Miss Rand "describes" is patently absurd. If competing agencies of retaliatory force protected criminals, they would not be competing agencies of retaliatory force at all. Rather, they would be criminal gangs, plain and simple.
Further, it would be sheer insanity for individuals "subscribing" to competing criminal gangs to live on the same "turf." In this respect, Miss Rand is correct. However, what I and every other advocate of a society without coercion are advocating are not "competing governments" (a misnomer) or "competing criminal gangs" (an ethical monstrosity), but "competing agencies of retaliatory force," which Miss Rand has in fact not dealt with at all.
In the situation described above, in which neighbors subscribed to competing police departments, what is certain (if they were in fact police departments operating on the basis of objective law, rather than criminal gangs operating on the basis of mob rule — which is what Miss Rand described) is that Police B would accept the validity of Police A, or in fact the validity of any reputable police department, and cooperate with them in the arrest of Mr. Jones. Police B certainly would not protect Mr. Jones from justice if there was objective evidence that Mr. Jones had committed a crime, nor would Police A proceed to attempt to arrest Mr. Jones unless there were such evidence. In this manner, objective law would eliminate coercive "shootouts."
Once competing police departments begin to function, standard operating procedures would be created to deal with such cases. At least two possible procedures come to mind: either by stipulation, the police department to which a man subscribed would be the only one which could incarcerate him; or, by stipulation, the police department where the complaint was filed would incarcerate him.
In the extreme, there would be little motivation for policemen to put their lives on the line for a suspected thief, and if competing police departments operated as Miss Rand falsely pictures, then they would quickly go out of business due to the attrition rate of policemen killed in the "line of duty."
This is only one of the flaws of Miss Rand's argument. Other problems include her failure to explain exactly how government can morally outlaw competing agencies of retaliatory force, or what it is that prevents the state police from shooting it out with the county police in similar situations. Clearly, both Miss Rand's premises and logic are in error in this case.
This article is excerpted from chapter 2 of Society Without Coercion: A New Concept of Social Organization (Society for Rational Individualism, 1969).
[Excerpted from chapter 2 of Society Without Coercion, 1969]
Government is, by definition, a "social monopoly of force." The greatest instrumentalities of force which have ever been assembled, the police forces and armies of the world, are at the disposal of governments. With these great agencies of force at their disposal, the potential ability of governments to violate the rights of the individual is accordingly great and indeed it is easy to see that they have done so.
Whenever one thinks of the worst injustices in history — massive wastes, confiscatory taxes, purposeless wars, great depressions, slavery, concentration camps, and genocide — one inevitably finds that such injustices were either a direct or an indirect result of governmental action. At the same time, governments usually meet valid and basic needs of human society (although almost never in a valid way). Thus, governments also provide water power and roadways, prevent fraudulent business practices, combat air pollution, quell riots, protect patents and copyrights, capture criminals, and defend their citizens against foreign invaders.
Yet even in doing so, governments also almost invariably violate the rights of their citizens. What is it, then, that differentiates the proper from the improper actions of governments?
What determines what is proper and improper for governments to do are, in essence, the same principles which differentiate the proper from the improper actions of the individual. Despite the lofty pretensions of most governments, the fact remains that they, like any other group of men, are nothing more than a collection of individuals. The "rights of a government," like the rights of any other association of men, can be morally no different than the rights of the men who comprise it. All that which is immoral for men acting individually is equally immoral for men acting in association. There is nothing a government can morally do, which individuals by themselves cannot morally do. The group is ethically no different from the individual.
Consider the following situation: During the course of a day, one man approaches a second and demands of him that he surrender a portion of his income, on the grounds that the claimant needs the money more and knows better how to spend it than does the second man. If the second man refuses to surrender his money, then the first man attempts to take it by force. If the second man continues to protest and resist, the first man then shoots him.
Now who would call the first man anything other than a thief and murderer? Who could regard the second man as anything but an innocent victim? The first man is clearly immoral and the second is clearly blameless.
Now let us suppose that instead of being one man, the would-be thief is a part of a larger gang, which calls itself "the Mafia." Now if the Mafia proceeds to rob the second man as did the lone criminal, would their actions be any the less criminal simply because there were five or ten of them instead of only one? The only rational answer is that their actions would not be any different, that robbery is robbery and murder is murder whether it is being committed by a single thief by himself, or by a thousand acting in concert.
Finally, let us say that our original thief is a member of a very large gang, that he in fact claims to be a representative of a group called "the Internal Revenue Service" and that this group is further empowered to seize money and property by an even larger group which is called "the government." Instead of calling himself a criminal, our thief calls himself a "tax collector," and instead of saying that he is taking money and property for himself, he claims that he is collecting it for "the poor."
Now how, I ask, is this "tax collector" any different from the lone criminal or a member of the Mafia? Like the criminal, the so-called "tax collector" is taking money or property which does not belong to him, for a purpose which his victim does not choose to voluntarily support (for if the victim voluntarily supported the tax collector's cause, there would be no need for him to forcibly seize his money or property). Like the criminal, the tax collector will seize the man's property if he does not surrender it to him, and like the criminal the tax collector (or his agents) will kill the man if he attempts to protect his own property.
It is irrelevant whether a man steals by his own authority or with the sanction of a million others, whether he takes money for himself or for "the poor," or for any other group which did not earn it. Theft consists of taking a man's property against his will, regardless of the beneficiary.
"The 'rights of a government,' like the rights of any other association of men, can be morally no different than the rights of the men who comprise it."If the individual has an inalienable right to his own life, liberty, and property, then morally his life and property are his own to do with as he pleases. It is just as immoral for a government to attempt to tax his earnings, regulate his business, or draft his sons as it would be for some isolated individual acting on his own authority to do so. The association of men into a group called "government" does not free them from morality or sanction actions otherwise immoral.
It is also irrelevant whether the tax collector's victim has some of his property returned to him in the form of road usage, postal services, police protection, etc., or not. Since it is government, rather than the individual, which is deciding what is to be taken and what is to be given, the individual's control of his own property has still been lost. The return of the tax collector's victim's property in the form of certain governmental services is not trade but theft.
In trade, exchange is conducted by the mutual consent of the individuals who wish to participate in it, according to their own terms. In taxation the individual's property is taken from him without his consent and services may be returned to him according to the government's decrees. For this reason, the only thing which one can call taxation, the foundation of modern governments, is theft.
Now that it has been made clear that the same moral law applies to governments as applies to individuals, we can begin to enumerate the actions of governments which are clearly immoral.
Firstly, any actions committed by governments which force the individual to act are immoral since they are violations of his human right to life and liberty. Thus, in modern times, forcible participation in social security or medical care programs, conscription, forced housing and public accommodations laws, and compulsory attendance at public schools is immoral.
Secondly, any interference with actions conducted by the mutual consent of the individuals involved is immoral. Thus laws prohibiting certain forms of sexual intercourse, laws against drugs, and anti-abortion laws are immoral.
Thirdly, any interference with free trade is a violation of man's right to property. Thus antitrust laws, censorship, gun registration, and minimum-wage laws are immoral.
Finally, the deprivation of the individual of any value, physical or mental, is immoral. Thus taxation, welfare programs, rent controls, the regulation of currency, zoning, subsidies and tariffs are immoral.
To put it on a more personal level, whatever else it should do, a government can not morally tell a middle class office worker that he must pay 20 percent of his income to feed unwed mothers and ship computers to the Soviet Union, send his children to a school that will teach them that their father is a member of a corrupt and sinful generation, contribute to socialized medicine, and censor his TV set.
The government of a moral society could not tell a poor Negro willing to work for less than $1.60 an hour that he cannot work for that amount, even though his employer cannot afford to pay him more; tax his income to build space ships and to pay farmers not to work; force his children to fight in Vietnam; or destroy his home in the name of "urban renewal."
"It is irrelevant whether a man steals by his own authority or with the sanction of a million others, whether he takes money for himself or for 'the poor,' or for any other group which did not earn it."Government also cannot properly tell a corporation president that he must force his employees to join a union, cannot build a new factory without government approval, must pay 52 percent of his profits to subsidize Appalachia and build dams in the Tennessee Valley, cannot merge with GM, and cannot charge less than his competitors.
In general, government can not morally coerce, threaten, harass, intimidate, investigate, conscript, regulate, censor, compete with, tax, subsidize, insure, license, inspect, indoctrinate, spy on, or murder its citizens. In other words, whatever else it does, the government of a free society does not itself act as a criminal in the name of its citizens, or try to judge and live their lives for them.
What then are the functions left which government might conceivably engage in? The answer is those which deal exclusively with the use of retaliatory force, for government to essentially act as a "policeman of man's rights." This is exactly the limitation of functions which philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand proposes. Miss Rand defines what she considers to be a proper government as "an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area," in essence, a social monopoly of retaliatory force. This is what we will call a limited government.
It would seem that the limited government advocated by Miss Rand would restrict its functions to primarily those now conducted by the Judicial Division of the US government. Specifically, the primary functions of a limited government (and its associate implementary agencies) would be as follows:
the passage of laws defining and dealing with the use of initiatory and retaliatory force (the legislative branch)
the administration of such laws (the executive branch)
the registration of patents and copyrights (the Bureau of Patents and Copyrights)
the enforcement of contracts (Contract Enforcement Division of the Justice Department)
the prosecution of fraud (Anti-fraud Division of the Justice Department)
the investigation of crimes and the arrest of criminals (police forces)
the prosecution of criminals and the adjudication of the differences between men (court system)
the punishment of criminals (penal system)
the protection of the society from foreign invaders (armed forces)
We will now consider the morality of such a limited government.
The Morality of Limited GovernmentAlthough such a limited government as described above would be a tremendous advancement over all of the political forms which man has ever known, there are still a number of questions which arise concerning its morality.
First there is the question of how its national boundaries are properly determined and what makes its laws (e.g., its constitution and procedural rules) binding upon a society.
Second, there is the question of whether a limited government can require men to patronize its services or participate in its activities.
Lastly, there is the question of how a limited government can morally prevent competition with its own functions — i.e., how can it maintain its "social monopoly of retaliatory force?"
Historically, national boundaries have been finally decided by force — the power of a ruling elite to maintain dominion over a given territory, against domestic and foreign challenges to their authority, by virtue of force of arms. If there was a dispute over which national group controlled a given piece of land, differences were settled by going to war, victor take all. Similarly, national laws were historically decided by force — the power of the ruling elite over its citizens. The state and its government then emerged, in general, not as the product of rational thought and voluntary agreements, but primarily as a consequence of simple brute force.
The United States is only a partial exception to this rule. It is true that America originally offered groups, such as the Puritans or the Germans or the Catholics, if not individual members of such groups, a place where they could live according to their own beliefs. However, throughout its history, in the Indian Wars, in the Mexican-American War, in governmental sanctioning of slavery, and in hundreds of other instances, the boundaries and the laws of the United States have been based upon force. The most that can be said for the United States is that it was, in the 19th century, the freest country of the modern world, and is still, in the 20th century, among the freest.
If one recognizes that the rights of the individual, including his property rights, are inalienable, then the only way in which social boundaries could be properly formed is by individual property owners voluntarily coming together to form a community whose boundaries are defined by their holdings. If within the perimeter formed by such holdings there existed an individual who did not wish to be a party to the community or consider himself a member of its "state," then he morally would be free to do so; and the external community would not have a right to force him to pledge allegiance to their national territory, flag, or goals.
"The most that can be said for the United States is that it was, in the 19th century, the freest country of the modern world, and is still, in the 20th century, among the freest."In a free society, each individual is in fact an autonomous state in himself, free to associate or not with a larger group. In a free society, cooperation between men, and hence the geographical boundaries of social groups, is a product of voluntary association.
Applying the social principle of voluntarism to an existent nation-state such as the United States, we find that its present political boundaries are essentially the arbitrary product of the coercive organization of the state, rather than the product of a voluntary association of men. Consequently, there is no reason to consider present US boundaries as either necessary, or as necessarily proper and just.
In addition to having a right to associate himself with a larger group, in a free society any individual would also have the right to dissociate himself from a formal society at any time (so long as he did not in the process violate a prior agreement). At no time can it be assumed that simply because a present political boundary exists, men are morally obligated to respect it. It may be impractical and irrational not to respect existent political boundaries; but there is nothing sacred about them, especially not today when virtually all societies are coercive.
Similarly, there is nothing sacrosanct about the laws of today's societies. As we have already seen, most of the activities of the government of the United States are clearly immoral and in violation of the rights of the individual. Since the individual always has the right to retaliate against those who initiate force against him, there is no obligation on the part of the individual to obey most existent laws. Indeed, since the draft, censorship and a host of other laws threaten the very physical and intellectual existence of the individual, draft evasion, underground presses, and a host of other illegal acts are thoroughly moral and proper.Whether they are to the individual's rational self-interest is another question, the answer to which depends upon many specific situational factors, such as the probability that the individual will be penalized for engaging in them or that his later success will be jeopardized by such acts.
There is simply no obligation on the part of the individual to obey laws simply because the laws exist. If the individual's rights are violated by laws, he is morally justified in regarding the unjust laws as a criminal invasion of his privacy and in retaliating accordingly.
There is, however, one type of law which is morally binding on all men — objective law. An objective law is one which is based on the objective facts of reality and on principles derived from those facts. In general, objective social laws are those which prohibit the initiation of force and protect the rights of men. Laws against theft, rape, embezzlement, arson, larceny, assault, fraud, and murder are examples of objective social laws.
The individual is bound to obey objective social laws in the same way in which he is bound to obey objective physical laws. Both are statements of facts of reality whose attempted evasion will be to the detriment of the individual. Just as an individual risks physical destruction when he tries to evade the law of gravity by attempting to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping his arms, so an individual risks psychological destruction by attempting to build a fortune on stolen money.
Both the would-be flier and the would-be "robber baron" are attempting to defy objective conditions of their environment. This can only result in the attainment of the opposite of what they seek. Thus, the would-be flyer falls to the ground rather than rises in the air, and the would-be entrepreneur finds that his property mocks him rather than gives him happiness.
"In a free society, each individual is in fact an autonomous state in himself, free to associate or not with a larger group. In a free society, cooperation between men, and hence the geographical boundaries of social groups, is a product of voluntary association."If the "constitution" of a society consists of a statement of objective law which prohibits the initiation of force, then it is objectively valid and morally binding on men — all men, in fact, and not just the men of the particular society for which it was written. However, if the constitution of any society attempts to do more — for example, to prescribe political forms for the society, such as elections, and a division of powers, then that constitution is not binding upon men in those aspects.
The reason that a constitution is not binding upon men in those respects should be obvious. How for example, can some group of men, declaring themselves to be the "representatives of the people" require that men vote every four years, or indeed at all? What principle of objective justice requires men to pledge their allegiance to the national political structure simply because they were born in a land where the structure exists?
This leads us to the second question about the morality of a limited government: to what extent, if any, can such a government require men to participate in its activities? Remember first, that a free society is a voluntary association of men, according to their own terms, for their own ends. Thus a free society cannot compel men to vote in its elections, register their inventions with its bureau of patents and copyrights, or make them patronize its courts (unless they have committed a crime). A free society can only prohibit initiatory force.
In essence, a free society is one in which participation is also free. If an individual wishes to live in the territory of a given society, without participating in its institutions and programs, that is his right. So long as he respects the rights of others, he is totally free to do as he pleases. So long as he violates none of his past agreements, his future choices are his to make.
Finally, we come to the crucial question of how a limited government can morally prevent competition with its own functions — i.e., how can it maintain its "social monopoly of retaliatory force?" Let us first consider this issue in terms of a specific case. What happens if, for example, a group of men living within a "limited government" United States of the future decide that the state's police force is inefficient and that they could do a better job themselves. They then proceed to create their own "agency of retaliatory force" by hiring detectives and guards, and advertizing their services on TV and in the newspapers.
Let us assume that they proceed unhampered by government for awhile and build up a sizable business through their competency. After a few months this private police force is serving thousands of citizens and is so competent at their task that they make fewer false arrests, catch more criminals, prevent more crimes, and charge less proportionately for their services than does the state police force.
Eventually, the state of course notices this "private defense company." What are they to do now? The state has two basic alternatives: it can either leave the new free market defense company alone to prosper or fail, as dictated by its future actions, or it can decree that the defense company has usurped a rightful function of the state and order it to cease operations under penalty of fine, imprisonment, or death of its managers and employees.
Now if the state does the former, if the state adopts an attitude of laissez-faire toward the defense company, then the state's monopoly of force will have been broken, and it will no longer be a government at all in the sense of a "social monopoly of retaliatory force." However, if the state does the latter, if it attempts to intimidate or to physically destroy the new defense company, it has then initiated force against innocent victims (persons who have not initiated force themselves).
"Competing agencies of retaliatory force are practical because they are moral; they are not 'immoral' because they are 'impractical'."It does no good to assert that the state's action is moral since somewhere along the line the private defense company might have violated someone's rights through an error on the part of one of its policemen. The state also makes such mistakes, yet the proponents of limited government do not advocate its dissolution for this reason. If policemen of a free market defense company err, they should be punished for their error, as should the policemen of a state police force. But unless that error is a matter of company policy, then the managers and the corporation itself cannot be morally prevented from doing future business by the state. In general, if a free market agency of retaliatory force obeys objective social laws, acts as a policeman of man's rights, and gets its customers through their voluntary consent, it has just as much right to exist as do the agencies of retaliatory force of the nominal state.
In short, the state has no moral right to prevent competitive agencies of retaliatory force from existing. In a free society, men are at liberty to form those agencies of retaliatory force which they wish to form in order to protect their rights. The form, number, and relationship between such agencies in any given geographical area can be variable. There may be one or many such agencies in any given area, and they may be functionally distinct or operationally integrated. What their form and number will be is for the free market to decide, which means it is for the voluntary judgment of each individual who participates in the market to decide. If the state intervenes, if it tells men that they cannot form such agencies under penalty of fine, imprisonment, or death, then the state is violating the rights of men to associate freely, and has in fact assumed the status of a coercive monopoly.
In a truly free society there would then be nothing to prevent the formation of competing agencies of retaliatory force, nor would there be anything to fear from them so long as they operated on the basis of objective law. It is true that it is possible for such competing agencies of retaliatory force to violate the rights of the individual or to fight among themselves (as Miss Rand points out). However, it is not true that such possibilities are probable, or that the existence of such possibilities implies that competing agencies of retaliatory force are inherently immoral. The moral determines the practical, not vice-versa.
The concept of "practicality" only has meaning in relationship to specific ends. Since morality is "a code of values to guide man's choices and actions — the choices and actions which determine the purpose and the course of his life," it is morality which enables man to select his ends; and because ends determine means, the moral determines the practical. Q.E.D.
Competing agencies of retaliatory force are practical because they are moral; they are not "immoral" because they are "impractical." Moreover, it is also possible for government to violate the rights of the individual, and in fact every government in history has done so on an incredibly vast scale. The gas chambers of Nazi Germany, and the rolls of Vietnamese dead of welfare-statist America are a mute and tragic testimony to the human destruction wrought by governments.
There is no such evidence that competing defense agencies would wreak similar carnage. Governments also fight among themselves, as R.A. Childs points out, but when they do, what occurs is not termed a battle, but a war; and the victims are numbered in the millions rather than the hundreds.
There is nothing innately necessary or moral about a limited government. What defines the morality and practicality of any organization of retaliatory force in a free society is not whether its agencies are one or many, but whether they are just and objective. A "social monopoly of retaliatory force" whose existence depends upon the initiation of force is worse than a contradiction in terms — it is an epistemological absurdity. Since a "limited government" cannot, by definition be limited to dealing solely in retaliatory force, we necessarily conclude that limited government is inherently immoral and must be rejected by any advocate of human freedom and justice in favor of competing agencies of retaliatory force.
Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Froma Harrop is as establishmentarian as they come, and her post-Christmas-Day-terrorist-bombing-attempt column does nothing to alleviate this impression. The title? "To Be Safe Flying, We'd Happily Perform This Strip Tease."That failed attempt, you see, did not simply exhilarate those on the left and right, who see it as reason to justify further expansions of state power. In Harrop's case, it also brings out her inner exhibitionist.
To Harrop, the "undie" bomber's near success at blowing a hole in the side of an international flight underscores the need for whole-body imaging as a primary screening technique at airports. Regarding these techniques, a Utah congressman said last spring, "You don't have to look at my wife and 8-year-old daughter naked to secure an airplane."
"As matter of fact, you do," counters Harrop. "The very technology that makes [US Rep. Jason] Chaffetz so indignant might have detected the bag of powerful explosives sewn into alleged terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear."
Can we at least emphasize the word "might" in the sentence above? After all, it makes her point somewhat-less absolute. There are probably a myriad of things that could have been done to thwart doe-eyed Nigerians who would otherwise sneak hazards on international, Detroit-bound flights. Firing those who treat terrorist watch lists with less significance than grocery lists might help. Or how about rechampioning the long-lost freedom of association, which would have given private firms like Northwest Airlines the incentive to reject passengers on the basis of whatever metric they deem appropriate?
There are deeper issues that deal with the heart of this matter, but Harrop, in her crusade for forced virtual disrobing, doesn't want to discuss them. One question is whether the government even has the ability to provide security. One no longer needs to invoke the murder rate that exists in any major American city to prove this point. The events of 9/11 suggest as much, as do more recent events such as November's shooting in Fort Hood and last month's kidnappings in Jacksonville, North Carolina, where the federal footprint is quite deep.
Then there is the question of why a well-educated young man, a product of Nigeria's upper class, would be willing to off himself in such a scheme. This does not exactly conform to the Marxist playbook, which argues that only the poor and desperate engage in such actions as part of their membership in the reserve army of the unemployed. Is it possible that representatives of all social classes in those third-world countries we bomb fight back in various ways, including, when necessary, the use of underwear bombs?
Nonetheless, as the shoe bomber's failed attempt to crash an international flight in 2001 means that today we trudge sock-footed through security checkpoints in order to fly in this free country, so does the undie-bomber's failed attempt mean that people like Harrop will sound credible telling us that we need to take off more — much more — in the name of security. She sounds giddy about it, pointing out that the brave new world grants no rights to fathers to protect the modesty of eight-year-old daughters.
The total state claims the right to see you naked. A freer people would demand an end to such nonsense and the policies that perpetuate it.
Harrop should keep her yearnings for strip tease to herself. But one thanks her for providing a teachable moment: Her perception of an overwhelming threat of underwear bombers brings to mind a short passage from Ludwig von Mises's Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Mises wrote in 1944,
The advocates of totalitarian control call the attitudes of their opponents negativism. They pretend that while they themselves are demanding the improvement of unsatisfactory conditions, the others are intent upon letting the evils endure. This is to judge all social questions from the viewpoint of narrow-minded bureaucrats. Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures, whereas everything else is passivity and quietism.I would add that only to the bureaucratic mind would the ideas of Froma Harrop make sense. The next decade will reveal the extent to which the United States has become a nation of bureaucrats.
Happy New Year.
Mises's Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War was first published in 1944 when 57 nations were locked in a total war that slew more than 15 million fighting men and countless women and children. It offers an ideological explanation of the international conflicts that caused both World Wars and continue to breed wars the world over.
Professor Mises illustrates his case with a review of the fall of Germany, from the collapse of classical liberalism to the rise of nationalism and socialism. But Germany merely constitutes an early example of the things to come — all of Western civilization is at stake.
Durable peace, Mises concludes, is only possible under perfect capitalism and laissez-faire government, a world of unhampered markets, free mobility of capital and labor, and equal treatment of everyone under one law. Government interference with business necessarily aims at autarky. But protectionism and autarky mean discrimination against foreign labor and capital and thus create international conflict.
The very ideas that breed bitter domestic conflict between classes and races also generate international conflict and war. "Progressives" at home and abroad aim at equality of income. But their own policies result in a perpetuation of the inequalities between classes and nations.
In Professor Mises's own words:
The same considerations which push the masses within a country toward a policy of income equality drive the peoples of the comparatively overpopulated countries into an aggressive policy toward the comparatively under populated countries. They are not prepared to bear their relative poverty for all time to come simply because their ancestors were not keen enough to appropriate areas better endowed by nature.
What the "progressives" assert with regard to domestic affairs — that traditional ideas of liberty are only a fraud as far as the poor are concerned, and that true liberty means equality of income, the spokesmen of the "have not" nations declare with regard to international relations.
At home and abroad they style themselves revolutionaries fighting for equal shares and proclaiming the right to take them by force if necessary. This is why our age is marked by perpetual conflict.
According to Professor Mises,
Government control of business engenders conflicts for which no peaceful solution can be found. It was easy to prevent unarmed men and commodities from crossing the borders; it is much more difficult to prevent armies from trying it. The socialists and other etatists were able to disregard or to silence the warning voices of the economists. They could not disregard or silence the roar of cannon and the detonation of bombs.
All the oratory of the advocates of government omnipotence cannot annul the fact that there is but one system that makes for durable peace: a free market economy. Government control leads to economic nationalism and thus results in conflict.
This review originally appeared in the Freeman, Vol. 20 (1970), pp. 440–442.
An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available for download.
[Originally published as "Song that's driving teachers up the wall" in Libertarian Review, Vol. 9, No. 9 (September 1980), pp. 42–43.]
The British Band, Pink Floyd's song, "Another Brick in the Wall" has been banned in South Africa, ignored by some radio stations in the United States, and attacked by schoolteachers all over the globe.
Yet the song has become the world's most popular rock record of 1980.
"Another Brick in the Wall," sung as an eerie chant by a children's chorus that backs up the band, is the centerpiece of a gloomy concept album, "The Wall," in which Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters charges that Western society uses its schools and other public institutions to build an impenetrable wall of destructive social conditioning around the individual.
While the song is not the first example of the antieducation theme in popular music, it comes at a time when increasing numbers of students are questioning the value of their education. Thus, young people are responding to the song with uncommon — and unsettling — enthusiasm.
In May [1980], the South African government banned the song — and the album — "because "Another Brick" had become the anthem of a national strike of more than 10,000 "coloured" (mixed) students and their white supporters. The students had been protesting the inequality of spending on education for the various races, as well as "intimidation" by teachers, whose authority the Pink Floyd song challenges. The government ban forbids radio stations to play the record, stores to sell it, and individuals to own it.
In the United States, educators in several states have tried — with some success — to have the song removed from the play lists of radio stations. Says Hope Antman of Columbia Records in New York,
The radio resistance has been surprisingly strong. Stations started getting angry calls and letters from teachers and principals and school boards claiming that "Another Brick in the Wall" was creating a crisis in their classrooms.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the record "is still very hot," said KSAN's Pierra Robert, a programming assistant, who said it was being played on "everything from rock stations to disco stations."
"We Don't Need No Education" graffiti has appeared on tunnel walls in the Sunset District of San Francisco, and its refrain has echoed through the lunch hours at private, Jesuit-run schools in the city.
Elsewhere, at least a dozen rock stations in major cities either stopped playing the record or refused to add it to their play lists. The resistance was even stronger in smaller towns, Antman says. One teacher in Chicago went so far as to cut his own record as a rebuttal to Pink Floyd, changing the lyrics to "We all need an education."
The rebuttal was an instant flop, while Pink Floyd's attack on schools has dominated the sales charts for months. According to the entertainment industry's trade paper, Variety, the album was number one in sales for twenty consecutive weeks last winter and spring, and "Another Brick" topped the singles charts for six weeks. Both have remained entrenched in the top five from February to June, although "Another Brick" never made the top five on Variety's list of the most-played records on radio.
Album sales have passed three million worldwide, with the single not far behind. "That's an unprecedented accomplishment for a record that has received so little radio exposure," says Antman.
Teenagers, of course, have always had a distaste for school, and their defiant spirit has frequently been captured in the lyrics of rock 'n' roll songs. In the mid-1970s, Alice Cooper's "School's Out (Forever)" topped the charts; In the 1960s, it was Gary U.S. Bond's "School's Out (At Last)."
Antieducation sentiment in rock dates to the very earliest days of the music, when Chuck Berry frequently contrasted the frustration of the classroom with the satisfaction of fast cars and music.
So why has "Another Brick" produced such an outcry? For one thing, it is far angrier in tone and content than its antischool predecessors.
As Rolling Stone magazine's Kurt Loder put it
in reviewing the record, Roger Waters is contending that in government-run schools, children are methodically tormented and humiliated by teachers whose comeuppance occurs when they go home at night and "their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives."
This is very strong stuff, and hardly the hallmark of a hit album.
Teachers found such vehemence especially troubling. "Many educators, particularly in the urban areas, were not only angered by the song's attack on their profession, but were afraid it would lead to a wave of student protests this past spring," says an official of the National Education Association, who asked that his name not be used.
$10 $6
Teachers were worried because their students were singing it in the corridors and quoting it in the classroom, and they felt a need to make some kind of response. The song has not led to any significant protests — at least in this country — because the current generation of high schoolers doesn't much believe in protesting. From the statistics we're seeing, they're more likely to drop out than to demand reforms when they feel they have been wronged in school.
According to Education Department figures, about one million teenagers of high-school age have quit school, leaving the average graduating class this spring with 25 percent fewer members than it had at the outset.
Interviews with numerous high-school students indicate that the Pink Floyd song has struck a chord of anger and frustration with which many students strongly identify.
Says Mark Jenkins of Alexandria, Virginia, "Pink Floyd is talking to me in that song."
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[Editor's Note: In this 2009 article, Lew Rockwell lists the problems with government mandates on private use of mobile phones. Observant readers will note the "public safety" arguments against the freedom to use phones as we choose are essentially the same as current claims that "public health" is a justification for dictating daily habits and behavior. ]
We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect of life from its smallest to its largest detail.
Every day presents more cases, but the most recent case is stunning. It turns out that 97% of people polled support a universal ban on texting while driving. Half of those surveyed say that the penalty should be as severe as that for drunk driving. Among these, how many do you suppose do text and drive but don't want to admit it to the pollster? Probably plenty. And yet I couldn't find a single online defense of the practice anywhere on the web.
The truth is that it is not necessarily unsafe to text behind the wheel. It all depends on the situation. If you are in a traffic jam, and are late to an appointment, the ability to text can be a lifesaver. Or if there are no cars around, you might be able to risk it. On the other hand, it would probably be a mistake to attempt this doing 80 mph around slower traffic on a freeway.
How can we know the difference between when it is safe and when it is not? The principle applied on American roads is that the driver himself makes that decision. If this principle didn't make sense, there would be no way that the roads themselves could work at all.
Think of this the next time you are in a big city zooming around curves and between lanes along with thousands of others, doing top speeds. Here we have 4,000-pound hunks of steel barreling down the road without aids other than a dotted yellow line on the road. These are real-life death machines in which one wrong move could cause a 100-car pileup and mass death. We do it anyway.
What's remarkable is not that there are so many wrecks. The miracle is that it works at all and that, for the most part, people get to where they are going. And consider too the demographic behind the car: old, young, abled, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. Some people have a facility for driving and others do not. Some people have spatial agility and others do not.
How does it all work? Don't tell me that it is due to central planning and the police. The police aren't driving every car and controlling every wheel. Our human volition on the road and the decisions we make that affect other drivers are nearly 100% our own.
And yet it works. Why? The reason is that it is not in anyone's interest to get in a crash. It is in everyone's interest to get to where one is going in one piece and to do it efficiently. Roll together tens of thousands of people with the same broad goal and you get spontaneous cooperation. Something that people normally think could not work does in fact work. Looked at from that angle, the orderliness we see on the roads is a general expression of the capacity for human society to work in the context of self-interested individualism.
Now think of this poll showing a widespread opposition to texting while driving. I submit that you would get similar results from a poll that asked people about the right to drive:
Do you support or oppose the right of everyone to own 4,000-pound heaps of steel and control them completely and autonomously at top speeds in the midst of thousands of other citizens whose lives could be in danger with so much as a slight flick of the wrist to the right or left?
That question could elicit nearly 100% negative results. We generally trust our capacity to manage ourselves but we do not trust the capacity of others to manage themselves. And we surely don't believe that society can generally function well under conditions of freedom. Even though we live in the midst of spontaneous order and use its brilliance every day (grocery store, the world wide web, restaurants, housing developments), we don't really understand it.
Or how about this one:
Do you support the right of anyone over a certain age to buy and consume as much hard liquor as he wants, even to the point of drinking himself into a life-threatening stupor, neglecting the kids, wrecking family life, and killing brain cells that cannot be replaced?
Probably most people would say no. And yet this is precisely the reasoning behind Prohibition, which most people today regard as a terrible error. Today, we supposedly realize that the social cost of the right to drink hard liquor was greater than the supposed benefit we receive from enforcing Prohibition.
So it is with texting and driving. There are times when it is safe. There are times when it is not safe. The only ones who can really know the difference are the people behind the wheel. These people already enjoy the freedom to talk to passengers, to fiddle with their stereo, to drive following an exhausting jog, to drive while distracted with anxieties over work and marriage, to pray or sing in the car, and do many other things that seem like a distraction from the goal at hand. Somehow it all works, and there is a lesson here. You can count on more order to emerge from trusting freedom than you get from attempting to micromanage people's lives.
Now, the libertarians among us might point out that these roads are publicly owned and that this is the core source of the problem. Under privately owned roads, there might be intense restrictions on what you can and cannot do and these might be part of the contract you make with the road owner.
The market would take care of the rest. If an owner were too restrictive, drivers would take other routes. If they are too lenient, their insurance premiums would rise and they would pay too high a price. The resultant rules of the road would be a result of this careful calibration, tested constantly by the forces of supply and demand.
Under the existing rules of private roads, we see no evidence of a crackdown on texting. Maybe it would come in the future, but at least there would be a market test. When a rule fails in private markets, the rule is changed.
But it is different with government. No matter how preposterous the rule, it stays and stays, regardless of whether it works to accomplish its end. And there can be no question that a crackdown on texting is coming. Obama has already banned texting while driving for federal workers. A bill that would deny federal funds to states is flying through the Senate. Look for a nationwide ban in the coming months.
The ban says, You don't know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you. The ban gets support because people generally think that while they are responsible and good at calibrating what is safe and unsafe, others are not. Through this method, all freedoms could be abolished.
It's a bad way to form the rules of a society.
Originally published November 2009.
[Excerpted from Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.]
In this first decade of the 21st century, liberal thought, in both its theoretical and political aspects, has reached a historic crossroads. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall and of real socialism beginning in 1989 appeared to herald "the end of history" (to use Francis Fukuyama's unfortunate and overblown phrase), today, and in many respects more than ever, statism prevails throughout the world, accompanied by the demoralization of freedom lovers.
Therefore, an "aggiornamento" of liberalism is imperative. It is time to thoroughly revise liberal doctrine and bring it up to date in light of the latest advances in economic science, and the experience the latest historical events have provided.
This revision must begin with an acknowledgement that classical liberals have failed in their attempt to limit the power of the state and that today economic science is in a position to explain why this failure was inevitable. The next step is to focus on the dynamic theory of the entrepreneurship-driven processes of social cooperation that give rise to the spontaneous order of the market. This theory can be expanded and transformed into a full-fledged analysis of the anarchocapitalist system of social cooperation, which reveals itself as the only system that is truly viable and compatible with human nature.
In this article, we will analyze these issues in detail, along with a series of additional, practical considerations regarding scientific and political strategy. Moreover, we will make use of this analysis to correct certain common misunderstandings and errors of interpretation.
The Fatal Error of Classical Liberalism The fatal error of classical liberals lies in their failure to realize that their ideal is theoretically impossible, as it contains the seed of its own destruction, precisely to the extent that it includes the necessary existence of a state (even a minimal one), understood as the sole agent of institutional coercion.
Therefore, classical liberals commit their great error in their approach: they view liberalism as a plan of political action and a set of economic principles, the goal of which is to limit the power of the state while accepting its existence and even deeming it necessary. However, today (in the first decade of the 21st century) economic science has already shown:
that the state is unnecessary;that statism (even if minimal) is theoretically impossible; andthat, given human nature, once the state exists, it is impossible to limit its power. We will comment on each of these matters separately.
The State as an Unnecessary Body From a scientific perspective, only the mistaken paradigm of equilibrium could encourage belief in a category of "public goods" in which satisfaction of the criteria of joint supply and nonrivalry in consumption would justify, prima facie, the existence of a body with a monopoly on institutional coercion (the state) that would oblige everyone to finance those goods.
Nevertheless, the dynamic, Austrian conception of the spontaneous order that entrepreneurship drives has demolished this entire theory put forward to justify the state: the emergence of any case (real or apparent) of a "public good," i.e., joint supply and nonrivalry in consumption, is accompanied by the incentives necessary for the impetus of entrepreneurial creativity to find a better solution via technological and legal innovations and entrepreneurial discoveries which make it possible to overcome any problem that may arise (as long as the resource is not declared "public" and the free exercise of entrepreneurship is permitted, along with the accompanying private appropriation of the fruits of each creative, entrepreneurial act).
For instance, in the United Kingdom, the lighthouse system was for many years privately owned and financed, and private procedures (sailors' associations, port fees, spontaneous social monitoring, etc.) offered an effective solution to the "problem" of what "statist" economics textbooks depict as the most typical example of a "public good." Likewise, in the American Far West, the problem arose of defining and defending property rights concerning, for instance, head of cattle in vast expanses of land. Various entrepreneurial innovations which resolved the problems as they arose were gradually introduced (cattle branding, constant supervision by armed cowboys on horseback, and finally, the discovery and introduction of barbed wire, which, for the first time, permitted the effective separation of great stretches of land at a very affordable price).
This creative flow of entrepreneurial innovation would have been completely blocked if the resources had been declared "public," excluded from private ownership, and bureaucratically managed by a state agency. (Today, for instance, most streets and highways are closed to the adoption of innumerable entrepreneurial innovations — the collection of a toll per vehicle and hour, the private management of security and noise pollution, etc. — despite the fact that most such innovations no longer pose any technological problem. Nevertheless, the goods in question have been declared "public," which precludes their privatization and creative, entrepreneurial management.)
Furthermore, most people believe the state is necessary because they confuse its existence (unnecessary) with the essential nature of many of the services and resources it currently (and poorly) provides, and over the provision of which it exercises a monopoly (almost always under the pretext of their public nature). People observe that today highways, hospitals, schools, public order, etc. are largely supplied by the state, and since these are highly necessary, people conclude without further analysis that the state is as well.
They fail to realize that the above-mentioned resources can be produced to a much higher standard of quality as well as more efficiently, economically, and in tune with the varied and changing needs of each individual, through the spontaneous market order, entrepreneurial creativity, and private property. Moreover, people make the mistake of believing the state is also necessary to protect the defenseless, poor, and destitute ("small" stockholders, ordinary consumers, workers, etc.), yet people do not understand that supposedly protective measures have the systematic result, as economic theory demonstrates, of harming in each case precisely those they are claimed to protect, and thus one of the clumsiest and stalest justifications for the existence of the state disappears.
Rothbard maintained that the set of goods and services the state currently supplies can be divided into two subsets: those goods and services which should be eliminated, and those which should be privatized. Clearly, the goods mentioned in the above paragraph belong to the second group, and the disappearance of the state, far from meaning the disappearance of highways, hospitals, schools, public order, etc., would mean their provision in greater abundance, at higher standards, and at a more reasonable price (always with respect to the actual cost citizens currently pay via taxes).
In addition, we must point out that the historical episodes of institutional chaos and public disorder we could cite (for example, many instances during the years prior to and during the Spanish Civil War and Second Republic, or today in broad areas of Colombia or in Iraq) stem from a vacuum in the provision of these goods, a situation created by the states themselves, which neither do with a minimum of efficiency what in theory they should do, according to their own supporters, nor let the private, entrepreneurial sector do, since the state prefers disorder (which also appears to more strongly legitimize its coercive presence) to its dismantling and privatization at all levels.
It is particularly important to understand that the definition, acquisition, transmission, exchange, and defense of the property rights which coordinate and drive the social process do not require a body with a monopoly on violence (the state). On the contrary, the state invariably acts by trampling on numerous legitimate property titles, defending them very poorly, and corrupting the (moral and legal) behavior of individuals with respect to the private property rights of others.
The legal system is the evolutionary manifestation of the general legal principles (especially regarding ownership) compatible with human nature. Therefore, the state does not determine the law (democratically or otherwise). Instead, the law is contained in human nature, though it is discovered and consolidated in an evolutionary manner, in terms of precedent and, mainly, doctrine.
(We view the Roman, continental legal tradition, with its more abstract and doctrinal nature, as far superior to the Anglo-Saxon system of common law, which originates from disproportionate state support for legal rulings or judgments. These judgments, through binding case law, introduce into the legal system all sorts of dysfunctions that spring from the specific and prevailing circumstances and interests in each case.) Law is evolutionary and rests on custom, and hence, it precedes and is independent of the state, and it does not require, for its definition and discovery, any agency with a monopoly on coercion.
Not only is the state unnecessary to define the law; it is also unnecessary to enforce and defend it. This should be especially obvious these days, when the use — even, paradoxically, by many government agencies — of private security companies has become quite common.
This is not the place to present a detailed account of how the private provision of what today are considered "public goods" would work (though the lack of a priori knowledge of how the market would solve countless specific problems is the naïve, facile objection of those who favor the current status quo under the pretext, "better the devil you know than the devil you don't"). In fact, we cannot know today what entrepreneurial solutions an army of enterprising individuals would find for particular problems — if they were allowed to do so. Nevertheless, even the most skeptical person must admit that "we now know" that the market, driven by creative entrepreneurship, works, and it works precisely to the extent that the state does not coercively intervene in this social process.
It is also essential to recognize that difficulties and conflicts invariably arise precisely in areas where the free, spontaneous order of the market is hindered. Thus, regardless of the efforts made from the time of Gustav de Molinari to the present to imagine how an anarchocapitalist network of private security and defense agencies, each in support of more or less marginally alternative legal systems, would work, freedom theorists must never forget that what prevents us from knowing what a stateless future would be like — the creative nature of entrepreneurship — is precisely what offers us the peace of knowing that any problem will tend to be overcome, as the people involved will devote all of their effort and creativity to solving it.Israel M. Kirzner, Discovery and the Capitalist Process (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 168.
Economic science has taught us not only that the market works, but also that statism is theoretically impossible.
Why Statism Is Theoretically Impossible The Austrian economic theory of the impossibility of socialism can be expandedJesús Huerta de Soto, Socialismo, Cálculo Económico, y Función Empresarial, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2005), pp. 151–53. and transformed into a complete theory on the impossibility of statism, understood as the attempt to organize any sphere of life in society via coercive commands which involve intervention, regulation, and control and emanate from the body with a monopoly on institutional aggression (the state). The state cannot possibly achieve its coordination goals in any part of the social-cooperation process in which it attempts to intervene, especially the spheres of money and banking,Jesús Huerta de Soto, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, Melinda A. Stroup, trans. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006) (originally published in Spanish in 1998 as Dinero, Crédito Bancario, y Ciclos Económicos, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2006). the discovery of law, the dispensing of justice, and public order (understood as the prevention, suppression, and punishment of criminal acts), for the following four reasons:
The state would need a huge volume of information, and this information is only found in a dispersed or diffuse form in the minds of the millions of people who participate each day in the social process.The information the intervening body would need for its commands to exert a coordinating effect is predominantly tacit and inarticulable in nature, and thus it cannot be transmitted with absolute clarity.The information society uses is not "given;" it changes constantly as a result of human creativity. Hence, there is obviously no possibility of transmitting today information which will only be created tomorrow and which is precisely the information the agent of state intervention needs to achieve its objectives tomorrow.Finally and above all, to the extent state commands are obeyed and exert the desired effect on society, their coercive nature blocks the entrepreneurial creation of the very information the intervening state body most desperately needs to make its own commands coordinating (rather than maladjusting). Not only is statism theoretically impossible, but it also produces a whole series of distorting and highly damaging peripheral effects: the encouragement of irresponsibility (as the authorities do not know the true cost of their intervention, they act irresponsibly); the destruction of the environment when it is declared a public good and its privatization is prevented; the corruption of the traditional concepts of law and justice, which are replaced by commands and "social" justice;F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973–1979). and the imitative corruption of individuals' behavior, which becomes more and more aggressive and less and less respectful of morality and law.
The above analysis also permits us to conclude that if certain societies thrive nowadays, they do so not because of the state, but in spite of it.Carlos Rodríguez Braun, A Pesar Del Gobierno: 100 Críticas al Intervencionismo con Nombres y Apellidos (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 1999). For many people are still accustomed to behavior patterns that are subject to substantive laws; areas of greater relative freedom remain; and the state tends to be very inefficient at imposing its invariably clumsy, blind commands. Furthermore, even the most marginal increases in freedom provide great boosts to prosperity, which illustrates how far civilization could advance without the hindrance of statism.
Finally, we have already commented on the false belief held by all those who identify the state with the provision of the ("public") goods it now provides (poorly and at great cost) and who wrongly conclude that the disappearance of the state would necessarily mean the disappearance of its valuable services. This conclusion is drawn in an environment of constant political indoctrination at all levels (especially in the educational system, which no state wishes to lose control of, for obvious reasons), an environment where standards of "political correctness" are dictatorially imposed, and the status quo is rationalized by a complacent majority, which refuses to see the obvious: that the state is nothing but an illusion created by a minority to live at others' expense, others who are first exploited, then corrupted, and then paid with outside resources (taxes) for all sorts of political "favors."
The Impossibility of Limiting the Power of the State: Its "Lethal" Character in Combination with Human Nature Once the state exists, it is impossible to limit the expansion of its power. Granted, as Hoppe indicates, certain forms of government (like absolute monarchies, in which the king-owner will, ceteris paribus, be more careful in the long term to avoid "killing the goose that lays the golden eggs") will tend to expand their power and intervene somewhat less than others (like democracies, in which there are no real incentives to worry about what will happen after the next elections). It is also true that in certain historical circumstances, the interventionist tide has appeared to have been dammed to a certain extent.
Nevertheless, the historical analysis is irrefutable: the state has not ceased to grow.Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001). And it has not ceased to grow because the mixture of human nature and the state, as an institution with a monopoly on violence, is "explosive." The state acts as an irresistibly powerful magnet which attracts and propels the basest passions, vices, and facets of human nature. People attempt to sidestep the state's commands yet take advantage of its monopolistic power as much as possible.
Moreover, in democratic contexts particularly, the combined effect of the action of privileged interest groups, the phenomena of government shortsightedness and vote buying, the megalomaniacal nature of politicians, and the irresponsibility and blindness of bureaucracies amounts to a dangerously unstable and explosive cocktail. This mixture is continually shaken by social, economic, and political crises which, paradoxically, politicians and social "leaders" never fail to use as justification for subsequent doses of intervention, and these merely create new problems while exacerbating existing ones even further.
The state has become the "idol" everyone turns to and worships. Statolatry is without a doubt the most serious and dangerous social disease of our time. We are taught to believe all problems can and should be detected in time and solved by the state. Our destiny lies in the hands of the state, and the politicians who govern it must guarantee us everything our well-being demands. Human beings remain immature and rebel against their own creative nature (an essential quality which makes their future inescapably uncertain).
They demand a crystal ball to ensure not only that they know what will happen in the future, but also that any problems which arise will be resolved. This "infantilization" of the masses is deliberately fostered by politicians and social leaders, since in this way they publicly justify their existence and guarantee their popularity, predominance, and governing capacity. Furthermore, a legion of intellectuals, professors, and social engineers join in this arrogant binge of power.
Not even the most respectable churches and religious denominations have reached an accurate diagnosis of the problem: that today statolatry poses the main threat to free, moral, and responsible human beings; that the state is an enormously powerful false idol which is worshipped by all and which will not countenance anyone's freeing himself from its control nor having moral or religious loyalties outside its own sphere of dominance.
In fact, the state has managed something which might appear impossible a priori: it has slyly and systematically distracted the citizenry from the fact that the true origin of social conflicts and evils lies with the government itself, by creating scapegoats everywhere ("capitalism," the desire for profit, private property). The state then places the blame for problems on these scapegoats and makes them the target of popular anger and of the severest and most emphatic condemnation from moral and religious leaders, almost none of whom has seen through the deception nor dared until now to denounce that in this century, statolatry represents the chief threat to religion, morality, and thus, human civilization. Perhaps the most recent notable exception appears in Pope Benedict XVI's brilliant work on Jesus of Nazareth. That the state and political power are the institutional embodiment of the Antichrist must be obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of history who reads the Pope's reflections on the most dangerous temptation the devil can put in our way:The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes. Soloviev attributes to the Antichrist a book entitled The Open Way to World Peace and Welfare. This book becomes something of a new Bible, whose real message is the worship of well-being and rational planning. Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, Adrian J. Walker, trans. (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 41. Redford makes similar, though much more categorical, comments. James Redford, “Jesus Is an Anarchist,” Anti-state.com (2001).
Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provided the best historical illustration of the theorem of the impossibility of socialism, the huge failure of classical-liberal theorists and politicians to limit the power of the state perfectly illustrates the theorem of the impossibility of statism, specifically the fact that the liberal state is self-contradictory (as it is coercive, even if "limited") and theoretically impossible (since once we accept the existence of the state, it is impossible to limit the expansion of its power). In short, the "law-based state" is an unattainable ideal and a contradiction in terms as flagrant as that of "hot snow, wanton virgin, fat skeleton, round square,"Anthony de Jasay, Market Socialism: A Scrutiny: This Square Circle (Occasional paper 84) (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1990), p. 35. or that evident in the ideas of "social engineers" and neoclassical economists when they refer to a "perfect market" or the so-called "perfect-competition model."Jesús Huerta de Soto, "The Essence of the Austrian School," lecture delivered at the Bundesministerium für Wissenschart und Forchung, March 26, 2007, in Vienna; published in Procesos de Mercado: Revista Europea de Economía Política 4, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 343–50, see esp. 347–48.
Anarchocapitalism as the Only Possible System of Social Cooperation Truly Compatible with Human Nature Statism runs counter to human nature, since it consists of the systematic, monopolistic exercise of a coercion which, in all areas where it is felt (including those corresponding to the definition of law and the maintenance of public order), blocks the creativity and entrepreneurial coordination which are precisely the most typical and essential manifestations of human nature. Furthermore, as we have already seen, statism fosters and drives irresponsibility and moral corruption, as it diverts the focus of human behavior toward a privileged pulling on the reins of political power, within a context of ineradicable ignorance that makes it impossible to know the costs of each government action. The above effects of statism appear whenever a state exists, even if every attempt is made to limit its power, an unattainable goal which renders classical liberalism a scientifically unfeasible utopia.
It is absolutely necessary to overcome the "utopian liberalism" of our predecessors, the classical liberals, who were both naïve in thinking the state could be limited, and incoherent in failing to carry their ideas to their logical conclusion and accept the implications. Hence, today, with the 21st century well under way, our top priority should be to allow the (utopian and naïve) classical liberalism of the 19th century to be superseded by its new, truly scientific, and modern formulation, which we could call libertarian capitalism, private property anarchism, or simply, anarchocapitalism. For it makes no sense for liberals to continue saying the same things they said one hundred fifty years ago when, well into the 21st century, and despite the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly twenty years ago, states have not ceased to grow and encroach upon people's individual freedoms in all areas.
Anarchocapitalism (or "libertarianism") is the purest representation of the spontaneous market order in which all services, including those of defining law, justice, and public order, are provided through an exclusively voluntary process of social cooperation, which thus becomes the focal point of research in modern economic science. In this system, no area is closed to the drive of human creativity and entrepreneurial coordination, and hence efficiency and fairness increase in the solution of problems, and all of the conflicts, inefficiencies, and maladjustments which bodies with a monopoly on violence (states) invariably cause simply by virtue of existing, are eradicated.
Moreover, the proposed system eliminates the corrupting incentives created by the state, and in contrast fosters the most moral and responsible human behaviors, while preventing the emergence of any monopolistic body (state) which legitimizes the systematic use of violence and the exploitation of certain social groups (those which have no choice but to obey) by others (those which at any time have the tightest hold on the reins of state power).
Anarchocapitalism is the only system which fully recognizes the free, creative nature of human beings and their perpetual capacity to internalize increasingly moral behavior patterns in an environment in which, by definition, no one can arrogate to himself the right to exercise monopolistic, systematic coercion. In short, in an anarchocapitalist system, any entrepreneurial project can be tried if it attracts enough voluntary support, and therefore many possible creative solutions can be devised in a dynamic and constantly changing environment of voluntary cooperation.
The progressive replacement of states by a dynamic network of private agencies which back different legal systems and also provide all sorts of security, crime prevention, and defense services constitutes the most important item on the political and scientific agenda, as well as the most momentous social change to take place in the 21st century.
Conclusion: The Revolutionary Implications of the New Paradigm The revolution spearheaded in the 18th and 19th centuries by the old classical liberals against the ancien régime finds its natural continuity today in the anarchocapitalist revolution of the 21st century. Fortunately, we have discovered the reason behind the failure of utopian liberalism as well as the need to overcome it with scientific liberalism. Also, we know that the old revolutionaries were naïve and mistaken in pursuing an unattainable ideal which, throughout the twentieth century, opened the door to the worst statist tyrannies humanity has ever known.
The message of anarchocapitalism is markedly revolutionary. It is revolutionary in its end: the dismantling of the state and its replacement by a competitive market process in which a network of private agencies, associations, and organizations take part. It is also revolutionary in its means, particularly in the scientific, economic-social, and political spheres.
Scientific Revolution. On the one hand, economic science becomes the general theory of the spontaneous market order extended to all social realms. On the other hand, it incorporates the analysis of the social discoordination statism produces in any area it influences (including law, justice, and public order). In addition, the different methods for dismantling the state, the transition processes involved, and the ways and effects of wholly privatizing all services now considered "public" comprise an essential field of research for our discipline.
Economic and Social Revolution. One cannot even imagine the spectacular human achievements, advances, and discoveries that will be possible in an entrepreneurial environment completely free from statism. Even today, despite continual government harassment, a hitherto unknown civilization has begun to develop in an increasingly globalized world. It is a civilization with a degree of complexity for which the power of statism is no match, and once it is totally rid of statism, it will expand without limit. For the force of creativity in human nature is such that it inevitably sprouts up through even the thinnest cracks in the government's armor. As soon as people gain a greater awareness of the fundamentally perverse nature of the state that restricts them, and once they perceive the tremendous opportunities removed daily from their reach when the state blocks the driving force of their entrepreneurial creativity, they will in large numbers join in the social clamor for reform, the dismantling of the state, and the advancement toward a future which remains entirely unknown to us but is bound to raise human civilization to heights unimaginable today.
Political Revolution. The daily political struggle becomes secondary to that described in a and b above. It is true that we must always support the least interventionist alternatives, in clear keeping with the efforts of classical liberals to democratically limit the state. However, the anarchocapitalist does not stop at that; he knows, and must also do, much more. He knows that the ultimate goal is the total dismantling of the state, and this fires his entire imagination and fuels all of his political action on a daily basis. Small advances in the right direction are certainly welcome, but we must never slip into a pragmatism that forsakes the ultimate goal of putting an end to the state. For purposes of teaching and influencing the general public, we must always pursue this objective in a systematic, transparent manner.Jesús Huerta de Soto, "El Economista Liberal y la Política," in Manuel Fraga: Homenaje Académico, vol. 2 (Madrid: Fundación Cánovas del Castillo), pp. 763–88; reprinted at pp. 163–92 of Nuevos Estudios de Economía Política. For example, one indication of the growing importance of libertarian capitalism on the current political agenda is the article "Libertarians Rising," which appeared in the Essay section of Time magazine in 2007. Michael Kinsley, "Libertarians Rising," Time (October 29, 2007), p. 112.
For instance, the anarchocapitalist political agenda will include ever reducing the size and power of states. Through regional and local decentralization in all areas, libertarian nationalism, the reintroduction of city-states, and secession,Jesús Huerta de Soto, "Teoría del Nacionalismo Liberal," in Estudios de Economía Política, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2004); idem, "El Desmantelamiento del Estado y la Democracia Directa." the aim will be to block the dictatorship of the majority over the minority and to permit people to increasingly "vote with their feet" rather than with ballots. In short, the goal is for people to be able to collaborate with each other on a worldwide scale and across borders, to achieve the most varied ends without regard to states (religious organizations, private clubs, Internet networks, etc.).Bruno S. Frey, "A Utopia? Government Without Territorial Monopoly," The Independent Review 6, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 99–112.
Moreover, let us remember that political revolutions need not be bloody. This is especially true when they result from the necessary process of social education and development, as well as from popular clamor and the widespread desire to stop the deception, lies, and coercion that prevent people from fulfilling their aims. For example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, which brought an end to socialism in Eastern Europe, were both basically bloodless. Along the path to this important final result, we must use all of the peacefulWe must never forget the prescriptions of the Spanish scholastics of the Golden Age regarding the strict conditions an act of violence must satisfy to be "just":
all possible peaceful means and procedures must first have been exhausted;the act must be defensive (a response to concrete acts of violence) and never aggressive;the means used must be proportional (e.g., the ideal of independence is not worth the life or liberty of even one human being);every attempt must be made to avoid claiming innocent victims;there must be a reasonable chance of success (if not, it would be unjustifiable suicide). These are wise principles, to which I would add that participation and financing must be entirely voluntary. Any act of violence which goes against one of these principles is automatically delegitimized and becomes the worst enemy of the professed objective. Finally, Father Juan de Mariana's whole theory of tyrannicide is also relevant here. Juan de Mariana, De Rege et Regis Institutione (Toledo: Pedro Rodríguez, 1599) and legalAs Rothbard indicated, it is not advisable to violate current laws (basically administrative commands), because in the vast majority of cases, the costs outweigh the benefits. Hidden FieldHidden Field means that current political systems permit.
An exciting future is opening up, in which we will continually discover new roads that will lead us, in keeping with fundamental principles, toward the anarchocapitalist ideal. Though this future may seem distant today, at any moment we may witness giant steps forward which will surprise even the most optimistic. Who was able to predict five years in advance that in 1989 the Berlin Wall would collapse, and with it communism itself in Eastern Europe? History has entered into an accelerated process of change, and although it will never come to a halt, it will begin an entirely new chapter when humanity, for the first time in modern history, manages to rid itself of the state once and for all and reduce it to nothing more than a dark and tragic historical relic.
Comments on the Spanish Anarchist Tradition The chart shows the different political systems and how they evolve naturally into each other. They are grouped according to the degree to which they favor statism or antistatism, and support or oppose private property.
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We see how the initial (mistaken and utopian) revolutionary movement of the classical liberals against the old regime slips into the pragmatism of accepting the state and opens the door to forms of socialist totalitarianism (communism and fascism/Nazism). The fall of real socialism ushers in social democracy, which today prevails far and wide (groupthink).
The liberal revolution, which owes its failure to error and naïveté on the part of classical liberals, has a still-pending stage, which will consist precisely of the evolution toward anarchocapitalism.
One consequence that followed the failure of the liberal revolution was the appearance of libertarian communism, which was unanimously reviled and combated by supporters of the other political systems (particularly the most left-leaning ones), precisely due to its antistatist nature. Libertarian communism is also utopian, because its rejection of private property compels the use of systematic (i.e., "state") violence against it, thus revealing an insuperable logical contradiction and blocking the entrepreneurial social process which drives the only anarchist order scientifically conceivable: that of the capitalist libertarian market.
Spain has a long-established anarchist tradition. While we must not forget the great crimes committed by its supporters (in any case qualitatively and quantitatively less serious than those of communists and socialists), nor the contradictions in their thinking, it is true that, especially during the Spanish Civil War, anarchism was an experiment which enjoyed great popular support, though it was destined to fail. Just as with the old liberal revolution, today anarchists have before them their second great opportunity, which lies in overcoming their errors (the utopian quality of an anarchism which rejects private property) and accepting the market order as the sole, definitive path toward abolishing the state. If the Spanish anarchists of the 21st century can internalize these teachings from theory and history, Spain will very likely surprise the world again (this time for good, and on a large scale) by leading the theoretical and practical vanguard of the new anarchocapitalist revolution.
Excerpted from Property, Freedom and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe; Mises Institute, 2009, pp. 161–178, this article was first published in Spanish as "Liberalismo Versus Anarcocapitalismo,"Procesos de Mercado: Revista Europea de Economía Política 4, no. 2 (2007): 13–32, and is based on two separate lectures given under the same title, one at the summer university of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Aranjuez, Friday, July 6, 2007) and the other at the summer university of the Universidad Complutense (San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Monday, July 16, 2007).The author writes, "In these lectures, I formalized my theoretical and political "break" with classical liberalism, itself a mere step in the natural evolution toward anarchocapitalism. Back in September of 2000, at the general meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Santiago, Chile, in a speech I gave as part of a joint presentation with James Buchanan and Bruno Frei, I clearly hinted at this break. Jesús Huerta de Soto, "El Desmantelamiento del Estado y la Democracia Directa," Nuevos Estudios de Economía Política, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Unión Editorial, 2007): chap. 10, pp. 239–45."
A great many people have learned from Mises and Rothbard, but Lew Rockwell belongs to a much more select class: he has developed their thought in an original way. His essay, "The Economics of Discrimination," included in the present collection of Rockwell's speeches and articles, stands as an especially impressive contribution.
Through a well-known argument, Mises showed that interventions in the free market could quickly lead to full-scale socialism. Suppose, to take a familiar example, that the state institutes price controls on milk, in an effort to help the impoverished. The result will be a shortage, precisely the opposite of the program's aim.
What then is to be done? The interventionists can come to their senses and abandon their misguided interference. If they do not, they must proceed to further interventions.
To attempt to remedy the shortage, they may impose further controls. If the costs of production to milk retailers are lowered, will not the shortage disappear? Such efforts are of course futile, and planners must again confront the same choice as before: back to the free market or forward to more controls.
All readers of Mises will recognize the argument that I have just paraphrased from "Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism," but Rockwell has found an illuminating parallel to it. Mises's contention, he shows, applies also to laws that forbid discrimination. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, its proponents claimed, did not tell employers whom they could hire. It merely forbade them from refusing to hire someone on grounds of race and a few other categories.
But so taken, the law would inevitably have failed to achieve its purpose. What employer in his right mind would tell an applicant, "I'm rejecting you because I don't like people of your race"? The employer has only to invent a plausible excuse for rejecting those whom he dislikes, and he may discriminate as much as he wishes.
To block him, must not the state impose further restrictions? It will require employers to hire specific numbers of the groups it holds to be disadvantaged.
If an owner is forbidden to discriminate in hiring on grounds of sex or race, the government can only discover a violation of the law by looking at who is hired. This compels active discrimination against people on grounds of their sex and race. It is a zero sum game, where one person's winnings come from another's losses. (p. 100)
Rockwell's development of Mises's argument reflects his careful study of that great economist. Rockwell often calls attention to details not usually stressed. Everyone knows that Mises showed that economic calculation under socialism is impossible; but how many are aware that Mises was also a pioneering critic of socialized medicine?
Mises called attention to a crucial feature of systems that separate the benefits of medical programs from their costs. Rockwell summarizes his key insight in this way:
Because there is no clear line between sickness and health, and where you stand on the continuum is bound up with individual choice, the more medical services are provided by the State as a part of welfare, the more the programs reinforce the conditions that bring about the need to make use of them.… Socialized medicine must fail for the same reason all socialism must fail: it offers no system for rationally allocating resources, and instead promotes the overutilization of all resources, ending in bankruptcy. (p. 116)
Rockwell uses a detail in the work of Friedrich Hayek to make another point of vital importance in the struggle for the free market. Opponents of the free market sometimes disguise their plans. Claiming to be defenders of economic freedom, they promote schemes inimical to the free market. For instance, in Orwellian fashion, plans for control of trade by international bureaucracies come packaged as "free trade." Rockwell notes that Hayek warned against this threat:
As F.A. Hayek wrote in the neglected conclusion to his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom: "If international economic relations, instead of being between individuals, become relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they will inevitably become the source of friction and envy." (p. 144)
To use Hayek against NAFTA is indeed a stroke that would have occurred to few.
But we have not yet reached the central theme of Rockwell's book. As our author sees matters, the principal threat to the market, and to freedom generally, is war. During a war, and in the period of preparation for it, the state seizes control of the economy, a state of affairs that at least in part continues even after the supposed emergency passes. (The classic account of this process is Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan.)
One cannot rationally favor both the market and a bellicose foreign policy. As Rockwell puts it,
The framers intended to keep the US out of foreign wars. They understood that a government that goes in search of monsters to destroy will end up destroying its own people. The foreign-policy apparatus of today inflicts a horrible cost on the world. But the greatest cost of all — or at least the one that should matter to us most — is the cost to the liberty that is our birthright." (p. 157)
But, one might object, cannot a peace-loving nation sometimes be forced to fight? After the attacks of September 11, for example, what choice did the Bush administration have but to strike back at those who attacked us?
Rockwell rises to the challenge: though the attacks on the World Trade Center were a grievous wrong, the American response made matters much worse. How did the overthrow of the backward Afghanistan regime, in no way a threat to the United States, advance our safety? The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks remain at large, and since the triumph over the Taliban, we have since proceeded to a much more costly and futile war.
The right response to September 11 would have been for government's entire security apparatus to be dismantled, and to allow the airlines and other firms to provide their own security. But, of course, it had all the earmarks of a crisis, and history shows that crises are great opportunities for the State. (p. 138)
Rockwell's emphasis on war and its dangers derives in large part from Murray Rothbard, whose thought, along with that of Mises, underlies the entire program of the Mises Institute. Rothbard constantly stressed the imperative necessity of a peaceful foreign policy. The contrasting view, long favored by William Buckley and his National Review colleagues, which claimed to marry free-market economics and the warfare state, could not possibly succeed.
Rothbard's prescience won him few friends among conventional conservatives.
But what really did Murray in was not his conviction that the State was unnecessary, but his position on the Cold War. [Because of Rothbard's noninterventionism] Libertarians were said to be tacit supporters of the Sovietization of the world. (p. 398)
Rothbard's resolute views come as no surprise, but Rockwell once again presents readers with something unexpected. Mises also warned against the dangers of militarism. Rockwell cites a characteristically incisive passage from Mises:
Military Socialism is the Socialism of a state in which all institutions are designed for the prosecution of war.…
Standing preparedness for war is impossible if aims other than war influence the lives of individuals.… The military state is a state of bandits. (p. 195)
Militarism, then, is Rockwell's great enemy, and a free society his goal. But what, specifically, should defenders of a free economy support? Our author, following Mises and Rothbard, places great emphasis on the gold standard. Only a currency immune to government manipulation can save us from inflation, with all its attendant dangers. The needed separation of government and money can only be effected by resort to a commodity standard.
Why do the government and its partisans dislike the gold standard? It removes the discretionary power of the Fed by placing severe limits on the ability of the central bank to inflate the money supply. Without that discretionary power, the government has far fewer tools of central planning at its disposal. (p. 61)
A further advantage of sound money, Rockwell explains, is that the government cannot initiate business cycles through credit expansion.
Rockwell's powerful defense of the key tenets of Mises and Rothbard presents us with a paradox: The American Right once strongly supported both a noninterventionist foreign policy and the gold standard. The arguments in favor of these measures, as Rockwell has abundantly shown, have great force. Why, then, were the supporters of traditional American foreign policy unable to mount an effective resistance to interventionist "conservatives" and their neoconservative successors? Why has the gold standard become a lost cause, for many, abandoned for nostrums peddled from Chicago?
As Rockwell sees matters, the problems lie not in any deficiency in the arguments for correct policy. Quite the contrary, American conservatives placed little emphasis on argument. They often viewed logical thinking as doctrinaire; and, although Mises was widely admired, many on the Right viewed him as extreme because of the radical conclusions to which his rigorous thinking led him. And to reiterate, Rothbard, who rejected government and the Cold War altogether, was dismissed completely.
The point, once more, is not that the conservatives deployed bad arguments against the supposed extremism of Mises and Rothbard. Rather, they downgraded the role of reason as such; and this rendered ineffective their resistance to the Left.
In this connection, Rockwell cites the baleful influence of Russell Kirk.
In the middle fifties, as a consequence of Russell Kirk's book Conservative Mind, the word "conservative" came to describe anyone who was a nonsocialist skeptic of federal policy.…
In Kirk's hands, conservatism became a posture, a demeanor, a mannerism.… And if there was a constant strain in Kirkian conservatism, it was opposition to ideology, a word that Kirk demonized. This allowed him to accuse Mises and Marx of the same supposed error.
In fact, ideology means nothing more than systematic social thought. Without systematic thought, the intellectual shiftiness of statist impulse gets a free ride. (p. 395)
Speaking of Liberty is an excellent example of systematic thought in action, imbued with the value of freedom.
This article first published in Mises Review, Summer 2004, Volume 10, Number 2.
Film Noir is not riding any wave of popularity so it is the perfect time to anticipate a trend. These movies from the 1940s are not only brilliant and beautiful but also entertaining in their own right. They look completely different to us now from what they must have looked like then, and I don't mean merely to inspire a sentimentalism for days gone by.
These were times when Mises's was writing Human Action in English, Hazlitt was working at the New York Times, and Ayn Rand was marketing the Fountainhead to Hollywood. These authors, writing on manual typewriters and submitting the results only in hard copy, were the champions of markets and technological progress. They saw what others did not, namely, that the innovations of the time, as wonderful as they seemed, were only the beginning of what was possible under freedom.
The film noir of their period beautifully illustrates the strange way in which the operation of society itself was limited by the existing technology as compared with our own digital age. Because none of us can live two lifetimes, we depend on media like this to provide us insight in this area and many others.
Many of the plots of these hundreds of films turn on the ability of people to change identities and get lost in the thick of things, with tricks and turns that would be completely unimaginable today in the information age. What is especially interesting is that the actors in the movies are unaware that they are living in what seems like prehistoric times to us. For them, the ability to call house to house, to listen to the radio in the car, to communicate with others from phone booths might have been dazzling.
For us watching today, we see a society radically hobbled by the limits of technology, with people whose decisions and course of life is determined by this fact, even without their knowing it. The biggest limit concerns the absence of information about people's backgrounds and hence core character. Evildoers masquerade as respectable people, while respectable people turn to evil and are oddly successful at hiding it even from intimates.
The Detour, for example, is about a hitchhiker — talk about an anachronism! — picked up by a driver who hasn't contacted his parents in many years; nor do they have a way to contact him. The driver unexpectedly dies and the hitchhiker, fearing blame, dumps his body, takes his money and clothes, and assumes a new identity. He even plans to sell the car, since there was some disconnect between the owner and the car registration. The girl he picks up turns to him and demands to know where the body is, a terrifying moment simply because one person knows something that was previously hidden. The lack of communication and knowledge is the core of the plot device, so that information is the source of terror.
There are other features of this film that turn on technological limits. Many people seem strangely displaced without a known past, and they can float around from place to place with anonymity, appearing and disappearing from the social fabric. The newspapers were the way you heard the news, but gossip was generally more reliable. You had to be standing right by the phone to get a call. The phones were necessarily connected to the wall, so if you wanted to make a private call, you had to grab the phone and take it in another room. In Detour, when one person pulls on the cord to get the phone back, he inadvertently strangles a girl in the next room.
Not even credit checks are very efficient, which is why the lead in Quicksand was able to buy a watch on a borrowed $100 and resell it for $30 a little while later, so that he could return the $20 that he borrowed from the cash register at work, which no one would have noticed was gone until the weekly accountancy check. By the way, in this particular film, his misdeed is discovered, and he has to return the $100 the next day, which requires that he mug a drunk, which then leads to being blackmailed for $500 by someone who saw him do it, and so on until he is on the run for auto theft and murder. It's like a metaphor for financing the US government.
Sometimes the information asymmetry is extreme, as it is in Double Indemnity. An insurance investigator is checking into an exorbitant insurance claim with a partner who in fact is the perpetrator of the very crime he is investigating. The insurance man is romantically pursuing a woman, who he does not know plans to kill him once the scheme is complete. She is, in turn, married to a man who doesn't know that his current wife is the killer of his previous wife. And the daughter of the woman befriends the insurance man without knowing that he is the killer of her father. Meanwhile, the daughter's boyfriend doesn't know that her stepmother is lying to him and probably setting him up to take the fall for this grisly mess.
In The Man Who Cheated Himself, the entire plot turns on a confusion about whether the car that dumped a body at the airport is blue or green, a problem that would have been solved with a color camera at the scene of the crime.
In a personal favorite of mine, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, the details of a murder some 20 years ago had been forgotten so that a stranger in town has to go to the deepest archives of the local newspaper to discover that the heiress who runs the local industry conspired with her now-district-attorney husband to frame up an innocent man who went to the chair for a crime he didn't commit. This plot wouldn't have gone anywhere in an age of Google.
Nor would the scenario of The Scar, in which a gangster assumes the identity of a psychoanalyst by murdering him following a casino robbery gone bad, be plausible in the slightest today. Our looks are on the tiniest piece of our identities, and they count for very little as compared with our digital data trail. Nor would the crook be surprised to find that the seemingly respectable psychoanalyst whose identity he assumed was in even deeper trouble with the law than he was.
The naive bride in Dangerous Crossing would not have inadvertently married a man who planned to murder her to steal her fortune, which he believes should have been inherited by her father's brother. Nor would she have lost track of him on the cruise ship they boarded together on their honeymoon. And surely the doctor examining the sick passenger would have quickly figured out that this was the same man who was missing!
There are a series of strange apartment break-ins in I Wake Up Screaming. Several times, the plot turns on the uncanny way in which people can easily break locks on doors and windows. Not infrequently, people wake in the middle of the night to find someone standing over them asking questions. The absence of reliable alarm systems and secure locks gives the film a strange quality: everyone is vulnerable; no one is safe from prying eyes, whether they are doing good or evil.
So on the one hand, the level of privacy is far beyond what we imagine is possible today. Who today can disappear, sneak away, be out of touch for any length of time, much less change identities or travel anonymously? On the other hand, there is no security against physical invasion of one's home, car, office, or personal records, none of which are password protected and all of which exist only in the physical world. As much as people bemoan the absence of privacy today, the current inversion of the film-noir world is far to be preferred.
The ability to disappear and inability to be secure fosters the world of relentless suspicion and danger that is inherent in the film-noir genre. Women fall into two general categories: black widows whose secret pasts lie in hiding as they pursue their next victim in a nefarious plot, or fallen angels who pine for stability and get hooked up with bad men before being rescued from a life of desperation. Surely we have here a reflection of the deep anxieties of women in a time when men were being snatched away by the draft and sent away to foreign lands to kill and be killed.
In many plots, a moral ambiguity is pervasive, as one small and regrettable decision turns out to have disproportionately bad results, which then require an attempt at coverup that involves the further suppression of conscience and a further trip down the road to ruin. The viewer is never entirely sure when to stop sympathizing with the evildoer, who often seems to have bad choices imposed on him because of the imperfections of the world around him. The small steps towards dishonesty don't trouble us until we find ourselves traveling with him to perdition.
What's more, many of the small steps toward wrongdoing have a rationale rooted in a distrust of the justice system. The judge will never believe me if I say that I didn't commit this murder so I'd better make a break for it! The police will throw me in the slammer for decades for this petty theft so I'd better cover it up! and on it goes: no one quite believes that the state's system really works fairly and accurately. Despite the censor's attempts to bolster civic mythology in the final scenes of such movies, a deep distrust of all official institutions is their underlying political infrastructure.
And this fact is very striking given the portrayal of police and police investigators in the film, who don't seem to be entirely on the other side of the divide from mere civilians in film noir. They are not jack booted or heavily armed or otherwise tasing people for showing the slightest bit of resistance. They seem like people with different jobs to do, and that's about it.
And they always have time, as when the poisoned man in D.O.A. arrives stumbling into the investigations bureau and says, "I'm here to report a murder. Mine." He then takes a couple of hours out of the time of five officers to explain how he ended up being poisoned by a dangerous gang of racketeers.
It can sometimes be hilarious to our generation when the criminals are trying to head for the border, where presumably the law then cannot reach them. We know nothing of this strange assumption today.
Even if individual policemen themselves are decent and conscientious, these films are replete with cynicism toward law — toward the system, with lies leading to more lies and deceptions and coverups in all aspects of life. They were made in the 1940s, in a time we are all taught was defined by the great struggle between obvious good and obvious evil, embodied in the "greatest generation" that fought the "good war." How could these themes of deeply complicated moral ambiguity and official corruption really connect with audiences?
Well, reading Riggenbach's Why American History Is Not What They Say provides a richer picture of a time when people did not, in fact, trust government.
It was widely believed (or understood) that there was something fishy about that whole Pearl Harbor thing and the drive to war, widely believed that officials in Washington were just improvising during the Depression, widely believed that the expansion of the state and its vast new powers were not really about science but were rather a power grab.
In fact, one looks in vain for evidence from film noir that any viewers were predisposed to believe anything from on high.
In other words, there was a veneer of naiveté but growing distrust beneath the surface — times, in other words, very much like our own. It is in the writings of Mises, Hazlitt, and Rand that we discover the secrets to understanding the strange world of film noir. It is a feast for the eyes and ears, a look at how dramatically and sweepingly different our times are in so many ways, and yet how the themes of corruption, deception, and lies are persistent wherever public and private violence against person and property rears its ugly head.
If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely, a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price fixing, wage fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
Moreover, it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. "The law of England and of this country," he wrote, "has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen." State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.
Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact — except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic asylum, city hospital, and county poorhouse — destitution, unemployment, "depression," and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living.
Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called "the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government"; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.
It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted.The result of a questionnaire published in July, 1935, showed 76.8 per cent of the replies favorable to the idea that it is the State's duty to see that every person who wants a job shall have one; 20.1 per cent were against it, and 3.1 per cent were undecided. When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigor. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained.
If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them.
We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the State's relief agency. The State has said to society, "You are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself." Hence when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
Every positive intervention that the State makes upon industry and commerce has a similar effect. When the State intervenes to fix wages or prices, or to prescribe the conditions of competition, it virtually tells the enterpriser that he is not exercising social power in the right way, and therefore it proposes to confiscate his power and exercise it according to the State's own judgment of what is best. Hence the enterpriser's instinct is to let the State look after the consequences.
As a simple illustration of this, a manufacturer of a highly specialized type of textiles was saying to me the other day that he had kept his mill going at a loss for five years because he did not want to turn his workpeople on the street in such hard times, but now that the State had stepped in to tell him how he must run his business, the State might jolly well take the responsibility.
The process of converting social power into State power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State's intervention is directly competitive. The accumulation of State power in various countries has been so accelerated and diversified within the last twenty years that we now see the State functioning as telegraphist, telephonist, match peddler, radio operator, cannon founder, railway builder and owner, railway operator, wholesale and retail tobacconist, shipbuilder and owner, chief chemist, harbor maker and dockbuilder, housebuilder, chief educator, newspaper proprietor, food purveyor, dealer in insurance, and so on through a long list.In this country, the State is at present manufacturing furniture, grinding flour, producing fertilizer, building houses; selling farm products, dairy products, textiles, canned goods, and electrical apparatus; operating employment agencies and home-loan offices; financing exports and imports; financing agriculture. It also controls the issuance of securities, communications by wire and radio, discount rates, oil production, power production, commercial competition, the production and sale of alcohol, and the use of inland waterways and railways.
It is obvious that private forms of these enterprises must tend to dwindle in proportion as the energy of the State's encroachments on them increases, for the competition of social power with State power is always disadvantaged, since the State can arrange the terms of competition to suit itself, even to the point of outlawing any exercise of social power whatever in the premises; in other words, giving itself a monopoly. Instances of this expedient are common; the one we are probably best acquainted with is the State's monopoly on letter carrying. Social power is estopped by sheer fiat from application to this form of enterprise, notwithstanding it could carry it on far cheaper and — in this country at least — far better.
The advantages of this monopoly in promoting the State's interests are peculiar. No other, probably, could secure so large and well-distributed a volume of patronage, under the guise of a public service in constant use by so large a number of people; it plants a lieutenant of the State at every country crossroad. It is by no means a pure coincidence that an administration's chief almoner and whip at large is so regularly appointed postmaster general.
Thus the State "turns every contingency into a resource" for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted — or as I believe our American glossary now has it, "conditioned" — to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State's institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.
"Every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power."IIIn the United States at the present time, the principal indexes of the increase of State power are three in number.
First, the point to which the centralization of State authority has been carried. Practically all the sovereign rights and powers of the smaller political units — all of them that are significant enough to be worth absorbing — have been absorbed by the federal unit; nor is this all. State power has not only been thus concentrated at Washington, but it has been so far concentrated into the hands of the executive that the existing regime is a regime of personal government. It is nominally republican, but actually monocratic; a curious anomaly, but highly characteristic of a people little gifted with intellectual integrity.
Personal government is not exercised here in the same ways as in Italy, Russia or Germany, for there is as yet no State interest to be served by so doing, but rather the contrary; while in those countries there is. But personal government is always personal government; the mode of its exercise is a matter of immediate political expediency, and is determined entirely by circumstances.
This regime was established by a coup d'état of a new and unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country. It was effected, not by violence, like Louis-Napoleon's, or by terrorism, like Mussolini's, but by purchase. It therefore presents what might be called an American variant of the coup d'état.There is a sort of precedent for it in Roman history, if the story be true in all its details that the army sold the emperorship to Didius Julianus for something like five million dollars. Money has often been used to grease the wheels of a coup d'état, but straight over-the-counter purchase is unknown, I think, except in these two instances.
Our national legislature was not suppressed by force of arms, like the French Assembly in 1851, but was bought out of its functions with public money; and as appeared most conspicuously in the elections of November, 1934, the consolidation of the coup d'état was effected by the same means; the corresponding functions in the smaller units were reduced under the personal control of the executive.On the day I write this, the newspapers say that the president is about to order a stoppage on the flow of federal relief funds into Louisiana, for the purpose of bringing Senator Long to terms. I have seen no comment, however, on the propriety of this kind of procedure.
This is a most remarkable phenomenon; possibly nothing quite like it ever took place; and its character and implications deserve the most careful attention.
A second index is supplied by the prodigious extension of the bureaucratic principle that is now observable. This is attested prima facie by the number of new boards, bureaus, and commissions set up at Washington in the last two years. They are reported as representing something like 90,000 new employees appointed outside the civil service, and the total of the federal payroll in Washington is reported as something over three million dollars per month.A friend in the theatrical business tells me that from the box-office point of view, Washington is now the best theater town, concert town and general-amusement town in the United States, far better than New York.
This, however, is relatively a small matter. The pressure of centralization has tended powerfully to convert every official and every political aspirant in the smaller units into a venal and complaisant agent of the federal bureaucracy. This presents an interesting parallel with the state of things prevailing in the Roman Empire in the last days of the Flavian dynasty, and afterwards. The rights and practices of local self-government, which were formerly very considerable in the provinces and much more so in the municipalities, were lost by surrender rather than by suppression. The imperial bureaucracy, which up to the second century was comparatively a modest affair, grew rapidly to great size, and local politicians were quick to see the advantage of being on terms with it. They came to Rome with their hats in their hands — as governors, congressional aspirants and such-like now go to Washington. Their eyes and thoughts were constantly fixed on Rome, because recognition and preferment lay that way; and in their incorrigible sycophancy they became, as Plutarch says, like hypochondriacs who dare not eat or take a bath without consulting their physician.
A third index is seen in the erection of poverty and mendicancy into a permanent political asset. Two years ago, many of our people were in hard straits; to some extent, no doubt, through no fault of their own, though it is now clear that in the popular view of their case, as well as in the political view, the line between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor was not distinctly drawn. Popular feeling ran high at the time, and the prevailing wretchedness was regarded with undiscriminating emotion, as evidence of some general wrong done upon its victims by society at large, rather than as the natural penalty of greed, folly or actual misdoings; which in large part it was.
The State, always instinctively "turning every contingency into a resource" for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living; and this was accordingly done. It immediately precipitated an enormous mass of subsidized voting power, an enormous resource for strengthening the State at the expense of society.The feature of the approaching campaign of 1936 which will most interest the student of civilization will be the use of the four-billion-dollar relief fund that has been placed at the president's disposal — the extent, that is, to which it will be distributed on a patronage basis.
"Thus the State 'turns every contingency into a resource' for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power…"IIIThere is an impression that the enhancement of State power which has taken place since 1932 is provisional and temporary, that the corresponding depletion of social power is by way of a kind of emergency loan, and therefore is not to be scrutinized too closely. There is every probability that this belief is devoid of foundation.
No doubt our present regime will be modified in one way and another; indeed, it must be, for the process of consolidation itself requires it. But any essential change would be quite unhistorical, quite without precedent, and is therefore most unlikely; and by an essential change, I mean one that will tend to redistribute actual power between the State and society. It must always be kept in mind that there is a tidal motion as well as a wave motion in these matters, and that the wave motion is of little importance, relatively. For instance, the Supreme Court's invalidation of the National Recovery Act counts for nothing in determining the actual status of personal government. The real question is not how much less the sum of personal government is now than it was before that decision, but how much greater it is normally now than it was in 1932, and in years preceding.
In the nature of things, there is no reason why such a change should take place, and every reason why it should not. We shall see various apparent recessions, apparent compromises, but the one thing we may be quite sure of is that none of these will tend to diminish actual State power.
For example, we shall no doubt shortly see the great pressure group of politically organized poverty and mendicancy subsidized indirectly instead of directly, because State interest can not long keep pace with the hand-over-head disposition of the masses to loot their own Treasury. The method of direct subsidy, or sheer cash purchase, will therefore in all probability soon give way to the indirect method of what is called "social legislation"; that is, a multiplex system of State-managed pensions, insurances and indemnities of various kinds.
This is an apparent recession, and when it occurs it will no doubt be proclaimed as an actual recession, no doubt accepted as such; but is it? Does it actually tend to diminish State power and increase social power? Obviously not, but quite the opposite. It tends to consolidate firmly this particular fraction of State power, and opens the way to getting an indefinite increment upon it by the mere continuous invention of new courses and developments of State-administered social legislation, which is an extremely simple business. One may add the observation for whatever its evidential value may be worth, that if the effect of progressive social legislation upon the sum total of State power were unfavorable or even nil, we should hardly have found Prince de Bismarck and the British Liberal politicians of forty years ago going in for anything remotely resembling it.
When, therefore, the inquiring student of civilization has occasion to observe this or any other apparent recession upon any point of our present regime,As, for example, the spectacular voiding of the National Recovery Act. he may content himself with asking the one question, What effect has this upon the sum total of State power? The answer he gives himself will show conclusively whether the recession is actual or apparent, and this is all he is concerned to know.
There is also an impression that if actual recessions do not come about of themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one political party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the Praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be "got away with," and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that.
One may remark in this connection also the notoriously baseless assumption that party designations connote principles, and that party pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in "political action" contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit.
However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer-Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself.
This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call "reorganization" of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that "reorganization" of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party administration is illusory.
On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.
Indeed, it is by this means that the aim of the collectivists seems likeliest to be attained in this country; this aim being the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State. Their fundamental doctrine was formulated and invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the idealist philosophers of the last century; and among peoples who have accepted it in terms as well as in fact, it is expressed in formulas almost identical with theirs.
Thus, for example, when Hitler says that "the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it," he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that "the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents." Or, again, when Mussolini says, "Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State," he is merely vulgarizing the doctrine of Fichte, that "the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent."
It may be in place to remark here the essential identity of the various extant forms of collectivism. The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious studentThis book is a sort of syllabus or précis of some lectures to students of American history and politics — mostly graduate students — and it therefore presupposes some little acquaintance with those subjects. The few references I have given, however, will put any reader in the way of documenting and amplifying it satisfactorily. sees in them only the one root idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. When Hitler and Mussolini invoke a kind of debased and hoodwinking mysticism to aid their acceleration of this process, the student at once recognizes his old friend, the formula of Hegel, that "the State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth," and he is not hoodwinked. The journalist and the impressionable traveler may make what they will of "the new religion of Bolshevism"; the student contents himself with remarking clearly the exact nature of the process which this inculcation is designed to sanction.
Indeed, the aim of the collectivists is the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State.IVThis process — the conversion of social power into State power — has not been carried as far here as it has elsewhere; as it has in Russia, Italy or Germany, for example. Two things, however, are to be observed.
First, that it has gone a long way, at a rate of progress which has of late been greatly accelerated. What has chiefly differentiated its progress here from its progress in other countries is its unspectacular character. Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger he dreaded so much as "the consolidation [i.e., centralization] of our government by the noiseless and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court." These words characterize every advance that we have made in State aggrandizement. Each one has been noiseless and therefore unalarming, especially to a people notoriously preoccupied, inattentive and incurious.
Even the coup d'état of 1932 was noiseless and unalarming. In Russia, Italy, Germany, the coup d'état was violent and spectacular; it had to be; but here it was neither. Under cover of a nationwide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and aimless commotion, it took place in so unspectacular a way that its true nature escaped notice, and even now is not generally understood. The method of consolidating the ensuing regime, moreover, was also noiseless and unalarming; it was merely the prosaic and unspectacular "higgling of the market," to which a long and uniform political experience had accustomed us.
A visitor from a poorer and thriftier country might have regarded Mr. Farley's activities in the local campaigns of 1934 as striking or even spectacular, but they made no such impression on us. They seemed so familiar, so much the regular thing, that one heard little comment on them. Moreover, political habit led us to attribute whatever unfavorable comment we did hear, to interest; either partisan or monetary interest, or both. We put it down as the jaundiced judgment of persons with axes to grind; and naturally the regime did all it could to encourage this view.
The second thing to be observed is that certain formulas, certain arrangements of words, stand as an obstacle in the way of our perceiving how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone. The force of phrase and name distorts the identification of our own actual acceptances and acquiescences. We are accustomed to the rehearsal of certain poetic litanies, and provided their cadence be kept entire, we are indifferent to their correspondence with truth and fact.
When Hegel's doctrine of the State, for example, is restated in terms by Hitler and Mussolini, it is distinctly offensive to us, and we congratulate ourselves on our freedom from the "yoke of a dictator's tyranny." No American politician would dream of breaking in on our routine of litanies with anything of the kind. We may imagine, for example, the shock to popular sentiment that would ensue upon Mr. Roosevelt's declaring publicly that "the State embraces everything, and nothing has value outside the State. The State creates right." Yet an American politician, as long as he does not formulate that doctrine in set terms, may go further with it in a practical way than Mussolini has gone, and without trouble or question. Suppose Mr. Roosevelt should defend his regime by publicly reasserting Hegel's dictum that "the State alone possesses rights, because it is the strongest." One can hardly imagine that our public would get that down without a great deal of retching. Yet how far, really, is that doctrine alien to our public's actual acquiescences? Surely not far.
The point is that in respect of the relation between the theory and the actual practice of public affairs, the American is the most unphilosophical of beings. The rationalization of conduct in general is most repugnant to him; he prefers to emotionalize it. He is indifferent to the theory of things, so long as he may rehearse his formulas; and so long as he can listen to the patter of his litanies, no practical inconsistency disturbs him — indeed, he gives no evidence of even recognizing it as an inconsistency.
The ablest and most acute observer among the many who came from Europe to look us over in the early part of the last century was the one who is for some reason the most neglected, notwithstanding that in our present circumstances, especially, he is worth more to us than all the de Tocquevilles, Bryces, Trollopes, and Chateaubriands put together. This was the noted Stationing and political economist, Michel Chevalier.
Professor Chinard, in his admirable biographical study of John Adams, has called attention to Chevalier's observation that the American people have "the morale of an army on the march." The more one thinks of this, the more clearly one sees how little there is in what our publicists are fond of calling "the American psychology" that it does not exactly account for; and it exactly accounts for the trait that we are considering.
An army on the march has no philosophy; it views itself as a creature of the moment. It does not rationalize conduct except in terms of an immediate end. As Tennyson observed, there is a pretty strict official understanding against its doing so; "theirs not to reason why." Emotionalizing conduct is another matter, and the more of it the better; it is encouraged by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations, and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie. In every relation to "the reason of the thing," however — in the ability and eagerness, as Plato puts it, "to see things as they are" — the mentality of an army on the march is merely so much delayed adolescence; it remains persistently, incorrigibly, and notoriously infantile.
Past generations of Americans, as Martin Chuzzlewit left record, erected this infantilism into a distinguishing virtue, and they took great pride in it as the mark of a chosen people, destined to live forever amidst the glory of their own unparalleled achievements wie Gott in Frankreich. Mr. Jefferson Brick, General Choke and the Honorable Elijah Pogram made a first-class job of indoctrinating their countrymen with the idea that a philosophy is wholly unnecessary, and that a concern with the theory of things is effeminate and unbecoming.
An envious and presumably dissolute Frenchman may say what he likes about the morale of an army on the march, but the fact remains that it has brought us where we are, and has got us what we have. Look at a continent subdued, see the spread of our industry and commerce, our railways, newspapers, finance companies, schools, colleges, what you will! Well, if all this has been done without a philosophy, if we have grown to this unrivalled greatness without any attention to the theory of things, does it not show that philosophy and the theory of things are all moonshine, and not worth a practical people's consideration? The morale of an army on the march is good enough for us, and we are proud of it.
The present generation does not speak in quite this tone of robust certitude. It seems, if anything, rather less openly contemptuous of philosophy; one even sees some signs of a suspicion that in our present circumstances the theory of things might be worth looking into, and it is especially towards the theory of sovereignty and rulership that this new attitude of hospitality appears to be developing. The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this or that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, Hitlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.
The citizen should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it.VThere appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature of an institution into which one was born and one's ancestors were born. One accepts it as one does the atmosphere; one's practical adjustments to it are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom thinks about the air until one notices some change, favorable or unfavorable, and then one's thought about it is special; one thinks about purer air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air.
So it is with certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they affect us in various ways, but we do not ask how they came to exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they affect us so unfavorably that we rebel against them, we contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or variant of the same institution. Thus colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the republican State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanges the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State for the totalitarian State.
It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was towards the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. The State was then a very weak institution; the Church was very strong. The individual was born into the Church, as his ancestors had been for generations, in precisely the formal, documented fashion in which he is now born into the State. He was taxed for the Church's support, as he now is for the State's support. He was supposed to accept the official theory and doctrine of the Church, to conform to its discipline, and in a general way to do as it told him; again, precisely the sanctions that the State now lays upon him. If he were reluctant or recalcitrant, the Church made a satisfactory amount of trouble for him, as the State now does.
Notwithstanding all this, it does not appear to have occurred to the Church citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance. There it was; he accepted its own account of itself, took it as it stood, and at its own valuation. Even when he revolted, fifty years later, he merely exchanged one form or mode of the Church for another, the Roman for the Calvinist, Lutheran, Zwinglian, or what not; again, quite as the modern State citizen exchanges one mode of the State for another. He did not examine the institution itself, nor does the State citizen today.
My purpose in writing is to raise the question of whether the enormous depletion of social power which we are witnessing everywhere does not suggest the importance of knowing more than we do about the essential nature of the institution that is so rapidly absorbing this volume of power.An inadequate and partial idea of what this volume amounts to, may be got from the fact that the American State's income from taxation is now about one third of the nation's total income! This takes into account all forms of taxation, direct and indirect, local and federal.
One of my friends said to me lately that if the public-utility corporations did not mend their ways, the State would take over their business and operate it. He spoke with a curiously reverent air of finality. Just so, I thought, might a Church citizen, at the end of the fifteenth century, have spoken of some impending intervention of the Church; and I wondered then whether he had any better-informed and closer-reasoned theory of the State than his prototype had of the Church. Frankly, I am sure he had not. His pseudoconception was merely an unreasoned acceptance of the State on its own terms and at its own valuation; and in this acceptance he showed himself no more intelligent, and no less, than the whole mass of State citizenry at large.
It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled offhand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought.
He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State's primary function. Then, whether he finds that "the State" and "government" are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an antisocial institution?
It is pretty clear now that if the Church citizen of 1500 had put his mind on questions as fundamental as these, his civilization might have had a much easier and pleasanter course to run; and the State citizen of today may profit by his experience.
And then one day the stop sign was gone.It was the very stop sign one block from my house that was oddly stationed at a low-traffic, 3-way intersection, tempting every driver to slow down but not come to a complete stop.
How the city cleaned up on that one! I have personally coughed up in excess of $1,000 for tickets there, one time receiving two tickets in as many days. This sign was even the reason that I spent a day in jail for failing to fork over when the judge said I should.
I'm not alone: 93% of the drivers failed to come to a complete stop. Even so, I'm routinely lectured that my job as a citizen is to do precisely as I'm told. I've learned to habitually stop completely, even when the place looks like a ghost town with no cars anywhere in view.
Then one day the stop sign vanished.
What happened here? Did the cops finally get all the citizens trained to stop and thereby dissipate their opportunity for rents? Was there just no more money to be made from the disobedient?
Do I get a refund? How about compensation for the day I spent in jail? What about everyone else?
The local government must have extracted tens of thousands of dollars before good sense overcame our overlords and they decided to relent to reality. But no, there will not be compensation. The law changed its mind, and we are supposed to just deal with it. Now I must rehabituate myself to breaking — I mean keeping — the law.
One day, I'm jailed for failing to stop. Presumably, I could now get a ticket for stopping, since surely there is a law against suddenly stopping on a public road for no reason other than some vague memory than one had to in the past.
What is evil one day is mandatory the next.
Now, I know what some readers are thinking: here we go with the libertarian wacko complaining about the "coercion" of stop signs. For decades, conservatives have been poking fun, caricaturing libertarians as people who rail against stop signs and thereby reveal their personal problem with authority—even such obviously justified authority as government stop signs.
Don't we understand that these keep us safe, and so surely we should be willing to give up just a bit of license to speed around with abandon in the interest of the common good?
Even now, a quick google of "libertarians" and "stop signs" reveals many people on the Left and the Right who think it is just stupidly hilarious that libertarians talk about these issues.
As a matter of fact, the management of the roads is a hugely important issue, given that tens of thousands of people die on government roads every year. Private ownership would in fact lead to greater liability for the road owner — and also more rational rules of the road. The private road would be devoted to serving the customers, not looting them at the point of a gun. And not only are private roads viable; there is a long history and a present practice to draw on.
Walter Block's new book on road privatization makes the case that this is not an issue to ignore but one to solve through free enterprise.
In some ways, then, it is true that the stop sign — as with every regulation by the state — embodies all that is wrong with the public sector. The rules are made to benefit the state. You are on the hot seat if any policeman says that you have done wrong. The pretense of a fair trial is a complete farce, as you have to tangle with judges who hate you, waste several days of work, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Once you are entangled in the web, you can't really get out.
And who makes the rules? The central planners make the rules, and the public be damned. The rules are there to serve the state, not us, and the stop sign that is oddly placed in order to extract revenue makes the point very well.
When you are stopped, you become aware that the imbalance between the citizens and the state couldn't be more obvious. Deliver an insult and you are arrested. Try to run and you are gunned down. Fail to pay and you end up in the slammer. And maybe the cop will find something else about your life to be suspicious of. Whatever they want to know, you must tell them.
Government is not reason; it is force. What was the actual social rationale for that stop sign in the first place? You dare not ask, for then you are questioning the elites who are in charge of your life. And why was it removed? It's not for you to question why; it is for you to do or die. It was there and now it is gone. All "law-abiding citizens" must change with the arbitrary dictate of the traffic masters.
Now, I'm not saying that we don't need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?
Something as seemingly innocuous as a stop sign can become the occasion for the use of terrible violence and terrible oppression. And think about it: we are talking about local government that is especially sensitive to public opinion. If we see corruption here, what about at the national level, where the citizens are nothing but an abstraction?
So, no, I have no problem with making the stop sign a symbol of the fight. It shows that even the least objectionable aspects of the state can mask despotism and that we should think hard — very hard — before ever ceding control of even the smallest parts of life to the state.
Ultimately, the state is in control or we are.
There is nothing in between.
Let me begin with a few words about society. Why is there society? Why do people cooperate? Why is there peaceful cooperation rather than permanent war among mankind? Austrians, and in particular Misesians, emphasize the fact that we do not need to assume anything like sympathy or love for other people in order to explain this. Self-interest—that is, to prefer more over less—is entirely sufficient to explain this phenomenon of cooperation. Men cooperate because they are able to recognize that production under division of labor is more productive than self-sufficient isolation. Imagine just that we would withdraw from division of labor, and you would immediately recognize that we would be desperately poor and most of mankind would immediately die out.
Note one important thing here, and I’ll come back to this. What this explanation implies and what it does not imply: It does not imply of course that there will be always and without any exception or disturbance nothing but peace among men. There are always robbers and murderers around, and every society somehow has to deal with these types. But what it does imply is that the Hobbesian account of the emergence of peaceful cooperation is fundamentally misconceived.
Thomas Hobbes assumed that people would be permanently at each others throats if it were not for some independent third party—that is the State of course—to make peace among them. Now, you notice immediately what kind of curious construction this. People are assumed to be bad wolves, and they can be turned into sheep if another third wolf is made to rule above them. If this third party is also a wolf, as obviously he must be, then even if he can make peace between two individuals, this obviously implies that there would be a permanent war between the ruling wolf and the two wolves that are now peacefully cooperating with each other.
What this implies is something of great importance. There must be no State, or there must be no independent third party, in order to have cooperation between two individuals. Which you can also recognize immediately if you just look, for instance, at the international scenery. There exists no such thing as a world government—at least not yet—and still, people of different countries still cooperate peacefully with each other. Or, even out of the greatest social chaos, cooperation always emerges again.
What this boils down to is simply that peaceful cooperation between humans is a perfectly natural and constantly reemerging phenomenon; and out of this cooperation then, and equally naturally, and equally driven by self-interest, comes capital formation, and money, the medium of exchange, and then the division of labor ultimately expands to the entire globe, and likewise money, commodity money, also becomes a worldwide used commodity money. Material living standards increase for everyone, and based on higher material living standards, an ever more elaborate superstructure of non-material goods, that is civilization—science, arts, literature, and so forth—can be developed and maintained.
How should anarcho-capitalists engage the modern state? Hans-Hermann Hoppe dissects the nature of the modern democratic state and suggests strategies for enacting a bottom-up libertarian revolution in ideology and civil government.
Hoppe begins by examining the nature of the state as “a monopolist of defense and the provision and enforcement of law and order.” Like all state-mandated monopolies, the monopoly of law enforcement also leads to higher prices and lower quality of services. Why is this state of affairs tolerated? The modern democratic states, much more than the monarchies and princely estates of old, are seen as moral and necessary despite ample evidence to the contrary.
In the minds of most modern citizens of democratic states, law and order is what the state says it is, and this has led to a long period of centralization and power consolidation by those states.
How can the libertarian fight back against this trend? Hoppe offers a program that can pave the way for a new libertarian society.
The problem up to 1914 was comparatively small and the possible solution was comparatively easy then; and today as we will see, matters are more difficult and the solution is far more complicated. By mid-19th century, in Europe as well as in the United States, not only was the degree of political centralization far less pronounced than it is now; the Southern War of Independence had not yet taken place, and neither Germany nor Italy existed as unified States.
But in particular, the age of mass democracy had hardly begun at this time. In Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon, countries were still ruled by kings and princes, and elections and parliaments played little roles and were in addition restricted to extremely small numbers of major property owners. Similarly, in the United States, government was run by small aristocratic elites, and the vote was restricted by severe property requirements. After all, only those people who have something to be protected should be running those agencies that do the protection.
One hundred and fifty or even one hundred years ago, only the following thing was essentially necessary in order to solve the problem. It would have been necessary only to force the king to declare that from now on, every citizen would be free to choose his own protector, and pledge allegiance to any government that he wanted. That is, the king would no longer presume to be anyone’s protector, unless this person had asked him, and met his prize that the king would have asked for such service.
Now what would have happened in this case? What would have happened, let’s say, if the Austrian emperor had made such a declaration in 1900? Let me try to give a brief sketch or scenario of what I think would likely have happened in this situation.
First, everyone, upon this declaration, would have regained his unrestricted right to self-defense, and would have been free to decide if he wanted more or better protection than that afforded by self-defense, and if so, where and from whom to secure this protection. Most people in this situation undoubtedly would have chosen to take advantage of the division of labor, and rely, in addition to self-defense, also on specialized protectors.
Second, on the lookout for protectors, almost everyone would have looked to persons or agencies who own or are able to acquire the means to assure the task of protection—that is, who have themselves a stake in the to-be protected territory in the form of substantial property holdings—and who possess an established reputation as reliable, prudent, honorable, and just.
It is safe to say that no one would have considered an elected parliament up to this task. Instead, almost everyone would have turned for help to one or more of three places: either the king himself, who is now no longer a monopolist; or a regional or local noble, magnate, or aristocrat; or a regional, national, or even international operating insurance company.
Obviously, the king himself would fulfill these requirements that I just mentioned, and many people would have voluntarily chosen him as their protector. At the same time, however, many people also would have seceded from the king; of these, a large proportion would have likely turned to various regional nobles or magnates, who are now natural instead of hereditary nobility. And on a smaller territorial scale these local nobles would be able to offer the same advantages as protectors as the king himself would be able to offer. And this shift to regional protectors would bring about a significant decentralization in the organization and structure of the security industry. And this decentralization would only be reflective of, and in accordance with, private or subjective protection interests—that is, the centralization tendency that I mentioned before has also led to an overcentralization of the protection business.
Lastly, nearly everyone else, especially in the cities, would have turned for protection to commercial insurance companies, such as fire insurers. Insurance and private property protection are obviously very closely related matters. Better protection leads to lower insurance payoffs. And by insurers entering the protection market, quickly protection contracts, rather than unspecified promises, would have become the standard product form in which protection would have been offered.
Further, by virtue of the nature of insurance, the competition and cooperation between various protection insurers would promote the development of universal rules of procedure, evidence, conflict resolution, and arbitration. As well, it would promote the simultaneous homogenization and dehomogenization of the population into various classes of individuals with different group risks regarding their property protection, and accordingly, different protection insurance premiums. All systematic and predictable income and wealth redistribution between different groups within the population as it existed under monopolistic conditions would be immediately eliminated. And this would of course make for peace.
Most importantly, the nature of protection and defense would have been fundamentally altered. Under monopolistic conditions, there is only one protector; whether it is monarchical or democratic makes no difference in this respect, a government is invariably conceived of as defending and protecting a fixed and contiguous territory. Yet this feature is the outcome of a compulsory protection monopoly. With the abolition of a monopoly, this feature would immediately disappear as highly unnatural or even artificial. There might have been a few local protectors who defended just one contiguous territory. But there would have also been other protectors, such as the king or insurance agencies, whose protection territory consisted of widespread patchworks of discontiguous bits and pieces and stretches. And the “borders” of every government would be in constant flux. In cities in particular, it would not be more unusual for two neighbors to have different protection agencies, than it is to have different fire insurers.
This patchwork structure of protection and defense improves protection. Monopolistic, contiguous defense presumes that the security interests of the entire population living in a given territory are somehow homogeneous. That is, that all people in a given territory have the same sort of defense interests. But this is a highly unrealistic and actually untrue assumption. Actually, peoples’ security needs are highly heterogeneous. People may just own property in one location, or numerous territorially widely dispersed locations, or they may be largely self-sufficient, or only dependent on a very few people in their economic dealings; or on the other hand, they may be deeply integrated into the market and dependent economically on thousands and thousands of people strewn out over large territories.
The patchwork structure of the security industry would merely reflect this reality of highly diversified security needs that exist for various people. As well, this structure would in turn stimulate the development of a corresponding protective weaponry. Rather than producing and developing weapons and instruments of large scale bombing, instruments would be developed for protecting small-scale territories without collateral damage.
In addition, because all interregional redistribution of income and wealth would be eliminated in a competitive system, the patchwork structure would also offer the best assurance of interterritorial peace. The likelihood and the extent of interterritorial conflict would be reduced if there are patchworks. And because every foreign invader, so to speak, would almost instantly, even if he invaded only a small piece of land, run into the opposition and military and economic counterattacks by several independent protecting agencies, likewise the danger of foreign invasions would be reduced.
Indirectly, it is already clear at least partially how and why it has become so much more difficult to reach this solution in the course of the last one hundred and fifty years. Let me point out some of the fundamental changes that have occurred which make all of these problems far bigger. First, it is no longer possible to carry out the reforms from the top-down. Classical liberals, during the old monarchical days, could and did in fact frequently think and could actually realistically believe in simply converting the king to their view, and ask him to abdicate his power, and everything else would have almost automatically fallen into place.
Today, the State’s protection monopoly is considered public instead of private property, and government rule is no longer tied to any particular individual, but to specified functions, exercised by unnamed or anonymous individuals as members of a democratic government. Hence, the one or few man conversion strategy does no longer work. It doesn’t matter if one converts a few top government officials—the president and a handful of senators—because, within the rules of democratic government, no single individual has the personal power of abdicating the government’s monopoly of protection. Kings had this power; presidents don’t.
The president can only resign from his position, only to be taken over by someone else. But he cannot dissolve the government protection monopoly, because supposedly the people own the government, and not the president himself. Under democratic rule then, the abolition of the government’s monopoly of justice and protection requires either that a majority of the public and of their elected representatives would have to declare the government’s protection monopoly and accordingly all compulsory taxes abolished, or even more restrictive, that literally no one would vote and the voter turnout would be zero. Only in this case could the democratic protection monopoly be said to be effectively abolished. But this would essentially mean that it was impossible to ever rid ourselves of an economic and moral perversion. Because nowadays it is a given that everyone, including the mob, does participate in politics, and it is inconceivable, that the mob should ever, in its majority or even in its entirety, should renounce or abstain from exercising its right to vote, which is nothing else than exercising the opportunity to loot the property of others.
Moreover, even if one assumes against all odds that this was achieved, the problems do not end. Because another fundamental sociological truth in the age of modern egalitarian mass democracy is the almost complete destruction of natural elites. The king could abdicate his monopoly and the security needs of the public still would have been almost automatically been taken care of because there existed for mostly the king himself, and also regional and local nobles and major entrepreneurial personalities, a clearly visible and established natural, voluntarily acknowledged elite and a multilayered structure of hierarchies, and rank orders to which people could turn with their desire to be protected.
At last to the detailed explanation of the meaning of this bottom-up revolutionary strategy. For this, let me turn to my earlier remarks about the defensive use of democracy, that is, the use of democratic means for non-democratic, libertarian pro-private property ends. Two preliminary insights I have already reached here.
First, from the impossibility of a top-down strategy, it follows that one should expend little or no energy, time, and money on nationwide political contests, such as presidential elections. And also not on contests for central government, in particular, less effort on senatorial races than on house races, for instance.
Second, from the insight into the role of intellectuals, in the preservation of the current system, the current protection racket, it follows that one should likewise expend little or no energy, time, or money trying to reform education and academia from the inside. By endowing free enterprise or private property chairs within the established university system, for instance, one only helps to lend legitimacy to the very idea that one wishes to oppose. The official education and research institutions must be systematically defunded and dried up. And to do so all support of intellectual work, as an essential task of this overall task in front of us, should of course be given to institutions and centers determined to do precisely this.
The reasons for both of these pieces of advice are straightforward: Neither the population as a whole nor all educators and intellectuals in particular are ideologically completely homogeneous. And even if it is impossible to win a majority for a decidedly anti-democratic platform on a nationwide scale, there appears to be no insurmountable difficulty in winning such a majority in sufficiently small districts, and for local or regional functions within the overall democratic government structure. In fact, there seems to be nothing unrealistic in assuming that such majorities exist at thousands of locations. That is, locations dispersed all over the country but not evenly dispersed. Likewise, even though the intellectual class must be by and large regarded as natural enemies of justice and protection, there exists at various locations isolated anti-intellectual intellectuals, and as the Mises Institute proves, it is very well possible to assemble these isolated figures around an intellectual center, and give them unity and strength, and a national or even an international audience.
But what then? Everything else falls almost automatically from the ultimate goal, which must be kept permanently in mind, in all of one’s activities: the restoration from the bottom-up of private property and the right to property protection; the right to self-defense, to exclude or include, and to freedom of contract. And the answer can be broken down into two parts.
First, what to do within these very small districts, where a pro-private property candidate and anti-majoritarian personality can win. And second, how to deal with the higher levels of government, and especially with the central federal government. First, as an initial step, and I’m referring now to what should be done on the local level, the first central plank of one’s platform should be: one must attempt to restrict the right to vote on local taxes, in particular on property taxes and regulations, to property and real estate owners. Only property owners must be permitted to vote, and their vote is not equal, but in accordance with the value of the equity owned, and the amount of taxes paid. That is, similar to what Lew Rockwell already explained has happened in some places in California.
Further, all public employees—teachers, judges, policemen—and all welfare recipients, must be excluded from voting on local taxes and local regulation matters. These people are being paid out of taxes and should have no say whatsoever how high these taxes are. With this platform one cannot of course win everywhere; you cannot win in Washington, D.C. with a platform like this. but I dare say that in many locations this can be easily done. The locations have to be small enough and have to have a good number of decent people.
Consequently, local taxes and rates as well as local tax revenue will inevitably decrease. Property values and most local incomes would increase whereas the number and payment of public employees would fall. Now, and this is the most decisive step, the following thing must be done, and always keep in mind that I am talking about very small territorial districts, villages.
In this government funding crisis which breaks out once the right to vote has been taken away from the mob, as a way out of this crisis, all local government assets must be privatized. An inventory of all public buildings, and on the local level that is not that much—schools, fire, police station, courthouses, roads, and so forth—and then property shares or stock should be distributed to the local private property owners in accordance with the total lifetime amount of taxes—property taxes—that these people have paid. After all, it is theirs, they paid for these things.
These shares should be freely tradeable, sold and bought, and with this local government would essentially be abolished. If it were not for the continued existence of higher superior levels of government, this village or city would now be a free or liberated territory. What would consequently happen to education and more importantly, what would happen to property protection and justice?
On the small local level, we can be as certain, or even more so than we could have been one hundred years ago about what would have happened if the king abdicated, that what would happen is roughly this: all material resources that were previously devoted to these functions—schools, police stations, courthouses—still exist, and so does the manpower. The only difference is that they are now privately owned, or temporarily unemployed in the case of public employees. Under the realistic assumption that there continues to be a local demand for education and protection and justice, the schools, police stations, and courthouses will be still used for the very same purposes. And many former teachers, policemen and judges would be rehired or resume their former position on their own account as self-employed individuals, except that they would be operated or employed by local “bigshots” or elites who own these things, all of whom are personally known figures. Either as for-profit enterprises, or as, and what seems to be more likely, some mixture of charitable and economic organization. Local “bigshots” frequently provide public goods out of their own private pocket; and they obviously have the greatest interest in the preservation of local justice and peace.
And this is all easy enough to see to work for schools and policemen, but what about judges and justice? Recall that the root of all evil is compulsory monopolization of justice, that is one person says this is right. Accordingly judges must be freely financed, and free entry into judgeship positions must be assured. Judges are not elected by vote, but chosen by the effective demand of justice seekers. Also don’t forget that on the small local level under consideration, one is talking actually about a demand for one or very few judges only. Whether this or these judges are then employed by the private courthouse association or stock company, or are self-employed individuals who rent these facilities or offices, it should be clear that only a handful of local people, and only widely known and respected local personalities—that is, members of the natural local elite—would have any chance whatsoever of being so selected as judges of local peace.
Only as members of the natural elite will their decision possess any authority and become enforceable. And if they come up with judgments that are considered to be ridiculous, they will be immediately displaced by other local authorities that are more respectable. If you proceed along these lines on the local level, of course it cannot be avoided that one will come into direct conflict with the upper and especially the federal level of government power. How to deal with this problem? Wouldn’t the federales simply crush any such attempt?
They would surely like to, but whether or not they can actually do so is an entirely different question, and to recognize this, it is only necessary to recognize that the members of the governmental apparatus always represent, even under conditions of democracy, merely a teeny proportion of the total population. And even smaller is the proportion of central government employees.
This implies that a central government cannot possibly enforce its legislative will, or perverted law, upon the entire population unless it finds widespread local support and cooperation in doing so. This becomes particularly obvious if one imagines a large number of free cities or villages as I described them before. It is practically impossible, manpower-wise, as well as from a public relations standpoint, to take over thousands of territorially widely dispersed localities and impose direct federal rule on them.
Without local enforcement, by compliant local authorities, the will of the central government is not much more than hot air. Yet this local support and cooperation is precisely what needs to be missing. To be sure, so long as the number of liberated communities is still small, matters seem to be somewhat dangerous. However, even during this initial phase in the liberation struggle, one can be quite confident.
It would appear to be prudent during this phase to avoid a direct confrontation with the central government and not openly denounce its authority or even abjure the realm. Rather, it seems advisable to engage in a policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation. One simply stops to help in the enforcement in each and every federal law. One assumes the following attitude: “Such are your rules, and you enforce them. I cannot hinder you, but I will not help you either, as my only obligation is to my local constituents.”
Consistently applied, no cooperation, no assistance whatsoever on any level, the central government’s power would be severely diminished or even evaporate. And in light of the general public opinion, it would appear highly unlikely that the federal government would dare to occupy a territory whose inhabitants did nothing else than trying to mind their own business. Waco, a teeny group of freaks, is one thing. But to occupy, or to wipe out a significantly large group of normal, accomplished, upstanding citizens is quite another, and quite a more difficult thing.
Once the number of implicitly seceded territories has reached a critical mass, and every success in one little location promotes and feeds on the next one, it will become inevitably further radicalized to a nationwide, municipalization movement, with explicitly secessionist local policies and openly and contemptuously displayed non-compliance with federal authority.
And it is in this situation then, when the central government will be forced to abdicate its protection monopoly and the relationship between the local authorities that reemerge and the central authorities, who are about to lose their power, can be put on a purely contractual level, and one might regain the power to defend one’s own property again.
Now, once the protection monopoly is in place, a logic of its own is set in motion. Every monopolist takes advantage of his position. The price of protection will go up, and more importantly, the content of the law, that is the product quality, will be altered to the advantage of the monopolist and at the expense of others. Justice will be perverted, and the protector becomes increasingly an exploiter and an expropriator. More specifically, as the result of the territorial monopolization of protection, two tendencies are generated. First, a tendency towards the extensification of exploitation, and second, a tendency towards the intensification of exploitation.
Originally local institutions, States have an inherent tendency, driven by self-interest, of wanting more income rather than less—toward territorial expansion. The more subjects a State protects—or rather exploits—the better it is. The competition between States—that is, territorial monopolists—is an eliminative competition: either I am the monopolist or you are the monopolist of ripping people off.
Moreover, with numerous States, people can easily move with their feet. However, a loss of population from the point of view of the State, is a bothersome problem. Hence, States almost automatically come into conflict with each other, and one way of solving this conflict, from a statist viewpoint, is territorial expansion: either by means of war or intermarriage, and sometimes by outright purchase. Ultimately, this tendency would come to a halt only with the establishment of a one-world single state.
The second tendency is the intensification of exploitation. Extensifying exploitation—ripping people off—of a State monopoly, implies in and of itself an intensification, because the smaller the number of competing states—that is, the larger the State territories become—the less are the opportunities of voting with one’s feet. And under the scenario of a world State, wherever one goes, the tax and regulation structure is the same. That is, with the threat of immigration gone, monopolistic exploitation will naturally increase—that is to say, the price of protection will rise, and the quality will fall.
Lecture given at "The Bankruptcy of American Politics" conference, sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Newport Beach, California; January 24-25, 1997. An audio version of this talk is available here.
A slightly more appropriate titleVladimir Lenin in 1902 titled a book What is to be Done? (or What Must Be Done) which describes his plans to bring Communism to Russia. Hoppe uses the same title to describe his plans to bring Libertarianism to American society. would be “Society, State, and Liberty: The Austro-Libertarian Strategy of Social Revolution.” So I want to step up things a little bit after all these moderate talks that you have heard before. I want to end with some rather concrete strategic advice, but in order to give this first I have to diagnose what the problem is otherwise the cure might be worse than the disease. And this diagnosis involves some sort of systematic reconstruction or theoretical explanation of human history.
But something can and obviously has happened that disrupts and distorts or even derails this normal, self-interest driven development. And this is of course the State, which I will define initially, rather abstractly, as a compulsorily-funded territorial monopolist of protection. That is, a monopolist of defense and the provision and enforcement of law and order.
Now how does a State originate? While this is generally, and I think intentionally, confused, it should be made clear right from the outset that law and order, or protection of property, and State law, and State order, and State protection are not one and the same thing; they are not identical things. Just as property and social cooperation based on the division of labor are natural, so the human desire to have one’s property protected against natural and social disasters, such as crime, is a completely natural desire. And in order to satisfy this desire, there is first and foremost self-protection. Precaution, insurance (individual or cooperative), vigilance, self-defense, and punishment.
And let there be absolutely no doubt as to the effectiveness of a protection system based on peoples willingness to defend themselves. This is how law and order was maintained for most of the time for most of mankind. In every village, even up to this day, law and order is basically maintained in this way. The American Wild West, which was not exactly “wild” as compared to the current situation, that’s the way law and order was maintained, by people being willing to defend themselves.
Moreover, the division of labor will then naturally affect the production of security and protection services. The higher standards of living grow, the more people will, besides relying on self-defense measures, also want to partake in the advantages of the division of labor, and attach themselves for protection to a specializes protector, to providers of law and order, justice, and protection. And naturally, every person will look for this particular task to persons or institutions who have something to protect themselves—who have the means to assure effective protection and have a reputation as just and impartial judges. In every society of more than the most minimal degree of complexity, there will quickly emerge specific individuals, who on account of having property to defend, having a good reputation and so forth, will assume the role of judges and peacemakers and protectors. And again, every single village up to this day, every small community, and even the Wild West of course, illustrate the truth of this conclusion.
Protection is also possible without a State. This should be absolutely obvious, but in an age of statist obfuscation and confusion, it is increasingly necessary to emphasize this elementary and yet as we will see, very dangerous insight. The decisive step in diverting human history from its natural course—the original sin of mankind, so to speak—occurs with the monopolization of the provision of protection, defense, security, and order: the monopolization of these tasks by a single one of these initially numerous protectors at the exclusion of all others. A protection monopoly exists once a single agency or a single person can effectively insist that everyone on a given territory must exclusively come to him for justice and protection. That is, that no one can rely exclusively or solely on self-defense, or attach himself for protection to somebody else. Once this monopoly is reached, then funding of this protector is no longer entirely voluntary, but in part becomes compulsory.
And, as standard Austrian economics predicts, once there is no longer free entry into the business of property protection, or any other business for that matter, the price of protection will rise, and the quality of protection will fall. The monopolist will become increasingly less of a protector of our property, and increasingly more a protection racket, or even a systematic exploiter of property owners. He will become an aggressor against and a destroyer of the people and their property that he was initially supposed to protect.
Now what is easily described in abstract terms (monopoly) is in practice a painstaking and lengthy task. How can anyone get away with barring all other protectors from competition? And why would the people and especially the excluded other potential peacemakers and judges allow such a thing to happen, that one individual monopolizes this service? Now the answer regarding the original of the State is in detail very complicated, but in its general structure is very easy to recognize.
First, every state, that is every monopolistic protection agency, must begin, or can only originate on an extremely small territorial level, such as a village. It is practically inconceivable that a world State, or a protection monopoly encompassing the entire world population could come into existence from scratch.
The second thing we have to notice is that not just anyone become a local protection monopoly. Rather, the local protection monopolists are initially members of the natural social elite. That is, they are initially accomplished and acknowledged members of society. They were also, before they reached the position of a monopolist, previously chosen voluntarily as protectors. Only as established and recognized elites, whose authority is essentially voluntary, is it possible for them to make this decisive step toward monopolization and get away with it.
That is to say, every initial local government or state originates in the form of personal or private lordships or of princely rule. No one would entrust just anyone with the maintenance of law, order, and justice, and in particular if this person or agency had a monopoly for this particular task. Instead, people would look for protection obviously from someone known, and known to be a knowledgeable person, and only such a person, a noble or an aristocrat, can possibly attain a monopoly position initially.
Historically, by the way, if one looks at modern or ancient history, States everywhere are basically first princely States, and only later do they become democratic States. And even though it is true that States must begin only locally and usually as princely States, it still took hundreds of years before anything resembling the modern State came into existence.
At this moment, let me simply take stock. Here we are at the end of the 20th century, closer than ever to the end-state of a one-world State, at least closer than ever before in history. The United States is the sole superpower and the world’s top cop. At the same time, democracy has become almost universal, and the world’s leading power, the United States, is the world’s leading champion of democracy.
Some neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama pointed out that this must be the end of history. One world democracy, we almost reached it. Now, from an Austro-libertarian point of view, matters look somewhat different. Under highly centralized democracy, or let me call it highly centralized mob rule, the security of private property has almost completely disappeared. The price of protection is enormous, and the quality of justice dispensed has gone downhill constantly. It has deteriorated to the point where the idea of immutable laws of justice, of natural law, has almost entirely disappeared from public consciousness. Law is considered nothing but State-made law—positive law. Law and justice is whatever the State says it is. There is still private property in name, but in practice private property owners have been almost completely expropriated. Rather than protecting people from invaders and invasions of person and property, the State has increasingly disarmed its own people, and stripped them of their most elementary right to self-defense.
Moreover, private property owners are no longer free to include or exclude other people from their property as they see fit. This is the right to include if you want, or exclude if you want, is an essential ingredient of private property. And this entails a defense mechanism; it is an anti-invasion method that you can kick people off your property. But this right to kick people off your property, especially commercial property, has been entirely taken away from you. And with this right gone—and no one can today hire or fire, buy or sell, include or exclude from his property at will—with all of this gone, is also another method of defending oneself from invasion.
The State, which was supposed to protect us, has in fact rendered us completely helpless. It robs its subjects of more than half their income, to be distributed according to public sentiment, rather than according to principles of justice. It subjects our property to thousands of arbitrary and invasive regulations. We can no longer freely hire and fire whoever we want, for whatever reason we deem good and necessary. We cannot sell or buy whatever we want, to whoever we want, and wherever we want. We cannot charge prices freely as we wish, we cannot associate and disassociate, separate ourselves with whoever we want, or with whoever we do not want.
Instead of protecting us, then, the State has delivered us and our property to the mob and mob instincts. Instead of safeguarding us, it impoverishes us, it destroys our families, local organizations, private foundations, clubs and associations, by drawing all of them increasingly into its own orbit. And as a result of all of this, the State has perverted the public sense of justice and of personal responsibility, and bred and attracted an increasing number of moral and economic monsters and monstrosities.
Today, after less than one century of mass democracy, there exists no such natural elites and social hierarchies to which one could immediately turn for protection. Natural elites and hierarchical social orders and organizations, that is people and institutions commanding an authority and respect independent of the State, are even more intolerable and unacceptable to a democrat and more incompatible with the democratic spirit of egalitarianism than they were a threat to any king or to any prince. And because of that, under the democratic rules of the game, all independent authorities, all independent institutions have been systematically wiped or diminished through economic measures to insignificance. Today, no one person or institution outside of government itself possesses genuine national or even regional authority. Rather than people of independent authority we now merely have an abundance of people who are prominent: sports and movie stars, pop stars, and of course politicians. But these people, while they may be able to set trends and shape fashions, do not possess any such thing as natural personal social authority.
This is true in particular of politicians: they may be great stars now, every day they are on TV and the subject of public debate, but this is almost entirely due to the fact that they are a part of the current State apparatus with its monopolistic powers. Once this monopoly was dissolved, these “stars” of politics would become non-entities, because in real life they are mostly nothings, hacks, and half-wits. And only democracy allows them to rise to these elevated positions. Left to their own devices, left to their own personal achievements, they are, with almost no exception, complete nobodies. Put bluntly, once the democratic government—Congress—had declared that from now on everyone would be free to choose his own judge and protector, such that he still can but no longer must choose the government for protection, who in his right mind would ever choose them?! That is, the current members of Congress and the federal government: who would choose them voluntarily as their judge and protector?! To raise this question is to answer it. Kings and princes possessed real authority; there was coercion involved, no question whatsoever, but they received a significant amount of voluntary support.
In contrast, democratic politicians are generally held in contempt, even by their own mob constituency. But then there is also no one else to whom one might turn for protection. Local and regional politicians are basically posing the same sort of problem, and with the abolition of their monopoly powers, they obviously do not offer an attractive alternative to this problem either. Nor are there any great entrepreneurial personalities standing in the wings, and insurance companies in particular, have become almost entirely creatures of the egalitarian democratic state, and thus appear as little trustworthy as anybody else to take over this particularly important task of protection and justice.
Thus, if one did today what the king could have done a hundred years ago, there would be the immediate danger of having in fact social chaos, or of “anarchy” in the bad sense. People would indeed at least temporarily become highly vulnerable and defenseless. So then the question becomes: is there no way out? Let me sum up the answer in advance: Yes, but rather than by means of the top-down reform, one’s strategy must now be that of a bottom-up revolution. And instead of one battle, on a single front, a liberal-libertarian revolution now will have to involve many battles on many fronts. That is, we want guerrilla warfare rather than conventional warfare.
How can the State and the statist disease be stopped? Now I will come to my strategic considerations. First off, three fundamental insights or guiding principles must be recognized. First: that the protection of private property and of law, justice, and law enforcement, is essential to any human society. But there is no reason whatsoever why this task must be taken on by one single agency, by a monopolist. As a matter of fact, it is precisely the case that as soon as you have a monopolist taking on this task, he will with necessity destroy justice and render us defenseless against foreign as well as domestic invaders and aggressors.
It is then one’s ultimate goal which one has to keep in mind is the demonopolization of protection and justice. Protection, security, defense, law, order, and arbitration in conflicts can and must be supplied competitively—that is, entry into the field of being a judge must be free.
Second, because a monopoly of protection is the root of all evil, any territorial expansion of such a monopoly is per se evil too. Every political centralization must be on principle grounds rejected. In turn, every attempt at political decentralization—segregation, separation, secession and so forth—must be supported.
The third basic insight is that a democratic protection monopoly in particular must be rejected as a moral and economic perversity. Majority rule and private property protection are incompatible. The idea of democracy must be ridiculed: it is nothing else but mob rule parading as justice. To be labeled a democrat must be considered the worst of all possible compliments! This does not mean that one may not participate in democratic policies; I will come to that a little bit later.
But one must use democratic means only for defensive purposes; that is, one may use an anti-democratic platform to be elected by an anti-democratic constituency to implement anti-democratic—that is, anti-egalitarian and pro-private property—policies. Or, to put it differently, a person is not honorable because he is democratically elected. If anything, this makes him a suspect. Despite the fact that a person has been elected democratically, he may still be a decent and honorable man; we have heard one before.
From these principles we now come to the problem of application. The basic insights—that is: monopolized protection, a State, will inevitably become an aggressor and lead to defenselessness; and political centralization and democracy are means of extensifying and intensifying exploitation and aggression—while these basic insights give us a general direction in the goal, they are obviously not yet sufficient to define our actions and tell us how to get there.
How can the goal of demonopolized protection and justice possibly be implemented given the present circumstances of centralized—almost world democracy—as at least temporarily our starting point from which we have to begin. Let me try to develop an answer to this question by elaborating first in what respect the problem, and also the solution to it, has changed in the course of the last 150 years—that is, since around the middle of the 19th century.
Before explaining this answer as another step in the direction of this goal, a second sociological fact has to be recognized: the change of the role of intellectuals, of education, and of ideology. As soon as the protection agency becomes a territorial monopolist—that is, a State—it is turned from a genuine protector into a protection racket. And in light of resistance on the part of the victims of this protection racket, a State is in need of legitimacy, of intellectual justification for what it does. The more the State turns from a protector to a protection racket—that is, with every additional increase in taxes and regulation—the greater does this need for legitimacy become.
In order to assure correct statist thinking, a protection monopolist will employ its privileged position as the protection racket to quickly establish an education monopoly. Even during the 19th century under decidedly undemocratic monarchical conditions, education, at least on the level of elementary schooling and university education, was already largely monopolistically organized and compulsorily funded. And it was largely from the ranks of the royal government teachers and professors, that is, those people who had been employed as intellectual bodyguards of kings and princes, from where the monarchical rule and the privileges of kings and nobles was ideologically undermined and instead egalitarian ideas were promoted, in the form of democracy and socialism.
This was with good reason from the point of view of the intellectuals. Because democracy and socialism in fact multiply the number of educators and intellectuals, and this expansion of the system of government public education in turn has led to an ever greater flood of intellectual waste and pollution. The price of education, as the price of protection and justice, has gone up dramatically under monopolistic administration, all the while the quality of education, just as the quality of justice, has continuously declined. Today, we are as unprotected as we are uneducated.
Without the continued existence of the democratic system and of publicly funded education and research, however, most current teachers and intellectuals would be unemployed or their income would fall to a small fraction of its present level. Instead of researching the syntax of Ebonics, the love life of mosquitoes, or the relationship between poverty and crime for $100 grand a year, they would research the science of potato growing or the technology of gas pump operation for $20 grand.
The monopolized education system is by now as much of a problem as the monopolized protection and justice system. In fact, government education and research and development is the central instrument by which the State protects itself from public resistance. Today, intellectuals are as important or even more so, from the point of view of the government, for the preservation of the status quo, than are judges, policemen, and soldiers.
And just as one cannot convert the democratic system from the political top-down, so it also cannot be expected that this conversion will come down from within the established system of public education and public universities. This system cannot be reformed. It is impossible for liberal-libertarians to infiltrate and take over the public education system, as the democrats and socialists could when they replaced the monarchists.
From the point of view of classical liberalism, the entire system of publicly, or tax-funded education must go, root and branch. And with this conviction, it is obviously impossible for anyone to make a career within these conditions. I will not ever be able to become the president of the university. My views bar me from making a career like this. Now this is not to say that education and intellectuals do not play a role in bringing about a libertarian revolution. To the contrary, as I explained before, everything hinges ultimately on the question of whether or not we will succeed in delegitimizing and exposing as an economic and moral perversity, democracy and the democratic monopoly of justice and protection.
This is obviously nothing but an ideological battle. But it would be wrongheaded to assume that official academia will be of any help in this endeavor. On the government dole, educators and intellectuals will tend to be statists. Intellectual ammunition and ideological direction and coordination can only come from outside of established academia, from centers of intellectual resistance—from an intellectual counterculture outside and independent of, and in fundamental opposition to the government monopoly of protection as well as of education, such as the Mises Institute.
However, even apart from this, as soon as a protection monopoly exists, for any given sized territory, the monopolist will try to intensify his exploitation and increase his income and wealth at the expense of the protected subjects to the maximum extent possible. As long as the monopoly is held by a single person, like a prince or a king, and especially when it is a hereditary monopoly, then it is in the monopolist’s interest, because he owns the monopoly and the capital value of it, to preserve the value of his property. He will exploit little today in order to exploit more tomorrow.
Popular resistance against expansion of State power will be very high if there is a single person in charge because there is obviously no free entry into the State apparatus, and the benefits of the monopoly accrue to a single man and his extended family—that is, the hereditary nobility. Accordingly, the public resentment and vigilance is heightened, and attempts to intensify exploitation find quick and severe limitations. People hated the king because they realized that “he is the ruler and we are ruled by him.”
Predictably, a great push forward in the State’s desire for intensified exploitation occurred only in conjunction with the reform of the State—drawn out over centuries—from a princely to a democratic State. Under modern majoritarian democracy—that is, the type of State that came into full bloom after World War I on a world wide scale—the monopoly and exploitation do not disappear. Majoritarian democracy is not a system of self-rule and self-defense. State and people are not one and the same thing. With the substitution of an elected parliament and presidents for an unelected prince or king, protection remains as much a monopoly as it was before. What happens is only this: the territorial protection monopoly becomes now public rather than private property. Instead of a prince who regards it as his private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in charge of the protection racket. The caretaker does not own the protection racket. Instead, he is just allowed to use the current resources for his own advantage. He owns usufruct but he does not own the capital value. This does not eliminate the self-interest driven tendency toward increased exploitation. To the contrary, it only makes exploitation less rational and less calculating, and more shortsighted and more wasteful.
Moreover, because entry into a democratic government is open—everyone can become president—resistance against State property invasions is reduced. This leads to the same result: increasingly under democratic conditions, the worst will rise to the top of the State in free competition. Competition is not always good. Competition in the field of becoming the shrewdest aggressor against private property is nothing to be greeted. And this is precisely what democracy amounts to.
Princes and kings were dilettantes as rulers, and normally had a good measure of natural elite upbringing and value system so as to act often enough simply as a good household father would have done. Democratic politicians on the other hand, are and must be professional demagogues, constantly appealing to even the basest—and that is typically egalitarian instincts—as every vote is obviously as good as any other. And because publicly elected politicians are never held personally accountable for official public service, they are far more dangerous, from the viewpoint of those who want their property to be protected and want security, than any king has ever been.
If you combine these two tendencies that I mentioned, inherent in a State: intensification—exploiting the domestic population, and extensification; then you get a one-world democracy, with a one-world paper currency issued by a world central bank.
The glorious Barack Obama, broad-minded humanitarian universalist that he is, promised to reverse the wickedness of the Bush administration, which ran a prison camp in Guantánamo Bay and kept pictures of ruthless abuse from public view to save the face of BushBush the despot!
Obama the savior!
And sure enough, after taking office, Obama did something or other toward closing that prison camp just off our shores, along with its secret military trials and abuse. How the partisans cheered on one side and booed on the other.
Except that just the other day, Obama quietly reversed himself. Now the camps must stay. After all, there are real enemies there, the "worst of the worst." The trials will still be in secret. The military will still run them, because, you know, you just can't trust those civilian courts to arrive at the right verdict.
As for those pictures of abuse, Obama can't allow those to be seen. What were they thinking? Why, for our Islamic enemies to have access to those will only give them a weapon to whip up their countries in some sort of anti-US frenzy.
Is the idea that if we do not release those pictures that the Islamic world will come to believe that the prisoners in Guantánamo and other venues are treated decently, with three square meals per day, awaiting trial by jury?
Clearly the reason for blocking the photos is not to embarrass the US state with its own people. No surprise here: the state's interest is mainly in protecting itself. That's why it does what it does.
Of course the Republicans played their appointed role as guardians of the torture power and celebrated when Obama reversed his previous position and his campaign promise. Finally he is taking his responsibility as head of state.
But how is it possible that the great humanitarian universalist reversed himself at all, even against his own promises and even to the point that the ACLU is protesting?
Well, it is all about thinking like the state. It took his administration a bit to get the hang of it in international affairs but it was just a matter of applying the logic of his domestic program, which is all-controlling.
Think of it this way. Even if Obama wanted to be another way, wanted to bring a new sense of things to government, it is not difficult to slip into the role of a despot. That is, after all, the job he campaigned for years to get and the job he now holds.
Let's say you are a health geek who is dedicated to the proposition that Americans eat too much junk food. But then you are hired as the manager of the local doughnut shop. Your first day on the job you issue mild warnings to customers that they should go easy on the double-dozen purchases.
Everyone around you thinks you are out of your mind. It only takes a few days to realize that you are in fact crazy to talk this way. The more doughnuts people buy, the better off you are and the better off your employees are. You are working against your own success by promoting other forms of eating.
Of course you change your tune!
And would that the state were like a doughnut shop. As Butler Shaffer points out in his new book Boundaries of Order, which argues that the state is unviable in our times,
every political system is nothing more than a mechanism that allows some to benefit at the expense of the many through violent takings of property…. Politics is unthinkable without property trespasses and takings.
This is why "there are no fundamental differences among major political parties: at their core, each embraces the authority of the state to regulate how property will be owned and used."
The state is driven by its own internal interests, which can only be fulfilled at the expense of society. The state operates according to the principle of violence. Violence is the ultimate bargaining tool of the state. This is true in domestic and foreign relations, whether running a health program or a prison camp.
It is particularly telling that Obama cited the grave threat that these poor slobs — who are in Guantánamo because they dared fight against the interests of the Holy American Empire — represent to all of us. As Shaffer writes,
Because of our willingness to huddle at the feet of political officials whenever we feel ourselves threatened, the state will feed us an endless supply of fear-objects with which to assure our continuing submission. This is why the well-being of the state is dependent upon the war system.
This is how I can predict only muted protests from the Left concerning Obama's betrayal. So long as he continues to expand the state in the domestic area — inflating, taxing, regulating, nationalizing — they will put up with abuses of the human rights that they claim to champion.
Guantánamo is a metaphor. How those prisoners are treated is a mere foreshadowing of how we will all be treated under the total state.
[Deleting the State: An Argument about Government. By Aeon J. Skoble. Open Court, 2008. Viii + 129 pages.]
Aeon Skoble's excellent bookI ought to say that I was one of the two readers of the manuscript whom Skoble is kind enough to acknowledge (p. vii) and that I highly recommended it for publication. poses a fundamental challenge to minimal-state libertarians. All libertarians take freedom to be the highest political value and oppose coercion. Why, then, do some libertarians reject anarchism? Under anarchism, people freely choose their own protection agency; but the minarchist variety of libertarianism forbids them to do so, so long as they remain on the territory controlled by the minimal state. How can libertarians justify coercing people in this way?
Skoble finds the answer in what he calls the "Hobbesian Fear." Hobbes famously argued that people in a state of nature could not trust one another to keep agreements to refrain from force. In a state of perpetual war (including both actual fighting and readiness to fight) life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." To escape this fate, it would be rational for everyone to surrender his arms to a sovereign, who would then have the power to assure that people kept their agreements. In this circumstance, people could benefit from society. Hobbes did not welcome the loss of liberty as a good in itself, but he argued that only by the drastic surrender of liberty he specified could the peace be preserved.
Libertarians of course reject Hobbes's Leviathan. Nevertheless, Skoble thinks, minarchists in part embrace the Hobbesian Fear. They do not think that people, or the protection agencies that they designate to enforce their rights, would be able to come to peaceful agreement, in the absence of a monopoly state. Hence they think it necessary to allow more coercion than would be ideally desirable. No doubt it is bad that people cannot always be defended by the protection agency of their choice; but this sacrifice of freedom is necessary for the existence of society.
Has Skoble accurately diagnosed the motivations of minimal statists? He endeavors to support his contention through an analysis of three noted libertarian philosophers: Robert Nozick, Tibor Machan, and Jan Narveson. As Skoble points out, Narveson abandoned statism after the publication of The Libertarian Idea; and even there, he displayed considerable dissatisfaction with the state. Nevertheless, Skoble rightly thinks it important to examine the contractarian argument for the state presented in that book.
His account of Nozick seems to me not fully to have grasped the elusive argument of Part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Skoble maintains that Nozick favors the minimal state on grounds of efficiency. Competing protection agencies would fear preemptive attacks by other agencies. To prevent this outcome, a dominant agency would be justified in forcing everyone in the territory it controls to make use of its services. Not only could the dominant agency legitimately forbid competition; it could compel even those who would prefer a different agency to pay for its protective services.
Taken this way, Nozick's account makes use of just the Hobbesian Fear that Skoble has postulated. But Nozick does not say that the dominant agency can compel those who prefer other agencies to join it. Neither can it compel people to pay for its protective services. Further, although Nozick does discuss preemptive attacks, he does not at all assume that agencies will fear such attacks by other agencies.
Skoble himself quotes a passage from Nozick that appears to undermine his thesis.
[But we] have rebutted the charge we imagined earlier that our argument fails because it "proves" too much in that it provides a rationale not only for the permissible rise of a dominant protective association, but also for the association's forcing someone not to take his patronage elsewhere or for some person's forcing someone not to join any association. Our argument provides no rationale for the latter actions and cannot be used to defend them (p. 68, emphasis removed, quoting Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 129.)
Faced with this passage, how can Skoble maintain his interpretation of Nozick? He responds in this way:
If the argument does not provide a justification for the dominant protective association forbidding individuals from opting out, then Nozick has no argument for the state beyond that one could arise without violating anyone's rights. However, he views the development as more than simply a logical possibility … he must believe that no competitive set of such agencies could be fair and feasible. (pp. 68–9)
Skoble has allowed his conception of what a minimal statist must believe to govern his interpretation of Nozick. In Nozick's system, the dominant agency can successfully forbid other agencies from imposing risky decision procedures on its clients. Because in doing so it disadvantages these independents, it must provide them with low cost or free protective services. These features, in Nozick's view, suffice to make the dominant agency a minimal state. If Skoble does not agree that this is enough for a state, he may well be right; but that is Nozick's contention. He does not say, as Skoble thinks, that preservation of society necessitates rights-violating coercion.
Even if I am right about Nozick, though, does not Skoble still have a good point? The reason Nozick thinks that the dominant agency can prohibit risky decision procedures is that knowledge that these procedures may be applied evokes fear. Do we not have here a type of Hobbesian Fear?
But this is just the crucial point. In Skoble's framework, Hobbesian Fear leads libertarians to accept coercion they would otherwise deem unjustified. Nozick does not think this: he thinks that the dominant agency acts perfectly within its rights in forbidding risky decision procedures to its clients. Skoble, if I have understood him, thinks that the dominant agency can de facto shut down all competing agencies by declaring their decision procedures unacceptably risky. But this is not correct: the dominant agency cannot forbid other agencies from applying such procedures to nonclients. Nozick does not contend that agencies would be unable, without a minimal state, peacefully to resolve their differences about decision procedures: he thinks that they are under no obligation to do so. Skoble misses this when he says,
Do we have any reason to think that companies would seek this (co-operative) type of solution, rather than resorting to violent conflict? … Nozick can only rule out this possibility by appeal to a Hobbesian Fear. (p. 69)
Skoble's schema also does not fully fit Tibor Machan's argument. Machan does raise an objection to competing protection agencies that supports Skoble's analysis. Machan envisions a situation in which an agency convicts a client of another agency of a crime. What then happens? If Machan considers this a difficulty for anarchism, must he not think that the agencies would find it difficult, if not impossible, to reach agreement? If so, does he not favor a single protection agency in a given territory on grounds of efficiency, precisely as Skoble's model suggests?
Machan does indeed raise the problem of competing agencies, but he does not handle it in the way that Skoble's account would suggest. He does not argue that because competing agencies would find agreement difficult in this type of case, a monopoly state therefore may out of necessity restrict rights. Quite the contrary, his contention is that a protection agency of the type he supports violates no one's rights. It is not a matter of surrendering rights out of necessity, as Skoble would have it.
My objection to Skoble can be clarified if one considers how a supporter of Robert LeFevre might evoke the Hobbesian Fear against standard libertarian anarchism. He might claim that conventional anarchists allow the use or threat of force in defense of property. Such concessions to necessity, he would say, rest on a quasi-Hobbesian view that society could not function without such reliance on force. Only a system that renounces force altogether, as described e.g., in LeFevre's book This Bread Is Mine, qualifies as fully libertarian.
Would not the response of the standard anarchist be obvious? People who use force in the indicated circumstances have not violated any rights: the standard anarchist does not agree with LeFevre's contrary position. In like fashion, the minarchist does not, I suggest, normally view himself as compromising rights. He thinks that his system accords with rights. Skoble of course disagrees, and I think he is correct to do so; but, once more, it does not follow that, from his own point of view, the minarchist accepts violations of rights.
That said, Skoble's discussion of the Hobbesian Fear is of great value. Many people do dismiss libertarian anarchism just because they think that it would lead to chaos. Skoble argues that the Hobbesian Fear lacks adequate grounds: people can resolve disputes without a monopoly state.
Like many libertarians, Skoble adduces historical examples of societies without a state, Iceland, Ireland, and the American West chief among them. But he does not stop with this. He confronts the Hobbesian Fear on its own ground of theory.
The Hobbesian argument may be put in this way. A group of people may recognize that if all of them refrained from initiating violence, they would all be better off. No longer would life be nasty, brutish, and short: people could now live peacefully. Unfortunately, this recognition will fail to generate the required agreement. Each person will also recognize that he would be still better off if he himself resorted to violence whenever he deemed it advantageous. If others keep their agreement, so much the better, and if they do not, one clearly is worse off by being the sole person to observe the agreement. Of course, everyone will reason in the same fashion and no one will keep the agreement. In brief, we have here a classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Skoble brings to bear important work by Robert Axelrod and later writers that undercuts the analysis just presented. The argument that keeping the agreement, despite its recognized advantages to the group, is irrational applies only in a special case. If people do not expect to have further dealings with one another, then defection is the rational course. But people in a society do not find themselves in such a "one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma." Quite the contrary, they must deal with one another repeatedly. In such an "iterated Prisoner's Dilemma," cooperation, not defection is rational.Skoble should have noted that this is true only if the players do not know the number of times they will have to decide what to do. If they do know this, then since defection is rational on the last play, backward induction shows it is rational for each earlier play.
[D]efecting is the dominant strategy, only if you play the game just once. It is not the dominant strategy, the research [of Axelrod and later writers such as Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund] shows, if you play the game in series, that is, over and over again. It turns out in that case that the most effective strategy is responsive cooperation… (p. 63)
Objections can no doubt be raised to this argument; e.g., can one directly apply the argument for cooperation to a situation where actors do not repeatedly confront identical payoffs? But Skoble's argument is immensely suggestive. The assumption that people need a state to survive as a society must confront a powerful challenge.
The book contains much else, e.g., excellent discussions of how a libertarian anarchist society would handle disasters and whether disagreements between libertarians and advocates of other political views are "incommensurable." But I have thought it best to concentrate on Skoble's central argument. Deleting the State is an outstanding contribution to libertarian political theory.
This review originally appeared in The Mises Review, Spring 2009.
Mises Review 14, No. 3 (Fall 2008)A NATION OF SHEEPAndrew P. NapolitanoThomas Nelson, 2007, xiii + 240 pgs.
Judge Napolitano has organized his excellent book around a central metaphor. He contrasts sheep, who follow their shepherd with unquestioning devotion, and wolves, who are alert to protect themselves:
There are two kinds of people who stand out in the United States today: sheep and wolves. Sheep stay in their herd and follow their shepherd without questioning where he is leading them. Sheep trust that the shepherd looks out for their safety. … Wolves, on the other hand, do not aimlessly follow a shepherd. … Wolves question the shepherd and act in a way that forces the shepherd also to question his decisions. Wolves challenge government regulations, reject government assistance, and demand that the government recognize and protect their natural rights. They are rugged individualists (p. 10).
America, Napolitano thinks, consists largely of sheep: we acquiesce in gross violations of our civil liberties, including but by no means confined to, those inflicted on us by the Bush administration, in the course of its "War on Terror." Too often, even those concerned about the current violations of civil liberties will think in this way.
True enough, the Patriot Act gives the government the power to pry into our correspondence, telephone calls, and personal records; and if I were unfortunate enough to be suspected of being an "enemy combatant," I might suffer a dire fate indeed. Why, though, should I care about that? The Administration is concerned only with blocking terrorists. There is only the remotest chance any of these civil liberties violations will have any direct effect on me.
Napolitano makes clear that this is an unduly narrow way to view matters, and not only because of the familiar argument that a government that targets one group may later target others as well. ("First they came for the…, etc.") Quite, the contrary, violations of rights affect the ordinary person as well.
As a prime example, commuters who enter the New York subway must submit to random searches of their bags.
The New York Police Department, along with many other police departments across the country, now conducts random bag searches in the subway, without suspicion or warrant, in order to prevent terrorist attacks. These random searches clearly violate the Fourth Amendment, which is meant to protect all persons from warrantless searches and seizures. If you are unlucky enough to be selected "randomly," the officers will stop you as you hurry to catch your morning train. As the doors slide closed on the platform below and your train departs, you stand helplessly as the bored cops search your bag. (p. 14)
A federal appeals judge ruled that these searches were constitutional.
In August 2006, Judge Chester Straub of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the NYPD acted within the law because the subway bag searches fell within the "special needs exception" to the Fourth Amendment due to imminent terrorist threats. (p. 15)
Napolitano mordantly comments, "There is no 'special needs' exception in the Fourth Amendment. The court simply made it up" (p. 15).
Napolitano's point is expressed with characteristic force, but I wish that he had addressed in this connection an important issue. Does the Fourth Amendment apply to the states? The claim that it does rests on the "incorporation" doctrine, i.e., the view that the 14th Amendment makes the states subject to the Bill of Rights.
Critics of incorporation such as Raoul Berger have persuasively argued that the doctrine has scant basis; additionally, it strikes at the states as independent sources of authority to the federal government. Is it not likely that more is lost to individual liberty by the increased subordination of the states to federal courts than is gained by decisions that on occasion strike down bad state laws?
The same issue applies to what Napolitano says about the Kelo decision. He remarks
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides that the government can seize private property for public use, as long as it fairly compensates the owner. … Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the case is that the City [of New London, Connecticut] seized property from one private citizen and sold it to another. There was no public use. (p. 137, emphasis in original)
Of course, the city grossly violated property rights. But does the 5th Amendment apply to the states? It would be most valuable to have Napolitano's reflections on this topic.
All airline travelers will have encountered another way in which the Bush administration has interfered with our right to privacy. But, faced with silly demands that, e.g., we remove our shoes for inspection before our federal masters permit us to board, we act as sheep. "But how does confiscating water bottles, snow globes, and 'toy transformer robots' while waving deadly weapons and diseases through the gates, protect our security?" (p. 123). We do not protest but meekly do as we are told.
The measures that I have so far mentioned form part of the "War on Terror," but not all violations of our right to privacy have this battle as their ostensible justification. In a section that will be of interest to all drivers, Napolitano indicts the use of cameras to check speeders. Relying on these cameras denies due process to the accused:
The tickets are practically indisputable, since the images of the vehicle are not close enough to capture the driver of the vehicle. If the license plate recorded is registered to you, you're guilty. Period. These cameras are so profitable that in Britain they are referred to as "yellow vultures" and are the most lucrative cameras in the country. (p. 118)
Napolitano notes that using these cameras increases accidents, since drivers speed up at intersections in an effort to avoid detection; nevertheless, the cameras are increasingly part of the local scene in various sections of America. Again, people act as sheep and fail adequately to protest.
Those who dismiss the measures just described as mere annoyances and, reverting to a style of argument mentioned earlier, ask what the War on Terror has to do with them, should be careful. They may find that the draconian laws they imagined could not affect them hit very close to home:
If you're a member of an activist organization or have ever blogged about how betrayed you feel by your government, or how you really wish they would end this futile war and bring your kid home from Iraq, your name might be on the terrorist watch list along with thousands of other innocent people. Your phone might be tapped, your computer might be monitored, and thousands of surveillance cameras may be focused on you as you trip over that crack in the sidewalk. Today more than ever, Big Brother may be watching. (p. 66)
If he is watching, then, Napolitano reminds us, the Patriot Act allows him to enlist involuntarily the services of members of the public to assist in spying. Further, a citizen thus drafted into service is forbidden, under criminal penalties, to disclose that he has received a National Security Letter.
The Patriot Act places a gag order on any person served with a self-written search warrant … for information, barring them from disclosing that the FBI has either sought or obtained information from them. If a town librarian tells a neighbor … that the government has taken her Internet browsing records, the innocent librarian can end up in a federal prison for five years because of her truthful speech." (pp. 69–70)
Is this not an outrageous interference with our right of free speech?
Assaults on liberty, today as in the past, are supported on the grounds that security must be protected. But the defenders of these measures fail to show that they in any way do improve our security. In what way, e.g., did the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II aid the American war effort? Napolitano remarks that it took more than thirty years for the American government to apologize for this outrageous policy. One wonders whether thirty years from now the government will issue a new apology for the manifold invidious actions of the Bush administration. We must thank Judge Napolitano for alerting us to our peril in this excellent book.
It's a suburban neighborhood, on Sunday morning. There is a three-way stop at which hardly anyone ever goes the other direction than the main one. But you often see a police car in the nearby parking lot, keeping his sharp eye out for evil lawbreakers. These are the dangerous criminals who slow down almost to a full stop that causes the car to shift back the other direction, but don't quite do this. Instead they do what is sometimes called a "rolling stop" which stops short of full immobilization.The policeman in the car regards this as "running a stop sign," as if you paid no attention to it at all, and he'll give you a ticket whenever he catches you doing it.
From the policeman's point of view, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. One recent empirical accounting at this intersection (I dragooned some neighborhood kids into keeping count) observed that more than 9 in 10 people do not come to what the law regards as a "full stop."
I should know about this because, try as I might to be a law-abiding citizen, I have now received my fifth ticket this year at this very intersection one block from my house. That's not a typo. Five! I know it sounds crazy — why the heck can't I obey those who are ordained to keep me safe? — but when you consider that I go through this intersection several times per day, I'm actually doing rather well.
It goes without saying that this is a racket. The city is many hundreds of dollars richer because of my penchant for law breaking alone, and probably hundreds of thousands richer if you include everyone else's.
But it wasn't until someone drew my attention to this link that I understood the full extent of what this whole racket is about. Yes, it's about money. But there is more to it than that. You see, it turns out that I'm an archetype, a person who rolls through stop signs in my safe neighborhood and then gets outraged when the ticket is issued and attempts to "fight authority" rather than pay up. So, fool that I am, I actually believe in "challenging the system." I take seriously the claim that I'm innocent until proven guilty. Can you believe the naïveté?
It's typical of suburbanites. We challenge tickets, especially frivolous ones. And this, it turns out, is precisely what the police want us to do, for reasons explained below.
So on the appointed court day, I leave the office to go to the courthouse to fight this ridiculous ticket. I sit for hours and hours until I'm given a chance to declare my innocence. All the while, the cop who stopped me stands at the back of the courtroom with his arms folded over his bulletproof chest. He is heavily armed. I, on the other hand, was searched before I even walked in.
If at this point I declare my innocence, I am given the opportunity for a trial with my own attorney, whom I must pay because I'm not poor enough to have the court appoint a lawyer even if I wanted it to. This trial is scheduled for sometime in the future, which means another trip to the courthouse, and another opportunity for the cop to enjoy the air-conditioned surroundings of the courtroom he rules. What chance is there for me? In the end, I would probably have to declare myself guilty of something or other, and pay a lesser fine; meanwhile I will have missed at least two days of work.
What's going on here turns out to do with the way policemen are paid. According to federal labor law, they are only allowed to be scheduled for patrolling up to 40 hours per week, just as the rest of us can only be scheduled to work up to a certain number of hours. Courtroom time — and by subpoena, they have to be there — often counts as overtime, meaning 50% more than they are paid for patrolling during regular hours.
In the case examined by John Stossel on 20/20, a policeman named Officer Kanapsky made an additional $21,562 over his regular pay just by standing around in court. The more tickets he issued, especially for minor issues that outraged people are likely to challenge in court, the more money he made. This is a result of labor law. As the Department of Labor says, "An employer who requires or permits an employee to work overtime is generally required to pay the employee premium pay for such overtime work."
Now, it starts to make sense.You and I — his employers, so to speak — are paying a premium for his court time, which is why he spends his patrolling time trying to goad people into going to court. The policeman is being paid time and a half to waste our time and to cause our insurance rates to rise.
In the private sector, the permission to work more than 40 hours per week is a real benefit to the employee and the employer, though the terms ought to be left to the contracting parties. But in the police work, this overtime permission results in a scam that causes police to engage in low-risk, high-revenue earning activities that exploit the population.
It occurs to everyone who is given a frivolous ticket: surely the cop's time would be better spent stopping real crimes, not harassing nonthreatening citizens. Now we can better see why they do this. It may be a product of federal overtime rules, another case in which the ghost of FDR haunts us every day.
But what to do about it? Denounce the cop on the spot? That's not a good idea. It strikes you immediately when you are stopped by a policeman that there is a huge disparity of power at work here. You are effectively captured by them. You must comply no matter what. They have the legal right to use any method to keep you quiet and docile and to punish you to the point of death if you resist.
YouTube is filled with clips showing people being subjected to the latest weapon of choice: the taser gun. The police love the taser gun. It leaves no trace of physical injury. You are shot through with electricity, which causes frightening physical and mental convulsions, but there is nothing you can take a picture of. No bruises. No wounds. No broken bones. This is all the better for them — and all the worse for you.
Never forget what happens to you if you decide to run instead. That's a death sentence. Forget that the instinct to evade your captors is universal and deeply embedded in our mental/biological equipment. The state operates on the assumption that you are its slave when it wants you to be, and otherwise free in name only. This is especially true in the age of Bush, in which all police at all levels have morphed into militarized "security personnel." The friendly, helpful policeman of old civics texts seems to be a thing of the past.
In any case, the phenomenon of Officer Kanapsky raises fundamental questions not only about federal labor law but also about the role of the police in any community. Do they really stop crime? Sure, they arrive after a crime has been committed; they take fingerprints (those only seem to work in the movies) and file reports. In real life, however, crime prevention is due to the private sector: locks, alarm systems, and the like.This is what prevents crimes from taking place.
The police aren't so hot at prosecuting crime either, but for people who commit crimes like slowing down at three-way stops. Yet we are all somehow under the illusion that the police are the reason we are safe. It is the core mythology of our civic religion.
If you do believe that they do more good than harm, consider the unseen costs. What kind of private alternatives are being crowded out by the very presence of the police?
It is also deeply troubling that most people believe there aren't too many police but too few. How many are too many? What if one in three people were a cop? One in two? Maybe we should have two cops for every one civilian. How safe we would be! Really, there is an ethos in this country that you can never have too many cops on the street, and the idea of hiring more nearly always garners public support.
And yet, when it comes right down to it on the particulars, we can't stand the police. We keep a constant lookout for them when we drive. We dread being pulled over. We know in our hearts that they are out to get us, and represent more of a threat than a security for our freedoms.
In the end, we need to realize that the police are like all other government employees: self-interested, living off tax dollars, parasitical on our liberties. The case of Officer Kanapsky shows precisely how and why.
Politics brings out the worst in everyone, which is one good reason to completely depoliticize society. This way we can all busy ourselves in productive work or leisure, instead of wasting vast time watching these clowns on television promise the impossible to us.
What we are being offered on television is two flavors of dictatorship. One party imagines Athens, with fairness and justice for all, international brotherhood and sisterhood, a world free of hate and discrimination in which all wealth is shared and no wealth is made at the expense of nature.
Of course, this is an Athens of their own invention, since the original's culture and accomplishments depended on free trade, private ownership, sound money, and low taxes. What the Democrats are offering is a monstrously larger state that assumes control of all property, the crushing of private initiative, and an end to economic freedom.
Note that they don't talk about this. But that is the core of all their plans for fairness and justice: an increased use of violence in society, and an increased centralization of political power. Often the person who recommends this path imagines that he will be the dictator, and that his plans alone will prevail.
They don't consider that the state they advocate is also wholly capable of doing things that they do not like, like crushing civil liberties and starting wars all over the world. Note that the Left's critique of Bush's big government is not that it is crushing liberty; rather, they believe that government power is being used for the wrong purposes.
Another problem with these people: they can't stand capitalism. They resent the commercial society. They have not come to terms with the fact that without capitalism, most of the human race would starve to death. Why do they hate it? Because wealth under capitalism will always be unequally distributed.
They favor a different form of dictatorship.
Now to the Republicans, who imagine themselves creating a modern form of Sparta, with military strength and a disciplined citizenry unified in the drive to national greatness, courage, and heroism. Along with this comes support for national service (the draft) and a demand that Congress stop meddling in executive-branch matters.
They also say that they are for free enterprise, but what they really mean is that they support their main constituents who are large corporations dependent on government contracts and privileges. That goes for the banks and the mortgage companies too, whose interests they defend through a fiat-money system that further fuels state growth.
This too is their version of dictatorship.
It is long past time for both of these parties to admit it. They won't of course, so it is incumbent on the rest of us to at least recognize it for what it is. It is often said that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the parties, but there is little reflection on what precisely they have in common. It comes down to a love of some version of dictatorship, of which they believe they will be the administrators.
What is the alternative? It is pure liberty, a word that is used only as a slogan in public affairs these days. By liberty, I mean only one kind: a life without badgering from the state. There is nothing on God's green earth that the state can do better than we can as individuals and communities and voluntary associations. What I mean by liberty is no more or less than firing the state as the administrator of society.
The politicians are forever talking about their plans for us. We should reject them all, left, right, and center. Would this leave chaos in its wake? Not at all. It would leave the orderliness of the private-property society.
As Mises wrote,
The truth is that the choice is not between a dead mechanism and a rigid automatism on the one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself or should the paternal government alone plan for all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is spontaneous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.
Mises wrote those words in 1949. People said that he was being hyperbolic, that he was nuts and inflammatory. Surely our system has nothing in common with the German system we had just fought a war to destroy, and nothing in common with the Russian system that was becoming our new enemy.
But people forget that in the 1930s, it was conventional wisdom that our essential choice was between two forms of dictatorship, socialism or fascism. People were more open back then, using these words not in a derogatory way. Here we are all these years later, and we no longer speak with deference toward socialism and fascism as systems of government.
Even so, the intellectual assumptions remain the same. Watch the conventions with an eye to what the political class wants to do for you. Everything they promise has a flip side of what they want to do to you. And the power to do these things has to come from the violence of the state, and using that violence requires a form of total control over government and society. They may look nice and sweet. They may claim to love you and your family and community. But their political ideology is actually steeped in hatred for your liberty and property. They seek an end to your freedom to seek a better life.
They seek dictatorship. All the rest is illusion.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, Nobel Prize winner, and the most famous Soviet dissident died at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008 in his home near Moscow. He lived a long and hard life, but he died the way that he wanted to: "He wanted to die in the summer — and he died in the summer," his wife Natalya said. "He wanted to die at home — and he died at home. In general I should say that Aleksandr Isayevich lived a difficult but happy life."
His entire life was a victory over the most improbable. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in Southern Russia, half a year after his father died in a hunting accident. He managed to get a Soviet university education despite the fact that his mother Taisiya came from one of the richest families of Southern Russia and his father Isaakiy was an officer in the tsar's army.
Aleksandr was raised by his mother in abject poverty as his earliest years coincided with war communism and its abolition of private property (making economic calculation impossible); what followed was mass starvation and destruction. His family was no exception — their property was confiscated and later destroyed by central planners.
Solzhenitsyn stated in his autobiographical series of novels The Red Wheel that his mother was fighting for survival and they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. Taisiya was well educated and openly encouraged her son's literary and scientific interests, while also secretly raising him in the Christian faith. He studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
He was commissioned as a Soviet artillery officer during the Second World War despite the fact that he had previously been rejected due to poor health. A successful artillery captain, he was arrested by the secret police in 1945 for disrespectful remarks about Stalin in a letter to a friend.
Despite his eight-year sentence for hard labor (which was nearly a death sentence in Stalin's dreadful Gulag system), he managed to stay near Moscow in the government research facility for imprisoned scientists. Eventually he was transferred to the special Ekibastuz camp in Kazakhstan. In the Tashkent medical ward a malignant tumor was removed from his stomach in 1954, and he survived the tumor and the surgery against all odds.
After release from the Gulag in 1956, Solzhenitsyn returned to Central Russia, worked as a math teacher and began to write his powerful prose. "During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known," he said in his autobiography. "Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down."
He published his first works, two novellas: "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," and "Matryona's House" in a literary journal Novyi Mir (New World) in 1962 with explicit approval by Nikita Khrushchev. These were the only publications of Solzhenitsyn in his own country until 1990.
In 1970, after publishing several works in the West, including the novel Cancer Ward — a fictional piece based on Solzhenitsyn's own treatment at the Tashkent cancer ward — he was awarded, while in exile, the Nobel Prize in literature. Solzhenitsyn didn't attend the ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden for fear that he would not be allowed to re-enter the USSR.
Three years later, his Gulag Archipelago was published in France. Immediately after this publication he was accused of treason, stripped of his citizenship, and deported to Germany. He wrote sarcastically: "For a country to have a great writer … is like having another government. That's why no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."
He accepted an invitation to teach at Stanford University, and then moved to Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived with his family for years.
In 1990, his citizenship was restored by Gorbachev, and he returned to Russia in 1994 and actively participated in the reform process. He crossed the country that had already ceased to be the Soviet Union, from the East to the West, acquiring "a collection of cries and tears."
"It is history's sorrow," Solzhenitsyn wrote afterwards, "the grief of our era, which I carry about me like an anathema."
We will remember Solzhenitsyn as an unyielding champion of freedom who dedicated himself to revealing the horrors of socialism and exposing the ultimate evil of Lenin, Stalin, and their cohort of mass murderers. Once a prisoner of brutal labor camps himself, Solzhenitsyn chronicled the horrors of the Soviet Gulag system and emerged as a one of Russia's greatest writers. He became a moral and spiritual leader who exposed and condemned the nefarious nature of the socialist ideology that served as the basis for the monstrous communist slave camps established from Siberia to Ethiopia, Cuba to Vietnam, China, and Yugoslavia. He riveted socialists of all countries whose secret ghastly history he exposed.
"For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion", wrote Solzhenitsyn while in his exile in the West.
In the West, he liked the Swiss model of local government and spoke highly of his experiences living in Vermont. Before leaving for Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke to his neighbors in a Cavendish town meeting and thanked the town for its hospitality and for respecting his privacy. He thought of the town-meeting type of self-government as the most suitable for Russia. He did not, however, make a god of democracy; he admired great Russian reformer Pyotr Stolypin with his strong promarket and antisocialist stand as the prime minister of the Russian Empire (1906-1911).
Solzhenitsyn believed in the individual rather than the group, party, or state. He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, "that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but through all human hearts."
Solzhenitsyn had enough courage to equate socialism and Nazism as equally evil and morally reprehensible. He condemned both Nazi and Soviet atrocities during the Second World War and he accused his fellow countrymen of masterminding their own shipwreck.
According to Solzhenitsyn, 61,000,000 people were slaughtered in the USSR in the quest for equality. Under Stalin alone, 43,000,000 were murdered. Lenin and Khrushchev are responsible for the other 18,000,000. Most of these deaths (39,000,000) were due to forced labor in gulags and during deportations.
His writings earned him over 20 years of prison, exile, and world-wide renown, making him the most prominent dissident of the Soviet era and a symbol of intellectual resistance to communist rule. But he is also one of the most maligned and defamed writers of the 20th century. He has been the victim of character assassination and willful distortions from almost every quarter.
He published his final original work in June 2001 with "200 Years Together: 1775-1995," about the history of Jews in Russia. Solzhenitsyn spent his last years in failing health and seclusion at his rural home in Troitse-Lykovo near Moscow, editing his 30-volume collected works. He predicted that he would not be able to complete the work, which will "continue after my death."
Frédéric Bastiat famously observed that the state costs us in ways we can see and ways we cannot see. Economists tend to focus on the second type because they elude public perceptions. What inventions are we denied because of regulations? What might have been done with the resources that are diverted in taxes or higher prices due to protectionism? The answers demonstrate that, because of intervention, we are worse off than we know.
Sometimes, however, we should also look at the potentially seen costs of the state, if only because the state doesn't want us to see those either. These are the direct destructions caused by some state activity, most especially war. Seeing war in photographs changes things. It causes us to observe the state's war and what it is doing to people: us and them.
This is why the state doesn't want pictures of US wounded or dead circulating in public. The media mostly obey. Did you ever notice that? You are being shown only what the government wants you to see. The state does not want you to see dead soldiers or suffering families of those shot and killed.
Instead the state wants you to believe that the Iraq War is about patriotism, 9/11, national pride, the campaign to make you safer, the administering of justice, manhood and courage, and all the rest of the coverups for what war really is: murder and destruction paid for by you and me and made legal solely because it is the state and not someone else doing it.
Take a picture of dead soldier, or the child of a killed Iraqi family, broadcast it on your blog, and what happens? Photo journalist Zoriah Miller has found out. He was kicked out of his "embed," which is the name for the pack of journalists permitted to travel with a group of soldiers and report what those in command want reported. Afterwards, he was prohibited from traveling in any Marine-patrolled area of Iraq. The military command worked to get him kicked out of the country altogether.
Yes, it all seems very premodern and primitive, and contrary to all our pieties about the free flow of information — the First Amendment and all that. But from the government's point of view, it is running the war, and it should control what people know about it to the same extent it controls everything else about the war. As a result, after 4,000 dead soldiers, countless hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, millions of wounded on all sides, there are only a handful of bloody pictures to be found anywhere.
Amazing isn't it, just how effective the state can actually be when it cares intensely about something? And why does it care so much? One reason, they say, is that photos provide the enemy with information about the effectiveness of their attack and the response. In effect, that's like claiming that anything but approved propaganda amounts to subversion and treason. In any case, we can be pretty darn sure that when the enemy makes a hit, the enemy knows about it.
Another claim — and actually they have said the same thing from World War I until the present day — their main interest is in protecting the families of the dead from shock, privacy violation, and humiliation. Maybe that sounds plausible, but another way to look at it is that the state is most especially interested in continuing to foster the myth that these kids are dying for their country, and there are no more important people to convince of that than the parents of the dead.
But actually, only the most naïve could possibly believe that this is what the rules are wholly about. They want to protect the rest of us from reality. The Vietnam War lost massive support at home when the military loosened up on photojournalism. The handful of pictures we have from World War II all date from a period after FDR too bowed to public pressure.
At one level, it is pathetic that we need pictures to underscore what war is all about. But since the ancient world, the masses at large have proven susceptible to believing every myth about the grandeur and glory of war. We imagine that we as a people are going abroad to bring justice, truth, and liberty to some unenlightened and threatening foreign tribe. This has been the constant theme since the ancient world.
Then we see the pictures. It turns out that the unenlightened tribe is a collection of individuals pretty much like us. They are made of flesh and blood, have families, worship God, and struggle with pretty much the same issues that all people everywhere have always struggled with. There is no great glory in killing them, nor in being killed by them.
But the state says that sometimes war is necessary. If our masters really believe that, why hide its costs? Let us see precisely what we are getting into here. If it is justified, let us see why and how, and let us observe what we are giving up in exchange for the just war.
The truth is that the state must hide not only its wars but all of its activities. It hides its inflation. It hides the effects of its taxation and its protectionism. It fears anyone who draws the cause-and-effect connection between its activities and their deleterious consequences for the rest of us. It is the most destructive force in our world. Because that truth is so momentous, the state does everything possible to hide the smallest drop of blood.
The state wants us to all go on with our lives, believing it, loving it, and seeing only the pictures it wants us to see.
Christopher Ratte, professor in the department of classics at the University of Michigan, was recently turned into a jailbird and had his son taken away from him, all in the name of protecting the child from the father. He had taken his 7-year old son to a baseball game in Detroit and ordered him lemonade. What was served up was a "Mike's Hard Lemonade," which his son prepared to drink. Suddenly security arrived.
"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the security guard asked.
"You have got to be kidding," responded the professor. And before the professor could examine the bottle, the guard snatched it away, and the boy was taken to the hospital where no traces of alcohol were found in him. The boy was then promptly put in foster care. It was two days before the mother, a professor of architecture, was allowed to take him home, and a full week before the father was allowed to come back into the home again.
The case provides a remarkable look at the workings of bureaucracy. The Detroit Free Press interviewed all the people involved. It turns out that no one was happy about what happened, but the gears of the bureaucracy ground away, ruining people's lives for no good reason.
The cop on duty thought it was a mistake, but his supervisor was insisting that he act. When Child Protective Services came to take the child into their cruel foster care, the police objected. But CPS was just doing its duty. It had no choice but to take the child since the police had requested a court order — also triggered by events — to remove the child. Observers who know the system say that the only surprising aspect to this case is that the child was returned so quickly. Had the couple been poor, uneducated, and unconnected, the case might still be tied up in the courts.
The lesson many people draw from this is that social workers are being given too much authority, that governments need to be reformed so that they do not take extreme measures too hastily, that cops need to use good sense before busting up families, etc. The problem is that all of these reforms ultimately depend on the state to use its discretionary power judiciously.
The real issue concerns the locus of the control. Does it belong to the family or the state? When there is a dispute, to whom does the presumption of innocence belong? It is not enough to say, here is a bad family environment, so of course the state should control the outcome. When it comes to the power of the state over the family, there is no such thing as a judicious use. The state has every reason to invent excuses to destroy families, and the families themselves have no choice but to crawl and beg.
State campaigns for the welfare of children have long been a major justification for the expansion of Leviathan. This is the primary basis for the war on drugs, which has robbed us of so many civil liberties. It is the basis for the nationalization of education that is taking place, administration by administration, in the name of preventing any child from being left behind. If the Internet is ever regulated in the United States the way it is in China and parts of Europe, it will be in the name of protecting the children. Indeed, it is possible to erect a totalitarian state in the name of helping the children.
So it was in Texas, when the state swept in to remove 416 children from their mothers. The police were responding to a call claiming abuse, but there was no other basis for this incredible action than the desire to crush a religion completely. The state decided the dissident church shouldn't exist, and so it claimed all power in the interest of the children. The state could count on sympathy from mainstream American culture, which disapproves of polygamy and underage marriages. And that is precisely why the group separated themselves completely from the rest of the culture. See if you can watch this video of mothers speaking out against the action and not conclude that the case for the invasion was at best ambiguous.
Should people be free to set up cults, to live undisturbed to practice their religion, to deviate from mainstream ethical codes? Certainly if we believe in freedom, people should be able to do this. In fact, the group was already under a great deal of pressure to reform from the outside and inside, with former members of the group reporting despotic control by the leader and many men who had been excommunicated putting pressure on those inside to leave. We don't know whether the entire matter — if indeed abuse was taking place — might have been handled in this way, because the state intervened to impose the cruelest possible solution, namely, taking children from their mothers' arms and putting them in the hands of government social workers.
In the name of protecting children, the state already runs a huge program with government officials posing as teenagers seeking sex and arresting those who fall for the scam. By itself, this is very strange, with government becoming a source for the very problem that government is trying to correct. Meanwhile, a February-March 2008 report from the American Psychologist reports that the fears about Internet predation are wildly exaggerated and do not reflect the facts. This is hardly a surprise, since the state has incentive to exaggerate the pathologies of society as a means of getting a claw hold over every independent sector.
The goal of the state is to find some practice that is universally reviled and pose as the one and only way of expunging it from society. The best example today is child pornography, a grim and ghastly industry that every decent person would like to see eradicated from the earth. But in the name of doing so, the state invades everyone's privacy, controls speech, interferes with families, and otherwise uses the issue as a wedge to eliminate every freedom.
Thus do we see what is wrong with statements such as the following:
We have an obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse, and we can do this by increasing communication between state and federal agencies to help combat this repulsive industry. While privacy rights should always be respected in the pursuit of child pornographers, more needs to be done to track down and prosecute the twisted individuals who exploit innocent children.
Do we really want to unleash the state to solve this problem? Not if we understand the dynamics of statism. The power will not be used to solve the problem, but rather to intimidate the population in ways that people will find difficult to object to. The trouble is that the above words were not written by the typically naïve do-gooder, social worker, or Justice Department bureaucrat. They were penned by a spokesman for the Libertarian Party.
Thus can we see the power of propaganda — and its uses. Not even self-identified libertarians can see that state authority over the family is a basis for the loss of liberty in our time, and that the state always poses a greater threat to society than whatever problem it purports to solve. There is a further problem: to concede that there are social problems that cannot be corrected without the state is to give up the entire argument over the future of liberty itself.
Americans, perhaps like all people, have a remarkable capacity for tuning out unpleasantries that do not directly affect them. I'm thinking here of wars on foreign lands, but also the astonishing fact that the United States has become the world's most jail-loving country, with well over 1 in 100 adults living as slaves in a prison. Building and managing prisons, and locking people up, has become a major facet of government power in our time, and it is long past time for those who love liberty to start to care.
Before we get to the reasons why, look at the facts as reported by the New York Times. The United States leads the world in prisoner production. There are 2.3 million people behind bars. China, with four times as many people, has 1.6 million in prison.
In terms of population, the United States has 751 people in prison for every 100,000, while the closest competitor in this regard is Russia with 627. I'm struck by this figure: 531 in Cuba. The median global rate is 125.
What's amazing is that most of this imprisoning trend is recent, dating really from the 1980s, and most of the change is due to drug laws. From 1925 to 1975, the rate of imprisonment was stable at 110, lower than the international average, which is what you might expect in a country that purports to value freedom. But then it suddenly shot up in the 1980s. There were 30,000 people in jail for drugs in 1980, while today there are half a million.
Other factors include the criminalization of nearly everything these days, even passing bad checks or the pettiest of thefts. And judges are under all sorts of minimum-sentencing requirements. Now, before we move to causes and answers, please consider what jail means. The people inside are slaves of the state. They are captured and held and regarded by their captors as nothing other than biological beings that take up space. The delivery of all services to them is contingent on the whims of their masters, who have no stake in the outcome at all.
Now, you might say that this is necessary for some people, but be aware that it is the ultimate assault on human dignity. They are "paying the price" for their actions, but no one is in a position to benefit from the price paid. They aren't working off debts or compensating victims or struggling to overcome anything. They are just "doing time," costing taxpayers almost $25,000 a year per person. That's all these people are to society: a cost, and they are treated as such.
And the communities in which they exist in these prisons consist of other unvalued people, and they become socialized into this mentality that is utterly contrary to every notion of civilization. Then there is the relentless threat and reality of violence, the unspeakable noise, the pervasiveness of every moral perversity. In short, prisons are Hell. It can be no wonder that they rehabilitate no one. As George Barnard Shaw said, "imprisonment is as irrevocable as death."
What's more, everything we know about government applies to this ultimate government program. It is expensive (states alone spend $44 billion on prisons every year), inefficient, brutal, and irrational. The modern prison system is also a relatively new phenomenon in history, one that is used to enforce political priorities (the drug war) rather than punish real crimes. It is also manipulated by political passions rather than a genuine concern for justice. The results of the drug war are not to reduce consumption but rather the opposite. Illegal drugs are now a $100 billion industry in the United States, while the drug war itself cost taxpayers $19 billion, even as the costs of running the justice system are skyrocketing (up 418% percent in 25 years).
People say that crime is down, so this must be working. Well, that depends on what you mean by crime. Drug use and distribution are associated with violence solely because they are illegal. They are crimes because the state says they are crimes, but they do not fit within the usual definition we find in the history of political philosophy, which centers on the violation of person or property.
What's more, the "crime" of drug use and distribution hasn't really been kept down; it has only gone further underground. In a major irony and commentary on the workability of prisons, drug markets are very active there.
Now to causes. Some social scientists give the predictable explanation that all this is due to the lack of a "social safety net" in the United States. In the first place, the United States has had such a net for a hundred years, and yet these people seem not to have noticed, even though no such net is big enough for some people. Moreover, it is more likely the very presence of such a net — which creates a moral hazard so that people do not learn to be responsible for their own well being — that contributes to criminal behavior (all else being equal).
There are those on all sides who attribute the increase to racial factors, given that the imprisoned population is disproportionately black and Hispanic, and noting the disparity in crime rates in such places as Minnesota with low levels of minority populations. But this factor too could be illusory, especially with regard to drug use, since it is far more likely that a state system will catch and punish people with less influence and social standing than those whom the state regards as significant.
A more telling point comes to us from political analysts, who observe the politicization of judicial appointments in the United States. Judges run on their "tough on crime" records, or are appointed for them, and so have every incentive to lock people up more than justice truly demands.
One factor that hasn't been mentioned so far in the discussion is the lobbying power of the prison industry itself. The old rule is that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. And so it is with prisons and the prison-industrial complex. I've yet to find any viable figures on how large this industry is, but consider that it includes construction firms, managers of private prisons, wardens, food service providers, counselors, security services, and 100 other kinds of companies to build and manage these miniature societies. What kind of political influence do they have? Speculation here, but it must be substantial.
As for public concern, remember that every law on the books, every regulation, every line in the government codebook, is ultimately enforced by prison. The jail cell is the symbol and ultimate end of statism itself. It would be nice if we thought of the interests of those who are prisoners in society and those who will become so. But even if you are not likely to be among them, consider the loss of privacy, the loss of liberty, the loss of independence, the loss of all that used to be considered truly American, in the course of building prison nation.
But won't crime go up if we abandon our prison system?
Let Robert Ingersoll answer:
The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumb-screws and racks, with hangmen and headsmen — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities and crimes have accomplished little for the preservation of property or life. It is safe to say that governments have committed far more crimes than they have prevented. As long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.
[How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. By Glenn Greenwald. Working Assets Publishing, 2006. 128 pages.]
In this remarkable book, Glenn Greenwald solves a difficult problem. President Bush has for several years authorized the National Security Agency to wiretap telephones within the United States without a judicial warrant. Doing so is illegal, but Bush claims that security against terrorism requires it. Here our puzzle arises. The administration thinks that certain wiretaps are necessary. But under existing law, it can readily obtain a warrant from a special court. When warrants have been requested from this court, they have never been denied. Why, then, do the minions of the Bush administration decline to seek a warrant? The answer cannot be that sudden emergency leaves no time to go to court, since the law allows for an immediate wiretap so long as judicial approval is secured a short time later.
Greenwald cogently sketches the situation:
[P]rior to the December 2005 disclosure that President Bush had violated the law, no one ever suggested that the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] framework impeded necessary eavesdropping. If anything, the FISA court had long been criticized … for being too permissive, for allowing the government whatever eavesdropping powers it requested. Indeed, its reputation for granting every eavesdropping request made by the government is so widespread that it has long been ridiculed as the "Rubber Stamp Court." … The FISA court approved every single request [out of 13,102 submitted between 1978 and 2001] and only modified the requested warrant on a grand total of two occasions. (p. 28)
Why then did the Administration bypass the court? Greenwald responds:
As Congress devised the law, the FISA court plays two critical, independent functions — not just warrant approval but also, more critically, judicial oversight. FISA's truly meaningful check on abuse in the eavesdropping process is that the president is prevented from engaging in improper eavesdropping because he knows that every instance of eavesdropping he orders will be known to a federal judge — a high level judicial officer who is not subject to the president's authority … it is precisely that safeguard which President Bush simply abolished by fiat. In effect, President Bush changed the law all by himself, replacing the federal judges with his own employees at the NSA [National Security Agency] and abolishing the approval and warrant process entirely. (p. 37)
Bush ignored the court, in sum, because he thinks that he possesses plenary powers in all matters that concern security. But how can he think this? Does not the Constitution grant the president strictly limited powers? No one can reasonably question this; but, as Greenwald notes, some legal theorists have not scrupled to do so. Notoriously, John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general, wrote an extraordinary memorandum on September 25, 2001:
You contended that the president's powers were not confined only to battlefields or wars; he emphatically argued that the president has the power to make any decisions with regard to all matters relating to defense and that neither the Congress, nor the courts, nor any longstanding laws can restrict or limit those decisions in any way. (pp. 40–41)
Is there anything to be said in favor of this view? Greenwald calls attention to an important article by Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard. Mansfield contends that the president sometimes faces the need to act in an emergency. He cannot, in a dire situation, always follow the law. He must violate the law to save the country. Mansfield appeals to Machiavelli for support:
To confirm the extra-legal character of the presidency, the Constitution has him take an oath not to execute the laws but to execute the office of president, which is larger … the rule of law is not enough to run a government…. In Machiavelli's terms, ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion. (p. 70, quoting Mansfield)
Has not Mansfield confused two very different things? To say that the president, faced with an emergency, may have to act swiftly, is one thing; to say that, in so acting, he may violate the law, is quite another. Mansfield forgets that Machiavelli was not one of the Founding Fathers. Where in the Constitution is the president given the power to abrogate the law? The Constitution does not incorporate Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, granting the president the power to suspend constitutional guarantees of rights; and given the sorry outcome of that document, it is a fortunate omission. Elsewhere, Mansfield has appealed to John Locke's "prerogative power" to support his claims; but one suspects that their real source is Carl Schmitt, the enigmatic legal theorist who famously said, "Sovereign is he who has the power to declare the exception [i.e., an emergency suspending the laws]."
Greenwald easily shows that this bizarre contention directly contradicts the principles of the American Revolution. Exactly the grievance of the colonists was that the king had acted in an arbitrary way, in disregard of law and precedent. Is it to be believed, then, that the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution just the executive tyranny against which they had rebelled? "To the founders, the defining characteristic of the tyrannical British king was that he possessed precisely those powers that the Constitution prohibits but the Bush administration is now claiming it can exercise" (p. 82).
But what if the Constitution and the Founding Fathers are wrong? Should we not address, independent of precedent, the arguments of those who claim that the power to suspend the law is essential for national survival? However anxious we may be to do so, we face a difficulty. No plausible circumstance has ever been adduced by Yoo, Mansfield, or others with like views in which such extreme action is necessary. Instead, we are offered a threatening situation, e.g., a terrorist group attempting to secure atomic weapons. It is then taken for granted that the laws must be violated to combat this danger, but we are never told why.
As Greenwald makes clear, Bush has applied his claim to be above the law far beyond the issue of wiretaps. Bush has acted on the belief that he may seize anyone, even an American citizen living within the United States, and hold him as he deems fit in a military prison, there to be subject to harsh treatment that does not fall short of torture. Yaser Hamdi, an American citizen, was seized by the American Army in Afghanistan in 2001.
In secret, President Bush signed a decree accusing Hamdi of being an "enemy combatant" and ordered his administration to keep Hamdi in a military prison. Hamdi was not charged with any crime and was not allowed access to a lawyer. He was simply locked away and allowed no contact with anyone, and the administration asserted the right to detain Hamdi under these circumstances indefinitely. (p. 43)
When the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim, Hamdi was deported to Saudi Arabia.
Even worse, José Padilla, also an American citizen, was arrested on American soil and cast into a military prison.
On June 9, 2002, President Bush signed yet another secret order, this one decreeing Padilla to be an enemy combatant, and as a result, he was transferred to a military prison in South Carolina and subjected to the same "black hole" treatment that Hamdi received — placed in solitary confinement, not formally charged with any crime, denied access to a lawyer. (p. 47)
Once more, the administration claimed that it was free to do anything it wanted to an American citizen in the name of defense. When it appeared that the Supreme Court was about to rule on the constitutionality of this claim to dictatorial power, the administration transferred Padilla to the civilian authorities; he was then tried in court and convicted. The treatment he received in military prison had meanwhile rendered him mentally ill.
Even if Congress passes a law that forbids the use of torture, Yoo and his associates contend that the president is not bound by its terms: once more, he possesses plenary powers in matters of defense. The president has brazenly issued "signing statements" when he approves new legislation that declare that he will interpret laws in accord with his own dictatorial conception of his powers, i.e., he will disregard the law when it suits him.
Greenwald has rendered an inestimable service by his clear and cogent analysis of gross presidential usurpation of power. I should also like to call attention to Greenwald's other outstanding book, A Tragic Legacy. See my review in The Mises Review, Fall 2007.
Faced with a constitutional crisis of this magnitude, what are we to do? Most of the candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination offer little or no improvement on Bush's malodorous security policies. One candidate stands out, though, as a clear defender of the Constitution and our civil liberties. As Ron Paul noted in speech to Congress on November 29, 2001,
The target of our [congressional] efforts has sadly been the liberties all Americans enjoy. With all the new powers we have given the administration, none has truly improved the chances of catching the terrorists who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. All Americans will soon feel the consequences of this new legislation…. Laws recently passed by Congress apply to all Americans, not just terrorists. (Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, Foundation for Rational Economics and Education Inc., pp. 168–69).
[Robert Higgs's Schlarbaum Award Acceptance Speech, delivered on October 12, 2007, at the Mises Institute's 25th Anniversary Celebration.]
Margaret Atwood's poem "Siren Song" begins:
This is the one song everyonewould like to learn: the songthat is irresistible:the song that forces mento leap overboard in squadronseven though they see the beached skulls.
Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The beached skulls are those of our fathers and our sons, our friends and our neighbors, for whom the song proved not only irresistible, but fatal.
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state's depredations and therefore augments the public's multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency — war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose.
States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war — not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state's most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its intrinsic crime as permissible and socially necessary. State propaganda, statist ideologies, and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.
They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged "services" and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket.
All governments are, as they must be, oligarchies: only a relatively small number of people have substantial effective discretion to make critical decisions about how the state's power will be brought to bear. Beyond the oligarchy itself and the police and military forces that compose its Praetorian Guard, somewhat larger groups constitute a supporting coalition. These groups provide important financial and other support to the oligarchs and look to them for compensating rewards — legal privileges, subsidies, jobs, exclusive franchises and licenses, transfers of financial income and wealth, goods and services in kind, and other booty — channeled to them at the expense of the mass of the people. Thus, the political class in general — that is, the oligarchs, the Praetorian Guards, and the supporting coalition — uses government power (which means ultimately the police and the armed forces) to exploit everyone outside this class by wielding or threatening to wield violence against all who fail to pay the tribute the oligarchs demand or to obey the rules they dictate.
Democratic political forms and rituals, such as elections and formal administrative proceedings, disguise this class exploitation and trick the masses into the false belief that the government's operation yields them net benefits. In the most extreme form of misapprehension, the people at large become convinced that, owing to democracy, they themselves "are the government."
Individual passages back and forth across the boundary between the political class and the exploited class testify, however, to nothing more than the system's cunningly contrived flexibility and openness. Although the system is inherently exploitative and cannot exist in any other form, it allows some leeway at the margins in the determination of which specific individuals will be the shafters and which the shaftees. At the top, a modest degree of "circulation of elites" within the oligarchy also serves to mask the political system's essential character.
It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it — that is, government without genuine, express, individual consent — a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process, while the oligarchs (elected or not, it scarcely matters) preside over the enormous web of criminal organizations we know as the state.
Notwithstanding the ideological enchantment with which official high priests and statist intellectuals have beguiled the plundered class, many members of this class retain a capacity to recognize at least some of their losses, and hence they sometimes resist further incursions on their rights by publicly expressing their grievances, by supporting political challengers who promise to lighten their burdens, by fleeing the country, and, most important, by evading or avoiding taxes and by violating legal prohibitions and regulatory restraints on their actions, as in the so-called underground economy, or "black market."
These various forms of resistance together compose a force that opposes the government's constant pressure to expand its domination. These two forces, working one against the other, establish a locus of "equilibrium," a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black-market transactions, and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules.
Politics in the largest sense can be viewed as the struggle to push this boundary one way or the other. For members of the political class, the crucial question is always: how can we push out the frontier, how can we augment the government's dominion and plunder, with net gain to ourselves, the exploiters who live not by honest production and voluntary exchange, but by fleecing those who do so?
National emergency — war or a similarly menacing crisis — answers the political class's crucial question more effectively than anything else, because such a crisis has a uniquely effective capacity to dissipate the forces that otherwise would obstruct or oppose the government's expansion.
Virtually any war will serve, at least for a while, because in modern nation-states the outbreak of war invariably leads the masses to "rally 'round the flag," regardless of their previous ideological stance in relation to the government.
Recall the situation in 1941, for example, when public-opinion polls and other evidence indicated that a great majority of the American people (approximately 80 percent as late as autumn) opposed outright engagement in the world war, an engagement that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration had been seeking relentlessly by hook and by crook from the very beginning. When news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached the public, mass opposition to war dissolved overnight almost completely. No wonder the neocon intriguers, in a September 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, expressed their yearning for "some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor."
Although other kinds of great crises may not elicit the same immediate submission to the government's announced program for the people's salvation, they may prove equally effective if they are sufficiently menacing and persistent. Thus, the Great Depression, which pushed millions of Americans into economic desperation in the early 1930s, was eventually viewed by almost everybody as, in Justice Brandeis's words, "an emergency more serious than war." Other pregnant crises have included nation-wide strikes or widespread labor disturbances, so-called energy crises, such as those of the 1970s, perceived crime waves, great epidemics or health scares, and, lately, even a bogus scare about global warming.
In 2001, the attacks of 9/11 answered to perfection the neocon prayer for "a new Pearl Harbor." An administration that had been wallowing without a breeze in its sails was suddenly invested with overwhelming public support for aggressive military action abroad. In a Gallup poll taken during September 7–10, 2001, 51 percent of the respondents approved of "the way George W. Bush [was] handling his job as president," 39 percent disapproved, and 10 percent had no opinion — yielding an "opinion balance" of + 12 percent (= 51–39). A few days later, while the ruins of the World Trade Center's twin towers were still smoldering, 86 percent approved, 10 percent disapproved, and only 4 percent had no opinion — an opinion balance of + 76 percent, or more than six times greater than it had been just a few days earlier. Although Bush had done absolutely nothing to demonstrate an abruptly improved performance of his job as president, nearly the entire population, many members of which roundly disliked the president, suddenly showered approbation on his performance in office. A week later, the opinion balance had risen even higher, to 84 percent, on the strength of a 90-percent approval response.
Afterward, Bush's job-performance-approval rating followed a long downward trend, interrupted by only brief upticks, until it reached its present range. In the Gallup poll of July 6–8, 2007, the opinion balance was negative 37 percent, and only 29 percent of the respondents rated the president's performance favorably. (In more recent polls, the balance has stood a few points higher in the president's favor, but such small differences have little significance.) During the long downhill slide, Bush's performance-approval rating held up amazingly well among Republicans, but fell lower and lower among both Democrats and independents — an expression of how normal political partisanship reasserted itself as the initial, unifying crisis slipped farther and farther into the background.
Similar movements may be seen in the Gallup polls that asked the respondents whether they viewed George W. Bush himself favorably or unfavorably: here, the opinion balance jumped from + 25 percent in August 2001 to + 76 percent in November 2001 — a three-fold increase — before beginning a long downward trend and becoming increasingly negative after mid-2005.
When the public's approval of the president's actions is broken down by specific issues, we see that his greatest 9/11-related jump occurred in the area of — mirabile dictu — foreign affairs. In the Gallup poll taken during July 10–11, 2001, the opinion balance in this area was + 21 percent (54 percent favorable minus 33 percent unfavorable), but in the poll taken during October 5–6, 2001, the opinion balance had jumped to 67 percent, or more than three times higher (81 percent favorable minus 14 percent unfavorable).
The lesson is clear: if the president conducts foreign policy so as to antagonize foreigners and provoke them to launch massively destructive attacks on this country, the American public will respond with an enormous outpouring of approval of his actions, as if to prove that in our political system no failure goes unrewarded.
Bertrand Russell long ago stated the underlying condition for this sort of perverse public reaction when he remarked that "neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." Indeed, the fundamental condition of the entire process by which the government leads people to their own destruction is widespread public fear, which causes people to put aside their normal distrust of the state and to turn to it, especially to its chief, as a child turns to a parent, for security and reassurance that everything will be okay if only people do as they are told.
Not only did the events of September 11, 2001, cause the American public to look more favorably on the president as a person, as a president, and as the principal architect of US foreign policy, but those events also apparently caused the public to express more trust in the federal government in general in its handling of both international and domestic matters.
In the Gallup poll of September 7–10, 2001, 68 percent of the respondents expressed "a great deal" or a "fair amount" of trust and confidence in the government's handling of international problems, whereas 31 percent expressed "not very much" or "none at all," which implied an opinion balance of + 37 percent (= 68–31). A month later, in the poll conducted during October 11–14, this opinion balance had risen to 67 percent (= 83–16), almost doubling. The public's perversely increased trust in the government had also spilled inexplicably onto its handling of domestic problems, increasing this opinion balance from 22 percent (= 60–39) in the early September poll to 56 percent (= 77–21) in the October poll.
A final measure of public opinion, "trust in Washington to do what is right," which is normally a fairly stable indicator, also rose in an unusual way owing to 9/11. In the Gallup poll of July 6–9, 2000, 42 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that the government will do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time," whereas 58 percent responded "only some of the time" or "never," which implies an opinion balance of negative 16 percent. When the pollsters next asked this question, in October 5–6, 2001, however, the opinion balance had risen to + 21 percent (= 60–39), indicating a complete turnaround toward greater trust than distrust in government.
At the time of these events, as I considered everything that was going on, I was dismayed by what seemed to me to be a wholly unwarranted public stampede into the protective arms of the federal government — the same government that had been robbing and abusing most of the people in countless ways for as long as they could remember. Hardly anyone asked whether the government's actions abroad might actually have provoked the 9/11 attacks — of course, most were so ignorant of those actions that they had no inkling of how the government might have created such a provocation. Many people seemed consumed by a combination of fear and rage that manifested itself in a desire to "nuke" someone, anyone, who might have had something to do with the attacks. Standards of proof fell precipitously. People didn't want careful investigation; they didn't want to "get to the bottom" of what had happened. Instead, they wanted action, and in particular they wanted the government to "strike back" immediately at any and all plausible targets.
In searching for the cause of this tremendous, rationally unjustified "rallying 'round the flag," we do not have far to go. Such public reactions are always driven by a combination of fear, ignorance, and uncertainty against a background of intense jingoistic nationalism, a popular culture predisposed toward violence, and a general inability to distinguish between the state and the people at large.
Because the government ceaselessly sings the siren song, relentlessly propagandizing the public to look upon it as their protector — such alleged protection being the principal excuse for its routinely robbing them and violating their natural rights — and because the mass media incessantly magnify and spread the government's propaganda, we can scarcely be surprised if that propaganda turns out to have entered deeply into many people's thinking, especially when they are in a state of near-panic. Unable to think clearly in an informed way, most people fall back on a childlike us-against-them style of understanding the perceived threat and what should be done about it.
If any resistance should arise to the rulers' war-making, the state has a time-tested means of disposing of the resisters. Perhaps the classic description of this tactic was given by the Nazi bigwig Hermann Göring when he was being held in prison during the trials at Nuremberg in 1946. This account comes to us from Gustave M. Gilbert, the German-speaking prison psychologist who had free access to all of the prisoners during the trials and talked to them frequently in private. On the evening of April 18, 1946, Gilbert visited Göring in his cell, and he later described their conversation as follows:
We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Göring shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. (Nuremberg Diary, pp. 278–79)
Göring was right, and matters have only become worse in this regard during the past sixty years. Under the postwar regime in the United States, of course, Congress never declares war — it has made no such declaration since June 5, 1942, when it declared war on Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary — and the president now wages war solely at his own pleasure and caprice, as if he were Caesar.
"Dragging the people along," as Göring put it, remains as easy as ever, because, as we have seen, an initial incident, even one the government itself has provoked or trumped up, invariably causes the masses to rally 'round the flag. We have also seen, however, that the ardent enthusiasm and mindless support for the government's war-making begins to erode soon afterward. When the people increasingly come to their senses, as casualties and other costs accumulate and as bits and pieces of the truth seep out, why does the system not revert to the status quo ante bellum?
The answer is that actions taken during the early days of the crisis, when the government responds practically without opposition to the public's fear and desire for retribution by vastly expanding its powers (Stage II of the ratchet phenomenon), take the form of political, legal, and institutional changes that set precedents or become so deeply embedded that not all of them are abandoned during the postcrisis stage of incomplete retrenchment (Stage IV of the ratchet phenomenon).
For example, soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, the government enacted the First War Powers Act (December 18, 1941) and the Second War Powers Act (March 27, 1942). These sweeping delegations empowered the president to rearrange the executive branch as he pleased, gave him a free hand to contract with munitions suppliers almost as he pleased, and gave him far-reaching control over international financial transactions and censorship power over all communications between the United States and any foreign country; they expanded the government's powers to seize private property for war purposes, empowered the president to set priorities for deliveries of designated goods and services, and gave the president effectively unrestrained power over resource allocation in the domestic economy, a power he delegated to the War Production Board under his direct oversight. Wielding all this authority, the president and his lieutenants became in effect central planners of a command economy for the duration of the war.
Similarly, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the government enacted the USA PARTIOT Act, which greatly trenched on civil liberties and long-established rights, effectively demolished the Fourth Amendment, and gave a mighty boost to the US police state. Other measures moving in the same direction followed soon afterward, including nationalization of the airline-security industry and creation of the bureaucratic monstrosity known as the Department of Homeland Security, an organization as menacing in its ideological underpinnings as it is feckless and absurd in its day-to-day operations.
Once the government has expanded greatly at the outset of a war or other crisis and then employed its new powers for an extended period, getting rid of all the new weapons in the government's arsenal of power is virtually impossible even when the emergency ends and people clamor for a return to normal arrangements. Therefore, many of the crisis measures become permanent parts of the government's apparatus for dominating and robbing those outside the political class.
Wartime organizations may be retained to carry out new functions, as, for example, the War Finance Corporation of World War I was kept going for six years after the war, providing subsidized credit to exporters, agricultural cooperatives, and rural banks. After finally having been discontinued in 1925, it was revived in 1932 as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a huge lender to politically favored railroads, banks, and insurance companies during the Depression, and later the government's chief agency for financing a variety of military-industrial undertakings during World War II. Retained after 1945, the RFC continued to make subsidized loans to privileged borrowers until it sank in a storm of scandal in 1953, only to be replaced — as a political quid pro quo — by a similarly egregious agency, the Small Business Administration, which has continued its politically driven misallocation of taxpayer money ever since.
Cases such as that of the War Finance Corporation and its direct descendants exemplify how national emergency solidifies so-called iron triangles: alliances of government bureaucrats, congressional overseers, and privileged private-sector beneficiaries. These arrangements are called "iron" because they are so difficult to break. Their beneficiaries have great incentive to fight for the retention and even for the expansion of the triangle's activities, whereas the general public rarely has much incentive to fight against them, even when it is aware of them, because the public burden per capita is normally too small to justify anyone's expenditure of much time or effort in the requisite politicking.
Under modern conditions, high wartime taxes always stick to some extent, leaving the amount of the government's plunder much greater after the war than it was before the war. In the present so-called war on terror, the government has partially concealed this increased seizure of private property by running up the national debt, rather than by jacking up ordinary tax rates or imposing new kinds of taxes, but this financial trick does not alter the raw fact that the government has been using more of the people's resources for its own purposes, as shown by the rapid run-up of its spending, leaving the public on the hook to pay the increased interest and eventually to repay the principal, or to suffer the consequences if the government should attempt in effect to repudiate its obligations to creditors by inflating the money stock. During the present Bush administration, Treasury debt held by the public has grown from $3.3 trillion (end FY 2001) to an estimated $5.1 trillion (end FY 2007), or by about 53 percent in only six years.
During the Great Depression, governments at every level greatly increased their tax revenues, by imposing new kinds of taxes — state and local sales taxes, for example, and an undistributed-profits tax at the federal level. In fiscal year 1940, with the Depression still lingering, the federal government collected 57 percent more total revenue than it had in the prosperous year 1927. Federal taxes relative to GNP doubled between 1933 and 1940.
Apart from the financial legacies that exacerbate the government's burden on the public, national emergencies leave institutional legacies of various kinds that enhance government power at the expense of the people's liberties. The rent controls of World War II, for example, never ended here in New York City. For more than sixty years, they have denied landlords and tenants the liberty to contract on any mutually agreeable terms, and they have created incentives that foster the avoidance of maintenance for rented apartments and discourage the construction of the new structures that would be built if only the housing market were free of these war-borne fetters.
The institutional legacies of the New Deal, of course, are legion even now, nearly seventy years after FDR's political momentum petered out: a vast system of agribusiness subsidies; intricate regulations of financial markets, union-management relations, and financial intermediaries; federal insurance of bank deposits, home mortgages, and other financial liabilities; direct federal involvement in electricity production and distribution — the list goes on and on.
Perhaps most important, crisis has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties. During wartime or other crises, governments take many actions that would be more or less unthinkable in a reasonably free society during normal times, because people would not tolerate them. Having tolerated them during a national emergency, however, people may come to regard them not only as permanently tolerable, but even as desirable.
For example, nearly everything the US government did during the Great Depression had an obvious wartime precedent in the Great War. President Herbert Hoover declared, "We used such emergency powers to win the war; we can use them to fight the depression." Everything from the Depression-era agricultural price controls to the industrial cartelization program, the public housing program, the schemes to control oil and coal prices, the tax hikes, and the promotion of labor unionization had a precedent during 1917–18. Obviously, many of these war-inspired public policies then became permanent after the 1930s, as did, later, the military-industrial complex created from 1940 to 1945. People can get used to almost anything, especially if it has a plausible justification. War and other great crises managed by government soften up formerly free people and habituate them to government controls and abuses that they would resist except for their alleged emergency necessity. In this way, government emergency measures change the very character of once-free people, by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist homegrown tyranny.
It is important to appreciate that all the effects on freedom that I have been discussing occur regardless of the rationale for the war or other crisis intervention itself. One may regard a war, for example, as ever so necessary and desirable or not, yet these effects will occur in any event. The logic of a government at war asserts itself in more or less the same fashion regardless of the war's provocation and purpose, because every major war requires the government to take a much bigger bite out of the people's resources quickly, and it cannot do so successfully without suppressing many normal liberties and rights, especially those that might be exercised to obstruct the government's wartime programs and policies or to persuade people to resist the war or to demand its discontinuation or settlement.
Hence, as Göring noted, the government and its supporters vigorously denounce all those who stand in the way as traitors, and the state encourages the masses to act as amateur G-men, identifying "disloyal" citizens, hounding them into buckling under, and reporting them to governmental authorities. Great peacetime initiatives operate similarly. Many historians have noted the parallels between the government's intimidating public efforts to entice or browbeat people into cooperation with the National Recovery Administration and the Nazi extravaganzas being staged in Germany at the same time.
Nowadays, for example, the government frequently encourages all of us to report any "suspicious" persons or actions to the police or the FBI, ostensibly to prevent terrorism. Needless to say, no free society can exist when everyone in effect has enlisted as a government informant, especially when the character of the threatening persons and actions is so vague that it is bound to give rise to abuses. Not uncommonly now, people are reported for nothing more than looking like an Arab or for speaking a strange language to strange-looking companions. This insidious enlistment of informants, so reminiscent of the atrocious American Protective League during World War I, is turning our once-open society into a sort of East Germany redux. Horror stories abound of perfectly innocent persons taken into custody for interrogation or worse.
While the government promotes mindless support of its war-making and may induce a sort of patriotic hysteria in the most mentally fragile personalities, many citizens swing into action as faux patriots on strictly opportunistic grounds. War contractors, for example, may be able to position themselves to make a killing, so to speak, off of the actual killing; moreover, they may parlay their wartime business as government suppliers into profitable postwar business that long outlives the war itself. The aircraft companies that suddenly profited so greatly during World War II, for example, became permanent, highly successful feeders at the government's trough, where some of them are feasting lavishly even now, the current administration's military buildup having proved a godsend for them and a boon to their stockholders. Other people simply want a cushy job in the government's expanded wartime bureaucracy.
The so-called war on terror has given rise to a huge industry that has emerged almost from scratch during the past few years. According to a 2006 Forbes report, the Department of Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies paid private contractors at least $130 billion after 9/11, and other federal agencies have spent a comparable amount. Thus, besides the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), we now have a parallel security-industrial-congressional complex (SICC).
Between 1999 and 2006, the number of federal homeland-security contractors increased from nine companies to 33,890, and a multi-billion-dollar industry selling security-related goods and services has emerged complete with specialized newsletters, magazines, websites, consultants, trade shows, job-placement services, and a veritable army of lobbyists working around the clock to widen the river of money that flows to these opportunists. As Paul Harris wrote, "America is in the grip of a business based on fear." The last thing these vultures want, of course, is an abatement of the perceived terrorist threat, and we can count on them to hype any signs of an increase in such threats and, of course, to crowd the trough, happily slurping up the taxpayers' money.
What chance does peace have when millions of well-heeled, politically connected opportunists of all stripes depend on the continuation of a state of war for their personal financial success? For members of Congress, the Department of Homeland Security has quickly become the most magnificent dispenser of pork and patronage to come along in decades. Everyone is happy here, except for the beleaguered ordinary citizens, whose pockets are being picked and whose liberties are being overridden by politicians and private-sector predators with utter contempt for the people's intelligence and rights. Yet, so long as the people continue to be consumed by fear and to fall for the age-old swindle that the government seeks only to protect them, these abuses will never end.
Along the Gulf Coast during the past two years, a legion of opportunists has similarly rushed onto the scene to take advantage of the unprecedented sums of federal money pouring into the area in the guise of financing recovery from the damage wreaked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Bank accounts have been stuffed with this loot, to be sure, but little in the way of genuine recovery and reconstruction has sprung from it. Nevermind: in the immortal words of President Bush, "Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job." The ridiculous Brownie was subsequently sacked as the head of FEMA, of course, but the "heck of a job" goes on as before, all at taxpayer expense and at great profit for the corporatist cronies, political favorites, and other privileged parties who are appropriating the people's money after it has been duly laundered through the federal treasury.
Recall Margaret Atwood's poem "Siren Song," with which I prefaced my remarks. It begins,
This is the one song everyonewould like to learn: the songthat is irresistible:the song that forces mento leap overboard in squadronseven though they see the beached skulls.
And the poem ends,
Alasit is a boring songbut it works every time.
In the present regard, it works every time because the people falsely believe that those who sing it are their protectors, rather than their exploiters. Until people learn to disregard the state's siren song of beneficence and protection, they will continue to suffer and die as victims of the state's wars, foreign and domestic. People yearn for security, and they look to the state to provide it, but they are calling upon a wolf to guard the sheep.
The state cannot refrain from crime because it is an inherently criminal enterprise, living by robbery (which it relabels taxation) and retaining its turf by mass murder (which it relabels war). Constantly singing the siren song, it seduces the people by giving back to them a portion of what it has previously extorted from them and by ceaselessly claiming to protect them from all manner of threats to their lives, liberties, property, and even their self-esteem. If it protects them at all, however, it does so only as a shepherd protects his captive flock: not because he recognizes and respects the natural rights of his sheep, but only to keep them unmolested in his sole possession and control until he finds it expedient to shear or slaughter them.
A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously, to keep them under its control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state's siren song.
When the Israelites had fled from their captivity in Egypt, they made do for centuries with only judges, yet they were not satisfied, and eventually they demanded a king, crying out:
we will have a king over us; That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles. (1 Samuel 8:19–20)
Well, they got a king all right, just as we Americans have embraced one of our own, though we call ours a president. The Israelites, as the prophet Samuel had warned, were no better off for having a king, however: King Saul only led them from one slaughter to another (1 Samuel 14: 47–48). Likewise, our rulers have led us from one unnecessary slaughter to the next; and, to make matters worse, they have exploited each such occasion to fasten their chains around us more tightly. Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans shall never have real, lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to a king — that is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the state.
[Originally published as "Sons of Leviathan" in October 2007.]
Robert Higgs identified the Leviathan as an opportunistic beast, using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its realm, to slither its tentacles into the remaining halls where large amounts of liberty are found. Any national or international event can be spun into the need for more government, more interventions, and more intrusions of its slimy appendages.
We have seen this time and time again, as the Leviathan strikes while the masses tremble. Somehow we are calmed by the sight of this powerful yet ugly serpentlike creature, believing that it is only grasping what it needs in order to protect us, and praying that it will release its grasp once the crisis passes.
However, government never willingly releases its hold of liberty. No, and in fact, any taste of the liberty that remains in possession of the masses simply whets government's appetite for more. That which we give up in a momentary shudder of fear is gone forever.
Nevertheless, crises never seem to arise often enough for those wanting more power. Therefore, government will manufacture events, or spin the innocuous or unrelated incident into a crisis, whenever it desires more of the people's liberty. While Higgs's scholarship shows how this occurs at the national level, it also occurs at the local level as the sons of the Leviathan seek their own bits of power, the tidbits dropped from the mouth of the great beast.
Not four miles from my home is an old bridge that captivates many. Folks like the bridge's style, simple beauty, and setting. The bridge, a registered national historic place, spans a section of the Olentangy River that still holds its natural qualities—a stretch of the water designated as a state scenic river.
Local and state officials—led by the county engineer, an elected official—wanted to tear down this bridge years ago. They regularly cited its age, restricted traffic flow, and possible structural deficiencies as reason to replace it with a modern—though institutional-looking—cement span. In opposition, local residents and other nature lovers have fought government all along. They have used every possible means to stop the destruction of their favored bridge. In fact, they even appealed to laws that protect areas designated as state scenic rivers and bridges deemed historic—anything to stop the state (you just have to love it when laws impede the state and its local minions).
The two groups—bridge lovers and government officials—locked horns, with neither side gaining ground. But, that all ended with one tragic event: the collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis. Finally, a crisis.
Within days, the county had reevaluated the structure of the bridge and determined that it was indeed deficient. Well, the bridge wasn't actually deficient, but there was some slight evidence that overweight vehicles may have continued to cross it. So, they closed it down.
After years of battles, it only took one national event to change the balance of power at the local level: government had won. No voices arose from bridge lovers in defense of their span. No, they simply rolled over in the face of the fear; they blinked. And with that, years of battle ended, and their bridge is gone.
It certainly appears that local governments used the timing of a national tragedy to pursue their goals. The closing of the bridge was now an issue of safety, and government always claims a monopoly on the ability to provide safety. And, more important, the majority of local citizens have come to agree with government on this.
OK, so this incident is not really a matter of negative rights, but it does show how even local governments take advantage of any situation, large or small. And how local residents willingly concede that government is security.
More to the point: in June of 2001, a local resident was arrested for possession of pipe bombs, assault rifles, etc. This individual and his fellow conspirators were bombing and shooting in the state park not seven miles from my home, in an outlying suburban area. The man had strong ties to national groups that advocate violence as a means to achieve political ends.
Even though there was strong evidence to believe that harm would result from the groups' activities, and given that this all occurred after Oklahoma City, it is hard to imagine today that the arrest was only considered minor local news. The Leviathan could not advance, not yet anyway.
A few years later, another local resident blustered about bombing a local mall. There was never any evidence that he possessed the wherewithal to execute his plans. Yet, post-9/11, this arrest achieved much greater attention. The Leviathan was allowed to advance because a majority of local residents have accepted—no, embraced—the belief that only government can provide safety in a crisis, and that safety is more valuable than liberty.
Finally, there are the debates over how much money is required by the various local governments to protect us in the event of a major natural disaster. Katrina has become the cry for more funding, because many believe that there can never be too much money spent on safety.
Given this, the city administrator rolls out the most fantastic scenario of catastrophe and emphatically states "We have to be ready for this." Not to be outdone, the police and fire chiefs one-up the administrator and each other with scenarios bordering on the bizarre, claiming that "the city must be ready for these also." Then, in unison, council members and local media race to bring attention to the need for more government, and the local Leviathans smile.
Of course, money is the solution, and more is always needed. However, dare question them and they will scream "Katrina, Katrina, Katrina!" The crisis drives it all.
So, we have a closed bridge, reduced liberty, and additional taxes. Yet many claim that we are safer for all of this. But are we safer, or is government safer? I venture to say that the local Leviathans are smug and more comfortable in our need for them. We, on the other hand, are in more danger than ever of losing the remnants of liberty that we still hold in our possession.
We must be vigilant with regard to the great Leviathan, as well as its local sons. They all exist solely to rob the liberty we hold dear.
A hysteria of sorts has been generated by reports that some of China's products lack quality control. Some cat food has been tainted. A few cell phone batteries have blown up. Cough syrup contained stuff that makes you sick. And so on. In response, the Chinese government actually executed its regulatory head of food and product safety, Zheng Xiaoyu.
How very strange this last point is! In the West, we long ago gave up the idea that these people are actually supposed to carry out their jobs and should be personally responsible for their failure to do so.
What is most striking about these criticisms is how historically insular they appear in light of the modern history of China. This is a subject that is deeply painful, horrifying in its detail, highly instructive in helping us understand politics — and also puts into perspective these reports of recent troubles in China. It's a scandal, in fact, that few Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong.
How many died as a result of persecutions and the policies of Mao? Perhaps you care to guess? Many people over the years have attempted to guess. But they have always underestimated. As more data rolled in during the 1980s and 1990s, and specialists have devoted themselves to investigations and estimates, the figures have become ever more reliable. And yet they remain imprecise. What kind of error term are we talking about? It could be as low as 40 million. It could be as high as 100 million or more. In the Great Leap Forward from 1959 to 1961 alone, figures range between 20 million to 75 million. In the period before, 20 million. In the period after, tens of millions more.
As scholars in the area of mass death point out, most of us can't imagine 100 dead or 1000. Above that, we are just talking about statistics: they have no conceptual meaning for us, and it becomes a numbers game that distracts us from the horror itself. And there is only so much ghastly information that our brains can absorb, only so much blood we can imagine. And yet there is more to why China's communist experiment remains a hidden fact: it makes a decisive case against government power, one even more compelling than the cases of Russia or Germany in the 20th century.
The horror was foreshadowed in a bloody civil war following the Second World War. After some nine million people died, the communists emerged victorious in 1949, with Mao as the ruler. The land of Lao-Tzu (rhyme, rhythm, peace), Taoism (compassion, moderation, humility), and Confucianism (piety, social harmony, individual development) was seized by the strangest import to China ever: Marxism from Germany via Russia. It was an ideology that denied all logic, experience, economic law, property rights, and limits on the power of the state on grounds that these notions were merely bourgeois prejudices, and what we needed to transformed society was a cadre with all power to transform all things.
It's bizarre to think about it, really: posters of Marx and Lenin in China, of all places, and rule by an ideology of robbery, dictatorship, and death that did not come to an end until 1976. So spectacular has the transformation been in the last 25 years that one would hardly know that any of this ever happened, except that the Communist Party is still running the place while having tossed out the communist part.
The experiment began in the most bloody way possible following the second world war, when all Western eyes were focused on matters at home and, to the extent there was any foreign focus, it was on Russia. The "good guys" had won the war in China, or so we were led to believe in times when communism was the fashion.
The communization of China took place in the usual three stages: purge, plan, and scapegoat. First there was the purge to bring about communism. There were guerillas to kill and land to nationalize. The churches had to be destroyed. The counterrevolutionaries had to be put down. The violence began in the country and spread later to the cities. All peasants were first divided into four classes that were considered politically acceptable: poor, semi poor, average, and rich. Everyone else was considered a landowner and targeted for elimination. If no landowners could be found, the "rich" were often included in this group. The demonized class was ferreted out in a country-wide series of "bitterness meetings" in which people turned in their neighbors for owning property and being politically disloyal. Those who were so deemed were immediately executed along with those who sympathized with them.
The rule was that there had to be at least one person killed per village. The numbers killed is estimated to be between one and five million. In addition, another four to six million landowners were slaughtered for the crime of being capital owners. If anyone was suspected of hiding wealth, he or she was tortured with hot irons to confess. The families of the killed were then tortured and the graves of their ancestors looted and pillaged. What happened to the land? It was divided into tiny plots and distributed among the remaining peasants.
Then the campaign moved to the cities. The political motivations here were at the forefront, but there were also behavioral controls. Anyone who was suspected of involvement in prostitution, gambling, tax evasion, lying, fraud, opium dealing, or telling state secrets was executed as a "bandit." Official estimates put the number of dead at two million with another two million going to prison to die. Resident committees of political loyalists watched every move. A nighttime visit to another person was immediately reported and the parties involved jailed or killed. The cells in the prisons themselves grew ever smaller, with one person living in a space of about 14 inches. Some prisoners were worked to death, and anyone involved in a revolt was herded with collaborators and they were all burned.
There was industry in the cities, but those who owned and managed them were subjected to ever tighter restrictions: forced transparency, constant scrutiny, crippling taxes, and pressure to offer up their businesses for collectivization. There were many suicides among the small- and medium-sized business owners who saw the writing on the wall. Joining the party provided only temporary respite, since 1955 began the campaign against hidden counterrevolutionaries in the party itself. A principle here was that one in ten party members was a secret traitor.
As the rivers of blood rose ever higher, Mao brought about the Hundred Flowers Campaign in two months of 1957, the legacy of which is the phrase we often hear: "Let a hundred flowers bloom." People were encouraged to speak freely and give their point of view, an opportunity that was very tempting for intellectuals. The liberalization was short lived. In fact, it was a trick. All those who spoke out against what was happening to China were rounded up and imprisoned, perhaps between 400,000 and 700,000 people, including 10 percent of the well-educated classes. Others were branded as right wingers and subjected to interrogation, reeducation, kicked out of their homes, and shunned.
But this was nothing compared with phase two, which was one of history's great central planning catastrophes. Following collectivization of land, Mao decided to go further to dictate to the peasants what they would grow, how they would grow it, and where they would ship it, or whether they would grow anything at all as versus plunge into industry. This would become the Great Leap Forward that would generate history's most deadly famine. Peasants were grouped into groups of thousands and forced to share all things. All groups were to be economically self-sufficient. Production goals were raised ever higher.
People were moved by the hundreds of thousands from where production was high to where it was low, as a means of boosting production. They were moved too from agriculture to industry. There was a massive campaign to collect tools and transform them into industrial skill. As a means of showing hope for the future, collectives were encouraged to have huge banquets and eat everything, especially meat. This was a way of showing one's belief that the next year's harvest would be even more bountiful.
Mao had this idea that he knew how to grow grain. He proclaimed that "seeds are happiest when growing together" and so seeds were sown at five to ten times their usual density. Plants died, the soil dried out, and the salt rose to the surface. To keep birds from eating grain, sparrows were wiped out, which vastly increased the number of parasites. Erosion and flooding became endemic. Tea plantations were turned to rice fields, on grounds that tea was decadent and capitalistic. Hydraulic equipment built to service the new collective farms didn't work and lacked any replacement parts. This led Mao to put new emphasis on industry, which was forced to appear in the same areas as agriculture, leading to ever more chaos. Workers were drafted from one sector to another, and mandatory cuts in some sectors was balanced by mandatory high quotas in another.
In 1957, the disaster was everywhere. Workers were growing too weak even to harvest their meager crops, so they died watching the rice rot. Industry churned and churned but produced nothing of any use. The government responded by telling people that fat and proteins were unnecessary. But the famine couldn't be denied. The black-market price of rice rose 20 to 30 times. Because trade had been forbidden between collectives (self-sufficiency, you know), millions were left to starve. By 1960, the death rate soared from 15 percent to 68 percent, and the birth rate plummeted. Anyone caught hoarding grain was shot. Peasants found with the smallest amount were imprisoned. Fires were banned. Funerals were prohibited as wasteful.
Villagers who tried to flee the countryside to the city were shot at the gates. Deaths from hunger reached 50 percent in some villages. Survivors boiled grass and bark to make soup and wandered the roads looking for food. Sometimes they banded together and raided houses looking for ground maize. Women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition. People in work camps were used for food experiments that led to sickness and death.
How bad did it get? In 1968 an 18-year-old member of the Red Guard, Wei Jingsheng, took refuge with a family in a village of Anhui, and here he lived to write about what he saw:
"We walked along beside the village… Before my eyes, among the weeds, rose up one of the scenes I had been told about, one of the banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them. I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children. The children who were chasing butterflies in a nearby field seemed to be the reincarnation of the children devoured by their parents. I felt sorry for the children but not as sorry as I felt for their parents. What had made them swallow that human flesh, amidst the tears and grief of others — flesh that they would never have imagined tasting, even in their worst nightmares?"
The author of this passage was jailed as a traitor but his status protected him from death and he was finally released in 1997.
How many people died in the famine of 1959–61? The low range is 20 million. The high range is 43 million. Finally in 1961, the government gave in and permitted food imports, but it was too little and too late. Some peasants were again allowed to grow crops on their own land. A few private workshops were opened. Some markets were permitted. Finally, the famine began to abate and production grew.
But then the third phase came: scapegoating. What had caused the calamity? The official reason was anything but communism, anything but Mao. And so the politically motivated roundup began again, and here we get the very heart of the Culture Revolution. Thousands of camps and detention centers were opened. People sent there died there. In prison, the slightest excuse was used to dispense with people — all to the good, since the prisoners were a drain on the system, so far as those in charge were concerned. The largest penal system ever built was organized in a military fashion, with some camps holding as many as 50,000 people.
There was some sense in which everyone was in prison. Arrests were sweeping and indiscriminate. Everyone had to carry around a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. To question the reason for arrest was itself evidence of disloyalty, since the state was infallible. Once arrested, the safest path was instant and frequent confession. Guards were forbidden from using overt violence, so interrogations would go on for hundreds of hours, and often the prisoner would die during this process. Those named in the confession were then hunted down and rounded up. Once you got through this process, you were sent to a labor camp, where you were graded according to how many hours you could work with little food. You were fed no meat nor given any sugar or oil. Labor prisoners were further controlled by the rationing of the little food they had.
The final phase of this incredible litany of criminality lasted from 1966 to 1976, during which the number killed fell dramatically to "only" one to three million. The government, now tired and in the first stages of demoralization, began to lose control, first within the labor camps and then in the countryside. And it was this weakening that led to the final, and in some ways the most vicious, of the communist periods in China's history.
The first stages of rebellion occurred in the only way permissible: people began to criticize the government for being too soft and too uncommitted to the communist goal. Ironically, this began to appear precisely as moderation became more overt in Russia. Neo-revolutionaries in the Red Guard began to criticize the Chinese communists as "Khrushchev-like reformers." As one writer put it, the guard "rose up against its own government in order to defend it."
During this period, the personality cult of Mao reached it height, with the Little Red Book achieving a mythic status. The Red Guards roamed the country in an attempt to purge the Four Old-Fashioned Things: ideas, culture, customs, and habits. The remaining temples were barricaded. Traditional opera was banned, with all costumes and sets in the Beijing Opera burned. Monks were expelled. The calendar was changed. All Christianity was banned. There were to be no pets such as cats and birds. Humiliation was the order of the day.
Thus was the Red Terror: in the capital city, there were 1,700 deaths and 84,000 people were run out. In other cities such as Shanghai, the figures were worse. A massive party purge began, with hundreds of thousands arrested and many murdered. Artists, writers, teachers, scientists, technicians: all were targets. Pogroms were visited on community after community, with Mao approving at every step as a means of eliminating every possible political rival. But underneath, the government was splintering and cracking, even as it became ever more brutal and totalitarian in its outlook.
Finally in 1976, Mao died. Within a few months, his closest advisers were all imprisoned. And the reform began slowly at first and then at breakneck speed. Civil liberties were restored (comparatively) and the rehabilitations began. Torturers were prosecuted. Economic controls were gradually relaxed. The economy, by virtue of human and private economic initiative, was transformed.
Having read the above, you are now in a tiny elite of people who know anything about the greatest death camp in the history of the world that China became between 1949 and 1976, an experiment in total control unlike anything else in history. Many more people today know more about China's exploding cell-phone batteries than they do about the hundred million dead and the untold amount of suffering that occurred under communism.
When you hear about shoddy products coming from China or wheat poorly processed, imagine millions in famine, with parents swapping children to eat in order to stay alive. And what do China's critics today recommend? More control by the government. Don't tell me that we've learned anything from history. We don't even know enough about history to learn from it.
The upshot was that it was a bat, which, despite the prevalence of bat revisionism, is a spooky, nasty, disease-carrying, malicious threat to peace and contentment, made all the worse by its elusive, nocturnal habits.
But this wasn't at all obvious at first. It began as little more than a peculiar sound, noted by a visitor to our home. It sounded like a woodpecker but not as steady and sharp, so it couldn't be that. I dismissed the observation. Noises are everywhere. Not to worry.
The next night, at 1:30 a.m., my 12-year old daughter came running from her room, terror in her pale face, complaining that a bird was in her room. It was hitting the door and the wall so hard that it seemed like his bird skull would crack, or so she claimed.
Now, a bird in the house is not an unusual problem. It is just a matter of shooing it out the window. So on went the lights, and the mystery began: there was no bird. I moved objects around the room for 20 minutes and still no bird.
I concluded that she was dreaming, poor dear.
The next night the visitor came fleeing from her room at 1:30, complaining of the same. The signs were the same: wide eyes, white with terror, the look of someone who has felt an ominous presence. I turned off all the lights, open the door, and put the porch light on, on the theory that the bird would be attracted to light and fly away.
Now, all the clues were before me but it wasn't until after this commotion died down that the realization dawned on me. Let's see: mysterious noises, reports of a bird that flies at night but disappears when the light is on, the sense on the part of all who experienced it that they had been in the presence of something terrifying.
A bat! Now, we've been scolded for decades that bats aren't really that bad. They are clean and cuddly, like hamsters with wings. They don't rip your hair out: "Bats don't want to get tangled in your hair anymore than you want that to happen." And they aren't "likely" to be carriers of rabies. Umm, sure. So why do they fly with their mouths open exposing horrid teeth? Oh, that's just so that they can catch their dinner, silly! And then this site tells us that "Not all bats are vampires."
Yeah, well, to heck with these revisionists. If only 1 bat in 50 is a rabies-carrying vampire that gets tangled in one's hair, that's a good enough reason to treat them as grave threats. If they are indeed an endangered species, I'm not conducting any candlelight vigils. (As an aside, someday someone will have to explain to me why, in the progressive/governmental view of the world, we are supposed to be deathly afraid of mercury, asbestos, and trans fats, but we are supposed to adore wolves, snakes, and bats!)My plan for bat removal was that everyone should sleep with a tennis racket. When the bat comes around, whack it with the racket and, when it is disoriented, step on it and kill it. The kids pointed out that they would not be sleeping with hard shoes. So my workaround was to keep hammers in every room.
My daughter thought this was ridiculous and uncool. She googled around and came up with some alternative plan that she predicted would be infallible.
Everyone went to bed as normal, and so far as I knew, it was just another night. The next morning I learned what the night had actually brought. The bat came back. My daughter had been prepared with a specially made bat shield, a tupperware container, and a digital camera to snap images. The battle began at 1:30, in low light, and ended 15 minutes later.
The threat had been chased away and the family safe from the threat. Our homeland was secure! And of course she blogged all about it.
All during the great bat saga, there were politicians parading on television asking us to vote for them because they would do the best job of maintaining our nation's security against vague foreign threats to our well-being.
But this idea of "national security" is just about as mythical as the notion that some elected official with no fiduciary interest in our personal well-being can do anything to bring it about. Security is a microeconomic issue. Threats to person and property come in very precise forms. What gives us homeland security is not a swaggering occupant of the White House but locks on our doors, reliable insurance, a gun in the closet, or a daughter with a good technique for catching bats.
The key to feeling secure is good management of precise threats. The solution is carefully calibrated based on matching risk level, data of time and place, and making contracts with people who have an interest in bringing about the desired result. There is also a need for constant trial and error, since the nature of the threat is ever changing.
There is an interesting pattern to the problem of treating security as a macro-political problem rather than a micro-technical problem. Lew Rockwell reports that with every increase in the war on terror, the incidents of reported terror have increased.
Now, just imagine if you contracted with a company that promised to get rid of bats, and after six years, you had 14,000 bats in your house instead of the original 300. Would you consider this success? Would you gladly pay the bill for another six years? Would you believe the company's excuses for why the problem has gotten worse rather than better?
Not likely. But there is something about the idea of "national security" that compels us to take leave of our senses and not apply normal standards of success and failure.
And what if instead of making a contract with you, that same company stole the money from your bank account to pay itself for the services it was allegedly offering you? Under those conditions, you might rightly conclude their "service" is a worse threat to your security than the bats themselves. You would be right.
After the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, many well-intentioned people all over the country have been calling for increased gun control laws. However, economists tend to oppose gun control laws, since such laws generally pay no attention to basic economic issues.
Let's start with the relationship between means and ends. The shooter had his ends: he wanted to kill many people, and he wanted it to be visible and spectacular. He also had his means: guns and bullets. He engaged in forward-looking behavior: he purchased the guns, bullets, chains, locks, and video equipment well in advance. He taped himself in advance explaining what he was going to do and why he was going to do it.
Now let's consider gun control. Many people argue that if the shooter did not have guns and bullets, he would not have been able to shoot all of those people. This is surely correct. However, from that, they infer that if he did not have guns and bullets, he would not have been able to kill all of those people. This is a whole different question.
As Mises.org readers know, in economics, we discuss the idea of substitutes. These are goods that can be used to replace each other such as Coke vs. Pepsi, contact lenses vs. eyeglasses, Macs vs. PCs. When a person has ends, a person can select among different means to achieve those ends. These different means are substitutes.
Cho wanted to kill many people, and he wanted it to be visible and spectacular. To that end, he purchases guns, bullets, chains, and locks (to prevent survivors from escaping). Would gun control have prevented this? Or would Cho — who apparently planned this attack for weeks, based on the fact that he acquired guns, bullets, chains, and locks for weeks — have used substitute goods?
What would Cho's substitutes have been? What others means are there by which he could engage in mass murder? Well, he could have purchased a knife, although that is probably a weak substitute for guns and bullets in achieving his ends. He has to be right next to his victim, and he might be defeated in personal combat by another person. Likewise, he could not kill a lot of people in the same time frame, and it would not be as spectacular.
Perhaps he could have resorted to convincing people to engage in mass suicide, as Rev. Jim Jones did at Jonestown, or Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite did in California. However, since Cho was apparently a non-charismatic loner, this substitute would not likely have been very effective as a means to his end of mass murder.
Consider instead, though, the news we see every day from Iraq and Afghanistan. On the day this was written, a moving car bomb killed 19 and wounded 35 in a restaurant. Meanwhile, a parked car bomb killed several more. That is the sort of visible and spectacular mass destruction that Cho desired, and it is not greatly difficult to produce a car bomb. Clearly, a car bomb is a substitute means to achieving Cho's end of a visible and spectacular killing of many students. In fact, it is possible that Cho might even have been more effective with such a means. After all, student traffic flows are very predictable, being based on when classes begin and end. Had Cho built a bomb, he could have detonated it at a time and place where hundreds of students might be within the blast radius.
In fact, we see car bombings in the news almost every day, but mass shootings are so rare that we remember them all. We remember the Columbine shooting, and we will remember the Virginia Tech shooting. We remember 9/11 and we remember Pearl Harbor. Why do we remember these things? Because they are so rare! However, we don't remember how many people were killed in Iraq this week, or last week, or the week before. Why not? Because there are so many car bombings that we are nearly immune to news of them. Mass shootings are extremely rare, which makes them news.
So however much some people might yearn for gun control, it seems unlikely that it would have prevented Cho from achieving his ends. He had substitutes available, he had more than one means available to achieve his ends, and he plotted long enough to hit upon other means — especially since those other means are described in detail on TV, in the newspapers, and on the internet every day.
Economists recognize the relationship between means and ends, including the role played by substitutes. Economists understand that when government restricts one market, consumers merely move into another market, and when government tries to foreclose one means, individuals will simply shift into other means to achieve the same ends.
However horrendous we might find the mass shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other places, the fact is that when disaffected people start planning mass mayhem, the lack of a gun will not stop them. The 1927 Bath Township School bombing, in which 45 people were killed by a school board member, shows that guns are neither necessary nor sufficient for the commission of mass murder at schools.
Economists call for a re-thinking of the issue using economic reasoning. As Henry Hazlitt pointed out in his great book Economics in One Lesson, good analysis requires people to look past the obvious and short-term effects on some people, and to focus on the longer-term effects to all people. After all, those longer-term economic realities will arise regardless of the good intentions of people who call for market restrictions.
In a stunning contradiction of the principles enshrined in the Unites States Constitution, the US Supreme Court on April 3 denied petitions of certiorari to two plaintiffs who have been held in legal limbo for five years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. By doing so, the justices have added another burdensome car to the long train of abuses the federal government has sent barreling down the tracks at US citizens.
The cases were named al Odah v. United States and Boumedienne v. United States, and in both instances, the court declined to hear the plaintiffs' requests for habeas corpus hearings. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals had already ruled against the plaintiffs, citing the habeas-stripping provisions of the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress and signed into law by the president in 2006.[1]
In ruling to deny certiorari, and, hence, habeas corpus hearings for the plaintiffs, the US Supreme Court might appear to some observers to be upholding a long-held power of the Congress to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress has done so numerous times in United States history, including a recent law restricting federal courts from hearing liability cases brought against gun manufacturers. But there are other principles at stake here, ones which the majority on the court, and many reporters, do not seem willing to discuss.
Missed in the Odah and Boumedienne rulings are the principles of the separation of powers between the three branches of the federal government, and the constitutional stricture against Congress ceding any of its granted powers to any other body. While these points may seem esoteric to some, especially during this time of so-called "war," they are essential and fundamental to insuring our liberties against government attenuation.
The roots of the April 3 ruling trace back to events just prior to the US invasion of Iraq, when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales approached Congress and asked the representatives to do something not allowed under the US Constitution. He asked them to grant the president the power to use the military without a formal declaration of war. Such a declaration is the only power granted to Congress to facilitate the president's use of the US military. Instead, the Bush administration wanted Congress to grant him a "resolution for the use of military force", which seems an awfully cumbersome term when one could just, well, declare war.
The reason Gonzales and the Bush Administration did not want a formal declaration was obvious: the United States government is a signatory to the Geneva Accords. According to the treaty, which is easily found by utilizing a simple web search, all uniformed and non-uniformed enemies captured during wartime in any signatory state (Iraq and Afghanistan are both signatory) would have to be treated according to Common Article Three of the Accords. This insures certain standards of behavior for those holding prisoners of war, prohibiting torture, and insuring that all signatory nations will afford humane treatment of their POWs.
According to US law prior to 2006, if the individuals captured on the battlefield in this undeclared "war on terror" were not going to be treated as POWs, then they would have to be tried under US criminal code, just like other terrorists in the past. This, of course, would require the courts to provide habeas corpus hearings to the arrested parties, unless Congress utilized its constitutional power to broadly suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus for all Americans and those being tried under US law.[2]
Instead, what US citizens saw between late 2001 and 2004 was a federal government operating outside both the Constitution and the Geneva Accords, with the executive branch apprehending and holding suspected terrorists for long periods of time, without treating them as either POWs or criminals under US codes.
Enter the Supreme Court case Hamdan v Rumsfeld. In 2004, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the captured and detained former driver for Osama bin Laden, filed suit for a habeas corpus hearing in US court. Held without trial, and as an "enemy combatant" without protection of the Geneva Accords, Hamdan requested what other terrorism suspects had typically received in US history: a hearing bound by US law, in which the evidence against him was presented. The Bush Administration fought the request, on the grounds that to reveal certain evidence against Hamdan could put intelligence operatives and soldiers at risk. Such an argument was valid to a point, but it overlooked the necessity to abide by the Constitution and the constitutional treaties agreed to by the US government.
In 2005, the Supreme Court found in favor of Hamdan, setting in motion a number of troubling and revealing actions by the executive branch and Congress that ought to alert even the most disinterested Americans that the "train of abuses" is getting longer and longer.
First, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the administration had to either treat the "detainees" as prisoners of war or as criminals under US Code, and thus afford them the protection of habeas corpus hearings, the president, vice president, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that if they had to abide by the Geneva Accords, they would not be able to derive the valuable information from their "detainees" that had helped "save American lives." As powerful as such statements were, they contradicted Bush Administration claims of a year before, in which the same men repeatedly stated that the "detainees" were being afforded all the protections of the Geneva Accords in Common Article Three.
The two positions are incompatible. If the Supreme Court ruling that Hamdam should be tried under US criminal code or as a POW under the provisions of the Geneva Accord meant that the Bush Administration could no longer carry out the interrogations it had been conducting at a time when Administration members claimed they were affording the protections of the accords, then, clearly, the Bush Administration was not acting in accordance with the accords prior to the Hamdan ruling. If employees of the executive branch had been conforming, the ruling would have had no effect on their interrogation procedures.
To many Americans this might not sound like such a big deal. After all, the "detainees" or "enemy combatants," as they are called, are all foreigners suspected of terrorist activities against American citizens. But what needs to be remembered is that we have a system under which this country is supposed to operate, and that system is set down in the US Constitution. Avoiding it without trying to amend it is an injustice to the Founding Fathers who wrote the rule book for the operation of the United States, and to those of us who were under the mistaken impression that we operated under the rule of law.
Those abuses aside, there is another aspect of the Supreme Court's actions that might resonate even more strongly with some Americans. Under the 2006 Military Commissions Act established by Congress in response to the Hamdan case, and upheld by the Supreme Court on April 3, 2007, anyone can now be labeled an "enemy combatant."
As a result, US citizens can now be designated "detainees" and held indefinitely without trial, or habeas corpus hearing, and if they are brought to trial, they can be put on the stand in quasi-federal courts created by the executive branch, not the legislative branch.
Unfortunately, Congress responded to the Hamdan ruling in precisely the wrong manner. It did not pass laws intended to stop the administration from creating its own "military tribunals", and it did not actually declare war, thus setting the US military on the proper track and arranging a POW system for capture, imprisonment, and trial under the Geneva Accords. It responded by codifying what the Supreme Court had just ruled against. Congress recklessly passed the Military Commissions Act, allowing the Bush administration to set up military courts not sanctioned by the accords, prohibiting federal courts from hearing any more cases requesting clarification as to the status of "detainees" as either POWs or criminals under US law, and ceding Congress's constitutionally provided power to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus.
There once was a time when Congress would not have been so quick to hand its powers over to other bodies. But we now have self-managing agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the FDA, and most Americans think they are justified, so why fuss over yet another hand-off to the executive branch, this time involving trials and the suspension of habeas corpus?
There are plenty of reasons to fuss. As it stands under the law, and the recent court rulings, American citizens can now be arrested by the federal government, held indefinitely without trial, questioned under standards we would not allow for our own soldiers if captured by other nations or subordinates of those nations, and never have a hearing to find out the evidence being presented against them. This is shameful and stunning, and is all derived from a legislative branch that is unwilling to do what the Constitution allows it to do: declare war.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the "train of abuses" by the Crown that he cited filled half a page. Today, Jefferson's quill could fill volumes, and every abuse is being perpetrated by the very politicians and bureaucrats who swore an oath to uphold the government he helped establish. It is a sad commentary on the likelihood that any constitutional republic can long endure without growing to infringe on individual rights, and makes one wonder why anyone ought to put his trust in even the most limited of governments in the first place.
Notes
[1] In favor of the Circuit Court ruling were Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts, while Justices Breyer, Ginsberg and Souter dissented.
[2] Article One, Section Nine: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
During the 1990s, many of us complained bitterly about rule by the Left. We were outraged at how the Clinton administration had so much faith in government's ability to bring about universal fairness and equality. Government, we were told, would make right all relations between groups, equalize access to health care, curb every corporate abuse, and stop all forms of exploitation of man against man, and man against nature.
Except that behind every regulation, every bill, and every central plan, no matter how humane it appeared on the outside, an informed person could discern the iron fist of the state, which the Clinton administration freely used against its enemies. Clinton himself was perhaps never as convinced of the cure of power as the worst Clintonites, but it remained and remains his default worldview.
What was wrong with the leftists' worldview in the 1990s and today? Essentially it is this: they see society as unworkable by itself. They believe it has fundamental flaws and deep-rooted conflicts that keep it in some sort of structural imbalance. All these conflicts and disequilibria cry out for government fixes, for leftists are certain that there is no social problem that a good dose of power can't solve.
If the conflicts they want are not there, they make them up. They look at what appears to be a happy suburban subdivision and see pathology. They see an apparently happy marriage and imagine that it is a mask for abuse. They see a thriving church and think the people inside are being manipulated by a cynical and corrupt pastor. Their view of the economic system is the same. They figure that prices don't reflect reality but instead are set by large players. There is a power imbalance at the heart of every exchange. The labor contract is a mere veneer that covers exploitation.
To the brooding leftist, it is inconceivable that people can work out their own problems, that trade can be to people's mutual advantage, that society can be essentially self managing, or that attempts to use government power to reshape and manage people might backfire. Their faith in government knows few limits; their faith in people is thin or nonexistent. This is why they are a danger to liberty. We knew this in the 1990s, and we know this today.
The remarkable fact about the conflict theory of society held by the Left is that it ends up creating more of the very pathology that they believe has been there from the beginning. The surest way to drive a wedge between labor and capital is to regulate the labor markets to the point that people cannot make voluntary trades. Both sides begin to fear each other. It is the same with relations between races, sexes, the abled and the physical and mentally challenged, and any other groups you can name. The best path to creating conflict where none need exist is to put a government bureaucracy in charge.
And yet, the Left is hardly alone in holding this essential assumption about the way the world works. We have lived through six years of a Republican president. The regime is dominated by a different philosophical orientation. And we have thereby been reminded that there are many flavors of tyranny. Bush's spending record is far worse than Clinton's. After promising a humble foreign policy, war and war spending define our era. We're told that every problem with war can be solved through more force; that there is nothing necessarily wrong with imprisoning people without cause and without legal representation; that torture can be a legitimate wartime tactic; that some countries have to be destroyed in order to be made free; and that we can have all the warfare and welfare we desire at virtually no cost, thanks to the miracle of debt-driven economic growth.
Traveling on airplanes reminds us how much freedom we've lost and how we have become accustomed to it. Government bureaucrats presume the right to search us and all our property. We are interrogated at every step. The slightest bit of resistance could lead to arrest. We mill around airports while the loudspeakers demand that we report all suspicious behavior. Sometimes it seems like we are living in a dystopian novel.
Some people say that the real problem with the Bush administration is that it is too far left, and that a genuine right-wing government would be better. I'm disinclined to believe that, for I detect in the Bush administration a particular philosophy of governance that departs from that of the Clinton regime in many ways, except in its unlimited faith in government, that is, force and the threat of force.
I would go so far as to say that the most imminent threat that we face is not from the Left but from the conservative Right. I would like to defend the idea that rule by the Right is as dangerous as rule by the Left. Elsewhere, I've referred to members of political groups that support the conservative Right as "red-state fascists," and I don't use that phrase merely for rhetorical purposes. There was and is such as thing as fascism as a non-leftist form of social theory that puts unlimited faith in the state to correct the flaws in society.
In the American postwar tradition, the political Right has been a mix of genuine libertarian elements together with some very dangerous tendencies. Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government that there is a breed of warmonger who sees war not as an evil to be avoided as much as possible, but rather a productive and wonderful event that gives life meaning. To these people — and Mises of course was speaking of Nazis — war and all its destruction is a high achievement, something necessary to bring out the best in man and society, something wonderful and necessary to push history and culture forward.
Reading Mises's claim in peacetime makes it seem implausible. Who could possibly believe such things about war? And yet I think we know now. There have been hundreds of articles in the conservative press in the last six years that have made the precise claims we see above. Even in the religious world, we see the shift taking place, with new emphasis on the God of War over the Prince of Peace.
During the New Deal and before the Cold War, the libertarian tendencies of the American Right prevailed. But after the Cold War began, the mix became unstable, with the militarists and statists gaining an upper hand. It was during this period that we first heard the term "conservative" applied to people who believe in free enterprise and human liberty — a ridiculous moniker if there ever was one. Frank Chodorov was so fed up with it that he once said: "anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose." Neither did Hayek or Mises, much less Rothbard, permit that term to be applied to their worldview.
Nonetheless, it stuck, and the bad habits of mind along with it. It would be impossible to say what policy of the current-day Right constitutes the biggest danger to liberty. For now, I would like to leave aside the most commonly talked about issues of the Bush administration, such as its ahistorical view of the power of the executive branch and its post 9-11 violations of civil liberties, which are very real indeed. Instead, however, let's look at the grimmest aspect of the state: its enforcement arm.
Lock 'em up The American Right has long held a casual view toward the police power, viewing it as the thin blue line that stands between freedom and chaos. And while it is true that law itself is critical to freedom, and police can defend rights of life and property, it does not follow that any tax-paid fellow bearing official arms and sporting jackboots is on the side of the good. Every government regulation and tax is ultimately backed by the police power, so free-market advocates have every reason to be as suspicious of socialist-style police power as anyone on the Left.
Uncritical attitudes toward the police lead, in the end, to the support of the police state. And to those who doubt that, I would invite a look at the US-backed regime in Iraq, which has been enforcing martial law since the invasion, even while most conservatives have been glad to believe that these methods constitute steps toward freedom.
The problem of police power is hitting Americans very close to home. It is the police, much militarized and federalized, that are charged with enforcing the on-again-off-again states of emergency that characterize American civilian life. It is the police that confiscated guns from New Orleans residents during the flood, kept residents away from their homes, refused to let the kids go home in the Alabama tornado last month, and will be the enforcers of the curfews, checkpoints, and speech controls that the politicians want during the next national emergency. If we want to see the way the police power could treat US citizens, look carefully at how the US troops in Iraq are treating the civilians there, or how prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are treated.
A related problem with the conservative view toward law and justice concerns the issue of prisons. The United States now incarcerates 730 people per 100,000, which means that the US leads the world in the number of people it keeps in jails. We have vaulted ahead of Russia in this regard. Building and maintaining jails is a leading expense by government at all levels. We lock up citizens at rates as high as eight times the rest of the industrialized world. Is it because we have more crime? No. You are more likely to be burglarized in London and Sydney than in New York or Los Angeles. Is this precisely because we jail so many people? Apparently not. Crime explains about 12% of the prison rise, while changes in sentencing practices, mostly for drug-related offenses, account for 88%.
Overall, spending on prisons, police, and other items related to justice is completely out of control. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the twenty years ending in 2003, prison spending has soared 423%, judicial spending is up 321%, and police spending shot up 241%. When current data become available, I think we will all be in for a shock, with total spending around a quarter of a trillion dollars per year. And what do we get for it? More justice, more safety, better protection? No, we are buying the chains of our own slavery.
We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them. Many inmates are there for drug offenses, supposedly being punished for their behavior, but meanwhile drug markets thrive in prison. If that isn't the very definition of failure, I don't know what is. In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?
In the US prison and justice system, there is no emphasis at all on the idea of restitution, which is not only an important part of the idea of justice but, truly, its very essence. What justice is achieved by robbing the victim again to pay for the victimizer's total dehumanization? As Rothbard writes: "The victim not only loses his money, but pays more money besides for the dubious thrill of catching, convicting, and then supporting the criminal; and the criminal is still enslaved, but not to the good purpose of recompensing his victim."
Free-market advocates have long put up with jails on grounds that the state needs to maintain a monopoly on justice. But where in the world is the justice here? And how many jails are too many? How many prisoners must there be before the government has overreached? We hear virtually nothing about this problem from conservatives. Far from it, we hear only the celebration of the expansion of prison socialism, as if the application of ever more force were capable of solving any social problem.
Kill 'em All This ideology of power is particularly clear when it comes to war. In the 1970s, there developed a myth on the Right that the real problem with Vietnam was not the intervention itself, but the failure to carry it out to a more grim and ruthless end. This seems to be the only lesson that the Bush administration garnered from the experience. So the solution to every problem in Iraq — at least, I can't think of an exception to the rule — has been to apply more force through more troops, more bombs, more tanks, more guns, more curfews, more patrols, more checkpoints, and more controls of all sorts. It's as if the administration were on an intellectual trajectory that it cannot escape.
Why the lack of any critical thinking here? How is it that the war planners and their vast numbers of supporters do not question the underlying assumption that government is capable of achieving all its aims, provided that it is given enough time and firepower? It's as if they are unable to apply the logic behind their support of free enterprise in any other area of politics.
What's more, it is not even clear that American conservatives are temperamentally inclined to support free enterprise. Let us never forget that it was the Nixon administration that finally destroyed the gold standard and gave us price and wage controls, and it was the Reagan administration that set the world record on government spending and debt, before it was broken by the current Republican administration. There is no doubt in my mind that under the right conditions, the Bush administration would institute wage and price controls in the same way that it has pursued an intermittently protectionist program, regulated business, erected new bureaucracies, and failed to seriously cut taxes.
Why is it the case that American conservatives cannot be trusted with the defense of liberty? Here is where we have to penetrate more deeply into the philosophical infrastructure of American conservatism. I wish I could say it is derived from the Republicanism of Madison, or the libertarianism of Jefferson, or the aristocratic old-style liberalism of Edmund Burke, or the rabble-rousing faith in freedom exhibited by that American original Patrick Henry. Sadly, this is not the case. Nor do the conservatives show evidence of having been influenced by the thinkers discussed in Russell Kirk's book The Conservative Mind, such as John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Adams, much less the eccentric Orestes Brownson.
Conservatives have become addicted to entertainment radio and television as the source of their news, and the underlying philosophy seems not to have any connection to history in any way. But because we are all intellectually indebted to some body of ideas, we have to ask: which one is it that informs modern-day conservatism?
Law-Keeper, Law-Breakers What we have at work here is a crude form of Hobbesianism, the political philosophy hammered out by the 17th-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes. His book Leviathan was published in 1651 during the English Civil War in order to justify a tyrannical central government as the price of peace. The natural state of society, he said, was war of all against all. In this world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Conflict was the way of human engagement. Society is rife with it, and it cannot be otherwise.
What is striking here is the context of this book. Conflict was indeed ubiquitous. But what was the conflict about? It was over who would control the state and how that state would operate. This was not a state of nature but a society under Leviathan's control. It was precisely the Leviathan that bred that very conflict that Hobbes was addressing, and he proposed a cure that was essentially identical to the disease.
In fact, the result of the Civil War was the brutal and ghastly dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, who ruled under democratic slogans. This was a foreshadowing of some of the worst political violence of the 20th century. It was Nazism, Fascism, and Communism that transformed formerly peaceful societies into violent communities in which life did indeed become "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Leviathan didn't fix the problem; it bred it — and fastened it on society as a permanent condition.
What is striking about Hobbes is that he thought not at all about economic problems. The problem of human material well-being was not part of his intellectual apparatus. He could not have imagined what England would become only a century to a century and a half later: a bastion of freedom and rising prosperity for everyone.
He wrote at the tail end of an epoch before the rise of old-style liberalism. At the time that Hobbes was writing, the liberal idea had not yet become part of public consciousness in England. In this respect, England was behind the Continent, where intellectuals in Spain and France had already come to understand the core insights of the liberal idea. But in England, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government would not be written for another thirty years, a book that would supply the essential framework of the Declaration of Independence and lead to the formation of the freest and most prosperous society in the history of the world.
Because Hobbes didn't think about economic issues, the essential liberal insight was not part of his thinking. And what is that insight? It is summed up in Frederic Bastiat's claim that "the great social tendencies are harmonious."
We Can Get Along What he means by this is that society contains within itself the capacity to resolve conflicts and create and sustain institutions that further social cooperation. By pursuing their individual self-interest, people can come to mutual agreement and engage in exchange to their mutual benefit. A critical insight here, one that needs to be taught to every generation, relates to the law of association.
The law of association points out that people of radically different abilities, backgrounds, religions, races, and capacities can successfully cooperate to achieve ever higher levels of social welfare through negotiation and trade. The law of association is what explains the method by which humans were able to move out of caves, away from isolated production, beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and into what we call civilization. This law makes it possible for people to stop stealing from each other, stop killing each other, and begin to cooperate. It is the basis of society.
Note that the law of association does not suppose that everyone in society is smart, enlightened, talented, or educated. It presumes radical inequality and points to the paradox that the world's smartest, most talented person still has every reason to trade with his polar opposite because scarcity requires that the tasks of production be divided between people. Under the division of labor, everyone plays an essential role. It is the basis of families, communities, firms, and international trade. Another fact that needs to be understood is this: the law of association is a fact of human existence whether or not there is a state. Indeed, the foundation of civilization itself precedes the existence of the state.
What the law of association addresses is the core problem of freedom itself. If all people were equal, if everyone had the same skill level, if there were racial, sexual, and religious homogeneity in society, if people did not have differences of opinion, there would be few if any problems in society to overcome because it would not be a human society. It would be an ant heap, or a series of machine parts that had no volition. The essential problem of social and economic organization, aside from scarcity, is precisely how to deal with the facts of inequality and free will. It is here that freedom excels.
Let us be clear. Bastiat was not saying that there are no such things as criminals. He was saying that society can deal with malevolence through the exchange economy, and in precisely the way we see today: private security companies, private production of locks and guns, private arbitration, and private insurance. The free market can organize protection better than the state. Private enterprise can and does provide the police function better than the state. As Hayek argued, the state is wildly overrated as a mechanism of order keeping. The state is and has been in history a source of disorder and chaos.
This essential insight of liberalism is what led the founding fathers to take such a radical step as throwing off the rule of Britain. They had to be firmly convinced that chaos would not ensue, that the American people could manage their own affairs without overarching leviathan control. They believed that the source of any conflict in their society was the central state, and that society itself could be self-regulating. In place of control by the king, they put the Articles of Confederation, which was a type of government that more closely approximated anarchy than any system in the modern period. The government was barely in existence, and had essentially no power.
Why did anyone believe it could work? It was the new science of liberty that led to this conviction. The American consensus was precisely that Hobbes was wrong. In the state of nature, life is not nasty and brutish, or, rather if it is, there is nothing that a nasty and brutish state can do to improve it. The only way a society can advance out of barbarism is from within by means of the division of labor.
This logic has been forgotten by the American Right. Instead they have bought into the view that society is fundamentally unstable and rife with a conflict that only the state can solve. That root conflict is between those who adhere to the law and those who are inclined to break it. These they define as good guys and bad guys, but it is not always true, since the law these days is not that written by God on our hearts, but rather the orders handed down by our political masters.
This seemingly important point is completely lost on the Republican mind, since they believe that without the state as lawmaker, all of society and all of the world would collapse into a muddle of chaos and darkness. Society, they believe, is a wreck without Leviathan. This is why they celebrate the police and the military more than merchants and entrepreneurs, and why they think that war deserves more credit than trade for world prosperity.
One Faith Per SocietyThe conviction that society, no matter how orderly it appears, is really nothing more than a gloss on deep-rooted conflict, expresses itself in the romantic attachment to the police power and war. But it also affects the Right's attitude toward religion. Many people are convinced that, in the end, it is not possible that society can be religiously heterogeneous. In particular, these days, most conservatives believe that the United States cannot abide the presence of Muslims and other religious minorities.
Now, on this question, we can grant that the existence of the universal franchise does create problems with religious heterogeneity. But this is a problem created by the state itself. In conditions of freedom, there is no reason why all religions cannot peacefully coexist.
The current-day view of conservatives that we are in an intractable war against Islam also stems from the conflict-based view of society. In the absence of the state, people find ways to get along, each preserving their own identities. Religious heterogeneity presents no problems that freedom cannot solve.
And yet conservatives today are disinclined to accept this view. They seem to have some intellectual need to identify huge struggles at work in history that give them a sense of meaning and purpose. Whereas the founding generation of old liberals was thrilled by the existence of peace and the slow and meticulous development of bourgeois civilization, the Right today is on the lookout for grand morality plays into which they can throw themselves as a means of making some mark in history. And somehow they have come to believe that the state is the right means to fight this battle.
In short, their meta-understanding of politics bypassed the liberal revolution of the 18th century and embraced the anti-liberal elements of the Enlightenment. Up with Hobbes, down with Locke: that is their implied creed. Liberty is fine but order, order, is much more important, and order comes from the state. They can't even fathom the truth that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order. That thought is too complex for the mind that believes that the law alone, legislated or by executive fiat, is what separates barbarism from civilization. Freedom, to them, is not a right but something conferred as a reward for good behavior. The absence of good behavior justifies any level of crackdown.
I once heard a leading Republican intellectual, a respected figure with lots of books on everyone's shelves, express profound regret when the Soviet Union was falling apart. The problem, from this person's perspective, is that this led to disorder, and order — meaning control even by the Soviet state — is the fundamental conservative value. That about sums it up. Even Communism is to be tolerated so long as it keeps away what they dread more than death: people within their rights doing whatever they want.
At the end of the Cold War, many conservatives panicked that there would be no more great causes into which the state could enlist itself. There were about 10 years of books that sought to demonize someone, somewhere, in the hope of creating a new enemy. Maybe it would be China. Maybe it would be the culture war. Maybe it should be drugs. At last, from their point of view, 9-11 presented the opportunity they needed, and thus began the newest unwinnable war in the tradition of LBJ: The War on Terror.
So must government rule every aspect of life until every last terrorist is wiped off the face of the earth? Must we surrender all our liberty and property to this cause, as the regime and its apologists suggest?
This view of society is certainly not sustainable in these times and in the future. Ever more of daily life consists in seceding from the state and its apparatus of edicts and regulations. In the online world, billions of deals are made every day that require virtually no government law to enforce. The technology that is pushing the world forward is not created by the state but by private enterprise. The places we shop and the communities in which we live are being created by private developers. Most businesses prefer to deal with private courts. We depend on insurance companies, not police, to reduce the risks in life. We secure our homes and workplaces through private firms.
What's more, these days we see all around us how liberty generates order and how this order is self-sustaining. We benefit daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, from an order that is not imposed from without but rather generated from within, by that remarkable capacity we have for pursuing self-interest while benefiting the whole. Here is the great mystery and majesty of social order, expressed so well in the act of economic exchange.
Many Republicans by contrast live intellectually in a world long past, a world of warring states and societies made up of fixed classes that fought over ever-dwindling resources, a world unleavened by enterprise and individual initiative. They imagine themselves to be the class of rulers, the aristocrats, the philosopher kings, the high clerics, the landowners, and to keep that power, they gladly fuel the basest of human instincts: nationalism, jingoism, and hate. Keeping them at bay means keeping the world of their imaginations at bay, and that is a very good and important thing for the sake of civilization.
The Rothbard Revival Having said all of this about the modern-day Right, I do want to draw your attention again to the forgotten tradition of the Old Right of the 1930s and '40s. These were times when Garet Garrett was celebrating free enterprise against New Deal planning, John T. Flynn was exposing the warfare state as a tool of socialism, Albert Jay Nock was heralding the capacity of private education to create literacy and artistry, and when politicians on the Right were advocating peace and trade. This period came to an end in the 1950s with the emergence of the first neoconservatives attached to National Review.
Very few people today know anything about this aspect of American intellectual history. But in a few months, this period of ignorance is going to come to an end. The Mises Institute is publishing a remarkable document. It is Murray Rothbard's unpublished history of the postwar American Right. The name of the book is The Betrayal of the American Right. It chronicles both his life and the life and death of a movement. Ultimately his outlook is hopeful, just as mine is hopeful.
The manuscript has circulated privately for 30 years. It will soon see the light of day. He names names. He spares no enemy of freedom. Many people will cheer. Many others will weep. It will be a great day. If you would like to join in supporting this project please let us know. If you want to help in other ways, please talk to us. The Mises Institute is the powerhouse for publishing and educating in the libertarian tradition. The young are listening and we are having a great effect in bringing to life the vision of society that animated the American Revolution and, indeed, gave rise to civilization as we know it.
I've spoken about the problem of those who look at society and see nothing but conflict and no prospect for cooperation. It is a view shared by the Left and the Right. But truly there is an actual conflict at the root of history — but it is not the one most people understand or see. It is the great struggle between freedom and despotism, between the individual and the state, between the voluntary means and coercion. The party of freedom knows where it stands.
We do find ourselves not quite in a crowd in this struggle, indeed depending completely on your help. More than ever, both the Left and the Right are allied against us, and they are both in league with power. The forces of liberty have always been in the minority, and yet we can and do prevail. Thank you for your continued support in the great struggle between liberty and power.
[This talk was given at the Houston Mises Circle on April 14, 2007.]
Events such as the massacre at Virginia Tech set off national discussions on the problem of evil. There are two aspects to this: moral and social. Another way to put it is: how does such an impulse come to reside in a particular person and unleash itself in ghastly ways? The part that impacts on politics and economics is the second consideration: how can we as a society best deal with the problem of evil?
I begin with this distinction because most discussion of this issue conflates the two. For example, we might say that the propensity toward evil is quite minimal and limited. Therefore, the conclusion runs, we don't need drastic changes in the way we deal with it. Maybe we need background checks for handguns, better counseling services, more attentive administrators who spot problems before they get out of control.
This is generally the way the mainstream (also called "liberalism" in our times) deals with the problem. Several commissions will be established to look into the Virginia Tech matter, and they will all conclude that mostly people did what they were supposed to do, but people might make some effort to do it even more and better. That conclusion is the usual one, but it is profoundly unsatisfying.
The other position is that human evil is ubiquitous. Sometimes it rears its head in overt and super-bloody ways, but make no mistake: the appearance of normalcy is always an illusion. Life is, at its core, brutal and shocking. People are depraved in every way, whether they show it or not.
This is the thinking of the group generally known as conservatives. And what do they suggest? That we always and everywhere prepare for total war. Whether we are speaking of Virginia Tech or international politics, society must be armed to the teeth and people must be relentlessly roughed up and scared straight, or else society crumbles. This probably means that we need more jack-booted thugs and more decisive wars to give the enemy the what-for. And let's hear nothing from the wimps who doubt the need for torture and prison without trial as policy options.
This is roughly the way the political factions break down when faced with violence, massacres, terrorism, and the like.
Both sociopolitical perspectives are wrong because they claim to flow from an evaluation of the human soul that may or may not be right. What if, for example, the mainstream perspective is actually wrong, and evil in fact lurks all around us, and every third person really is a potential terrorist? Small reforms to the existing system won't fix the problem. Certainly "background checks" for ownership of guns are useless under these conditions.
And what if the conservative position of total depravity turns out to put totally depraved people in charge of running the system that is supposed to protect us against evil? That only magnifies the problem. In fact, I've never understood the people who claim that the universal pervasiveness of human evil means that we need a strong state. What guarantee do we have that the people who run the state will be less evil than those who are run by the state? If people are irredeemably corrupt, don't we have even more reason to reduce the chance that evil people will get hold of the mechanisms of power?
In any case, the problem with both positions is that they start with an assumption about human nature and then launch into a sociopolitical analysis. What we really need is a system of social organization and political management that creates the best possible environment for human thriving regardless of man's propensity toward evil. Whether men are angels or devils should not matter. The system we favor should keep devils at bay and allow angels to flourish, and somehow be able to tell the difference and deal with it when they change roles.
In the case of Virginia Tech or any other institution, there must be some way in place to protect against violence in the future. But that system needs to be carefully calibrated to match the level of danger. Otherwise, we end up with the current situation in airports in which the official policy assumes that every single passenger is a likely terrorist. Every person is investigated inside and out. And yet even the investigators know that this is going too far, and therefore they become lax and the system eventually fails.
The problem is that we don't know in advance precisely what level of risk is present in any given situation or when or how the problem of human evil will show its face. So it does no good to turn society into a prison camp, nor does it makes sense to be naïve about evil and therefore at its mercy when it does appear.
There is only one system of social organization that strives daily for a more perfect way of identifying the problem of evil, assessing its likelihood, and curbing it as much as humanly possible, and that is the competitive market economy rooted in the private ownership and control of property.
Matching security to risk is a very complicated undertaking, so firms work with insurance companies to discover the right means. Clearly, a convenience store in a violent East Coast urban environment is going to need more protection than even a fancy jewelry store in a Midwest suburb. Customers would think the owner was nuts if they encountered bulletproof glass in a 7-Eleven in Sheridan, Wyoming, but this is the norm in the Bronx. Of course firms make errors, but competitive pressure drives them always to adjust security to match the facts as they know them.
For this reason, it is not enough to say that Virginia Tech ought to ban guns or ought to arm students and teachers. Neither solution is necessarily right. One can imagine that some universities might not want students to carry sidearms. For other places, this might be just great and even essential for putting parents at ease. Which is the right solution? Only when such decisions are left to private owners and the competitive marketplace can we know for sure. One-size-fits-all doesn't work any better in security provision than in clothing.
With the market, there are many decisions that we as a society do not have to make collectively but instead we make them individually as buyers. We do not have to decide collectively what cars to drive, what websites to visit, or what food to eat. So it is with security.
And so it is with the problem of human evil. We do not have to side with either liberals or conservatives. We only need to say that whatever is the intrinsic nature of man, the market will find the best possible means to deal with it, and whatever the outcome of that market process, it cannot be made better by involving the state.
The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars, and revolutions is its anti-capitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. It is an almost unchallenged dogma that capitalism is done for and that the coming of all-around regimentation of economic activities is both inescapable and highly desirable.
Nonetheless capitalism is still very vigorous in the Western Hemisphere. Capitalist production has made very remarkable progress even in these last years. Methods of production were greatly improved. Consumers have been supplied with better and cheaper goods and with many new articles unheard of a short time ago. Many countries have expanded the size and improved the quality of their manufacturing. In spite of the anti-capitalistic policies of all governments and of almost all political parties, the capitalist mode of production is in many countries still fulfilling its social function in supplying the consumers with more, better, and cheaper goods.
It is certainly not a merit of governments, politicians and labor union officers that the standard of living is improving in the countries committed to the principle of private ownership of the means of production. Not offices and bureaucrats, but big business deserves credit for the fact that most of the families in the United States own a motor car and a radio set. The increase in per capita consumption in America as compared with conditions a quarter of a century ago is not an achievement of laws and executive orders. It is an accomplishment of business men who enlarged the size of their factories or built new ones.
One must stress this point because our contemporaries are inclined to ignore it. Entangled in the superstitions of statism and government omnipotence, they are exclusively preoccupied with governmental measures. They expect everything from authoritarian action and very little from the initiative of enterprising citizens. Yet, the only means to increase well-being is to increase the quantity of products. This is what business aims at.
It is grotesque that there is much more talk about the achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority than about all the unprecedented and unparalleled achievements of American privately operated processing industries. However, it was only the latter which enabled the United Nations to win the war and today enables the United States to come to the aid of the Marshall Plan countries.
The dogma that the state or the government is the embodiment of all that is good and beneficial and that the individuals are wretched underlings, exclusively intent upon inflicting harm upon one another and badly in need of a guardian, is almost unchallenged. It is taboo to question it in the slightest way. He who proclaims the godliness of the State and the infallibility of its priests, the bureaucrats, is considered as an impartial student of the social sciences. All those raising objections are branded as biased and narrow-minded. The supporters of the new religion of statolatry are no less fanatical and intolerant than were the Mohammedan conquerors of Africa and Spain.
History will call our age the age of the dictators and tyrants. We have witnessed in the last years the fall of two of these inflated supermen. But the spirit which raised these knaves to autocratic power survives. It permeates textbooks and periodicals, it speaks through the mouths of teachers and politicians, it manifests itself in party programs and in plays and novels. As long as this spirit prevails there cannot be any hope of durable peace, of democracy, of the preservation of freedom or of a steady improvement in the nation's economic well-being.
The Failure of Interventionism Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in their indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its "bourgeois" pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the "progressives" blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly outdated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.
Although capitalism is the economic system of modern Western civilization, the policies of all Western nations are guided by utterly anti-capitalistic ideas. The aim of these interventionist policies is not to preserve capitalism, but to substitute a mixed economy for it. It is assumed that this mixed economy is neither capitalism nor socialism. It is described as a third system, as far from capitalism as it is from socialism. It is alleged that it stands midway between socialism and capitalism, retaining the advantages of both and avoiding the disadvantages inherent in each.
More than half a century ago the outstanding man in the British socialist movement, Sidney Webb, declared that the socialist philosophy is "but the conscious and explicit assertion of principles of social organization which have been already in great part unconsciously adopted." And he added that the economic history of the nineteenth century was "an almost continuous record of the progress of socialism."Sidney Webb in Fabian Essays in Socialism, first published in 1889 (American edition, New York, 1891, p. 4). A few years later an eminent British statesman, Sir William Harcourt, stated: "We are all socialists now."Cf. G.M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (London, 1942), p. 510. When in 1913 an American, Elmer Roberts, published a book on the economic policies of the Imperial Government of Germany as conducted since the end of the 1870s, he called them "monarchical socialism."Elmer Roberts, Monarchical Socialism in Germany (New York, 1913).
However, it was not correct simply to identify interventionism and socialism. There are many supporters of interventionism who consider it the most appropriate method of realizing—step by step—full socialism. But there are also many interventionists who are not outright socialists; they aim at the establishment of the mixed economy as a permanent system of economic management. They endeavor to restrain, to regulate and to "improve" capitalism by government interference with business and by labor unionism.
In order to comprehend the working of interventionism and of the mixed economy it is necessary to clarify two points:
First: If within a society based on private ownership of the means of production some of these means are owned and operated by the government or by municipalities, this still does not make for a mixed system which would combine socialism and private ownership. As long as only certain individual enterprises are publicly controlled, the characteristics of the market economy determining economic activity remain essentially unimpaired. The publicly owned enterprises, too, as buyers of raw materials, semi-finished goods and labor, and as sellers of goods and services, must fit into the mechanism of the market economy. They are subject to the law of the market; they have to strive after profits or, at least, to avoid losses. When it is attempted to mitigate or to eliminate this dependence by covering the losses of such enterprises with subsidies out of public funds, the only result is a shifting of this dependence somewhere else. This is because the means for the subsidies have to be raised somewhere. They may be raised by collecting taxes. But the burden of such taxes has its effects on the public, not on the government collecting the tax. It is the market, and not the revenue department, which decides upon whom the burden of the tax falls and how it affects production and consumption. The market and its inescapable law are supreme.
Second: There are two different patterns for the realization of socialism. The one pattern—we may call it the Marxian or Russian pattern—is purely bureaucratic. All economic enterprises are departments of the government just as the administration of the army and the navy or the postal system. Every single plant, shop or farm, stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a post office to the office of the Postmaster General. The whole nation forms one single labor army with compulsory service; the commander of this army is the chief of state.
The second pattern—we may call it the German or Zwangswirtschaft systemZwang means compulsion, Wirtschaft means economy. The English language equivalent for Zwangswirtschaft is something like compulsory economy.—differs from the first one in that it, seemingly and nominally, maintains private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship, and market exchange. So-called entrepreneurs do the buying and selling, pay the workers, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But they are no longer entrepreneurs. In Nazi Germany they were called shop managers or Betriebsführer. The government tells these seeming entrepreneurs what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. The government decrees at what wages laborers should work, and to whom and under what terms the capitalists should entrust their funds. Market exchange is but a sham. As all prices, wages and interest rates are fixed by the authority, they are prices, wages and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the authoritarian orders determining each citizen's income, consumption and standard of living. The authority, not the consumers, directs production. The central board of production management is supreme; all citizens are nothing else but civil servants. This is socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify here something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.
It is necessary to point out this fact to prevent a confusion of socialism and interventionism. The system of the hampered market economy, or interventionism, differs from socialism by the very fact that it is still market economy. The authority seeks to influence the market by the intervention of its coercive power, but it does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It desires that production and consumption should develop along lines different from those prescribed by the unhindered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of coercion and compulsion stand ready. But these are isolated interventions; their authors assert that they do not plan to combine these measures into a completely integrated system which regulates all prices, wages and interest rates, and which thus places full control of production and consumption in the hands of the authorities.
However, all the methods of interventionism are doomed to failure. This means: the interventionist measures must needs result in conditions which from the point of view of their own advocates are more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they were designed to alter. These policies are therefore contrary to purpose.
Minimum wage rates, whether enforced by government decree or by labor union pressure and compulsion, are useless if they fix wage rates at the market level. But if they try to raise wage rates above the level which the unhampered labor market would have determined, they result in permanent unemployment of a great part of the potential labor force.
Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such an inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.
The inherent tendency of capitalist evolution is to raise real wage rates steadily. This is the effect of the progressive accumulation of capital by means of which technological methods of production are improved. There is no means by which the height of wage rates can be raised for all those eager to earn wages other than through the increase of the per capita quota of capital invested. Whenever the accumulation of additional capital stops, the tendency towards a further increase in real wage rates comes to a standstill. If capital consumption is substituted for an increase in capital available, real wage rates must drop temporarily until the checks on a further increase in capital are removed. Government measures which retard capital accumulation or lead to capital consumption—such as confiscatory taxation—are therefore detrimental to the vital interests of the workers.
Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.
It can hardly be asserted that the economic history of the last decades has run counter to the pessimistic predictions of the economists. Our age has to face great economic troubles. But this is not a crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of interventionism, of policies designed to improve capitalism and to substitute a better system for it.
No economist ever dared to assert that interventionism could result in anything else than in disaster and chaos. The advocates of interventionism—foremost among them the Prussian Historical School and the American Institutionalists—were not economists. On the contrary. In order to promote their plans they flatly denied that there is any such thing as economic law. In their opinion governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena. Like the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, they maintain that the State is God.
The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
In the eyes of the interventionists the mere existence of profits is objectionable. They speak of profit without dealing with its corollary, loss. They do not comprehend that profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all entrepreneurial activities. It is profit and loss that make the consumers supreme in the direction of business. It is absurd to contrast production for profit and production for use. On the unhampered market a man can earn profits only by supplying the consumers in the best and cheapest way with the goods they want to use. Profit and loss withdraw the material factors of production from the hands of the inefficient and place them in the hands of the more efficient. It is their social function to make a man the more influential in the conduct of business the better he succeeds in producing commodities for which people scramble. The consumers suffer when the laws of the country prevent the most efficient entrepreneurs from expanding the sphere of their activities. What made some enterprises develop into "big business" was precisely their success in filling best the demand of the masses.
Anti-capitalistic policies sabotage the operation of the capitalist system of the market economy. The failure of interventionism does not demonstrate the necessity of adopting socialism. It merely exposes the futility of interventionism. All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure of capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market. Only the ignorant, wrongly identifying interventionism and capitalism, believe that the remedy for these evils is socialism.
The Dictatorial, Anti-Democratic, and Socialist Character of Interventionism Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favor a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.
What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis, emerges.
We have already mentioned the case of minimum wage rates. Let us illustrate the matter further by an analysis of a typical case of price control.
If the government wants to make it possible for poor parents to give more milk to their children, it must buy milk at the market price and sell it to those poor people with a loss at a cheaper rate; the loss may be covered from the means collected by taxation. But if the government simply fixes the price of milk at a lower rate than the market, the results obtained will be contrary to the aims of the government. The marginal producers will, in order to avoid losses, go out of the business of producing and selling milk. There will be less milk available for the consumers, not more. This outcome is contrary to the government's intentions. The government interfered because it considered milk as a vital necessity. It did not want to restrict its supply.
Now the government has to face the alternative: either to refrain from any endeavors to control prices, or to add to its first measure a second one, i.e., to fix the prices of the factors of production necessary for the production of milk. Then the same story repeats itself on a remoter plane: the government has again to fix the prices of the factors of production necessary for the production of those factors of production which are needed for the production of milk. Thus the government has to go further and further, fixing the prices of all the factors of production—both human (labor) and material—and forcing every entrepreneur and every worker to continue work at these prices and wages. No branch of production can be omitted from this all-around fixing of prices and wages and this general order to continue production. If some branches of production were left free, the result would be a shifting of capital and labor to them and a corresponding fall of the supply of the goods whose prices the government had fixed. However, it is precisely these goods which the government considers as especially important for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses.
But when this state of all-around control of business is achieved, the market economy has been replaced by a system of planned economy, by socialism. Of course, this is not the socialism of immediate state management of every plant by the government as in Russia, but the socialism of the German or Nazi pattern.
Many people were fascinated by the alleged success of German price control. They said: You have only to be as brutal and ruthless as the Nazis and you will succeed in controlling prices. What these people, eager to fight Nazism by adopting its methods, did not see was that the Nazis did not enforce price control within a market society, but they established a full socialist system, a totalitarian commonwealth.
Price control is contrary to purpose if it is limited to some commodities only. It cannot work satisfactorily within a market economy. If the government does not draw from this failure the conclusion that it must abandon all attempts to control prices, it must go further and further until it substitutes socialist all-around planning for the market economy.
Production can either be directed by the prices fixed on the market by the buying and by the abstention from buying on the part of the public, or it can be directed by the government's central board of production management. There is no third solution available. There is no third social system feasible which would be neither market economy nor socialism. Government control of only a part of prices must result in a state of affairs which—without any exception—everybody considers as absurd and contrary to purpose. Its inevitable result is chaos and social unrest.
It is this that the economists have in mind in referring to economic law and asserting that interventionism is contrary to economic law.
In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Their buying and their abstention from buying ultimately determine what the entrepreneurs produce and in what quantity and quality. It determines directly the prices of the consumers' goods and indirectly the prices of all producers' goods, viz., labor and material factors of production. It determines the emergence of profits and losses and the formation of the rate of interest. It determines every individual's income. The focal point of the market economy is the market, i.e., the process of the formation of commodity prices, wage rates and interest rates and their derivatives, profits and losses. It makes all men in their capacity as producers responsible to the consumers. This dependence is direct with entrepreneurs, capitalists, farmers and professional men, and indirect with people working for salaries and wages. The market adjusts the efforts of all those engaged in supplying the needs of the consumers to the wishes of those for whom they produce, the consumers. It subjects production to consumption.
The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. It is true that the various individuals have not the same power to vote. The richer man casts more ballots than the poorer fellow. But to be rich and to earn a higher income is, in the market economy, already the outcome of a previous election. The only means to acquire wealth and to preserve it, in a market economy not adulterated by government-made privileges and restrictions, is to serve the consumers in the best and cheapest way. Capitalists and landowners who fail in this regard suffer losses. If they do not change their procedure, they lose their wealth and become poor. It is consumers who make poor people rich and rich people poor. It is the consumers who fix the wages of a movie star and an opera singer at a higher level than those of a welder or an accountant.
Every individual is free to disagree with the outcome of an election campaign or of the market process. But in a democracy he has no other means to alter things than persuasion. If a man were to say: "I do not like the mayor elected by majority vote; therefore I ask the government to replace him by the man I prefer," one would hardly call him a democrat. But if the same claims are raised with regard to the market, most people are too dull to discover the dictatorial aspirations involved.
The consumers have made their choices and determined the income of the shoe manufacturer, the movie star and the welder. Who is Professor X to arrogate to himself the privilege of overthrowing their decision? If he were not a potential dictator, he would not ask the government to interfere. He would try to persuade his fellow citizens to increase their demand for the products of the welders and to reduce their demand for shoes and pictures.
The consumers are not prepared to pay for cotton prices which would render the marginal farms, i.e., those producing under the least favorable conditions, profitable. This is very unfortunate indeed for the farmers concerned; they must discontinue growing cotton and try to integrate themselves in another way into the whole of production.
But what shall we think of the statesman who interferes by compulsion in order to raise the price of cotton above the level it would reach on the free market? What the interventionist aims at is the substitution of police pressure for the choice of the consumers. All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously. In such proposals as: let us raise farm prices, let us raise wage rates, let us lower profits, let us curtail the salaries of executives, the us ultimately refers to the police. Yet the authors of these projects protest that they are planning for freedom and industrial democracy.
In most non-socialist countries the labor unions are granted special rights. They are permitted to prevent non-members from working. They are allowed to call a strike and, when on strike, are virtually free to employ violence against all those who are prepared to continue working, viz., the strike-breakers. This system assigns an unlimited privilege to those engaged in vital branches of industry. Those workers whose strike cuts off the supply of water, light, food, and other necessities are in a position to obtain all they want at the expense of the rest of the population. It is true that in the United States their unions have up to now exercised some moderation in taking advantage of this opportunity. Other American unions and many European unions have been less cautious. They are intent upon enforcing wage increases without bothering about the disaster inevitably resulting.
The interventionists are not shrewd enough to realize that labor union pressure and compulsion are absolutely incompatible with any system of social organization. The union problem has no reference whatsoever to the right of citizens to associate with one another in assemblies and associations; no democratic country denies its citizens this right. Neither does anybody dispute a man's right to stop work and to go on strike. The only question is whether or not the unions should be granted the privilege of resorting with impunity to violence. This privilege is no less incompatible with socialism than with capitalism. No social cooperation under the division of labor is possible when some people or unions of people are granted the right to prevent by violence and the threat of violence other people from working. When enforced by violence, a strike in vital branches of production or a general strike are tantamount to a revolutionary destruction of society.
A government abdicates if it tolerates any non-governmental agency's use of violence. If the government forsakes its monopoly of coercion and compulsion, anarchic conditions result. If it were true that a democratic system of government is unfit to protect unconditionally every individual's right to work in defiance of the orders of a union, democracy would be doomed. Then dictatorship would be the only means to preserve the division of labor and to avoid anarchy. What generated dictatorship in Russia and Germany was precisely the fact that the mentality of these nations made suppression of union violence unfeasible under democratic conditions. The dictators abolished strikes and thus broke the spine of labor unionism. There is no question of strikes in the Soviet empire.
It is illusory to believe that arbitration of labor disputes could bring the unions into the framework of the market economy and make their functioning compatible with the preservation of domestic peace. Judicial settlement of controversies is feasible if there is a set of rules available, according to which individual cases can be judged. But if such a code is valid and its provisions are applied to the determination of the height of wage rates, it is no longer the market which fixes them, but the code and those who legislate with regard to it. Then the government is supreme and no longer the consumers buying and selling on the market. If no such code exists, a standard according to which a controversy between employers and employees could be decided is lacking. It is vain to speak of "fair" wages in the absence of such a code. The notion of fairness is nonsensical if not related to an established standard. In practice, if the employers do not yield to the threats of the unions, arbitration is tantamount to the determination of wage rates by the government-appointed arbitrator. Peremptory authoritarian decision is substituted for the market price. The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution.
Metaphors are often very useful in elucidating complicated problems and in making them comprehensible to less intelligent minds. But they become misleading and result in nonsense if people forget that every comparison is imperfect. It is silly to take metaphorical idioms literally and to deduce from their interpretation features of the object one wished to make more easily understandable by their use. There is no harm in the economists' description of the operation of the market as automatic and in their custom of speaking of the anonymous forces operating on the market. They could not anticipate that anybody would be so stupid as to take these metaphors literally.
No "automatic" and "anonymous" forces actuate the "mechanism" of the market. The only factors directing the market and determining prices are purposive acts of men. There is no automatism; there are men consciously aiming at ends chosen and deliberately resorting to definite means for the attainment of these ends. There are no mysterious mechanical forces; there is only the will of every individual to satisfy his demand for various goods. There is no anonymity; there are you and I and Bill and Joe and all the rest. And each of us is engaged both in production and consumption. Each contributes his share to the determination of prices.
The dilemma is not between automatic forces and planned action. It is between the democratic process of the market, in which every individual has his share, and the exclusive rule of a dictatorial body. Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner's own plan for the plans of his fellow men. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan.
It is no less erroneous to declare that a government that is not socialistic has no plan. Whatever a government does is the execution of a plan, i.e., of a design. One may disagree with such a plan. But one must not say that it is not a plan at all. Professor Wesley C. Mitchell maintained that the British liberal government "planned to have no plan."Wesley C. Mitchell, "The Social Sciences and National Planning" in Planned Society, ed. Findlay Mackenzie (New York, 1937), p. 112. However, the British government in the liberal age certainly had a definite plan. Its plan was private ownership of the means of production, free initiative, and market economy. Great Britain was very prosperous indeed under this plan which according to Professor Mitchell is "no plan."
The planners pretend that their plans are scientific and that there cannot be disagreement with regard to them among well-intentioned and decent people. However, there is no such thing as a scientific ought. Science is competent to establish what is. It can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at. It is a fact that men disagree in their value judgments. It is insolent to arrogate to oneself the right to overrule the plans of other people and to force them to submit to the plan of the planner. Whose plan should be executed? The plan of the CIO or those of any other group? The plan of Trotsky or that of Stalin? The plan of Hitler or that of Strasser?
When people were committed to the idea that in the field of religion only one plan must be adopted, bloody wars resulted. With the acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom these wars ceased. The market economy safeguards peaceful economic cooperation because it does not use force upon the economic plans of the citizens. If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.
It is an illusion to believe that a system of planned socialism could be operated according to democratic methods of government. Democracy is inextricably linked with capitalism. It cannot exist where there is planning. Let us refer to the words of the most eminent of the contemporary advocates of socialism. Professor Harold Laski declared that the attainment of power by the British Labour Party in the normal parliamentary fashion must result in a radical transformation of parliamentary government. A socialist administration needs "guarantees" that its work of transformation would not be "disrupted" by repeal in event of its defeat at the polls. Therefore the suspension of the Constitution is "inevitable."Laski, Democracy in Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1933), pp. 87–8. How pleased would Charles I and George III have been if they had known the books of Professor Laski!
Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Lord and Lady Passfield) tell us that "in any corporate action a loyal unity of thought is so important that, if anything is to be achieved, public discussion must be suspended between the promulgation of the decision and the accomplishment of the task." Whilst "the work is in progress" any expression of doubt, or even of fear that the plan will not be successful, is "an act of disloyalty, or even of treachery."Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (New York, 1936), Vol. II, pp. 1038–39. [Mises.org Editor's Note: the question mark was removed from the title after the first edition.] Now as the process of production never ceases and some work is always in progress and there is always something to be achieved, it follows that a socialist government must never concede any freedom of speech and the press. "A loyal unity of thought," what a high-sounding circumlocution for the ideals of Philip II and the Inquisition! In this regard another eminent admirer of the Soviets, Mr. T.G. Crowther, speaks without any reserve. He plainly declares that inquisition is "beneficial to science when it protects a rising class,"T.G. Crowther, Social Relations of Science (London, 1941), p. 333. i.e., when Mr. Crowther's friends resort to it. Hundreds of similar dicta could be quoted.
In the Victorian age, when John Stuart Mill wrote his essay On Liberty, such views as those held by Professor Laski, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, and Mr. Crowther were called reactionary. Today they are called "progressive" and "liberal." On the other hand people who oppose the suspension of parliamentary government and of the freedom of speech and the press and the establishment of inquisition are scorned as "reactionaries," as "economic royalists," and as "Fascists."
Those interventionists who consider interventionism as a method of bringing about full socialism step by step are at least consistent. If the measures adopted fail to achieve the beneficial results expected and end in disaster, they ask for more and more government interference until the government has taken over the direction of all economic activities. But those interventionists who look at interventionism as a means of improving capitalism and thereby preserving it are utterly confused.
In the eyes of these people all the undesired and undesirable effects of government interference with business are caused by capitalism. The very fact that a governmental measure has brought about a state of affairs which they dislike is for them a justification of further measures. They fail, for instance, to realize that the role monopolistic schemes play in our time is the effect of government interference such as tariffs and patents. They advocate government action for the prevention of monopoly. One could hardly imagine a more unrealistic idea. For the governments whom they ask to fight monopoly are the same governments who are devoted to the principle of monopoly. Thus, the American New Deal Government embarked upon a thorough-going monopolistic organization of every branch of American business, by the NRA, and aimed at organizing American farming as a vast monopolistic scheme, restricting farm output for the sake of substituting monopoly prices for the lower market prices. It was a party to various international commodity control agreements the undisguised aim of which was to establish international monopolies of various commodities. The same is true of all other governments. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was also a party to some of these intergovernmental monopolistic conventions.The collection of these conventions, published by The International Labour Office under the title Intergovernmental Commodity Control Agreements (Montreal, 1943). Its repugnance for collaboration with the capitalistic countries was not so great as to cause it to miss any opportunity for fostering monopoly.
The program of this self-contradictory interventionism is dictatorship, supposedly to make people free. But the liberty its supporters advocate is liberty to do the "right" things, i.e., the things they themselves want to be done. They are not only ignorant of the economic problem involved. They lack the faculty of logical thinking.
The most absurd justification of interventionism is provided by those who look upon the conflict between capitalism and socialism as if it were a contest over the distribution of income. Why should not the propertied classes be more compliant? Why should they not accord to the poor workers a part of their ample revenues? Why should they oppose the government's design to raise the share of the underprivileged by decreeing minimum wage rates and maximum prices and by cutting profits and interest rates down to a "fairer" level? Pliability in such matters, they say, would take the wind from the sails of the radical revolutionaries and preserve capitalism. The worst enemies of capitalism, they say, are those intransigent doctrinaires whose excessive advocacy of economic freedom, of laissez-faire and Manchesterism renders vain all attempts to come to a compromise with the claims of labor. These adamant reactionaries are alone responsible for the bitterness of contemporary party strife and the implacable hatred it generates. What is needed is the substitution of a constructive program for the purely negative attitude of the economic royalists. And, of course, "constructive" is in the eyes of these people only interventionism.
However, this mode of reasoning is entirely vicious. It takes for granted that the various measures of government interference with business will attain those beneficial results which their advocates expect from them. It blithely disregards all that economics says about their futility in attaining the ends sought, and their unavoidable and undesirable consequences. The question is not whether minimum wage rates are fair or unfair, but whether or not they bring about unemployment of a part of those eager to work. By calling these measures just, the interventionist does not refute the objections raised against their expediency by the economists. He merely displays ignorance of the question at issue.
The conflict between capitalism and socialism is not a contest between two groups of claimants concerning the size of the portions to be allotted to each of them out of a definite supply of goods. It is a dispute concerning what system of social organization best serves human welfare. Those fighting socialism do not reject socialism because they envy the workers the benefits they (the workers) could allegedly derive from the socialist mode of production. They fight socialism precisely because they are convinced that it would harm the masses in reducing them to the status of poor serfs entirely at the mercy of irresponsible dictators.
In this conflict of opinions everybody must make up his mind and take a definite stand. Everybody must side either with the advocates of economic freedom or with those of totalitarian socialism. One cannot evade this dilemma by adopting an allegedly middle-of-the-road position, namely interventionism. For interventionism is neither a middle way nor a compromise between capitalism and socialism. It is a third system. It is a system the absurdity and futility of which is agreed upon not only by all economists but even by the Marxians.
There is no such thing as an "excessive" advocacy of economic freedom. On the one hand, production can be directed by the efforts of each individual to adjust his conduct so as to fill the most urgent wants of the consumers in the most appropriate way. This is the market economy. On the other hand, production can be directed by authoritarian decree. If these decrees concern only some isolated items of the economic structure, they fail to attain the ends sought, and their own advocates do not like their outcome. If they come up to all-around regimentation, they mean totalitarian socialism.
Men must choose between the market economy and socialism. The state can preserve the market economy in protecting life, health, and private property against violent or fraudulent aggression; or it can itself control the conduct of all production activities. Some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumers by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the government by compulsion.
Socialism and Communism In the terminology of Marx and Engels the words communism and socialism are synonymous. They are alternately applied without any distinction between them. The same was true for the practice of all Marxian groups and sects until 1917. The political parties of Marxism which considered the Communist Manifesto as the unalterable gospel of their doctrine called themselves socialist parties. The most influential and most numerous of these parties, the German party, adopted the name Social Democratic Party. In Italy, in France and in all other countries in which Marxian parties already played a role in political life before 1917, the term socialist likewise superseded the term communist. No Marxian ever ventured, before 1917, to distinguish between communism and socialism.
In 1875, in his Criticism of the Gotha Program of the German Social Democratic Party, Marx distinguished between a lower (earlier) and a higher (later) phase of the future communist society. But he did not reserve the name of communism to the higher phase, and did not call the lower phase socialism as differentiated from communism.
One of the fundamental dogmas of Marx is that socialism is bound to come "with the inexorability of a law of nature." Capitalist production begets its own negation and establishes the socialist system of public ownership of the means of production. This process "executes itself through the operation of the inherent laws of capitalist production."Marx, Das Kapital, 7th ed. (Hamburg, 1914), Vol. I, p. 728. Publisher's Note: In English edition, p. 836. It is independent of the wills of people.Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, ed. Kautsky (Stuttgart, 1897), p. xi. Publisher's Note: In English edition by Kerr, pp. 11–12; by Eastman, p. 10. It is impossible for men to accelerate it, to delay it or to hinder it. For "no social system ever disappears before all the productive forces are developed for the development of which it is broad enough, and new higher methods of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have been hatched out in the womb of previous society."Ibid., p. xii. Publisher's Note: In English edition by Kerr, p. 12; by Eastman, p. 11.
This doctrine is, of course, irreconcilable with Marx's own political activities and with the teachings he advanced for the justification of these activities. Marx tried to organize a political party which by means of revolution and civil war should accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The characteristic feature of their parties was, in the eyes of Marx and all Marxian doctrinaires, that they were revolutionary parties invariably committed to the idea of violent action. Their aim was to rise in rebellion, to establish the dictatorship of the proletarians and to exterminate mercilessly all bourgeois. The deeds of the Paris Communards in 1871 were considered as the perfect model of such a civil war. The Paris revolt, of course, had lamentably failed. But later uprisings were expected to succeed.Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, ed. Pfemfert (Berlin, 1919), passim. Publisher's Note: In English, "The Civil War in France." Reprinted in Eastman anthology, pp. 367–429.
However, the tactics applied by the Marxian parties in various European countries were irreconcilably opposed to each of these two contradictory varieties of the teachings of Karl Marx. They did not place confidence in the inevitability of the coming of socialism. Neither did they trust in the success of a revolutionary upheaval. They adopted the methods of parliamentary action. They solicited votes in election campaigns and sent their delegates into the parliaments. They "degenerated" into democratic parties. In the parliaments they behaved like other parties of the opposition. In some countries they entered into temporary alliances with other parties, and occasionally socialist members sat in the cabinets. Later, after the end of the first World War, the socialist parties became paramount in many parliaments. In some countries they ruled exclusively, in others in close cooperation with "bourgeois" parties.
It is true that these domesticated socialists before 1917 never abandoned lip service to the rigid principles of orthodox Marxism. They repeated again and again that the coming of socialism is unavoidable. They emphasized the inherent revolutionary character of their parties. Nothing could arouse their anger more than when somebody dared to dispute their adamant revolutionary spirit. However, in fact they were parliamentary parties like all other parties.
From a correct Marxian point of view, as expressed in the later writings of Marx and Engels (but not yet in the Communist Manifesto), all measures designed to restrain, to regulate and to improve capitalism were simply "petty-bourgeois" nonsense stemming from an ignorance of the immanent laws of capitalist evolution. True socialists should not place any obstacles in the way of capitalist evolution. For only the full maturity of capitalism could bring about socialism. It is not only vain, but harmful to the interests of the proletarians to resort to such measures. Even labor-unionism is not an adequate means for the improvement of the conditions of the workers.Marx, Value, Price and Profit, ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (New York, 1901), pp. 72–74. Marx did not believe that interventionism could benefit the masses. He violently rejected the idea that such measures as minimum wage rates, price ceilings, restriction of interest rates, social security and so on are preliminary steps in bringing about socialism. He aimed at the radical abolition of the wages system which can be accomplished only by communism in its higher phase. He would have sarcastically ridiculed the idea of abolishing the "commodity character" of labor within the frame of a capitalist society by the enactment of a law.
But the socialist parties as they operated in the European countries were virtually no less committed to interventionism than the Sozialpolitik of the Kaiser's Germany and the American New Deal. It was against this policy that George Sorel and Syndicalism directed their attacks. Sorel, a timid intellectual of a bourgeois background, deprecated the "degeneration" of the socialist parties for which he blamed their penetration by bourgeois intellectuals. He wanted to see the spirit of ruthless aggressiveness, inherent in the masses, revived and freed from the guardianship of intellectual cowards. For Sorel nothing counted but riots. He advocated action directe, i.e., sabotage and the general strike, as initiatory steps towards the final great revolution.
Sorel had success mostly among snobbish and idle intellectuals and no less snobbish and idle heirs of wealthy entrepreneurs. He did not perceptibly move the masses. For the Marxian parties in Western and Central Europe his passionate criticism was hardly more than a nuisance. His historical importance consisted mainly in the role his ideas played in the evolution of Russian Bolshevism and Italian Fascism.
In order to understand the mentality of the Bolshevists we must again refer to the dogmas of Karl Marx. Marx was fully convinced that capitalism is a stage of economic history which is not limited to a few advanced countries only. Capitalism has the tendency to convert all parts of the world into capitalist countries. The bourgeoisie forces all nations to become capitalist nations. When the final hour of capitalism sounds, the whole world will be uniformly in the stage of mature capitalism, ripe for the transition to socialism. Socialism will emerge at the same time in all parts of the world.
Marx erred on this point no less than in all his other statements. Today even the Marxians cannot and do not deny that there still prevail enormous differences in the development of capitalism in various countries. They realize that there are many countries which, from the point of view of the Marxian interpretation of history, must be described as precapitalistic. In these countries the bourgeoisie has not yet attained a ruling position and has not yet set the historical stage of capitalism which is the necessary prerequisite of the appearance of socialism. These countries therefore must first accomplish their "bourgeois revolution" and must go through all phases of capitalism before there can be any question of transforming them into socialist countries. The only policy which Marxians could adopt in such countries would be to support the bourgeois unconditionally, first in their endeavors to seize power and then in their capitalistic ventures. A Marxian party could for a very long time have no other task than to be subservient to bourgeois liberalism. This alone is the mission which historical materialism, if consistently applied, could assign to Russian Marxians. They would be forced to wait quietly until capitalism should have made their nation ripe for socialism.
But the Russian Marxians did not want to wait. They resorted to a new modification of Marxism according to which it was possible for a nation to skip one of the stages of historical evolution. They shut their eyes to the fact that this new doctrine was not a modification of Marxism, but rather the denial of the last remnant which was left of it. It was an undisguised return to the pre-Marxian and anti-Marxian socialist teachings according to which men are free to adopt socialism at any time if they consider it as a system more beneficial to the commonweal than capitalism. It utterly exploded all the mysticism inwrought into dialectical materialism and in the alleged Marxian discovery of the inexorable laws of mankind's economic evolution.
Having emancipated themselves from Marxian determinism, the Russian Marxians were free to discuss the most appropriate tactics for the realization of socialism in their country. They were no longer bothered with economic problems. They had no longer to investigate whether or not the time had come. They had only one task to accomplish, the seizure of the reins of government.
One group maintained that lasting success could be expected only if the support of a sufficient number of the people, though not necessarily of the majority, could be won. Another group did not favor such a time-consuming procedure. They suggested a bold stroke. A small group of fanatics should be organized as the vanguard of the revolution. Strict discipline and unconditional obedience to the chief should make these professional revolutionists fit for a sudden attack. They should supplant the Czarist government and then rule the country according to the traditional methods of the Czar's police.
The terms used to signify these two groups—Bolshevists (majority) for the latter and Mensheviks (minority) for the former—refer to a vote taken in 1903 at a meeting held for the discussion of these tactical issues. The only difference dividing the two groups from one another was this matter of tactical methods. They both agreed with regard to the ultimate end: socialism.
Both sects tried to justify their respective points of view by quoting passages from Marx's and Engels's writings. This is, of course, the Marxian custom. And each sect was in a position to discover in these sacred books dicta confirming its own stand.
Lenin, the Bolshevist chief, knew his countrymen much better than his adversaries and their leader, Plekhanov, did. He did not, like Plekhanov, make the mistake of applying to Russians the standards of the Western nations. He remembered how foreign women had twice simply usurped supreme power and quietly ruled for a life-time. He was aware of the fact that the terrorist methods of the Czar's secret police were successful and he was confident that he could considerably improve on these methods. He was a ruthless dictator and he knew that the Russians lacked the courage to resist oppression. Like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Napoleon, he was an ambitious usurper and fully trusted the absence of revolutionary spirit in the immense majority. The autocracy of the Romanovs was doomed because the unfortunate Nicholas II was a weakling. The socialist lawyer Kerensky failed because he was committed to the principle of parliamentary government. Lenin succeeded because he never aimed at anything else than his own dictatorship. And the Russians yearned for a dictator, for a successor of the Terrible Ivan.
The rule of Nicholas II was not ended by a real revolutionary upheaval. It collapsed on the battlefields. Anarchy resulted which Kerensky could not master. A skirmish in the streets of Saint Petersburg removed Kerensky. A short time later Lenin had his eighteenth Brumaire. In spite of all the terror practiced by the Bolshevists the Constituent Assembly, elected by universal franchise for men and women, had only about twenty percent Bolshevist members. Lenin dispelled by force of arms the Constituent Assembly. The short-lived "liberal" interlude was liquidated. Russia passed from the hands of the inept Romanovs into those of a real autocrat.
Lenin did not content himself with the conquest of Russia. He was fully convinced that he was destined to bring the bliss of socialism to all nations, not only to Russia. The official name which he chose for his government—Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics—does not contain any reference to Russia. It was designed as the nucleus of a world government. It was implied that all foreign comrades by rights owed allegiance to this government and that all foreign bourgeois who dared to resist were guilty of high treason and deserved capital punishment. Lenin did not doubt in the least that all Western countries were on the eve of the great final revolution. He daily expected its outbreak.
There was in the opinion of Lenin only one group in Europe that might—although without any prospect of success—try to prevent the revolutionary upheaval: the depraved members of the intelligentsia who had usurped the leadership of the socialist parties. Lenin had long hated these men for their addiction to parliamentary procedure and their reluctance to endorse his dictatorial aspirations. He raged against them because he held them responsible for the fact that the socialist parties had supported the war effort of their countries. Already in his Swiss exile, which ended in 1917, Lenin began to split the European socialist parties. Now he set up a new, a Third International which he controlled in the same dictatorial manner in which he directed the Russian Bolshevists. For this new party Lenin chose the name Communist Party. The communists were to fight unto death the various European socialist parties, these "social traitors," and they were to arrange the immediate liquidation of the bourgeoisie and seizure of power by the armed workers. Lenin did not differentiate between socialism and communism as social systems. The goal which he aimed at was not called communism as opposed to socialism. The official name of the Soviet government is Union of the Socialist (not of the Communist) Soviet Republics. In this regard he did not want to alter the traditional terminology which considered the terms as synonymous. He merely called his partisans, the only sincere and consistent supporters of the revolutionary principles of orthodox Marxism, communists and their tactical methods communism because he wanted to distinguish them from the "treacherous hirelings of the capitalist exploiters," the wicked Social Democratic leaders like Kautsky and Albert Thomas. These traitors, he emphasized, were anxious to preserve capitalism. They were not true socialists. The only genuine Marxians were those who rejected the name of socialists, irremediably fallen into disrepute.
Thus the distinction between communists and socialists came into being. Those Marxians who did not surrender to the dictator in Moscow called themselves social democrats or, in short, socialists. What characterized them was the belief that the most appropriate method for the realization of their plans to establish socialism, the final goal common to them as well as to the communists, was to win the support of the majority of their fellow citizens. They abandoned the revolutionary slogans and tried to adopt democratic methods for the seizure of power. They did not bother about the problem whether or not a socialist regime is compatible with democracy. But for the attainment of socialism they were resolved to apply democratic procedures.
The communists, on the other hand, were in the early years of the Third International firmly committed to the principle of revolution and civil war. They were loyal only to their Russian chief. They expelled from their ranks everybody who was suspected of feeling himself bound by any of his country's laws. They plotted unceasingly and squandered blood in unsuccessful riots.
Lenin could not understand why the communists failed everywhere outside Russia. He did not expect much from the American workers. In the United States, the communists agreed, the workers lacked the revolutionary spirit because they were spoiled by well-being and steeped in the vice of money-making. But Lenin did not doubt that the European masses were class-conscious and therefore fully committed to revolutionary ideas. The only reason why the revolution had not been realized was in his opinion the inadequacy and cowardice of the communist officials. Again and again he deposed his vicars and appointed new men. But he did not succeed any better.
In the Anglo-Saxon and in the Latin American countries the socialist voters place confidence in democratic methods. Here the number of people who seriously aim at a communist revolution is very small. Most of those who publicly proclaim their adherence to the principles of communism would feel extremely unhappy if the revolution were to arise and expose their lives and their property to danger. If the Russian armies were to march into their countries or if domestic communists were to seize power without engaging them in the fight, they would probably rejoice in the hope of being rewarded for their Marxian orthodoxy. But they themselves do not long for revolutionary laurels.
It is a fact that in all these thirty years of passionate pro-Soviet agitation not a single country outside Russia went communist of its citizens' own accord. Eastern Europe turned to communism only when the diplomatic arrangements of international power politics had converted it into a sphere of exclusive Russian influence and hegemony. It is unlikely that Western Germany, France, Italy and Spain will espouse communism if the United States and Great Britain do not adopt a policy of absolute diplomatic "désintéressement." What gives strength to the communist movement in these and in some other countries is the belief that Russia is driven by an unflinching "dynamism" while the Anglo-Saxon powers are indifferent and not very much interested in their fate.
Marx and the Marxians erred lamentably when they assumed that the masses long for a revolutionary overthrow of the "bourgeois" order of society. The militant communists are to be found only in the ranks of those who make a living from their communism or expect that a revolution would further their personal ambitions. The subversive activities of these professional plotters are dangerous precisely on account of the naïveté of those who are merely flirting with the revolutionary idea. Those confused and misguided sympathizers who call themselves "liberals" and whom the communists call "useful innocents," the fellow travelers and even the majority of the officially registered party members, would be terribly frightened if they were to discover one day that their chiefs mean business when preaching sedition. But then it may be too late to avert disaster.
For the time being, the ominous peril of the communist parties in the West lies in their stand on foreign affairs. The distinctive mark of all present-day communist parties is their devotion to the aggressive foreign policy of the Soviets. Whenever they must choose between Russia and their own country, they do not hesitate to prefer Russia. Their principle is: Right or wrong, my Russia. They strictly obey all orders issued from Moscow. When Russia was an ally of Hitler, the French communists sabotaged their own country's war effort and the American communists passionately opposed President Roosevelt's plans to aid England and France in their struggle against the Nazis. The communists all over the world branded all those who defended themselves against the German invaders as "imperialist warmongers." But as soon as Hitler attacked Russia, the imperialist war of the capitalists changed over-night into a just war of defense. Whenever Stalin conquers one more country, the communists justify this aggression as an act of self-defense against "Fascists."
In their blind worship of everything that is Russian, the communists of Western Europe and the United States by far surpass the worst excesses ever committed by chauvinists. They wax rapturous about Russian movies, Russian music and the alleged discoveries of Russian science. They speak in ecstatic words about the economic achievements of the Soviets. They ascribe the victory of the United Nations to the deeds of the Russian armed forces. Russia, they contend, has saved the world from the Fascist menace. Russia is the only free country while all other nations are subject to the dictatorship of the capitalists. The Russians alone are happy and enjoy the bliss of living a full life; in the capitalist countries the immense majority are suffering from frustration and unfulfilled desires. Just as the pious Muslim yearns for a pilgrimage to the Prophet's tomb at Mecca, so the communist intellectual deems a pilgrimage to the holy shrines of Moscow as the event of his life.
However, the distinction in the use of the terms communists and socialists did not affect the meaning of the terms communism and socialism as applied to the final goal of the policies common to them both. It was only in 1928 that the program of the Communist International, adopted by the sixth congress in Moscow,Blueprint for World Conquest as Outlined by the Communist International, Human Events (Washington and Chicago, 1946), pp. 181–82. began to differentiate between communism and socialism (and not merely between communists and socialists).
According to this new doctrine there is, in the economic evolution of mankind, between the historical stage of capitalism and that of communism, a third stage, namely that of socialism. Socialism is a social system based on public control of the means of production and full management of all processes of production and distribution by a planning central authority. In this regard it is equal to communism. But it differs from communism in so far as there is no equality of the portions allotted to each individual for his own consumption. There are still wages paid to the comrades and these wage rates are graduated according to economic expediency as far as the central authority deems it necessary for securing the greatest possible output of products. What Stalin calls socialism corresponds by and large to Marx's concept of the "early phase" of communism. Stalin reserves the term communism exclusively for what Marx called the "higher phase" of communism. Socialism, in the sense in which Stalin has lately used the term, is moving towards communism, but is in itself not yet communism. Socialism will turn into communism as soon as the increase in wealth to be expected from the operation of the socialist methods of production has raised the lower standard of living of the Russian masses to the higher standard which the distinguished holders of important offices enjoy in present-day Russia.David J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 88–95.
The apologetical character of this new terminological practice is obvious. Stalin finds it necessary to explain to the vast majority of his subjects why their standard of living is extremely low, much lower than that of the masses in the capitalist countries and even lower than that of the Russian proletarians in the days of Czarist rule. He wants to justify the fact that salaries and wages are unequal, that a small group of Soviet officials enjoys all the luxuries modern technique can provide, that a second group, more numerous than the first one, but less numerous than the middle class in imperial Russia, lives in "bourgeois" style, while the masses, ragged and barefooted, subsist in congested slums and are poorly fed. He can no longer blame capitalism for this state of affairs. Thus he was compelled to resort to a new ideological makeshift.
Stalin's problem was the more burning as the Russian communists in the early days of their rule had passionately proclaimed income equality as a principle to be enforced from the first instant of the proletarians' seizure of power. Moreover, in the capitalist countries the most powerful demagogic trick applied by the Russia-sponsored communist parties is to excite the envy of those with lower incomes against all those with higher incomes. The main argument advanced by the communists for the support of their thesis that Hitler's National Socialism was not genuine socialism, but, on the contrary, the worst variety of capitalism, was that there was in Nazi Germany inequality in the standard of living.
Stalin's new distinction between socialism and communism is in open contradiction to the policy of Lenin, and no less to the tenets of the propaganda of the communist parties outside the Russian frontiers. But such contradictions do not matter in the realm of the Soviets. The word of the dictator is the ultimate decision, and nobody is so foolhardy as to venture opposition.
It is important to realize that Stalin's semantical innovation affects merely the terms communism and socialism. He did not alter the meaning of the terms socialist and communist. The Bolshevist party is just as before called communist. The Russophile parties beyond the borders of the Soviet Union call themselves communist parties and are violently fighting the socialist parties which, in their eyes, are simply social traitors. But the official name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics remains unchanged.
Russia's Aggressiveness The German, Italian, and Japanese nationalists justified their aggressive policies by their lack of Lebensraum. Their countries are comparatively overpopulated. They are poorly endowed by nature and depend on the import of foodstuffs and raw materials from abroad. They must export manufactures to pay for these badly needed imports. But the protectionist policies espoused by the countries producing a surplus of foodstuffs and raw materials close their frontiers to import of manufactures. The world is manifestly tending towards a state of full economic autarky of each nation. In such a world, what fate is in store for those nations who can neither feed nor clothe their citizens out of domestic resources?
The Lebensraum doctrine of the self-styled "have-not" peoples emphasizes that there are in America and in Australia millions of acres of unused land much more fertile than the barren soil which the farmers of the have-not nations are tilling. Natural conditions for mining and manufacturing are likewise much more propitious than in the countries of the have-nots. But the German, Italian and Japanese peasants and workers are barred from access to these areas favored by nature. The immigration laws of the comparatively underpopulated countries prevent their migration. These laws raise the marginal productivity of labor and thereby wage rates in the underpopulated countries and lower them in the overpopulated countries. The high standard of living in the United States and the British Dominions is paid for by a lowering of the standard of living in the congested countries of Europe and Asia.
The true aggressors, say these German, Italian, and Japanese nationalists, are those nations who by means of trade and migration barriers have arrogated to themselves the lion's share of the natural riches of the earth. Has not the PopePius XII (pope, 1939–1958) (Pub.). himself declared that the root causes of the World Wars are "that cold and calculating egoism which tends to hoard the economic resources and materials destined for the use of all to such an extent that the nations less favored by nature are not permitted access to them"?Christmas Eve broadcast, New York Times, December 25, 1941. The war that Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito kindled was from this point of view a just war, for its only aim was to give to the have-nots what, by virtue of natural and divine right, belongs to them.
The Russians cannot venture to justify their aggressive policy by such arguments. Russia is a comparatively underpopulated country. Its soil is much better endowed by nature than that of any other nation. It offers the most advantageous conditions for the growing of all kinds of cereals, fruits, seeds, and plants. Russia owns immense pastures and almost inexhaustible forests. It has the richest resources for the production of gold, silver, platinum, iron, copper, nickel, manganese, and all other metals, and of oil. But for the despotism of the Czars and the lamentable inadequacy of the communist system, its population could long since have enjoyed the highest standard of living. It is certainly not lack of natural resources that pushes Russia towards conquest.
Lenin's aggressiveness was an outgrowth of his conviction that he was the leader of the final world revolution. He considered himself as the legitimate successor of the First International, destined to accomplish the task in which Marx and Engels had failed. The knell of capitalism had sounded, and no capitalist machinations could delay the expropriation of the expropriators any longer. What was needed was only the dictator of the new social order. Lenin was ready to take the burden upon his shoulders.
Since the days of the Mongol invasions, mankind has not had to face such an unflinching and thorough-going aspiration for unlimited world supremacy. In every country the Russian emissaries and the communist fifth columns were fanatically working for the "Anschluss" to Russia. But Lenin lacked the first four columns. Russia's military forces were at that time contemptible. When they crossed the Russian borders, they were stopped by the Poles. They could not march further West. The great campaign for world conquest petered out.
It was just idle talk to discuss the problems whether communism in one country only is possible or desirable. The communists had failed utterly outside the Russian frontiers. They were forced to stay at home.
Stalin devoted all his energy to the organization of a standing army of a size the world had never seen before. But he was not more successful than Lenin and Trotsky had been. The Nazis easily defeated this army and occupied the most important part of Russia's territory. Russia was saved by the British and, above all, by the American forces. American Lend-Lease enabled the Russians to follow on the heels of the Germans when the scarcity of equipment and the threatening American invasion forced them to withdraw from Russia. They could even occasionally defeat the rearguards of the retreating Nazis. They could conquer Berlin and Vienna when the American airplanes had smashed the German defenses. When the Americans had crushed the Japanese, the Russians could quietly stab them in the back.
Of course, the communists inside and outside of Russia and the fellow travelers passionately contend that it was Russia that defeated the Nazis and liberated Europe. They pass over in silence the fact that the only reason why the Nazis could not capture Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad was their lack of munitions, airplanes and gasoline. It was the blockade that made it impossible for the Nazis to provide their armies with the equipment needed, and to construct in the occupied Russian territory a transport system that could ship this equipment to the far distant front line. The decisive battle of the war was the battle of the Atlantic. The great strategical events in the war against Germany were the conquest of Africa and Sicily and the victory in Normandy. Stalingrad was, when measured by the gigantic standards of this war, hardly more than a tactical success. In the struggle against the Italians and the Japanese, Russia's share was nil.
But the spoils of the victory go to Russia alone. While the other United Nations do not seek for territorial aggrandizement, the Russians are in full swing. They have annexed the three Baltic Republics, The annexation of Carpatho-Russia utterly explodes their hypocritical indignation about the Munich agreements of 1938.Bessarabia, Czechoslovakia's province of Carpatho-Russia, a part of Finland, a great part of Poland, and huge territories in the Far East. They claim the rest of Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Korea, and China as their exclusive sphere of influence. They are anxious to establish in these countries "friendly" governments, i.e., puppet governments. But for the opposition raised by the United States and Great Britain, they would rule today in the whole of continental Europe, continental Asia, and Northern Africa. Only the American and British garrisons in Germany bar the Russians' way to the shores of the Atlantic.
Today, no less than after the first World War, the real menace for the West does not lie in the military power of Russia. Great Britain could easily repel a Russian attack and it would be sheer lunacy for the Russians to undertake a war against the United States. Not the Russian armies, but the communist ideologies threaten the West. The Russians know it very well and place confidence not in their own army, but in their foreign partisans. They want to overthrow the democracies from within, not from without. Their main weapon is the pro-Russian machinations of their fifth columns. These are the crack divisions of Bolshevism.
The communist writers and politicians inside and outside of Russia explain Russia's aggressive policies as mere self-defense. It is, they say, not Russia that plans aggression but, on the contrary, the decaying capitalist democracies. Russia wants merely to defend its own independence. This is an old and well-tried method of justifying aggression. Louis XIV and Napoleon I, Wilhelm II and Hitler were the most peace-loving of all men. When they invaded foreign countries, they did so only in just self-defense. Russia was as much menaced by Estonia or Latvia as Germany was by Luxemburg or Denmark.
An outgrowth of this fable of self-defense is the legend of the cordon sanitaire. The political independence of the small neighbor countries of Russia, it is maintained, is merely a capitalist makeshift designed to prevent the European democracies from being infected with the germ of communism. Hence, it is concluded, these small nations have forfeited their right to independence. For Russia has the inalienable right to claim that its neighbors—and likewise its neighbors' neighbors—should only be ruled by "friendly," i.e., strictly communist, governments. What would happen to the world if all great powers were to make the same pretension?
The truth is that it is not the governments of the democratic nations that aim at overthrowing the present Russian system. They do not foster pro-democratic fifth columns in Russia and they do not incite the Russian masses against their rulers. But the Russians are busy day and night fomenting unrest in every country.
The very lame and hesitant intervention of the Allied Nations in the Russian Civil War was not a pro-capitalist and anti-communist venture. For the Allied Nations, involved in their struggle for life and death with the Germans, Lenin was at that time merely a tool of their deadly foes. Ludendorff had dispatched Lenin to Russia in order to overthrow the Kerensky regime and to bring about the defection of Russia. The Bolshevists fought by force of arms all those Russians who wanted to continue the alliance with France, Great Britain, and the United States. From a military point of view, it was impossible for the Western nations to stay neutral while their Russian allies were desperately defending themselves against the Bolshevists. For the Allied Nations, the Eastern Front was at stake. The cause of the "White" generals was their own cause.
As soon as the war against Germany came to an end in 1918, the Allies lost interest in Russian affairs. There was no longer any need for an Eastern Front. They did not care a whit about the internal problems of Russia. They longed for peace and were anxious to withdraw from the fighting. They were, of course, embarrassed because they did not know how to liquidate their venture with propriety. Their generals were ashamed of abandoning companions in arms who had fought to the best of their abilities in a common cause. To leave these men in the lurch was in their opinion nothing short of cowardice and desertion. Such considerations of military honor delayed for some time the withdrawal of the inconspicuous Allied detachments and the termination of deliveries to the Whites. When this was finally accomplished, the Allied statesmen felt relief. From then on, they adopted a policy of strict neutrality with regard to Russian affairs.
It was very unfortunate indeed that the Allied Nations had been willy-nilly entangled in the Russian Civil War. It would have been better if the military situation of 1917 and 1918 had not compelled them to interfere. But one must not overlook the fact that the abandonment of intervention in Russia was tantamount to the final failure of President Wilson's policy. The United States had entered the war in order to make "the world safe for democracy." The victory had crushed the Kaiser and substituted in Germany a republican government for the comparatively mild and limited imperial autocracy. On the other hand, it had resulted in Russia in establishing a dictatorship compared with which the despotism of the Czars could be called liberal. But the Allies were not eager to make Russia safe for democracy as they had tried to do with Germany. After all, the Kaiser's Germany had parliaments, ministers responsible to the parliaments, trial by jury, freedom of thought, of religion, and of the press not much more limited than in the West, and many other democratic institutions. But Soviet Russia was an unlimited despotism.
The Americans, the French and the British failed to see things from this angle. But the anti-democratic forces in Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and the Balkans thought differently. As the nationalists of these countries interpreted it, the neutrality of the Allied Powers with regard to Russia was evidence of the fact that their concern for democracy had been a mere blind. The Allies, they argued, had fought Germany because they envied Germany's economic prosperity and they spared the new Russian autocracy because they were not afraid of Russian economic power. Democracy, these nationalists concluded, was nothing else than a convenient catchword to delude gullible people. And they became frightened that the emotional appeal of this slogan would one day be used as a disguise for insidious assaults against their own independence.
Since the abandonment of the intervention, Russia had certainly no longer any reason to fear the great Western powers. Neither were the Soviets afraid of a Nazi aggression. The assertions to the contrary, very popular in Western Europe and in America, resulted from complete ignorance of German affairs. But the Russians knew Germany and the Nazis. They had read Mein Kampf. They learned from this book not only that Hitler coveted the Ukraine, but also that Hitler's fundamental strategical idea was to embark upon the conquest of Russia only after having definitely and forever annihilated France. The Russians were fully convinced that Hitler's expectation, as expressed in Mein Kampf, that Great Britain and the United States would keep out of this war and would quietly let France be destroyed, was vain. They were certain that such a new world war, in which they themselves planned to stay neutral, would result in a new German defeat. And this defeat, they argued, would make Germany—if not the whole of Europe—safe for Bolshevism. Guided by this opinion, Stalin already in the time of the Weimar Republic aided the then secret German rearmament. The German communists helped the Nazis as much as they could in their endeavors to undermine the Weimar regime. Finally Stalin entered in August 1939 into an open alliance with Hitler, in order to give him a free hand against the West.
What Stalin—like all other people—did not anticipate was the overwhelming success of the German armies in 1940. Hitler attacked Russia in 1941 because he was fully convinced that not only France but also Great Britain was done for, and that the United States, menaced in the rear by Japan, would not be strong enough to interfere successfully with European affairs.
The disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire in 1918 and the Nazi defeat in 1945 have opened the gates of Europe to Russia. Russia is today the only military power on the European continent. But why are the Russians so intent upon conquering and annexing? They certainly do not need the resources of these countries. Neither is Stalin driven by the idea that such conquests could increase his popularity with the Russian masses. His subjects are indifferent to military glory.
It is not the masses whom Stalin wants to placate by his aggressive policy, but the intellectuals. For their Marxian orthodoxy is at stake, the very foundation of the Soviet might.
These Russian intellectuals were narrow-minded enough to absorb modifications of the Marxian creed which were in fact an abandonment of the essential teachings of dialectical materialism, provided that these modifications flattered their Russian chauvinism. They swallowed the doctrine that their holy Russia could skip one of the inextricable stages of economic evolution as described by Marx. They prided themselves on being the vanguard of the proletariat and the world revolution who, by realizing socialism first in one country only, set up a glorious example for all other nations. But it is impossible to explain to them why the other nations do not finally catch up with Russia. In the writings of Marx and Engels, which one cannot keep out of their hands, they discover that the fathers of Marxism considered Great Britain and France and even Germany as the countries most advanced in civilization and in the evolution of capitalism. These students of the Marxian universities may be too dull to comprehend the philosophical and economic doctrines of the Marxian gospel, but they are not too dull to see that Marx considered those Western countries as much more advanced than Russia.
Then some of these students of economic policies and statistics begin to suspect that the standard of living of the masses is much higher in the capitalist countries than in their own country. How can this be? Why are conditions much more propitious in the United States which—although foremost in capitalist production—is most backward in awakening class-consciousness in the proletarians?
The inference from these facts seems inescapable. If the most advanced countries do not adopt communism and fare rather well under capitalism, if communism is limited to a country which Marx considered as backward and does not bring about riches for all, is not perhaps the correct interpretation that communism is a feature of backward countries and results in general poverty? Must not a Russian patriot be ashamed of the fact that his country is committed to this system?
Such thoughts are very dangerous in a despotic country. Whoever dared to express them would be mercilessly liquidated by the G.P.U. But, even unspoken, they are on the tip of every intelligent man's tongue. They trouble the sleep of the supreme officials and perhaps even that of the great dictator. He certainly has the power to crush every opponent. But considerations of expediency make it inadvisable to eradicate all somewhat judicious people and to run the country only with stupid blockheads.
This is the real crisis of Russian Marxism. Every day that passes without bringing the world revolution aggravates it. The Soviets must conquer the world or else they are menaced in their own country by a defection of the intelligentsia. It is concern about the ideological state of Russia's shrewdest minds that pushes Stalin's Russia towards unflinching aggression.
Trotsky's Heresy The dictatorial doctrine as taught by the Russian Bolshevists, the Italian Fascists, and the German Nazis tacitly implies that there cannot arise any disagreement with regard to the question who shall be the dictator. The mystical forces directing the course of historical events designate the providential leader. All righteous people are bound to submit to the unfathomable decrees of history and to bend their knees before the throne of the man of destiny. Those who decline to do so are heretics, abject scoundrels who must be "liquidated."
In reality the dictatorial power is seized by that candidate who succeeds in exterminating in time all his rivals and their helpers. The dictator paves his way to supreme power by slaughtering all his competitors. He preserves his eminent position by butchering all those who could possibly dispute it. The history of all oriental despotisms bears witness to this, as well as the experience of contemporary dictatorship.
When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin supplanted his most dangerous rival, Trotsky. Trotsky escaped, spent years abroad in various countries of Europe, Asia, and America and was finally assassinated in Mexico City. Stalin remained the absolute ruler of Russia.
Trotsky was an intellectual of the orthodox Marxian type. As such he tried to represent his personal feud with Stalin as a conflict of principles. He tried to construct a Trotsky doctrine as distinguished from the Stalin doctrine. He branded Stalin's policies as an apostasy from the sacred legacy of Marx and Lenin. Stalin retorted in the same way. In fact, however, the conflict was a rivalry of two men, not a conflict of antagonistic ideas and principles. There was some minor dissent with regard to tactical methods. But in all essential matters Stalin and Trotsky were in agreement.
Trotsky had lived, before 1917, many years in foreign countries and was to some degree familiar with the main languages of the Western peoples. He posed as an expert in international affairs. Actually he did not know anything about Western civilization, political ideas, and economic conditions. As a wandering exile he had moved almost exclusively in the circles of his fellow exiles. The only foreigners whom he had met occasionally in coffeehouses and club rooms of Western and Central Europe were radical doctrinaires, by their Marxian prepossessions precluded from reality. His main reading was Marxian books and periodicals. He scorned all other writings as "bourgeois" literature. He was absolutely unfitted to see events from any other angle than that of Marxism. Like Marx, he was ready to interpret every great strike and every small riot as the sign of the outbreak of the final great revolution.
Stalin is a poorly educated Georgian. He has not the slightest knowledge of any Western language. He does not know Europe or America. Even his achievements as a Marxian author are questionable. But it was precisely the fact that, although an adamant supporter of communism, he was not indoctrinated with Marxian dogmas that made him superior to Trotsky. Stalin was not deluded by the spurious tenets of dialectical materialism. When faced with a problem, he did not search for an interpretation in the writings of Marx and Engels. He trusted his common sense. He was judicious enough to discern the fact that the policy of world revolution as inaugurated by Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 had failed completely outside the borders of Russia.
In Germany, the communists—led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg—were crushed by detachments of the regular army and by nationalist volunteers in a bloody battle fought in January 1919 in the streets of Berlin. The communist seizure of power in Munich in spring 1919 and the Hölz riotThe Hölz riot was a communist uprising in Germany (March 1921 in Mansfeldischen), led by World War I veteran Max Hölz (1889–1933). Hölz was sentenced to life imprisonment as a result, granted amnesty in 1928, and then left Germany for the Soviet Union (Pub.). in March 1921 ended likewise in disaster. In Hungary, in 1919, the communists were defeated by Horthy and Gömbös and the Rumanian army. In Austria various communist plots failed in 1918 and 1919; a violent upheaval in July 1927 was easily quelled by the Vienna police. In Italy, in 1920, the occupation of the factories was a complete miscarriage. In France and in Switzerland the communist propaganda seemed to be very powerful in the first years following the Armistice of 1918; but it evaporated very soon. In Great Britain, in 1926, the general strike called by the labor unions resulted in lamentable failure.
Trotsky was so blinded by his orthodoxy that he refused to admit that the Bolshevist methods had failed. But Stalin realized it very well. He did not abandon the idea of instigating revolutionary outbreaks in all foreign countries and of conquering the whole world for the Soviets. But he was fully aware of the fact that it was necessary to postpone the aggression for a few years and to resort to new methods for its execution. Trotsky was wrong in accusing Stalin of strangling the communist movement outside of Russia. What Stalin really did was to apply other means for the attainment of ends which are common to him and all other Marxians.
As an exegetic of Marxian dogmas, Stalin was certainly inferior to Trotsky, but he surpassed his rival by far as a politician. Bolshevism owes its successes in world policies to Stalin, not to Trotsky.
In the field of domestic policies, Trotsky resorted to the well-tried traditional tricks which Marxians had always applied in criticizing socialist measures adopted by other parties. Whatever Stalin did was not true socialism and communism, but, on the contrary, the very opposite of it, a monstrous perversion of the lofty principles of Marx and Lenin. All the disastrous features of public control of production and distribution as they appeared in Russia were, in Trotsky's interpretation, brought about by Stalin's policies. They were not unavoidable consequences of communist methods. They were attendant phenomena of Stalinism, not of communism. It was exclusively Stalin's fault that an absolutist irresponsible bureaucracy was supreme, that a class of privileged oligarchs enjoyed luxuries while the masses lived on the verge of starvation, that a terrorist regime executed the old guard of revolutionaries and condemned millions to slave labor in concentration camps, that the secret police was omnipotent, that the labor unions were powerless, that the masses were deprived of all rights and liberties. Stalin was not a champion of the egalitarian classless society. He was the pioneer of a return to the worst methods of class rule and exploitation. A new ruling class of about 10 percent of the population ruthlessly oppressed and exploited the immense majority of toiling proletarians.
Trotsky was at a loss to explain how all this could be achieved by only one man and his few sycophants. Where were the "material productive forces," much talked about in Marxian historical materialism, which—"independent of the wills of individuals"—determine the course of human events "with the inexorability of a law of nature"? How could it happen that one man was in a position to alter the "juridical and political superstructure" which is uniquely and inalterably fixed by the economic structure of society? Even Trotsky agreed that there was no longer any private ownership of the means of production in Russia. In Stalin's empire, production and distribution are entirely controlled by "society." It is a fundamental dogma of Marxism that the superstructure of such a system must necessarily be the bliss of the earthly paradise. There is in Marxian doctrines no room for an interpretation blaming individuals for a degenerative process which could convert the blessing of public control of business into evil. A consistent Marxian—if consistency were compatible with Marxism—would have to admit that Stalin's political system was the necessary superstructure of communism.
All essential items in Trotsky's program were in perfect agreement with the policies of Stalin. Trotsky advocated the industrialization of Russia. It was this that Stalin's five-year plans aimed at. Trotsky advocated the collectivization of agriculture. Stalin established the Kolkhoz and liquidated the Kulaks. Trotsky favored the organization of a big army. Stalin organized such an army. Neither was Trotsky when still in power a friend of democracy. He was, on the contrary, a fanatical supporter of dictatorial oppression of all "saboteurs." It is true, he did not anticipate that the dictator could consider him, Trotsky, author of Marxian tracts and veteran of the glorious extermination of the Romanovs, as the most wicked saboteur. Like all other advocates of dictatorship, he assumed that he himself or one of his intimate friends would be the dictator.
Trotsky was a critic of bureaucratism. But he did not suggest any other method for the conduct of affairs in a socialist system. There is no other alternative to profit-seeking private business than bureaucratic management.Mises, Bureaucracy (Yale University Press, 1944).
The truth is that Trotsky found only one fault with Stalin: that he, Stalin, was the dictator and not himself, Trotsky. In their feud they both were right. Stalin was right in maintaining that his regime was the embodiment of socialist principles. Trotsky was right in asserting that Stalin's regime had made Russia a hell.
Trotskyism did not entirely disappear with Trotsky's death. Boulangerism in France, too, survived for some time the end of General Boulanger. There are still Carlists left in Spain although the line of Don Carlos died out. Such posthumous movements are, of course, doomed.
But in all countries there are people who, although themselves fanatically committed to the idea of all-around planning, i.e., public ownership of the means of production, become frightened when they are confronted with the real face of communism. These people are disappointed. They dream of a Garden of Eden. For them communism, or socialism, means an easy life in riches and the full enjoyment of all liberties and pleasures. They fail to realize the contradictions inherent in their image of the communist society. They have uncritically swallowed all the lunatic fantasies of Charles Fourier and all the absurdities of Veblen. They firmly believe in Engels's assertion that socialism will be a realm of unlimited freedom. They indict capitalism for everything they dislike, and are fully convinced that socialism will deliver them from all evil. They ascribe their own failures and frustrations to the unfairness of this "mad" competitive system and expect that socialism will assign them that eminent position and high income which by right are due to them. They are Cinderellas yearning for the prince-savior who will recognize their merits and virtues. The loathing of capitalism and the worship of communism are consolations for them. They help them to disguise to themselves their own inferiority, and to blame the "system" for their own shortcomings.
In advocating dictatorship such people always advocate the dictatorship of their own clique. In asking for planning, what they have in mind is always their own plan, not that of others. They will never admit that a socialist or communist regime is true and genuine socialism or communism, if it does not assign to themselves the most eminent position and the highest income. For them the essential feature of true and genuine communism is that all affairs are precisely conducted according to their own will, and that all those who disagree are beaten into submission.
It is a fact that the majority of our contemporaries are imbued with socialist and communist ideas. However, this does not mean that they are unanimous in their proposals for socialization of the means of production and public control of production and distribution. On the contrary. Each socialist coterie is fanatically opposed to the plans of all other socialist groups. The various socialist sects fight one another most bitterly.
If the case of Trotsky and the analogous case of Gregor Strasser in Nazi Germany were isolated cases, there would be no need to deal with them. But they are not casual incidents. They are typical. Study of them reveals the psychological causes both of the popularity of socialism and of its unfeasibility.
The Liberation of the Demons The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories, and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim at, and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends. The sensational events which stir the emotions and catch the interest of superficial observers are merely the consummation of ideological changes. There are no such things as abrupt sweeping transformations of human affairs. What is called, in rather misleading terms, a "turning point in history" is the coming on the scene of forces which were already for a long time at work behind the scene. New ideologies, which had already long since superseded the old ones, throw off their last veil and even the dullest people become aware of the changes which they did not notice before.
In this sense Lenin's seizure of power in October 1917 was certainly a turning point. But its meaning was very different from that which the communists attribute to it.
The Soviet victory played only a minor role in the evolution towards socialism. The pro-socialist policies of the industrial countries of Central and Western Europe were of much greater consequence in this regard. Bismarck's social security scheme was a more momentous pioneering on the way towards socialism than was the expropriation of the backward Russian manufactures. The Prussian National Railways had provided the only instance of a government-operated business which, for some time at least, had avoided manifest financial failure. The British had already before 1914 adopted essential parts of the German social security system. In all industrial countries, the governments were committed to interventionist policies which were bound to result ultimately in socialism. During the war most of them embarked upon what was called war socialism. The German Hindenburg Program which, of course, could not be executed completely on account of Germany's defeat, was no less radical but much better designed than the much talked-about Russian five-year plans.
For the socialists in the predominantly industrial countries of the West, the Russian methods could not be of any use. For these countries, production of manufactures for export was indispensable. They could not adopt the Russian system of economic autarky. Russia had never exported manufactures in quantities worth mentioning. Under the Soviet system it withdrew almost entirely from the world market of cereals and raw materials. Even fanatical socialists could not help admitting that the West could not learn anything from Russia. It is obvious that the technological achievements in which the Bolshevist gloried were merely clumsy imitations of things accomplished in the West. Lenin defined communism as: "the Soviet power plus electrification." Now, electrification was certainly not of Russian origin, and the Western nations surpass Russia in the field of electrification no less than in every other branch of industry.
The real significance of the Lenin revolution is to be seen in the fact that it was the bursting forth of the principle of unrestricted violence and oppression. It was the negation of all the political ideals that had for three thousand years guided the evolution of Western civilization.
State and government are the social apparatus of violent coercion and repression. Such an apparatus, the police power, is indispensable in order to prevent anti-social individuals and bands from destroying social cooperation. Violent prevention and suppression of anti-social activities benefit the whole of society and each of its members. But violence and oppression are nonetheless evils and corrupt those in charge of their application. It is necessary to restrict the power of those in office lest they become absolute despots. Society cannot exist without an apparatus of violent coercion. But neither can it exist if the office holders are irresponsible tyrants free to inflict harm upon those they dislike.
It is the social function of the laws to curb the arbitrariness of the police. The rule of law restricts the arbitrariness of the officers as much as possible. It strictly limits their discretion and thus assigns to the citizens a sphere in which they are free to act without being frustrated by government interference.
Freedom and liberty always mean freedom from police interference. In nature there are no such things as liberty and freedom. There is only the adamant rigidity of the laws of nature to which man must unconditionally submit if he wants to attain any ends at all. Neither was there liberty in the imaginary paradisiacal conditions which, according to the fantastic prattle of many writers, preceded the establishment of societal bonds. Where there is no government, everybody is at the mercy of his stronger neighbor. Liberty can be realized only within an established state ready to prevent a gangster from killing and robbing his weaker fellows. But it is the rule of law alone which hinders the rulers from turning themselves into the worst gangsters.
The laws establish norms of legitimate action. They fix the procedures required for the repeal or alteration of existing laws and for the enactment of new laws. They likewise fix the procedures required for the application of the laws in definite cases, the due process of law. They establish courts and tribunals. Thus they are intent upon avoiding a situation in which the individuals are at the mercy of the rulers.
Mortal men are liable to error, and legislators and judges are mortal men. It may happen again and again that the valid laws or their interpretation by the courts prevent the executive organs from resorting to some measures which could be beneficial. No great harm, however, can result. If the legislators recognize the deficiency of the valid laws, they can alter them. It is certainly a bad thing that a criminal may sometimes evade punishment because there is a loophole left in the law, or because the prosecutor has neglected some formalities. But it is the minor evil when compared with the consequences of unlimited discretionary power on the part of the "benevolent" despot.
It is precisely this point which anti-social individuals fail to see. Such people condemn the formalism of the due process of law. Why should the laws hinder the government from resorting to beneficial measures? Is it not fetishism to make supreme the laws, and not expediency? They advocate the substitution of the welfare state (Wohlfahrtsstaat) for the state governed by the rule of law (Rechtsstaat). In this welfare state, paternal government should be free to accomplish all things it considers beneficial to the commonweal. No "scraps of paper" should restrain an enlightened ruler in his endeavors to promote the general welfare. All opponents must be crushed mercilessly lest they frustrate the beneficial action of the government. No empty formalities must protect them any longer against their well-deserved punishment.
It is customary to call the point of view of the advocates of the welfare state the "social" point of view as distinguished from the "individualistic" and "selfish" point of view of the champions of the rule of law. In fact, however, the supporters of the welfare state are utterly anti-social and intolerant zealots. For their ideology tacitly implies that the government will exactly execute what they themselves deem right and beneficial. They entirely disregard the possibility that there could arise disagreement with regard to the question of what is right and expedient and what is not. They advocate enlightened despotism, but they are convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion concerning the measures to be adopted. They favor planning, but what they have in mind is exclusively their own plan, not those of other people. They want to exterminate all opponents, that is, all those who disagree with them. They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion. Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends' unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow citizens. He prefers to "liquidate" them. He scorns the "bourgeois" society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed.
The irreconcilable conflict of these two doctrines—rule of law versus welfare state—was at issue in all the struggles which men fought for liberty. It was a long and hard evolution. Again and again the champions of absolutism triumphed. But finally the rule of law predominated in the realm of Western civilization. The rule of law, or limited government, as safeguarded by constitutions and bills of rights, is the characteristic mark of this civilization. It was the rule of law that brought about the marvelous achievements of modern capitalism and of its—as consistent Marxians should say—"superstructure," democracy. It secured for a steadily increasing population unprecedented well-being. The masses in the capitalist countries enjoy today a standard of living far above that of the well-to-do of earlier ages.
All these accomplishments have not restrained the advocates of despotism and planning. However, it would have been preposterous for the champions of totalitarianism to disclose the inextricable dictatorial consequences of their endeavors openly. In the nineteenth century, the ideas of liberty and the rule of law had won such a prestige that it seemed crazy to attack them frankly. Public opinion was firmly convinced that despotism was done for and could never be restored. Was not even the Czar of barbarian Russia forced to abolish serfdom, to establish trial by jury, to grant a limited freedom to the press and to respect the laws?
Thus the socialists resorted to a trick. They continued to discuss the coming dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the dictatorship of each socialist author's own ideas, in their esoteric circles. But to the broad public they spoke in a different way. Socialism, they asserted, will bring true and full liberty and democracy. It will remove all kinds of compulsion and coercion. The state will "wither away." In the socialist commonwealth of the future there will be neither judges and policemen nor prisons and gallows.
But the Bolshevists took off the mask. They were fully convinced that the day of their final and unshakable victory had dawned. Further dissimulation was neither possible nor required. The gospel of bloodshed could be preached openly. It found an enthusiastic response among all the degenerate literati and parlor intellectuals who for many years already had raved about the writings of Sorel and Nietzsche. The fruits of the "treason of the intellectuals"Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, x927). Publisher's Note: In English, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow, 1928) and The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955) mellowed to maturity. The youths who had been fed on the ideas of Carlyle and Ruskin were ready to seize the reins.
Lenin was not the first usurper. Many tyrants had preceded him. But his predecessors were in conflict with the ideas held by their most eminent contemporaries. They were opposed by public opinion because their principles of government were at variance with the accepted principles of right and legality. They were scorned and detested as usurpers. But Lenin's usurpation was seen in a different light. He was the brutal superman for whose coming the pseudo-philosophers had yearned. He was the counterfeit savior whom history had elected to bring salvation through bloodshed. Was he not the most orthodox adept of Marxian "scientific" socialism? Was he not the man destined to realize the socialist plans for whose execution the weak statesmen of the decaying democracies were too timid? All well-intentioned people asked for socialism; science, through the mouths of the infallible professors, recommended it; the churches preached Christian socialism; the workers longed for the abolition of the wage system. Here was the man to fulfil all these wishes. He was judicious enough to know that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Half a century ago all civilized people had censured Bismarck when he declared that history's great problems must be solved by blood and iron. Now the majority of quasi-civilized men bowed to the dictator who was prepared to shed much more blood than Bismarck ever did.
This was the true meaning of the Lenin revolution. All the traditional ideas of right and legality were overthrown. The rule of unrestrained violence and usurpation was substituted for the rule of law. The "narrow horizon of bourgeois legality," as Marx had dubbed it, was abandoned. Henceforth no laws could any longer limit the power of the elect. They were free to kill ad libitum. Man's innate impulses towards violent extermination of all whom he dislikes, repressed by a long and wearisome evolution, burst forth. The demons were unfettered. A new age, the age of the usurpers, dawned. The gangsters were called to action, and they listened to the Voice.
Of course, Lenin did not mean this. He did not want to concede to other people the prerogatives which he claimed for himself. He did not want to assign to other men the privilege of liquidating their adversaries. Him alone had history elected and entrusted with the dictatorial power. He was the only "legitimate" dictator because—an inner voice had told him so. Lenin was not bright enough to anticipate that other people, imbued with other creeds, could be bold enough to pretend that they also were called by an inner voice. Yet, within a few years two such men, Mussolini and Hitler, became quite conspicuous.
It is important to realize that Fascism and Nazism were socialist dictatorships. The communists, both the registered members of the communist parties and the fellow travelers, stigmatize Fascism and Nazism as the highest and last and most depraved stage of capitalism. This is in perfect agreement with their habit of calling every party which does not unconditionally surrender to the dictates of Moscow—even the German Social Democrats, the classical party of Marxism—hirelings of capitalism.
It is of much greater consequence that the communists have succeeded in changing the semantic connotation of the term Fascism. Fascism, as will be shown later, was a variety of Italian socialism. It was adjusted to the particular conditions of the masses in overpopulated Italy. It was not a product of Mussolini's mind and will survive the fall of Mussolini. The foreign policies of Fascism and Nazism, from their early beginnings, were rather opposed to one another. The fact that the Nazis and the Fascists closely cooperated after the Ethiopian war, and were allies in the second World War, did not eradicate the differences between these two tenets any more than did the alliance between Russia and the United States eradicate the differences between Sovietism and the American economic system. Fascism and Nazism were both committed to the Soviet principle of dictatorship and violent oppression of dissenters. If one wants to assign Fascism and Nazism to the same class of political systems, one must call this class dictatorial regime and one must not neglect to assign the Soviets to the same class.
In recent years the communists' semantic innovations have gone even further. They call everybody whom they dislike, every advocate of the free enterprise system, a Fascist. Bolshevism, they say, is the only really democratic system. All non-communist countries and parties are essentially undemocratic and Fascist.
It is true that sometimes also non-socialists—the last vestiges of the old aristocracy—toyed with the idea of an aristocratic revolution modeled according to the pattern of Soviet dictatorship. Lenin had opened their eyes. What dupes, they moaned, have we been! We have let ourselves be deluded by the spurious catchwords of the liberal bourgeoisie. We believed that it was not permissible to deviate from the rule of law and to crush mercilessly those challenging our rights. How silly were these Romanovs in granting to their deadly foes the benefits of a fair legal trial! If somebody arouses the suspicion of Lenin, he is done for. Lenin does not hesitate to exterminate, without any trial, not only every suspect, but all his kin and friends too. But the Czars were superstitiously afraid of infringing the rules established by those scraps of paper called laws. When Alexander Ulyanov conspired against the Czar's life, he alone was executed; his brother Vladimir was spared. Thus Alexander III himself preserved the life of Ulyanov-Lenin, the man who ruthlessly exterminated his son, his daughter-in-law and their children and with them all the other members of the family he could catch. Was this not the most stupid and suicidal policy?
However, no action could result from the daydreams of these old Tories. They were a small group of powerless grumblers. They were not backed by any ideological forces and they had no followers.
The idea of such an aristocratic revolution motivated the German Stahlhelm and the French Cagoulards.Stahlhelm was an association of German World War veterans, established 1918. Cagoulards were members of a secret French extreme rightist, terrorist organization, the Cagoule. It was responsible for several assassinations of socialists and Italian anti-fascists and it collaborated with the Nazis and the French Vichy government during WWII (Pub.). The Stahlhelm was simply dispelled by order of Hitler. The French Government could easily imprison the Cagoulards before they had any opportunity to do harm.
The nearest approach to an aristocratic dictatorship is Franco's regime. But Franco was merely a puppet of Mussolini and Hitler, who wanted to secure Spanish aid for the impending war against France or at least Spanish "friendly" neutrality. With his protectors gone, he will either have to adopt Western methods of government or face removal.
Dictatorship and violent oppression of all dissenters are today exclusively socialist institutions. This becomes clear as we take a closer look at Fascism and Nazism.
Fascism When the war broke out in 1914, the Italian socialist party was divided as to the policy to be adopted.
One group clung to the rigid principles of Marxism. This war, they maintained, is a war of the capitalists. It is not seemly for the proletarians to side with any of the belligerent parties. The proletarians must wait for the great revolution, the civil war of the united socialists against the united exploiters. They must stand for Italian neutrality.
The second group was deeply affected by the traditional hatred of Austria. In their opinion the first task of the Italians was to free their unredeemed brethren. Only then would the day of the socialist revolution appear.
In this conflict, Benito Mussolini, the outstanding man in Italian socialism, chose at first the orthodox Marxian position. Nobody could surpass Mussolini in Marxian zeal. He was the intransigent champion of the pure creed, the unyielding defender of the rights of the exploited proletarians, the eloquent prophet of the socialist bliss to come. He was an adamant adversary of patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, monarchical rule and all religious creeds. When Italy in 1911 opened the great series of wars by an insidious assault upon Turkey, Mussolini organized violent demonstrations against the departure of troops for Libya. Now, in 1914, he branded the war against Germany and Austria as an imperialist war. He was then still under the dominating influence of Angelica Balabanoff, the daughter of a wealthy Russian landowner. Miss Balabanoff had initiated him into the subtleties of Marxism. In her eyes the defeat of the Romanovs counted more than the defeat of the Habsburgs. She had no sympathy for the ideals of the Risorgimento.
But the Italian intellectuals were first of all nationalists. As in all other European countries, most of the Marxians longed for war and conquest. Mussolini was not prepared to lose his popularity. The thing he hated most was not to be on the side of the victorious faction. He changed his mind and became the most fanatical advocate of Italy's attack on Austria. With French financial aid he founded a newspaper to fight for the cause of the war.
The anti-Fascists blame Mussolini for this defection from the teachings of rigid Marxism. He was bribed, they say, by the French. Now, even these people should know that the publication of a newspaper requires funds. They themselves do not speak of bribery if a wealthy American provides a man with the money needed for the publication of a fellow traveler newspaper, or if funds mysteriously flow into the communist publishing firms. It is a fact that Mussolini entered the scene of world politics as an ally of the democracies, while Lenin entered it as a virtual ally of imperial Germany.
More than anybody else Mussolini was instrumental in achieving Italy's entry into the first World War. His journalistic propaganda made it possible for the government to declare war on Austria. Only those few people have a right to find fault with his attitude in the years 1914 to 1918 who realize that the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire spelled the doom of Europe. Only those Italians are free to blame Mussolini who begin to understand that the only means of protecting the Italian-speaking minorities in the littoral districts of Austria against the threatening annihilation by the Slavonic majorities was to preserve the integrity of the Austrian state, whose constitution guaranteed equal rights to all linguistic groups. Mussolini was one of the most wretched figures of history. But the fact remains that his first great political deed still meets with the approval of all his countrymen and of the immense majority of his foreign detractors.
When the war came to an end, Mussolini's popularity dwindled. The communists, swept into popularity by events in Russia, carried on. But the great communist venture, the occupation of the factories in 1920, ended in complete failure, and the disappointed masses remembered the former leader of the socialist party. They flocked to Mussolini's new party, the Fascists. The youth greeted with turbulent enthusiasm the self-styled successor of the Caesars. Mussolini boasted in later years that he had saved Italy from the danger of communism. His foes passionately dispute his claims. Communism, they say, was no longer a real factor in Italy when Mussolini seized power. The truth is that the frustration of communism swelled the ranks of the Fascists and made it possible for them to destroy all other parties. The overwhelming victory of the Fascists was not the cause, but the consequence, of the communist fiasco.
The program of the Fascists, as drafted in 1919, was vehemently anti-capitalistic.This program is reprinted in English in Count Carlo Sforza's book, Contemporary Italy, translated by Drake and Denise de Kay (New York, 1944), pp. 295–6. The most radical New Dealers and even communists could agree with it. When the Fascists came to power, they had forgotten those points of their program which referred to the liberty of thought and the press and the right of assembly. In this respect they were conscientious disciples of Bukharin and Lenin. Moreover they did not suppress, as they had promised, the industrial and financial corporations. Italy badly needed foreign credits for the development of its industries. The main problem for Fascism, in the first years of its rule, was to win the confidence of the foreign bankers. It would have been suicidal to destroy the Italian corporations.
Fascist economic policy did not—at the beginning—essentially differ from those of all other Western nations. It was a policy of interventionism. As the years went on, it more and more approached the Nazi pattern of socialism. When Italy, after the defeat of France, entered the second World War, its economy was by and large already shaped according to the Nazi pattern. The main difference was that the Fascists were less efficient and even more corrupt than the Nazis.
But Mussolini could not long remain without an economic philosophy of his own invention. Fascism posed as a new philosophy, unheard of before and unknown to all other nations. It claimed to be the gospel which the resurrected spirit of ancient Rome brought to the decaying democratic peoples whose barbarian ancestors had once destroyed the Roman empire. It was the consummation both of the Rinascimento and the Risorgimento in every respect, the final liberation of the Latin genius from the yoke of foreign ideologies. Its shining leader, the peerless Duce, was called to find the ultimate solution for the burning problems of society's economic organization and of social justice.
From the dustheap of discarded socialist utopias, the Fascist scholars salvaged the scheme of guild socialism. Guild socialism was very popular with British socialists in the last years of the first World War and in the first years following the Armistice. It was so impracticable that it disappeared very soon from socialist literature. No serious statesman ever paid any attention to contradictory and confused plans of guild socialism. It was almost forgotten when the Fascists attached it to a new label, and flamboyantly proclaimed corporativism as the new social panacea. The public inside and outside of Italy was captivated. Innumerable books, pamphlets and articles were written in praise of the stato corporativo. The governments of Austria and Portugal very soon declared that they were committed to the noble principles of corporativism. The papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) contained some paragraphs which could be interpreted—but need not be—as an approval of corporativism. In France, its ideas found many eloquent supporters.
It was mere idle talk. Never did the Fascists make any attempt to realize the corporativist program, industrial self-government. They changed the name of the chambers of commerce into corporative councils. They called corporazione the compulsory organizations of the various branches of industry which were the administrative units for the execution of the German pattern of socialism they had adopted. But there was no question of the corporazione's self-government. The Fascist cabinet did not tolerate anybody's interference with its absolute authoritarian control of production. All the plans for the establishment of the corporative system remained a dead letter.
Italy's main problem is its comparative overpopulation. In this age of barriers to trade and migration, the Italians are condemned to subsist permanently on a lower standard of living than that of the inhabitants of the countries more favored by nature. The Fascists saw only one means to remedy this unfortunate situation: conquest. They were too narrow-minded to comprehend that the redress they recommended was spurious and worse than the evil. They were moreover so entirely blinded by self-conceit and vainglory that they failed to realize that their provocative speeches were simply ridiculous. The foreigners whom they insolently challenged knew very well how negligible Italy's military forces were.
Fascism was not, as its advocates boasted, an original product of the Italian mind. It began with a split in the ranks of Marxian socialism, which certainly was an imported doctrine. Its economic program was borrowed from German non-Marxian socialism and its aggressiveness was likewise copied from Germans, the Alldeutsche or Pan-German forerunners of the Nazis. Its conduct of government affairs was a replica of Lenin's dictatorship. Corporativism, its much advertised ideological adornment, was of British origin. The only home-grown ingredient of Fascism was the theatrical style of its processions, shows and festivals.
The short-lived Fascist episode ended in blood, misery and ignominy. But the forces which generated Fascism are not dead. Fanatical nationalism is a feature common to all present-day Italians. The communists are certainly not prepared to renounce their principle of dictatorial oppression of all dissenters. Neither do the Catholic parties advocate freedom of thought, of the press or of religion. There are in Italy only very few people indeed who comprehend that the indispensable prerequisite of democracy and the rights of men is economic freedom.
It may happen that Fascism will be resurrected under a new label and with new slogans and symbols. But if this happens, the consequences will be detrimental. For Fascism is not as the Fascists trumpeted a "new way to life,"For instance Mario Palmieri, The Philosophy of Fascism (Chicago, 1936), p. 248. it is a rather old way towards destruction and death.
Nazism The philosophy of the Nazis, the German National Socialist Labour Party, is the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anticapitalistic and socialistic spirit of our age. Its essential ideas are not German or "Aryan" in origin, nor are they peculiar to the present day Germans. In the genealogical tree of the Nazi doctrine such Latins as Sismondi and Georges Sorel, and such Anglo-Saxons as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain were more conspicuous than any German. Even the best-known ideological attire of Nazism, the fable of the superiority of the Aryan master race, was not of German provenance; its author was a Frenchman, Gobineau. Germans of Jewish descent, like Lassalle, Lasson, Stahl, and Walter Rathenau contributed more to the essential tenets of Nazism than such men as Sombart, Spann, and Ferdinand Fried. The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, viz., Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit), is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal and the Soviet management of economic affairs. It implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority, and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution.
The only specifically German ingredient in Nazism was its striving after the conquest of Lebensraum. And this, too, was an outcome of their agreement with the ideas guiding the policies of the most influential political parties of all other countries. These parties proclaim income equality as the main thing. The Nazis do the same. What characterizes the Nazis is the fact that they are not prepared to acquiesce in a state of affairs in which the Germans are doomed forever to be "imprisoned," as they say, in a comparatively small and overpopulated area in which the productivity of labor must be smaller than in the comparatively underpopulated countries, which are better endowed with natural resources and capital goods. They aim at a fairer distribution of earth's natural resources. As a "have-not" nation they look at the wealth of the richer nations with the same feelings with which many people in the Western countries look at the higher incomes of some of their countrymen. The "progressives" in the Anglo-Saxon countries assert that "liberty is not worth having" for those who are wronged by the comparative smallness of their incomes. The Nazis say the same with regard to international relations. In their opinion the only freedom that matters is Nahrungsfreiheit (viz., freedom from importing food). They aim at the acquisition of a territory so large and rich in natural resources that they could live in economic self-sufficiency at a standard not lower than that of any other nation. They consider themselves as revolutionaries fighting for their inalienable natural rights against the vested interests of a host of reactionary nations.
It is easy for economists to explode the fallacies involved in the Nazi doctrines. But those who disparage economics as "orthodox and reactionary," and fanatically support the spurious creeds of socialism and economic nationalism, were at a loss to refute them. For Nazism was nothing but the logical application of their own tenets to the particular conditions of comparatively overpopulated Germany.
For more than seventy years, the German professors of political science, history, law, geography, and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of "liberation" against the capitalistic West. The German "socialists of the chair," much admired in all foreign countries, were the pacemakers of the two World Wars. At the turn of the century the immense majority of the Germans were already radical supporters of socialism and aggressive nationalism. They were then already firmly committed to the principles of Nazism. What was lacking and was added later was only a new term to signify their doctrine.
When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder, which still troubled some of the Germans, nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism. The Nazis were quick to adopt the Soviet methods. They imported from Russia: the one-party system and the preeminence of this party in political life; the paramount position assigned to the secret police; the concentration camps; the administrative execution or imprisonment of all opponents; the extermination of the families of suspects and of exiles; the methods of propaganda; the organization of affiliated parties abroad and their employment for fighting their domestic governments and espionage and sabotage; the use of the diplomatic and consular service for fomenting revolution; and many other things besides. There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin than the Nazis were.
Hitler was not the founder of Nazism; he was its product. He was, like most of his collaborators, a sadistic gangster. He was uneducated and ignorant; he had failed even in the lower grades of high school. He never had any honest job. It is a fable that he had ever been a paperhanger. His military career in the first World War was rather mediocre. The First Class Iron Cross was given to him after the end of the war as a reward for his activities as a political agent. He was a maniac obsessed by megalomania. But learned professors nourished his self-conceit. Werner Sombart, who once had boasted that his life was devoted to the task of fighting for the ideas of Marx,Sombart, Das Lebenswerk yon Karl Marx (Jena, 1909), p. 3. Sombart, whom the American Economic Association had elected to honorary membership and many non-German universities to honorary degrees, candidly declared that Führertum means a permanent revelation and that the Führer received his orders directly from God, the supreme Führer of the Universe.Sombart, A New Social Philosophy, trans. and ed. K. F. Geiser (Princeton University Press, 1937), p. 194.
The Nazi plan was more comprehensive and therefore more pernicious than that of the Marxians. It aimed at abolishing laissez-faire not only in the production of material goods, but no less in the production of men. The Führer was not only the general manager of all industries; he was also the general manager of the breeding-farm intent upon rearing superior men and eliminating inferior stock. A grandiose scheme of eugenics was to be put into effect according to "scientific" principles.
It is vain for the champions of eugenics to protest that they did not mean what the Nazis executed. Eugenics aims at placing some men, backed by the police power, in complete control of human reproduction. It suggests that the methods applied to domestic animals be applied to men. This is precisely what the Nazis tried to do. The only objection which a consistent eugenist can raise is that his own plan differs from that of the Nazi scholars and that he wants to rear another type of men than the Nazis. As every supporter of economic planning aims at the execution of his own plan only, so every advocate of eugenic planning aims at the execution of his own plan and wants himself to act as the breeder of human stock.
The eugenists pretend that they want to eliminate criminal individuals. But the qualification of a man as a criminal depends upon the prevailing laws of the country and varies with the change in social and political ideologies. John Huss, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were criminals from the point of view of the laws which their judges applied. When Stalin robbed the Russian State Bank of several million rubles, he committed a crime. Today it is an offense in Russia to disagree with Stalin. In Nazi Germany sexual intercourse between "Aryans" and the members of an "inferior" race was a crime. Whom do the eugenists want to eliminate, Brutus or Caesar? Both violated the laws of their country. If eighteenth-century eugenists had prevented alcohol addicts from generating children, their planning would have eliminated Beethoven.
It must be emphasized again: there is no such thing as a scientific ought. Which men are superior and which are inferior can only be decided by personal value judgments not liable to verification or falsification. The eugenists delude themselves in assuming that they themselves will be called to decide what qualities are to be conserved in the human stock. They are too dull to take into account the possibility that other people might make the choice according to their own value judgments.The devastating critique of eugenics by H.S. Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (New York, 1930), pp. 223–52. In the eyes of the Nazis, the brutal killer—the "fair-haired beast"—is the most perfect specimen of mankind.
The mass slaughters perpetrated in the Nazi horror camps are too horrible to be adequately described by words. But they were the logical and consistent application of doctrines and policies parading as applied science and proved by some men who in a sector of the natural sciences have displayed acumen and technical skill in laboratory research.
The Teachings of Soviet Experience Many people all over the world assert that the Soviet "experiment" has supplied conclusive evidence in favor of socialism and disproved all, or at least most, of the objections raised against it. The facts, they say, speak for themselves. It is no longer permissible to pay any attention to the spurious aprioristic reasoning of armchair economists criticizing the socialist plans. A crucial experiment has exploded their fallacies.
It is, first of all, necessary to comprehend that in the field of purposive human action and social relations, no experiments can be made and no experiments have ever been made. The experimental method to which the natural sciences owe all their achievements is inapplicable in the social sciences. The natural sciences are in a position to observe in the laboratory experiment the consequences of the isolated change in one element only, while other elements remain unchanged. Their experimental observation refers ultimately to certain isolable elements in sense experience. What the natural sciences call facts are the causal relations shown in such experiments. Their theories and hypotheses must be in agreement with these facts.
But the experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is essentially different. It is historical experience. It is an experience of complex phenomena, of the joint effects brought about by the cooperation of a multiplicity of elements. The social sciences are never in a position to control the conditions of change and to isolate them from one another in the way in which the experimenter proceeds in arranging his experiments. They never enjoy the advantage of observing the consequences of a change in one element only, other conditions being equal. They are never faced with facts in the sense in which the natural sciences employ this term. Every fact and every experience with which the social sciences have to deal is open to various interpretations. Historical facts and historical experience can never prove or disprove a statement in the way in which an experiment proves or disproves.
Historical experience never comments upon itself. It needs to be interpreted from the point of view of theories constructed without the aid of experimental observations. There is no need to enter into an epistemological analysis of the logical and philosophical problems involved. It is enough to refer to the fact that nobody—whether scientist or layman—ever proceeds otherwise when dealing with historical experience. Every discussion of the relevance and meaning of historical facts falls back very soon on a discussion of abstract general principles, logically antecedent to the facts to be elucidated and interpreted. Reference to historical experience can never solve any problem or answer any question. The same historical events and the same statistical figures are claimed as confirmations of contradictory theories.
If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be that private ownership of the means of production is a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization. Nevertheless, only few people consider this as a sufficient and incontestable refutation of the socialist program.
On the contrary, there are even people who argue the other way round. It is frequently asserted that the system of private property is done for precisely because it was the system that men applied in the past. However beneficial a social system may have been in the past, they say, it cannot be so in the future too; a new age requires a new mode of social organization. Mankind has reached maturity; it would be pernicious for it to cling to the principles to which it resorted in the earlier stages of its evolution. This is certainly the most radical abandonment of experimentalism. The experimental method may assert: because a produced in the past the result b, it will produce it in the future also. It must never assert: because a produced in the past the result b, it is proved that it cannot produce it any longer.
In spite of the fact that mankind has had no experience with the socialist mode of production, the socialist writers have constructed various schemes of socialist systems based on aprioristic reasoning. But as soon as anybody dares to analyze these projects and to scrutinize them with regard to their feasibility and their ability to further human welfare, the socialists vehemently object. These analyses, they say, are merely idle aprioristic speculations. They cannot disprove the correctness of our statements and the expediency of our plans. They are not experimental. One must try socialism and then the results will speak for themselves.
What these socialists ask for is absurd. Carried to its ultimate logical consequences, their idea implies that men are not free to refute by reasoning any scheme—however nonsensical, self-contradictory, and impracticable—that any reformer is pleased to suggest. According to their view, the only method permissible for the refutation of such a—necessarily abstract and aprioristic—plan is to test it by reorganizing the whole of society according to its designs. As soon as a man sketches the plan for a better social order, all nations are bound to try it and to see what will happen.
Even the most stubborn socialists cannot fail to admit that there are various plans for the construction of the future utopia, incompatible with one another. There is the Soviet pattern of all-around socialization of all enterprises and their outright bureaucratic management; there is the German pattern of Zwangswirtschaft, towards the complete adoption of which the Anglo-Saxon countries are manifestly tending; there is guild socialism, under the name of corporativism still very popular in some Catholic countries. There are many other varieties. The supporters of most of these competing schemes assert that the beneficial results to be expected from their own scheme will appear only when all nations will have adopted it; they deny that socialism in one country only can already bring the blessings they ascribe to socialism. The Marxians declare that the bliss of socialism will emerge only in its "higher phase" which, as they hint, will appear only after the working class will have passed "through long struggles, through a whole series of historical processes, wholly transforming both circumstances and men."Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich, ed. Pfemfert (Berlin, 1919), p. 54. Publisher's Note: In English, "The Civil War in France," p. 408. The inference from all this is that one must realize socialism and quietly wait for a very long time until its promised benefits come. No unpleasant experiences in the period of transition, no matter how long this period may be, can disprove the assertion that socialism is the best of all conceivable modes of social organization. He that believeth shall be saved.
But which of the many socialist plans, contradicting one another, should be adopted? Every socialist sect passionately proclaims that its own brand is alone genuine socialism and that all other sects advocate counterfeit, entirely pernicious measures. In fighting one another, the various socialist factions resort to the same methods of abstract reasoning which they stigmatize as vain apriorism whenever they are applied against the correctness of their own statements and the expediency and practicability of their own schemes. There is, of course, no other method available. The fallacies implied in a system of abstract reasoning—such as socialism is—cannot be smashed otherwise than by abstract reasoning.
The fundamental objection advanced against the practicability of socialism refers to the impossibility of economic calculation. It has been demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a socialist commonwealth would not be in a position to apply economic calculation. Where there are no market prices for the factors of production because they are neither bought nor sold, it is impossible to resort to calculation in planning future action and in determining the result of past action. A socialist management of production would simply not know whether or not what it plans and executes is the most appropriate means to attain the ends sought. It will operate in the dark, as it were. It will squander the scarce factors of production both material and human (labor). Chaos and poverty for all will unavoidably result.
All earlier socialists were too narrow-minded to see this essential point. Neither did the earlier economists conceive its full importance. When the present writer in 1920 showed the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, the apologists of socialism embarked upon the search for a method of calculation applicable to a socialist system. They utterly failed in these endeavors. The futility of the schemes they produced could easily be shown. Those communists who were not entirely intimidated by the fear of the Soviet executioners, for instance Trotsky, freely admitted that economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations.Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order (Chicago University Press, 1948), pp. 89–91. The intellectual bankruptcy of the socialist doctrine can no longer be disguised. In spite of its unprecedented popularity, socialism is done for. No economist can any longer question its impracticability. The avowal of socialist ideas is today the proof of a complete ignorance of the basic problems of economics. The socialist's claims are as vain as those of the astrologers and the magicians.
With regard to this essential problem of socialism, viz., economic calculation, the Russian "experiment" is of no avail. The Soviets are operating within a world the greater part of which still clings to a market economy. They base the calculations on which they make their decisions on the prices established abroad. Without the help of these prices their actions would be aimless and planless. Only as far as they refer to this foreign price system are they able to calculate, keep books, and prepare their plans. In this respect one may agree with the statement of various socialist and communist authors that socialism in one or a few countries only is not yet true socialism. Of course, these authors attach a quite different meaning to their assertion. They want to say that the full blessings of socialism can be reaped only in a world-embracing socialist community. Those familiar with the teachings of economics must, on the contrary, recognize that socialism will result in full chaos precisely if it is applied in the greater part of the world.
The second main objection raised against socialism is that it is a less efficient mode of production than is capitalism and that it will impair the productivity of labor. Consequently, in a socialist commonwealth the standard of living of the masses will be low when compared with conditions prevailing under capitalism. There is no doubt that this objection has not been disproved by the Soviet experience. The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than that of the masses in the country which is universally considered as the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.
It is true that the advocates of socialism are intent upon interpreting the lowness of the Russian standard of living in a different way. As they see things, it was not caused by socialism, but was—in spite of socialism—brought about by other agencies. They refer to various factors, e.g., the poverty of Russia under the Czars, the disastrous effects of the wars, the alleged hostility of the capitalist democratic nations, the alleged sabotage of the remnants of the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie and of the Kulaks. There is no need to enter into an examination of these matters. For we do not contend that any historical experience could prove or disprove a theoretical statement in the way in which a crucial experiment can verify or falsify a statement concerning natural events. It is not the critics of socialism, but its fanatical advocates, who maintain that the Soviet "experiment" proves something with regard to the effects of socialism. However, what they are really doing in dealing with the manifest and undisputed facts of Russian experience is to push them aside by impermissible tricks and fallacious syllogisms. They disavow the obvious facts by commenting upon them in such a way as to deny their bearing and their significance upon the question to be answered.
Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that their interpretation is correct. But then it would still be absurd to assert that the Soviet experiment has evidenced the superiority of socialism. All that could be said is: the fact that the masses' standard of living is low in Russia does not provide conclusive evidence that socialism is inferior to capitalism.
A comparison with experimentation in the field of the natural sciences may clarify the issue. A biologist wants to test a new patent food. He feeds it to a number of guinea pigs. They all lose weight and finally die. The experimenter believes that their decline and death were not caused by the patent food, but by merely accidental affliction with pneumonia. It would nevertheless be absurd for him to proclaim that his experiment had evidenced the nutritive value of the compound because the unfavorable result is to be ascribed to accidental occurrences, not causally linked with the experimental arrangement. The best he could contend is that the outcome of the experiment was not conclusive, that it does not prove anything against the nutritive value of the food tested. Things are, he could assert, as if no experiment had been tried at all.
Even if the Russian masses' standard of living were much higher than that of the capitalist countries, this still would not be conclusive proof of the superiority of socialism. It may be admitted that the undisputed fact that the standard of living in Russia is lower than that in the capitalist West does not conclusively prove the inferiority of socialism. But it is nothing short of idiocy to announce that the experience of Russia has demonstrated the superiority of public control of production.
Neither does the fact that the Russian armies, after having suffered many defeats, finally—with armament manufactured by American big business and donated to them by the American taxpayers—could aid the Americans in the conquest of Germany prove the preeminence of communism. When the British forces had to sustain a temporary reverse in North Africa, Professor Harold Laski, that most radical advocate of socialism, was quick to announce the final failure of capitalism. He was not consistent enough to interpret the German conquest of the Ukraine as the final failure of Russian communism. Neither did he retract his condemnation of the British system when his country emerged victorious from the war. If the military events are to be considered as the proof of any social system's excellence, it is rather the American than the Russian system for which they bear witness.
Nothing that has happened in Russia since 1917 contradicts any of the statements of the critics of socialism and communism. Even if one bases one's judgment exclusively on the writings of communists and fellow travelers, one cannot discover any feature in Russian conditions that tells in favor of the Soviet's social and political system. All the technological improvements of the last decades originated in the capitalistic countries. It is true that the Russians have tried to copy some of these innovations. But so did all backward oriental peoples too.
Some communists are eager to have us believe that the ruthless oppression of dissenters and the radical abolition of the freedom of thought, speech, and the press are not inherent marks of the public control of business. They are, they argue, only accidental phenomena of communism, its signature in a country which—as was the case with Russia—never enjoyed freedom of thought and conscience. However, these apologists for totalitarian despotism are at a loss to explain how the rights of man could be safeguarded under government omnipotence.
Freedom of thought and conscience is a sham in a country in which the authorities are free to exile everybody whom they dislike into the Arctic or the desert, and to assign him hard labor for life. The autocrat may always try to justify such arbitrary acts by pretending that they are motivated exclusively by considerations of public welfare and economic expediency. He alone is the supreme arbiter to decide all matters referring to the execution of the plan. Freedom of the press is illusory when the government owns and operates all paper mills, printing offices, and publishing houses, and ultimately decides what is to be printed and what not. The right of assembly is vain if the government owns all assembly halls and determines for what purposes they shall be used. And so it is with all other liberties too. In one of his lucid intervals, Trotsky—of course Trotsky the hunted exile, not the ruthless commander of the Red army—saw things realistically and declared: "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."Quoted by Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944), Chapter IX, p. 119. This confession settles the issue.
What the Russian experience shows is a very low level of the standard of living of the masses and unlimited dictatorial despotism. The apologists of communism are intent upon explaining these uncontested facts as accidental only; they are, they say, not the fruit of communism, but occurred in spite of communism. But even if one were to accept these excuses for the sake of argument, it would be nonsensical to maintain that the Soviet "experiment" has demonstrated anything in favor of communism and socialism.
The Alleged Inevitability of Socialism Many people believe that the coming of totalitarianism is inevitable. The "wave of the future," they say, "carries mankind inexorably towards a system under which all human affairs are managed by omnipotent dictators. It is useless to fight against the unfathomable decrees of history."
The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered. Bismarck once deplored the lack of what he called civilian courage, i.e., bravery in dealing with civic affairs, on the part of his countrymen. But neither did the citizens of other nations display more courage and judiciousness when faced with the menace of communist dictatorship. They either yielded silently, or timidly raised some trifling objections.
One does not fight socialism by criticizing only some accidental features of its schemes. In attacking many socialists' stand on divorce and birth control, or their ideas about art and literature, one does not refute socialism. It is not enough to disapprove of the Marxian assertions that the theory of relativity or the philosophy of Bergson or psychoanalysis is "bourgeois" moonshine. Those who find fault with Bolshevism and Nazism only for their anti-Christian leanings implicitly endorse all the rest of these bloody schemes.
On the other hand, it is sheer stupidity to praise the totalitarian regimes for alleged achievements which have no reference whatever to their political and economic principles. It is questionable whether the observations that in Fascist Italy the railway trains ran on schedule and the bug population of second-rate hotel beds was decreasing, were correct or not; but it is in any case of no importance for the problem of Fascism. The fellow travelers are enraptured by Russian films, Russian music, and Russian caviar. But there lived greater musicians in other countries and under other social systems; good pictures were produced in other countries too; and it is certainly not a merit of Generalissimo Stalin that the taste of caviar is delicious. Neither does the prettiness of Russian ballet dancers or the construction of a great power station on the Dnieper expiate for the mass slaughter of the Kulaks.
The readers of picture magazines and the movie fans long for the picturesque. The operatic pageants of the Fascists and the Nazis and the parading of the girl-battalions of the Red army are after their heart. It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who pave the way for economic improvement work in seclusion; their work is not suitable to be visualized on the screen. But the dictators, intent upon spreading death and destruction, are spectacularly in sight of the public. Dressed in military garb they eclipse in the eyes of the moviegoers the colorless bourgeois in plain clothes.
The problems of society's economic organization are not suitable for light talk at fashionable cocktail parties. Neither can they be dealt with adequately by demagogues haranguing mass assemblies. They are serious things. They require painstaking study. They must not be taken lightly.
The socialist propaganda never encountered any decided opposition. The devastating critique by which the economists exploded the futility and impracticability of the socialist schemes and doctrines did not reach the molders of public opinion. The universities were mostly dominated by socialist or interventionist pedants not only in continental Europe, where they were owned and operated by the governments, but even in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The politicians and the statesmen, anxious not to lose popularity, were lukewarm in their defense of freedom. The policy of appeasement, so much criticized when applied in the case of the Nazis and the Fascists, was practiced universally for many decades with regard to all other brands of socialism. It was this defeatism that made the rising generation believe that the victory of socialism is inevitable.
It is not true that the masses are vehemently asking for socialism and that there is no means to resist them. The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are molding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them. No proletarian or son of a proletarian has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist and socialist programs. Their authors were all of bourgeois background. The esoteric writings of dialectical materialism, of Hegel, the father both of Marxism and of German aggressive nationalism, the books of Georges Sorel, of Gentile and of Spengler were not read by the average man; they did not move the masses directly. It was the intellectuals who popularized them.
The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization. The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our century. They alone can reverse the trend and pave the way for a resurrection of freedom.
Not mythical "material productive forces," but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend towards socialism and despotism is common sense and moral courage.
This book was published in 1947. The title comes from Mises's description of the reality of central planning and socialism, whether of the Russian or German pattern. This important work was written decades after Mises's original essay on economic calculation and includes the broadest and boldest attack on all forms of state control.
The lessons of Iraq pose challenges for our understanding of the state. Consider the gap that separates the Bush administration’s original theory with the reality on the ground today. The idea was that the Iraqi government would be "decapitated," and that once Saddam and his few henchmen were crushed, the country could breathe free and get on with the business of building a great society.
He surely believed it, otherwise he and his team would have put something in place for what followed the overthrow, and otherwise he would not have held his victory dance in full flight gear after the invasion. No, he had a model in his mind of an oppressive dictator who ruled all mercilessly and by force alone. Bush figured that he could use more force than Saddam and that would be the end of it.
But now look! The country of Iraq is in civil war. Sunnis long for the days of Saddam. Shiites long for total power, and, as the majority, they figure that they might just get it, and use it against their historic enemies. The Christians and Jews have largely fled the country. And the tit-for-tat killing grows ever more gruesome. The US military is killing too: largely out of fear and in the belief that it is all in self-defense. Not a soldier on the ground wants to be there.
Thus did a simple theory of the state – kill the king and all will be well – fail. The Bush administration had the idea that the Iraqi state was somehow artificially imposed on an otherwise stable society. The reality is otherwise.
Which raises the question: just how integral is the state to society? Is it the case that we can expect every society that loses its state to fall into chaos such as Iraq is doing today?
Before we go there, let us first distinguish the state from society. The state is the only entity that is permitted to maintain a legal monopoly on the use of aggressive force. It therefore operates according to its own law. If you steal or kill, you get in trouble. The state steals and kills as part of its operating procedure, and there is no higher law to keep it in check. The same goes for its monopoly on "justice." I am not permitted to chase down and punish a person who broke into my house, but rather the state presumes the prerogative of administering justice and allows no competition.
On the face of it, the role of the state – the legal monopolist on the use of aggressive force against person and property – is absurdly implausible. There is no obvious reason why any society should put up with it. Ah, but then ideology comes into play. We are told that the state serves high religious, philosophical, economic, or social-scientific ends. I won't bother listing them because doing so would take up the rest of the article.
The point is that the state is unstable without an ideology to back it up, and convince people that it is necessary. But ideology is not all it needs. It must also put together a matrix of interest-group privilege, as a means of placating the opposition. The state can kill some of its enemies but it can't ever kill all (as the US is discovering in Iraq). What it must do is co-opt them into a variety of arrangements – usually financial – that reap mutual benefit. In this sense, the state is pushed into the role of a capitalist of sorts. It seeks out trades as a means of making people less hostile and, the state hopes, garnering friends and defenders as far and wide as possible.
For more on this, see the State of the Union address.
So on one hand, the state is always in a unique position as the sole entity that can legally steal, beat, and hang. On the other hand, it must also cultivate other talents in order to win over the population, lest it be overthrown. If it fails to do so, it will fall, maybe not immediately but eventually. For examples, you can see the history of the Soviet Union or the current history of the US in Iraq. These are two states that were unable to maintain a sufficiently sophisticated matrix of ideological support combined with a matrix of interest-group payoffs that are necessary to survive.
Saddam, on the other hand, was very careful to cultivate both necessary pillars of state stability. Yes, he killed enemies, but his preferred method was to buy them off in some way. He had all important religious leaders on the payroll, and helped religious minorities when they needed it. He was generous with public works and maintained the semblance of law and order. He walked a thin line, avoiding religious extremism while not going overboard in Western-style liberalism to risk his rule. He also cultivated an Iraqi-style nationalism to cover the ideological angle.
The Saddam state, then, was not an organic part of society but it had managed to weave itself carefully into the political, cultural, and economic fabric of the nation – as a means of survival. This is what the Bush administration had overlooked. Once Saddam was gone, the glue that held together the factions and groups was gone. The result is what you see today.
Let us return, then, to our original question. Is it the case that any overthrow of the state risks turning society into a current-day Iraq? The answer is no. You see, the Bush administration's fateful error was not in overthrowing Saddam (I'm leaving aside the issue of imperialism here: the law of nations allows no state the right to overthrow foreign despots). Rather, the fateful error of the Bush administration was in attempting to create a new state.
This is what cannot be done, and the very possibility of a new central state is precisely what has set off the bloodshed. It is not the case that the groups in Iraq cannot get along. What they cannot do is get along under a central state ruled by some other group. This is the basis of the bloodshed.
So what should happen? The US should abandon Baghdad. It should, in effect, allow the country to "fall apart" in the same way that Gorbachev let his empire dissolve. Iraq would split into many states, some of them noncontiguous. Governing units of all shapes and sizes would appear. The main reason for the ghastly killing – fear of the rule by one group over another – would vanish. Here is the highest hope for peace in Iraq.So long as the US insists that Iraq be a single nation under one government, it will inspire chaos and killing. Bush was wrong, but in a way that is usually not understood. His mistake was not in overthrowing the state but in hoping to create and control a new one.